Articles by Ryan Truscott

Eight years ago, a research team from the National Museums of Kenya stumbled upon an unfamiliar frog on the eastern flanks of Mount Kenya. The small green toad has now…

The Indigenous residents of the highlands of southeastern Angola have long lived there with a light touch. Ironically, with the end of the country’s civil war and the slow return…

Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains, home to nearly 5,000 different plant species and dozens of amphibians unique to each isolated massif, provide the world with ecosystem services worth more than $8…

Lomwé and Macua communities in Mozambique’s Zambezia province traditionally harvest wild mushrooms to eat alongside staples like cassava. Conservationists are working with hundreds of Indigenous women there to commercialize the…

Conservationists are working to restore Uganda’s threatened Mabira Central Forest Reserve, a refuge for hundreds of species of birds, mammals and plants in the center of the country. In April,…

Conservation groups in Uganda are working to protect Mabira Central Forest Reserve, a 30,000-hectare (74,000-acre) forest in the center of the country, close to Lake Victoria. Mabira is a surviving…

DISANGA, Tanzania — Michele Menegon creeps stealthily through short grass before pouncing. Gently, the scientist holds up his prize: an unnamed species of forest agama. He shows the reptile to…

Tanzanian herpetologist John Lyakurwa was born and raised in a village at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. The chameleons he and his family encountered on their coffee farm sparked his…

Climate change will severely reduce the distribution of a caterpillar that’s harvested, sold and eaten by millions of people across Southern Africa, with some regions projected to lose nearly 100%…

A population of endangered elephant shrews has rebounded in a threatened coastal forest reserve in Kenya, suggesting the rabbit-sized mammals with endearingly long snouts could be adapting to both human…

Afromontane forests occur at high altitudes across Africa. They’re thought to be relics of former glacial periods in Africa. Studying genetic data from birds living in these moist temperate forests,…

A team of international scientists has used a new genetic tool to measure the size of a population of crab-fishing chimpanzees living in a pristine mountain range in Guinea where…

Gorillas and chimpanzees, like humans, have long been known to get infected with malaria. But evidence of the parasite's effects on bonobos, one of humankind's closest genetic relatives, has been…

Michele Menegon and a team of local and international scientists have just described six new species of thumb-sized chameleon in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains. The forest-capped mountains form an inland…

When John Midgley dug a golden brown tarantula out of its burrow in the remote woodlands of southeastern Angola, he felt he had found “one of the most astonishing animals…

Tanzania is Africa's second-biggest producer of honey, and to get it to the next level, the country’s government and aid agencies want beekeepers to adopt hanging-frame beehive designs to increase…

Two African penguin chicks have emerged from their nest beneath a boulder at a site in South Africa where conservationists have used lifelike decoy penguins and broadcast penguin calls to…

It’s a stunning landscape with a prophetic name: Lisima lya mwono, or “the source of life” as it’s known in the language of the local Luchazi people. But that’s not…

Gorillas and chimpanzees living in a remote part of the Congo Basin hang out together and some, like humans, even establish “relationships with benefits,” a new study reveals. Observations of…

Australian firm Invictus plans forest protection projects covering more than 300,000 hectares, or 741,000 acres, of indigenous forest in western Zimbabwe, which the company says will more than offset emissions…

Nearly a decade ago, poachers used cyanide to slaughter more than 135 elephants for their ivory in and around Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park. In the wake of these poisonings, the…

Gunshots, grassland and a tiny population of critically endangered gorillas coexisting with nearby human populations in southwestern Cameroon: a new study analyzes a complex set of factors to help understand…

Four species of critically endangered vulture have returned to a park in southern Malawi from which they disappeared more than 20 years ago, and their comeback is credited to the…

TSHOLOTSHO, Zimbabwe – Two men crouch beside a pile of rhino dung, using their bare hands to break apart the drying lumps to search for the remnants of the animal’s…

Gcina Dlamini blows through a whistle fashioned from a piece of dried fruit in the forest near his home in the town of Lavumisa in Eswatini, the Southern African kingdom…

Eliupendo Laltaika spent much of his childhood in the village of Nainokanoka, in the northern part of Tanzania's Ngorongoro Conservation Area, herding cattle with his older brother. Sometimes they would…

Spotted hyenas appear to be adapting to climate change in Tanzania’s famous Serengeti National Park, surprising researchers who expected changing rainfall patterns would force the carnivores to spend more time…

The export of 22 wild-caught elephants from Namibia to the United Arab Emirates in March has raised concerns over their welfare and stoked criticism of how Namibia manages its wildlife.…

A team of biologists has discovered a nesting stronghold for Africa’s rarest falcon in the granite domes that tower over Mozambique's Niassa Special Reserve. The team surveyed more than 30…

An international conservation group is pushing forward with ambitious plans for extended elephant corridors in Africa that would allow the animals room to move more freely — not just across…