With catches down 80%, dead crabs and lobsters washed up on beaches and officials denying any responsibility, Hartlepool seafarers have taken a stand

Hartlepool fisherman Stan Rennie has been called the next Mr Bates. For nearly 50 years Rennie has fished the same stretch of northeast coastline – then in October 2021, thousands of crabs, starfish and lobsters washed up dead and dying on the beaches. “It was like something out of a horror film,” says one local. Rennie and other fishermen suspected industrial pollution, but an investigation by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs concluded that the most likely cause of the die-off was “algal bloom”. For Rennie and the other fisherman, it didn’t add up. So, they crowdfunded their own independent scientific study.

This documentary from Jeanie Finlay (Your Fat Friend) tells the story, and it’s maddening. The fishermen are close to bankruptcy, they’ve got mortgages and kids, catches are down 80%. The cost of diesel is higher than the price of a haul, and most put their boats up for sale. “Any jobs in Lidl?” reads one placard as they protest through town. What the fishermen suspect is that toxic sediment dredged from the River Tees and dumped in the sea is to blame. Their investigation finds evidence of a link to the chemical pyridine, a byproduct of steelmaking.

In 2022, I helped push through the international agreement to protect biodiversity. Wars and economic pressures can make nature seem like a ‘nice-to-have’. But it is a critical asset, and Cop17 must deliver real action

When I was five, property developers came to cut down the woods behind my home in La Tuque, Quebec. My mother encouraged me to climb one of the trees in protest, then told the developers, straight-faced, that there was nothing she could do when they asked her to get me down. A few days later, the tree was cut down anyway.

I thought about that tree in the early hours of a freezing Montreal morning in December 2022, as the gavel came down on a global agreement between nearly 200 countries to halt and reverse the loss of nature by 2030. I thought about how important nature is for our health, our food security and our economies, but also how much passion there is around protecting it, and how it has the power to inspire people all around the world.

Ouse Fen, Cambridgeshire: The great egret’s story is remarkable, as is the conversion of this low-grade agricultural land into one of the richest wetlands in Britain

In keeping with this region’s summer of torrid heat and drought, the field by the path was an expanse of burnt, dead thistles. What was totally unexpected were the 13 great egrets among it. Ironically, the birds may well be here as a consequence of the climate crisis, but their appearance in a parched brown expanse felt strange.

First, they are creatures of freshwater marsh and routinely hunt fish. Second, great egrets are the size of grey herons, but pure white, aside from lemon eyes and dagger-like beaks of pale autumnal orange. What was weirdest of all was the gestalt whole; the way they threaded through that horizon of brown, long necks extending and retracting like winding snakes, and all this gleaming intensity focused on catching voles. Then a bird would fly, the white rope of its neck rising, followed by a ragged cloak of wings, turning eventually to the stolid beat of heavy flight.

Every sun-dappled object is an instrument as composer Dom Coyote and sound designers Elena Peña and Dave Price conjure trip-hop-inspired rhythms in the Mendips for a new stage adaptation

The woodland is stuck to our skin. Sound designers Elena Peña and Dave Price are hunched next to me, burying a microphone into mossy ground. Composer Dom Coyote is listening on headphones, crunching out a rhythm with his boot before shucking his shoes for a subtler sound. “It’s got to be socks off, Dom,” says Price. Coyote obliges, the balls of his feet soon covered in dead conifer needles. “Do you wish you’d had a pedicure now?” Peña asks.

It’s a short drive from Bristol to this patch on the Mendip Hills, where pine cones and rowan berries scatter at the entrance to the trees. We’re on the hunt for sounds to orchestrate a staging of Max Porter’s novel Lanny. The adaptation by Somerset-based Bea Roberts moves the spectral story of a lost boy and a mulch-guzzling creature from commuting-distance-to-London to commuting-distance-to-Bristol, with director Nancy Medina wanting the show’s sound to exist within the city’s historical music scene. “A kind of trip-hop world,” says Coyote, who is exploring this idea by replacing electronic beats with those of the natural world. “So we need to go and play the forest.” Every sun-dappled object becomes an instrument. Up on his feet, Price tests out a rhythm on a deep-timbred trunk. He points to the tree. “Any notes for the snare drum department?”

