Category: 7. Science

Humpback whales lose around 36 percent of their energy reserves during their long annual migrations, according to a new study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

Using drones, researchers monitored 103 humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) to see how their body conditions – how much muscle and blubber it has – changed during their migration between their Antarctic feeding grounds and their breeding grounds in Colombia.

The whales’ body condition changed considerably between early autumn (March to May), when they were at their fattest after feasting on krill, and late spring (August to December) when they had lost significant amounts of weight.

“An average size adult humpback whale loses about 36 percent of its body condition during migration – equivalent to 11,000 kilograms of blubber, which is as much as the weight of standard single-decker city bus or two adult African elephants,” says lead author Alexandre Bernier-Graveline, PhD candidate from Griffith University’s Southern Ocean Persistent Organic Pollutants Programme.

To gain this amount of energy for their remarkable journeys, the whales would need to eat 57,000 kilos of Antarctic krill. At around 196 million kilojoules of energy, it would take the average adult human more than 62 years to consume this much.

Bernier-Graveline was surprised when he calculated the figures. He was used to working with four-metre, 1,000-kilo beluga whales, but humpbacks can grow to 13 metres and tip the scales at around 35,000 kilos – so everything is supersized. Their sheer size “makes any estimates quite impressive and difficult to grasp.”

Bernier-Graveline first became interested in marine mammals’ energy reserves while studying beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River, Quebec, Canada.

He decided to study how declining reserves could offer insights into the health of marine mammal populations. “Understanding early warning signal of population collapse, such as changes in behaviour, morphology, and life-history traits is crucial for anticipating population declines and implementing effective conservation strategies,” he says.

Data-collecting drones

The researchers used drones to monitor the whales’ body conditions. Although this is an effective and non-invasive method of collecting data, the approach is technically demanding and lots of things can go wrong.

“The method relies on converting pixel-based measurements from overhead images into accurate real-world dimensions, which requires precise data and good image quality,” Bernier-Graveline says. “Working in marine environments presents several logistical challenges. Weather conditions can be unpredictable and often limit flight opportunities.”

Any issues with the drone can cause problems and, even if they do capture what they need, processing the images is a long and complex process. “It involves managing various sources of variability, such as whale posture, sea state, image quality and light conditions, all of which can affect measurement accuracy,” he says.

There are also many benefits to using drones. Compared with other research methods, like biopsies, they are less invasive and help the scientists to keep track of more whales.

Importance of krill

The findings demonstrate just how important it is for humpbacks in the Southern Hemisphere to binge on krill during the Antarctic feeding season. This important energy source will sustain them for months as they swim thousands of miles to their tropical breeding grounds.

But krill are under threat. “The Antarctic sea-ice ecosystem is changing rapidly, significantly impacting krill populations,” Bernier-Graveline says.

The loss of krill could cause huge problems for humpback populations. “With less food comes less energy, directly affecting their health, body condition, and reproductive success, factors closely linked to krill abundance and sea ice extent,” he adds.

Without enough to eat, whales could be in serious trouble. “Modelling studies suggest that while humpback whales may fully recover from historical whaling by 2050, their numbers could decline sharply by 2100 due to ocean warming and reduced prey availability,” says Bernier-Graveline – and this will have a ripple effect on ecosystems across the ocean.

The idea is worrying but there is hope. Many species of whales were nearly wiped out by industrial whaling but, since a global ban was put in place, they have rebounded.

Bernier-Graveline says: “History has shown that bold conservation actions can reverse negative trends.”

Read the full study: Drone-Based Photogrammetry Provides Estimates of the Energetic Cost of Migration for Humpback Whales Between Antarctica and Colombia.

More amazing wildlife stories from around the world

Top image credit: Griffith University

A massive planet trapped in a death spiral around its star could unlock some of the secrets surrounding star systems. However, the fate of this world is not yet set in stone, with two deaths and one “rebirth” possible in its future.

The extrasolar planet or “exoplanet” in question is TOI-2109b, which has five times the mass of Jupiter and is located around 870 light-years from our solar system. The planet orbits so close to its parent star, TOI-2109, that it has a year that lasts just 16 hours.

Antarctica’s oldest ice has arrived in the UK for analysis which scientists hope will reveal more about Earth’s climate shifts.

The ice was retrieved from depths of up to 2,800 metres at Little Dome C in East Antarctica as part of an international effort to “unlock the deepest secrets of Antarctica’s ice”.

