分类： science

Nearly 1,800 meters below the sunlit surface of the Pacific Ocean, off the rugged coast of the Galapagos Islands, a research submersible navigated the dark, unexplored abyssal plain and captured footage of a creature that would rewrite what we know about deep-sea cephalopod diversity. As the clear, blue-tinted image of the tiny animal beamed back to the research team on the surface, one excited researcher could not contain her awe, blurting out the simple, enthusiastic observation that has now become tied to the find: “He’s tiny! It’s blue!”

The discovery, formally published this week in the taxonomic journal *Zootaxa*, confirms the creature is a previously undocumented species of octopus, now officially named *Microeledone galapagensis*. The journey from first sighting to formal classification took nearly a decade, after the initial 2015 encounter near Darwin Island — the same Galapagos landmark that helped inspire Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution more than 180 years ago.

Octopus expert Janet Voight, a curator at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, was brought on to identify the unusual specimen after the Charles Darwin Foundation research team captured it. Voight told Agence France-Presse that she recognized the creature was extraordinary from the first photographs she received. When the preserved specimen arrived in the mail weeks later, that initial excitement only grew: “When it arrived, I was like ‘Oh! My goodness! It’s beautiful,’” she said.

What struck Voight immediately was the strange geographic gap between this new octopus and its closest known relative. The most similar shaped octopus on record lives thousands of kilometers away off the coast of Uruguay, on the opposite side of the South American continent in a completely different ocean basin. This unexpected range separation adds new questions about the evolutionary history and dispersal of deep-sea octopus species.

Faced with only a single specimen, the research team refused to dissect the fragile animal for traditional anatomical study, a common step in describing new species. Instead, they turned to cutting-edge imaging technology: the Field Museum’s CT scanning lab captured thousands of high-resolution X-ray images, which were compiled into a detailed 3D model that revealed the octopus’s internal anatomy without damaging the irreplaceable specimen. “There’s nothing like spending the day looking at something no other human has ever seen,” said Stephanie Smith, head of the museum’s X-ray lab, in a public statement announcing the find.

Beyond its one-of-a-kind status as a new species, *Microeledone galapagensis* stands out for multiple unique traits. Most notably, its pale cerulean blue back is an extremely rare coloration in natural animal populations, while its underside is a striking deep purple. It is also the smallest known member of the Megaleledonidae family, a group of octopuses that typically grow to much larger sizes and are mostly found in the frigid Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica.

Voight explained that the unusual two-tone color pattern likely serves an important defensive purpose. Deep-sea environments are home to many bioluminescent organisms that emit light when disturbed, and a glowing captured prey could draw the attention of larger predators. The octopus’s dark purple underside is used to cloak glowing prey it has captured, hiding the light and keeping the octopus concealed from larger hunters. Additional distinguishing features include its short, stubby arms that bear only a single row of suckers, and its uniquely smooth dorsal skin that sets it apart from other closely related species.

Despite the excitement of this new find, Voight emphasized that discoveries of new octopus species in the deep sea are far rarer than they should be — not because new species are uncommon, but because so little of the world’s deep ocean floor has been explored. To put that in perspective, Voight notes that if all of Earth’s landmasses were combined into a single continuous landmass, they would still not cover the area of the Pacific Ocean alone. The deep sea remains the largest and least explored ecosystem on the planet, meaning countless new species are still waiting to be discovered by researchers. Voight added that this is already the second new octopus species she has identified in just two years, following a 2023 discovery off the coast of Costa Rica.

China has successfully launched the Shenzhou-23 crewed spacecraft, marking another major milestone in its ambitious plan to land humans on the lunar surface by 2030, with the craft completing a smooth docking with the country’s Tiangong Space Station just hours after liftoff, according to official Chinese state media. This mission carries historic significance, as it includes the first ever astronaut from Hong Kong to travel to space, opening a new chapter in the region’s participation in China’s growing space exploration program.

The Long March 2-F carrier rocket lifted off on schedule at 11:08 pm Beijing Time Sunday (1508 GMT) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center located in China’s arid northwestern Gobi Desert. Footage broadcast by China’s state-run CCTV captured the powerful launch, with the rocket ascending through the night sky, engulfed in bright orange flames and thick plumes of smoke. Roughly 10 minutes after liftoff, the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft successfully separated from the rocket and entered its planned orbit, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) confirmed in a social media statement shortly after launch. “All three astronauts are in good physical condition, and the launch mission has been declared a complete success,” the agency added.

