“Bats have gained a bad reputation as being something to fear, especially after reports of a possible linkage with the origins Covid-19,” says study author Eyal Frank, an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. “But bats do add value to society in their role as natural pesticides, and this study shows that their decline can be harmful to humans.”

Frank compared the effect of bat die-offs on pesticide use in counties that experienced those bat population declines to counties that were likely unaffected by the wildlife disease. He found that when the bat populations declined, farmers increased their use of pesticides by about 31 percent. Because pesticides have been linked to negative health impacts, Frank next tested to see if the increased use of pesticides corresponded with an increase in infant mortality — a common marker to study the health impacts of environmental pollution. Indeed, when farmers increased their use of pesticides, the infant mortality rate rose by almost 8 percent. This corresponds to an additional 1,334 infant deaths. Or, for every 1 percent increase in pesticides, there was a 0.25 percent increase in the infant mortality rate.

The study also found that pesticides aren’t as good at preventing pests as bats. The quality of the crops likely declined, as farmers’ revenue from crop sales decreased by nearly 29 percent. Combining this revenue loss with the expense of the pesticides, farmers in communities that experienced the bat die-offs lost $26.9 billion dollars between 2006 and 2017. Adding onto those losses the $12.4 billion in damages from infant mortality, the total societal cost from the bat die-offs in these communities amounted to $39.6 billion.

“When bats are no longer there to do their job in controlling insects, the costs to society are very large — but the cost of conserving bat populations is likely smaller,” says Frank. “More broadly, this study shows that wildlife adds value to society, and we need to better understand that value in order to inform policies to protect them.”

A team of data scientists at eBird, the participatory science platform, has packaged summaries covering every bird species, in every state, and made them available online for free. These data summaries will help states prepare their federally required 2025 updates to State Wildlife Action Plans.

“As we began to work more closely with state agencies and regional conservation partnerships, we realized that we needed to significantly increase the accessibility of eBird information for these partners,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, assistant director of the Cornell Lab’s Center for Avian Population Studies and the driving force behind development of the state summaries.

“By providing these customized summaries, state agencies don’t have to wrangle with big data and spatial tools. They get data targeted to the area they are responsible for,” said Andrew Stillman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab. “It’s much more efficient, saving them time and money.”

State Wildlife Action Plans are critical to conservation in the United States, Stillman said. The plans must be updated every 10 years and submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for approval. Approval releases funding from the State and Tribal Wildlife Grants program, which is used to proactively conserve birds and other species that make up the biodiversity of each state.

The 2025 updates will mark the second major revision to state wildlife plans since the first plans were completed in 2005. But this is the first time eBird state data summaries will be available to inform the revisions, helping planners easily identify which species are in greatest need of conservation and to set priorities for where and when to take conservation action.

Without year-round weekly bird abundance data from eBird, an important part of the big picture is missing. For example, tundra swans don’t breed in Michigan and are not found there for most of the year. But during two weeks in March, 13% of the global population is migrating through Michigan, making marsh and wetland habitat vital for stopovers during their long journey back to their Arctic breeding grounds.

The state summaries are updated each year with new population numbers from eBird. With the latest August 2024 update, planners can now also see which way bird populations are trending for the entire state: increasing, decreasing or stable; and by how much.

“We’ll continue to refine and update the summaries so states have what they need,” Stillman said. “We’re also looking into expanding this customization for the two dozen Migratory Bird Joint Ventures in the U.S. and Canada. Birds are not known for recognizing human boundaries and joint venture partnerships work across boundaries to conserve birds and the habitats they need, where they need it. The state planners tell us, ‘Keep it coming.'”

In creating a pair of new robots, Cornell University researchers cultivated an unlikely component, one found on the forest floor: fungal mycelia. By harnessing mycelia’s innate electrical signals, the researchers discovered a new way of controlling “biohybrid” robots that can potentially react to their environment better than their purely synthetic counterparts.

The team’s paper published in Science Robotics. The lead author is Anand Mishra, a research associate in the Organic Robotics Lab led by Rob Shepherd, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, and the paper’s senior author.

“This paper is the first of many that will use the fungal kingdom to provide environmental sensing and command signals to robots to improve their levels of autonomy,” Shepherd said. “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment. In this case we used light as the input, but in the future it will be chemical. The potential for future robots could be to sense soil chemistry in row crops and decide when to add more fertilizer, for example, perhaps mitigating downstream effects of agriculture like harmful algal blooms.”

Mycelia are the underground vegetative part of mushrooms. They have the ability to sense chemical and biological signals and respond to multiple inputs.

“Living systems respond to touch, they respond to light, they respond to heat, they respond to even some unknowns, like signals,” Mishra said. “If you wanted to build future robots, how can they work in an unexpected environment? We can leverage these living systems, and any unknown input comes in, the robot will respond to that.”