Elk, bear, frogs and other animals have used the overpass, which connects 39,000 acres of habitat, since its completion

Colorado officials have tracked herds of elk, bears, pronghorn and even northern leopard frogs ambling across its new wildlife overpass. According to a newly released report, the overpass, which acts as a bridge over a busy stretch of interstate, has helped cut wildlife-vehicle collisions by 91% since its completion 10 months ago.

The overpass is the centerpiece of a larger system built by the state to assist wildlife crossing the highway, which also includes miles of 8-ft-tall fencing and five large wildlife underpasses.

As Cop17 kicks off, records since 1921 show more bee species declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alps

Most of Europe’s wild bee species and about half of its hover fly species have declined over the last century, a study has found, as a UN biodiversity summit begins in Armenia.

Records since 1921 show more bee species are declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alpine region. The richness of bee and hover fly species suffered a persistent drop in the Atlantic and Continental regions, the study found, though trends in other regions were mixed or even positive.

Dutch MEP says government is trying to avoid EU environmental rules as protests over luxury development turn violent

MEPs have accused Albania of deploying “sneaky” practices to fast-track a proposed Trump-linked luxury resort in the country amid protests that have turned increasingly violent.

As the prime minister, Edi Rama, pledged to “listen to the voices of young people” taking to the streets, there was mounting criticism of his failure to address demonstrators who had long opposed the controversial project peacefully.

So far not a single target of the plan has been met. As negotiators convene for Cop17, the pressure is on to find a way to honour the commitments made at previous summits

• Cop17 at a glance: everything you need to know about the UN’s nature summit

Passersby could smell the dead fish before they saw them. In August, more than 3,000 pike, roach, carp and rudd were found lifeless along the River Wensum in Norwich. Some gasped for air in their final moments, desperate for the oxygen that heatwave conditions had depleted in the water. Investigators believe that the die-off was triggered by heavy rainfall that flushed through high concentrations of pollution at a time when wildlife were already struggling.

The 45-mile (70km) chalk river is one of about 250 in the country. They are a geological accident almost unique to Britain – and one of Earth’s rarest habitats. They emerge from chalk aquifers and are home to species such as freshwater shrimp, otters and stoneflies, also providing drinking water for millions of people. But just 11 have formal protection, with many ravaged by sewage pollution and overextraction. The Norfolk river is one of the few that does have legal protection, but it is in poor ecological health.

This month’s biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, aims to push governments to meet the 23 targets agreed at Cop15 in 2022

This month, nearly every country on Earth will return to the question of how to stem the rapid destruction of the natural world. Humans are driving it, but so far we have not found a way to stop it.

In late 2022, governments reached an ambitious once-in-a-decade deal to better protect nature amid scientific warnings that the planet is going through the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, they are assessing their progress on the targets for the first time.

Steve Hamilton was fishing in Winter Garden when he was attacked by gator, which was later killed

A man fishing at a pond in Florida was killed on Friday by an alligator that was almost 12ft long in a rare kind of animal attack, according to authorities and media reports.

Steve Hamilton, 71, was on the shoreline in the community of Winter Garden when the animal dragged him into the water, the Florida news outlet WOFL reported, citing local police and the state’s fish and wildlife conservation commission.

As Mark Cocker approaches a landmark for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper, he is still inspired by powerful encounters with nature

In the autumn of 1987, Mark Cocker sat in a field near Norwich and watched a jay burying acorns for the long winter ahead. He described the scene in his first country diary for the Guardian. Thirty-nine years on, some of those jay-planted acorns will be mature oaks now, and Cocker is completing his 1,000th diary for the world’s oldest column in an English-language newspaper.

In his next diary, he will reflect on the changing birdlife around Flint Clough, in the Peak District, where he first marvelled at rare birds aged 12 after devouring bird books in his bedroom. As a boy, he would find cuckoo, golden plover, ring ouzel and twite, a once-common bird which is now virtually extinct in England.

In an extract from his new book, the nature historian explains how technology could help the seabird survive

For centuries human beings have exploited puffins, harvesting them by the thousand on their breeding grounds for their food and feathers. Over time, though, this relationship has changed, so that today we have come to love them, celebrating their quirky character and comical appearance and giving them a central place in our affections – a journey described by the environmental historian Dr Rob Lambert as the shift “from use to delight”.

