Lula's administration is weighing the renewal of Belo Monte hydroelectric plant's license, a dam blamed for taking away the livelihoods of riverine communities and causing socio-environmental chaos - built by Lula's party.
Sometimes, our current mass extinction crisis can be represented by the loss of a single individual. On April 21, locals spotted a 93-kilogram (205-pound) body in the waters of Dong…
KATHMANDU — In 2002, the black softshell turtle was declared extinct in the wild — not a difficult assessment to make, given that, back then, the only known population of…
KATHMANDU — When conservationist Bed Bahadur Khadka roamed the banks of the Rapti River near Chitwan National Park to monitor gharials released from a breeding center in August 2020, he…
MANILA — The Philippines’ most traded turtle species, and among the world’s rarest, received a bit of a population boost as researchers introduced two juveniles in the wilds of the…
IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, has reversed itself, allowing Norte Energia, operator of the mega-dam, to divert water flow to turbines, potentially wrecking the river’s Big Bend Indigenous and traditional fishery.
A plan by Brazil’s Norte Energia, builder and operator of the Belo Monte mega-dam, to drastically reduce Xingu River water flows will be a disaster for habitat, fish, fisheries, and riverine communities, experts say.
Once considered extinct, the Burmese roofed turtle (Batagur trivittata) was brought back from the brink by an ambitious conservation program. Now, almost 30 years after its rediscovery in the wild,…
While MRN, a mining firm makes big profits working within, and harming, a Brazilian conservation unit, traditional people can be fined for collecting Brazil nuts and fishing sustainably in a nearby protected area.
Turtles and tortoises in trouble On the island of Madagascar, locked gates, razor-wire fences, and 24-hour armed guards protect one of the world’s rarest treasures. That treasure, worth roughly $50,000…
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.
Eighty-eight-year-old Le Huy Hoanh stands up from his bench and carefully poured tea in rural Vietnam, and mimes for us how he used to kill gods. With his long spear…
This is the second article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One. TELOK SERABANG, Malaysia — At the westernmost tip of Borneo sits a dense…
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…
A puzzling disease lurks among western pond turtles, one of only two native freshwater turtle species that live in the state of Washington in the U.S. The disease produces deep…
When Cu Rua, an old Yangtze giant softshell turtle, died in Vietnam in 2016, he left behind only three of his kind: an elderly pair in a Chinese zoo, and…
JAKARTA — The sale of some of the most threatened tortoise and turtle species from around the world continues to flourish at stores and exhibitions across Jakarta, highlighting longstanding concerns…
Madagascar is known as an ark for biodiversity that's found nowhere else on the planet. Unfortunately, it's also known for the bevy of threats that those distinctive species that live…
Beneath their prehistoric-looking shells, turtles conceal an extraordinary ability to hold their breath underwater, going without oxygen for hours, even months, at a time. This cellular-level capacity to survive underwater…
ven before the controversial Belo Monte hydroelectric power station — the third largest in the world — began operation in April of this year, the harm the project was doing…
or as long as people have lived in the Amazon, turtles have likely been on the menu. But what was once low-impact subsistence hunting escalated dramatically after the arrival of…
For one Asian giant softshell turtle, a single person's kindness meant the difference between life and death-as-soup. In July, Serene Voo Nyuk Wei stumbled on a 15 kilogram (33 pound)…