As Swiss glaciers melt at an ever-faster rate, new species move in and flourish, but entire ecosystems and an alpine culture can be lost

• Photographs by Nicholas JR White

From the slopes behind the village of Ernen, it is possible to see the gouge where the Fiesch glacier once tumbled towards the valley in the Bernese Alps. The curved finger of ice, rumpled like tissue, cuts between high buttresses of granite and gneiss. Now it has melted out of sight.

People here once feared the monstrous ice streams, describing them as devils, but now they dread their disappearance. Like other glaciers in the Alps and globally, the Fiesch is melting at ever-increasing rates. More than ice is lost when the giants disappear: cultures, societies and entire ecosystems are braided around the glaciers.

The Aletsch glacier viewed from Moosfluh, looking towards the Olmenhorn and Eggishorn peaks

Sea life needs protection, and the UK’s current system of marine management isn’t up to it

Up to 90% of the ocean floor around Britain is covered with sand and gravel, derived from the erosion of shell and rocks. Other, more unusual habitats include maerl beds, seagrass meadows and kelp forests. These biodiverse landscapes are home to 330 species of fish, as well as seals, seahorses and thousands of lesser‑known species – which share them with the offshore energy, fishing and shipping industries.

Heightened awareness of pollution from sewage and plastics means that the public knows more about marine conservation than it used to. For his 99th birthday this year, the broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough made a film, Ocean, in which he described the seas as the planet’s “greatest life support system”, and urged people to get behind efforts to protect and renew marine nature.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Banning order comes after multiple complaints from residents of apartment block about feathers and droppings

Rome’s mayor has ordered a woman to stop feeding dozens of pigeons that have overrun an apartment block, after furious residents, claiming to be drowning in feathers and guano, demanded relief from what has been described as a Hitchcockian nightmare.

For several months, on the third floor of a building at 108 Via Spartaco, a woman nicknamed “The Pigeon Lady” by the press has been feeding the flock of birds that has been plaguing the block. After countless complaints from residents, exasperated by the thick layer of guano covering the building’s interior and the public areas below – not to mention the parked cars – local authorities issued an order banning her from feeding the pigeons.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

DNA analysis of endemic specimens in museums finds 79% of ant populations in Pacific archipelago are shrinking

Island-dwelling insects have not been spared the ravages of humanity that have pushed so many of their invertebrate kin into freefall around the world, new research on Fijian ant populations has found.

Hundreds of thousands of insect species have been lost over the past 150 years and it is believed the world is now losing between 1% and 2.5% a year of its remaining insect biomass – a decline so steep that many entomologists say we are living through an “insect apocalypse”. Yet long-term data for individual insect populations is sparse and patchy.

Creatures favour front arms for most tasks, study suggests, despite fact all eight arms are capable of all actions

While some humans find they have two left feet on the dancefloor, octopuses manage to coordinate eight highly flexible arms across a host of behaviours, from foraging to den-building, or moving around the seafloor.

Now researchers say they have completed the most comprehensive study of its kind, not only identifying the actions and small motions involved in different types of movements, but revealing that – like primates, rodents and fish – the cephalopods prefer to use particular limbs for certain tasks.

Whether to kill one species to save another has split biologists, anglers and Indigenous communities in the Miramichi

• Photographs by Brittany Crossman

Since the 19th century, Atlantic salmon in the Miramichi have lured politicians, celebrities and wealthy anglers from across North America and Europe to fishing camps along the river’s banks, its undammed branches once producing more of the fish than almost any other river on the continent. In 2010, the fishery was valued at C$16m (£8.6m) and provided hundreds of jobs.

Rip Cunningham has been travelling from the US state of Massachusetts to the Canadian province of New Brunswick to fish since the 1970s. When he first started, he would sit on the deck at the Black Brook Salmon Club, on one of the Miramachi’s tributaries, watching the water boil with the leaps and rolls of salmon.

Rip Cunningham has witnessed the decline of salmon numbers in the Miramichi River since the 1970s

Sea levels are rising in New England at some of the fastest rates in the world. On a quiet ribbon of saltmarsh in Rhode Island, septuagenarian Deirdre isn’t prepared to accept the loss of her beloved saltmarsh sparrow - the species is facing extinction before 2050 due to elevated high tides inundating nests and drowning fledgling birds. Leading a team of citizen scientists, Deirdre unravels the secret to finding delicate nests amid thick marsh grass, while they design and deploy a low-cost ‘ark’ to try to raise the sparrow nests to safety.