How ironic, then, that just as we have come to truly appreciate them, our own existence now threatens theirs. The climate crisis threatens almost all the world’s roughly 11,000 species of birds, but its consequences have particularly dire significance for seabirds, whose life cycle is so intimately connected to the timing and abundance of their food supplies.

As a surge in beekeepers has led to increased numbers of honeybees, researchers record them pushing bumblebees and other rival species away from flowers

Honeybees are outcompeting wild pollinators for resources by aggressively bumping into them and chasing them away from flowers, research has shown.

The study, by researchers from Anglia Ruskin University, found that areas where there were higher concentrations of honeybees had fewer wild pollinators, such as bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies.

Glenisla, Angus: Damage by squirrels is common; the mustelid less so. Still, as a local told me, ‘you cannae blame them wanting somewhere to live’

That the thatch is thick with moss and crusted with the brittle fronds of lichen is not unusual for a roof of this age. What’s puzzling me is the hole in its centre. It is about 10in wide – a dark scoop, as if someone has taken a giant ladle to the roof.

When I climb the ladder for a closer look, I can see toothmarks on the reed. I also see that the hole does not go all the way through – the animal obviously gave up after an exploratory burrow.

The tawaki, or Fiordland crested penguin, known for its prominent yellow eyebrows, has for years baffled scientists with its unusual habits

Deep in the misty fjords of New Zealand’s South Island, a team of researchers is trying to catch one of the world’s most elusive penguins: the forest-dwelling tawaki, or Fiordland crested penguin.For weeks, researchers stand sentry each day over a burrow on Eleanor Island, hoping to corner the female bird so they can retrieve data from its tagging device.

But this penguin has developed a clever exit strategy – digging multiple tunnels to elude its captors.

The Tutoko I prepares for a research trip during its annual Fiordland crested penguin nest survey around Doubtful Sound

With his war in Iran and siding with Russia, it’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place

It might have been more, shall we say, diplomatic if Donald Trump had taken some deep breaths after finding out he had been overlooked for the Nobel peace prize for the second year running before virtually declaring war on Norway. But maybe we should just be grateful he refrained from rubbishing the South African human rights activist Navi Pillay, who picked up the award, and shelved his plans to livestream the execution of the Norwegian prize committee. There again, you can understand his frustration. It’s hard to think of someone who has done more to make the world a safer place. Where would we be had not The Donald started a war with Iran which he shows no sign of knowing how to finish and which has forced up the price of global energy? And it was so good to see him intervening so positively in Russia’s war with Ukraine by appearing to side with the aggressor. These are just the things everyone is looking for in a Nobel peace laureate. The president is also put out that no one has noticed he has personally ended eight global conflicts; though it would be helpful if he could let us know which ones. Are they ones he has personally started – Trump appears disappointed that Argentina hasn’t invaded the Falklands again – or ones that only he knows about. During a press conference at Chequers in 2025, he claimed to have brought about a lasting peace between Albania and Azerbaijan. Maybe there are other wars going on we just don’t know about. Perhaps Australia and New Zealand have been bombing each other for years with neither side noticing. And perhaps the border between France and Italy has been a no-go zone ever since the fight between Zinedine Zidane and Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final. Still, Trump looks a cert to retain Gianni Infantino’s Fifa peace prize – if only because it seems likely to be scrapped, making him the only winner.

This week’s best wildlife photographs from around the world

​The world pledged to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, but as Cop17 delegates meet in Armenia next week the outlook is bleak and optimism has faded

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The world has lost its way on nature once again. Next week, biodiversity Cop17 begins in Yerevan, Armenia, and expectations are low. Very low.

Almost four years ago, governments reached an historic agreement at the biodiversity Cop15 to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems – to rapturous applause in Montreal, Canada. I still remember the excitement in the hall in the early hours of that freezing December morning.

A perfect storm: how the super El Niño is devastating the fishing industry

‘We need less point scoring’: What party conference season taught us about UK climate action

‘I didn’t want to write about this’: the man who first saw chimps waging civil war

While anglers cannot take endangered sand tiger sharks, a loophole lets private firms catch the fish to sell abroad, profiting from Delaware Bay’s conservation success

Shortly after 12.45pm, what remains of a 300-metre line goes taut. Somewhere beneath the murky green surface of Delaware Bay, on the eastern US coast, a sand tiger shark has taken the bait of a mackerel chunk. Marine researchers at the University of Delaware haul the line towards a small boat as the shark’s grey-brown outline emerges.

