Ecology

A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer Jenny Uglow Faber & Faber (2025)The first person to identify harvest mice (Micromys minutus), Gilbert White was an eighteenth-century English curate and naturalist who has been called the ‘father of ecology’. Yet records from his student days show that he was not so much a quiet country gentleman as a lad about town, losing money at cards and buying fancy waistcoats. In her grandly illustrated book A Year with Gilbert White, historian Jenny Uglow looks between these extremes to investigate who White really was.She depicts a self-taught biologist who not only enjoyed wining and dining, but also took natural history out of stuffy dissecting rooms and into the wild. Spurning the dry descriptions of wildlife commonly used at the time, White’s only book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789), brought colourful character to its scientific records of plants and animals. In doing so, it transformed the art of nature writing.Swarming bees and greedy sheepBorn in 1720, White was educated at the University of Oxford, UK, before settling at The Wakes — his family home in Selborne, UK — in around 1757. Then, from 1768, he worked for 25 years on his Naturalist’s Journal, a columnar diary in which each page covered a week of observations on fruit and vegetable experiments, local creatures and weather conditions.White’s daily entries in Selborne were often haiku-like in their simplicity. He described “vast rocklike, distant clouds” or simply stated “Bees swarm much. Sheep are shorn.”Gilbert White added entries to his Naturalist’s Journal every day for 25 years. Credit: Culture Club/Getty Uglow’s book examines one year of journal entries, from 1781. She chose this year for two reasons: it was the mid-point in White’s writing of his book, and a year after Timothy the tortoise arrived, a pet inherited by White that was later found to be female. Timothy often featured in the journal entries, being suspected of amorous longings whenever it wandered off.Uglow compares White’s year in nature with personal sightings at her own home in the Lake District, UK. In January, centuries and miles apart, White logs the chatter of nuthatches (Sitta spp.) while Uglow searches for eelworms (nematodes). Originally, Uglow thought of toadflax (Linaria spp.) as a weed, but White’s delight in its loveliness makes her reconsider. They share a gardener’s irritation with field mice. They each find beauty in autumnal beeches (Fagus spp.). Tulips in both of their gardens are destroyed — White’s by rain, Uglow’s by greedy sheep about whom she jibes, “They have left the daffodils, in disdain”.Should we treat rivers as living things?Selborne was not a safe haven for animals, it was a working community. For low-paid labourers, it was a case of human rights over nature’s rites. Birds were routinely shot if they were harmful to crops or livestock. “The air crackles with fear and rage,” writes Uglow, as she relays White’s account of a farmer and his hens tormenting a captured hawk to death.Uglow also traces the publication of White’s book from its germination to its blossoming. It has remained in print since 1789 and came about when White realized the literary potential of the letters he’d written to fellow naturalists Daines Barrington and Thomas Pennant. For publication, he revised these old letters and added entries from his journals to give an intricate view of Selborne’s natural world. The work inspired a youthful Charles Darwin, who went on a pilgrimage to Selborne in 1857.But perhaps White’s greatest legacy lies in the chronicling of avian sights and sounds. He kept lists of which birds sang until midsummer and which all year round. Detecting the nocturnal stone-curlew’s cry, he surmised that night-time fliers sent noisy signals to keep their flocks together after dark. Birdsong so obsessed White that he identified three different species of leaf warbler (the chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita), wood warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) and willow warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus)) by their tunes.Birds from Gilbert White’s journals feature in a stained-glass window in a Selborne church.Credit: RDImages/Epics/Getty

