We are interested in the preservation of the biodiversity on Earth. What I’ve been working on is rats. Just looking at rats, you can understand continental drift and climate change. We’ve actually rediscovered rats that were thought to be extinct. Darwin was the last one to document them on the Galapagos Islands. People have gone there for hundreds of years and not seen one. In 1997, I went there with my mentor(导师) and another graduate student. Everyone thought I was crazy, why look for something that doesn’t exist? They wouldn’t even give us permits. Our plan was to stop on a beach for a day and then hike up to the top of an extinct volcano where very few people had been:We were on a picturesque, isolated beach. We set out the traps just to see what we might find. The next morning, I checked my traps! I immediately ran back to my mentor. When he looked in the mental trap—I will never forget his face--- It looked like he’d seen a ghost.

I certainly understand the argument: “ Who cares about an extinct rat?” but you have no idea what role that rat plays in that functioning ecosystem. People can appreciate beauty, so that’s why people love pandas and want to keep them around. You never hear, “What good is panda?” Ecologically, these rats are much more important to their ecosystem than those pandas--- not that I don’t love pandas but we have to look beyond the big and beautiful.

I teach conservation biology and evolution. In both you have to appeal to people asking “ Why is this important to me?” Some scientists refuse to do that. That’s my entire approach. I’ll ask “How many of you had a family member who was in a tornado, hurricane or flood?” .And almost every hand goes up. Climate change is suddenly very personal, and now they want to hear what you are saying. You are not looking for sympathy for the rats but for a greater understanding of the system.

Though known for being violent, six-foot-long Humboldt squid (鱿鱼) in the Pacific Ocean, are good communicators,

It is not news that the squid can rapidly change the color of their skin-making different patterns for communication something other squid species are also known to do.

But it is totally dark where the Humboldt squid live, more than one thousand feet below the ocean surface. So their pattern is invisible. Instead, a new study suggests that they create backlighting for the patterns by making their bodies glow, like the screen of an ereader.

“Right now, what blows my mind in there’s probably squid talking to each other in the deep ocean and they’re probably sharing all sorts of cool information.” said Ben Burford, a graduate student at Stanford University.

Burford and his fallow researchers studied deep-water recordings made by remotely operated vehicles off the California coast. They found the squid make around 30 different patterns, some of which are only used around other squid, suggesting they’re used for communication. The squid also appear to reorder the patterns, almost like words in a sentence.

“That’s really exciting because then you can say a whole lot more based on their arrangement,” Burford said. “So, they could for instance say, hey, that fish over there is mine, and I’m the ruling squid.”

The findings could change the way scientists think about bioluminescence (生物荧光), which is used by many deep-sea animals to attract prey or a mate.

“We generally think of deep: sea stuff as having very simple displays because it’s a low-light environment,” said Mike Vecchione, a zoologist from the National Museum of Natural Museum of Natural History. “This turns some of our ideas about bioluminescence almost around upside down.”

The deep ocean is a challenging place to study, so Vecchione said there may be much more complexity to discover.

Pesticides might just be a bee's worst enemy. They harm their brains, slow down their reproduction, and even kill their buzz. Now it seems they damage their social lives and reduce their ability to care for their young.

While previous studies have shown that commonly used neonicotinoid（新烟碱类）pesticides make bees sick and affect how they search for food and navigate, a new study gives more of an idea of how these chemicals affect the internal workings of a colony（种群）. Studying these effects has proved difficult, so the team employed a new technique. They stuck tiny QR codes to the backs of humblebees and tracked their movements using a robotic camera.

The researchers looked at 12 colonies housed in a lab, giving some the same level of imidacloprid—the world's most commonly used pesticide—that they'd be exposed to in the wild while keeping others pesticide-free as controls. They checked on them for a few minutes 12 times a day. The findings are published in the journal Science.

Unfortunately, the researchers found a number of obvious differences between the bees exposed to the pesticide and the controls. The bees given neonicotinoids spent less time interacting with other bees and more time resting. This pause in activity tended to happen more at night, but the researchers aren't sure why.

"Bees actually have a very strong circadian rhythm（生理节奏）," lead author James Crall explained in a statement. "So what we found was that, during the day, there was no statistically observable effect, but at night, we could see that they were crashing. We don't know yet whether the pesticides are destroying circadian gene regulation or if this is just some, maybe physiological feedback…But it suggests that, just from a practical perspective, if we want to understand or study these compounds, looking at effects overnight matters a lot."