1 . It’s no secret that humans have been using wells to collect water for a long history. Now, it turns out we’re not the only species that knows how to tap water from the earth.

In April 2019, Science posted an article that details how various horses and donkeys had been seen digging wells up to six feet deep to try and reach fresh water when they were miles away from the nearest natural source. Apparently, they use their hooves (蹄) to dig into the ground until they have enough water. They were found doing so at one site in Mojave Desert, California, and four different sites in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona.

Scientists quickly set up cameras to watch the area and noticed that as many as 57 species visited the well to drink. Most of them were different types of birds, including Cooper’s hawks, owls, and red-tailed hawks. They were not alone. American badgers and even black bears were seen drinking from the new wells too. It seems that many of the wells became an oasis (绿洲) for those in the surrounding areas as the likes of river toads, sheep, and mule deer all moved into the area.

It seems the wild donkeys and horses that dig wells have done a lot more than create a place to drink; they have changed the local environment now that everything has access to fresh water. Cottonwoods and willows quickly started to appear in some of the spots as they germinated (发芽) in the fresh soil. Not only has this changed the landscape, but it could be the difference needed to bring some of the endangered and critical desert trees back from the edge. Scientists have called it “ecosystem engineering”, an event that sees animals change their environment. The most well- known example of this has often come in the form of beavers (an animal), who create dams that prevent wildfires, raise the water table, and enhance species diversity. Now, it seems the wild donkeys and horses have found a new way to improve their areas, too.

2 . Wildlife crossings don’t just protect animals. They can also mitigate problems related to wildlife-vehicle collisions (碰撞) and save significant money for a community.

Wildlife crossings are man-made structures that help animals move safely around their habitat. They are often paths under or over another existing road or railway, or underground passages for animals to get past for food or avoiding attacks.

Some animals are unable to migrate to survive. People still rely on highways for business and travel, and animals continue to have mobility needs for survival, though. When new roads are built, animals living in a part of their habitat can greatly increase the number of wildlife vehicle collisions while trying to cross the new barriers.

In a new study, Wisnu Sugiarto, a Washington State University economics doctoral student, examined data for 13 of the 22 wildlife crossings, including bridges and underpasses, in the Washington State. He compared the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions each year before and after the construction of a wildlife crossing. He considered the area within 10 miles of a crossing.

Then he compared his analysis to a separate area in the state with no crossings at all. “The findings reported that wildlife crossing structures reduced the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions by one to three accidents on average per mile per year,” Sugiarto said. “Therefore, building wildlife crossing structures is typically an essential and effective strategy to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions.”

“Trior to working on this research, I wasn’t aware of any strategies to reduce wildlife vehicle collisions. I also thought we couldn’t do much about it, partly because we wouldn’t be able to communicate with wildlife and control their movement,” Sugiarto added. “However, it turns out that there are multiple strategies to deal with issues related to wildlife-vehicle collisions and we can do something about them. ”

It is reported that the government has invested $ 350 million over five years for the construction of wildlife crossings. Every wildlife crossing offers a mean benefit of between $235,000 and $443,000 each year.

Koalas usually get the water they need from the eucalyptus (桉树)leaves they eat,     1     as drought and wildfires caused by climate change dry out their food     2     (supply), many koalas are starting to drink water.

Robert Frend, a farmer from New South Wales, Australia,     3     (notice) how thirsty the koalas got and helped researchers at the University of Sydney bring them water. Frend invented something called Blinky Drinkers, a water station     4     (attach) to trees so that koalas can drink all they want.

In April 2016, researchers set up 10 of these water stations on the ground and up in the trees on a large piece of land     5     a sizable population of koalas. They also built up a surveillance (监视) system     6     (see) how much the koalas were using the Blinky Drinkers.

    7     they found was surprising: The koalas drank a lot, even waking up during the day, when they     8     (normal) sleep, to go to drink water from the stations on the ground. All of the Blinky Drinkers     9     (visit) 一193 times in total. And this was in the fall and winter seasons, when the heat isn’t so severe.

Researchers were excited to find out something new about how animals change     10     (they) behavior based on climate change and worried about the future of the koalas.

6 . The effect of climate change extends beyond ruining Earth’s environment and our physical safety. A report published this week suggests that climate change has a negative effect on our mental health, too.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States(PNAS), links an increase in monthly temperatures to a rise in mental health issues. The experimental evidence stems from meteorological (气象的) data paired with information collected from nearly 2 million randomly sampled residents in the United States. The data was collected over the span (跨度) of a decade.

“We find that experiences with hotter temperatures and added rainfall each worsen mental health, that long-lasting warming associates with an increased popularity of mental health issues, and that exposure to tropical cyclones(热带气旋), likely to increase in frequency in the future, is linked to worsened mental health,” authors of the study stated. “These results provide added large-scale evidence to the growing link between climate change and mental health.”

The report specifically focused on mental health outcomes due to the effects of environmental stress - such as temperature, rainfall, and tropical cyclones - but other climate change-related issues are likely to affect mental health as well - specifically, the stress and anxiety of knowing natural disasters could be more frequent as temperatures rise.

