As if the human suffering caused by Europe’s new anti-refugee fences was not enough, casualties are now being reported among animals – some of which are already endangered.

The hastily built barriers along national borders are designed to keep out refugees fleeing from war-torn Syria and elsewhere. Yet they also keep the wildlife out of its natural habitats.

The most widely reported victims so far are deer that died after becoming tangled in barbed-wire barriers along Croatia’s borders with neighbouring Slovenia and Hungary.

“Many of the reports have come and from hunting clubs, whose members have noticed deer becoming tangled and dying in agony that can last for days, until someone comes along and finds them,” says , a zoologist at Karlovac University of Applied Sciences in Croatia.

But although have stirred emotion and sympathy, the impacts on migrating or roaming animals of suddenly losing their usual territory could ultimately be more devastating.

Lynx effect

“For big populations such as roe and red deer, the problem is not so much in numbers but the suffering,” says , a researcher at the University of Zagreb. In contrast, she says, “for small, endangered populations, each individual is priceless”.

Sindičić has studied the genetic diversity of the remaining Dinaric lynx populations shared between Slovenia and Croatia, where numbers have dwindled to between 60 and 70.

“Lynx use habitats in both countries and cross the border daily to search for food and partners to mate,” she says. “The population is primarily endangered through inbreeding, so mating and producing fertile offspring is already a challenge for this population, and this fence will make it even harder as it will stop animals from migrating freely across the border.”

Slovenia began erecting the barbed-wire barrier – now 140 kilometres long – along the border with Croatia a few weeks ago near Dobova, a town on a refugee route. The fence now follows the border along the river Kupa through a region called Gorski Kotar in Croatia. This is one of the richest habitats for wildlife on both sides of the border, according to Sindičić.

Slijepčević says that the barrier is obstructing an annual migration of roe and red deer from high summer to low winter altitudes. It’s possible, he says, that the deer might become stuck in snow if they can’t make it to their usual lowlands.

These animals are in turn tracked by large predators, including lynx and wolves. Although the predators are less likely to get caught, they may get snagged if they try to scavenge deer from the wire.

Bear with me

Bears, too, could suffer if their territories suddenly contract because of the fences, warns of the University of Zagreb, who has monitored the movement of about 50 bears through radio-tagging.

“A single bear can have a territory of as much as 1000 square kilometres,” he says. “They make big seasonal movements, showing up at different times in different areas.”

For example, he says, since late June this year, the same bear crossed the border into Slovenia and back three times. His tagging also revealed that more than half the bears he studied frequent habitat on both sides of the border.

In all, Huber estimates that there are probably 3000 bears in a tract of Europe that runs from Croatia in the north through the Balkans to Greece. “It’s all connected,” he says.

But the entire habitat is now being fragmented by fences between Macedonia and Greece, and Bulgaria and Greece, as well as those around Hungary and in Slovenia and Croatia.

The same fragmentation could be affecting four large wolf packs shared between Slovenia and Croatia, says Huber. “Now they’re partitioned, with half their range suddenly out of reach,” he says. “Gene flow will become much more of a problem.”

Schengen for carnivores

Huber and others are drafting a letter to the European Commission, pointing out the damaging impacts of the fences on nature. They will argue that the fences violate the , which requires open conservation corridors for the transboundary movement of animals, and a 2008 agreement called , which contains guidelines for the transboundary management of large carnivores.

But what can be done in the meantime?

Slijepčević says there are media reports that people have been creating gaps in the fences for animals to get through. “But if animals come to the wire, they won’t find the passageways easily,” he says.

Huber agrees, adding that people will find ways to get through anyway. “People can get through the fence easily, using wire cutters or boards laid across the wire, but animals can’t,” he says.

Huber and Slijepčević agree that the only solution that would work for the animals would be to remove the fences altogether.

Read more: “Where the wild things are: Big beasts return to Europe”

Image credit: STR/AFP/Getty

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(Image: Juliet Brodie/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum)

Just like soap bubbles, some seaweed can produce extraordinary colours. On a bright, sunny day, the tips of this can become an other-worldly blue.

