Common approaches for assessing business impact on biodiversity are powerful, but often insufficient for strategy design

University of Oxford

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

A University of Oxford study has determined that the widely used tools available to businesses for assessing their biodiversity impacts depend on broad assumptions and can have large uncertainties that are poorly understood or communicated. If used appropriately, they can be powerful tools to help guide effective action to address biodiversity loss – but if not, they can lead to misguided effort and can be insufficient for robust biodiversity strategy design.

Businesses across a range of industries and sectors are under growing pressure to develop biodiversity strategies that not only minimise their negative impacts but also enhance their positive contributions to nature. As businesses start on their nature positive journey, a range of tools and approaches have emerged to help them assess risks and impacts on biodiversity. Among the leading approaches increasingly recommended for assessing organisational impacts on nature are Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs). These approaches offer a powerful means to track environmental impacts across all business activities and stages of product’s life cycles, capturing many of the pressures driving the loss of biodiversity from land-use change to eutrophication. The results provide businesses with data on their environmental impacts which can inform decision-making and measure progress year-on-year.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Nature Positive Hub and The Biodiversity Consultancy has investigated the assumptions made by these tools, and outlined the opportunities and risks associated with their use in biodiversity strategy design.

LCAs are one of the only methods accessible for assessing broad life cycle impacts by gathering data on company activities and estimating the environmental pressures exerted by all the inputs and outputs to a company’s activities. The methods are therefore now being used to estimate “biodiversity footprints”, a term used to refer to estimates of organisational biodiversity impacts. However, LCA-based methods and associated models were not originally developed for biodiversity footprinting and have recognised limitations in capturing the complexities of biodiversity.

In addition, despite their ease of use, LCAs carry significant uncertainties. These arise from the structure of the models—such as which biodiversity threats are included—the quality and completeness of the underlying data, and the way results are presented. As a result, these uncertainties can influence user decision making, potentially resulting in misleading conclusions.

Dr Thomas White (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), co-lead of the study, says: “Whilst recognised by those very familiar with LCAs, these uncertainties are often overlooked or poorly communicated to users. LCAs can be very powerful tools for understanding impacts on biodiversity, but without careful navigation, these uncertainties can lead to misinformed decisions, misallocated resources, and ineffective biodiversity strategies. In the paper we suggest ways that researchers and practitioners can help reveal, reduce, and appropriately navigate these uncertainties to improve LCA use.”

While LCAs are powerful tools for assessing biodiversity impacts across life cycle stages and biodiversity pressures, they must be used in conjunction with conservation science best practices and direct biodiversity monitoring to develop effective and actionable biodiversity strategies.

Dr Talitha Bromwich (Department of Biology, University of Oxford), the other co-lead of the study, says: “The tools can be very useful so long as an understanding of the risks posed by these uncertainties exists. Businesses should be able to weigh them against the costs of inappropriate action or inaction, and ensure decisions are robust to these uncertainties. If this is done well, then we can still design effective biodiversity strategies that utilise these tools to their greatest potential.”

The researchers have suggested several recommendations to embed these tools within business strategy design. These include:

• Risk screening & tracking progress: LCAs are most effective for high-level risk screening, prioritising action, and tracking biodiversity impact reduction over time.
• Complemented by other approaches: Once high-impact areas are identified, LCAs should be paired with more specific approaches to provide robust impact estimates and guide effective, location-specific recommendations from conservation science.
• Cautious use & complementary metrics: LCA impact values should be interpreted carefully due to uncertainties and lack of specificity. Targets should combine LCA and non-LCA metrics, focusing on direct biodiversity measurements, pressure reductions, and clear conservation actions. Care should be taken when using absolute estimates of biodiversity impact from LCA’s in strategy design.

Notes to editors

Interviews with Thomas White & Talitha Bromwich are available on request: thomas.white@biology.ox.ac.uk; talitha.bromwich@biology.ox.ac.uk.

The paper ‘Navigating uncertainty in LCA-based approaches to biodiversity footprinting’ will be published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution at 05:01 AM GMT / 01:01 AM ET on Monday 10 March at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/2041-210X.70001

About the University of Oxford

Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the ninth year running, and ​number 3 in the QS World Rankings 2024. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.

