New in Wildlife Science: No-Snow Winter in the Arctic

Scientists encounter a springlike Arctic February; pet dogs help detect the spotted lanternfly; why Nemo is shrinking

By Laura Tangley
Wildlife Science
Dec 17, 2025

A Snowless Arctic Winter?

In the depths of winter, the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, is known for its rugged terrain of frozen tundra and glaciers where iconic wildlife such as polar bears, Arctic foxes and reindeer (above) roam. But when scientists arrived to conduct fieldwork there in February 2025, they were shocked to encounter springlike temperatures and rain that had turned the landscape “into a melting ice rink” dotted by greenery and flowers, they report in a commentary published in Nature Communications. “Standing in pools of water at the snout of the glacier—or on bare, green tundra—was shocking and surreal,” recalls co-author James Bradley of Queen Mary University of London. “The thick snowpack covering the landscape vanished within days. The gear I packed felt like a relic from another climate.” His first-person observations back up data showing that Svalbard and other parts of the Arctic are warming at six to seven times the global average rate, with extreme warming events increasingly common. These events threaten everything from wildlife to remote Indigenous communities to the ability of scientists to collect data to study future changes. Says Bradley, “Climate policy must catch up to the reality that the Arctic is changing much faster than expected.”

An image of a dog finding lanternfly eggs.

An image of a lanternfly.

Four-Legged Fieldwork

First detected in Pennsylvania in 2014, the invasive spotted lanternfly (pictured) has moved rapidly across 19 states, posing a threat to orchards, vineyards and forests everywhere it becomes established. To slow the insect’s spread, detecting its egg masses before they hatch is critical. But because eggs appear as nothing more than tiny lichens or mud smears, finding the egg masses is extremely challenging. Now, in a paper published in the journal PeerJ, scientists from Virginia Tech report that dogs trained by everyday pet owners can sniff out hard-to-spot lanternfly egg masses (top) with up to 82 percent accuracy in experimental trials. With thousands of pet dogs living across the country—many already trained in scent detection by their owners as a hobby—the researchers say canine lanternfly hunters can be a powerful ally in the fight against this destructive invasive pest. “It’s about empowering people to work alongside their dogs to protect the places and communities they care about,” says lead author Sally Dickinson, who recently earned her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech.

An image of clown anemonefish in sea anemone.

Shrinking Nemo? Heat Stress Makes Shorter Fish

With oceans experiencing more frequent and extreme heat waves, will sea creatures be able to adapt? For one fish, the clown anemonefish (above), scientists have made a hopeful discovery. Measuring the lengths of 134 clownfish every month off Papua New Guinea during a marine heat wave in 2023, they report in Science Advances that the fish can get shorter in response to heat stress—a change that boosts survival chances by up to 78 percent. “This is not just about getting skinnier under stressful conditions; these fish are actually getting shorter,” says lead author Melissa Versteeg, a Ph.D. researcher at Newcastle University. “We were so surprised to see shrinking in these fish that ... we measured each fish individual repeatedly over a period of five months.” If shrinking in response to heat stress is common among other fish, she and her colleagues say it may help explain why the size of many species is declining, a shift often attributed to overfishing.

An image of bluebells in Trelease Woods blooming.

Microscope

Invasives Drive Down Tree Diversity

Analyzing 96 years of data from Illinois’ Trelease Woods (pictured), scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign report in Forest Ecology and Management that tree species diversity has fallen, largely due to invasive insects and pathogens.