An ancient tree’s crowning glory and more…

Shark declines: finning regulations might have bitten off more than they can chew

In recent years governments around the world have attempted to slow the catastrophic decline in shark numbers with regulations, including on the practice of shark finning. But a new study led by marine biologist Boris Worm and published in the journal Science suggests that these regulations have backfired and shark mortality is still rising. The reason is that shark fishers responded by keeping all of the shark, and developing ever more markets for shark meat and oils, such as in supplements, cosmetics, and even hidden as “whitefish” or “flake” in fish and chip markets.

Dogs like TV about dogs but don’t give a rat’s about squirrels

Like a lot of us, dogs spend a certain amount of time in front of the TV. But what are they watching and what do they like? Freya Mowat, a veterinary ophthalmologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was interested in finding what dogs like to watch on TV so that she could develop new ways to test dog vision. Her study, recently published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, revealed that, unsurprisingly, dogs preferred to watch other dogs, and ten per cent also enjoyed watching cartoons as much as live action animals. The more unexpected finding was that the dogs were not as interested in watching humans, squirrels, or trucks.

An ancient tree’s crowning glory

Paleontologists working in Norton, New Brunswick have made an extraordinary discovery: a fully intact 350 million year old fossilized tree unlike any previously known to science. Matt Stinson, the assistant curator of geology and paleontology at the New Brunswick Museum, says it’s extremely rare in the fossil record to find a fully intact tree like this one that has its trunk, branches and leaves still attached. Olivia King, a research associate at the museum, described it as “odd and whimsical,” like the trees from Dr. Seuss’s famous book The Lorax. Their study is in the journal Current Biology.

There was an old elephant who swallowed an ant…

The complex interdependence of plants and animals in an ecosystem are often hard to fathom until they go wrong. This is illustrated by a new study in Kenya showing how an invasive ant led to elephants knocking down trees, affecting how lions hunt zebras, which turned out to be bad news for buffalo. Adam Ford from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan is part of the team on this study published in Science.

Understanding when (earlier), and how (cleverly), stone-age people lived in Europe

New technology to study fragments of bone found in a cave in Germany is leading to a rewriting of the history of how Homo sapiens established themselves in Europe, when the continent was dominated by Neanderthals. A team, led by Jean-Jacques Hublin, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, uncovered human bones dating back 46,000 years in a cave in Northern Germany, which means the Homo sapiens were living side by side much earlier with Neanderthals in a frigid ice-age climate instead of sticking to the tropics like previously believed. The research, including detailed climatic reconstructions, led to three papers published in the journal Nature.

A separate find is giving new insight into their material culture as archaeologists have uncovered a subtly clever tool they think ancient humans would have used to spin rope. The team built replicas of the tool and found it worked remarkably effectively to twist plant fibres into strong rope. Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany, was part of the team, and the work was published in Science Advances.