Two biohybrid robots were built: a soft robot shaped like a spider and a wheeled bot.

The robots completed three experiments. In the first, the robots walked and rolled, respectively, as a response to the natural continuous spikes in the mycelia’s signal. Then the researchers stimulated the robots with ultraviolet light, which caused them to change their gaits, demonstrating mycelia’s ability to react to their environment. In the third scenario, the researchers were able to override the mycelia’s native signal entirely.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) CROPPS Science and Technology Center; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture; and the NSF Signal in Soil program.

In a study published on July 31 in the journal Earth’s Future, scientists, including researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, revealed how heat waves, especially those occurring in Antarctica’s cold seasons, may impact the animals living there. The research illustrates how extreme weather events intensified by climate change could have profound implications for the continent’s fragile ecosystems.

In March 2022, the most intense heat wave ever recorded on Earth hit Antarctica, just as organisms in the southern region braced themselves for the long, harsh winter ahead. The extreme weather raised temperatures in parts of Antarctica to more than 70°F above average, melting glaciers and snow even in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of the planet’s coldest and driest regions.

As part of a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project in Antarctica, the research team found that the unexpected melt followed by a rapid refreeze likely disrupted the life cycles of many organisms and killed a large swath of some invertebrates in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

“It’s important that we pay attention to these signals, even if they’re coming from microscopic organisms in soils in a polar desert,” said Michael Gooseff, the paper’s senior author and professor in the Department of Civil, Environment and Architectural Engineering at CU Boulder. “They’re the early responders to changes that could cascade up to larger organisms, the landscape and even us, far away from Antarctica.”

When Gooseff arrived in Antarctica in November 2021, the continent looked much like it had for the past two decades. As a fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), Gooseff has led the LTER at the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a National Science Foundation-funded project, for the past decade. Nearly every Antarctic summer, he travels to the southern region to study its ecosystem and how organisms survive in extreme environmental conditions.

While most animals can’t tolerate the region’s dryness and cold, some microbes and invertebrates, including roundworms and water bears, thrive in this frozen desert. Water bears, or tardigrades, are tiny, eight-legged animals measuring 0.002 to 0.05 inches long. They can survive extreme conditions — as cold as -328°F and as hot as 300 °F — that would kill most other forms of life.

In 2022, all members of the polar expedition team left the continent in February, before the Antarctic summer ended. A month later, Antarctica experienced the most extreme heat wave on record, driven by an intense storm known as an atmospheric river, which transported moist air over long distances to the polar region.

The team’s sensors in the McMurdo Dry Valleys recorded air temperatures, which typically hover around -4°F in March, rising above freezing and exceeding the average by 45°F.

Satellite imagery and stream discharge measurements showed that the sudden warming wetted the valleys’ soil more than two months after the peak summer thaw, at a time when the land is typically dry.

In two days, after the heat wave passed, temperatures plummeted and the soil froze. This event happened during a critical transition period, when organisms hunker down and get ready for the dark, cold winter. Gooseff and his colleagues were curious about how animals in the valleys responded.

“These animals invest a significant amount of energy in preparing and shutting down for the winter,” said Gooseff. “When things start to warm up the following summer, they use energy to become active again. One of our major concerns with unusual weather events like this heat wave is that these animals might start using a lot more energy, thinking it’s summer, only to have to shut down again two days later. How many times can they go through that cycle before they exhaust their energy reserves?”

He and the team returned to Antarctica the following summer, in December 2022. They sampled the soil and compared organisms living in areas that became wet to those that stayed dry during the heat wave.

They observed a 50% decrease in the population of Scottnema, a common roundworm, in areas that got wet. Scottnema is adapted to extremely cold and dry climates.

“The heat wave made the environment appear warm enough for things to get wet, creating a false start to summer. Some of the biology responding to these temperatures might be seriously disrupted by this,” Gooseff said.

Rapid swings between extremes in weather can disproportionately impact sensitive species like Scottnema, but they may have far less impact on other animals, such as tardigrades. These creatures have a higher tolerance for moisture, allowing them to proliferate as the environment becomes wetter.

“Changes in which species are in the soil and how big the populations are can have a major impact on the ecosystem’s food web and nutrient cycling,” Gooseff said.

Previous research has shown Scottnema is responsible for about 10% of the carbon processed in the Dry Valleys’ soil ecosystem.

As climate change exacerbates extreme weather events in Antarctica, larger species are also being impacted. For example, in the summer of 2013, an unusual rainfall event along the Adélie Coast of East Antarctica killed all Adélie penguin chicks in the region. In July, temperatures in parts of East Antarctica climbed up to 50 °F above the usual winter average.

Gooseff and his team plan to continue documenting extreme weather events and their impacts on the Antarctic ecosystem.

What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica, Gooseff said.

“The loss of ice shelves has pretty dramatic impacts on the mass balance of our oceans, and it affects us even thousands of miles away.”