Now from the Natural History Museum in London and her team have figured out how this Irish moss, Chondrus crispus, does it.

By taking detailed images of the plant under a microscope, they found that the outer coating of the tips of the fronds consists of several transparent layers. When submerged in water, these reflect blue light, giving the moss its shine (see photo below, left). Nearer the base of the frond, the protective “skin” is thicker, so it loses its iridescence, as shown on the right.

(Image: Chandler et al. (2015))

The role, if it even has one, of the seaweed’s lustre is still a mystery. It may be that it deters would-be seaweed munchers, when fresh and hydrated, by displaying an uncharacteristic blue colour. Or it could act as a sunscreen by reducing the absorption of UV radiation from the sun. When growing underwater, the extremities of the seaweed are most vulnerable. “The tips of fronds grow towards the surface so they are more vulnerable to UV light and grazing,” says Brodie.

The world’s only iridescent mammal, a blind mole that lives underground, is thought to have accidentally evolved its shine, although it helps repel water from its hairs.

A rare iridescent fossil beetle uncovered a few years ago had retained its shimmer for 49 million years.

Journal reference:

Video: How a bizarre ancient worm used to walk

It’s easier to be bamboozled by a worm than you might think. This enigmatic 508-million-year-old worm-like creature has been tricking scientists since the 1970s. Reconstructions of what it would have looked like had it upside down, on its side and even back to front.

Now of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues think they finally have the correct description of this creature, which lived during the Cambrian explosion when most major animal groups first emerge in the fossil record.

Hallucigenia was a worm-like marine animal with legs, spikes and a head that is difficult to distinguish from its tail. It is only a few centimetres long, and its body is as thin as a pin.

The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould how Simon Conway Morris, the palaeontologist who coined the name Hallucigenia, chose it because the creature reminded him of something he’d once seen on a trip – “and I don’t mean to Boston”.

Wacky interpretations

“Early studies did not realise that parts of the body were buried, and parts of the fossil were not actually part of the animal – leading to the somewhat wacky early interpretations,” says Smith.

Now, his team has used electron microscopy to describe the creature in unprecedented detail.

As thin as a pin and as prickly as one too (Image: Martin R. Smith)

What was once thought to be its head is in fact just a dark stain that could have been gut contents that oozed out as the animal was flattened in a submarine landslide. So they dug away the sediment around the other side of the animal to reveal its head.

There, they found a pair of simple eyes, which sat above a mouth with a ring of teeth. Its throat was also lined with needle-shaped teeth, which are thought to have worked like a ratchet, keeping food from slipping out each time it took another “suck” at its food.

The findings could help us understand the evolution of moulting animals, a diverse group that includes arthropods, velvet worms and water bears. The teeth resemble those from many other early moulting animals, suggesting that a tooth-lined throat was present in a common ancestor, the team says.

Smith thinks that we now have the final and correct view of what Hallucigenia really looked like. “But with a creature so bizarre and full of surprises, you never know what else it might have up its sleeve.”

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature14573

(Image: Jaeyoun Kim/Iowa State University)

Good news if you want to hold an insect rodeo. The robotic tentacle pictured above can handle tiny, fragile objects – capturing an ant without harming it.

The soft robot, developed by from Iowa State University and colleagues, can curl itself into a circle with a radius of just 200 micrometres. This is thanks to its microtube structure, fabricated from a kind of polymer called an elastomer. Existing robots inspired by animal tentacles are larger, since it can be tricky to reproduce the spiralling motion at a small scale. The smallest designs are currently centimetre-sized.

(Image: Jaeyoun Kim/Iowa State University)

The tentacle was also able to grasp the egg of a fish called a capelin, shown above. These often deform and burst when handled by tweezers.

Such miniature soft robots could be useful for microsurgery. The lassoing motion and low force exerted by the tentacle could be an advantage in endovascular operations, for example, where the target for surgery is reached through blood vessels.