Approximately 3.5 hours after entering orbit, the spacecraft completed an automated docking with the Tiangong Space Station, China’s permanent outpost in low-Earth orbit, state news agency Xinhua reported, citing CMSA updates. The three-member crew is led by 43-year-old Li Jiaying, a former Hong Kong police officer who makes history as the first Hong Kong-born astronaut to reach space. She is joined by two other crewmates: 39-year-old space engineer Zhu Yangzhu, and 39-year-old Zhang Zhiyuan, a former Chinese Air Force pilot who is making his first trip to space.

In pre-launch ceremonies held at the launch center, crowds of attendees waved national flags and cheered as the three crew members saluted from the stage, accompanied by a ceremonial performance from a military band. Once settled aboard Tiangong, the crew will conduct a wide range of scientific experiments across multiple disciplines, including life sciences, materials science, fluid physics, and biomedical research.

The centerpiece of the mission is a groundbreaking 12-month orbital stay for one crew member, a first for China’s manned space program that will generate critical data to support the country’s 2030 lunar landing goal. This long-duration mission is designed to study the physiological and psychological impacts of extended exposure to microgravity, a key area of research for any crewed deep space exploration effort, including future missions to Mars. CMSA has stated that the specific crew member selected for the full-year stay will be announced at a later date, based on the progress of the mission in its early phases.

Richard de Grijs, an astrophysicist and professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, outlined the unique challenges that this mission will address. Extended stays in space carry well-documented health risks for humans, including bone density loss, muscle atrophy, increased radiation exposure, sleep disruption, and cumulative mental and physical fatigue, he explained. Beyond human health, the mission will also test the reliability of critical life support systems, including closed-loop water and air recycling technologies, as well as protocols for managing potential medical emergencies thousands of kilometers from Earth.

De Grijs noted that the year-long mission represents a steady, deliberate step forward for China’s space program, building operational experience for long-term sustained occupation of the Tiangong Space Station and laying critical groundwork for future lunar and deep space exploration. “A 12-month orbital stay pushes both the program’s hardware and the astronauts themselves into a new operational domain, compared to the shorter six-month missions that have been standard for Shenzhou in earlier phases of the program,” he told Agence France-Presse. Prior to this mission, all crews rotating through Tiangong have served six-month tours of duty before being relieved by replacement crews.

Shenzhou-23 is a core part of China’s timeline to put astronauts on the Moon before 2030, a goal that puts Beijing in a friendly global space race with the United States, which is pursuing its own return to the Moon through the NASA-led Artemis program. China is already moving forward with testing the next-generation hardware needed for lunar missions, with an uncrewed orbital test flight of the new Mengzhou spacecraft planned for 2026. The Mengzhou craft will replace the current Shenzhou fleet, and is designed specifically to carry Chinese astronauts to the Moon. Beijing also aims to complete the first phase of its International Lunar Research Station, a permanent manned outpost on the lunar surface, by 2035.

Looking beyond its national program, China has plans to expand international collaboration in low-Earth orbit, with the first foreign astronaut – a Pakistani crew member – set to visit Tiangong by the end of 2024.

Over the past three decades, China has rapidly expanded its space exploration program, investing tens of billions of dollars into the sector to close the gap with long-established space powers including the United States, Russia, and Europe. The country has already notched multiple historic space firsts: in 2019, it became the first nation in the world to land a robotic probe, Chang’e-4, on the far side of the Moon, a feat no other space program had achieved. In 2021, China successfully landed a robotic rover on the surface of Mars, cementing its status as a major player in deep space exploration.

China’s development of an independent space station grew out of a political restriction: since 2011, the country has been excluded from participating in the U.S.-led International Space Station, after U.S. legislation banned NASA from any formal collaboration with Beijing. That restriction pushed China to pursue an entirely domestic space station program, which it completed with the construction of Tiangong in 2022.

As climate change continues to push ocean temperatures to record highs, leading coral researchers around the globe are sounding the alarm: a potentially powerful El Nino weather pattern forecast for this year could deliver a fatal blow to reef ecosystems already reeling from repeated mass bleaching.

Meteorological forecasters have grown increasingly confident that the cyclical climate phenomenon, which emerges every two to seven years, will return in 2025 with unusual strength. El Nino disrupts established global weather patterns, triggering severe drought in some regions and catastrophic flooding in others. For coral reefs, the most dangerous impacts stem from El Nino’s tie to elevated ocean temperatures and reduced cloud cover across many tropical basins—two conditions that directly trigger mass bleaching.

