Researchers are ignoring most living things

University of New South Wales

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According to two new UNSW studies, researchers often choose research topics based personal preferences and cultural attitudes, including exposure to films, TV shows and even zoos, rather than attempting to fill the most pressing gaps in knowledge.

The result is a scientific blind spot that extends across most living things, with birds and mammals species dominating research despite making up a tiny fraction of overall biodiversity.

“Finding Nemo may have inspired many people to become marine biologists,” says lead author Dr Pietro Pollo, from UNSW Science.

“In nature documentaries the focus is usually on polar bears, lions, elephants and other mammals, and that is where most research interest and funding ends up.”

Less popular animals like insects, spiders, slugs and worms receive far less attention, leaving big gaps in our understanding of nature.

The researchers say this blind spot manifests in unpredictable ways because it’s impossible to predict the long-term outcomes of basic research.

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Pietro.

Research into lizard saliva helped lead to drugs such as Ozempic, while fluorescent proteins discovered in jellyfish transformed the study of individual cells, highlighting the important of studying a broad range of things.

“The next major discovery could be in an organism we currently ignore because we don’t find it cute or exciting.”

The researchers analysed more than one million ecology and evolution papers found that vertebrates appeared in more than half of papers involving animals, despite making up just 4.7% of described animal species.

Further, studies of vertebrates attract more citations and media attention than studies of invertebrates published in the same journals.

The researchers say science should broaden training, outreach and research opportunities to include a more representative sample of life on Earth.

“We have millions of species and limited time and funding, so we need to diversify our research as much as we can.”

For more information contact:

Tom Melville
UNSW Science
0432 912 060
tom.melville@unsw.edu.au

-ENDS-

 

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Journal

Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1002/ece3.74460

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Drivers of Taxonomic Bias in Ecology and Evolution: Insights From Ethologists and Behavioural Ecologists

Article Publication Date

12-Oct-2026

 

Salvage Operation Has Cleared More Than Two-Thirds of MSC Baltic III

The latest reprot says approximately 68 percent of the vessel's tonnage has been recovered (Canadian Coast Guard)

By The Maritime Executive 2026-10-16 

The salvage and recycling operation for the wrecked containershp MSC Baltic III continues to make strong progress. The Canadian Coast Guard in its most recent update on the operation says that Resolve Marine has removed approximately 68 percent of the tonnage of the vessel, with the remaining sections being pulled toward shore.

The latest figures compare with just over 6,000 tons that had been recovered as of the beginning of October. At that point, they said approximately 55 percent of the vessel’s tonnage had been recovered and sent for recycling. The latest calculation puts it at 7,445 tonnes recovered.

The 207-meter (679-foot) vessel had blacked out and beached on the coast of Newfoundland in February 2025. The focus of the first phase of the salvage operation was to remove the fuel from the ship and other potential pollutants as well as the cargo. The second phase, which focused on the recycling of the vessel, began in May 2026 with a contract to Resolve Marine.

After removing the accommodation block, most of the deck gear, and cargo hatches, the operation during the summer began cutting away the upper portion of the hull. By the end of July, the deconstruction of the upper portions of the hull was completed, and they began the pulling operation to move the remaining portion forward toward the shoreline for cutting and lifting. On September 9, a large portion of the bow section was removed from the MSC Baltic III.

 

Remaining sections of the hull are being pulled forward with large chain pulls (Canadian Coast Guard)

 

According to the latest report, the forward and midship section of the hull have now been moved forward a total of 170 meters (557 feet). Resolve Marine has also commenced pulling the stern section forward, having moved it a total of 78 meters (256 feet).

The operation will continue until winter conditions overtake the area. They have not said if the hull will be fully recovered this year, but in the past said some operations could continue into 2027. The operation also calls for a restoration of the cover where the ship grounded after the wreck is cleared.

The Canadian Coast Guard reported a heavier level of oil release during this phase of the operation. The tanks were emptied, but they had warned that there was residual oil in the systems that would likely be released. The new report mentions observed sheening in Cedar Cove, which has had shoreline impacts, including oiled vegetation and debris, as well as fresh tar stains, balls, and smears. There have also been three deceased birds recovered from the area, although the cause of death is not yet confirmed.

 

Wild birds rewrite rules for travel

The largest study of flight costs in the wild finds that riding the air can make flying cheaper than swimming, overturning a textbook ranking

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

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Adult male condor in Patagonia showing the soaring flight that allows birds to flap remarkably little despite their large size.

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Credit: Facundo Vital

An Andean condor and a trumpeter swan both weigh about 11 kilograms. Yet the condor covers each kilometer of flight for about a fifth of the swan’s energy bill. The difference is the air: the condor rides rising currents and flaps for 0.1% of its flight time, while the swan flaps for 99%. A new study of 50 bird and bat species in the wild showed that once the atmosphere is taken into account, flying can be the cheapest form of travel.

“To us, the sky might just look like background for flying animals, but it is an essential resource that can dramatically change the cost of a journey,” says first author Dr. Martina Scacco.

