Throughout folktale, tales of shapeshifting creatures, from wolves to vampires, have often spread horror across a variety of cultures. But these physical transformations are not limited to the pages of fiction.

A review article suggests that climate change could be physically altering a variety of species across the planet, as individuals change their shape to suit the rising temperatures across the world. Features such as tails, legs and ears are changing to provide different levels of heat exchange with the environment. Warm-blooded animals tend to have longer ears, tails, and limbs if they live in warmer conditions, compared with similar animals in colder places. The long body parts provide a bigger skin surface that they can use to get rid of extra heat.

While the changes occur across a range of species, they’re not universal across every animal considered. These adaptations may be beneficial in the short to medium term, but as the climate continues to change, animals can not continually adapt. At some point, the trade-off won’t be beneficial anymore, which could lead to population declines and even extinction. So, while a larger beak may be useful for species wanting to lose more heat, if it makes the beak more impractical for feeding then it may end up being more of a disadvantage for the birds. There are also a variety of other ways of controlling body temperature that don’t require changes in body shape, such as behavioral changes like making use of shade and migrating at warmer times of year.

Of course, to some extent we already know what’s needed to limit the emptiness of the future natural world. This includes reducing greenhouse gases; protecting biodiversity; restoring connectivity between habitats; and reducing interrelated threats like pollution and land harvesting. Even species that are close to extinction can be brought back from the edge with enough conservation effort.

The rainforests are alive with the sound of animals. Besides the pleasure of the din (喧嚣), it is also useful to ecologists. If you want to measure the biodiversity of a piece of land, listening out for animal calls is much easier than looking for tracks in the undergrowth. But such “bioacoustic (生物声音的) analysis” is still time-consuming, and it requires an expert pair of ears.

In a paper published on October 17th in Nature Communications, a group of researchers led by Jörg Müller, an ecologist at the University of Würzburg, describe a better way: have a computer do the job. Smartphone apps already exist that will identify birds, bats or mammals simply by listening to the sounds they make. Their idea was to apply the principle to conservation work.

The researchers took recordings from across 43 sites in the Ecuadorean rainforest. Some sites were relatively uncultivated, old-growth forests. Others were areas that had recently been cleared for grazing or cacao planting. And some had been cleared but then abandoned, allowing the forest to regrow. Sound recordings were taken four times every hour, over two weeks. The various calls were identified manually by an expert, and then used to construct a list of the species present. As expected, the longer the land had been free from agricultural activity, the greater the biodiversity it hosted.

Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller.

Of course, not everything in a rainforest makes a noise. Dr Müller and his colleagues used light-traps to catch night-flying insects, and DNA analysis to identify them. To their relief, they found that the diversity of noisy animals was a reliable proxy for the diversity of the quieter ones.

The results may have application outside ecology departments, too. Under pressure from their customers, firms such as L’Oreal, a make-up company, and Shell, an oil firm, have been spending money on forest restoration projects around the world. Dr Müller hopes that an automated approach to checking on the results could help monitor such efforts, and give a standardised way to measure whether they are working as well as their sponsors say.

If you've been paying attention, you know that corvids (crows, rooks and ravens) are remarkably intelligent birds. Now these feathered geniuses have been given a job: six rooks have been trained to pick up rubbish in the Puy du Fou historical theme park in western France.

Whenever Boubou, Bamboo, Bill, Black, Bricole and Baco place a cigarette butt or other small pieces of trash in a special container, it offers a treat-rewarding for their efforts. The idea came from one of the park's falconers （养鹰人），Christophe Gaborit. As part of the falconry show, crows had already been trained to pick up roses and bring them to a princess, so in the 2000s, Gaborit raised and trained two rooks to do the same with rubbish.

The training system is similar to experimental programs for testing corvids' intelligence, in which a vending machine distributes a food reward when a crow correctly performs a task. Earlier this year, a type of vending machine was used to teach crows how to tear paper into a specific shape. And 10 years ago, "hacker" Josh Klein built a similar vending machine to reward crows for getting back lost money. So we know the concept works.

The rooks are employed for the first time over the weekend, and they'll be working four days aweek under close watch — not for the birds, but to make sure the humans don't deliberately drop rubbish to watch the birds clean it up. That's because the aim of the rook garbage collectors isn't only to collect garbage — it's also to get park-goers to think before they litter. "OK, the birds are able to do something that we are much more able to do than them, so we should do this by ourselves, park president Nicolas de Villiers told NPR. "It's a funny way to show the people that you cannot throw papers everywhere."^,