UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — Everything is growing in Perpétua's grove now. "Can you see? This is avocado; over there, papaya. This year I already got acerola. We plant a little…
The diminutive Karoo dwarf tortoise (Chersobius boulengeri) may play an outsized role as gardener in its arid South African habitat. Researchers gathered droppings of the miniature species — this endangered…
The world’s two worst nuclear accidents, in Ukraine and Japan, along with the human exclusion zones around them, are informing scientists about radiation effects, and how ecosystems evolve with less pressure from people.
The sand cat is small, elusive and adapted to life in some of Earth’s most inhospitable deserts — that makes it hard to study and conserve, with lots of unknowns about its behaviors and populations across its range.
UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — In the backlands of northern Bahia state, nobody ever thought about putting up a fence in the woods. According to the tradition that governs fundo de…
This story is the first part of a Mongabay series titled “Climate Crisis in Cape Horn” that won the Inter American Press Association Award for Excellence in Journalism in the…
The government of New Caledonia recently announced that it would highly protect 10% of its ocean to safeguard ecologically important marine areas for sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, whales and seabirds.…
Japan is home to two rare subspecies of leopard cat, one found only on Iriomote Island and the other on Tsushima Island. Neither larger than a housecat, each subspecies has…
NOVA XAVANTINA, Brazil — This past July, 15 Indigenous women made the thousand-mile journey from their home of Rolim de Moura, in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Rondônia, east to…
CAPE TOWN — The endangered African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) could be extinct in the wild in just over a decade. To protect the bird’s food supply and slow its population…
"One of the greatest pleasures I had when I came here was telling my friends, 'Today I planted 5,000 fig tree seeds,'" says Yacov Kilsztajn. "Planting seeds here at the…
The Amazon Rainforest — together with other forests around the globe — lies at the center of concern over climate changes inside Brazil and worldwide. Yet little is studied and…
“This here is really great. I feel so good! I’m not stressed, and I’m not sad. When I’m here in the garden, everything is good,” says Waldir Francisco de Almeida,…
Each year from June to August, it's tapir hunting season in Suriname, the only country in South America that allows hunting the animal, which already faces a host of other…
A new study identified the presence of up to seven transgenic genes in single seeds of traditional, or “creole” corn from more than 1,000 samples collected in 10% of the towns in Brazil’s Caatinga.
Between March 2017 and January 2018, researchers tracked the movements of a female puma as it prowled around the Boqueirão da Onça protected area complex in the north of Brazil’s…
Released in February 2022, the latest report prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stressed that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme temperatures…
In the Chapada dos Veadeiros area, in Goiás state — 230 kilometers (143 miles) from Brasília — members of seed networks from several parts of Brazil met for almost a…
Big cat conflict is a threat to charismatic species like tigers and leopards. Small cat conflict, though often less severe, can also harm the livelihoods of communities and farmers and…
JAKARTA — Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range,…
From high up in the Serra das Almas Private Natural Heritage Reserve in Brazil’s Ceará state, the forest spreads out beyond the horizon. It’s April here in the municipality of…
Interbreeding with domestic cats, and also with other wildcat species, is altering the behaviors and genetic profiles of some small wildcats, creating conservation dilemmas about how best to define and protect these species.
Every night, somewhere unseen across the vast, semidesert and dry savanna habitat of Southern Africa, the continent’s deadliest cat emerges to hunt. Black-footed cats (Felis nigripes) are ideally suited for…
More than 30 species of small cats roam Earth today. They control small mammal populations to keep ecosystems in balance while helping farmers reduce rodent numbers. Over a dozen small cat species are hugely at risk.
When it comes to environmental destruction in Brazil, the world’s focus tends to be on the deforestation and burning of the Amazon. Yet the Cerrado, the second-largest Brazilian biome, at…
Bearded pigs play a prominent role in the lives of many people living on the island of Borneo. For some ethnic groups, they're a hunter’s most-prized quarry, providing an important…
MEDAN, Indonesia — An investigation into the violent death of an orangutan in northern Sumatra in January has shone a light on the persistent problem of human-wildlife conflict and illegal…
At a conference on herpetology — the branch of zoology studying reptiles and amphibians — at the end of the 1980s, researchers from numerous countries began to tell of disappearing…
When we speak about destruction of the Amazon, deforestation data are often the reference. Over the last few decades, it is the rates of clear cutting that are best documented,…
“Everything is happening at the wrong time,” says Myrian Pereira Vasques. “The trees are blossoming at the wrong time, the soil isn’t the same, the weather is too hot and…
On the evening of March 15, 2016, two large jaguars walked along a narrow lakeshore trail in Venezuela’s Llanos ecosystem, a vast mosaic of seasonally flooded lowland savannas, forests, pastures…
As human activities have pushed many animal species to the margins of former habitats, some protected areas may not be located in the right places, especially as frequent extreme temperatures shrink their ranges further.