Oxford is world-famous for research and teaching excellence and home to some of the most talented people from across the globe. Our work helps the lives of millions, solving real-world problems through a huge network of partnerships and collaborations. The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of our research alongside our personalised approach to teaching sparks imaginative and inventive insights and solutions.

Through its research commercialisation arm, Oxford University Innovation, Oxford is the highest university patent filer in the UK and is ranked first in the UK for university spinouts, having created more than 300 new companies since 1988. Over a third of these companies have been created in the past five years. The university is a catalyst for prosperity in Oxfordshire and the United Kingdom, contributing £15.7 billion to the UK economy in 2018/19, and supports more than 28,000 full time jobs.

The Department of Biology is a University of Oxford department within the Maths, Physical, and Life Sciences Division. It utilises academic strength in a broad range of bioscience disciplines to tackle global challenges such as food security, biodiversity loss, climate change and global pandemics. It also helps to train and equip the biologists of the future through holistic undergraduate and graduate courses. For more information visit www.biology.ox.ac.uk.

About The Biodiversity Consultancy

The Biodiversity Consultancy exists to bridge the worlds of business and biodiversity. Our work aims to accelerate organisations’ journeys towards nature positive futures. The Biodiversity Consultancy was born of a very clear premise: in the future, all businesses will need to think, operate and act with respect to nature and biodiversity.

Since our founding, science and innovation have been at the core of our approach, ensuring that the businesses we work with, and the standards we help set, are taking robust action that benefits nature.  Being leaders in the underlying science of biodiversity, we continue to actively engage in scientific research - collaborating with research organisations to develop practical and robust solutions that improve business engagement with nature.

Our initiatives help businesses align with performance and international lender standards, manage risks and take effective action to mitigate their impacts. The Biodiversity Consultancy have played leading roles in developing best practice standards and frameworks. We are also an active member of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) Forum and the Science-Based Targets Network Corporate Engagement Program, and partner with industry associations such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, IUCN, and UNEP-FI.

For more information visit www.thebiodiversityconsultancy.com.

---

Journal

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.1111/2041-210x.70001 

Article Title

Navigating uncertainty in LCA-based approaches to biodiversity footprinting

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

 

Facebook is constantly experimenting on consumers — and even its creators don’t fully know how it works

University of British Columbia - Sauder School of Business

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

Users of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok might think they’re simply interacting with friends, family and followers, and seeing ads as they go. But according to research from the UBC Sauder School of Business, they’re part of constant marketing experiments that are often impossible, even for the companies behind them, to fully comprehend.

For the study, the researchers examined all known published, peer-reviewed studies of the use of A/B testing by Facebook and Google — that is, when different consumers are shown different ads to determine which are most effective — and uncovered significant flaws.

UBC Sauder Associate Professors and study co-authors Dr. Yann Cornil and Dr. David Hardisty say that at any given moment, billions of social media users are being tested to see what they click on, and most importantly for marketers, what they buy. From that, one would think advertisers could tell which messages are effective and which aren’t — but it turns out it isn’t nearly that simple.

By using Facebook’s A/B test tool, researchers can access a massive audience and observe real behaviour — and because the participants are unaware they’re part of an experiment, their responses are considered more genuine and reliable.

The problem is that highly complex algorithms decide which consumers will be shown different content and ads; and as a result it’s impossible for anyone — even those who created the algorithms — to fully understand why specific consumers have been targeted by an ad, and to determine why some of them decided to click on the ad. According to Dr. Cornil, it comes down to a lack of something called “random assignment” — for example, when experimenters randomly present two different ads to selected groups.

“You can’t say that whatever changes you made in your ad are causing an increase in click behaviour, because within each ad there's going to be an algorithm that will select the participants most likely to click on it. If the algorithms are different, it means that there's no real random assignment,” he says. “It also means we cannot say for sure that an ad generated a higher click-through rate because creatively it's a better ad. It might be because it's associated with a better algorithm.”

What’s more, people are often shown ads based on their search history, but if they have already decided on a particular product, and then the algorithm shows them an ad for it, researchers might wrongly conclude the ad led them to buy it.

“It will choose people not just on observable things like age or gender or location that we can easily know, but on unobservable things like past behaviour, interests, and even things that Facebook itself cannot quantify, because they’re determined by machine learning and AI,” says Dr. Hardisty. The targeted groups might seem similar in some ways, he adds, but the algorithm may have chosen them for completely different reasons.