“Every single global coral bleaching event in recorded history has coincided with an El Nino year,” noted Clint Oakley, a coral biologist at Victoria University of Wellington. He shared that he feels “dread, though not surprise” at the prospect of a strong event, which he says could prove “serious and devastating for reef systems across the world.”

To understand why warm water poses such an existential threat to corals requires looking at their symbiotic biological relationship: corals rely on tiny algae called zooxanthellae that live within their calcium carbonate structures. The algae use photosynthesis to produce nutrient-rich food for their coral hosts, and in exchange gain a stable habitat and access to the sunlight needed for photosynthesis. The algae are also responsible for the vivid, distinctive colors that make reefs so iconic. When ocean temperatures rise too far above historical averages, however, this delicate partnership breaks down. Researchers have not yet pinpointed the exact biological mechanism that triggers this collapse, but the outcome is consistent: the algae either leave the coral tissue voluntarily or are expelled by the coral itself. Without their algae symbionts, corals are left stark white, a state called bleaching, and slowly starve because they no longer receive the nutrients the algae provide.

If ocean temperatures drop back to safe levels quickly enough, corals can survive on stored energy reserves until the algae return. Even then, surviving bleaching leaves corals weakened, malnourished, far more susceptible to disease, and unable to allocate enough energy to reproduce. If heat stress persists or reaches extreme levels, the coral will starve to death before temperatures cool, explained Jen Matthews, a coral scientist at the University of Technology Sydney.

Occasional localised bleaching is a natural part of reef ecosystem dynamics, and can even help cull weaker corals to make space for hardier individuals. The modern crisis stems from repeated mass global bleaching events, which have become the new normal as climate change drives steady long-term ocean warming. When reefs are hit by bleaching before they have fully recovered and had time to produce new juvenile corals to replace lost individuals, the ecosystem enters an irreversible downward spiral, Oakley said.

The most recent global mass bleaching event was officially declared in 2024, and its impacts have already been devastating. In the Caribbean, multiple key coral species are now classified as functionally extinct, meaning they can no longer reproduce enough to sustain stable populations. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest reef system and the only living structure visible from space, has already lost between 15 and 40 percent of its total coral cover across different regions since 2024.

A powerful “super El Nino” this year would add new heat stress to ocean temperatures that are already far above the safe threshold for most corals. Oakley pointed out that average global ocean temperatures over the past five years are already equal to the peak temperatures recorded during the 1998 global bleaching event, the first major mass bleaching event in modern history.

While a small subset of coral species and individual colonies have shown natural resilience to warm water, these hardier corals are not abundant enough to replace the massive losses caused by repeated bleaching. Scientists have pursued a range of experimental interventions to protect vulnerable reefs, from nutrient gels that feed starved corals to solar shading that cools reefs during heatwaves, and even genetic engineering to breed more heat-tolerant coral strains. These innovative strategies are important, Matthews said, but ultimately they only “buy time” for reefs rather than solving the core crisis.

Researchers emphasize that key details about this year’s El Nino remain uncertain: while an event is very likely, its exact strength and duration are still unpredictable, said Kimberley Reid, an atmospheric science research fellow at the University of Melbourne. El Nino is just one factor shaping regional ocean conditions, she added, with local ocean temperature anomalies and regional wind patterns also playing major roles in how much heat stress reefs will face.

Even if an unusually strong El Nino does not materialise this year, the long-term outlook for global coral reefs remains grim. Roughly half of the world’s total coral cover has already been lost over the past few decades. These ecosystems are not just tourist attractions: they provide critical spawning and nursery habitat for commercial fish species that feed billions of people around the world, and act as natural sea walls that absorb storm energy and protect coastal communities from flooding and erosion.

Matthews called the current trajectory a sobering reality. “If we don’t get our act together on climate change, then all we’re doing is buying time until our reefs, as we know them, disappear.”

Gibraltar’s famous colony of Barbary macaques, a top draw for international visitors to this British overseas territory on southern Spain’s border, have developed an unexpected adaptive behavior: they deliberately eat soil to counteract gastrointestinal distress caused by consuming large amounts of human junk food, according to groundbreaking new research published by an international team of biologists.

Originating from North Africa, the population of roughly 230 macaques holds a unique status as the only free-ranging colony of wild monkeys in all of Europe, per data from the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society. For millions of tourists who flock to the territory’s iconic Rock of Gibraltar each year, seeing these charismatic primates is often the highlight of their trip. “We came here specifically for the monkeys, because this is the only place in Europe you can see wild populations of them,” 29-year-old Danish visitor Elish told Agence France-Presse. But the tourist attention comes with a hidden cost: despite repeated warnings, many visitors either feed the macaques directly or leave food waste accessible, and the animals regularly raid snacks from unaware guests.