It is a large animal: 225cm (7ft) long with a 90cm girth. Its mouth hangs open, revealing rows of jagged teeth. The researchers work quickly, measuring the shark, recording its sex, and taking blood and muscle samples. A tag is then fastened beneath its dorsal fin, through its thick sandpapery skin.

The ‘Great Fall’ of 1965 was caused by harsh conditions forcing migrating species to land on their way to Africa

My birding mentor, the late Derek Moore, was also a keen cricketer. But one autumn day in 1965 he was unable to concentrate while fielding because many hundreds of songbirds were landing around him on the pitch at Lowestoft.

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of birds along the Suffolk coast that day became known as the “Great Fall”, and it was caused by a weather system bringing cloud, winds and heavy rain.

Downe, Kent: It’s hard not to feel the earth move by a visit to the great man’s house. He truly valued these creatures of the dirt

The garden beds are moistened by steady rain, but the ground is still unyielding. A blackbird hops across bare soil. A dart, a jab, and up it comes – a wriggling tube of pink flesh. A simple catch. But when I rummage in the dirt, my only reward is loam under the fingernails. Perhaps I should have brought a bassoon.

I’ve come to Down House. Here, Charles Darwin changed the world. And here he wrote his last book, its title usually shortened for convenience: Earthworms.

At Bybi in Copenhagen, a dedicated group of staff and volunteers have built a community for all centred on the production of honey – much of which is given away for nothing. Could it be replicated elsewhere?

The bees at Bybi, a collective of beekeepers in Copenhagen, live on the roof. Their home is a complex of Victorian buildings, right in the centre of the city, that looks like an idealised vision of the modern social enterprise, ennobled by the architecture of the past. It’s a place of cottage industry in concert with nature, where the marginalised are brought in from the fringes and corporations stand waiting to help, where jobs happen but a lot of the work is done by volunteers, and where – this bit is important – a lot of time is spent discussing ideas.

Oliver Maxwell, Bybi’s 48-year-old founder, encourages me to examine the buildings more closely. They were once a prison, a workhouse and a hospital; their functions today – a homeless shelter, a young offender institution and, until recently, a job centre – are not so different. Denmark’s Victorian transformation, from “agricultural backwater to industrialised agriculture”, was reflected in how they treated people, Maxwell says.

A selection of the winning images from this year’s competition across topics ranging from underwater to urban wildlife, and photojournalism to mammal behaviour. The overall winner is Federico Veronesi of Italy for his powerful image of an elephant carrying a dead calf

• The winning photographs will be showcased at the Natural History Museum in London from 16 October 2026 until July 2027

Declining stocks and increased fishing pressure have led to lower sustainability ratings for two popular cod alternatives

UK shoppers have previously been urged to avoid UK-caught cod and to buy European hake or coley instead – but now these fish are in trouble, too.

The Marine Conservation Society (MCS), an environmental charity, publishes its Good Fish Guide to help consumers and businesses make sustainable seafood choices. It uses a traffic-light system to rate seafood according to the health of fish stocks and environmental impact.

Citizen scientists on UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme recorded insect visits to flowers during 10-minute surveys

Ubiquitous urban plants often derided as “weeds” are the most attractive to pollinating insects.

The autumn blooms of common ivy, rich in pollen and nectar, are the most visited by insects including bees and butterflies, according to an eight-year study.

Despite their size and gentle appearance, puffins will fight to keep their catch of sand eels from an opportunistic gull

Few birds are as paradoxical as the puffin. It rivals the robin as Britain’s best-loved bird, yet most people have never seen one in the flesh. In spring and summer, they gather in large, noisy colonies to breed, but spend the autumn and winter far out to sea in the North Atlantic. And despite their small size, and gentle, clown-like appearance, puffins will fight to save their precious catch of sand eels from being seized by an opportunistic – and much larger – skua or gull.

