Armed with headlamps and flashlights, a team of researchers in northwestern Madagascar searched through the night for an elusive chameleon, Voeltzkow’s chameleon (Furcifer voeltzkowi), which hadn’t been spotted for more than 100 years. On the sixth day of their expedition, they found it. But the species wasn’t in the forest as they expected: it was […]
Tag: chameleon
Deforested areas bleed heat to nearby forests, drive local extinctions
Areas cleared of forests bleed heat to neighboring forests, and this fuels increases in temperatures there, new research has found. Average temperatures in forests around the world are already rising because of climate change; this leaked heat exacerbates the problem and accelerates local extinctions of forest-dwelling species. “The warming is happening from global climate change […]
POLL: Should the trapping and “ranching” of chameleons be banned?
Armed with a flashlight on a backroad in Florida, Hillary Dupont-Joyce is on the hunt. Her target is a master of disguise, but a flash of light can make it stick out among the dark trees. She scans her light along a thicket. Suddenly, her trained eye spots the prize: a sleeping chameleon. Dupont-Joyce is […]
Beautiful Footage: Chameleons Are Amazing
Watch these charismatic creatures shoot their tongues out like arrows to catch an insect, mimic leaves swaying in the wind, and display their hidden colors—and learn just how they do it. This article was first published by National Geographic on 11 Aug 2015.
Chameleon crisis: extinction threatens 36% of world’s chameleons
Chameleons are an unmistakable family of wonderfully bizarre reptiles. They sport long, shooting tongues; oddly-shaped horns or crests; and a prehensile tail like a monkey’s. But, of course, chameleons are most known for their astonishing ability to change the color of their skin. Over millions of years, these Old World reptiles have used this evolutionary […]
Google Earth spurs discovery of a ‘new’ chameleon species
Google Earth has spurred the discovery of another new species. In this case, the creature is a pygmy chameleon, one of four previously unknown Rhampholeon chameleon species described from the remote ‘sky islands’ in Mozambique. The Mount Mabu pygmy chameleon (Rhampholeon maspictus) was discovered after Google Earth images of a tract of forest led Julian […]
Sky islands: exploring East Africa’s last frontier
The montane rainforests of East Africa are little-known to the global public. The Amazon and Congo loom much larger in our minds, while the savannas of East Africa remain the iconic ecosystems for the region. However these ancient, biodiverse forests—sitting on the tops of mountains rising from the African savanna—are home to some remarkable species, […]
Most Popular and Widely-Read Articles in Apr 2013
The purpose of this review is to highlight the most popular and widely-read articles during the previous month. During April our global team of wildlife photographers and authors published 182 articles in promoting the cause of wildlife conservation. First prize goes once again to Adam Riley with Komodo and its Dragons, an article published in […]