On the northern tip of Madagascar, scientists have described eight new-to-science species of geckos, all about the length of your thumb. For decades, scientists have studied the Lygodactylus madagascariensis species…
STUNG TRENG, Cambodia — A long-dormant plan to build a mega dam on the mainstream of the Mekong River in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province appears to have been revived…
Giant tortoises (Chelonoidis spp.) have trundled across the Galápagos Islands for perhaps 3 million years. Over that time, they’ve evolved to survive with little food or water in the islands’…
DENPASAR, Indonesia — People in Sibetan village got used to wearing face masks before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Bali’s tourism industry for two years and killed more than 4,000…
In 2021, faced with an economy battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the island nation of Maldives considered lifting a ban on shark fishing that had been in place since 2010.…
MEDAN, Indonesia — On a recent morning in Kampung Nelayan, a village on the northeastern coast of the island of Sumatra, fisherman Heri Gunawan returned home frustrated and dissatisfied. Heri…
For years, seabird ecologist Jennifer Lavers longed to survey the colonies of short-tailed shearwaters on Figure of Eight Island off the coast of Western Australia. She’d identified this remote island…
At 49, Hamid Ali has moved house at least eight times in his life. The reason each time has been the same: the erosion of the char lands, or river…
A previously unknown genus of primitive giant kangaroo that once roamed the rainforests of New Guinea has been described by a team of paleontologists from Flinders University in Australia. The…
For decades, the nomadic Bajo people have crisscrossed the seas of Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. But due to pollution, climate change, overfishing and other harmful practices, their way of…
LISBON — Should we mine the seabed, a part of the world rich in resources, but less mapped than the surface of the moon? A growing number of politicians, scientists…
JAKARTA — Decades of unsustainable marine governance in Indonesia have benefited extractive land-based economic activities, costing the environment and marginalized communities whose livelihoods depend on the ecosystem, a new paper…
In northern Indonesia dwells a shy and overlooked species: the Talaud bear cuscus. Critically endangered and found on only a few small islands, the marsupial faces a decline due to…
GORO, New Caledonia – Known widely as the “Madagascar of the Pacific,” New Caledonia is coated in remnant Gondwana rainforest and surrounded by reefs rich in marine life that constitute one…
GORO, New Caledonia — On the south side of Grand Terre, the largest and principal island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific, mountains rise like a spine out of a…
The Sepik River takes an unhurried 1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles, to snake from the lush highland rainforests of western Papua New Guinea, swerving momentarily across the border into Indonesia’s…
In an ideal world, perhaps we can learn how to live in coastal areas while coping with climate change and perhaps even pursue cutting-edge technologies in tandem with innovative island…
Before the inhabitants of Itsamia in Comoros decided to intervene, turtles arriving to nest on its beaches drew villagers from neighboring hamlets. Anywhere from 10 to 30 green sea turtles…
On a breezeless, sunbaked beach in Borneo, one of the biggest challenges paleobotanist Peter Wilf faced in his team’s hunt for plant fossils was getting used to a new set…
In the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean lies a remote tropical island known as Saint Helena. It is a United Kingdom territory that is 1,200 miles (1,950 km) west…
In some respects, it was expected. The same doomsday scenarios. The same periodic reminders of more horror to come. The same organization of working groups. The same approach grounded in…
PEKANBARU, Indonesia — Fishers in Indonesia’s Riau province have petitioned President Joko Widodo to end offshore dredging operations that they say threaten their livelihoods and the marine ecosystem. The letter,…
In February 2020, lightning struck Figure of Eight Island in Western Australia’s Recherche Archipelago, igniting a fire that burned through most of its vegetation in just a few days. While…
Conservation biologist Estrela Matilde has won the 2022 Whitley Award for her work to save sea turtles on the island of Príncipe in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea. The awards, often…
The Ambatovy nickel mine located in a biodiversity-rich Madagascar rainforest made up for the forest lost due to its operation, a recent study in Nature Sustainability concluded. The mine operators…
It might be surprising to learn that, in a lake as large as Victoria, a single fish could shape so much of East Africa’s history, culture and, now, an uncertain…
There’s no one way to describe Noah Idechong. Born in the small Pacific island country of Palau, Idechong has donned different hats over the past 40 years. He’s been a…
JAKARTA — A court in Jakarta has rejected a lawsuit by a remote island community against a gold-mining operation that overlaps onto their villages, in a ruling deemed “problematic” by…
The Mediterranean is a cradle — of civilization, of agriculture, of history. But the region, stretching across southern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, is also a…
Gomon. In Seychellois Creole, this has generally been the word to refer to anything “green and slimy,” says biologist and marine turtle expert Jeanne Mortimer. “You have gomon in the…
