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In the shadow of multimillion-dollar mansions and towering high-rises, beneath the daily roar of cruise and container ships, there is a colony of corals that's not supposed to exist. The corals, found in PortMiami, part of Florida's largest city, grow on discarded shopping carts and on concrete and stone breakwaters.

On a fine October morning in the hills of Spain's Extremadura region, Sofia Marrero carries a wild bird across a field of bones. Gripped tightly in Marrero's right hand, tail feathers askew, mouth agape like a bewildered hostage, the red kite stares wide-eyed at the journalists waiting on the other side of a raptor feeding station enclosed by chain-link fencing.

On a dripping-hot morning in July, the kind of day that makes you wonder why anyone moves to Florida, I exited the interstate south of Sarasota and headed toward a ragged 7.5-hectare (10-acre) field sandwiched between Hollywood Boulevard and a Walmart Supercenter.

The team's work revealed two important difficulties of dealing with a nurdle spill. Because they're so small and light, nurdles are easily carried long distances by waves and ocean currents. And, when they do eventually wash ashore, they can dig deep into the sand.

In the long quest to understand what life was like for the saber-toothed cats, bison, and mammoths that roamed North America's dry tundra during the last Ice Age, scientists have hit on a potent new tool: ancient poop. Specifically, the new tool is ancient DNA, miraculously preserved for up to 700,000 years in ground squirrel scat.

In Golfo Nuevo, Argentina, a young southern right whale ( Eubalaena australis) sidles up to Tui De Roy's camera for a closer look. De Roy spent several days snorkeling under permit in the shallow lagoon, where the curious newborn sometimes came so close-even nudging De Roy at times, like a behemoth baby testing the boundaries of play-that the photographer had to back up to get a decent image. The calf's mother, who hovered nearby, "was surprisingly chill," says De Roy.

Cargo ships are loud. Extremely loud. At up to 190 decibels, a cargo container ship’s roaring engines, vibrating machinery, and churning propellers are louder than a jet taking off. This cacophony is unpleasant, but for all sorts of marine life, it’s also dangerous. And in the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean along the Canada-United States border, the noise is set to grow much louder.

Imagine lying prone as your dentist cleans your teeth. Now imagine that your dentist is so small that she has to climb inside your mouth. Picture being tended by a similarly tiny dermatologist or pedicurist. Each practitioner disposes of the morsels they scrape from your teeth or toes or skin by eating them. And each belongs to a species that you might also like to eat, under other circumstances.

The first glimpse lasted only a few seconds. Darío Soraires, a wildlife tour guide, was sailing up the Bermejo River in northern Argentina when he saw them: two jaguars lying in a ravine. He quickly flagged his colleague, Pablo Luna. But by the time Luna lifted his camera and got the pair in view, one of the jaguars—a cub—had disappeared into the thick brush. Undeterred, Soraires steered his boat toward the shore. A few moments later, the cub popped up again. This time, Luna was ready.

An ice-slicked road bisecting open grassland in southern Germany exposes a paradox. On one side of the road, a herd of nearly three dozen red deer (Cervus elaphus) graze, their heads bowed as they munch the grass poking through snow. On the other side, a group of camouflaged artillery tanks, low like bulldogs and equipped with cannons, take aim and fire at practice targets. Several deer look up. Most continue grazing.