Chipmunks in the Chicago area have developed larger skulls with shorter teeth on the sides of their mouths, while parts of voles’ inner ears have shrunk. Through looking at specimens housed at Chicago’s Field Museum, scientists found evidence of fast-paced city evolution linked to urbanization in the rodents. Researchers took measurements and created 3D scans of the skulls, comparing how their size and shape changed over 125 years. Researchers think that changing diets caused the shifts in the eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) skulls. The chipmunks became larger because they were eating more human food. They had smaller teeth because they were eating fewer hard foods, like seeds and nuts. The eastern meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus) had smaller bones in the inner ear associated with hearing, potentially to help them deal with noise pollution. “These findings clearly show that interfering with the environment has a detectable effect on wildlife,” said Anderson Feijó, assistant curator of mammals at the Field Museum and co-author of the study, in an interview with the museum.
Jim Scull received the Central Mountains and Plains Section’s 2025 Citizen Conservation Award.
The award presented by The Wildlife Society’s Central Mountains and Plains Section recognizes nonwildlife professionals who have made contributions to wildlife conservation.
“He demonstrates a lifetime of commitment to wildlife, habitat conservation and education through volunteer service and philanthropy,” said Dennie Mann, president of the South Dakota Chapter of The Wildlife Society, who nominated Scull for the award after he won the South Dakota Chapter’s 2024 Citizen Conservation Award. The Section considered him among nominees from North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
“I’m deeply honored,” Scull said. “I see [conservation] as a way of life.”
South Dakota Governor Larry Rhonden presented Scull with the award at the banquet for South Dakota Youth Hunting Adventures, a nonprofit founded by Scull whose mission is to foster a lifelong appreciation for the outdoors and a conservationist mindset in young people who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to get outside through mentored hunting and outdoor recreational experiences.
For the last 18 years, Youth Hunting Adventures has introduced around 60-80 young people each year to ethical, safe hunting practices with the support of vetted mentors. “I’m really proud of that program,” Scull said.
Jim Scull harvests a deer with his son and granddaughter on one of his ranches. Courtesy of Jim Scull
Part of Scull’s strategy to engage youth hunters is improving the state’s offerings for recreational shooters, including the in-progress Pete Lien & Sons Shooting Sports Complex outside of Rapid City, which will open this October.
In total, Scull and his companies have donated $900,000 to the project. Mann said that Scull was “instrumental” in acquiring the land for the project—he was the one who initiated the outreach and community involvement from the beginning—and in determining the layout for the project. “It’s really important to recognize individuals outside the agencies that are doing important work,” Mann said.
Scull, who owns and operates Scull Construction, has used his business to support the state’s conservation initiatives at various levels. Scull Construction built both the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Outdoor Campus West in Rapid City and the Custer State Park Visitors Center, which provides outdoor outreach and education.
He has also taken wildlife conservation into his own hands, owning and operating several ranch units in western South Dakota in collaboration with wildlife managers to follow best management practices for conserving and enhancing wildlife habitat. Around 25,000 acres of his ranches are held in conservation easements with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which will protect these areas from development in perpetuity.
Scull, who is now 75, prioritizes conservation now more than ever. “I do all this so my grandchildren can have these wild places and wild things,” he said.
The decline of western migratory monarchs is likely not driven by the increasing number of resident monarchs in California’s Bay Area, a pattern associated with warmer winters, the presence of nonnative milkweed and potentially elevated parasite prevalence.
“My intuition was that a lot of effort was being put into something that might not be as bad for monarch butterflies as people thought,” said Elizabeth Crone, a professor at UC Davis.
Western migratory monarchs (Danaus plexippus) are a distinct population that breeds west of the Rocky Mountains during the spring and summer in areas like California’s Central Valley, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Intermountain West. In the fall, the last generation of the year migrates to the California coast, where they cluster in sheltered groves to overwinter. While this migratory population has plummeted in the past decade, more and more monarch butterflies have become year-round residents in coastal Californian cities.
During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, people—and it seemed, monarchs—were on lockdown in the California Bay Area. That winter of 2020-2021, the lowest ever count of western monarch butterflies overwintered on the California coast, making up only 1% of the typical numbers. At the same time, people in places like the East and South Bay were spotting monarchs in their gardens.
