I found this ladybug in my garden and wanted to know if anyone knows about it. I noticed its gold color and that the color faded when it was in the shade and the color slowly came back when it was under the light. I wanted to know if anyone has seen it and if it is a rare species.

What’s In This Issue

• Letter from the Editor
• Urban Parks Are Refuges For Bees | Carlos Hernández-Castellano
• Plastic, Soil, and Biodiversity | María Fernández-Maquieira
• Nature Photo of the Month | Bernd Dittrich
• Notes From A Radical Ecologist: A Letter to Brief Ecology | Guilherme E. Meyer
• Eco Fiction Review: Concentric Macroscope | Ben Lockwood
• More from Brief Ecology in April

La réserve marine de Banyuls veut grandir : “Un modèle à suivre pour protéger la Méditerranée”

Use mosquito buzz to identify host-seeking species that transmit malaria to humans. Call for participation:
BioDCASE 2026 Cross-Domain Mosquito Species Classification Challenge

Jointly organised by teams at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, and the University of Surrey, this challenge focuses on a key real-world question:

Can mosquito species classifiers still work when recordings come from new locations, devices, and acoustic environments?

Mosquito-borne diseases affect over 1 billion people each year. Audio-based monitoring could help scale surveillance, but domain shift remains a major barrier to real-world deployment.

To support transparent and reproducible research, we are releasing:

• an open development dataset with 271,380 clips and 60.66 hours of audio;
• a fully public, lightweight baseline that is easy to run;
• a benchmark focused on cross-domain generalisation in mosquito bioacoustics.

Participants are warmly invited to join and help develop more robust methods for mosquito monitoring under real recording conditions.

Useful Links:

• Challenge Website: [https://biodcase.github.io/challenge2026/task5]
• Baseline code: [https://github.com/Yuanbo2020/CD-MSC]
• Dataset: [https://zenodo.org/records/19095788]

Key Dates:
• April 1, 2026: Challenge opening
• Jun 1, 2026: Evaluation set release
• June 15, 2026: Challenge submission deadline

Feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested!

Apologies for cross-posting.

Hi! I'm a high school student and I started an initiative (Fauna Ark), working to spread awareness + utilize policy to reduce collisions. We're currently working with the UC Davis Road Ecology Center for mentorship (in addition to research help) and have worked with the Texas DPS to add wildlife signage information to the drivers handbook (the most recent version can be found here)!

I realized I wasn't on the social media side of things, however, and you can follow for more updates on our (newly created) Instagram account (@faunaarkfoundation).

I also wanted to reach out in case there are other students interested in helping out (in which case there'll be volunteer and leadership opportunities soon posted)!

I found this interview with Craig Bennett, CEO of Wildlife Trusts really enlightening: https://youtu.be/DNjj5jTknxQ

I like his central argument, that politicians keep getting it wrong on what the public actually wants in regards to environmental policy, what does everyone else think?

Nature : Autour de l’ours dans les Pyrénées, génétique et polémique

Hi! I’m a computer science and engineering student doing a hackathon soon, and I’d really love feedback on an idea. A hackathon for those of you who don't know is basically a competition in which you have a very limited time period to come up with a technical solution to a specific problem.

The challenge is:

My problem with the challenge

I have zero experience on biodiversity but love to get some! After doing some research my main concerns are:

1. Biodiversity is incredibly hard to measure
Unlike stocks, biodiversity is complex, local, and made up of many interacting parts. It feels hard to reduce it to one number in a meaningful way.

2. Even if we could measure it, would people care?
A stock price matters because people immediately feel the consequence: they gain or lose money. Biodiversity loss, as well as climate change, often feels distant and abstract to regular people, even if the consequences are huge in the long run.

The idea I’m considering

Instead of trying to measure biodiversity directly like a stock price, I’m thinking about building a platform that shows:

how the things humans care about are dependent on healthy ecosystems and biodiversity

For example:

• food
• clean water
• medicine
• pets and wildlife
• travel and nature experiences
• beautiful landscapes
• materials and products we use in everyday life

So the idea would be to make visible the origin of the things we value, and show what ecosystems and biodiversity they depend on.

Core thought

Maybe the strongest way to make biodiversity measurable is not to force it into a single ecological score, but to measure it through human dependence, attachment, and risk.

In other words:

• what in our lives depends on biodiversity?
• what becomes weaker, poorer, riskier, or disappears when ecosystems decline?
• would that make people care more than just showing “biodiversity index: 62 → 58”?

What I’d love feedback on

• Does this sound like a good direction, or does it miss the point of biodiversity?
• Are there any projects or organizations doing this?
• Your thoughts!

I’d really appreciate any thoughts, criticism, or ideas. Feel free to DM me also but keeping it in the comments allows for everyone to participate!

i have no clue where to ask this at i just felt this was the best subreddit to do so. i by no means believe this, i actually find it quite hard to believe. i just stumbled apon a comment on scoopz that said:

“There are not wild animals roaming around in China.😂 It all ends up in a pot.😂 Seriously it’s so weird to be in woods and not a bird around.”

how true/untrue is that?