“It's basically a complicated model that has somehow figured out that some type of person — we don't know what type — is more likely to click. So even if we asked people at Facebook, ‘Why was this group of people selected?’ they wouldn’t know the answer.”

So why does this matter? For one, many marketers rely on Facebook A/B testing to determine what to advertise and how; but perhaps even more importantly, different segments of the public can be excluded from important information, which can reinforce divides.

“There's one paper that explains why women are not targeted by ads for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education purely because of algorithms,” says Dr. Cornil. “Women are more expensive to target on social media, and those algorithms are going to try to generate as many clicks as possible at the lowest cost. So if women are too costly to target for the purpose of STEM education, they are not targets.”

What’s more, the algorithms then reinforce what’s working and what isn’t, so if women aren’t clicking on particular ads, they will be even less exposed to them.

While the UBC study — titled On the Persistent Mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B Tests: How to Conduct and Report Online Platform Studies — focuses on Facebook and Google, the researchers say that all of the major social media platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, employ similar practices.

They are also ubiquitous. At a conference a Facebook employee once told Dr. Hardisty that at any given time, every Facebook user is an unwitting participant in an average of 10 different experiments. With the advent of AI-generated content and ads, that number is almost certainly on the rise.

As a result, Dr. Hardisty and Dr. Cornil — who co-authored the study with Dr. Johannes Boegershausen of Erasmus University and Dr. Shangwen Yi of Hong Kong Polytechnic University — warn that marketers should beware of reading too much into the results of Facebook A/B testing.

“If you have an ad that’s going crazy and getting a lot more clicks, it may just be that Facebook successfully identified a small, particular group of people that really like it,” says Dr. Hardisty. “And if you change your whole product line or campaign to match that, it might actually be alienating to most people. So you have to be very careful not to draw broader lessons from one Facebook study.”

In fact, the algorithms are so complex and precise, adds Dr. Cornil, social media platforms can “micro-target” people right down to the individual level. “It's selecting the best possible ads for a specific segment — and the segment isn’t even a group of people. With all the data we have about consumers, the segment is one,” he says. “And it all happens in a black box. The advertiser doesn't know, but the machine knows. AI knows.”

---

Journal

International Journal of Research in Marketing

DOI

10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.12.004 

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

On the persistent mischaracterization of Google and Facebook A/B tests: How to conduct and report online platform studies

 

Growing consumption of the American eel may lead to it being critically endangered like its European counterpart

A study by a Yale-NUS research team finds the endangered American eel being sold in Singapore as ‘eel’or ‘unagi’ – findings call for more attention to monitor the eel trade

Yale-NUS College

Facebook

XLinkedIn
MessageWhatsAppEmail

High demand for eel combined with decline in stock have resulted in soaring prices for this food item, which in many cultures, is considered a delicacy. This has fuelled a concern globally as the prized food item is now being illegally traded from Europe to Asia.

Current research has focused on the critically endangered Anguilla anguilla, commonly known as the European eel. While its export outside the European Union is tightly regulated, large quantities of A. anguilla juveniles continue to be smuggled out of the EU to Asia where they are grown in eel farms until reaching a marketable size.

To investigate the prevalence and consumption of endangered eels – particularly the European eel – a Yale-NUS College research team examined 327 individual eel products purchased across 86 retailers throughout Singapore. However, instead of prevalence of the European eel, the team identified 70% of another species in the sample – Anguilla rostrata, commonly known as the American eel. While not critically endangered like the European eel, the American eel is also considered an endangered species. The findings suggested a possible shift in trade and consumption of eel to the American eel.

Given these findings, the research team called for specific attention to the American eel, with increased enforcement and monitoring needed as proactive steps necessary to avoid the same dramatic population declines that have been documented in other eel species like the European eel.

The paper was a result of Yale-NUS alumnus Joshua Choo (Class of 2024)’s Environment Studies capstone, which he did under the supervision of Yale-NUS Assistant Professor of Science (Marine Biology) Benjamin Wainwright. The paper was published in Conservation Science and Practice. In July 2024, Joshua presented the research at the 2024 International Eel Science Symposium in Liverpool, UK.