Local authorities have long enforced a ban on feeding the macaques, with posted warning signs across the territory and fines for violations reaching as high as £4,000 ($5,350). But enforcement remains a major challenge: thousands of tourists visit the Rock daily, and the macaques, which can grow up to 15 kilograms, are bold, independent, and skilled at snatching ice cream, cakes, crisps, chocolate and other processed treats from unguarded bags, picnic baskets and public waste bins. Over time, this steady access to unhealthy human food has drastically altered the macaques’ natural diet, which originally consists of wild fruits, leafy vegetables, seeds and native vegetation.

The new study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Paris-Sorbonne and Gibraltar’s local environment department between August 2022 and April 2024, documents this soil-eating behavior — formally called geophagy — for the first time in this Gibraltar macaque population. The research team found that geophagy occurs at far higher rates among this colony than it does among other macaque populations around the world, and that the behavior spikes in summer, when tourist numbers to Gibraltar reach their annual peak. Critically, the behavior was not observed at all in a separate group of Gibraltar macaques that have no regular contact with tourists and do not access human junk food.

“That is a strong argument for the direct association between soil-eating and the consumption of human food,” explained Sylvain Lemoine, co-author of the study and assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Lemoine noted that the processed junk food the macaques consume is extremely high in sugar, salt and dairy — ingredients that the primates’ digestive systems are not evolved to process properly, leading to frequent stomach discomfort and disrupted gut microbiomes.

The research team classifies the behavior as an early form of self-medication. They hypothesize that the soil the macaques consume carries beneficial microfungi and natural microorganisms that help rebalance the disordered gut microbiome after a junk food binge, in addition to absorbing toxins to reduce gastrointestinal distress. Bethany Maxwell, technical officer at the Gibraltar Botanic Gardens, pointed out that while primate geophagy is already well-documented in scientific literature, the link to excess junk food consumption from human tourism is an entirely new finding. “We already know primates eat soil mostly to detoxify or to supplement missing nutrients, but this study shows that this behavior is also being driven here by eating too much unhealthy human food — that’s something quite novel,” Maxwell said.

For most modern urban residents, feral pigeons are little more than uninvited pests: filthy birds that leave droppings on building facades, spread disease, and are repelled by ubiquitous anti-perching spikes across city skylines. But this dismissive reputation hides a thousands-year-long partnership between humans and rock doves that shaped both species, and new archaeological research is rewriting the timeline of that shared history.

Published Thursday in the journal *Antiquity*, the study led by a team of Dutch researchers confirms that domestic pigeons were integrated into human societies as early as 3,500 years ago – nearly 1,000 years earlier than the previous scholarly consensus.

Lead author Anderson Carter, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Groningen, told AFP that humans’ widespread rejection of pigeons is a remarkably recent development in the long arc of human-animal coexistence. For millennia, pigeons were far more than urban strays: they served as a reliable food source, delivered messages across impossible distances, produced fertilizer for crops, and held deep meaning as religious symbols across multiple cultures. Even into the 19th and 20th centuries, pigeons remained critical to human society, most notably carrying vital military messages during times of war.

That centuries-long utility ended abruptly with the explosion of communications technology. “When the telegraph and then the telephone were invented, pigeons were out of a job,” Carter explained. But thousands of years of selective breeding and conditioning had left the birds adapted to live alongside humans, so they did not leave human settlements. It was not until the Industrial Revolution created large, dense modern cities that the narrative around pigeons shifted, framing them as dirty, unwanted pests that spread illness.

To unpack the origins of this relationship, the research team traveled to the Hala Sultan Tekke archaeological site on the shores of Larnaca Salt Lake in southeast Cyprus. There, they analyzed 159 ancient pigeon bones recovered from Bronze Age excavation layers, using biometric, isotopic and collagen analysis to trace the birds’ diet and identify signs of human influence.

Dating placed the remains between the 13th and 14th centuries BC, or roughly 3,500 years before the present. When researchers compared the nitrogen and carbon isotope ratios from the pigeon collagen to isotope data from contemporary human remains found at other Bronze Age Cypriot sites, they discovered a near-perfect overlap, indicating the pigeons shared a very similar diet to humans living in the same region. This overlap is strong evidence the birds were already domesticated, or well on their way to domestication, by that time.