These observations led Crone to lead a study published in Ecosphere to find out what was going on with both migratory and resident monarchs in the area. She also wondered if the migratory population was suffering from the effects of a parasitic protozoan, OE (Ophryocystis elektroscirrha), which is prominently found on nonnative milkweed. The infection can make it hard for migratory monarchs to complete their journeys and has been associated with high abundances of resident monarchs.
For a year, Crone and her colleagues tracked monarch numbers, life stages, disease levels and plant types across 15 routes in East Bay neighborhoods. They found that urban gardens support nonmigratory populations of monarch butterflies, which appear to persist year-round, feeding and breeding on both native and nonnative milkweed.
While tropical milkweed is often blamed for disrupting monarch migration and spreading disease, the research suggests that urban gardens may act more as stable habitats for resident monarchs than harmful traps.
“Among the community of people studying monarch butterflies, there are at least a handful of people who still strongly disagree with our conclusion that the tropical milkweed is not obviously bad for the migratory monarch populations,” Crone said. She also said that interactions may differ in other regions.
Crone said conservation groups or homeowners associations may not need to be overly concerned about whether individuals have tropical milkweed in their yards. Instead, they can spend more time encouraging people to plant diverse flower gardens that are good for nectar, for monarch butterflies and for other pollinators.
Her lab continues to examine four of the 15 sites from this study to examine yearly variation in the response. Future work aims to examine the potential impact of these urban gardens on other pollinators like bees and pipevine swallowtail (Battus philenor) butterflies.
In a historic move, the nonprofit organization Conservation Fund bought 8,000 acres of land—and the rights to the minerals below it—near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in rural Georgia. They paid the Alabama mining company Twin Pines’ $60 million for the parcel, which included 600 acres of Twin Pines’ proposed titanium dioxide mine, a mineral used in whitening pigments like toothpaste and paint. While proponents for the mine argued it would bring needed jobs to the area, scientists warned that such a project and its groundwater budget would cause irreversible damage to the Okefenokee Swamp, which is North America’s largest blackwater swamp. The Okefenokee is also home to many species of wildlife, including federally threatened and endangered species like the red-cockaded woodpecker (Leuconotopicus borealis), indigo snake (Drymarchon couperi), gopher tortoise (Gopherus polyphemus) and wood stork (Mycteria americana). “Twin Pines’ decision to sell their land to a conservation buyer instead of to a mining company is a respectable response to the hundreds of thousands of voices who have spoken out against the mining proposal,” said Megan Desrosiers, president and CEO of the Brunswick-based coastal protection nonprofit One Hundred Miles, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The refuge is currently under consideration to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which would afford the area additional long-term protection.
A newly developed stable isotope analysis can distinguish between legal woolly mammoth ivory and illegal elephant ivory. To save elephants from extinction, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) of Wild Fauna and Flora banned the sale of their tusks in 1989. However, mammoth ivory, dug up from permafrost layers in the tundra, is still legal to harvest and sell. Though mammoth ivory is much less valuable than elephant ivory, smugglers often mix mammoth and elephant ivory together in a single shipment to deceive law enforcement. In a new study, researchers investigated the elemental forms—or isotopes—of oxygen and hydrogen in the ivory and can now distinguish elephant and mammoth ivory. Mammoths, which lived thousands of years ago in cold areas like Siberia, drank water that had different isotopic signatures than the water that modern-day elephants drink in tropical areas. “Our results showed that stable isotope analyses of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes are an efficient tool to distinguish elephant and mammoth ivory,” said Maria Santos, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong, in a press release. Previous tests used carbon dating or molecular analyses, which were both expensive and time-consuming compared to stable isotope analysis. “We hope that the protocol described in our study will be applied to screen large batches of supposedly mammoth ivory objects,” Santos said. “This could help combat the illegal ivory trade more effectively and close the potential laundering loophole.”
The sale of up to 3 million acres of public lands in the Senate’s proposed budget reconciliation bill has led to an outpouring of dissent from interest groups across sectors. Known as the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the reconciliation bill is a 1,100+ page bill that spans taxes, spending, defense, immigration, energy, healthcare and social welfare. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) recently released draft reconciliation bill text that significantly increased the scope of potential land sales seen in the House’s version of the bill in late May. That bill narrowly passed the House with a vote of 215 to 214, following the removal of an amendment authorizing the sale of between 450,000-500,000 acres. Representatives Zinke (R-MT) and Vasquez (D-NM), who launched the bipartisan Public Lands Caucus earlier this year, led the effort to remove this amendment. TWS joined the American Fisheries Society to thank both representatives for their dedication to the stewardship of America’s public lands.
