Icelandic whaling company IP-Utgerd announced April 24 that it is stopping whaling completely, while the country’s largest whaling firm, Hvalur hf., says it won’t be hunting any whales for the second year in a row. IP-Utgerd, which mainly targeted minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), cited financial difficulties after no-fishing zones were extended off the Icelandic coast, […]
Tag: mongabay
For world’s rarest great ape, COVID-19 is latest in a litany of threats
JAKARTA — The COVID-19 pandemic has become the latest threat to the Tapanuli orangutan in Indonesia, the rarest great ape species of all and one already under severe pressure from a range of human threats. The critically endangered species, Pongo tapanuliensis, found in a single patch of rainforest in northern Sumatra, shares 97% of its […]
Birds in Amazon forest fragments: New study summarizes 40 years of research
For the past 40 years, researchers have studied Amazonian bird communities in the world’s longest-running experiment on tropical forest fragments. This research, summarized in a newly published paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, sheds light on the way Neotropical birds respond to and recover from deforestation in a dynamic tropical landscape. The Biological Dynamics of […]
Palm Oil Deforestation: A Threat to Orangutan Populations, Indigenous People and Biodiversity
The California fires in November 2018 were more severe than ever and yet – the amount of forest that was lost in the combined fires makes up only a fraction of Indonesian forest that is burned every year in slash-and-burn practices to clear palm oil plantations. In 2015 alone,the area of Indonesian forest burned was […]
Twelve rangers killed in latest Virunga Park incident
Twelve rangers and five other people were killed in Virunga National Park in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday. It was the latest deadly incident in the park, where more than 150 rangers have been killed since 2006. Virunga, which includes large areas of intact rainforest that are home to […]
Images from a dropped phone reveal the ugly truth behind bonobo trafficking
In the early morning hours of Feb. 23, a gunshot rang out from deep within a Congolese forest. And then another, followed by one last bang. The shots were fired about 10 kilometers (6 miles) outside the village of Mondombe in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an experienced anti-poaching team from local NGO Conserv […]
Poachers kill 3 near-extinct giant ibises amid pandemic pressure in Cambodia
The giant Ibis, a mega-sized bird that can stand more than a meter (3 feet) tall and weigh more than 4 kilograms (9 pounds), was once thought to be extinct in Cambodia. But in 1993, scientists working with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) rediscovered the birds on the border with Laos, and since then, a […]
Photos of wild tiger cubs in Thailand rekindles hope for species
Camera traps in eastern Thailand’s Dong Phayayen-Khao Yai (DPKY) forest complex have yielded photos of tiger cubs, providing long-awaited evidence that the big cat is breeding in this part of Southeast Asia. Conservationists conducted the camera-trap survey in the Thap Lan-Pang Sida Tiger Conservation Landscape (TCL) of DPKY, where recent reports suggest a small, but […]