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Mary Hagedorn, who studies cryopreservation of corals, wants to put a biobank on the Moon.Credit: Marco GarciaWorking scientist profilesThis article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests.Mary Hagedorn has spent decades studying coral reproduction as part of an effort to save reefs from being destroyed by rapidly warming oceans. To collect precious fragments of new coral life, she must carefully synchronize her activities to the Moon’s phases.Corals breed at or near a full moon, releasing a blizzard of sperm and eggs into shimmering waters, but the unpredictability of which full moon corals choose makes fieldwork a gamble. On one trip “we dove for 60 nights straight” before capturing the magic moment, Hagedorn says.The patience and persistence required to collect coral sperm, cryopreserve it, transport it to the laboratory for rearing coral larvae and then releasing them into the ocean could serve her well for another planned mission: a literal moonshot to preserve threatened organisms.Working Scientist career profilesHagedorn, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Kāne‘ohe, Hawaii, is part of an interdisciplinary team proposing to build a frozen repository in a permanently shadowed polar area on the far side of the Moon. Initially, the effort would focus on cryopreserving a veritable Noah’s ark of Earth’s animal life. It would start by banking tissue samples from endangered and threatened animals, as well as from priority species. These would include pollinators and ecosystem engineers such as beavers, that, through dam-building, create whole systems of aquatic environments for other organisms. Hagedorn and ten collaborators published the lunar biorepository idea in 2024 in the journal BioScience as a backup plan for biodiversity — a way to introduce life back to Earth, or to other planets, in the event of catastrophic loss (M. Hagedorn et al. BioScience 74, 561–566; 2024).She likens the planned repository to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway, which stores seeds of genetic importance for food, agriculture and biodiversity in a rocky cavern deep under an icy mountain held at −18 °C. It’s an ambitious idea that faces many challenges, including a political climate in which science in the United States and beyond is being undermined and underfunded, especially when related to the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, the lunar biorepository idea is gaining traction and being given serious consideration.“We wanted something that could act like Svalbard,” but there’s no place on Earth that is naturally cold enough, says Hagedorn. Even Svalbard needs refrigeration to keep its samples frozen. In 2016, extraordinarily warm winter temperatures sent a flood of melt water into the vault’s entrance. It was a wake-up call for a facility thought to be a fail-safe because it is surrounded by permafrost.Thinking big, and extraterrestrially, Hagedorn reasoned that the lunar south pole is spared the vagaries of climate and temperature (see ‘Quick-fire Q&A’). Being stored under the Moon’s surface, also protects the samples from another damaging factor: radiation. Another advantage is the Moon’s lack (so far) of war, violence, natural disasters, overpopulation and resource depletion. Samples could be stored and retrieved using robots similar to the Mars rovers.Addressing criticism that retrieving samples could be challenging, Hagedorn responds that, barring an apocalypse, “we will be travelling into space regularly in the future”.Quick-fire Q&AIf you could do a site visit for a biorepository on the Moon, would you go?In a heartbeat. I would love to go into space. I actually applied to be an astronaut with NASA, but my eyesight was not good enough.Every author on our 2024 BioScience paper proposing the biorepository is like me — they’re frustrated astronauts, sci-fi buffs or both.How did your biorepository team come together?Around 2015, I was giving a talk in London about biorepositories in general. I said, “you know, one of the best places we could probably have a biorepository is on the Moon”.Then, I brought this concept up at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, and the response of my colleagues there was, “this is really stupid — don’t do this”. So I didn’t pursue it, for about four years. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, I had some time, and I decided to get a group together, meeting on Zoom. It just grew from there.What is the biggest challenge to getting this project off the ground?Money. This project is going to cover so many different areas, from space engineering to ethics, and there are going to be a lot of scientific changes and breakthroughs.It’s all new territory; I think that is going to be very exciting. We just have to be patient and try to get some small grants to keep us going. There will be a way.Composite image of the lunar south pole.Credit: Stocktrek Images/GettyLocation, location, locationOne favoured site for a lunar bio-repository lies in a crater some 6 kilometres deep, “way deeper than the Grand Canyon” in Arizona, Hagedorn says. In this permanently shadowed space, the temperature is stable — at or below −196 °C.Protecting Earth’s life must be a top priority in the rush to stake out lunar sites