The Senate has not yet voted on the bill, meaning there is still a window for outreach to Senate offices. Earlier this week, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s proposed land sales could not be included in the reconciliation bill. The Senator has since said he would remove U.S. Forest Service lands from his proposal and reduce the acreage of BLM lands that would be available for sale.
Bat viruses closely related to the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) could be close to jumping to humans. Researchers investigated how a group of coronaviruses known as merbecoviruses, which includes MERS-CoV, infect host cells. They found that merbecoviruses use spike proteins—proteins that form spike structures that project from the surface of the virus—to bind to receptors. Some viruses use a host receptor called ACE2, the same receptor used by SARS-CoV-2. In lab tests, this subgroup of viruses can only use the ACE2 receptor in bats, not humans. However, when researchers looked at viruses from Asia that are found in the Japanese house bat (Pipistrellus abramus), they discovered some genetic mutations that may enable the spike proteins to bind to ACE2 receptors in other species, including humans. Despite the history of merbecoviruses, including the MERS-CoV spillover event in 2012 from dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) that killed 34% of infected humans, research on this group of viruses has been relatively limited. “These viruses are so closely related to MERS, so we have to be concerned if they ever infect humans,” said Michael Letko, a virologist at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in a press release. “While there’s no evidence they’ve crossed into people yet, the potential is there—and that makes them worth watching.”
Thousands of years after wild horses last roamed the Italian Peninsula, a growing population is now grazing—and potentially maintaining—grassland near Florence.
“The horses might be an asset for the preservation of these grasslands,” said Ilaria Greco, a research fellow in ecology at the University of Florence.
During the Pleistocene and perhaps the Early Holocene, horses distantly related to the domesticated species found all around the world and in some reintroduced wild populations used to roam the grasslands of Europe.
The questions of exactly which species these may have been and where they roamed are complicated by years of interbreeding with domesticated horses. The Przewalski’s horse (E. f. przewalskii), which lives in Mongolia, is the only subspecies of wild horses that has survived in some form to the present day. But horses in Italy were likely related to the now extinct tarpan (Equus ferus ferus). The genes of all domestic horses today are made up of these horses and potentially other wild subspecies.
Wild horse release
Around 40 years ago, a breeder released some domesticated horses into La Calvana, a protected area in central Italy. The population did quite well, expanding in the mountainous area until it reached a number of around 83 individuals in 2024, according to census data carried out by Associazione Salvaguardia e Sviluppo Calvana, an association focused on preserving La Calvana.
Researchers have studied little about the impact of this feral population, though. In a study published recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Greco and her colleagues sought to understand more about the ways that the horses used the landscape in La Calvana and how they interacted with other ungulates in the area.
“It was an accidental rewilding project—we are just studying the consequences of it,” Greco said.
La Calvana is known for having higher elevation grasslands. Credit: Ilaria Greco
From May to July 2022, the team placed 40 trail cameras in La Calvana—one for every 2 square kilometers in an area spanning 45 square kilometers. Each camera was active in the field for at least 30 days during this period.
Analysis of the photos revealed that the horses tended to use the upper-ridge grasslands in the area more often than other regions.
Forest encroachment has been increasing in this area over the years, leading to a decrease in grasslands home to various endemic and rare plants. But Greco said that the horses’ grazing is likely stopping the encroachment of forests in these areas.
“This is a demonstration of the utility of the horses actually taking care of the grassland,” she said.
In some ways, this might be coming at the expense of other ungulates, though. The trail cameras caught native ungulates like roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), common fallow deer (Dama dama), red deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild boar (Sus scrofa) showing up in some of the same areas as the horses, but not at the same time. The trail cameras revealed that the horses were taking up prime areas for keeping cool, such as shaded grassland during hot days. “Other ungulates, they avoid these places,” Greco said.
This may be due to the size of horses, but it also may be due to their tendency to move in larger herds than these other ungulates.
The trail cameras also revealed that humans using the area for recreation didn’t bother the horses much.
