It took several days of observation before researchers and local fishermen found the best way to catch the Amazon river dolphins they were studying in the largest lake in the…
READER ADVISORY: This story contains images of dead wildlife that some viewers may find disturbing. Monday, March 20. That’s a date French marine conservation groups will remember. Fishers, too. France’s…
Paul Van Damme and Fortuna Vargas Mejía met 28 years ago in Puerto Villarroel, a village in the Bolivian department of Cochabamba. Van Damme was a Belgian marine biologist who…
The potentially imminent start of deep-sea mining in international waters could impact whales, dolphins and porpoises, particularly in terms of noise pollution, according to experts who say there needs to…
The indiscriminate use of gillnets by fishers in Bangladesh has become a major threat to the two freshwater dolphin species found there: the Ganga River dolphin (Platanista gangetica) and the…
JAKARTA — One of the most threatened population of Irrawaddy dolphins in Asia is set to get a much-needed reprieve as officials in Indonesia roll out a ban on unsustainable…
READER ADVISORY: This story contains images of dead cetaceans that some viewers may find disturbing. On May 9, Bogdan Bulete, regional head ranger at the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve in…
Today we’re looking at two stories that show how bioacoustics research is helping us better understand the lives of marine mammals — and we take a listen to some of…
Generally, the word pollution conjures images of billowing smokestacks, oily water and trash-filled highway medians. But for whales, dolphins and porpoises, a subtler and perhaps more sinister source of pollution…
Known only by his identity code, ID#35 was the last individual of a doomed subpopulation of freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris). He was the sole occupant of a deep pool…
JAKARTA — Conservationists in Indonesia are pushing for the establishment of a protected area along a stretch of Borneo’s Mahakam River to save the remaining population of the nearly extinct…
The last 80 Irrawaddy dolphins that inhabit the Mahakam River in Indonesian Borneo lead precarious lives. Their forays to find fish are frequently thwarted, sometimes fatally so, by a series…
Croatia’s Lošinj archipelago is home to a large resident population of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), which suffered a decline between 1995 and 2003. Driving the drop, among other factors, is…
The recent killing of 1,428 white dolphins in the Faroe Islands has brought renewed scrutiny to the island nation’s long-held tradition of driving cetaceans into shore and butchering them for…
A few months after the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 began to pop up in the U.S., a piece of news came out of the Bronx Zoo in New York…
Amid the steaming swamps adjoining Borneo’s Mahakam River, a fisherman slows his boat to glide gently across the surface of Lake Melintang. He senses something amiss up ahead. A critically…
Thousands of people demonstrated in Mauritius on Aug. 29 over the government's handling of a recent ship grounding that spilled 1,000 tons oil in the seas around the island nation.…
On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we’re taking a look at two examples of how bioacoustics studies have allowed us to discover things we never knew before about marine…
In the early 1990s, whale watching opportunities in Sri Lanka were few and far between as both opportunity and access were rare. Whale watching requires both whales and whale watchers,…
A planned industrial shipping channel would destroy vital fish habitat at the Lourencão Rocks on the Tocantins River in the Brazilian Amazon, while also likely wrecking traditional fishing livelihoods.
A lapsed moratorium protecting the Amazon river dolphin is up for renewal, but the Bolsonaro administration has delayed acting, even as scientists warn it could mean the freshwater mammal’s extinction.
It was one of the worst environmental disasters the world has witnessed. Ten years ago, on April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig exploded, killing 11 people and…
COLOMBO — For Nilantha Kodithuwakku, a naturalist involved in whale and dolphin-watching operations, it’s always a spectacular scene to witness pods of playful dolphins jumping and spinning in the air.…
MANILA — Sightings of dolphins and whales in a Philippine strait long considered an important waterway for the marine mammals have plummeted over the past two decades, with human activity…
This is our last episode of 2019, so we took a look back at the bioacoustic recordings we featured here on the Mongabay Newscast over the past year and today…
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…
Canada has made it illegal to catch and hold whales, dolphins and porpoises in captivity. On June 10, Canada’s House of Commons passed Bill S-203, or the Ending the Captivity…
On today’s episode, we speak with Gabriel Melo-Santos, whose study of Araguaian river dolphins in Brazil has revealed that the species is chattier than we’d previously known — and could…
The Araguaian river dolphin was just discovered and described to science in 2014, so it’s no surprise that there’s a lot we don’t know about the cetacean native to the…
On today’s episode, we speak with marine biologist Isha Bopardikar, an independent researcher who is using bioacoustics to study humpback dolphins off the west coast of India. Listen here: …