for industry and research, argue Hagedorn and her co-authors, whose expertise encompasses cryobiology, medicine, engineering, atmospheric research, coral and fish biology, and law and policy. They issued an open call for others to collaborate on this ambitious, decades-long programme.The process would start by banking skin samples that contain fibroblast cells. Those fibroblasts are isolated from a cell-culture process, and then cryopreserved. They can later be thawed and transformed into sperm and egg cells from the specific species. Eventually, whole organisms could be reintroduced into their natural habitat.A sit in the sauna can save endangered frogsAs proof of concept, the team will test one species on the International Space Station. The researchers plan to cryopreserve pelvic fins from a coral-reef dwelling fish aptly named the starry goby (Asterropteryx semipunctata), and test them in space for sensitivity to radiation and microgravity. They will also refine the optimal storage materials for cryopreserved cells and study how frozen storage in space affects DNA and the ability to derive and culture cells from thawed fin samples.Once the team works out the kinks for starry gobies, it wants to expand to other species. There are plans to collaborate with continental-scale sampling already being undertaken by entities such as the National Ecological Observatory Network, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and collects 100,000 biological samples annually from freshwater and terrestrial habitats.Cryobiology, corals and lunar missions were not always Hagedorn’s focus. After earning a PhD in marine biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, in 1983, Hagedorn next studied the physiology of electric fishes and a cichlid fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) as a postdoctoral fellow. That research abruptly ended after a boating accident in the Peruvian Amazon claimed the lives of two colleagues. Hagedorn could not bring herself to go back, but realized she wanted to work on the impacts of warming oceans, which led her to bleached and dying coral — the ocean’s canary in the coal mine.An article by Canadian molecular physiologist Ken Storey, on the ability of tree frogs to freeze solid in winter and thaw again in spring (K. B. Storey and J. M. Storey Sci. Am. 263, 92–97; 1990), sparked the idea of using cryobiology for ocean conservation work. “Nothing had been done at the time with cryo-preservation of corals,” says Hagedorn. She received a mid-career fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC in 1996 to start work on fish-embryo cryopreservation. In 2004, she transferred her lab group to Hawaii, expanding the scope of her work to include developing techniques for coral cryopreservation.The lunar biobank could start with tissue samples from corals and other endangered species.Credit: Andrew Heyward, AIMSMehmet Toner, a biomedical engineer at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has known Hagedorn for more than 30 years, says: “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world who knows coral biology and cryobiology like her.”Toner, Hagedorn and their colleagues are funded by the NSF as part of the ATP-Bio programme, which brings together partners from industry, academia, the non-profit sector and government to investigate how to cryo-preserve and store samples ranging from cells to whole organisms.Toner’s cryobiology research includes work to understand how to freeze and thaw cells without damaging them. “When I learned about the southern lunar pole being in cryogenic temperatures, it sparked my interest,” says Toner, a co-author of the lunar biorepository proposal.Moonstruck collaboratorsThe cryobiology involved in preserving life across a spectrum of biodiversity is extremely complex, he explains. “You’re taking a living thing to −196 °C and bringing it back” to the temperature of its habitat, alive. “I call that a miracle.” At the same time, he notes that cryobiology techniques have advanced significantly in the past 20–30 years. “It’s much more predictable and doable now,” he says.Toner notes that their team is not the only one vying for lunar real estate. “That part of the Moon is becoming very popular,” with scientists also proposing polar craters as sites for mines, telescopes and temporary human habitation. Indeed, NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to land humans on the Moon again, is encouraging the exploration of lunar resources.John Bischof, a bioengineer at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the director of ATP-Bio, notes Hagedorn’s talent for identifying scientists to join their team. “She’ll bring you into the collaboration, show you exactly where you can make the contribution, and explain why it’s so important. So, even before you do anything, you’re just so pumped up,” he says, describing her as enthusiastic and empathetic. “It’s fun to be around somebody like Mary,” says Bischof, describing her as “untethered in a good way”.This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting startedClaire Lager, Hagedorn’s lab manager since 2016, and once her graduate student, notes that “somebody who wants to put things on the Moon has to be optimistic, enthusiastic and very, very charismatic”, and that Hagedorn ticks all the boxes.

