Opening doors may not seem that hard, but when you have a trunk instead of hands, things can get complicated. Researchers tested the problem-solving skills of wild elephants for the…
Chimpanzees tend to sleep more on the ground than previously thought, a behavior that has implications for their conservation and could help explain how and when early humans abandoned trees…
“Deep inside the skull of every one of us there is something like a brain of a crocodile” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos. In science, reptiles have been considered to be…
Electric wire fences set up to keep marauding elephants out of farms and villages in Indonesia’s Aceh province worked well — at least at first. When the elephants realized the…
In her new book, Karen Bakker relates a story from Brazilian researcher Rafael José de Menezes Bastos that crystallizes how differently some humans process and respond to the sounds around…
Bonobos, sometimes referred to as the "hippies" of the ape kingdom, have long been known for their relatively peaceful relations within core family groups. But there’s been less consensus about…
"Nature, red in tooth and claw.” According to Alfred Tennyson's poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” that line describes "Creation's final law." Scholars say it captures the sometimes ruthless nature of ……
There are moments in researchers’ lives when they realize the significance of something they hadn’t paid much thought to in the past. For primatologist Catherine Hobaiter and her team, one…
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…
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…
In 2019, researchers sailed to a sprawling seamount off the coast of South Africa, and lowered hydrophones to the seafloor. They picked up all kinds of noises: waves, the crackling of…
When Alessandra Mascaro first recorded a video of a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) catching something in the air, putting it in its mouth, and then putting it on the wound…
The earliest reports of nutcracking behavior in chimpanzees by Western scientists came in the 1840s. In the time since, evidence of animals modifying something in their environment and then using…
On the title page of Hidden: Animals in the Anthropocene is a black-and-white portrait of a lamb. The little animal, probably only a few weeks old, stands alone on the…
Many of us love animals. At least, we think we do. We may serve our cats gourmet food and let them sleep in our beds. We may buy our dogs…
Female putty-nosed monkeys know what to do when they detect a leopard. They chirp out an alarm call to the males, essentially recruiting them to be their “hired guns.” In…
Shoes, watches, wallets and bags — anything made from exotic reptile skins — were plucked from the shelves in Selfridges, a high-end department store in the U.K., in February 2019.…
Nahoko Tokuyama says she couldn’t believe what she was seeing when she noticed the wild bonobo with an unknown infant on her back in the Luo Scientific Reserve in the…
It looked like a game of parrot poker, but the token exchange counter set up by European researchers at a Spanish zoo was an experiment to determine if African grey…
Scientists have discovered a new chimpanzee “behavioral realm” in the Bili-Uéré region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). A research team led by Thurston C. Hicks of the Max…
There’s a chimpanzee population in Western Africa that uses tools to crack open nuts. Scientists theorize that this behavior provides the chimps with access to an important source of food…
Chimps have been taught to sound an alarm when poachers approach; polar bears and condors have been trained to avoid towns; and even butterflies can learn new tricks.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with the co-author of a new book about the minds and lives of animals — their memories, how we know that…
On today’s episode, we speak with the legendary Jane Goodall, who truly needs no introduction, and will have a direct report from the United Nations’ climate talks happening now in…
Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…
There are only a handful of bird species known to use tools for foraging in the wild, and now the ‘Alalā, or Hawaiian crow, can be counted as one of…
The Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) is responsible for depletion of 40 percent of the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef over the last 30 years, and currently can only…
When I was ten, I acquired my first dog. Rani was a Doberman Pinscher—tall, lean, and a huge pushover. She was wonderfully friendly, but sadly misunderstood her whole life, regularly…
For the first time, researchers have observed an adult marmoset comforting a dying adult family member, behavior that was previously thought to be unique only to humans and chimpanzees. Researchers…
Lioness feeding. Photo by: Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson. In the new book, In Predatory Light: Lions and Tigers and Polar Bears, authors Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Sy Montgomery, and John…
