By their own admission, John Knight and Caroline Thomas are blow-ins to the cattle country in South Australia’s far north. An Adelaide cardiac surgeon and a clinical researcher respectively, they bought Evelyn Downs, a cattle station near the Painted Desert about 150km north of Coober Pedy, in 2006 and moved north a decade later. From […]
Tag: Dingo
How kangaroos could be jeopardising conservation efforts across Australia
The experimental fencing had gone up to keep the rabbits out, but the ground inside the conservation area at Yathong in central New South Wales had still been nibbled and munched bare. “It was completely denuded,” says Prof Mike Letnic. “It was like a moonscape.” The culprit? Australia’s most ubiquitous marsupial: the kangaroo. “There’s this perception […]
The New Guinea singing dog, once thought extinct, is alive in the wild
An analysis of the DNA of three wild dogs living above 4,300 meters (14,000 feet) on the island of New Guinea matches that of captive New Guinea singing dogs. These findings show that the New Guinea singing dog is not extinct in the wild, as most zoologists had assumed, researchers reported recently in the Proceedings […]
The plight of the “Short-Ear.” A wild dog in trouble
Whether famous or obscure, Earth’s wild creatures cannot hide from the hand of man. Scant months ago, more than a billion animals, including iconic kangaroos and cuddly koalas, perished in Australia’s calamitous bushfires, found by scientists to have been worsened by man-made climate change. Now, researchers say, one of Amazonia’s least-known species could be all […]
POLL: Should “petting zoos” displaying wild animals be closed down?
When you visit a petting zoo– or any facility that claims to promote conservation education — you expect that the animals will be well cared for and live long, happy lives. But, sadly, this is not always the case. Animal rights groups say that the animals at Fur-Ever Wild in Lakeville, Minnesota — including cougars, […]
10 of the Most Endangered Species on Earth
In 2006, the United States Congress designated the third Friday of May as Endangered Species Day. The day highlights the importance of protecting the most endangered animals on our planet. The World Wildlife Fund tracks the most critically endangered species today. These are ten magnificent animals who are designated as critically endangered. 1. Amur Leopard […]
Gigantic Rats Will Rule the Earth When Other Animals Go Extinct
University of Leicester academic predicts rats will continue to grow and fill a ‘significant chunk’ of Earth’s emptying ecospace. When Reggae band UB40 famously asked, ‘There’s a rat in my kitchen what am I going to do?” in their 1986 hit single, they were looking for a practical solution to rid them of a pesky […]
Over 75 percent of large predators declining
The world’s top carnivores are in big trouble: this is the take-away message from a new review paper published today in Science. Looking at 31 large-bodied carnivore species (i.e those over 15 kilograms or 33 pounds), the researchers found that 77 percent are in decline and more than half have seen their historical ranges decline […]