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(Image: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC BY SA)

Cute as a button and about as small as one too. The mini-frog pictured above is roughly a centimetre long. It is one of seven species recently discovered in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, which are some of the world’s tiniest frogs.

Discovered by from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil and colleagues, their bright colour may be warning predators of their poisonous skin, which contains a potent neurotoxin. But getting eaten could be the least of their worries.

Restricted to mountaintop cloud forests, where their habitat is shrinking due to climate change, they could be at risk of extinction.

(Image: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro, CC BY SA)

These Brachycephalus frogs are among the smallest terrestrial vertebrates, joining the ranks of little frogs from other parts of the world. At 7.7 millimetres long, a species from Papua New Guinea claims the title of world’s smallest vertebrate. A slightly larger frog from the Seychelles, measuring 11 millimetres long, has a head too tiny to contain full ears so it hears through its mouth instead.

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(Image: Peter Vršanský)

This exotic, praying-mantis-like cockroach that lived at the same time as dinosaurs was caught in amber about 100 million years ago. It is part of a new family of extinct predatory cockroaches that hunted at night.

from the Geological Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Günter Bechly from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, who examined the insect, say its long neck, which allows the head to rotate freely, and unusually long legs, suggest that it actively pursued prey. The fossilised insect, called Manipulator modificaputis, was discovered at a mine in Noije Bum, Myanmar.

During the early Cretaceous period when it lived, several predatory cockroach-like lineages evolved. Only one group survives today: the praying mantises, which have similar front legs to the fossil, and are closely related to cockroaches.

The specimen is one of dozens of preserved insects found in the area, making it the most important site of dinosaur-age amber in the world, says Vršanský. Many large pieces of amber contained complete adult insects, which should help reconstruct the history of the animals and their ecosystem.

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(Image: Philipp Gunz, Simon Neubauer & Fred Spoor)

Meet the digital handy man. This is a reconstruction of the skull of one of the first known members of the human genus, Homo habilis, which means “handy man”, from about 1.8 million years ago.

The original fossil from Tanzania, which was first reported in 1964, is incomplete, consisting of just a few distorted fragments, coloured in the image above. But now a computer reconstruction has realigned the distorted fragments and filled in the missing parts, making it possible to compare the skull with other fossils from what was a critical time for early human evolution.

Three different Homo species existed between 2.1 and 1.6 million years ago: Homo erectus and Homo rudolfensis, as well as H. habilis.

The skull reconstruction caused a stir this week because it implied that these three hominids might have had older evolutionary roots than we thought.

It looks more primitive than much older remains from what was, until just this week, thought to be oldest bit of Homo we had – a fossil from Ethiopia from 2.3 million years ago called AL 666-1.

This means AL 666-1’s owner couldn’t have been an ancestor of H. habilis, and any joint ancestor must have been from much earlier.

The digitally reconstructed skull above shows the handy man shared some features with H. erectus, but in other ways resembled Australopithecus afarensis (the infamous “Lucy”), which lived some 3.2 million years ago.

Convenient find

This idea is backed up by another study published this week. It presented evidence of an even older Homo fossil – now the oldest known fossil from our genus. Dated to 2.8 million years ago, it was found in 2013 at the Ledi-Geraru site in Ethiopia and brings us the closest yet to our genus’s split from the more ape-like Australopithecus.

“By digitally exploring what H. habilis really looked like, we could infer the nature of its ancestor, but no such fossils were known,” says Fred Spoor from University College London, lead author of the reconstruction study, published in the journal Nature. “Now the Ledi-Geraru has turned up as if ‘on request’, suggesting a plausible evolutionary link between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis.”

Journal references: ;

(Images: Merlin Tuttle/Science Source)

BATS roost in big groups in caves. Wrong! If you’re a Hardwicke’s woolly bat, you prefer to sleep in a more luxurious – and private – place.

Kerivoula hardwickii roosts inside tropical pitcher plants. These carnivorous plants usually attract insects, but Nepenthes hemsleyana lacks the scents that others have, so few bugs are lured in. Instead, it benefits from the faeces of this tiny bat, which provides more than a third of its nitrogen and may be crucial to the plant’s survival.

