While out on routine coastal surveys this past summer, a group of researchers noticed something odd. There were huge clusters of small, black mussels clinging on to wood stumps, plastic…
India’s Ganga is a noisy river. There’s the churning of sediment, the hums, grunts and growls of fishes and turtles. There are the cacophonous stretches of cities and industries breathing…
Pygmy seahorses are fascinating animals. These tiny, colorful seahorses measure less than an inch (2.7 centimeters) and match their body colors and textures to those of the vibrant corals they…
Giraffes have many problems to deal with. There’s habitat loss and poaching. Then there’s a mysterious skin disease that’s been recorded in 13 giraffe populations in seven African countries. The…
You know a giraffe when you see one. But where in Africa can you see one? Unlike lions and rhinos, the world’s tallest animal is grossly understudied, with very little…
The Okapi Wildlife Reserve in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), created to protect the secretive okapi (Okapia johnstoni), will now be run under a new management partnership agreement between…
We’ve all had duds. We’ve worked on projects far longer than we would have liked to and failed. We’ve agonized over missteps. We’ve learned from roadblocks — sometimes we’ve not.…
The fires ravaging the Amazon forest in Brazil and Bolivia this year have burned key habitats of at least 500 adult, resident jaguars as of Sept. 17, rendering them dead…
The plant Roussea simplex, usually referred to by its scientific name, is one of a kind. It grows only in the mountains of the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius; it’s…
One of the world’s rarest bats, the Cuban greater funnel-eared bat, is known from just a single remote cave in the island’s west. The bat was in fact thought to…
From an area of southern Amazonia, where forests are rapidly being cut for gold mining, agriculture, cattle pastures, and construction of dams, researchers have described a species of marmoset that’s…
In June this year, researchers surveying a remote part of the Russian Far East finally managed to find what they had been looking for: a Nordmann’s greenshank sitting on a…
Look around, and you’ll see examples of how we’ve modified our planet’s land surface: roads, buildings, farms, plantations. But is the widespread human impact on Earth a modern occurrence? No,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The case of the river tern is a curious one. The medium-sized gray bird with a forked tail, a black cap and a white belly is quite common along rivers…
For more than 200 years, naturalists, adventurers, explorers and plant hunters have navigated the Earth, documenting the planet’s rich, unique plant life in journal pages, books and herbaria. From hard…
