Tracking Lucero: Scientists follow a rare Eastern Pacific leatherback sea turtle. Mongabay Bobby Bascomb 26 May 2026 Ecuador Fewer than 1,000 leatherback sea turtles remain in the Eastern Pacific, nesting along the coastline that runs from Mexico to Ecuador. Scientists have previously fitted tracking devices to leatherbacks on other beaches across Latin America and from bycatch near Ecuador. However, they recently tagged the first nesting leatherback in Ecuador, the southern limit of the species’ nesting range.

As honey bees swarm farms, though, their less visible colleagues are also hard at work. The vast majority of them are solitary, making their homes underground or in natural cavities like trees. The regular miner bee, for instance, digs cavities under the East Lawn Cemetery, where it lays eggs that hatch into larvae and emerge as adults the following spring. Those adults go on to become critical pollinators for local plants, including New York’s apple trees, a highly valuable crop. Weirdly enough, a cemetery might tick many of the boxes for a ground-dwelling buzzer in the market for a home. If this is a good spot for humans to bury their dead, it’s also a good spot for the regular miner bee: “places that don’t flood, and places that are easy to dig and don’t collapse when you dig them,” said Jordan Kueneman, a community ecologist at Cornell University and co-author of a new paper describing the findings. “So we think the bees in this area are drawn towards some of those same characteristics.”But if a lawn mower grazed your house, wouldn’t you think about moving? Well, this might not be too big of a deal for the regular miner bee. In fact, by cutting the grass close, groundskeepers could be doing the insects a favor. “They do like to often have the ground exposed,” Kueneman said. “That helps the ground warm up quicker, allows them to become more active more quickly in the day. It allows them to get in and out of their nests easily.”

The researchers discovered that this population of miner bees is absolutely booming. By collecting individuals and scaling that count up across the grounds, they estimate that the East Lawn Cemetery hosts between 3 million and 8 million bees, including species other than the miner. “It was an extraordinary size, and a lot of that has to do with extraordinary density,” Kueneman said. “In some locations, we were measuring thousands of individuals emerging in a square meter.” (Still, Kueneman added, gardening crews could help the bees out even more by mowing earlier in the morning, before the insects emerge for the day.)The researchers could also determine that this is a healthy population because of how many females were flying around. Male regular miner bees are smaller than they are, so when a mother lays eggs, she has to put fewer resources into making male offspring. If a population has a healthy proportion of females, then, it suggests that it’s thriving, and indeed that’s what the scientists found in the cemetery.e,”Enter the miner bee’s mortal enemy, Nomada imbricata, a variety of cuckoo bee. Just as cuckoo birds lay their eggs in other species’ nests, this opportunist invades the miner bee’s burrows and lays its eggs. This saves it the trouble of digging its own home, and its offspring hatch with plenty of food. “The parasitic bee develops and often has these large mandibles that they use to devour everything in their path, including the host bee  Kueneman said. “They’ll sometimes decapitate them.” Not great for the miner bee, obviously, but the cuckoo’s presence at the cemetery provides more evidence that it has a healthy population to parasitize.

The bees are not alone in their success in this unlikely habitat. Other scientists are finding that many species across the tree of life — bats, migrating geese, owls, coyotes, rare types of plants — are using cemeteries as refuges in an increasingly urbanized world. “It has a lot of the things you want,” said Seth Magle, senior director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “It’s got trees, it’s got grass, it’s potentially got prey species for you, and resources. And then it largely lacks a couple of things you don’t like about parks, which are probably people and dogs.” Also absent from cemeteries are speeding cars, which in the United States hit hundreds of millions of birds and large animals, not to mention untold numbers of insects, each year.......read on   https://grist.org/cities/why-millions-of-adorable-bees-are-emerging-from-this-cemetery/

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake review – a brilliant 'door opener' book.Guardian Richard Kerridge 27Aug 2020  Eating rubbish and the interpenetration of life ... this entrancing study of fungi changes our view of the world. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” So said the nature writer John Muir. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/27/entangled-life-by-merlin-sheldrake-review-a-brilliant-door-opener-book 

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake review – a brilliant 'door opener' book.Guardian Richard Kerridge 27 Aug 2020  Eating rubbish and the interpenetration of life ... this entrancing study of fungi changes our view of the world. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” So said the nature writer John Muir. His statement is spectacularly true of fungi. Mostly, they come to our notice as mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, infections and antibiotics but, invisibly, they are inside us and all around us. Fungi live in all kinds of organisms, on surfaces, in and below the soil, in the air, in water, in deep ocean floors and inside solid rock. In these places, fungi are not merely present. They are structural. Their interaction with other matter has played an essential role in making the world we inhabit. The symbiotic merging of algae and fungi to form lichens enabled the rootless ancestors of all our plants to emerge from water. Ninety per cent of all plants depend on fungi for minerals. Fungi can eat most rubbish, and even oil spills. We can use them in numerous ways (drugs, cooking, even furniture building). And when we look closely, we meet large, unsettling questions. Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist who studies underground fungal networks, carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision. His fascination with fungi began in childhood. He loves their colours, strange shapes, intense odours and astonishing abilities, and is proud of the way this once unfashionable academic field is challenging some of our deepest assumptions. Entangled Life is a book about how life-forms interpenetrate and change each other continuously. He moves smoothly between stories, scientific descriptions and philosophical issues. He quotes Prince and Tom Waits.

There are more than 2 million species of fungi. Most, he explains, take the form of multi-cellular filaments called hyphae, which grow at their tips, branch in all directions, mate, fuse, entwine and tangle, creating the networks known as mycelia. The fungi we see, the mushrooms, brackets and moulds, are the fruiting bodies that sprout from the mycelia to release spores: 50 megatons each year. Spores concentrate in the atmosphere, sometimes changing the weather: a droplet forms on one, which then traps more moisture, becoming the nucleus of a raindrop or hailstone. Mycelium, Sheldrake says, is the tissue that holds together much of the world. The filaments thread through the soil, and through living and decomposing bodies, plant or animal. Each exploring tip is looking for water and nutrients, which it will begin to absorb, sending chemical signals to other parts of the network. In some species, scientists have also detected electrical waves. Other filaments nearby that receive these messages turn towards the nourishment. The network can store information. Scientists have tried removing the food source and severing all the connections. New filaments appear and set out in the right direction. It is hard not to call this “memory”.

The tips circulate “information”, and, in response, the mycelium makes advantageous changes to its behaviour. This is more than mere chemical reaction. Here is a responsive entity with interests that its actions can serve or harm......(ed)  a fascinating must read       https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/27/entangled-life-by-merlin-sheldrake-review-a-brilliant-door-opene