Current models of global climate change predict warmer temperatures will increase the rate that bacteria and other microbes decompose soil organic matter, a scenario that pumps even more heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. But a new study shows that while the rate of decomposition increases for a brief period in response to warmer temperatures, elevated levels of decomposition don’t persist.

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A “living fossil” tree species is helping a researcher understand how tropical forests responded to past climate change and how they may react to global warming in the future.

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Mammals are limited by the availability of salt, and now researchers have shown that ants are too. In experiments in North, Central and South American, researchers have shown that plant-eating and omnivorous ants living more than 60 miles inland are more interested in salt than sugar, with the preference greater the farther they live from the coast. Carnivorous ants show no such preference.

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Streams that once sang with the croaks, chirps and ribbits of dozens of frog species have gone silent. They’re victims of a fungus that’s decimating amphibian populations worldwide. Such catastrophic declines have been documented for more than a decade, but until recently scientists knew little about how the loss of frogs alters the larger ecosystem. A new study has found that tadpoles play a key role keeping the algae at the base of the food chain productive.

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Politics have played a critical role in the increase of the cod stock in the Baltic Sea, but environmental conditions are equally important. Only the synergies from these two factors have resulted in a stock increase that exceeds the sums of both factors. The study is highly relevant for the management decision on Baltic cod, which will be taken by the Council of Ministers on October 27th 2008.

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