“To leave my dream was difficult, but I had to do it for my son,” says Ileana Herrera, a former ecologist from Venezuela, now living in Ecuador. Herrera, like many…

When Luiz Rocha, a fish biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, goes scuba diving, he tacks on one and a half times his body weight in specialized diving gear.…

Money, it’s said, makes the world go round. The old adage appears to be true in conservation, too: A paper in Nature tracked $14.4 billion spent on conservation programs over…

Children in every corner of the globe can identify an elephant in a wildlife lineup. They are as recognizable as any basic shape and as endearing as any household pet.…

Picture a game of whack-a-mole: a noisy arcade, frustration and elation building as toy moles appear and disappear at random. Now imagine the game is in Brazil, covering 140 square…

Whale sharks don’t need help being spectacular. The world’s biggest fish is impressive in nearly every aspect, growing as long as 12 meters (40 feet) and weighing up to 21…

In many ways, 2018 is the year of the refugee. At U.S. borders, Mediterranean shores and Asian cities, millions are fleeing war, hunger and persecution in search of safety and…

Madagascar is facing an invasion. Not military, but amphibian. Toxic Asian common toads (Duttaphrynus melanostictus) have spread rapidly around the port city of Toamasina on the country’s east coast. The…

Plastic water bottles and snack-food packaging have made their way to the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, drifting to depths of nearly 11,000 meters (36,100 feet), according to a…

Several mines around the world dispose of potentially toxic mine waste directly into the ocean. Environmentalists have criticized the practice, arguing that the waste smothers ocean habitat and leaches harmful…

Organic, Humane, Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Sustainable, Free Range — there are as many food labels today as there are ways to skin a cat. And yet, can we be…

On April 9, suspected members of an armed militia gunned down five wildlife rangers and their driver in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was the…

Lead bullet fragments in animal carcasses left behind by game hunters could be poisoning vultures in Botswana, according to a new study that echoes similar findings from elsewhere around the…

Spiti Valley, located in the remote Trans-Himalayas, is one of the least populated places in India and home to several rare and endangered wild animals. Here, to see wild herbivores…

A photographer and I have been walking for an hour through Zuid-Kennemerland National Park, which is sandwiched between the North Sea and the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. You’re…

It may seem like yet another set of picture-perfect tropical islands: high cliffs and modest hills rolling into the brilliant blue Atlantic Ocean. Scrubby bushes and small rocks dominate the…

In 1987, Asad Rahmani, ornithologist and the former director of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), wrote in the journal Oryx that the greatest threat to the great Indian bustard…

A new study in Environmental Research Letters shows that applying a theoretic carbon tax — one aimed at stimulating changes to farming and land-use practices that minimize emissions —could have…

Type “climate change” into any search engine and the results aren’t difficult to predict: you’ll probably see a woeful polar bear on a shrinking patch of ice. Either that or…

Every Antarctic summer between December and January, a group of biologists heads out into the vast wilderness. They do not look for the giant whales or the emperor penguins that…