3 . More than a score of Australian rare mammals have been killed by wild cats. These predators, which arrived with European settlers, still threaten native wildlife — and are too plentiful on the mainland to eliminate, as has been achieved on some small islands which were previously filled with them. But Alexandra Ross of the University of New South Wales thinks she has come up with a different way to deal with the problem. As she writes in a paper in the Journal of Applied Ecology, she is giving feline (猫科的) — awareness lessons to wild animals involved in re-introduction programs, in order to try to make them cat-conscious.

Many Australian mammals, though not actually extinct, are restricted to fragments of cat-free habitat. This will, however, put the forced migrants back in the sights of the cats that caused the problem in the first place. Training the migrants while they are in captivity, using stuffed models and the sorts of sounds made by cats, has proved expensive and ineffective. Ms Ross therefore wondered whether putting them in large natural enclosures with a scattering of predators might serve as a form of training camp to prepare them for introduction into their new, cat-ridden homes.

She tested this idea on a type of bandicoot (袋狸) that superficially resembles a rabbit. She and her colleagues raised two hundred bandicoots in a huge enclosure that also contained five wild cats. As a control, she raised a nearly identical population in a similar enclosure without the cats. She left the animals to get on with life for two years, which, given that bandicoots breed four times a year and live for around eight years, was a considerable period for them. After some predation (扑食) and probably some learning, she abstracted 21 bandicoots from each enclosure, attached radio transmitters to them and released them into a third enclosure that had ten hungry cats in it. She then monitored what happened next. The outcome was that the training worked. Over the subsequent 40 days, ten of the untrained animals were eaten by cats, but only four of the trained ones. One particular behavioral difference she noticed was that bandicoots brought up in a predator-free environment were much more likely to sleep alone than were those brought up around cats. And when cats are around, sleeping alone is dangerous. How well bandicoots that have undergone this extreme training will survive in the wild remains to be seen. But Ms Ross has at least provided reason for hope.

4 . The best ideas are often so smart, so simple and so clearly needed; it’s strange to discover they don’t already exist. So it is with Farm My School, a program that’s turning underused land at secondary schools into commercially achievable, regenerative market gardens farmed by and for local communities.

Co-founded by permaculturist Ben Shaw and regenerative educator James McLennan, Farm My School connects local people and organizations through volunteering that helps establish a school’s market garden. Students learn about community networks, healthy eating, ecological responsibility, waste reduction and climate relief while helping with food production. Schools integrate all these into their courses while producing vegetable boxes every week that feed local families, supply the school’s food needs and ultimately pay the farmer’s salary.

Farm My School has gained the extraordinary enthusiasm of the locals, who answered an online shout-out to buy tickets to the program’s launch event at Bell Secondary School last October. Called Build A Farm in a Day Festival, the event featured workshops by Ben and James to share the skills required to build what they say is the world’s largest no-dig garden. “It was such a powerful event, and I think that comes down to people wanting to act now,” says James. “We charged for the experience and 600 guys turned up! They didn’t even need free drinks to get excited. We were gardening till midnight. It was amazing. We’ve got true community buy-in.”

Volunteers have since begun beneficial planting throughout the school. Next steps include further discussions with local communities, employing a farmer, and bringing in a teacher to develop courses. “We’ve seen this huge push towards seeing schools as regenerative spaces, not just for planting but for kids to be more connected to the outside world, and really seeing the school in a whole new light,” James says. “For us, the big excitement is that by allowing a professional farmer to take the responsibility of growing food, it’s not only on the school to look after that farm anymore, which eventually makes it much more sustainable,” adds Ben.

7 . Homing pigeons combine precise internal compasses and memorized landmarks to re-trace a path back to their lofts — even four years after the previous time they made the trip, a new study shows.

Testing nonhuman memory retention (保持) is challenging; in research studies, “it’s rare that there is a gap of several years between when an animal stores the information and when it is next required to retrieve it,” says University of Oxford zoologist Dora Biro. For a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biro and her colleagues compared domestic homing pigeons’ paths three or four years after the birds established routes back to their loft from a farm 8.6 kilometers away. The study built on data from a 2016 experiment in which pigeons learned routes in different social contexts during several flights — on their own or with peers that did or did not know the way.

Using data from GPS devices temporarily attached to the birds’ backs, the researchers compared the flight paths a pack of pigeons took in 2019 or 2020, without the birds visiting the release site in between. Some birds missed a handful of landmarks along the way, but many others took “strikingly similar” routes to those they used in 2016, says Oxford zoologist and study co-author Julien Collet: “It was...as if the last time they flew there was just the day before, not four years ago.”

