ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

Blooms, or proliferations, of jellyfish can show a substantial, visible impact on coastal populations — clogged nets for fishermen, stinging waters for tourists, even choked cooling intake pipes for power plants — and recent media reports have created a perception that the world’s oceans are experiencing trending increases in jellyfish. Now, a new multinational collaborative study suggests these trends may be overstated, finding that there is no robust evidence for a global increase in jellyfish over the past two centuries.

In a new study, scientists report a rising threat to the whitebark pine forests of the northern Rocky Mountains as native mountain pine beetles climb ever higher, attacking trees that have not evolved strong defenses to stop them.