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RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
19 August 2025

Rat-sized carnivore called the ampurta makes speedy comeback despite unprecedented drought. More

In April, the United States opened up one million square kilometres of the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. Before then, for a decade, the region had been a marine protected area — in which all fishing was prohibited. Courts reclosed the area this August as part of an ongoing legal battle. Other protected areas, including the Papahānaumokuākea, Rose Atoll and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts marine national monuments, are under review (see go.nature.com/44Zambm).
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

Safe and snug: frogs kept warm in brick ‘saunas’ are able to ward off a deadly fungal infection.Credit: Anthony WaddleWorking scientist profilesThis article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests.On warm, muggy evenings, conservation biologist Anthony Waddle and his students, along with local frog enthusiasts, venture into the wild and wet suburbs of Sydney, Australia, head torches on, searching for green and golden bell frogs (Litoria aurea). Then they frogmarch the captured amphibians into a small greenhouse made from nothing more than a stack of masonry bricks for a “luxury treatment” sauna — which might ultimately save their lives, he explains.For many, the idea of a ‘frog sauna’ might sound bizarre. But when Waddle’s team published a study (A. W. Waddle et al. Nature 631, 344–349; 2024) showing that a simple sit in a warm enclosure could treat the deadly chytrid fungal infection plaguing the green and golden bell frog, it made waves — and resulted in him winning the 2025 Future for Nature award. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, he’s collaborating with partners, training local communities and helping Australia to save its declining population of these glossy green-and-golden-streaked frogs that fit in your palm and croak with a muffled, motorcycle-like revving sound.Chytrid fungus infections are a huge threat to the global frog population and have contributed to declines in more than 500 frog species and the extinction of more than 90 others.The good news is that infections can be cleared easily in some frogs under the right conditions, because the fungus is sensitive to heat. “Around 28 °C is enough to really limit chytrid growth,” Waddle says. And the sauna treatment can pay off really fast: a few hours a day for a week or less is all that’s needed. Saving one female frog can markedly change the trajectory of a population, because a single adult can produce thousands of offspring in one season.Waddle stacks bricks inside a mini greenhouse, where they function as saunas for frogs.Credit: Saeed Khan/AFP via GettyHow the treatment came about was serendipitous. In 2013, researchers studying tree frogs in Queensland, Australia, noticed a pattern: in areas where chytrid fungus had spread, frog populations survived near large granite boulders and crevices, but disappeared from shaded, forested areas. The researchers hypothesized that the boulders acted as natural refuges that absorbed heat during the day and slowly released it at night. The process created warmer microhabitats that protected the frogs from the fungus.However, not all habitats had these heating boulders. So Waddle and his colleagues wanted to finally “test this idea that people had been hemming and hawing about forever”, but that no one had tested by experiment.Trying a new approach meant there was no standard blueprint. Waddle and his team had to test and adjust various sauna designs as they went. Their simple set-up consists of a small garden-greenhouse frame wrapped with translucent plastic and placed over a stack of masonry bricks, each with a series of openings for frog entry and exit. Their experiments found that the frogs readily find and enter saunas on their own.So far, the researchers have placed about 70 frog saunas in three sites in greater Sydney and plan to use three more sites there in the next Southern Hemisphere winter, in 2026. They have also created how-to guides, educational videos and workshops to teach community members how to build the saunas (see ‘Quick-fire Q&A’). Several greenhouse suppliers have even listed the set-up on their websites as useful for creating frog saunas, as well as for growing plants.Quick-fire Q&AAnthony Waddle with an amphibian friend.Credit: Saeed Khan/AFP via GettyHow do you capture the frogs for the treatment?Capturing frogs is the fun part. You just go out at night with head torches and pick them up. We capture them by hand and bring them into a temperature- and environment-controlled facility. We either give them antifungal baths or increase their temperature for treatment, and then eventually release them. My students and I like capturing frogs the most, but it’s also the start of a lot of work, because the frogs are usually quite ill and need close attention.What has been the main challenge of this project?It’s mostly been about getting people on board with solution-driven research. I’ve worked on chytrid fungal infections for nearly 12 years — starting with an undergraduate project, then a master’s on chytrid and vaccines, a PhD focused on ‘vaccination’ in frog saunas, and now a postdoctoral position investigating synthetic-biology solutions for chytrid resistance.We’re in a position to make a big impact, even with a small team. But sometimes it’s been hard to get the exposure and support we need to grow and to secure major funding — especially when we don’t have the CVs of more-senior researchers to back us up.When someone develops a patent, or something for use during their PhD, it’s the responsibility of that person to make sure that the technology is used. So, I’m adopting an unconventional entrepreneurial spirit, doing citizen-science work, trying to secure partnerships with industry and going out to places where people don’t think to look for funding or support, to drive my research forwards. It’s been the secret to my success.What’s a surprising question that you are asked about your job?People often ask us to justify why we do our work or explain its broader benefit to society. I often retort with: “No one asks an accountant, or someone making money from money, what their greater purpose is.” Yet, someone like me working to conserve frogs is treated as if that’s not a real job. I’m not tired of justifying that what I do is important, because we are saving species from the face of extinction. But I do enjoy making people laugh with that joke, because it’s true.The saunas are a low-cost garden habitat for the endangered frogs that live throughout southeastern Australia. Waddle has worked with other frog conservationists, encouraging local people to use apps such as FrogID. This lets users make audio recordings of frog calls and upload them to an online database, togeher with GPS data. Experts then identify the frogs and notify the users.Jodi Rowley, a herpetologist at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney and lead scientist for FrogID, says that tens of thousands of people across Australia use the app, and have put more than 1.3 million frog records on the map. The app has contributed to the discovery of 13 frog species and is actively used by communities to monitor local frog populations. Now, regular FrogID users can get frog-sauna information and updates. “We are hoping that communities are using the app to record their local frogs and potentially determine whether the frogs do better after the installation of frog saunas,” Rowley adds.Beyond black and white: an ecologist applies racial-justice principles to predators and their ecosystems

