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More than a decade ago, looking to slow the decimation of wildlife populations for the bushmeat trade, researchers in West Africa sought to establish an alternative protein supply. Brush-tailed porcupine was one of the most popular and high-priced meats, in rural and urban areas alike. Why not farm it? It turned out that the porcupines are generally solitary, and when put together, they tended to fight and didn't have sex. In any case, moms produce only one offspring per birth, hardly a recipe for commercial success. 

Wildlife farming is like that — a tantalizing idea that is always fraught with challenges and often seriously flawed. And yet it is also growing both as a marketplace reality and in its appeal to a broad array of legitimate stakeholders as a potentially sustainable alternative to the helter-skelter exploitation of wild resources everywhere. 

Food security consultants are promoting wildlife farming as a way to boost rural incomes and supply protein to a hungry world. So are public health experts who view properly managed captive breeding as a way to prevent emerging diseases in wildlife from spilling over into the human population.

Climate change is disrupting the sensory systems of fish and can even make them swim towards predators, instead of away from them, a paper by marine biologists at the University of Exeter says.

Research into the impact of rising CO2 has shown it can disrupt the senses of fish including their smell, hearing and vision.

Globally averaged concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached the symbolic and significant milestone of 400 parts per million for the first time in 2015 and surged again to new records in 2016 on the back of the very powerful El Niño event, according to the World Meteorological Organization's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

Supervivencia del más apto. Este principio básico de la evolución explica por qué el pájaro dodo ya no existe y por qué los seres humanos tienen pulgares oponibles.

La adaptación es clave para la supervivencia, no importa cuántos dedos tienes. La capacidad de adaptarse a cualquier condición que la Madre Tierra pone en nuestro camino determina si conducen a la extinción o a una nueva generación.

El cambio climático acelerado por la actividad humana es un desastre esperando ocurrir. Ya hemos visto las supertormentas y la sequía que puede crear. A pesar de que podemos trabajar para frenar el cambio climático, no hay manera de detenerlo por completo. Esta realidad significa que la adaptación volverá a ser la estrategia más importante para la supervivencia.

Una cosa es segura: la Tierra seguirá existiendo, ya que tiene millones de años. La pregunta es, ¿Quiénes la habitarán después?

A continuación, se presentan cinco especies conocidas por su resistencia y capacidad de sobrevivir en condiciones adversas. Ellos son los más propensos a sobrevivir a un desastre el cambio climático. Decepción: los seres humanos no están en la lista.

Understanding how tiny particles emitted by cars and factories affect Earth's climate requires accurate climate modeling and the ability to quantify the effects of these pollutant particles vs. particles naturally present in the atmosphere. One large uncertainty is what Earth was like before these industrial-era emissions began. In a paper just published in Nature, scientists collaborating on the GoAmazon study describe how they tracked particles in the largely pristine atmosphere over the Amazon rainforest, which has given them a way to effectively turn back the clock a few hundred years.