On Feb. 13, a juvenile humpback dolphin was caught and killed in one of the many nets strung up off the coast of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province to protect beachgoers…
KOSI BAY, South Africa — “There’s a way to hold the spear,” Fano Tembe says, aiming a traditional fishing spear at the sand to show the tourists how they’ll be…
Protecting vulture populations in Africa presents some unique challenges for conservationists. These slow-breeding and ecologically vital scavengers range over vast territories and are vulnerable to poisons targeting other species and…
The southern elephant seal population in South Africa has seen its conservation status improve from near threatened to least concern, with a recent assessment citing the absence of serious threats…
“Spekboom is everywhere, it’s all anyone talks about … what used to be an Angora goat farming town is now a spekboom town,” says field ecologist Rae Attridge. In the…
A strikingly handsome emerald-green moth, lost to science for nearly one-and-a-half centuries, has been rediscovered in South Africa by citizen scientists who posted photographs of it online. The moth, Drepanogynis…
Over the past year, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K., officially named 125 plants and 65 fungi. The new-to-science species include a parasitic fungus that turns…
CAPE TOWN — Western leopard toads have been listed as endangered since 2016. Andrew Turner, scientific manager for CapeNature, the government body that manages protected areas and conservation in South…
Founder's Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In recent years, one of the loudest ideas in environmental policy has been…
In the vast savanna grasslands of sub-Saharan Africa towers the giraffe, draped in mosaics of brown and tan patches. Long regarded as a single species, this iconic African megafauna was…
Amid negotiations last week on wildlife trade regulations by delegates from around the world, one item was left out of the discussions. South Africa had been expected to bring to…
It was 2006 and Ismail Ebrahim, a botanist with the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI), was worried. While surveying one of the last remaining patches of renosterveld shrubland in…
Communities in Lesotho have filed a complaint with the African Development Bank over a controversial initiative that transfers water from the country to neighboring South Africa, one of the biggest…
In the coal towns of northern KwaZulu-Natal, the promise of South Africa’s “just transition” feels like a distant dream. While government plans speak of a fair shift to clean energy…
Gqeberha, SOUTH AFRICA — On June 17, marine biologist Enrico Gennari and a group of students set out into the water in South Africa’s Mossel Bay. They were planning to…
This series, Voices from the Land, brings together opinion pieces led and written by Indigenous peoples from around the world. Through these commentaries, we share our lived realities and reflections…
A cluster of mass vulture poisonings earlier this year has drawn attention to an alarming, ongoing problem in the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area that straddles South Africa, Zimbabwe and…
A spate of poisoning events this year has killed more than 400 vultures in and near South Africa’s Kruger National Park. In May, 49 vultures died after feasting on a…
“We are not causing climate change, yet we are the ones heavily affected,” says 26-year-old Solomon Islands health worker Matthew Bibao Paikea, as he expresses ongoing frustration over failing crops,…
Seventy southern white rhinos have successfully completed a journey from South Africa to Rwanda’s Akagera National Park. It’s the first international translocation from Platinum Rhino, a massive captive breeding operation…
CAPE TOWN — Siphe Mlawuli stands next to her e-bike outside a popular fast-food outlet in Table Bay, a Cape Town suburb. The sun has just set, giving the sky…
Earlier this year, the vulture conservation organization Vulpro hailed the return of Cape vultures to a farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, near Mountain Zebra National Park. That marked…
JOHANNESBURG — South Africa is a hub for the international pet trade, with thousands of animals exported each year. Many of these are exotic birds and mammals like parrots and…
As apex predators, lions (Panthera leo) roam the African savanna, and occasionally even the rainforests, as the only social big cats. A small, isolated population of Asiatic lions (Panthera leo…
A nasty wind rips across Cornell’s Kop one afternoon in October 2024, driving professor emeritus Timm Hoffman and his team to abandon the hilly study site a few clicks west…
CAPE TOWN — South Africa’s False Bay was once known as a global hotspot for great white sharks. But within the span of a few years, between 2015 and 2019,…
LANGEBAAN LAGOON, South Africa — Deon Warnick’s three chest freezers stood silently in his living room, lids open. Without any fish to keep frozen, he was using them as cupboard…
Sometimes words fall hopelessly short. This might explain the silences between the two botanists as their vehicle crunches over a gravelly Richtersveld moonscape, a desert that straddles the South African…
NAIROBI — Cheetahs are known to be selective in their feeding habits — “clean eaters” that only go after the prime parts of their kill, such as the liver. But…
Groundbreaking research in the late 1990s showed that Arctic-dwelling bowhead whales could live more than 150 or even 200 years — longer than any other mammal. New research, inspired by…
In July 2022, Anton Mzimba, the head ranger at Timbavati Private Nature Reserve in South Africa, was killed outside his home by two men, allegedly in connection with his rhino…
NIEUWOUDTVILLE, South Africa — It is the devil’s breath, this wind, blowing dry and mercilessly across a plain left threadbare by decades of overgrazing. With this wind at their backs,…