7 . It is a tough time to be a tree. Earth has lost a third of its forests over the past 10, 000 years — half of that just since 1900. We logged them for wood. We cut them to make way for farms and cattle. We cleared land to build homes and roads. Although deforestation has decreased globally from its peak in the 1980s, trends vary by region. In Indonesia, which had been cutting down forests for oil palm plantations (棕榈种植园), primary forest loss has declined since 2016. From August 2020 to July 2021, the Brazilian Amazon lost 5,000 square miles of rainforest, a 22 percent increase over the previous year. Since 1990, we’ve cut down more forest globally than there is forest in the United States.

Trees are growing faster as they absorb extra CO₂. That “greening” of the planet has so far helped slow climate change. But climate change is killing trees. And what has made forest scientists increasingly uneasy is the quickening pace of extreme events — fire, more powerful storms, and, most notably, severe heat and drought, which can worsen the effects of all the rest, shifting forests that have been around since the last ice age to entirely new states.

Climate change still poses less of a threat to forests than logging and land clearing, but the threat is growing fast. Satellite data show that Earth’s tree-covered area actually expanded from 1982 to 2016 by 7 percent, an area larger than Mexico. But that doesn’t mean forests are doing fine. The data don’t distinguish between natural forests and industrial tree farms, such as the millions of palm, eucalyptus (桉树), and pine trees planted as crops while rainforest is cleared. Also, the data don’t show which forests were lost to chain saws and which were killed by climate-related events.

8 . Even male chimps need their moms. Chimpanzees live in a male-dominated society, where most of their valuable mates are other males. However, as young male chimpanzees become adults, they, at least half of them, continue to maintain tight bonds with their mothers, a new study reveals. And approximately one-third of them have the closest friendship with their mothers while few female chimps contact their mothers.

Previous research has shown chimpanzee mothers provide their sons support that goes far beyond nursing. Young male chimps that are close with their moms grow bigger and have a greater chance of survival. To see whether this bond extends into later life, researchers followed 29 adolescent (9 to 15 years old) and young adult (16 to 20 years old) male chimpanzees at a research site in Kibale National Park in Uganda. For 3 years, they observed the chimps from a distance, recording any social interaction they witnessed. These included grooming (照料), comforting behaviors such as holding hands or patting shoulders, looking back for or waiting for other individuals, offering support during conflicts, and sitting near each other.

The team found that young adult males spent less time with their mothers than adolescents did—26% versus 76%. And unlike adolescents, they no longer cried for their mothers or sought comfort after fighting.

However, when these young adult males happened to be in the company of their mothers, they acted just like the adolescents, the researchers report this month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. They groomed their moms just as often and kept track of them. Many mothers remained the males’ “best friends”, or the social partner they associated with most frequently in the wilderness, says study co-leader Rachna Reddy, a biological anthropologist (人类学家) at Harvard University.

9 . Polar bears generally use sea ice to hunt (捕猎), but a newly discovered group has found another way. An isolated (与世隔绝的) population of polar bears has been discovered in a fjord (峡湾) in southeast Greenland, which is free of sea ice for most of the year. Polar bear generally need sea ice to survive, so the discovery is raising hopes that some kinds of the polar bears might survive the loss of sea ice caused by global warming.

Researchers found the population living in a fjord in the southeast Greenland, which is surrounded by mountains and an ice sheet to the west, and ocean to the east. The sea-ice coverage lasts for only around 100 days each year. With sea ice in the fjord becoming smaller because of global warming, the whole group were expected to die out by the end of this century.

But the isolated population has found a way to hunt without sea ice. The group, about 27 adult females, has been isolated from other polar bear populations along Greenland’s east coast for at least 200 years.

Tracking data from marked bears proves that they don’t move far. For example, when members of the group went out of the fjord, the ice on which they sat sometimes got caught in the rapid water flow. “Whenever this happened, they would get stuck and then, they would have to jump off, swim to the beach and walk back home empty-handed,” says lead author Kristin Laidre, an animal ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Though the researchers failed to video their hunting without sea ice, the existence of this small population in conditions of low sea-ice coverage suggests there is a chance that the population can survive, even as sea ice flows away to farther north each year.

10 . Human language is made possible by an impressive gift for vocal learning. Most animals cannot learn to imitate sounds at all. Though some species can learn how to use natural sounds in new ways, they don’t show a similar ability to learn new calls. Among all nonhuman vocal learners across the branches of life, the most impressive are birds.

“I wouldn’t say they have language in the way linguistic experts define it, ” says the neuroscientist Erich Jarvis. “But I would say they have a primitive form of what we might call spoken language. ”

Birdsong appears to have a lot in common with human speech, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language. One key element of human language is semantics, the connection of words with meanings. Over the past four decades, numerous studies have shown that many bird species use different alarm calls for different attackers. Recent studies suggest that the order of some birds’ calls may impact their meaning. This could represent a primary form of the rules governing the order and combination of words and elements in human language known as syntax, as illustrated by the classic “dog bites man” vs “man bites dog” example.

And the parallels run deeper, including similar brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning. Jarvis and his team have tried to compare the brain structures in songbirds and humans. “I think we humans tend to overestimate how different we are, ” he says. What has happened is that humans and songbirds have evolved a new forebrain circuit for learned sounds that has taken control of the brain stem circuit for natural sounds. “There is an assumption that species more closely related to us (e. g. monkeys) are going to be most like us. And that is true for many features, ” he says. “But, as you see, this is not true for every feature. ”

With all these similarities in mind, it’s reasonable to ask if birds themselves have language. It may come down to how you define it. But anyway, when the story of the evolution of language is finally complete, be prepared to thank the birds.