In the months leading up to Sri Lanka’s presidential election in November 2019, leading candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa spoke about the need for leaders to implement policies without arguing about the…
COLOMBO — During the 18th and 19th centuries when Sri Lanka was a British colony, many British naturalists studied the island’s rich biodiversity and contributed to profiling the same. Tea…
Colombo, SRI LANKA — Like floating mushrooms with thin and transparent tentacles, jellyfish would have been drifting in the oceanic currents for several millions of years and even predating the…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has received $2.5 million in the third interim payment for the impacts caused by the sinking of the X-Press Pearl cargo vessel off the country’s western…
COLOMBO — Look past the venomous vipers and cobras and the powerful constrictors. Dig a little deeper — literally, into the soil — and you might find one of the…
COLOMBO — Anyone who’d ever seen Maheshakya in the wildernesses of Kebithigollewa in Sri Lanka’s North Central province agreed that, as elephants went, he was an exemplary specimen with large…
Since the downfall of Sri Lanka’s former president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in mid-July, some commentators have blamed the economic crisis and social unrest that precipitated his departure on his nominal experiment…
JAKARTA — Seagrass meadows are the fishing grounds of choice for many households in four Indo-Pacific countries, according to a new study that calls for better-informed management of these often-overlooked…
COLOMBO — When Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced from office this month, among those leading the people power movement against Sri Lanka’s deeply unpopular president were the country’s environmental activists. For…
JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Ashani Arulananthan says she can recall childhood visits to the beach in her home village in Sri Lanka’s northern district of Jaffna. She would collect washed-up…
COLOMBO — It was a perfect morning in Pigeon Island National Park in eastern Sri Lanka, where a group of tourists in a boat was taking in the rich marine…
COLOMBO — When it comes to super dads in the animal kingdom, the striking-looking waterbird known as the pheasant-tailed jacana is in a universe all its own. From incubating the…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s main zoo is bracing for a food crunch for its 4,500 animals, amid runaway inflation that has pushed food prices up by nearly 60% and brought…
COLOMBO — As a school student in Sri Lanka in 1986, Deepthi Yakandawala sent a greeting card to the country’s president, J.R. Jayewardene, for Vesak, the holiest day in the…
COLOMBO — When fishermen in southern Sri Lanka recently caught a giant oceanic manta ray, they needed a backhoe to haul it out of the water once they reached land.…
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has submitted its 6th National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, offering the most comprehensive view yet of the country’s wealth of plant and animal…
COLOMBO — A year since the sinking of the cargo ship the X-Press Pearl, Sri Lanka continues to clean its beaches of the plastic pellets that the vessel was carrying,…
Looking at the roll call of Linnean Medal winners is to witness the history of natural history, taxonomy, and nature conservation since Darwin. The medal is tangential to the orbit…
COLOMBO — They’ve been called, erroneously, wasps and hornets, but the aggression is undeniable. The giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) of Sigiriya, an ancient rock fortress in central Sri Lanka that’s…
COLOMBO — Amphibians evolved from a fish ancestor that had functional lungs and bony lobed fins, which helped them become the first vertebrates to conquer land. Keeping these earlier trails,…
COLOMBO — The Knuckles mountain range in central Sri Lanka is a UNESCO-declared World Heritage Site that’s home to a rich diversity of wildflowers. Among them are plants in the…
COLOMBO — When a study published in January flagged the risks to Himalayan forests from excessive atmospheric nitrogen pollution, it relied on an often-overlooked member of the ecosystem to assess…
COLOMBO — Stuck in the long lines of vehicles queuing up for what little, and expensive, fuel is available at Sri Lanka’s beleaguered gas stations are the SUVs bearing the…
COLOMBO — Crows have long had a reputation as a nuisance and a pest, even though it’s widely recognized that they’re among the most intelligent of birds. In Sri Lanka,…
COLOMBO — For decades, the small population of Indian pangolins found in Sri Lanka has faced a single consistent threat: the domestic meat market. Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy…
COLOMBO — Mahalingam Kanapathi set off from his hometown of Beruwala in southwestern Sri Lanka in May 2021. Less than a month later, and nearly 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) away,…
COLOMBO — It took a tweet from Hollywood superstar Leonardo DiCaprio to bring the issue of trash-foraging elephants in Sri Lanka to global attention. But local conservationists have long been…
Inside an opulent shopping mall in the Thai capital Bangkok, a casually clad man meets a potential customer. They discuss how to bring live tortoises into the country to sell…
COLOMBO — Lake Diyawanna in Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, Sri Lanka’s administrative capital, sits at the heart of an urban wetland that’s a haven for birds and an attraction for nature…
COLOMBO — Travel bloggers and butterfly enthusiasts Paulmathi Vinod and Vinod Sadasivan were at Dhanushkodi Beach in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state for some bird-watching on Feb. 14. It hadn’t…