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…
For years, there have been stories and photographs of “odd-looking” killer whales lurking in some of the roughest parts of the sub-Antarctic seas. They’ve been spotted by fishermen on passing…
There’s a chimpanzee population in Western Africa that uses tools to crack open nuts. Scientists theorize that this behavior provides the chimps with access to an important source of food…
My organization, the Elephant Action League (EAL), spent 14 months investigating and infiltrating the illicit totoaba swim bladder supply chain, from Baja California in Mexico to Southern China. We released…
Blue whales in the northern Pacific Ocean use their memories to guide them to the best feeding spots, instead of seeking out the locations of shorter-term surges in prey, a…
Researchers who examined 50 marine mammals that had washed up on Britain’s shores say they found microplastics in the guts of every single animal. In a paper published in the…
On today’s episode, we talk with Mongabay contributor Martha Pskowski, who recently traveled to central Mexico to report on threats to monarch butterflies in their overwintering grounds. Listen here: …
For thousands of years, people of the Lummi Nation in Washington state have treasured their deep connection to the orca pods that populate the waters of the Salish Sea. It’s…
New research published in the journal PLoS ONE this month finds that the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) is effectively aiding in the recovery of beleaguered populations of marine mammals…
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…
1. The race is on to map the seafloor Is it true that we have explored the moon and Mars more thoroughly than the bottom of the ocean? Embarrassingly, yes.…
The number of whales ensnared in fishing nets and other debris in U.S. waters didn’t change much between 2016 and 2017, according to a report by the National Oceanic and…
The Trump Administration announced today that it will issue five Incidental Harassment Authorizations (IHAs) for airgun blasting off the Atlantic coast. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated:…
Scientists have mapped whale stress levels in relation to human activity going back nearly a century and a half — using earwax collected from baleen whales. From 1870 to 2016,…
On October 14, the crew of a US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship called the Henry B. Bigelow reported a whale carcass floating about 100 miles east of…
An international team of scientists has developed a method to assess the detection area of acoustic monitoring devices. These instruments, which can record the calls and other sounds of animals…
Noise from ships changes the way that whales and dolphins communicate with each other, according to two studies published this week. Marine biologists know that an increasingly cacophonous ocean, filled…
Earlier this year, Mongabay reported that there might be as few as 12 vaquita left in the world, down from 30 in 2017. The vaquita population has been driven to…
This is the second story in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Kawawana ICCA. Read the others: Senegal: After reviving fish and forests, Jola villages tackle new threats Women’s work in…
This is the main story in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Kawawana ICCA. Read the others: Watching the wildlife return: Q&A with a rural Senegalese river monitor Women’s work in…
Dead whales are a nutritional boon for polar bears, and they’ve likely helped bears survive lean periods during warm spells in the past when much of the Arctic was ice-free.…
Entanglement in fishing gear has claimed the life of a second North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) in 2018, according to reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).…
A few decades ago, most countries phased out the manufacture and use of a highly toxic group of industrial chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. But the dangers of these…
For 19th-century adventurers like Sir John Franklin, navigating a path through the ice-choked Northwest Passage — the Holy Grail of Arctic exploration — was a treacherous and often deadly undertaking.…
JAKARTA — Dolphins haven’t had it easy in Bali, a resort island in Indonesia that’s massively popular with tourists. They’re often held captive in chlorinated pools for traveling circuses; a…
KUCHING, Malaysia — Conservationists have called on governments and the private sector to do more to mitigate the impact of global shipping activities on marine ecosystems and communities in the…
TOULOUSE, France — Solving the problem of the growing amount of plastic in the ocean requires rethinking how we use and design plastic products, a group of scientists said at…
On this episode of the podcast we discuss the increasing use of drones by wildlife lovers, researchers, and businesses, how that might be stressing animals out, and how drone hobbyists…
A new investigation sheds light on an illegal trade that endangers the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean species, the vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus). The report released July 7 by…
An increasingly ice-free Arctic could test the adaptability of marine mammals, a new study has found, as hundreds of ships in recent years have used the newly open polar seas…