Textbooks rank the ways animals travel by cost: swimming is the cheapest, flying comes next, and running is the most expensive. That ranking comes from laboratory measurements of animals in swim tanks, in flight tunnels, and on treadmills. Outside the lab, the study found that this ranking changes.

“The laboratory rules tell us that condors and swans must have the same energy bill because they have the same body mass. Yet seeing how condors soar and swans flap, we know that clearly there must be a difference,” says senior author Prof. Emily Shepard from Swansea University.

The study put a price on that difference: the condor’s cost of transport was 79% lower than the swan’s, making soaring flight cheaper than swimming.

"When flying animals have access to natural atmospheric flows, they have free fuel from the sky. This study exposes the mistakes we make when we ignore the real-world conditions that animals have been responding to for millennia,” adds Shepard.

Published in Science, the work led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and Swansea University is the largest study yet to examine the cost of long-distance travel for wild animals. It combines 17 years of GPS and accelerometer tracking from 850 birds and bats of 38 species with four years of radar data covering 12 size classes of smaller flyers. The animals range in size from about 12 grams to more than 11 kilograms. An international team of 68 researchers contributed data to the project.

The study is the first to factor in the role of atmosphere in the movement of so many wild animals at a global scale, offering a key to conservation and management of aerial species.

“If atmospheric conditions change, so too will the cost of flight, and therefore how animals decide to migrate and establish communities,” says senior author Dr. Kamran Safi from MPI-AB.

The findings offer a new framework for predicting the energetic cost of flight, and how climatic changes might affect where and when animals travel in the future.

Measuring cost of transport in the wild

The team used accelerometers to tell apart high-cost flapping from low-cost soaring. With GPS data, they matched each stretch of flight with the wind and rising air the animals met on the way. This enabled them to calculate the time individual animals spent flapping or soaring along a stretch of flight, and to approximate how much energy they spent per meter travelled—their cost of transport.

“We boiled the differences down to fuel economy, nature’s equivalent of miles per gallon,” says Scacco. This allowed the scientists to compare transport costs across species and flight modes, “like we compare freight costs of sea mail or air mail,” she adds.

Indeed, when compared, the 50 species fell into two main groups: soarers and flappers. Among the soaring birds, size had a marked effect on transport cost: the heavier a soaring bird, the less it flapped and therefore the lower its cost of transport.

How to fly a hundred laps of the planet

Soaring vultures offer a vivid example. The seven vulture species in the study flew for a combined 128,000 days and more than 4.3 million kilometers, enough to circle the planet more than 100 times. Remarkably, they achieved that while flapping only 0.1% to 7% of flight time. And the heaviest vulture, the Andean condor, flapped least of all.

They did this by exploiting atmospheric energy. Soaring birds rode rising columns of air, which lowered their cost of transport the most, “like us riding the elevator to the top floor,” says Shepard. “Soarers are masters at extracting energy from the environment. When conditions are right, they can drive their costs down to very little.”

But conditions are not always right. The larger the soaring bird, the more restricted they were in terms of when and where they could fly.

Costly, but flexible flight

Flapping birds, on the other hand, use high-energy movement to cope with more variable conditions. Wind had the most significant effect on their transport costs, with tailwinds providing support and headwinds presenting resistance.

Says Safi: “Air can drive flight costs up as well as down for flappers. What surprised us was just how much flappers operate in costly conditions where their fuel economy is really low. We hope that our framework will drive further investigations of the different trade-offs these two groups face, and of potential energy saving mechanisms we might still be missing.”

In future work, the authors aim to build on their findings by measuring animals’ energy use directly, such as through heart rate monitoring. Doing so will capture differences in individual physiology, providing an even more realistic measure of the energetic cost of flight.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aee6550

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Airflows redefine the cost of aerial transport in the wild

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2026

Related News Releases

• Wild birds rewrite rules for travel
  (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)

Condors in Patagonia [VIDEO] 

Adult male condor in Patagonia showing the soaring flight that allows birds to flap remarkably little despite their large size.

Credit

Alvaro Moya Riffo

Atmospheric conditions shape the energy costs of animal flight

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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Studying data from 50 species of birds and bats using 17 years of observations has provided insights that challenge the traditional view that flight has a predictable energetic cost that’s always higher than the cost of other types of movement, like swimming or resting. Birds and bats can dramatically reduce the energy needed to travel, the new study shows, by exploiting winds and rising air currents. But to date, these environmental effects have largely been overlooked in estimates of flight costs. Current estimates of the energetic costs of movement across the animal kingdom are largely based on laboratory studies that do not capture the widely variable environmental conditions animals encounter in the wild. In nature, animals routinely exploit moving air and wind to reduce the energy required to travel long distances. These effects are particularly important for flying animals, as winds can dramatically alter how fast they travel, while updrafts can allow soaring birds to almost eliminate the need for flapping their wings and move vast distances at very low energetic costs. Although how atmospheric conditions influence birds’ flight behavior has been studied, the realized effect of these conditions on energy expenditure has not been measured directly. Here, Martina Scacco and colleagues measured the effective cost of transport – the energy flying animals use to travel a given distance – under real-world conditions. Scacco et al. analyzed data from 50 species of birds and bats spanning three orders of magnitude in body size (~12 grams to more than 11 kilograms), using 17 years of high-resolution GPS and acceleration sensor measurements from 850 animals, which was supplemented by radar observations of smaller species. The global biologging dataset allowed the authors to analyze how often animals flapped their wings versus soaring or gliding during sustained flights and compare the energetic costs of flights across species and environmental conditions.

