If you’re looking to buy orchids from plant markets in southern China, chances are you’ll find plenty of orchids that have been collected from the wild, sometimes illegally. And these…
It’s summer in the North and we’re on holiday! So for today’s show, we replay one of our favorite Field Notes episodes, featuring field recordings of the superb lyrebird, an…
High heat and conditioning throughout this year’s melt season put a hurting on Arctic sea ice, but it may still take big storms or more heat to break 2012 extent record.
When Kenji Suetsugu is out looking for plants in Japan’s forests, he's not looking for the usual green ones. Instead, on dark forest floors, where little light penetrates, Suetsugu painstakingly…
While wandering through northwestern Myanmar in 2016, a group of scientists stumbled on hundreds of huge tracks in the ground. According to a new paper in the journal Mammalia, these…
Millions of years ago, giant birds roamed ancient New Zealand. There was the moa, an extinct flightless bird, thought to weigh up to 230 kilogram (510 pounds). Then there was…
Traditional Asian medicine is driving the growing international trade in big cat products and leading to the mistreatment of thousands of animals, according to a recent report. Bones, blood, and…
The world’s largest known living frog species doesn’t build ordinary nests. It does a lot of heavy lifting, sometimes moving large stones and rocks weighing more than half its weight…
A New Zealand-based research team assessing the utility of small, multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to survey and study humpback whales determined that video data collected from a UAV improved…
New research bolsters the case for indigenous-led land management as a crucial conservation solution. The study, published in the journal Environmental Science & Policy last month, focused on land and…
The vital contribution of forests in protecting biodiversity, regulating the climate, and enhancing human well-being is being recognized as never before. Forest-related responses to tackling the climate crisis are increasingly…
When Chong Chen was in high school, he came across a paper published in 2003 that described a peculiar species of snail from the Indian Ocean, thousands of feet below…
From Japan’s Amami-Oshima and Tokunoshima islands, researchers have described a new-to-science species of orchid that produces dark brown flowers that likely never bloom. Kenji Suetsugu of the Kobe University Graduate…
Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and CALeDNA have developed a toolkit designed to quickly identify the species in a biological community by simultaneously analyzing the environmental…
Created in 2012, Niger’s Termit and Tin Toumma National Nature Reserve is the last region of the Sahara relatively undisturbed by human activity. But expanding oil exploration threatens this sanctuary…
The sex of some turtle species is influenced not by genes but by the temperatures they experience in the nest. Eggs incubated at cooler temperatures develop into males, while those…
After two years of severe drought, lacking electricity and water, with a $500 annual budget, the Botanical Garden of Caracas struggles valiantly to protect its precious collection.
In 2016, researchers digging along the Río Alto Madre de Dios in the Peruvian Amazon uncovered hundreds of fossils of rodents, bats and other animals. Among the fossils was an…
On the remote mountaintops of Queensland, Australia, researchers have rediscovered two species of ferns last seen more than 50 years ago. One of the ferns, Hymenophyllum whitei, was first recorded…
Baby whales, like all young mammals, rely on their mother’s milk for their early development. A new video follows a nursing humpback whale and her calf and takes the calf’s…