Joshua said, “It was sad to connect Singaporean unagi with the history of anguillid eel exploitation – where a crash in one anguillid’s stock repeatedly leads to another’s overexploitation and crash. It was, however, heartening to see so many researchers and Indigenous groups invested in anguillid recovery in Liverpool – from Japan to Aotearoa to the EU and UK. There’s room for Southeast Asian perspectives in eel science – it’s important to protect tropical anguillids from the endangerment plaguing their temperate cousins, and to explore conservation solutions for our food that can bypass profit-driven overexploitation.”

Joshua and the research team performed DNA barcoding of the samples of eel meat, sold as ‘eel’ or ‘unagi’ by supermarkets, restaurants, and wholesalers. Their findings found three pieces of the critically endangered European eel (which is banned from export outside the EU), and that 217 of the 257 products he tested were the endangered, though not internationally regulated, American eel.

“The mislabelling of seafood products is a significant global problem that contributes to ongoing biodiversity losses in the oceans. This deliberate mislabelling can have negative consequences for the health of human consumers and presents numerous opportunities for organised crime to prosper. The trade in eels is described as the greatest wildlife crime on Earth, it supports vast criminal networks that illegally traffic many hundreds of millions of glass eels (juvenile eels) to Asia each year,” said Asst Prof Wainwright.

He further explained, “What we show with this work is a likely shift in trade, this shift could be the consequence of EU enforced rules and regulations making it harder to smuggle the European eel to Asia, consequently suppliers have now shifted their focus to the less regulated American eel. If the American eel is to avoid a similar fate to that suffered by the European eels, it will be important to closely monitor the American eel trade and introduce rules and regulations designed to prevent overexploitation.” 

---

Journal

Conservation Science and Practice

DOI

10.1111/csp2.70013 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

A shift in the trade? An investigation of the eel trade reveals a likely species switch

 

Research shows humans have a long way to go in understanding a dog’s emotions

Arizona State University

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

video: 

New research from Arizona State University shows that people use contextual visual clues to determine a dog’s emotions, as exemplified in this short video, rather than focusing on the dog itself. 

view more 

Credit: Arizona State University

Tempe, Ariz., March 10, 2025 – Life with a dog is a matter of give and take. Especially when it comes to communication. With no common human-dog language, our ability to communicate relies on understanding and reading our pet, and vice versa. That process can seem seamless. You give your dog a treat, you look into her eyes and she says “I am delighted to have that cookie.” With a slight wag of her tail, she accepts the treat and romps off to another room to enjoy it. You feel connected to your dog.

 

At least, that’s what you think. 

 

New research from Arizona State University has revealed that people often do not perceive the true meaning of their pet’s emotions and can misread their dog. The reasons for this are many and include a human misunderstanding of dog expressions due to a bias towards projecting human emotions onto our pets. 

 

In a new paper, “Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,” ASU researchers Holly Molinaro and Clive Wynne outline a pair of experiments they ran to show how humans misperceive dog emotions. Their research shows that humans typically do not have a good understanding of the emotional state of their dog because they judge the dog’s emotions according to the context of the event they witness.

 

“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception off of that,” said Molinaro, an ASU Ph.D. student in psychology and animal welfare scientist.

 

“Our dogs are trying to communicate with us, but we humans seem determined to look at everything except the poor pooch himself.” added Wynne, an ASU psychology professor who studies dog behavior and the human-dog bond.

 

Adding to the misunderstanding is a human projection of their feelings onto the dog. This “anthropomorphizing” of the interaction further clouds truly understanding what your dog’s emotional state actually may be, what she is trying to tell you.

 

In two experiments, Molinaro and Wynne investigated human perception of dog emotions. They video recorded a dog in what they believed were positive (happy-making) or negative (less happy) situations. 

 

The happy situations were things like offering the leash or a treat, and the unhappy scenarios included gentle chastisement, or bringing out the dreaded vacuum cleaner. Then, in one experiment they showed ordinary members of the public these videos with and without their visual background. In the second experiment they edited the videos so the dog who had been filmed in a happy context looked like he had been recorded in an unhappy situation, and the dog who had been filmed in an unhappy situation looked like he was in a happy one. In both experiments, people rated how happy and excited they thought the dogs were. Sample size for the first experiment was 383 and for the second experiment was 485.

