Subterms
Carly Kay is the Fall 2025 science writing intern at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. More
In a single year, one polar bear can leave roughly 300 kilograms of prey for other animals to dine on. Altogether, the carnivores provide 7.6 million kilograms of carrion for scavengers throughout the Arctic, researchers estimate.
The findings, reported October 28 in Oikos, highlight the crucial role these apex predators play in feeding a vast array of species and hints at the way that food web might be shaken as climate change warms the Arctic, endangering polar bear populations. More
Australia’s tropical forests are the world’s first to flip a worrisome switch. The forests are now putting more carbon into the atmosphere than they are taking out, researchers report in the Oct. 16 Nature.
That switch is a clanging alarm bell for the planet’s tropical forests, sounding as world leaders prepare to gather in the heart of the Amazon rainforest to wrangle over how to address the crisis of global climate change. The 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, begins November 10 in Belém, Brazil. More
Bright flecks of burning wood stream through the smoky air and toward a hapless house. Before the one-story structure, the glowing specks, each merely centimeters in size, seem insignificant. But each lofted ember is a seed of destruction. Researchers estimate that embers cause somewhere between 60 to 90 percent of home ignitions.
Next to the house stands a trash bin, its lid propped open with sheets of cardboard inside. The fiery spores enter and in seconds flames sprout inside. Within minutes, a column of fire rises and licks the house’s sidewall. Black flaps of vinyl siding begin to peel and writhe. Burning chunks fall to the ground, and a crackling, smoldering fissure grows up the wall. Orange, blue and purple flames roar as they ascend toward the roof. More
The Water RemembersAmy Bowers CordalisLittle Brown & Co., $30In September 2002, an estimated 34,000 to 78,000 adult Chinook salmon died in the Klamath River within the Yurok Reservation in Northern California. The U.S. government had diverted river water to farms during a drought. The resulting low levels and warm temperature of the water, coupled with the flow of toxic blue-green algae that bloomed in the reservoirs behind the river’s four dams, created the perfect conditions for “ich,” a parasitic gill rot disease, to spread and suffocate the fish. It was one of the largest fish kills recorded in U.S. history.The ecological disaster catalyzed an Indigenous-led movement to remove the dams, the oldest of which had choked the river, blocking fish migrations and tainting water quality, for over 100 years. In The Water Remembers, Yurok tribal member, activist and attorney Amy Bowers Cordalis shares an intimate look into her family’s and nation’s decades-long fight to restore the health of the Klamath and preserve their way of life — a multigenerational effort that culminated in the largest dam removal and river restoration project in history.
The Yurok people believe it is their duty to live in balance with nature. They steward the Klamath and its surrounding ecosystems. In return, the river gives them sustenance, physically and spiritually. This sacred reciprocity is reflected in Yurok stories, Cordalis writes, which “teach that if the Klamath salmon and the Klamath River die, so will the Yurok people.”
Cordalis’ reverence for the river, the salmon and the craft of fishing drips from every page of this memoir. She describes the thrill that overcomes her and other members of the Yurok Nation when salmon return to the Klamath River from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. Bobbing in a boat, gill net in hand, surrounded by trees, water and wildlife, is a spiritual practice.
In 2002, tens of thousands of salmon died in the Klamath River from a gill rot disease called “ich.” The river’s four dams helped create the perfect conditions for the illness to spread.Northcoast Environment Center
Every page is also stained with stories of historical injustice. For nearly two centuries, colonization, genocide and their lingering scars have threatened the Yurok’s way of life, from the United States’ theft of Yurok land since the 19th century to California’s mid-20th century ban on Yurok fishing to boost non-Indigenous logging and fishing businesses.
Through it all, Cordalis’ family has resisted. Cordalis’ great-grandmother, Geneva Mattz, and her sons fished and sold bootlegged salmon throughout the ban. In the late 1960s, her great-uncle Ray Mattz sued California for violating his Indigenous rights by repeatedly arresting him for fishing on his ancestral land — a case that he won in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. The 2002 fish kill reinvigorated this tradition of resistance. Cordalis, then a 22-year-old intern at the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department, witnessed the devastation firsthand. Her gruesome descriptions of the limp and rotting carcasses of thousands of salmon crowded on the riverbank convey the visceral and emotional response of the Yurok to what Cordalis deems an “ecocide.” More
Carly Kay is the Fall 2025 science writing intern at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. More
Earth has entered a grim new climate reality.
The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an unprecedented die-off of global reefs and threatening the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists say in a new report published October 13.
Even under the most optimistic future warming scenario — one in which global warming does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — all warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain to pass a point of no return. That makes this “one of the most pressing ecological losses humanity confronts,” the researchers say in Global Tipping Points Report 2025. More
Antarctic krill keep revealing new superpowers.
Euphausia superba, the Southern Ocean’s ubiquitous krill species, sequester large amounts of carbon via their profuse poop. Now, scientists have identified another way in which the swimming crustaceans may modulate Earth’s climate: by sending their leftovers down to the bottom of the sea.
Laboratory observations of krills’ filter feeding behavior suggest that when food is plentiful — such as during a phytoplankton bloom — ejected “boluses” of leftover food also sequester carbon, researchers report October 7 in Biology Letters. More
In the 1960s, saltwater intrusion in a southeast Louisiana swamp killed the trees and plants that lived there. Now restored with freshwater, the swamp has become the perfect place for revegetation projects — particularly because healthy swamps can serve as a speed bump to slow hurricanes.
That’s one reason why the open water of Bayou Bienvenue, once home to cypress and tupelo trees, now hosts an island of native trees, grasses — and recycled glass. The artificial island is helping researchers understand a new approach to coastal restoration. More
