It sounds like a Disney movie: three wild dogs, all brothers, on an epic journey to find a home of their own after their family tells them to leave. They dodge cars and hunters in search of a new life, navigating bushmeat snares and the hostility of a human-dominated landscape until they find a new […]
VOTE for the Best Photo of the Month September 2026
Welcome to the “Best Photo of the Month” competition showcasing and celebrating the biodiversity of Planet Earth. Voting is easy and lots of fun. By popular request the number of images to be selected has been increased to six. First click an image and the slideshow will start automatically. Select the SIX images you like best […]
“As temperatures drop below freezing, it freezes solid, with 70% of the water in its body turning to ice. It stops breathing, its heart stops beating and its kidneys stop functioning”
The only amphibian to live north of the Arctic Circle, the wood frog (Lithobates sylvaticus) has an amazing ability to undergo freezing and thawing to survive cold winters. As you might guess from its common name, it lives mainly in woodland, only taking to shallow pools in springtime to breed, the males uttering a distinctive quacking call to attract mates. What […]
Do whales grieve? Rare footage of humpback alongside stillborn calf suggests they might
One day last July, a newborn humpback whale calf lay motionless on the seafloor, just a kilometre off Australia’s Gold Coast. The encounter was captured through underwater video. For more than an hour, the mother repeatedly returned to the same spot, gently touching the calf with her head and pectoral fin and resting beside it […]
“In a gloriously tragic act of self-sacrifice, she stops eating and dies of starvation before her young hatch”.
Mother octopuses never meet their babies, as they stop eating and die of starvation before the young hatch. However, that’s probably a good thing. While parents sacrifice much for their offspring, few routinely give up their lives. But such is the destiny of a female octopus: tending her eggs is the last thing she’ll do. […]
‘Don’t shoot. Listen’: The AI-aided quest to understand Yellowstone’s wolves
Jeff Reed wasn’t raised to hate wolves. But as a child he bought into the Little Red Riding Hood myth regarding their villainous nature. You see one, you shoot it. But not on a night on his Montana farm some five years ago, a night that proved life-changing not only for Reed, but perhaps for […]
It has the legs of a supermodel, can run at 40mph and leap 3m high – yet is just 50cm tall. Meet one of the world’s weirdest, yet most beautiful, cats
Graceful, wild, and built like a runway model with a hunter’s instinct—this guide dives into the captivating world of the serval cat. How big are serval cats? Counting the head and body serval cats are between 67cm-100cm long, with the tail adding between 24–35cm on. Males are the heaviest weighing between 10–18kg, while females weigh […]
They’re the sopranos of the forest, so what’s silencing the gibbons’ morning chorus?
Dawn has broken, and the air is cool and still. It’s at about this time that gibbons usually erupt into song, wa-oo-ing and wa-ing from the highest branches and filling the tree tops with rich melodies. But in this corner of Malaysian forest, bordered by housing and roads, the resident white-handed gibbons are quiet. All […]