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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

The Zeckendorf brothers bought the Mayflower Hotel for around $400 million in 2004 and cleared its rent-controlled tenants one by one with buyouts starting at $650,000, until a single 350-square-foot apartment held out and ultimately cost them $17 million to empty.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 1, 2026

Flora and Fauna

In 1965, a bottlenose dolphin named Peter was taught to mimic English words in a flooded Caribbean house where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived waist-deep in seawater with him for 10 weeks, and the dolphin learned to blow air through his blowhole to shape recognisable versions of 'hello' and 'ball'.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 28, 2026

Climate Science

How does a rodent felling saplings across a headwater stream raise a valley's water table by a metre or more and store measurably more carbon in the wet sediment behind its dams than the trees it cut down?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 26, 2026

Flora and Fauna

When crews broke ground on a Mojave solar plant in California’s Ivanpah Valley, the permit allowed 38 adult desert tortoises to be moved — biologists then collected 166, and across the valley Fish and Wildlife would eventually release more than 9,100 into a fenced translocation site.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 24, 2026

Flora and Fauna

On Hutchinson Island, Florida, a nuclear plant's intake canal delivered 921 sea turtles to the screens in a single year — 557 of them green turtles — and crews put 97.7 per cent back in the Atlantic alive, as they have with more than 20,000 turtles since 1976.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 23, 2026

Flora and Fauna

In Ukraine's Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, camera traps found grey wolves living at seven times the density of those in uncontaminated reserves nearby — a predator boom in a landscape emptied of people after the reactor failed, not emptied of wildlife.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 23, 2026

Flora and Fauna

At Altamont Pass east of San Francisco, about 60 golden eagles are still killed each year by wind turbines standing on a ridge that is also home to more than 200 of the birds — including 21 pairs that keep nesting inside the wind farm itself.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 22, 2026

Flora and Fauna

South of Miami, a nuclear plant's 270 kilometres of cooling canals were never designed as habitat — yet they now hold the densest nesting ground for American crocodiles in the country, and last season crews tagged more than 600 hatchlings.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 22, 2026

Climate Science

In California's Mojave Desert, 350,000 heliostat mirrors focus sunlight onto three 45-storey towers that heat to nearly 540°C — and in the plant's first year biologists estimated about 3,500 birds died after flying into what looked, from the air, like a lake.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 22, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Yellowstone's returning wolves became famous for supposedly restoring forests and even reshaping rivers, but long-term research suggests the real ecological story is much more complicated

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 22, 2026

Climate Science

How does a desert country grow tomatoes, peppers, and dates on a fraction of the water its neighbours use, after a 1930s water engineer noticed a leaking pipe made a tree grow faster?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 21, 2026

Climate Science

A parasitic barnacle called Sacculina injects itself into a crab, grows a root system through its host's body, and chemically rewires the crab's brain to care for the parasite's eggs as if they were its own, even castrating male crabs so they behave like females tending a brood.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 16, 2026

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