Growing population
Census records revealed that the horse population in La Calvana has grown by about 12% each year from 2018 to 2024. This translates to a density of roughly 1.8 horses per square kilometer, Greco said.
Horses are restoring grasslands in areas around Florence where forests are taking over. Credit: Ottavia Poli
While the density doesn’t seem to be a problem as of now, she said that wildlife managers should continue to monitor the situation so the population doesn’t grow out of control, like it has in western states in the U.S.
Wolves (Canis lupus) occasionally prey on horses in the area—records show they kill about three per year, Greco said. But there aren’t many other predators there, and most horses there die from other causes.
Currently, horses are still considered domestic animals, so the Italian government doesn’t regulate the population. Just before 2018, when the census began on the population, unknown people removed some 30 horses from the area, potentially with the goal of domesticating them or potentially killing and eating them, Greco said.
In other parts of Europe, stakeholders involved in rewilding efforts are attempting to create a new label for domestic species reintroduced into the wild, such as these, but there are currently no laws to regulate them one way or another.
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For two years after a wildfire, bumble bees are both bigger and more abundant in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
“Body size is really important in bumble bees,” said Claudinéia Costa, a project scientist at the University of California, Riverside. “So, we wanted to understand what factors affect this.”
Costa already knew two things to be true—what yellow-faced bumble bees (Bombus vosnesenskii) eat affects their body size, and fire reshapes the number and types of plants on a landscape. “We know that fires are important for environments that the bees are using,” Costa said.
Body size is important to bumble bees. Jobs within the colony are divided up based on size: smaller bees spend more time in the nest, while larger bees spend more time flying and foraging.
Claudinéia Costa, Claudette Torres, Natalie Fischer and Melissa Arellano in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near a field site. Credit: Claudinéia Costa
So, when fires hit some of the meadows and forests in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains in 2021, where Costa and her team had been monitoring bee populations, she jumped at the opportunity to analyze fire’s effects on bees. She published her findings in a study in Ecology and Evolution.
Surveys revealed that the bees were benefiting from the fire. Bees were bigger on average and more abundant. “In general, fires change the environment in a way that makes bees more abundant,” Costa said.
Bees are one of the first species to recolonize these areas after a fire. They feed on nectar and pollinate plants, which helps create more plants—a positive feedback loop that ultimately creates more foraging opportunities for bees.
A meadow site that was not burned in 2021. Credit: Claudinéia Costa
But this benefit wasn’t necessarily because of a significant difference in the quality of floral resources in burned areas compared to areas that hadn’t burned in the past 10 years. While the fires created unique floral assemblages, researchers found that the overall amount of resources the flowers offered—including nectar and pollen—didn’t increase during the study period.
A forested sites that was burned by a wildfire. Credit: Claudinéia Costa
Costa thinks this might be because the areas where she conducts her fieldwork are already high-quality habitats, so the relative change in quality was low, despite the burn.
Since the amount and quality of pollen and nectar didn’t change, Costa thinks some of the increases in body size of worker bees and overall bumble bee abundance could be due to finer-scale changes in resources that her study didn’t detect, including changes in soil chemistry post-fire.
There’s also nesting habitat. Costa thinks the increase in bee abundance might be due to habitat creation for these ground-nesting bees. “Because the fire cleans up the underbrush, it creates more nesting opportunities for the bees,” she said.
Melissa Arellano, an undergraduate researcher, with a bumble bee. Credit: Claudinéia Costa
As climate change increases the intensity and frequency of wildfires, Costa said it’s important to understand their effects on bumble bees, which are both ecologically and economically important species. In North America, bumble bees are one of the most important pollinators, helping several crops reproduce.
By understanding how fire impacts important species like pollinators, Costa said we can better understand how to manage these landscapes as the environment continues to change.
Conservationists have captured footage of an animal so rare in Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park that some refer to it as a “ghost elephant.” But footage collected from a trail camera placed by Panthera, the global cat conservation organization, has shown a male recently. The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) is a rare sight in the park and Senegal in general—the individual may even be the last one in the country. “If this was found to be the case, we will assess the feasibility of translocating a herd of females into the park so as to found a new breeding elephant population in Senegal,” Panthera’s West and Central Regional Director Philipp Henschel told Newsweek.
