The world is warming up. There can be no denying of that. Although some, including the President of the United States, may try, the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence is that average global temperatures are rising as a direct result of human activities. This is because we are, in a number of ways, producing monumental […]
Tag: green environment
Bolivia leads the way in wetland protection
Bolivia continues to be a champion for Amazonian conservation. On February 2, 2013, Bolivia celebrated World Wetlands Day with the designation of more than 6.9 million hectares of the Llanos de Moxos to the Ramsar Convention’s Wetlands of International Importance. In addition to being the largest Ramsar designation to date, Bolivia now claims 14.8 million […]
Madagascar’s chameleons came from African mainland
Madagascar’s color-changing chameleons originated in Africa and crossed over to the island some 65 million years ago, concludes a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research, which is based on genetic analysis of 174 chameleon species, found that the ancestors of today’s chameleons crossed channel between the African […]
Is it the end for Britain’s hedgehogs?
As hedgehogs all over the United Kingdom wake up from their winter hibernation, activists will be carefully counting their hogs. Every year, the hedgehog population in Britain’s rural towns declines by an estimated 5 percent. But between 2011 and 2012, a survey conducted by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES), a UK-based animal activism […]
Humans killed over 10 percent of the world’s bird species when they colonized the Pacific Islands
Around 4,000 years ago intrepid Polynesian seafarers made their way into an untamed wilderness: the far-flung Pacific Islands. Over a thousands or so years, they rowed from one island to another, stepping on shores never yet seen by humans. While this vast colonization brought about a new era of human history, it also ended the […]
For Easter: a baby horned screamer chick (photo)
A chick — typically a baby chicken — is a common symbol for Easter. Today we’re highlighting another type of chick: a young horned screamer from Eastern Colombia. The horned screamer (Anhima cornuta) is a large bird that lives in wetland areas of tropical South America. It is related to ducks, geese and swans and […]
Starry frog rediscovered after thought extinct for 160 years (photos)
In 1853 Edward Frederick Kelaart, a physician and naturalist, collected a strange frog on the island of Sri Lanka then a British colony known as Ceylon. The specimen was a large shrub frog (about 2 inches or 5.5 centimeters long) with black-outlined white specks on lime-green skin. He dubbed it “starry” after its pale specks, […]
Scientists discover two new remarkably-colored lizards in the Peruvian Amazon (photos)
Scientists have discovered two new species of woodlizards from the Peruvian Amazon. Woodlizards, in the genus Enyalioides, are little-known reptiles with only 10 described species found in South and Central America. Described in a new paper in ZooKeys, both new woodlizards were found in Cordillera Azul National Park, the nations third-largest. “These species were discovered […]