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…
A thousand northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) once lived among the sweeping cedars and towering Douglas firs of southwestern British Columbia’s old-growth forests. Today, only one female survives. She…
In 2019, the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia died. Her name was Iman and ever since her capture in 2014, she had been under the care of the Bornean Rhino…
Sometimes, our current mass extinction crisis can be represented by the loss of a single individual. On April 21, locals spotted a 93-kilogram (205-pound) body in the waters of Dong…
The Polynesian tree snail, a tiny mollusk about the size of an aspirin pill, used to be found in abundance on Tahiti, the largest island in French Polynesia. But about 30…
Authorities investigating the discovery of 14 dead vultures in a feeding zone that’s meant to be safe for the scavenging birds have found that they died from eating poisoned bait…
Las Chinchillas National Reserve is located in the hills of the Coquimbo region, in the province of Choapa, where more than a decade-long drought has turned the earth yellow. The…
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.
Monarch butterflies could go extinct, much to the dismay of environmentalists in the U.S. and Mexico. Monarch butterfly populations in Mexico have dropped 22% in the last year, according to…
The photo speaks for itself: a woman lies on the ground with just her smiling face visible, her body covered by about 20 dead geese, the result of a “successful”…
Sudan, a 45-year-old rhino believed to be the world’s last surviving male northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), died five years ago at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya on…
The Philippine eagle, the archipelagic nation's iconic, endemic apex predator, has been declared threatened with extinction for nearly three decades. Yet despite its status as the national bird, little is…
Hundreds of thousands of European bison once grazed the grassy slopes from Spain to Ukraine — until they gradually went extinct in the wild by 1927. But when the last…
Inside Bolivia’s Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), conservationists from Asociación Armonía rigged up a network of nine camera traps and 15 audio recorders. They were seeking out…
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…
Michele Menegon and a team of local and international scientists have just described six new species of thumb-sized chameleon in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains. The forest-capped mountains form an inland…
When John Midgley dug a golden brown tarantula out of its burrow in the remote woodlands of southeastern Angola, he felt he had found “one of the most astonishing animals…
Halting biodiversity loss is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, but our current approaches to global conservation are clearly not working. A good example of this is…
A worldwide international collaboration is locating tropical areas with high concentrations of plants not yet identified by science, then working with local communities to conserve those plants and their habitats.
KATHMANDU — On Nov. 1 last year, a leopard dragged off an 8-year-old boy as he was playing just steps away from the cowshed where his grandmother was milking the…
New research suggests travel between increasingly separated terrestrial and aquatic habitats may impact tropical amphibian microbiomes and immunity, leading to more disease, though more research is needed.
KATHMANDU — A popular dish in Nepal, momos are small, bite-sized dumplings filled with spicy minced meat and wrapped in dough. Served piping hot, they are often accompanied by a…
More than a third of all elasmobranch (shark and ray) species are at risk of extinction due to overfishing. Indonesia is both a hotspot of elasmobranch biodiversity and one of…
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.
COLOMBO — Each day, as the sun set over the horizon, Thettuwage Tennakoon and his wife would carefully climb up into their treehouse in the middle of their rice field.…
Each year, the European Union imports an estimated 4,000 metric tons of frogs’ legs. That sum is the equivalent of around 200 million frogs killed to feed demand, the majority…
In December, the UN Biodiversity Conference concluded with a historic commitment agreed to by nearly 200 nations, the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a commitment that aims to halt and reverse…
KATHMANDU — Throughout 2022, Mongabay reported on important biodiversity-related scientific discoveries in Nepal. The stories, some of them republished by different media outlets in Nepal and abroad, brought the country’s…
On a Russian-led expedition in the northern Pacific Ocean in the 1740s, German botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller laid eyes on a species that captured his imagination. It looked like a…
DHAKA — On Oct. 8 this year, police in Bangladesh recovered an endangered western hoolock gibbon from a passenger bus in the Chunati area of the Chattogram-Cox’s Bazar highway. They…
