Scientists with disabilities face many barriers and challenges related to accessibility during their careers. We can all do more to help make science more accessible — and this is especially true for journals.

Climate breakdown and unprecedented biodiversity loss put humanity at grave risk, and threaten human lives, livelihoods and well-being globally. Ecologists have been instrumental in revealing and detailing some of the mechanisms that drive biodiversity decline, and regularly call for immediate action1. In response to this, a sense of emergency has entered public discourse, and is heightened with each

Correction to: Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02667-x, published online 8 April 2025.

Several animals have evolved venom glands that produce toxins for use in predation and defence. Writing in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Zancolli and colleagues used a comparative transcriptomics approach to investigate the genetic mechanisms that underlie the evolution of venom glands in marine carnivorous snails. The digestive system of this clade is characterized by mid-oesophageal glands that

Mammalian herbivores, drought and invertebrate ecosystem engineers are among the main drivers of vegetation dynamics in grasslands and savannas. Although their individual effects are relatively well understood, and some studies have probed their pairwise interactions, it is unclear how all three might combine in real-world conditions. Writing in Journal of Ecology, Wells et al. address this gap using

Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) was named as a new species in 1998. It is one of three extant long-beaked echidna species and one of only five extant species of monotreme. But the description was based on a holotype collected in the Cyclops Mountains of New Guinea in 1961, and there has been no scientific documentation of the species since that time. However, Indigenous

Eduardo Eizirik works to understand a cat complex.

The Ruaha-Rungwa landscape of southern Tanzania contains one of the world’s largest populations of lions, as well as leopards, hyenas and other carnivores. Many local people also graze their livestock in the area, and predation on livestock by wildlife causes livelihood losses and conflicts that can undermine conservation efforts. Over recent years, some households have started to contain livestock

Ecologists investigate a vast range of questions, scales and organisms, which makes their methods correspondingly varied. Each approach has value, and we should celebrate the variety of this scientific field.

Correction to: Nature Ecology & Evolution https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02683-x, published online 22 April 2025.

DisabledInSTEM is a platform that offers support, mentorship opportunities and shared resources for persons who are navigating science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields with disabilities. We talked to Alyssa Paparella, a PhD candidate at the Baylor College of Medicine, Howard Hughes Medical Institute 2023 Gilliam Fellow, and founder of DisabledInSTEM, about her background and experiences

Cave-dwelling bat species rely on echolocation to perceive their environment, but also experience high levels of acoustic interference from conspecific calls when flying at the same time (especially when emerging from the cave). Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Goldshtein et al. explore how greater mouse-tailed bats (Rhinopoma microphyllum) cope with acoustic sensory

Long-term selective breeding of crops can result in reduced genetic diversity and high sensitivity to pathogenic diseases. The de novo domestication of the wild relatives of such crops can facilitate the identification and breeding of disease-resistant variants, but this requires knowledge of the evolutionary origins of crop cultivars and specific metabolites or genomic regions that confer disease