“This is the only bat species that has ever been found roosting in pitchers,” says Caroline Regina Schöner, whose team discovered the bats in 2009. “These bats managed to find a niche that no one else is occupying.”

To take these images, Merlin Tuttle waded through tropical forest peat swamps on Borneo. Once he had found an occupied plant, he would spend a few hours taming a bat before snapping it from his portable studio, which provided protection from heavy rains. “It only takes a small fraction of a second for a bat to either enter or emerge, so capturing the action at just the right moment is a real challenge,” says Tuttle.

Within a few days, the bats had learned to bump against his nose when they wanted him to give them some mealworms. “We were quite amazed at the intelligence of such tiny animals,” Tuttle says. “Contrary to common misconceptions, bats in general are gentle, highly intelligent and trainable.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Home, sweet plant”

(Image: Tim Calver/)

A SMALL school of grunts is unfazed by the photographer as they swim over this tiny coral oasis off Florida’s coast. But this is no ordinary reef: it has been made by biologists trying to farm corals to transplant onto damaged reefs. Many species are in need – staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis), the kind pictured, has experienced a 98 per cent decline over the past 30 years, leaving it scattered and facing local extinction.

“The images show two approaches to the same problem: getting coral fragments to grow into healthy coral pieces,” says Tim Calver, the wildlife photographer who shot these images off the coast of Key Largo, at the very top of the Florida Keys. The coral is clipped from healthy stock then glued to cement blocks or tied to vertical strings, where it is elevated into the current, its nutrient source. It is left to grow for a few months until it’s big enough to be transplanted.

This nursery is run by the Coral Restoration Foundation, whose president, Ken Nedimyer, can be seen below inspecting the growth of baby corals. The organisation has replanted thousands of colonies – most of which have survived. “To be in the water and to know it’s a success story is just fantastic,” says Calver.

This article appeared in print under the headline “School’s out on the reef”

Emerging threats to humanity will be on the agenda when the world’s political and business leaders meet in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

The 45th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum aims to find solutions for global risks – including environmental challenges and those posed by new technologies.

“The risks of the last 10 years were all about economy. Those in the next 10 will be about societal and environmental issues,” said Axel P. Lehmann of Zurich Insurance, at the launch last week of a that polled the opinions of 900 experts, including researchers, politicians and business leaders.

“Past warnings of potential environmental catastrophes have begun to be borne out,” the report concludes, criticising failures to adapt to climate change and tackle the growing demand for limited freshwater resources.

Water crisis

The demand for fresh water is so large and unsustainable that wide-scale shortages are expected. The report ranked this impending water crisis as the most dangerous risk facing our civilisation, followed by fast-spreading pandemics.

The meeting begins in Davos tomorrow, just days after we learned that 2014 was globally . Failure to adapt to climate change came fifth on the WEF report’s list of risks ranked by their potential impact on humankind.

As well as assessing impact, the report also estimates the likelihood of these risks becoming a reality. It ranks extreme weather events as second only to international conflicts, with natural catastrophes, not acting on climate change and water crises all featuring in the top 10.

Environmental risks to civilisation have risen in the forum’s assessment this year, said of the WEF at the launch. And thanks to a rise in conflicts and distrust among states, the international community will be less able to deal with global health and environment issues, as it expends more energy on squabbling, said , also of the WEF.

Tech as threat

New technologies, such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, carry largely unknown – but potentially huge – risks, according to the report. Synthetic biology commands tremendous and rising interest from both academia and industry, said John Drzik of Marsh, a risk advice company, but could be risky due to “error and terror”. The field is likely to grow dramatically but lacks oversight, he said.

According to Drzik, we face similar hazards from nanotech too. “Risks are not fully understood, yet already we have 180 products on the shelves,” Drzik said. Emerging technologies carry a higher risk because the pace of innovation is faster, and governments have not caught up with that, he added. “Bodies that exist haven’t done sufficient amount to regulate these risks.”