The ice cores – cylindrical tubes of ancient ice – will be analysed at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing up to 1.5 million years of Earth’s climate history, significantly extending the current ice core record of 800,000 years.

The research is also expected to offer valuable context for predicting future climate change, Dr Liz Thomas, head of the ice cores team at the British Antarctic Survey, said.

Over the next few years, the samples will be analysed by different labs across Europe to gain understanding of Earth’s climate evolution and greenhouse gas concentrations.

Dr Thomas said: “It’s incredibly exciting to be part of this international effort to unlock the deepest secrets of Antarctica’s ice.

“The project is driven by a central scientific question: why did the planet’s climate cycle shift roughly one million years ago from a 41,000-year to a 100,000-year phasing of glacial-interglacial cycles?

“By extending the ice core record beyond this turning point, researchers hope to improve predictions of how Earth’s climate may respond to future greenhouse gas increases.”

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The ice was extracted as part of the Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice project, which is funded by the European Commission and brings together researchers from 10 European countries and 12 institutions.

“Our data will yield the first continuous reconstructions of key environmental indicators-including atmospheric temperatures, wind patterns, sea ice extent, and marine productivity-spanning the past 1.5 million years,” Dr Thomas said.

“This unprecedented ice core dataset will provide vital insights into the link between atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate during a previously uncharted period in Earth’s history, offering valuable context for predicting future climate change.”

A recent study shows that reading chemical marks on just two stretches of human DNA can estimate a person’s chronological age to within about 1.36 years – if the person is younger than 50.

The work comes from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Professor Tommy Kaplan and his colleagues trained a deep learning model called MAgeNet to read single‑molecule methylation patterns.

“It turns out that the passage of time leaves measurable marks on our DNA,” said Kaplan, enthused about this finding he credits to the team’s focus on high‑resolution data.

DNA methylation is a steady change that happens over time, where a small chemical tag gets added to specific spots in the DNA.

Because methylation builds up or fades in predictable ways as people age, scientists have treated it as a molecular clock for more than a decade.

Earlier age prediction models looked at hundreds of scattered DNA sites, but MAgeNet focuses on just two specific regions.

It studies thousands of individual DNA fragments from those regions and runs them through a layered AI system to figure out a person’s age.

The network learns whether each fragment is fully methylated, partly marked, or untouched, then weighs more than 130,000 possible patterns to calculate a final age prediction.

Two DNA regions determine age

Horvath’s 2013 epigenetic clock needed 353 CpGs and still missed the mark by almost four years on individual blood samples.

Non‑linear “GP‑age” modeling cut that error to about two years using 30 CpGs, but it still relied on array data that blurs single‑molecule details. Pyrosequencing work later trimmed the list to five CpGs yet could not beat a 3.9‑year median error.

Kaplan’s team showed that focusing on pattern combinations rather than single averages lets a neural network squeeze out nearly twice the accuracy of any earlier clock.

Age test informs care

MAgeNet’s predictions did not change when researchers stratified volunteers by body‑mass index, smoking history, or sex, suggesting that the two‑locus signatures are insulated from lifestyle noise.

Such stability could help physicians decide whether a patient’s treatment plan matches cellular age rather than calendar age, a crucial distinction in emerging “gerotherapeutic” trials that target biological aging.

The study also tracked 52 Jerusalem residents a decade apart and found that early deviations between predicted and calendar age remained almost unchanged ten years later.

This fact implies that the methyl tags lay down a durable timestamp rather than fluctuating with short‑term health shifts.

Because the assay works on as few as 50 DNA molecules, even a pediatric finger prick or archived neonatal blood spot could, in principle, reveal whether growth‑related therapies are accelerating or slowing a child’s cellular timeline.

Forensics and DNA age testing

Forensic scientists have long sought a tool that can reveal a suspect’s age from a trace DNA profile, something standard methylation arrays could not deliver without milligrams of tissue.

The Hebrew University team showed that down‑sampling their libraries to the equivalent of 20 genomic copies still kept the median error below four years, a tolerance well within the age ranges investigators typically publish in bulletins.

Urine samples predicted age within 2.5 years, while saliva lagged at 6.4 years, indicating that re‑training the model on cell type-specific data could broaden its courtroom utility.

