Stan Boutin has climbed more than 5,000 spruce trees in the last 30 years. He’s fallen only once, and he has often returned to the forest floor knowing if a ball of twigs and moss contained newborn red squirrel pups. Over the years, those squirrels have taught Boutin and his colleagues many things, including their […]
BOULDER, Colo., March 22, 2017—Arctic sea ice was at a record low maximum extent for the third straight year, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. On March 7, sea ice extent over the Arctic Ocean reached 14.42 million square kilometers (5.57 million square miles), then gradually began […]
People who study animal behavior think they may have found out why wolves hunt in packs — because ravens are such good scavengers. Scientists who watched wolves on Isle Royale in Lake Superior came up with the raven-wolf pack theory after puzzling over a question: Why do wolves hunt in large groups when a single […]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a $5.6 million, five-year grant to establish a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site along the northern Alaskan coast that will focus on the interactions between land and ocean that shape coastal ecosystems in the Arctic over different time scales. Researchers at the Beaufort Sea Lagoons LTER site will […]