Puffins, like penguins, have a very human quality, too. When the late Bill Oddie and I filmed puffins at a colony on Shetland, he memorably described them as “looking like old men in dinner jackets, waiting to go into supper at the club”, while the bird’s scientific name, Fratercula arctica, translates as “little brother of the Arctic”.

Nearly half of species are in decline, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit, conservation bodies say

Wild bird populations in the UK have fallen to their lowest level since records began, figures show, with nearly half of species in decline.

Figures produced by leading nature conservation bodies for the government show that average populations across 132 native breeding species fell by 19% between 1970 and 2025, with farmland birds and seabirds the worst hit in recent years.

Team works to restore the sunflower sea star as 95% of these key underwater ecosystems have been decimated along the Pacific coast in past decade

Off the coast of Monterey, California, a team of researchers is gearing up for its first dive of the day into the cold and choppy waters of the Pacific Ocean.

On the back deck of the boat, Ashley Kidd, a co-founder of the non-profit Sunflower Star Laboratory, gave the divers their final command: “Dive No 1 … stars in the water.”

When populations fall, fledglings can struggle to learn the right notes to attract mates. But research on how birds communicate offers hope for species’ survival

Listening to birdsong is one of life’s great joys, but when researchers heard a particular tune emerging from a tree in a Buenos Aires park, they were especially jubilant. This arrangement was among those chirped by the local rufous-collared sparrows in the 1960s, but had since disappeared from the area.

That was until scientists created a computer-generated rendition, curious to find out if birds might consider it realistic enough to imitate. Less than three months later, a local avian resident began to copy parts of the song.

A living room encounter with a toast-loving pigeon proved a big mistake. It led to weeks of drawn curtains and crawling around on the floor to avoid its eerie and unerring gaze

The pigeon landed on the windowsill. It was shortly after dawn during the spring holidays, but I was 11 and had been up for a while eating toast and watching TV. It pecked at the window and I turned to see this bird pressed up against the glass. It was beautiful, with two dark wing bars and a navy-tipped tail. I was immediately taken with him. It wasn’t until later that I realised he wasn’t just looking inside, he was looking directly at me.

Pigeons are not that common in Somerset, and since we lived on the top floor of a house in a quiet village, our view was mostly sky, so we had come to really value sightings of them. We were having a run of beautiful mornings, and I enjoyed watching its peculiar rituals through the sash windows. The way he moved across the sill, his small dark doll’s eyes, his slightly unnatural head tilt, the way he seemed to know where he was. We certainly didn’t see pigeons as pests. Nor did we see them as threats.

River Lagan, Belfast: Right now you can see winter in the black-headed gull plumage, and spring in the mallards’. Yet feathers are also vital to how birds even came to exist

On my walk along the towpath, I pick up a small grey feather. It’s a flight feather, probably from the wing of a feral pigeon. I stroke it absently as I watch the birds that are swimming on the river’s surface. Steeped in autumn sunshine, the different species are also feathered with other seasons. Summer is in the fuzzy down of a late-hatched moorhen chick. Winter gleams in the white heads of the “black-headed” gulls. And, while a mallard’s emerald-green head is, as yet, tatty as old velvet, his crisply curled drake’s tails herald the coming spring.

If the story of birds is told in their plumage, then moult – the shedding and regrowth of feathers – is the turn of a page. The moorhen chick reminds me that the first chapter is about keeping warm. I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear, almost tucking the pigeon feather in as well. While our hair and birds’ feathers are both made of keratin, they differ in how they grow. In essence, hair extends as a single linear thread, whereas down feathers emerge frothing in all directions. As a fledgling matures, its outer feathers then lengthen, with a central shaft supporting branches that can flatten out and zip together to make a smooth surface.

John Mitani spent years studying a huge community of chimpanzees in Uganda. But then things took a dark turn – and his findings stunned the scientific world

John Mitani can still remember the first time he set foot in Uganda’s Kibale national park. The old-growth east African rainforest enveloped him, its canopy stretching to heights of 40 metres. Fruit trees bowed under the weight of African star apples and bountiful Ficus mucuso figs. And then there were the chimpanzees. Furry black blobs darted through the jungle, their raucous calls often deafening.

