The Walia ibex, an iconic wild goat species found only on the steep, ragged cliffs of the Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia, has sharply declined in number over the past decade, according to a recent study. This puts the Walia ibex (Capra walie), now largely confined to Simien Mountains National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage […]
Air pollution filters help scientists produce first UK wildlife survey using eDNA
As the UK’s Big Butterfly Count reaches more than 100,000 submissions, an international group of scientists have produced the first national survey of biodiversity using an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for species by eye, they took advantage of the samplers around the UK that constantly measure toxic metal particles in the air, and […]
Tell the EPA: Don’t remove this bedrock environmental protection!
Our access to clean air and water is seriously under threat. The Environmental Protection Agency is considering rolling back the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment finding, one of our bedrock environmental protection policies. The finding determined that carbon dioxide and certain greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health — and is the reason we have […]
Nat Geo Photographer Paul Nicklen Reveals He Was Almost Killed by Horny Elephant Seal
Photographer Paul Nicklen is one of the most famous nature documentarians of the age, but he recently revealed how his career was nearly cut short. Sea Legacy, an ocean conservation co-founded by Nicklen and his wife Cristina Mittermeier, published a social media post recalling the time Nicklen was in South Georgia, Antarctica, in 2008 and […]
Scarlett Johansson and AC/DC Are Being Used to Scare off Wolves by American Farmers
From Wyoming and Oregon comes a story most bizarre: Scarlett Johansson’s voice being used to frighten away wolves. Famed for their emotional intelligence, the gray wolf population around Greater Yellowstone are obviously not adept enough to detect acting when they hear it, as it was a scene from Johansson’s film Marriage Story that has them […]
The elephant whisperer: one Thai woman’s lifelong quest to protect a rescued herd
Saengduean Lek Chailert was five years old when she saw an elephant for the first time. It was in chains, lumbering past her home in rural Thailand on its way to help loggers pull trees from the forest. Back then, she saw the giant mammals like everyone else – as animals that served humans. But […]
Alligator clamps down on woman’s arm and drags her underwater, Florida cops say
A woman in waist-deep water was trapped in an alligator‘s jaws and pulled underwater in the South Fork of the St. Lucie River in Florida, according to investigators. She suffered injuries to her hand and wrist, but survived, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The attack happened just before 8 p.m. […]
World Nature Conservation Day: How a large, flightless parrot rebounded from the verge of extinction
In the mid-1990s, the kākāpō seemed destined for extinction. Only 51 individuals of the flightless, nocturnal parrot remained, all of them descended from a shrinking gene pool and spread across remote corners of New Zealand. A victim of its own evolutionary success, the kākāpō had once flourished in a predator-free island ecosystem. But its defenses—freezing […]