Because most criminal suspects are under 40, the sub‑one‑year error seen in that age band may finally let agencies add an accurate number, not just a broad bracket, to DNA‑based composite sketches.

Clock slows after 60

What drives some CpG clusters to tick in lockstep while others drift stochastically remains unclear. The authors speculate that nucleosome positioning and local enzyme kinetics may set the pace.

They also note that the clock’s error grows past age 60, hinting that accumulated epigenetic noise or selective survival of certain blood cell types begins to obscure the signal after mid‑life.

Future work aims to attach unique molecular identifiers during PCR to remove duplicate reads, a simple change that could shave away the remaining variance in the model.

A broader donor pool will test whether ethnicity, chronic disease, or extreme environments push the two‑locus DNA age clock off course, or whether, as the early data suggest, every cell on the planet keeps DNA time with the same molecular second hand.

The study is published in Cell Reports.

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An international team of astronomers has gained new understanding of some of the densest objects in the universe and where the source of their X-rays is. This is all thanks to PSR J1023+0038, or J1023 for short, a transitional millisecond pulsar, which spins on its axis almost 600 times every second.

Pulsars are a type of neutron star, the dense collapsed core of a star that has gone supernova. These pulsars emit powerful beams of light, and as they spin, the beams pulsate. In the case of J1023, this happens 35,520 times every single minute. Well, as long as it is active – because this system has the peculiarity of switching itself off and on again.  

The system experiences radio pulsation during its dormant state, while in its active state, the pulsar is stealing material from its companion, a small star about a quarter of our Sun’s mass that orbits the pulsar every 4.75 hours.

“Transitional millisecond pulsars are cosmic laboratories, helping us understand how neutron stars evolve in binary systems,” lead author Cristina Baglio of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) Brera Observatory in Merate, said in a statement.

Baglio is not overselling it. Thanks to the X-ray space observatory IXPE, a collaboration between NASA and the Italian Space Agency, as well as several other observatories across the wavelengths of light, the team was able to work out that the X-ray emission of pulsars comes from the pulsar wind, a flow of high energy particles and magnetic fields that stretch into the accretion disk of stolen material from the companion.

It was the disk that previous models suggested as the source of the X-rays, but these observations challenged that. Using polarization, the angles at which lights oscillate, they looked at the gamma-ray emission with NASA’s SWIFT and NICER telescopes and radio emission from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Array. The angle of polarization matched.

“That finding is compelling evidence that a single, coherent physical mechanism underpins the light we observe,” added co-lead author Francesco Coti Zelati of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona. 

“IXPE has observed many isolated pulsars and found that the pulsar wind powers the X-rays,” said NASA Marshall astrophysicist Philip Kaaret, principal investigator for IXPE at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “These new observations show that the pulsar wind powers most of the energy output of the system.”

The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Social insects like ants and termites are a substantial component of the land’s biomass, which explains why so many different species of animal like to munch on them. Today, there are over 200 mammal species that are known to eat ants and termites, but only 20 of them are obligate eaters – like anteaters, aardvarks, and pangolins – which have evolved specialist anatomy to consume them as their sole food source.

But when did this specialization first evolve across these various species? For a long time, scientists were not clear on this point, but recent research has shown that this adaptation has occurred 12 times since the Cenozoic era, which was around 66 million years ago.

This type of convergent evolution among mammals towards this dietary specialism – known as myrmecophagy – first emerged following the K-Pg extinction. This large-scale extinction event killed the non-avian dinosaurs and drastically transformed the ecosystem. In doing so, it set the stage for ants and termite colonies to quickly expand across the world, driving the need for some species to adapt to eat them.

“There’s not been an investigation into how this dramatic diet evolved across all known mammal species until now,” Philip Barden, associate professor of biology at New Jersey Institute of Technology, explained in a statement.

“This work gives us the first real roadmap, and what really stands out is just how powerful a selective force ants and termites have been over the last 50 million years – shaping environments and literally changing the face of entire species.”

To understand this evolutionary story, Barden and colleagues compiled dietary data for 4,099 mammal species using nearly a century of natural history records, as well as conservation reports, taxonomic descriptions, and dietary datasets. 

Species were sorted into five dietary groups that ranged from strict anti- and termite-eaters (obligate), to generalists like insectivores, carnivores, omnivores, and herbivores. These categories were determined by published data on the animal’s guts and field observations.

