Foxes and farmers have never got on well. These small dog-like animals have long been accused of killing farm animals. They are officially considered as harmful and farmers try to keep their numbers down by shooting or poisoning them.

Farmers can also call on the services of their local hunt to control the fox population. Hunting consists of running after a fox across the countryside, with a group of specially trained dogs, followed by men and women riding horses. When the dogs eventually catch the fox they kill it or a hunter shoots it.

People who take part in hunting think of it as a sport; they wear a special uniform of red coats and white trousers, and follow strict principles of behavior. But owning a horse and hunting regularly is expensive, so most hunters are wealthy.

It is estimated that up to 100,000 people watch or take part in fox hunting. But over the last couple of decades the number of people against fox hunting, because they think it is cruel, has risen sharply. Nowadays it is rare for a hunt to take place without some kind of conflict between hunters and hunt saboteurs (阻拦者). Sometimes these incidents lead to violence, but mostly saboteurs interfere with the hunt by misleading riders and disturbing the trail of the fox’s smell, which the dogs follow.

Noisy conflicts between hunters and saboteurs have become so common that they are almost as much a part of hunting as the pursuit of foxes itself. But this year supporters of fox hunting face a bigger threat to their sport. A Labour Party Member of the Parliament, Mike Foster, is trying to get Parliament to pass a new law which will make the hunting of wild animals with dogs illegal. If the law is passed, wild animals like foxes will be protected under the ban in Britain.

From 2018 to 2021, about 10 billion snow crabs (蟹) disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska. “It’s a fishery disaster in the truest sense of the word,” says Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist.

Usually, as winter’s thick sea ice melts (融化), the meltwater settles on the seafloor, creating a cold-water pool with temperatures below 2° Celsius on the eastern Bering Sea shelf, which makes perfect habitat for snow crabs. But a sea heat wave in the area in 2018 and 2019 prevented the usual amount of sea ice from forming.

After a close study, Szuwalski and his colleagues have found the water temperature probably didn’t kill the crabs directly, as snow crabs in laboratories can survive in waters up to 12℃. Instead, the crabs might have died from hunger. According to the study, the food demand of snow crabs in labs almost double as water temperature rises from 0℃ to 3℃. The crab population reached historic highs in 2018 thanks to great ocean conditions for newborn crabs around 2010. As a result, the crowded crabs probably needed more food, but because of the smaller foraging (觅食) area, they had even fewer resources to sink their claws into.

“It’s just something we didn’t expect, but now we have to live with,” says Christopher Harley, an ocean scientist. Such effects of ocean heat waves are likely to go beyond snow crabs. In answer to climate change, ecosystems in northern areas of the earth, such as Alaska’s, are changing more rapidly than anywhere else. Scientists can try to help predict (预测) and prepare for changes in the future with the aid of former research. “But the future increasingly holds events that have never happened on record before, like the drop in the snow crab population,” Harley says.