CHITWAN, Nepal — Wild male elephants in search of females to mate with are homing in on captive domestic elephants, in the process posing a threat to human settlements and property on the outskirts of Nepal’s Chitwan National Park. Wild bulls are involved in around one incident of property damage every month, according to the […]
Tag: mongabay
Ground-nesting chimps hold lessons for conservation — and for human evolution
Chimpanzees tend to sleep more on the ground than previously thought, a behavior that has implications for their conservation and could help explain how and when early humans abandoned trees to set up home on the ground, a new study says. Until now, nesting on the ground was considered rare in most populations of chimpanzees. […]
Indianapolis Zoo offers $1m grant for plan to save a threatened species
The Indianapolis Zoological Society has announced it will award a $1 million grant to an organization that can “develop and execute a plan that will have a measurable and sustainable impact on the survival of an animal species.” The species must be currently designated under one of the threatened categories — vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered, […]
Bangladesh’s vultures still threatened by poison despite conservation actions
Authorities investigating the discovery of 14 dead vultures in a feeding zone that’s meant to be safe for the scavenging birds have found that they died from eating poisoned bait left for other wildlife. The preliminary inquiry by the Bangladesh Forest Department and the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, determined that local people had […]
Proposal to export 100,000 crop-raiding macaques sparks outcry in Sri Lanka
COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s animal-human conflicts are on the rise with increasing crop raids, but a recent request from a Chinese company requesting 100,00 toque macaques from Sri Lanka has fueled a fresh debate on wildlife exploitation. Crop damage by wild animals has posed a serious problem to many people, especially farming communities, and a […]
Flawed count puts ‘glorified’ Javan rhinos on path to extinction, report says
JAKARTA — Every time a new Javan rhino calf is spotted, Indonesia’s environmental authorities issue an update of the precise population number for the near-extinct species. The rhino’s entire population is confined to a single national park, filled with hundreds of camera traps that allow conservationists to monitor sightings of known, named adult rhinos as […]
Roads, human activity take a toll on red pandas: Q&A with researcher Damber Bista
KATHMANDU — The spring season in the Northern Hemisphere is a critical time for red pandas, particularly in Nepal. This is the period when these furry, tree-dwelling animals spend a lot of time on the ground to look for food. It’s also the time when breeding adults of the species, Ailurus fulgens, start to reproduce, […]
Could biodiversity be a key to better forest carbon storage in Europe?
This May, Scarabaeus laticollis will return to France’s southeast and to one of Europe’s biggest plantation forests. Eighty of these lowly Old World dung beetles, first described by the naturalist Linnaeus in 1767, will be reintroduced at the Étang de Cousseau National Reserve as a first step to improving forest biodiversity there. Unlike other dung […]