“Compiling dietary data for nearly every living mammal was daunting, but it really illuminates the sheer diversity of diets and ecologies in the mammalian world,” Thomas Vida, from the University of Bonn, added.

“We see fruit-eating foxes, krill-eating seals and sap-drinking primates, but few rely exclusively on ants and termites … the ecomorphological adaptations required are such a major barrier. One thing myrmecophages share is an almost insatiable appetite – ants and termites are so low in energy that even a small animal like the numbat must eat about 20,000 termites a day, while an aardwolf can hunt up to 300,000 in a single night.”

In addition to focusing on the anteaters, the team also traced ant and termite colony sizes across time, going as far back to the Cretaceous period, around 145 million years ago. This helped them to understand when the insects became a reliable food source.

At that time, ants and termites were very few in number compared to today. They accounted for less than 1 percent of insects on Earth. This is tiny compared to 15,000 species inhabiting the world today, which accounts for a combined biomass that exceeds all living wild mammals. These insects did not reach this modern level until the Miocene, around 23 million years ago, when they crawled their way to being around 35 percent of all inspect specimens.

“It’s not clear exactly why ants and termites both took off around the same time. Some work has implicated the rise of flowering plants, along with some of the planet’s warmest temperatures during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago,” Barden added.

“What is clear is that their sheer biomass set off a cascade of evolutionary responses across plants and animals. While some species evolved defenses to avoid these insects, others took the opposite approach – if you can’t beat them, eat them.”

The analysis revealed that myrmecophagy evolved at least once in each major mammal group (placentals, monotremes, and marsupials). But this evolution was uneven, suggesting that some lineages were more “predisposed” to ant and termite eating.

At the same time, all the myrmecophages came from insectivore or carnivore ancestors, with the former making the transition three times more often than the latter. But within the carnivores, some families (including that of dogs, bears, and weasels) account for about a quarter of all origins.

“That was a surprise. Making the leap from eating other vertebrates to consuming thousands of tiny insects daily is a major shift,” Barden explained. “Part of the predisposition may lie in certain physiological features or dentition that are more malleable for handling a social insect diet.”

Interestingly, the team found few examples of myrmecophagous mammals switching back to more conventional diets or further diversifying after they’ve made the evolutionary leap. The only exception here is the elephant shrew, which became an omnivore after becoming one of the first myrmecophages in the Eocene – hoppy little hipsters.

This ability to embrace myrmecophagy and to never look back may have helped these different species in the past, but it could put them at risk in the long run, resulting in an evolutionary dead end.

“In some ways, specializing on ants and termites paints a species into a corner,” Barden said. “But as long as social insects dominate the world’s biomass, these mammals may have an edge – especially as climate change seems to favor species with massive colonies, like fire ants and other invasive social insects.”

The paper is published in Evolution.

Gene editing technologies – such as those used in agriculture and de-extinction projects – can be repurposed to offer what an international team of scientists is calling a transformative solution for restoring genetic diversity and saving endangered species.

In a new Nature Reviews Biodiversity Perspective article, the authors explore the promises, challenges and ethical considerations of genome engineering, and propose an approach for its implementation into biodiversity conservation.

They argue that gene editing could recover lost genetic diversity in species at risk of extinction using historical samples, such as DNA from museum collections, biobanks and related species.

The multidisciplinary team of conservation geneticists and biotechnologists is co-led by Prof Cock van Oosterhout at the University of East Anglia and Dr Stephen Turner from Colossal Biosciences, in collaboration with the Colossal Foundation, the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (University of Kent), Globe Institute (University of Copenhagen), Mauritius Wildlife Foundation (MWF), the Mauritius National Parks and Conservation Service (NPCS), and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

“We’re facing the fastest environmental change in Earth’s history, and many species have lost the genetic variation needed to adapt and survive,” said Prof van Oosterhout, of UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences. “Gene engineering provides a way to restore that variation, whether it’s reintroducing DNA variation that has been lost from immune-system genes that we can retrieve from museum specimens or borrowing climate-tolerance genes from closely related species.”

“To ensure the long-term survival of threatened species, we argue that it is essential to embrace new technological advances alongside traditional conservation approaches.”

Why genetics matters for conservation 

Conservation successes such as captive breeding and habitat protection often focus on boosting population numbers but do little to replenish the gene variants lost when a species’ numbers crash. 

