Several years ago, my colleague Richard York and I were sitting outside on a Eugene, Oregon patio discussing Elizabeth Kolbert’s then-new book, The Sixth Extinction, and we came to an…
You probably use it every day and don’t think once about gorillas. In today’s world, it’s almost impossible to get by without a mobile phone, but they’re wreaking havoc for…
The Apostle Islands, dotting Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, U.S., are home to at least 12 species of carnivores, a new study has found. These include the American marten (Martes…
Two Asiatic black bear cubs have been rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam. Vietnamese authorities confiscated the two female bear cubs from wildlife smugglers in Hai Phong province…
Chinese authorities have nabbed all three identified members of a major ivory trafficking syndicate first exposed by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) in 2017. In its 2017 report, EIA had…
“It was very peculiar,” says Anne Russon, a primatologist and psychology professor from York University, Toronto, recalling her 2010 study of orangutans in Indonesia's Kutai National Park. Having previously worked…
Forty thousand years ago — 28,000 years before the Neolithic Revolution saw hunter-gatherers settle down and farm, 36,000 before the first pyramids took shape, and 39,000 before the Norman conquest…
Social anthropologist Liana Chua leads a project, POKOK, that aims to reduce the killing of orangutans in Indonesian Borneo through deeper engagement with local people. The project came about as…
The recent plunge in numbers of Grauer's gorillas in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has lopped off one-fifth of the subspecies’ genetic diversity, leaving it potentially vulnerable to…
Entebbe, Uganda — At the Uganda Wildlife Conservation Education Center in Entebbe, a steady stream of school buses drops off hundreds of children from across eastern Uganda. The center, located…
Pulsating lights placed around llama and alpaca herds warded off puma attacks during a recent experiment in Chile, suggesting the method might help avert conflict between herders and dwindling populations…
There’s a lot to listen for in a tropical forest. There’s the sound of life: the howls, the hoots, the croaks. There’s the sound of loss: the buzz of chainsaws,…
Vietnam’s illegal ivory markets are still thriving, according to a new report by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network. Over two surveys conducted between November 2016 and June 2017, TRAFFIC’s…
December 1978 A year into an 18-month research project on the critically endangered mountain gorilla in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, newlywed graduate students from the…
JAKARTA — A devastating tsunami that killed more than 400 people in Indonesia has left the last surviving population of Javan rhinos unscathed — but has highlighted once again the…
Read the other stories in this four-part series on the indigenous groups living around Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh, India: From a new bird to a new community reserve:…
The government of Japan confirmed today that it is withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and will resume commercial whaling operations in the North Pacific. The IWC, an inter-governmental…
Once again this year, researchers described several new species of animals and plants after months, or even several years, of trials and tribulations. Some were tiny, like the Japan pig,…
The white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), a hairy, pig-like mammal that once lived throughout the forests of Central and South America, now only skitters around in 13 percent of its former…
In 1982, an orangutan researcher working in Indonesian Borneo wrote to a colleague at the biology department at the National University in Jakarta. He told of meeting a traditional-medicine trader…
