Western chimpanzees are the most threatened of the four confirmed chimpanzee subspecies. Conservationists estimate that populations of the western chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes versus) declined by 80% between 1990 and 2014.…
Human actions have pushed 13 more lemur species, the iconic primates native to Madagascar, to the brink of extinction, according to an update to the list of the world’s threatened…
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — This spring, Madagascar lost a prominent champion of the country’s system of protected areas. Guy Suzon Ramangason, a former director-general of Madagascar National Parks (MNP), the quasi-governmental…
Authorities in Madagascar have arrested three poachers carrying 144 radiated tortoises, the largest known seizure of its kind in almost two years in the country. They recovered the tortoises, which…
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we take a look at the state of the debate over trophy hunting five years after the killing of Cecil the Lion sparked…
The World Bank’s private investment arm has channeled more than $1.8 billion into major livestock and factory farming operations across the world over the past decade, despite calls for the…
Fatu doesn’t seem to care about the carrot she’s been offered by her caretaker. She raises her enormous head and gives it a sniff before returning to what she was…
On May 15, authorities in the northeastern province of Si Sa Ket in Thailand arrested two Cambodians and six Thai workers for illegally removing a large Siamese rosewood tree from…
When conservationists set up treetop cameras in Côte d’Ivoire’s Tanoé-Ehy forest, they hoped to get video of the elusive Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus waldroni), a critically endangered species…
Nearly 400 elephants have died in Botswana's Okavango Delta since March, in what wildlife experts say is one of the largest elephant mortality events ever recorded. Conservationists have criticized the…
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — Four kilometers (2.5 miles) from downtown Antananarivo, Tsarasaotra Park has long been an oasis of calm in Madagascar’s capital city. It is the first private site to…
SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the largest species of hyena in the…
MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…
Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…
The barbed terrain forged by the tsingy topography in western Madagascar has, for millions of years, sheltered the dry forests that grow between the limestone spires. This year, even before the fire…
Tropical rainforests have an outsized role in the world. Of the Earth’s ecosystems, rainforests support the largest variety of plants and animal species, house the majority of indigenous groups still…
Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka first saw Rafiki in 2001 while conducting research for her master’s degree in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda. At that time, Rafiki, a mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei…
Eating crops is a risky business for chimpanzees, who run the risk of injury or death if they are caught by farmers protecting their livelihoods. But new research shows that…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the largest ruminant in the world: the…
With just over 1,200 cases and ten deaths, it may appear that Madagascar has been spared the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. But in the deep south of the country,…
CAPE TOWN — South Africa’s great white shark population has been the subject of international scrutiny since 2017, when cage-diving operators reported a sudden, sharp decline in sightings around False…
Primary forests in the tropics are declining at an accelerating rate according to analysis of satellite data released last week by the University of Maryland (UMD) and World Resources Institute…
Madagascar is often called the “red island” because of its iron-rich soils. In school, Malagasy children are taught that their island was green until human beings destroyed most of the…
In January 2017, researchers noticed two ill chimpanzees in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire. The baby and adolescent West African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) were coughing, breathing hard, and…
Scientists, agricultural officers and farmers are struggling to protect crops from a fresh wave of desert locusts. Earlier swarms overran the Horn of Africa region in December 2019, and the…
Between 2002 and 2005, a series of Ebola outbreaks spread through the forests of northwest Republic of Congo. Dozens of people died. For the region’s western lowland gorilla (Gorilla gorilla…
A newly identified subspecies of diademed monkey in Tanzania faces an uncertain future due to growing threats to forest habitat in the region, primatologists have warned. The Manyara monkey (Cercopithecus…
Dean Cycon spoke recently to students at Harvard Business School. A student asked him what his profit margin was at Dean’s Beans Organic Coffee, a company he founded in 1993…
Scraping sounds fill the nights at Mapungubwe, a national park at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe rivers, where the borders of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa meet. Families…
