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Researchers ‘have no idea’ why red crabs off Panama might be behaving in such a way, says a biologist: ‘Nothing like this has ever been seen’

Descending in a submersible in waters off Panama, scientists noticed something strange happening near the seafloor. It was a drifting fog of sediment, disturbed by something below. Diving deeper, the scientists found the cause: crabs, thousands of them, swarming in a way never before recorded.

“We just saw this cloud but had no idea what was causing it,” said Jesús Pineda, a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the lead author of a paper on the crabs published on Tuesday.

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As cycling’s popularity has increased, there has been a cultural shift away from fun and experiences towards a macho world of speed and Strava

I came across an interesting film the other day. It was linked from Sidetracked, a beautiful, outdoors lifestyle-y type magazine. The kind you buy in a bookshop rather than a newsagent, full of long-form journalism and photo essays, not product reviews and top 10 lists.

The video was of one woman, Lael Wilcox, talking about her experience cycling the Arizona Trail. She was racing, trying to get the best time, but on her own in a self-supported attempt.

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Snake expert rejects suggestion that the 7.5m python might have killed itself

A python caught in Malaysia and first thought to be the longest snake in captivity has lost both its run at the title and its life.

Two people working for the department that trapped the animal said it was remeasured at 7.5 metres, just 17 centimetres short of first place.

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The public consultation period for both speices will be open until 27 May 2016.

If Jayden Burleigh, 22, did die as a result of the redback bite, it will be the first such fatality in more than 60 years thanks to the introduction of antivenom

A 22-year-old Australian has died after being bitten by a redback spider in what may turn out to be the first such death since the antivenom was introduced 60 years ago.

Jayden Burleigh, from Sydney’s northern beaches, was reportedly bitten while walking on the north coast of New South Wales last week.

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GREAT MOMENTS IN SCIENCE: Pi is a very long and a very important number, but how many decimal places of it do we really need to know? Dr Karl investigates.

Conservation Advices can be found in the relevant species and ecological communities profiles on the Species Profiles and Threats database.

Documentarian’s message rings especially loud for Australians, who have the privilege and duty to look after this natural wonder

“Do we really care so little about the Earth on which we live that we don’t wish to protect one of its greatest wonders from the consequences of our behaviour?”

Related: Greg Hunt rebuked by Attenborough film-maker after upbeat verdict on Great Barrier Reef

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There are now 3,890 animals roaming the forests of Asia but the increase may be down to improved survey methods

The number of tigers in the wild has risen for the first time in more than a century, with some 3,890 counted in the latest global census, according to wildlife conservation groups.

The tally marks a turnaround from the last worldwide estimate in 2010, when the number of tigers in the wild hit an all-time low of about 3,200, according to the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum.

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In 2006, Eli Reichman began photographing a ranching community in the fracking fields of western North Dakota. For the last decade, he has documented the cultural and social breakdown of an agricultural community being pressured to compromise in order to stay on land originally homesteaded by their ancestors in the early 1900s.

• To learn more about his work and upcoming documentary, Hinterlands, check out Reichman’s Kickstarter page
  

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Three decades after the nuclear disaster, the concrete protecting the reactor is starting to crack. Yet people still live there – and a new virtual reality project will take many more inside the ‘death zone’

At first they thought it was just a fire, then the chickens started to turn black. When it comes to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, everyone has a vivid detail that is snagged in the memory; the absurdities or the obscenities. It might be the local village that, once evacuated, was claimed by a mob of pigs. Or the way milk would turn to white powder whenever the residents of Pripyat (the town built a few hundred metres from the doomed power plant) would attempt to churn butter. Or the cat that refused to be stuffed into a suitcase by its owner, who couldn’t bear to abandon his pet during the mass exile, 36 hours after the explosion. Who can forget that 70 Belarusian villages had to be buried under the ground? Or that Soviet soldiers shot every dog, in case it wandered, toxically, into a neighbouring city? Or that many of those same men risked their lives hoisting flags on the roofs of buildings every few weeks, whenever the old ones were chewed to lace by the radioactive breeze?

For many, it is the story of a 23-year-old pregnant woman, married to one of the brave and reckless firemen who put out the blaze at reactor number four in the early morning of 26 April 1986. Doctors at the Moscow hospital to which he was transferred warned her not to hug her husband. She refused, tending to him even when the nurses would no longer enter the room where he lay, naked, under a sheet of thick plastic. Two months after he died, she visited the cemetery where he was buried in a matryoshka nest of coffins: one zinc and, within that, one wooden. She knelt at his grave and promptly went into labour. At her late husband’s suggestion, she named the baby Natashenka. Due to the radiation, Natashenka was born with cirrhosis of the liver and congenital heart disease. She died less than four hours later in a tragedy of appalling symmetry: a child both conceived and destroyed in her parents’ lingering embrace.

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‘Dramatic’ shift in polar motion attributed to effects of global warming and the impact humans are having on the planet

Global warming is changing the way the Earth wobbles on its polar axis, a new Nasa study has found.

Melting ice sheets, especially in Greenland, are changing the distribution of weight on Earth. And that has caused both the North Pole and the wobble, which is called polar motion, to change course, according to a study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances.

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SHIFTING POLES: Shifts in the spin axis of our planet are not only being driven by melting ice sheets but also changes in the relative amount of water stored on the continents, researchers have discovered.

With meat prices expected to soar, agricultural entrepreneurs believe invertebrate livestock can provide the protein we need. But will the mainstream ever be ready to eat mealworms?

It could be the tumbledown, moss-covered drystone walls marking the boundaries of land that has been farmed since the arrival of the Norse settlers. Or the gentle meanderings of the river Eden through the shadows of the Cumbrian fells. Or the proximity of the Settle-Carlisle railway line. All in all, Thringill Farm seems an unlikely setting for a 21st-century food revolution.

Yet just past the 17th-century farmhouse, an incongruous sound offers a clue of unusual goings-on. From behind the large wooden door of a heavily insulated room in the corner of an outbuilding comes the distinctive rhythmic chirping of crickets. The mating call, more usually heard in the Mediterranean than in the Pennines, reveals the location of the UK’s first edible-insect farm.

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Application on ecological sustainability - public comment open from 11 April 2016 until 13 May 2016

MISSING Y CHROMOSOME: The disappearance of the Neanderthal Y chromosome from modern humans may be due to genetic incompatibilities that led to miscarriages, suggests the first-ever analysis of the male Neanderthal sex chromosome.

The environment is the new battleground for human rights, and activists are getting caught in the crossfire – particularly in Honduras, where two were killed last month

Since her mother’s murder a month ago, Bertha Isabel Zuniga Cáceres has scarcely had time to grieve. The 25-year-old student is adamant that her mother, Berta Cáceres Flores, will not become just one more Honduran environmental activist whose work was cut short by their assassination.

“Development in Honduras cannot continue happen at the expense of indigenous peoples and human rights,” says Zuñiga Cáceres, who met today with members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Honduran officials in Washington DC to call for an independent investigation into her mother’s killing. She also requested greater protection for her family and members of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, the human rights group her mother co-founded.

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BIG SURPRISE: The discovery of a monster black hole 17 billion times more massive than the sun in a modestly-sized galaxy, raises suspicions supermassive black holes may be more common than originally thought.

HUMAN COLONISATION: The colonisation of South America by prehistoric people occurred in two distinct phases of population growth that resembled an invasive species, a study reveals

SUPERNOVAE SHOWERS: The Earth was bombarded by debris from a series of stellar explosions with the closest supernova occurring about 2.3 million years ago, two new studies indicate.