Jules Struck is an independent environmental reporter based in Seattle. She has written for National Geographic, The Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Planet Forward, the Christian Science Monitor and others, and has illustrated and animated for the Monitor. She has led the intern team at The Christian Science Monitor in producing a weekly numbers column and international news roundup for the print magazine since 2024. Previously she was the life & culture reporter for The Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, where she won two local awards for her reporting.
Right now, she’s writing two stories about water quality for Mongabay and National Geographic, and producing an animation about whales.
FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: Wild pigs are turning electric blue in California. Here’s why.
Dan Burton heard of pigs with electric blue meat in California years ago from an old-timer he used to hunt with, but he’d brushed it off as urban legend.
So when he cut open a dead wild pig in Monterey County, California, this past February,he was surprised to see blue fat— vivid, “7/11 slushie” blue—beneath the skin.
The color came from the blue dye of rodent poison, he correctly suspected, specifically from anticoagulant rodenticide bait containing the chemical diphacinone. He tipped off the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which confirmed the presence of diphacinone and sounded the alarm to local hunters.
It wasn’t the first time.
On the banks of an unassuming creek south of Seattle, biologist Nathan Ivy packed a pair of dripping waders and a cooler full of petri dishes into the back of his pickup truck, and peeled away towards the highway.
As he merged south on Interstate-5, he was uniquely aware that from this river of cars, including his own, issued an imperceptible and deadly chemical—the same chemical, he knew, disfiguring the vermillion salmon eggs in the petri dishes packed away beside him.
For decades, researchers suspected that a strange chemical in Washington’s streams was causing unnatural numbers of adult coho salmon to wash up dead after heavy rains, their bellies full of unlaid eggs. In 2020, after years of Curie-like obsession, a team of scientists finally identified the deadly chemical in roadway stormwater runoff as 6PPD-quinone. Its parent chemical, they confirmed, is in virtually every tire in the world.
FOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: Our car tires are poisoning salmon—and maybe us, too
Jim Borrowman cut the engine of the Nisku in the gray water of the Johnstone Strait, relinquishing his boat to an eastbound tide. He unraveled the line of a hydrophone – a cylindrical, underwater microphone – and dropped it portside.
On the other end of the cord a pint-size Honeytone speaker in the cabin broadcast a conversation from the deep: the ethereal, two-toned call of an orca whale to her clan.
“I think they’re what we call ‘A1s,’” said Mr. Borrowman, browsing a database of local orcas on his phone.Mr. Borrowman has been watching, and watching over, these whales for decades. He was one in a band of Vancouver Islanders who successfully lobbied in the early 1980s to set aside a protected area for Northern resident orcas, which lost a third of their population to hunting and capture in the 1950s and ’60s.
This early act of ocean preservation laid a foundation from which decades of important research – and a deep local allegiance to the whales – have flourished.
FOR THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: After a Canadian orca pod’s decline, now ‘you can see the whales coming back’
There’s a stretch of Kim Shade’s ranch in the North Dakota Badlands where he used to look for a peculiar long-billed bird from the seat of his saddle. Now, all he sees there is a road leading to an oil ri
“I used to see quite a few of them,” the cowboy said, of the speckled, chicken-size bird called a long-billed curlew. The curlew’s absence is unsettling, he said.
“Our birds on the prairie are the same thing as a canary in a coal mine,” Shade said. “If we lose them, something’s wrong.”
Curlew territory has been slowly shunted westward in North Dakota following the retreat of the state’s dwindling grasslands. That’s bad news for conservationists, who are trying to salvage one of the country’s most threatened habitats, which has been hit hard by industry and traditional crop development.It’s also a problem for ranchers, whose cattle rely on the health and sprawl of prairie as much as the curlews.
FOR THE WASHINGTON POST: What a chicken-size bird can tell us about a shrinking prairie
JULES STRUCK 
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