As populations rebound, they can remain trapped with a diminished genetic variation and a high load of harmful mutations, a phenomenon known as genomic erosion. Without intervention, species that recovered from a population crash may remain genetically compromised, with reduced resilience to future threats like new diseases or shifting climates.

One example of this is the pink pigeon, whose population has been brought back from the brink of extinction – from about 10 individuals to a population now of more than 600 birds – by decades of captive-breeding and reintroduction efforts in Mauritius.

Several of the authors have studied the pigeon’s genetics to reveal that, despite its recovery, it continues to experience substantial genomic erosion and is likely to go extinct in the next 50 to 100 years.

The next challenge is to restore the genetic diversity it has lost, enabling it to adapt to future environmental change – genome engineering could make this possible. 

The technology is already common in agriculture: crops resistant to pests and drought cover millions of hectares worldwide. More recently, announcements of plans to bring extinct species back to life have further highlighted its potential.

“The same technological advances that allow us to introduce genes of mammoths into the genome of an elephant can be harnessed to rescue species teetering on the brink of extinction,” said Dr Beth Shapiro, Chief Science Officer at Colossal Biosciences. “It is our responsibility to reduce the extinction risk faced today by thousands of species.”

A toolbox for genetic rescue 

The scientists outline three key applications for gene editing in conservation:

• Restoring lost variation – bringing back genetic diversity that has been lost from the gene pool of the modern populations of threatened species, using DNA from samples of the species collected decades or even centuries ago, which are stored in natural history museums all over the world.
• Facilitated adaptation – introducing genes from related, better-adapted species to confer traits like heat tolerance or pathogen resistance, equipping threatened species to adapt to rapid environmental change.
• Reducing harmful mutations – populations that have previously crashed in numbers often carry harmful mutations that have become fixed by chance, so targeted gene edits could replace these mutations with the healthy variant from before the population crash, with the potential to improve fertility, survival rates, and overall health.

Balancing promise and precaution 

They also address the risks, such as off-target genetic modifications and unintentional further reductions in genetic diversity, cautioning that the approaches remain experimental.

The need for phased, small-scale trials, and rigorous long-term monitoring of evolutionary and ecological impacts is emphasised, as well as robust engagement with local communities, indigenous groups and the wider public, before broader implementation. The authors stress that genetic interventions must complement, not replace, habitat restoration and traditional conservation actions.

“Biodiversity faces unprecedented threats that demand unprecedented solutions,” said Associate Professor Hernán Morales of the Globe Institute. “Genome editing is not a replacement for species protection and will never be a magical fix – its role must be carefully evaluated alongside established conservation strategies as part of a broader, integrated approach with species protection as a guiding principle.”

Biotech-driven initiatives could also attract new investors and expertise, potentially creating new benefits for existing endangered species programmes. 

Reference: van Oosterhout C, Supple MA, Morales HE, et al. Genome engineering in biodiversity conservation and restoration. Nat Rev Biodivers. 2025:1-13. doi: 10.1038/s44358-025-00065-6

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As Earth and Mars orbit the Sun, they pull on each other gravitationally, causing their paths to stretch and relax in a cycle that repeats roughly every 2.4 million years. These subtle orbital shifts change how close the planets approach the Sun, which in turn can alter their long-term climate patterns.

New research shows that the Mars–Earth cycle once had a 1.6-million-year cycle that coincided with major climate swings. The work was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The study was led by Yanan Fang of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and Paul Olsen of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School.

The researchers found geologic evidence for the shorter 1.6-million-year rhythm preserved in Jurassic lake sediments of the Sangonghe Formation in northwestern China. They measured signals lined up to form three complete 1.6-million-year “beats” centered around 183 million years ago. One beat aligns with the Jenkyns Event, when huge lava eruptions in present-day South Africa briefly but sharply warmed the planet via a massive release of volcanic CO₂.

“The implication is that the co-occurrence of these two independent events may have amplified their climate impact, although this remains to be fully explored,” says Olsen.

Another key outcome of their study concerns how far back scientists can reconstruct planetary orbits. Until now, orbital calculations were reliable only to about 60 million years ago; beyond that, chaotic interactions among the planetary bodies makes reconstructions unreliable.

Fang and Olsen’s new geological record, combined with older datasets, pushes that boundary about 120 million years deeper into the past, and confirms that the length of the Mars-Earth cycle can change markedly over geologic time, due to solar system chaos.

For media inquiries, please contact press@climate.columbia.edu.