Good news, Mexican wolf numbers are increasing! To be clear, that’s Mexican wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. They were reintroduced in 1998 and are now at 241 wolves!
Unfortunately, not everything is good. There’s a worry that biophobia, the fear of nature, could lead to less conservation of wild spaces. With many people living in cities with few green spaces and opportunities to interact with wildlife, nature seems strange, scary and not worth preserving. This is something we need to guard against.
In my previous postdoc, I worked with Professor Don Cowan. There’s a nice article about him and his work in Antarctica, where he’s shown that there is far more microbial diversity than was initially suspected. A lot of his work has involved microbial life in extreme environments, see also when I accompanied him on a field trip to the Namib Desert.
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