 

What the researchers found was that people’s perception of the dog’s mood was based on everything in the videos besides the dog himself. 

 

“People do not look at what the dog is doing, instead, they look at the situation surrounding the dog and base their emotional perception on that,” Molinaro said. “You see a dog getting a treat, you assume he must be feeling good. You see a dog getting yelled at, you assume he’s feeling bad. These assumptions of how you think the dog is feeling have nothing to do with the dog’s behavior or emotional cues, which is very striking.”

 

“In our study, when people saw a video of a dog apparently reacting to a vacuum cleaner, everyone said the dog was feeling bad and agitated,” she continued. “But when they saw a video of the dog doing the exact same thing, but this time appearing to react to seeing his leash, everyone reported that the dog was feeling happy and calm. People were not judging a dog’s emotions based on the dog’s behavior, but on the situation the dog was in.”

 

Further complicating the communication process is people’s projection of their emotions onto the dog. Molinaro explained that while humans and dogs have shared a bond over the centuries, that doesn’t mean their emotional processing, or even emotional expressions, are the same. 

 

“I have always found this idea that dogs and humans must have the same emotions to be very biased and without any real scientific proof to back it up, so I wanted to see if there are factors that might actually be affecting our perception of dog emotions,” Molinaro said. “If there were, if we as humans focused on other aspects not relating to the dog to deduce their emotional state, then as both scientists and pet owners, we really have to go back to the drawing board.”

 

Molinaro explained that even in studies of human perception of human emotions it is clear that there is more to reading emotion than just looking at a person’s face. Culture, mood, situational context, even a previous facial expression can influence how people perceive emotions. Yet when it comes to animal emotions, no one has yet studied if those same factors affect us in the same way. 

 

“Our research here shows that for one of those factors, the situational context, it does.”

 

So how does a good dog owner cut through the biases and misreadings to understand their pets true emotional state?

 

“The first step is just to be aware that we are not that good at reading dogs’ emotions,” she said. “We need to be humbler in our understanding of our dogs. Once we can start from a basis of understanding our biases, we can begin to look at our pups in a new light.”

 

“Every dog’s personality, and thus her emotional expressions, are unique to that dog,” Molinaro explains. “Really pay attention to your own dog’s cues and behaviors.” 

 

“When you yell at your dog for doing something bad and she makes that guilty face, is it really because she is guilty, or is it because she is scared you are going to reprimand her more? Taking an extra second or two to focus on your dog’s behaviors, knowing that you need to overcome a bias to view the situation around the dog rather than the dog himself, can go a long way in getting a true read on your own dog’s emotional state, leading to a stronger bond between the two of you.”

 

Molinaro and Wynne’s research is published in the journal Anthrozoos.

 

###

 

---

Journal

Anthrozoös

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Barking up the wrong tree: Human perceptions of dog emotions is influenced by extraneous factors,

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025

Discovery: The great whale pee funnel

Whales move nutrients thousands of miles—in their urine—from as far as Alaska to Hawaii, supporting health of tropical ecosystems and fish

University of Vermont

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

video: 

Footage by Lars Bejder shows a humpback whale urinating underway near Hawaii.

view more 

Credit: Lars Bejder, NOAA permit 21476

Whales are not just big, they’re a big deal for healthy oceans. When they poop, whales move tons of nutrients from deep water to the surface. Now new research shows that whales also move tons of nutrients thousands of miles—in their urine.

In 2010, scientists revealed that whales, feeding at depth and pooping at the surface, provide a critical resource for plankton growth and ocean productivity. Today, a new University of Vermont-led study shows that whales also carry huge quantities of nutrients horizontally, across whole ocean basins, from rich, cold waters where they feed to warm shores near the equator where they mate and give birth. Much of this is in the form of urine—though sloughed skin, carcasses, calf feces, and placentas also contribute.

“These coastal areas often have clear waters, a sign of low nitrogen, and many have coral reef ecosystems,” says Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont, who co-led the new research. “The movement of nitrogen and other nutrients can be important to the growth of phytoplankton, or microscopic algae, and provide food for sharks and other fish and many invertebrates.”