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RESEARCH BRIEFINGS
13 August 2025

A humidity index has been developed that considers lateral flow along rivers and groundwater systems, as well as precipitation, potential evaporation and plant transpiration. It performs better than a conventional humidity index when describing water availability for ecosystems and societies in arid regions. More

“In this picture, I’m working with my four-legged companion, Yang Mei (Little Sheep) near a small village called Nanxi on the eastern coast of Taiwan. I’m an ecologist studying lowland evergreen subtropical forests. I’ve been conducting research here for the past three years and have known Yang Mei since she was a puppy.Not all forest areas are safe for her. In some places, local people have set traps for deer and wild pigs, so she has to stay behind, which she hates.My research is on secondary forest succession, for my doctorate at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I want to understand how forests grow back after agricultural abandonment. The plot I’m studying in this photo was once a citronella plantation (Cymbopogon nardus), then a rice paddy (Oryza sp.), then an orchard. For the past 16 years, it’s been regenerating back into forest.To select areas to survey, I use a compass to get a bearing, and measuring tapes to mark out a specific plot across the slope. When this photo was taken, besides Yang Mei, my team members were Chance, a volunteer from Utah, and Mr Lai, a local landowner. He’s extremely knowledgeable about local plants.

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Download the Nature Podcast 06 August 2025In this episode:00:45 Researchers develop a new glue and test it on a rubber duckAided by machine learning, researchers have developed a super-sticky compound that works as an underwater adhesive. Inspired by animals like barnacles, the team developed a new kind of a material called a hydrogel. The material is capable of securely fastening objects together even when immersed in salty water— a challenge for existing adhesives. To show off its properties the researchers applied it to a rubber duck, which stuck firmly to a rock on a beach despite being battered by waves.Research Article: Liao et al.News and Views: AI learns from nature to design super-adhesive gels that work underwater07:37 Research HighlightsThe tomato-infused origins of the modern potato — plus, a specific group of stem cells that may help to drive osteoarthritis.Research Highlight: Potato, tomato: the roots of the modern taterResearch Highlight: Ageing stem cells in the knees drive arthritis damage09:46 The diversity of microbes within living treesBy taking samples from more than 150 trees in a forest in the United States, researchers have revealed a previously unknown community of microorganisms living there. Although the microbiomes of animals have been well explored, studies looking at the microbes living inside trees are limited. In this work, the team shows distinct populations of microbes living within different parts of a tree, and huge diversity in populations between trees. The team behind the work hopes these findings will lead to a greater understanding of tree physiology and the role these microbes play in broader ecosystems.Research Article: Arnold et al.18:46 The ‘de-extinction’ debateBack in April, the company Colossal Biosciences claimed to have de-extincted dire wolves, a large-bodied wolf species that once roamed North America. We discuss the science behind this technology, and the debates within the research community surrounding Colossal’s announcement.News Feature: This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started.Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too. More