Science

The grey seals slide out of their cages into the Baltic Sea near the Lithuanian coast, swimming off to new lives imperilled by climate change, pollution and shrinking fish stocks.

The seals have been nurtured at a rehabilitation centre in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda.

Survival rates for cubs in the wild can be as low as five percent, according to local scientists.

The Baltic Sea, which is shared by the European Union and Russia, rarely freezes over now, depriving seals of sanctuaries to rear their cubs.

"Mothers are forced to breed on land in high concentration with other seals," said Vaida Surviliene, a scientist at Vilnius University.

"They are unable to recognise their cubs and often leave them because of it," she said.

Rearing cubs ashore also leaves them exposed to humans, other wild animals, rowdy males, as well as a higher risk of diseases, according to Arunas Grusas, a biologist at the centre.

Grusas began caring for seals in 1987 when he brought the first pup back to his office at the Klaipeda Sea Museum, which now oversees the new rehabilitation centre built in 2022.

"We taught them how to feed themselves, got them used to the water –- they had to get comfortable with the sea, which spat them out ashore practically dying," Grusas said.

The very first cubs were placed into makeshift baths set up in an office.

"It was a sensation for us, there were practically no seals left then," Grusas said.

The scientists had to learn how to nurse the cubs back to health.

First, the cubs were treated to liquid formula before moving onto solid food.

At the time in the late 1980s, the seals were close to extinction –- there were just around 4,000 to 5,000 left in the sea from a population of around 100,000 before the Second World War.

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The 1960s also saw the use of pesticides in agriculture that were "incredibly toxic for predators", the scientist said.

The seals at the top of the food chain in the Baltic Sea absorbed the pollution, leaving the females infertile and the entire population with a weak immune system, unable to ward off parasites and resist infections.

After a ban on toxic pesticide use, the population survived, with the current estimates putting the number of grey seals in the Baltic Sea at 50,000 to 60,000.

In a response to overfishing, the European Commission also finally banned commercial cod fishing in the eastern Baltic Sea in 2019.

"Over 80 percent of fish resources in the Baltic Sea have been destroyed, the seals have nothing left to eat," said Grusas.

The ban has yet to show a positive result.

"There has been no fishing of eastern Baltic cod for around five years, but it's not yet recovering -- and it's one of the main sources of food" for the seals, said Darius Daunys, a scientist at Klaipeda University.

Recently a growing number of adult seals have been washing up on Lithuanian beaches.

Scientists like Grusas point the finger at near-shore fishing nets, where seals desperate for food end up entangled and ultimately drown.

Scientists confirm that two of the world’s most destructive invasive termite species are not only spreading in the United States but also hybridizing – the process of two different species crossbreeding to produce a hybrid.

This raises concerns about their potential to spread farther and cause even greater structural and environmental damage.

A new study from the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) confirms that hybrid termite colonies have now been established in South Florida. Just published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study documents how the invasive Formosan subterranean termites and Asian subterranean termites are not only coexisting in urban environments but also breed with each other.

“About 10 years ago, we first observed males and females from the two species interact through interspecies courtship behaviors during spring termite dispersal flights,” said Thomas Chouvenc, associate professor of urban entomology at the UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center and lead author of the study. “This was unexpected, and it raised red flags about the possibility of hybrid populations forming in the field.”

Both termite species form massive colonies that, once mature, can send out winged termites to find a mate and establish nests as new queen and king. Over the past decade, UF/IFAS scientists monitored termite activity across neighborhoods where the two species overlap. While initial lab studies showed that hybrid colonies could form, it was unclear whether they could thrive or produce fertile offspring.

“Unfortunately, termite colonies are very cryptic and trying to find hybrid colonies in the field is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Chouvenc. “We monitored termite activity closely for more than a decade to check for the establishment of hybrid colonies in some of the neighborhoods affected by the two termite species.”

“All initial observations raised doubt that hybrid colonies could thrive and produce fertile offspring, as quarantined lab colonies first appeared to be sterile mules,” Chouvenc added.

Then in 2021, Chouvenc and his team began collecting winged termites in Fort Lauderdale that didn’t match the shape or form of either species. That’s when they ramped up field monitoring.

“At first, I could not believe it, as I was hoping to never find it,” he said. “Since then, we have confirmed the presence of hybrid swarms every year since 2021, including in April 2025.”

Genetic testing confirmed these samples were hybrid termites, with individuals having half their genes from the two species. For the past four years, researchers collected winged hybrid termites during swarming events but were unable to determine the precise location of the colonies where the different winged hybrid termites came from. That changed in October 2024, during a routine survey of a city park in Fort Lauderdale, where the team discovered a tree infested with a colony that displayed hybrid-soldier traits they had previously studied in the lab.

What motivates victim-signalling – the “public and intentional expression of one's disadvantages, suffering, oppression, or personal limitations” (Ok et al., 2021, p. 1635)? And why does victim-signalling at times co-occur with virtue-signalling in what is known as “virtuous-victim signalling”? Being victimized often leads to feelings of vulnerability (Janoff-Bulman & Frieze, 1983) and, as such, genuine victims often avoid actively signalling their victim status (Fohring, 2018). This raises the question: why do some people actively signal victimhood? Noor et al. (2012) and others have demonstrated what they term “competitive victimhood” in which victims are enabled to claim not only compensation from nonvictims, but also immunization from claims on their own moral transgressions – be these deceit, intimidation, or even violence – in transferring resources to themselves or to their social group (Gray & Wegner, 2011). Building on this work, Ok et al. (2021) proposed that the combination of virtue signalling together with victim signalling is a strategic manipulation of non-victims, designed to elicit a transfer of resources from the non-victims to the victim signaller. Importantly, Ok et al. (2021) proposed and validated that this virtuous-victim signal is driven by dark traits of narcissism and amoral Machiavellianism. Here we 1) report a direct replication of the key study (study five) reported by Ok et al. (2021); 2) test robustness of the strategic manipulation model of victim signalling to different outcome measures, and 3) test association with sadism or taking pleasure in or causing pain to others, which has been proposed as a fourth dark trait extending the dark triad to a “dark tedrad”.