It was the summer of 1995, and Mitani, a primatologist from northern California, had just come from working with the chimps living in the Mahale mountains of Tanzania. At the time, Mahale was home to the largest known population of chimps, with about 100 individuals. But there were rumours that this section of Kibale – only accessible via a 12-hour drive from the capital, Kampala – might host an even more unusual abundance of apes.

Plans for a 200-room project on an unspoiled beach have pitted developers against the conservationists fighting for smaller-scale schemes to protect the island’s habitat

Visitors to Rocky Point in south-west Tobago are drawn to its sandy beach, fringed by coral reefs and dark rock formations and carpeted with the fruit-bearing trees found on Caribbean coastlines – almonds, sea grapes, coconuts, and the poisonous manchineel. The beach is part of Back Bay, a 500-metre swathe of land, and trekking through its undulating terrain, thickly covered in bush and shrubs, feels akin to walking through a rainforest.

But this still relatively unspoiled location is at the centre of a struggle between two opposing interests – those who see large-scale development as the most profitable path and those who believe smaller, incremental developments owned by the community would be best.

Lockerbrook, Derbyshire: Last week they were here, now they are not. Yet the details of their epic migration are still a mystery to us

The sudden absence of something, even though you know it’s coming, can dent the heart a little. The Japanese, inevitably, have a phrase for it: mono no aware, the pathos of things – and by things, in this case, I mean house martins.

Last week I had stood in the same spot, looking across the same valley. The weather then was much the same as it was today, low‑angled sunlight through patchy cloud lighting up the yellowing birch leaves and bronzing moors on the north-eastern slopes of Kinder Scout. It had picked out the spread wings of a buzzard a little below my eyeline, along with a haze of large insects, which in fact, I quickly realised, were house martins.

Our wildlife series Young Country Diary is looking for articles written by children, about their autumn encounters with nature

Once again, the Young Country Diary series is open for submissions! Every three months we ask you to send us an article written by a child aged 8-14.

The article needs to be about a recent encounter they’ve had with nature – whether it’s a hedge full of berries, a beetle on the move, or a nervous deer.

Installation of eight canopy bridges in Alta Floresta has enabled 15,000 safe crossings by animals including spider monkeys and marmosets – and more bridges are planned elsewhere

By about 7am, with dense fog blanketing the landscape, Gabriel Falquetto had already come across several road-killed animals along the ES-164 highway in Brazil’s Espírito Santo state. The biologist was on his way to Kaetés private natural heritage reserve (RPPN) in the Atlantic Forest, where he monitors wildlife and roadkill.

Then he spotted the lifeless body of a primate on the pavement. It was a buffy-headed marmoset (Callithrix flaviceps), a species listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list. An estimated 2,500 individuals remain in the wild, making it one of the world’s most threatened primates.

Guardian readers reveal their own tales of cross species cohabitation

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Chichester harbour, Hampshire: I witness a battle of wills as this magnificent raptor attempts to fuel up on sea bass, before it heads south on migration

The autumnal sunlight gilded the sea as our boat drifted off Fowley Island, a small, uninhabited tidal saltmarsh between Thorney Island and Hayling Island. A colony of grey seals lay sprawled along the intertidal mudflats, their size and prominent, sloping Roman noses making them easily distinguishable from the more lithe, cat-faced common seals that also inhabit the harbour.

Two sub-adults were tumbling and splashing in the shallows, play-fighting with the exuberance of puppies. They mouthed and nipped at each other’s heads and necks, lunging and rolling over one another before disappearing beneath the waves, only to pop up again in a spray of water and resume their boisterous tussle. These playful interactions are a form of social bonding, but they also serve as a rehearsal for future dominance contests.

Species with leaves large enough to be seen from space is already critically endangered – and plans are afoot to protect it

A chance social media encounter has led to the race-against-time discovery of a new species of giant waterlily that has until now been hidden in the depths of Colombia’s jungle.

But the plant, which is so huge it is visible from space, is already considered critically endangered.

Free-roaming Aldabra population far exceeds human population of Seychelles after decades-long recovery programme

A survey of the world’s largest free-roaming giant tortoise population has discovered that the once endangered species is thriving.

A population of Aldabra giant tortoises lives on an island in Seychelles called Aldabra Atoll.