The study, published March 10 in the journal Nature Communications, calculates that in oceans across the globe, great whales—including right whales, gray whales, and humpbacks—transport about 4000 tons of nitrogen each year to low-nutrient coastal areas in the tropics and subtropics. They also bring more than 45,000 tons of biomass. And before the era of human whaling decimated populations, these long-distance inputs may have been three or more times larger.

A giant conveyor belt

For example, thousands of humpback whales travel from a vast area where they feed in the Gulf of Alaska to a more restricted area in Hawaii, where they breed. There, in the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary, the input of nutrients—tons of pee, skin, dead bodies and poop—from whales roughly double what is transported by local physical forces, the team of scientists estimate.

“We call it the ‘great whale conveyor belt,”” Roman says, “or it can also be thought of as a funnel because whales feed over large areas, but they need to be in a relatively confined space to find a mate, breed, and give birth. At first, the calves don't have the energy to travel long distances like the moms can.” Plus, the whales probably stay in shallow, sandy waters because it muffles their sounds. “Moms and newborns are calling all the time, staying in communication,” says Roman, a conservation researcher in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and fellow in UVM's Gund Institute for Environment “and they don’t want predators, like killer whales, or breeding humpback males, to pick up on that.”

Which means that nutrients spread out over the vast ocean get concentrated in much smaller coastal and coral ecosystems, “like collecting leaves to make compost for your garden,” Roman says.

In the summer, adult whales feed at high latitudes (like Alaska, Iceland, and Antarctica), putting on tons of fat, chowing down on krill and herring. According to recent research, North Pacific humpback whales gain about 30 pounds per day in the spring, summer, and fall. They need this energy for an amazing journey: baleen whales migrate thousands of miles to their winter breeding grounds in the tropics—without eating. For example, gray whales travel nearly 7000 miles between feeding grounds off Russia and breeding areas along Baja California. And humpback whales in the Southern Hemisphere migrate more than 5000 miles from foraging areas near Antarctica to mating sites off Costa Rica, where they burn off about 200 pounds each day, while urinating vast amounts of nitrogen-rich urea. (One study in Iceland suggests that fin whales produce more than 250 gallons of urine per day when they are feeding. Humans pee less than half a gallon daily.)

Whales undertake the longest migration of any mammal in the world. And whales are gigantic. “Because of their size, whales are able to do things that no other animal does. They're living life on a different scale,” says Andrew Pershing, one of ten co-authors on the new study and an oceanographer at the nonprofit organization, Climate Central. “Nutrients are coming in from outside—and not from a river, but by these migrating animals. It’s super-cool, and changes how we think about ecosystems in the ocean. We don't think of animals other than humans having an impact on a planetary scale, but the whales really do.” 

Out of the blues

Before industrial whaling began in the nineteenth century, the nutrient inputs would have “been much bigger and this effect would've been much bigger,” says Pershing. Plus, the nutrient inputs of blue whales—the largest animals to ever live on the Earth—are not known and were not included in the primary calculations of the new study.  In the Southern Ocean, blue whale populations are still greatly reduced after intense hunting in the twentieth century. “There's basic things that we don't know about them, like where their breeding areas are,’’ said Pershing, “so that's an effect that's harder for us to capture.” Both blue whales and humpbacks were depleted from hunting, but some humpback and other whale populations are rebounding after several decades of concerted conservation efforts.

“Lots of people think of plants as the lungs of the planet, taking in carbon dioxide, and expelling oxygen,” says Joe Roman, “For their part, animals play an important role in moving nutrients. Seabirds transport nitrogen and phosphorus from the ocean to the land in their poop, increasing the density of plants on islands. Animals form the circulatory system of the planet—and whales are the extreme example.”

Many whales travel thousands of miles from their summer foraging areas to winter grounds for breeding and calving. Nitrogen and other elements can be released in the form of urine, carcasses, placentas, sloughing skin, and feces (primarily from nursing calves). Humpback whales of the Central North Pacific, shown here, primarily feed off the coast of Alaska and spend winters in the shallow waters of the Hawaiian archipelago. (Illustration by A. Boersma; text adapted from original study in Nature Communications).

Credit

Illustration by A. Boersma

---

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-025-56123-2 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Migrating baleen whales transport high- latitude nutrients to tropical and subtropical ecosystems

Article Publication Date

10-Mar-2025