The first time Robin Naidoo mapped GPS data points to track elephant movement in Southern Africa, he was in for a surprise. Across the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), one…
The yellow-legged hornet is a predator: after it sets up a nest in a new neighborhood, its workers head out in search of smaller wasps, flies and bees to feed…
To say tracking prairie dogs is difficult would be an understatement. The animals spend most of their time in burrows. Since conventional GPS collars don’t function underground, the movements and…
SABAH, Malaysia — The 3-year-old sun bear sits teddy bear-like in a secluded grassy glade in its rainforest enclosure. Its soft, densely furred belly vibrates as it sucks on one…
From getting alerts about injured elephants to tracking ones that are straying too close to villages, the Mara Elephant Project has used the EarthRanger platform since 2019 to manage the…
KATHMANDU — The spring season in the Northern Hemisphere is a critical time for red pandas, particularly in Nepal. This is the period when these furry, tree-dwelling animals spend a…
Squid fishing could be getting out of control due to the industry’s lack of regulations, scientists say, prompting calls for greater oversight. Thousands of squid fishing vessels operate across the…
KATHMANDU — It starts off like the premise for a joke: “Why did the tigers cross the road?” But for researchers and conservationists in Nepal, the spread of roads throughout…
Even in the isolated, scrubby plains of the savanna, spotting the black ear tufts of a caracal prowling nearby remains a rare opportunity. The wild cat, sometimes known as the…
As a biology undergraduate, Talia Speaker spent a grueling summer hiking around the mountains near Santa Cruz, California, interning with a team that monitored puma behavior. In one hand she…
CROSS RIVER NATIONAL PARK, Nigeria — It wasn’t supposed to be this straightforward. For days, we’d crisscrossed rainforest-blanketed mountains, hacked through thorny thickets and corkscrewing lianas, narrowly escaped rockfalls, and…
After spending two months incubating in eggs, it’s time for green sea turtles to break out of their shells. The newly hatched reptiles scale the steep sides of their nests…
The CMA CGM Brazil, a huge cargo freighter carrying more than 15,000 containers, powered through the Atlantic Ocean, headed for New York City. North of Nantucket, it entered what’s known…
Early on the morning of Sept. 16, 2018, an olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) hauled herself out of the ocean along a beach on Costa Rica’s Nicoya Peninsula. Moving…
In late June, a fleet of about 300 Chinese fishing vessels swarmed around the rich, biodiverse waters of the Galápagos Islands, armed with overhead lights and industrial jigging machines to…
When baby sea turtles hatch from their eggs, they skitter across the sand to the shoreline before disappearing into the open ocean. Many years later, by some remarkable feat, female…
Being a single mom is tough, even for a strong and formidable tigress. Hunting, protecting the territory, spending time with the cubs, resting — how does she do it all? For the…
In a recently published study, Canadian researchers monitored the fine-scale movements of GPS-tagged fishers (Pekania pennanti), a member of the weasel family, across a terrain of over 700 protected areas…
The last time the Peruvian government swooped in to eradicate coca crops in its northern Amazonian border region near Colombia and Brazil was in 2015. For the indigenous people of…
The ‘landscape of fear’ is not a new term among biologists. From the now-iconic study of how elk and bison gradually adjusted their vigilance levels after wolves were reintroduced into…
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Every other hour, Sonja Krüger logs onto her website and checks the birds’ status. Pharoah is taking a mud bath in the mountains, Jeremia is on…
Animal tracking has revolutionized our study of animal movements and behavior. Radio transmitter tags, followed by GPS and other satellite-based tags, placed on animals via a collar, harness, glue, or…
KATHMANDU, Nepal — As dawn peeks through the morning mist on an early spring day in Nepal's Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, a duck-sized bird flaps its wings and throws itself…
Of gaps and limitations Our knowledge about sea animals is riddled with holes. We may study and record sea lion colonies or sea turtle nesting and hatching events as they…
African elephants use areas of grassland, bushland, and woodland, but how do they move through these different vegetation types in different seasons, especially where water becomes a seasonally scarce resource?…
Data from satellite tracking tags deployed on elephants in Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and along the border of Angola and Zimbabwe have revealed that the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA…
Working under cover of night in parks as large as US states, poachers are skilled in avoiding detection. If they kill with silencers on their rifles, the animal’s death is…
Laura is now part of the history of Peru. She is an Andean spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus) and the face of the first coin of one sol (equivalent to $0.31)…
SINGAPORE — One of the world’s biggest palm oil companies is testing new GPS-based technology to trace the provenance of palm fruit all the way back to the plantation where…
Conservation-minded planners often pick places with the fewest signs of human impact for protection, and, across the tropics, pristine rainforests with the tallest trees often rise to the top of…
Technology above the clouds is helping scientists study sharks beneath the waves. A new initiative combines shark movement data with publicly available vessel identification data—both transmitted to researchers via satellite—to…
To understand the resource needs of a species, you need to know where individual animals go and what they do there. You can follow some animals around on foot or…