A new global biodiversity report strikes an encouraging note. But we cannot rest on our laurels – and resilience is key

The new Living Planet Report is out. Published every two years, it assesses the health of the natural world and, historically, it’s made for gloomy reading.

Take 2024’s report, which showed global wildlife populations had plummeted by 73% in 50 years and that ecosystems were being pushed toward collapse.

Four native species selected after consultation, but which one adorns which note is yet to be decided

Bees, barn owls, puffins and hedgehogs have been picked to feature on the next generation of banknotes, the Bank of England has announced.

The quartet of creatures were selected after a large-scale consultation settled on wild animals as the theme, with members of the public then asked to pick their favourites out of 18 options divided into three categories.

A landmark report reveals that the world must change the way it produces food to avoid a biodiversity collapse

Conservation comebacks for wild tigers, tuna and green​ sea turtles prove that global nature loss can be reversed, ​scientists have said. ​But a report warns food production must be the next ​“positive tipping point​” if the world is to avert biodiversity collapse.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) analysed nearly 36,000 animal populations and more than 5,000 species, producing the largest ever database of vertebrate wildlife. Scientists found populations had declined by an average of 73% since 1970, showing that “nature continues to be degraded at an alarming scale”, with “no sign of losses slowing”.

Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island in Antarctica down by two-thirds since 2011, probably due to climate crisis

The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely because of the climate crisis, a study has revealed.

Scientists said the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.

As well as books, the new facility in Colorado offers hundreds of kits to connect people with the natural world. We asked five of the first visitors what they thought of it

Mark Fink knows exactly why he opened the first public nature library in the US. “There are a lot of barriers for people to access nature here. We want people to learn about the birds and the plants in their own back yard and to appreciate that you don’t need a three-day camping trip in the mountains to experience nature.”

The library offers people in Colorado’s Adams county the opportunity to borrow books and equipment to help them to engage with the natural world – for free.

Teenagers Eva Wishart and Emily Smith launch project to breed and release 250 of the tiny animals by September

Children in Devon are being invited to become “citizen captive breeders”, rearing harvest mice at home for release into the wild to help revive endangered nature.

Wild Pets, a new conservation project launched by two 14-year-old friends, is seeking 20 Devon-based children to rear hundreds of mice after the duo’s own successful restoration efforts.

Research has shown that colourful and patterned species are the subject of more studies, and receive more conservation funding

Large and beautiful butterflies attract far more attention than species that are smaller and dull. Now a new study has shown that this bias towards beauty results in the boring butterflies being overlooked in conservation programmes.

To understand the link between beauty and conservation, researchers surveyed more than 21,000 people from more than 100 countries, asking them to look at photos of European butterflies and rate their beauty on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their first impression. The results, which are published in Current Biology, reveal that larger more colourful and patterned butterflies, like the yellow swallowtail, were consistently rated more attractive than the smaller, less conspicuous brownish species, such as the alpine grayling. That bias also extended into scientific research, with more studies on attractive species, and more funding and resource going into conservation of showier species.

My student house in Manchester had several thousand other occupants. Despite pest controllers regularly dousing the property, the glossy, greasy, relentless insects marched onwards, endlessly reproducing

‘You do know about the cockroaches?” I’ve forgotten most things people said to me in the 80s, but never that. It was said by one of the occupants of the student house in Longsight, Manchester, that I had signed up to live in the following year. When the landlord had shown me and my future housemates the property, the tenants had been out. He told us they were third years doing their finals and must not be disturbed under any circumstances. (What can I say? We were gullible back then.) Days before summer term ended though, I’d knocked on the door to show a friend where I’d be living. Instead, I learned that the house was infested.

The weird thing is, we moved in anyway. In truth, although I understood this was very bad news, I didn’t quite realise what a cockroach was. There was no internet, so I would have had to go to a library to know what I know now: their march, their canter, their crunch if you step on one. Their soft, sweet, sour smell (uric acid which they store in their fat, apparently). Sometimes, in the back of a shop, or a restaurant loo, I catch that scent and I know what it is.

If your local fox population has caused differences of opinion among neighbours, please get in touch

Have foxes in your area caused friction between you and your neighbours? If so, we want to hear from you.

Some people like to leave food out for foxes, while others take measures to try and deter them from coming near their homes – and this can be a point of tension between those living nearby one another.