Articles by Shreya Dasgupta

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…

From rays to deep-sea snails, primates to rosewood trees, the latest IUCN Red List update paints a gloomy picture for our world’s species. The update, which includes assessments of 105,732…

An iconic yet critically endangered species of lemur living in heavily degraded forests in Madagascar appears to be in poor health, a recent study has found. The study’s lead author,…

In November 2017, Joice Ruggeri and her colleagues came upon a pond with several dead tadpoles and a few dead fish in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in…

It was a chance encounter. But it turned Bunty Tao's life around. In mid-June, a group of boys were heading back from a fishing trip to a forest near the…

The great Indian bustard has been in deep trouble for a while. Once found across India’s grasslands and dry landscapes, the critically endangered bird is now down to just 160-odd…

In a boost to jaguars and other iconic wildlife of Central America, the government of Belize has approved a proposal to protect the Maya Forest Corridor, a key stretch of…

When Sahil Nijhawan and his colleagues placed cameras across the Dibang Valley in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh in 2014 and 2015, they hoped to learn about the…

In 2010, the Board of the Consumer Goods Forum (CGF), an organization comprised of around 400 of the world’s retail and manufacturing companies, passed a resolution to achieve zero net…

The largetooth sawfish, a large ray with a chainsaw-like nose extension, is among the largest fish in the world, growing more than 6.5 meters (20 feet) in length. This majestic…

How many ships and boats ply the world’s oceans for seafood today? Researchers have a new estimate: where there were about 1.7 million boats harvesting fish in 1950, the number…

Underneath the ground, hidden from view, there’s a massive network of fungi and bacteria hard at work in close partnership with tree roots. In exchange for food from the trees,…

Thanks to human actions, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are soaring. But plants are thankfully removing some of that greenhouse gas. In fact, the amount of atmospheric carbon that…

During a routine shark survey in the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2010, ecologist Marcus Drymon caught a small tiger shark. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about it.…

Sometimes looking for rare plants can mean taking extreme steps. And for decades, botanists at the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), a nonprofit based on the island of Kauaʻi in…

When Rohan Pandit and Wangchu Phiang accidentally stumbled upon a brown snake on a steep slope of a forest in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in India, little did…

The ocean is increasingly becoming too hot to handle. And coral reefs are suffering as a result. Above-normal sea surface temperatures due to human-induced climate change are creating conditions that…

In the East African savanna landscape, hippos and their poop play a critical role. By chomping on large amounts of silica-rich grass at night, then defecating into the Mara River…