The short-eared dog is one of the Amazon’s least-known carnivores. In Bolivia, it’s also one of the hardest to find. The species has a fox-like snout, small rounded ears, partially webbed toes, and a long bushy tail that often drags on the forest floor. In Spanish, it’s sometimes called perro fantasma, or ghost dog, a name that reflects how rarely even field biologists encounter it. A long-running camera-trap study has now brought the species into sharper focus, reports Iván Paredes Tamayo. Over more than two decades, researchers recorded the short-eared dog in Bolivia’s lowland Amazonian forests, in piedmont forests near the Andes, and in large protected and Indigenous-managed landscapes. The results suggest the animal may be present in more places than earlier records showed. That is useful evidence, although it doesn’t make the species common. It remains scarce, elusive, and closely linked to well-preserved forest. For conservation groups, land managers, and funders, the findings suggest the short-eared dog depends on large, connected areas of habitat. Small forest fragments are unlikely to provide what it needs. Its presence can help identify places where forests are still functioning well, especially where protected areas and Indigenous territories keep intact habitat at scale. The finding also shows why long-term monitoring matters. Rare species are easy to miss in short surveys. A camera trap may sit for months without recording one. A study that runs across years, landscapes, and management types can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden. The short-eared dog will probably never…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Thomas Crowther begins his book with a snakebite that was not, in any conventional sense, dangerous. The danger came from interpretation. A misidentified species, a surge of fear, and a body that responded as if the threat were real: numbness spread, panic intensified, and the situation escalated until a second opinion dissolved it almost instantly. The episode is more than an anecdote. It sets the terms of Nature’s Echo, a book that treats cause and effect not as linear sequences so much as loops that can amplify themselves in either direction. Thomas Crowther That idea—feedback loops as the underlying architecture of the natural world—is the organizing principle of the book. Crowther traces it from cosmology to ecology to human psychology, moving across scales with considerable ambition. The early chapters move outward from the origin of matter, suggesting that the same reinforcing processes that allowed stars to form also underpin biological evolution and social behavior. It is an ambitious framing. At its best, it brings a sense of coherence to subjects that are often treated separately. At times, the scope of the framework requires readers to travel across very different domains and scales of thought. The structure reflects that expansiveness. The table of contents alone signals the range: from “Cause and Effect” and “Feedback Loops” through “Resilience and Tipping Points” and into “The Story We Tell Ourselves.” The progression is deliberate. Crowther starts with physical systems, moves into ecological stability, and then into the social and psychological domains where perception begins…This article was originally published on Mongabay