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 — A year since the sinking of the cargo ship the X-Press Pearl, Sri Lanka continues to clean its beaches of the plastic pellets that the vessel was carrying,…
COLOMBO — They’ve been called, erroneously, wasps and hornets, but the aggression is undeniable. The giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) of Sigiriya, an ancient rock fortress in central Sri Lanka that’s…
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 — The Knuckles mountain range in central Sri Lanka is a UNESCO-declared World Heritage Site that’s home to a rich diversity of wildflowers. Among them are plants in the…
COLOMBO — When a study published in January flagged the risks to Himalayan forests from excessive atmospheric nitrogen pollution, it relied on an often-overlooked member of the ecosystem to assess…
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 — 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…
Inside an opulent shopping mall in the Thai capital Bangkok, a casually clad man meets a potential customer. They discuss how to bring live tortoises into the country to sell…
COLOMBO — Travel bloggers and butterfly enthusiasts Paulmathi Vinod and Vinod Sadasivan were at Dhanushkodi Beach in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state for some bird-watching on Feb. 14. It hadn’t…
MANNAR, Sri Lanka — With reddish-pink, brushstroke-like smudges on its wings, legs and large downward-curved beak, the greater flamingo is a stunning bird to watch, particularly in flight as part…
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/MANDAPAM — It was a calm October night over Sri Lanka’s northern seas, the silence broken only by the sound of a rapidly approaching motorboat from India. In Kalpitiya, a…
COLOMBO — The recent killing of a fisherman by a crocodile off the coast of the Sri Lankan capital has shone a spotlight on the city’s long-overlooked crocs — and…
COLOMBO — At his home in Thimbirigasyaya, a highly residential area in the heart of Sri Lanka’s commercial capital Colombo, Eshan Witana keeps expensive Japanese koi fish, a species of…
COLOMBO — With two large eyes on a flat rectangular face, and six more eyes around the head, jumping spiders from the Salticidae family can look a bit alien, even…
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.…
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.…
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sunitha Rathnayake, a homemaker in southern Sri Lanka, was down to the last of her salt and planned to order some more from an online grocery…
MATARA, Sri Lanka — The Polhena reef and the surrounding shallow seas in southern Sri Lanka are home to a number of marine turtles that stay there year round. Randunu…
GALLE, Sri Lanka — Buses are the most common mode of public transport in Sri Lanka. But after thousands of trips, facilitating millions of commuter rides over their operating lifetime,…