While we fumble and crash without any light, bats zipping away in the dark, effortlessly skirting obstacles and pouncing on prey, seem magical. To better understand this ability of bats…
Many hundreds of years ago, the first Polynesian boats arrived on the shores of what is now known as New Zealand. In the vast blue of the Pacific Ocean, the…
Weeks after the deadly cyclone Idai tore through Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the human toll is still being tallied. Entire communities remain submerged, more than a thousand people lost their…
Ritidian, a cliff-top refuge on the island of Guam, is one of the last places in the Pacific where you can find the mossy pillars and plunging crevices of a…
The ‘landscape of fear’ is not a new term among biologists. From the now-iconic study of how elk and bison gradually adjusted their vigilance levels after wolves were reintroduced into…
All you need to find out how many dung beetles survive in a damaged rainforest is a plastic cup, a length of string, a plate, a piece of muslin ……
To many in North America, the sound of birds among the early spring trees is the sound of renewal: after a long, cold winter, the colorful warblers and vocal thrushes…
Gliding over the moors of England in search of prey, the hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) may never have suspected it would itself fall prey to a greater predator—man. Scientists have…
On Dec. 17, 2010, a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor named Tarek el-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his produce. This act kicked off protests…
In 1975, famed explorer and conservationist Jacques Cousteau traveled aboard his boat, the Calypso, in hopes of documenting one of nature’s most impressive underwater gatherings: the spawning of the Nassau…
In a remote spot in the South Atlantic, roughly 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the coast of West Africa, lies Ascension Island, one of the U.K.’s Overseas Territories. In January…
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, triggering the First World War, Granny was out under the sea half a world away, catching salmon and communicating with her pod…
The waters of the eastern Baltic Sea around Finland are home to the flounder, a flatfish with both its eyes on one side of the head that uses its camouflage…
In April 2015, researchers headed out to the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean to service acoustic receivers they had dotted around the archipelago, and to download tag data from…
The big cats of Java haven’t had it easy. First to vanish was the Sunda clouded leopard, a small species that today survives only on Borneo and Sumatra. Next to…
Attitudes toward grasshoppers and other leggy insects were immortalized in popular culture with Disney Pixar’s 1998 animated hit “A Bug’s Life.” “They come, they eat, they leave,” a main character…
Imagine traipsing through a forest, growing thirsty, and stumbling on a small pool of water in the knot of a log. How would you drink it? If you had a…
The bill to train two dogs to guard a penguin colony: $18,000. Set up camera traps in one of the world’s most remote, understudied rainforests in New Guinea: $16,000. Build…
Central America is home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, with its rich savannas, tropical forests and coastal dunes hosting a bounty of flora and fauna.…
“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…