Here’s another case from the “pitting one animal against another” file: Japanese conservationists want to use bees to protect terns from crows.

Seabirds called little terns nest near Tokyo’s airport after migrating north from Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. But National Geographic reports that are area’s crows are bad neighbors, prone to attacking and killing young terns.

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When we wrote about the rash of dolphin deaths in Cornwall, England last month, it seemed like a sad aberration. But now British scientists are saying that dolphins and other cetaceans like porpoises have been dying at a dramatically higher rate this decade, and they are pointing the finger at trawler fishing as the main culprit.

According to the British study, only about 50 cetaceans washed up in Cornwall per year during the 1980s, but in the 2000s that number has risen to between 100 and 250. Brendan Godley from the University of Exeter says that at least 61 percent of the cetaceans found in Cornwall had been caught in fishing trawler nets and died.

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Tuatara are often called living fossils—the ancestors of these New Zealand creatures roamed the Earth 200 million ago and survived the extinction event that took down the dinosaurs. But according to a study released today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the lizard-like animal’s long run might come to a sudden end if the planet warms as rapidly as some fear.

The problem is that tuatara, like a lot of reptiles, show what’s called temperature dependent sex determination, meaning that the sex of a baby animal depends on the temperature during its development. For the tuatara, scientists say, the critical temperature is close to 71 degrees Fahrenheit. If the mercury reads higher than that during a baby tuatara’s development, it is much more likely to be born a male. So, the researchers say, a warmer world could throw off the male-female balance.

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Movie stardom can be a blessing and a curse, even for a fish.

Finding Nemo, the 2003 Disney/Pixar blockbuster about a young clownfish, his father, and a host of goofy aquatic animals, became the bestselling DVD of all time, according to The Times of London. While that was great news for Pixar, it turned out to be bad news for clownfish everywhere. British scientist Billy Sinclair of the University of Cumbria says that clownfish populations in the wild have been in steep decline since the movie’s release five years ago, and he thinks he knows what happened: They became pets.

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