European rabbits might not be much to look at. They have a grayish-brown coat, small ears, and short legs. But these animals are not as ordinary as they seem. European rabbits live in grass habitats. They are somewhat picky eaters. They dig and disturb (弄乱) the ground while they look for food. “Their activities can create areas of bare (无遮蔽的) soil which plants require,”   rabbit expert Diana Bell says.

Rabbits also contribute nutrients to the soil after they leave their waste there. Researchers have found that this activity benefits lowland grassland habitats, which can help maintain beneficial conditions for many plants, insects, and bird species. Without the help of rabbits, many of these species would have to leave the area or might even die out.

But due to threats such as disease, habitat loss, and hunting, the animals are classified as endangered in their native region, the Iberian Peninsula. One disease called myxomatosis is an insect-spread virus from South America that was intentionally introduced by a farmer in the mid-1950s to control the rabbit population. About 90% of European rabbits died during early outbreaks and the disease continues to affect rabbit populations on the Iberian Peninsula.

To help rabbit populations recover, Bell has suggestions in the habitat recovery project. She is encouraging people to do their part to help protect the rabbits. For instance, people can just create piles of branches and make sloping mounds of soil (土堆) in their spare time and then the rabbits can find cover. Actions like these won’t take people much energy or time, and over the past three years, researchers have found they are working. “Our work resulted in evidence of rabbit activity in significantly higher numbers,” Bell says.

Environmentalists have used other methods to help protect decreasing rabbit populations such as creating wildlife corridors, which are unbroken animal habitats that function like animal high-ways. “Efforts to reintroduce them on the Iberian Peninsula have been largely unsuccessful but we’ve managed to do this in the U.K.” Bell says.

Each year, the discovery of new shark species underlines how little we know about ocean biodiversity. In a recent report conducted by Sibert and Rubin, they reported an unexpected finding: a large-scale extinction of sharks in the pelagic ocean, the largest ecosystem on Earth, about 19 million years ago. Their discovery suggests that some extinctions in the open sea of the past may have been mysterious.

The study of Sibert and Rubin takes advantage of a system by using tiny, hard bits of shark skin and bony fish teeth that naturally fall from their bodies to the seafloor. These extremely small fossils provide a rich record of ancient oceanic sharks and their abundance for thousands of years. By studying fossils from many regions, the diversity patterns can give major insights into evolution (进化) of the open sea that would be otherwise unknown.

Sibert and Rubin quantified(量化)a past extinction of sharks, reporting a 90% decline in number and >70% drop in diversity. They found that nearer-shore sharks appear to survive, but migratory ones go extinct. The finding of this study is that sharks had undergone a widespread extinction that reorganized their communities from 16 million to 20 million years ago.

Sibert and Rubin narrowed the disappearance of sharks to a window of time under 100,000 years around 19 million years ago, but the causes of this event remain unclear. Because this time period does not stand out as a period of major climatic change, the authors do not attribute(归因于) environmental factors as an extinction driver. As for other causes, the loss of shark diversity is directly linked to overfishing.

The loss of sharks from the oceans has profound, complex, and unavoidable ecological consequences because their presence reflects the stability of marine ecosystems. Yet, one-quarter of the global diversity of sharks is currently threatened with extinction. Despite recent improvements in conservation actions, shark communities never recovered from a mysterious extinction event 19 million years ago; the ecological fate of what remains is now in our hands.

Bees are responsible for about 30 percent of the world's food supply. Our fruits vegetables would not grow without bees. Many farmers use pesticide to protect food plants from insects. Studies have shown that these chemicals are also hurting the bees and showing up in the world's honey supply. And researchers are wondering how that could affect us.

A recent study found evidence of these pesticides in most of the world's bees. David Goulson is a professor of biology at Britain's University of Sussex. He says the chemicals harm the ability of bees to find their way. "These chemicals stack the brain of the insects and the insects and they interfere（阻碍）with their ability to learn and to navigate, which is really important for a bee. If they get lost, then they're as good as dead."

Goulson says the problem seems to come from new genetically engineered seeds. He says some of the seeds are covered with pesticide. "So the idea is the farmer buys the seed, pre-coated with pesticide, he sows it in the ground, and the chemical is water soluble, it dissolve into the soil and the water in the soil, and then it's supposed to be sucked up by the plant, and it goes to all parts of the plant including, unfortunately, the nectar（花蜜）and the pollen（花粉）."And that pollen ends up on the bees.

Swedish researchers found the chemicals in 75% of all the world's honey They even found it on the French island of Tahiti, a place not known for industrial farming.

Goulson says it is not just bees that are dying off. He says researchers are also seeing "big declines of farmland birds, butterflies and so on."