 

The findings show that the energetic cost of flight in the wild largely depends on how animals interact with the atmosphere. Soaring birds, particularly larger species, can dramatically reduce their energy use by exploiting rising air currents and other atmospheric streams. This, in some cases, reduced flight costs to levels comparable to swimming or even resting. In contrast, frequent flapping species generally have flight costs closer to laboratory predictions and experience greater variation depending on wind conditions. According to the authors, the findings challenge the traditional view that flight has a predictable energetic cost based primarily on body size and biomechanics. Instead, Scacco et al. argue that atmospheric conditions are a fundamental part of flying animals’ energetic landscape and should be incorporated into models of animal movement, migration, and responses to environmental change. “The findings of Scacco et al. encourage researchers to further develop device-tracking technologies and conduct detailed wind-tunnel measurements of the metabolic costs of different flight modes,” writes Anders Hedenström in a related Perspective.

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Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aee6550

Article Title

Airflows redefine the cost of aerial transport in the wild

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2026

 

Not all early birds evolved toward better flight, Jurassic fossil suggests

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

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Photograph of the fossil skeleton of the new Jurassic bird, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, from China.

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Credit: Image by Min Wang.

For early birds, evolution wasn’t always about becoming better flyers. This conclusion is supported by the recent discovery of a remarkably well-preserved, 150-million-year-old bird fossil from Fujian Province, China, which is challenging long-held assumptions about early bird evolution.

A study published in Nature discusses the newly discovered species, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, which lived during the Late Jurassic period (150–148 million years ago). The research suggests that the evolution of the avian body plan was not a straightforward progression toward improved flight capabilities, but a complex process involving the exploration of different ecological niches, including some that did not require flight.

Discovered in the recently recognized Zhenghe Fauna of southeastern China by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Fujian Institute of Geological Sciences, the crow-sized fossil represents the earliest known example of flight loss in the evolutionary history of birds.

Yuezhuornis challenges the traditional view that the avian body plan evolved almost exclusively under selective pressures associated with flight. Instead, it exhibits a striking mosaic of primitive and derived features, combining characteristic avian traits with features inherited from earlier dinosaur ancestors.

The fossil preserves closely packed, serrated teeth, which are typically found in deinonychosaurs but not birds. Most notably, Yuezhuornis possessed a hyperextensible second toe with a sickle-shaped claw, a characteristic feature of deinonychosaurs, including dromaeosaurids and troodontids.

“When we examined Yuezhuornis, we were struck by its extraordinary mix of features,” said Dr. WANG Min, corresponding author of the study. “It possesses bird-like pelvic and hindlimb structures yet retains the specialized predatory foot and teeth of a small meat-eating dinosaur. It shows us that early bird evolution was far more complicated than we previously realized.”

To determine where this enigmatic species fits on the evolutionary tree, the research team conducted comprehensive phylogenetic analyses using both maximum parsimony and Bayesian tip-dating methods.

“The results consistently placed Yuezhuornis firmly within Avialae (the group containing modern birds and their closest extinct relatives), just crownward of Archaeopteryx and as a sister taxon to Zhengheornis,” said Dr. ZHOU Zhonghe, a co-author of the study.

Given its unique anatomy, the team investigated the ecological niche of Yuezhuornis using ecomorphometric and multivariate statistical analyses. The analyses revealed that the limb proportions of Yuezhuornis were similar to those of living terrestrial birds and some non-avialan paravians, suggesting a terrestrial, flightless lifestyle and shedding new light on the ecological diversification of early-diverging avialans.

The discovery of a flightless, ground-dwelling bird from the Late Jurassic challenges the notion that aerodynamic selection was the dominant force shaping early avialan evolution. Instead, it suggests that some early birds followed evolutionary paths that did not favor flight, highlighting the remarkable ecological and morphological diversity that emerged during the early evolution of birds.

The ongoing discovery of early avialans also highlights the potential of the Zhenghe Fauna to shed light on a poorly documented stage of Jurassic bird evolution.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10972-z 

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Eco-morphometric disparity of Yuezhuornis and other Jurassic paravians. 

Evolutionary tree showing the position of Yuezhuornis as one of the earliest branching of birds. The right panes show the fore limb evolution across dinosaur-bird transition.

Credit

Image by Min Wang.