Prior to this finding, the earliest confirmed evidence of pigeon domestication dated back to around 300 BC, from large purpose-built stone nesting structures discovered in Greece. The new finding pushes the timeline of domestication back by almost a millennium.

Genomic analysis also confirms that modern feral city pigeons are genetically closely linked to wild rock doves from the Mediterranean and Middle East, matching the archaeological evidence from Cyprus. For the research team, the broader goal of the work is to reframe public perception of the most common urban bird. Carter notes that pigeons’ evolutionary story is inextricably woven into human history: “Their story is also our story.”

Marine biologists have announced an extraordinary discovery that rewrites our understanding of humpback whale migration: two individual humpbacks have completed unprecedented transoceanic journeys between Brazil and Australia, setting new world records for the longest recorded travel distance in the species. The international research team, whose findings are published in *Royal Society Open Science*, pieced together the whales’ multi-decade odysseys using unique identifying markings on their tail flukes, with contributions from both professional scientists and recreational amateur photographers who snapped photos decades apart. The study’s lead author, Cristina Castro, a marine biologist with the Pacific Whale Foundation based in Ecuador, shared that these open-ocean crossings are entirely unlike any movement previously documented for the species. While individual whales have occasionally been spotted straying slightly outside their established migratory paths, the scale of these journeys far exceeds any previously recorded deviation, Castro explained.

What makes this tracking possible is the fact that every humpback whale bears a one-of-a-kind pigment pattern on the underside of its tail fluke, a natural marker as distinct as a human fingerprint that allows researchers to identify individual animals across decades and vast distances. To trace the two whales’ paths, the team analyzed more than 19,000 photos collected between 1984 and 2005 from locations across eastern Australia and Latin America, running the images through a custom image recognition algorithm to find potential matches, then manually verifying each candidate to confirm the identities of the wandering whales. The first of the two record-breaking whales was first photographed and documented in 2007 in Hervey Bay, a well-known humpback habitat on Queensland’s east coast, and spotted again at the same location in 2013. Six years after that second sighting, the same whale was photographed off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous coastal state. The straight-line distance between the Australian and Brazilian sighting points measures approximately 14,200 kilometers, or 8,800 miles; researchers note that the whale’s actual total travel distance is likely even longer, as its exact route between the two points remains unknown. The second whale took the reverse route across the South Pacific: it was first photographed swimming alongside eight other adult humpbacks off the coast of Bahia, Brazil in 2003. Nearly 25 years later, in 2025, the same whale was spotted and confirmed in Hervey Bay, Australia, with a straight-line distance of 15,100 kilometers between the two sightings. This journey surpasses the previous record for the longest recorded humpback migration, which was set by a whale that traveled more than 13,000 kilometers from Colombia’s Pacific coast to Zanzibar off the eastern coast of Africa.

For Southern Hemisphere humpback whales, migratory routes are deeply entrenched cultural behaviors. Most populations live in distinct, well-separated pods and follow the same fixed route year after year, moving between cold, nutrient-rich feeding grounds in polar waters and warm tropical breeding grounds where they give birth and mate. Castro notes that these routes are passed down socially: mother humpbacks teach the traditional migratory paths to their calves when they are young, cementing the patterns across generations. That makes these extraordinary deviations all the more surprising, and researchers are now exploring multiple potential explanations for why the two whales strayed so far from their expected paths. One leading hypothesis ties the unusual movement to human-driven climate change, which is altering ocean conditions, food availability, and traditional migration corridors in ways that are still not fully understood. Castro explains that increasing environmental pressure or disturbance to the whales’ original feeding and breeding habitats could push more individual animals to venture far beyond their traditional ranges in search of more suitable conditions, while changes in the distribution of their prey could also encourage long-distance exploration.

Beyond rewriting what we know about humpback migration capacity, these long-distance crossings also carry ecological benefits for the species. After being hunted to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling in the 20th century, humpback whale populations have made a remarkable rebound across much of their global range over the past 50 years. When whales travel between previously isolated breeding populations, they introduce new genetic material that boosts overall genetic diversity, strengthening the long-term resilience of the species. The wandering whales may also drive cultural exchange among humpback populations: male humpback whales are famous for their long, complex songs, which spread rapidly through populations as individuals copy new melodies. If a male from one isolated breeding population travels to a new region and sings his native song, he can introduce entirely new musical themes that spread through the local population, creating a lasting cultural shift. Researchers say the discovery highlights the value of long-term photo identification projects that combine scientific data with contributions from citizen scientists, to reveal unexpected behaviors in one of the ocean’s most iconic inhabitants.