The Friends of Charles Darwin

Growers of rhododendrons and other shrubs claim they are facing ruin due to the UK government's attempts to halt the spread of sudden oak death disease. More than 300 gardens and nurseries have been ordered to destroy plants and the peat they are planted in, but they have not been offered compensation.

It may sound like a load of quackers but according to new research ducks have regional accents. "Cockney" ducks from London make a rougher sound, not unlike their human counterparts, so their fellow quackers can hear them above the city's hubbub. But their country cousins communicate with a softer, more relaxed sound, the team from Middlesex University found.

Blob-like fossils dating back about 600 million years may indicate that complex life evolved much earlier on our planet than had been thought, scientists say. The animals are less than a fifth of a millimetre long and have a two-sided body plan previously thought to have existed much later in Earth's history. These "bilaterians" have what look like mouths and guts, as well as internal and external layers of body tissue.

Bringing the top predator back to Yellowstone has triggered a cascade of unanticipated changes in the park's ecosystem.

The world's oceans contain far more cold-water coral reefs than experts had realised, the United Nations says.

Scientists have found a series of vents in the Nordic Seas that may have burped enough methane to cause massive global warming 55 million years ago. The early Eocene Period witnessed a dramatic increase in temperature, which was triggered by a sudden surge of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But just where these gases came from has been something of a mystery.

A blockade is preventing tourists from visiting the Galapagos Islands as fishermen demand that their rights take priority over protecting the delicate ecosystem. Tour boats cannot unload visitors eager to see the rare iguanas, giant tortoises and birds unique to the islands because fishermen are demanding that the Ecuadorean government lifts quotas on the trawling of sea cucumbers, which are much sought after in Asia as an aphrodisiac.

Some people may be genetically programmed to be unfaithful to their partner, a scientist has claimed. Professor Tim Spector, of the Twin Research Unit at St Thomas' Hospital, London, says he has evidence of a genetic component to infidelity.

Scientists have used DNA from rats to trace migration patterns of the ancestors of today's Polynesians. People are thought to have arrived in Polynesia, comprising the Pacific islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, by boat some 3,000 years ago. Rat data suggests the journey was more complex than the popular "Express Train" theory, which proposes a rapid dispersal of people from South Asia.

Scientists at the University of Arizona may have witnessed the birth of a new species for the first time. Biologists Laura Reed and Prof Therese Markow made the discovery by observing breeding patterns of fruit flies that live on rotting cacti in deserts… Whether the two closely related fruit fly populations the scientists studied - Drosophila mojavensis and Drosophila arizonae - represent one species or two is still debated by biologists. However, the University of Arizona researchers believe the insects are in the early stages of diverging into separate species.

The world's most famous endangered species, the Chinese giant panda, appears to be in much better shape than previously thought. The Chinese government has released the results of the most comprehensive survey of giant pandas ever. It found that there were around 1,600 of the creatures left in the wild, 40% more than previous figures.

…Charles Darwin, who was fascinated with flowers and the insects that pollinate them, first came across this orchid [Angraecum sesquipedale from Madagascar] in the middle of the 19th century and predicted that there would be a species of moth with a tongue long enough to reach down to the nectar. Sure enough, in 1903, after Darwin had died, entomologists found a moth on Madagascar that could unfurl a 16-inch tongue that was perfectly adapted to feed on the orchid's deep-seated nectar. They named it Xanthopan morgani praedicta - praedicta in honour of Darwin's prediction.

The point about the tale of the moth and the orchid is that it shows how each co-evolved for mutual advantage - of pollinating the flower in the case of the orchid, and of gaining the nectar in the case of the moth. Other cases of more cut-throat co-evolution between plants and insects, where one is trying to out-do the other, are now thought to have driven evolution to produce today's breathtaking biodiversity.

A single gene can turn the Don Juan of voles into an attentive home-loving husband, Nature magazine has reported. By altering the small animal's brain hormone chemistry, scientists have made a promiscuous meadow vole faithful - just like its prairie vole cousin. The researchers think this will lead to a greater understanding of how social behaviour is controlled in humans. The same hormone activity could play a role in disorders like autism where people can lack simple social skills.

An Ecuadorean judge on Friday overturned limits set for fishing lucrative sea cucumbers in the pristine Galapagos islands in a ruling that threatens conservation efforts in the protected archipelago. The ruling followed a request for an injunction by a group of Galapagos fishermen who felt that government limits on sea cucumber catch denied them of their constitutional right to make a living fishing in the Pacific Ocean marine reserve.

Construction work on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in Kent has unearthed the 400,000-year-old remains of an elephant. The skeleton was found on the site of the new Ebbsfleet station, an area thought to be an early Stone Age site… The elephant, which has been identified as a straight-tusked Palaeoloxodon antiquus, would have been twice the size of the largest modern African elephant.

An international scientific team is to record and list the species thought to live deep in the Arctic Ocean's chill. One very deep area they will search, undisturbed for millennia, is said to contain the Earth's oldest seawater. The team, based at the University of Alaska, US, believes it is likely to find species never recorded before, and some commoner lifeforms in abundance.

New research suggests humans may have been able to talk much longer ago than previously thought, the Spanish media has reported. The claim is based on ear bones from skulls found in the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) at Atapuerca, northern Spain, in the early 1990s. They are said to belong to Homo heidelbergensis, who lived some 350,000 years ago and is thought to have been an ancestor of the Neanderthals.

Honeybees can precisely regulate the temperature of their nest – and they do it thanks to genetically determined variations in their individual thermostats. The new research has revealed one of the few known benefits of the high genetic diversity found in honeybee colonies.

The three-horned dinosaur Triceratops could apparently wrestle head-to-head with members of its own species.

Monkeys and apes who are good at deceiving their peers also have the biggest brains relative to their body size. The finding backs the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fuelled the evolution of large primate brains.