The team found that the pigeons remembered a route just as well if they first flew it alone or with others and fared much better than those that had not made the journey in 2016.

The result is not surprising, says Verner Bing-man, who studies animal navigation at Bowling Green State University and was not involved with the study. But it provides new confirmation of homing pigeons’ remarkable memory, he says: “It closes the distance a little bit between our self-centered sense of human intellectual abilities and what animals can do.”

8 . Ecotourism is a combination of ecology (the study of systems of living things) and tourism. It is defined as “responsible travel to natural areas that preserves the environment and improves the welfare of the local people” by the International Ecotourism Society. Actually, ecotourism can mean travel to far-off places of great natural beauty, but not always in a(n) _______ way. It's a big business, and the attraction of money can cause people to think about profits first. While ecotourism offers benefits to people and ecosystems, it leaves ecosystems _______ to negative effects, too.

Costa Rica, once a Spanish colony, and independent since 1821, has an ecotourism industry worth over one billion dollars yearly, and thousands of jobs have been _______. Nearly 21 percent of the land is now protected national parks, _______ thanks to ecotourism. Nevertheless, due to the number of people visiting the country's natural places, some damage to the ecosystem has occurred.

While tourists can have a negative impact on ecosystems, the same areas might have been _______ by industries such as farming, logging, or mining if there were no ecotourism industry. Shelters have been created instead, keeping the ecosystem protected. And, by visiting beautiful rain forests and seeing rare animals, visitors get a sense of their _______, and of gratitude for them. Tour guides can also be educators who train people to love and care for the environment. Visitors can take these lessons with them to their home countries.

Unfortunately, while their effect may not be _______ in the off-season, the constant parade of visitors in the high season can be damaging. At one national park in Costa Rica, wild monkeys now feed on garbage left by the tourists. In addition, ecotourists tend to seek out places with the rarest animals and plants, _______ the most delicate living things.

It is easy to be critical of the ecotourism industry, but it is important to be _______ as well. Ecotourism can never be “pure”. We can't expect zero negative effects on the ecosystem. It is also ________ to suppose that humans won't go anywhere accessible to them. If protection efforts are maintained and increased, those remaining places of undisturbed nature may be stressed, but they won't be destroyed.

9 . Biodiversity is a concept that's commonly referenced, yet regularly misunderstood. The complex_______ not only refers to the unbelievable variety of life on Earth, but to how everything from genes to entire ecosystems interact to make the planet habitable. The bad news: science shows that biodiversity is _______ worldwide at a faster rate than at any time in human history. That’s obviously devastating for everything in nature--including us.

“If biodiversity disappears, so do people,” says Dr. Stephen Woodley, field ecologist and bio-diversity expert with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “We are part of the _______ and we do not exist without it.”

Preventing such a catastrophe, says Woodley, begins with understanding why biodiversity is declining, and then taking action to _______ course.

“The two greatest _______ of biodiversity loss are habitat loss, primarily on land, and overexploitation, primarily in the ocean,” Woodley says. He explains that we can solve these problems by permanently _______ more lands and oceans and managing them for their conservation values.

That's the mission of the global Campaign for Nature, a partnership of the Wyss Foundation and the National Geographic Society. Instead of simply protecting 30 percent of the Earth, the_______ also encourages nations, in full partnership with local communities, to focus on the right 30 percent. Those areas, says Woodley, _______ the most important biodiversity, such as endangered species and ecosystems and rare species and ecosystems.

The campaign also recognizes the importance of_______ local rights. Local peoples manage or hold tenure(保有权) over lands that support about 80 percent of the world's biodiversity, making it ________ for these communities to be full partners in developing and implementing strategies.

________, protecting the health of key biodiversity areas is vital for tackling climate change, says National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Enric Sala. Pairing the international Paris Agreement to combat climate change, Sala's paper asserts, “would ________catastrophic(灾难性的) climate change, conserve species, and secure essential ecosystem services.”

“Biodiversity is stability,” says Sala. “Trees, wetlands, grasslands, peat bogs(泥炭沼泽), salt marshes(盐沼), healthy ocean ecosystems, mangroves(红树林), and plants ________ much of the carbon pollution humans put into the atmosphere. Yet, right now, less than half of the planet is in its natural state, which isn't enough.” Bottom line: Nature needs us to act-now. “Moving to Mars is not a(n) ________,” Sala adds. “The only conditions for our life and for the prosperity of human society are here on Earth ...we are ________ protecting it.”