Researchers have described a previously unknown species of tree shrew in the forests of Vietnam. The study was published July 2 in the open access journal ZooKeys. The species, named Crocidura sapaensis after Sa Pa District, where it was collected, was discovered after genetic analysis revealed that it was distinct from three closely-related species also […]
Tag: green
Making movies to save Uganda’s great apes
A new series of films aims to protect Uganda’s great ape species (mountain gorillas and chimpanzees) by bringing entertaining and educational movies to a rural audience living on the edges of Kibale National Park and Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Produced with heavy input from locals, these films are acted with an all-Ugandan task to teach […]
New long-horned beetle discovered in China
Recent expeditions by the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Zoology to the Yunnan Province of China have uncovered the existence of a new species of long-horned beetle. This newly discovered beetle has a beautifully colored blue-green body with short, slender, and distinctively blue legs according to a new article in Zookeys. There are over […]
Beaten and captured orangutan dies in Indonesia’s Aceh Province
An orangutan in Indonesia’s Aceh province died last Thursday after being beaten by residents of a local village attempting to capture the animal. The case casts a tragic spotlight on what is becoming an increasingly serious problem in the region, as habitat decline and weak law enforcement leave wild orangutans at risk of being killed […]
Amazonian students help monitor threatened frog populations
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, amphibians are the most threatened group of animals on Earth: currently around 30 percent of the world’s amphibians are listed as threatened with extinction. However this percentage doesn’t include those species about which too little is known to evaluate (26 percent). Amphibians face many threats but […]
Over 700 species added to the threatened categories on the IUCN Red List (photos)
In another sign of the global biodiversity crisis, the IUCN Red List has added 715 species to its threatened categories of Vulnerable, Endangered, and Critically Endangered in this year’s update. Some of these species were evaluated by the IUCN Red List for the first time while others saw their conditions deteriorate, such as the the […]
Saving the Raja of India’s grasslands: new efforts to conserve the Critically Endangered Great Indian Bustard
The Great Indian Bustard, one of India’s iconic birds, once ranged across most of the Indian subcontinent. Due to a variety of factors, however, the Great Indian Bustard is also now India’s rarest bird and faces imminent extinction. The following is an interview with Ramki Sreenivasan, co-founder of Conservation India, a group that recently petitioned […]
Bloodsucking flies help scientists identify rare, hard-to-find mammals
Last year scientists released a study that is likely to revolutionize how conservationists track elusive species. Researchers extracted the recently sucked blood of terrestrial leeches in Vietnam’s remote Annamite Mountains and looked at the DNA of what they’d been feeding on: remarkably researchers were able to identify a number of endangered and rarely-seen mammals. In […]