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Life Signs
A Space Daily column

Life Signs

Nature and earth science

Life Signs is where Space Daily looks down instead of up. Animals, ecosystems, and Earth science, with a bias for peer-reviewed studies over press-release hype. The living world turns out to be at least as strange as anything in orbit.

Earth News

Beginning in 1962, NASA acquired roughly 140,000 acres around Merritt Island for Kennedy Space Center—but used only a fraction for launch operations. Since 1963, the Fish and Wildlife Service has managed most of the remaining NASA land as a national wildlife refuge, where bald eagles nest in pine trees alongside launch pads, crawlerways and sprawling solar farms.

Kennedy’s undeveloped lands and lagoon waters support a refuge established in 1963. Eagle surveys, nest rescues and protection from launch-pad lighting show what managing the shared landscape involves.

Exo Life

Finding independently evolved microbial life on Mars would be one of history’s greatest discoveries—but Robin Hanson’s Great Filter argument gives it a darker edge. If simple life arises easily, then whatever keeps the universe silent must lie later on the road from microbes to spacefaring civilisation—and it may still be ahead of us.

A second origin of life could reshape the Great Filter argument. It would not establish that a catastrophe lies ahead: later evolutionary barriers and limits to our searches remain part of the question.

Science

We tend to think of oxygen as the essential requirement for animal life, but a less-than-10-celled parasite called Henneguya salminicola that lives inside salmon muscle has no mitochondrial genome and no ability to breathe, making it the first animal ever confirmed to survive without needing oxygen at all

A millimetre-long salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola has no mitochondrial genome and cannot use oxygen — the first multicellular animal ever confirmed to live its entire life cycle without breathing.

Science

Do any of Old Tom’s descendants survive? Geneticists drilled DNA from the tooth and jawbone of the killer whale that local accounts at Eden credited with helping the whalers run down baleen whales in Twofold Bay, and found no clear descendant among the killer whales they could sample

A 2023 ancestry study recovered 11,464 bases of Old Tom's mitochondrial genome from his mounted museum skeleton and set it into a global dataset that came to 490 mitogenomes. Separate nuclear comparisons place his closest match among contemporary New Zealand killer whales, and find that most of the variation in his genome is carried by none of the animals the team sampled.

Science

The first two juvenile Montagu’s Harriers ever fitted with satellite tags in Britain were tagged in late July, days before they first flew, and by 3 September one had crossed the North Sea to the Netherlands in a single three-hour flight while the other had been killed by a train and found by the tag she was wearing

FH and HV are half-sisters by the same father, the only adult male Montagu's Harrier the RSPB knows to be breeding in the UK currently. Tracking since late July has already produced one unexpected sea crossing and one dead bird.

Flora And Fauna

Two Minnesota solar farms built on retired cropland were sown with native grasses and wildflowers in early 2018. Across 358 surveys through August 2022, total insect abundance roughly tripled and native bees increased twentyfold, with bees from the restored habitat also visiting soybean flowers in neighboring fields.

Planting wildflowers beneath solar panels transformed barren ground into a pollinator haven—and the bees spilled into neighboring farms, boosting crop production too.

Science

A researcher at a Chengdu university was bitten on the ring finger by a grass-green pitviper from Mount Emei at 22:15 on a September night, the swelling reached his elbow before he reached hospital, and the snake has now been named a species new to science, described partly from museum specimens collected in 1956 and from populations that had been identified as a more widespread relative on their looks alone

The Huaxi green pitviper was described in January 2026 from western Sichuan, where the region's green pitvipers had been called Trimeresurus stejnegeri on morphology alone. A 171-sample genetic survey of that species had skipped the region entirely.

Outer Planets

Radioactive isotopes leaking from Europa’s seafloor rocks could split ocean water into hydrogen- and oxygen-bearing chemicals capable of feeding microbial life, according to a model presented in December 2025 — meaning the January 2026 finding that Europa probably lacks active seafloor faulting and hydrothermal vents may not eliminate its ocean as a potentially habitable environment.

A conference model suggests radioactive salts could maintain chemical energy in Europa's ocean even if its seafloor lacks the active faults and hydrothermal vents once imagined.

Exo Worlds

A moon does not necessarily need much warmth from a star to keep water liquid. If it follows a slightly stretched orbit around a giant planet, relentless gravitational flexing can heat its interior—much as Jupiter helps sustain Europa’s buried ocean—meaning habitable environments could exist far beyond the classical habitable zone, sealed beneath kilometres of ice.

Europa shows how a slightly eccentric orbit can turn gravity into internal heat, widening the search for liquid water beyond the part of a planetary system where starlight can warm a surface ocean.

Science

One of England’s rarest moths had not been recorded on a Northumberland estate since 1952, and the conservationist who had been hunting a second English colony since 2004 found his first moth there about ten minutes after he arrived, in habitat that did not look like what the team expected

Until July the species had one known English site, a 570-hectare common used as a military training area near York, where the Ministry of Defence's 2024 release recorded that "as little as 50 to 100" were believed to remain. The second site is real and dated. How long the moths have been on it is an inference, and the announcement gives no count of the Wallington colony.