In the months leading up to Sri Lanka’s presidential election in November 2019, leading candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa spoke about the need for leaders to implement policies without arguing about the…
COLOMBO — During the 18th and 19th centuries when Sri Lanka was a British colony, many British naturalists studied the island’s rich biodiversity and contributed to profiling the same. Tea…
Colombo, SRI LANKA — Like floating mushrooms with thin and transparent tentacles, jellyfish would have been drifting in the oceanic currents for several millions of years and even predating the…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has received $2.5 million in the third interim payment for the impacts caused by the sinking of the X-Press Pearl cargo vessel off the country’s western…
COLOMBO — Look past the venomous vipers and cobras and the powerful constrictors. Dig a little deeper — literally, into the soil — and you might find one of the…
COLOMBO — Anyone who’d ever seen Maheshakya in the wildernesses of Kebithigollewa in Sri Lanka’s North Central province agreed that, as elephants went, he was an exemplary specimen with large…
Since the downfall of Sri Lanka’s former president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in mid-July, some commentators have blamed the economic crisis and social unrest that precipitated his departure on his nominal experiment…
COLOMBO — When Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced from office this month, among those leading the people power movement against Sri Lanka’s deeply unpopular president were the country’s environmental activists. For…
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Ashani Arulananthan says she can recall childhood visits to the beach in her home village in Sri Lanka’s northern district of Jaffna. She would collect washed-up…
COLOMBO — When it comes to super dads in the animal kingdom, the striking-looking waterbird known as the pheasant-tailed jacana is in a universe all its own. From incubating the…
COLOMBO — As a school student in Sri Lanka in 1986, Deepthi Yakandawala sent a greeting card to the country’s president, J.R. Jayewardene, for Vesak, the holiest day in the…
COLOMBO — When fishermen in southern Sri Lanka recently caught a giant oceanic manta ray, they needed a backhoe to haul it out of the water once they reached land.…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has submitted its 6th National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the country’s wealth of plant and animal…
COLOMBO — Amphibians evolved from a fish ancestor that had functional lungs and bony lobed fins, which helped them become the first vertebrates to conquer land. Keeping these earlier trails,…
COLOMBO — Stuck in the long lines of vehicles queuing up for what little, and expensive, fuel is available at Sri Lanka’s beleaguered gas stations are the SUVs bearing the…
COLOMBO — Crows have long had a reputation as a nuisance and a pest, even though it’s widely recognized that they’re among the most intelligent of birds. In Sri Lanka,…
COLOMBO — For decades, the small population of Indian pangolins found in Sri Lanka has faced a single consistent threat: the domestic meat market. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy…
COLOMBO — Mahalingam Kanapathi set off from his hometown of Beruwala in southwestern Sri Lanka in May 2021. Less than a month later, and nearly 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away,…
COLOMBO — It took a tweet from Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio to bring the issue of trash-foraging elephants in Sri Lanka to global attention. But local conservationists have long been…
COLOMBO — Lake Diyawanna in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, Sri Lanka’s administrative capital, sits at the heart of an urban wetland that’s a haven for birds and an attraction for nature…
COLOMBO — To study the feeding patterns of frog-biting mosquitoes, scientist Priyanka de Silva of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka had to identify both the mosquitoes and the…
COLOMBO — There was little relief from the scorching sun on the beach, but the volunteers kept at their work, scouring the sand for small plastic pellets known as nurdles.…
COLOMBO — The rich diversity of bulbuls in South Asia can be traced as far as the Sundaland region of Southeast Asia, in the islands that today make up Indonesia…
WASGAMUWA, Sri Lanka — Elephant calves arriving at dusk to drink at the Weheragala reservoir tank in Wasgamuwa National Park can be particularly playful. But one day in September 2020,…
UDAWALAWE, Sri Lanka — Environmental activists in Sri Lanka have slammed a court order releasing endangered elephants into the custody of individuals suspected of involvement in their illegal capture and…
COLOMBO — Himesh Dilruwan Jayasinghe was on a butterfly chase in Sri Lanka’s Knuckles Mountains, in the Indian Ocean island’s central highlands. He’d tracked down a rare butterfly known as…
COLOMBO — The leaf litter and other decaying plant matter that carpet Sri Lanka’s lowland rainforests are potential lurking points for numerous blood-sucking leeches and hideouts of some venomous snakes.…
COLOMBO — In its territorial waters and exclusive economic zone, Sri Lanka is home to an abundance of coastal and marine resources. And while national policies and development visions already…
MANNAR, Sri Lanka — Born in the frozen Arctic tundra, a population of Heuglin’s gull (Larus fuscus heuglini) heads to tropical Sri Lanka every year during the harsh Northern Hemisphere…
NUWARA ELIYA, Sri Lanka — Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its natural significance, the Peak Wilderness rainforest in Sri Lanka’s central highlands is a difficult terrain to explore.…
