Tommy, a 26-year-old chimp (猩猩), lives in a small cage in a used truck sales lot in New York. Retired from movie work and whatever else once occupied him, he has no chimp friends—just a TV. He is worlds away from the rainforest of Western Africa, where chimps spend most of their lives in trees, hunting, and socializing together.

His owner hasn’t broken any laws, but an animal rights group called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is trying to change the view. The group says chimps have such a humanlike intelligence that they should be recognized as “legal persons” and be placed in an animal shelter and wander free.

You’ve probably heard the term “animal rights”, but animals don’t actually have rights in many countries. Animal-welfare laws punish people who mistreat animals, but that’s not the same as chimps having a right to liberty or anything else.

NhRP’s first step is to ask a judge to end people’s unjust arrest on behalf of Tommy and other privately owned chimps. If the court (法庭) decides to recognize chimps as legal persons, NhRP’s next step will be arguing for what rights the chimps should be guaranteed. “The right that they should have is the right to body liberty,” says Wise, a NhRP group member. “They should be able to choose how to live their lives.”

Tommy’s owner, Pat Lavery, says he rescued Tommy from a careless owner about a decade ago and denies the chimp is mistreated or unhappy. “He likes being by himself,” he says.

“There’s a danger in making a jump to say they’re just like people,” says Richard Cupp, a professor who writes about animals and the law. “If we really believe chimps are very, very smart, then who knows if maybe someday we might…say, ‘Hey, here’s a particular human being that’s not very smart at all, maybe the chimps have higher status than this person.’”

In habitats across the planet, animals periodically drop everything to walk, fly or swim to a new place. Wildlife such as whales and geese learn migration paths by following their parents. Others, including small songbirds, gain the distance and direction of their migration within their genetic code. And some animals use a combination of genetics and culture to guide their migration.

Another group of migrators does not quite fit either model, and researchers have only recently started to figure out how they find their way. Take the Cory’s shearwater, an oceangoing sea bird that migrates over the Atlantic every year. The young do not migrate with their parents, so culture cannot explain their journeys. And the exact paths vary wildly from individual to individual, making genetics equally unlikely.

Cory’s shearwaters are long-lived, rarely producing young successfully before age nine. This leaves an opening for learning and practice to develop their migration patterns. Researchers call this the “exploration-refinement”, and until now it has been hypothetical (假设的) because of difficulties in tracking migratory animals’ movements.

But a team of researchers has done that by attaching small geolocators to more than 150 of the birds aged four to nine. They found that younger birds traveled longer distances, for longer periods, and had more diverse paths than older birds. “We finally have evidence of the ‘exploration-refinement’ for migratory birds,” says Letizia Campioni, who led the study. Younger Cory’s shearwaters are able to fly just as fast as the adults— but they do not, suggesting that the young do more exploring, which gradually fades as they mature and settle into a preferred course.

Although it may seem less efficient than other strategies, “exploration refinement could be beneficial to birds and other organisms (生物) in a rapidly changing world due to unpredictable man-made changes,” says Barbara Frei. “It might be safer to repeat a behavior that was recently successful than to rely on patterns that were perfected long ago but might no longer be safe.”

Insects could disappear within a century at current rate of decline, says Global Review.

The world’ s insects are moving quickly down the path to dying out, indicating a disastrous collapse（崩溃）of nature’ s ecosystems is likely to happen, according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction（灭绝）is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

“It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web—they pollinate（授粉） the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or hate them, we humans cannot survive without insects,” said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK.

The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides（杀虫剂）. Urbanisation and climate change are also significant factors.

One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses.

Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said, “It is alarming to see this collation（整理） of evidence that shows the state of the world’ s insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet’ s ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to stop and reverse（反转）these terrible trends.”