Caracals are creatures that cultivate anonymity. A sleek and mysterious wild cat, is known for its striking appearance and agile hunting skills. What is a caracal? A caracal is a medium-sized beautiful wild cat with a sandy coat and some freckling (often faint) on the belly and the insides of the legs. It has large, […]
Tag: predators
“For one agonising moment, we huddled and dangled at their mercy…”
Four white rhinos, each weighing over two tonnes and with a shoulder height of up to six feet, stood shoulder to shoulder, huffing, stomping their front feet and kicking up clouds of dust. They were close enough that, though they have notoriously bad eyesight, even they could have read the trainee name tags on our […]
Watch the gut-wrenching, heart-stopping moment a prairie dog defending his pups from being devoured by a deadly and hungry snake – will they survive?
Prairie dogs may have a reputation for being full of chatter and looking adorable, but their calls are actually an incredibly complex alarm system for their towns (and other animals) – and they’re much fiercer than they first seem. Black-tailed prairie dogs are protected from predators such as birds of prey and coyotes while in […]
It drinks an animal’s tears – and has a terrifying way of getting them
Not all moths are harmless buffoons dashing themselves into porch lights and clumsily scattering pollen as they flit from flower to flower. The Madagascar tear drinking moth (Hemiceratoides hieroglyphica) has no compunction about plunging its barbed proboscis into the eyes of slumbering birds in a quest for vital nutrients. Researchers documented three cases of the […]
World Snow Leopard Day: Community action and new science foster coexistence with humans
Snow leopards range across Asia’s rugged mountains, where they face mounting threats from climate change, declining wild prey, and retaliatory killings from local herders. Today, on Oct. 23, International Snow Leopard Day, we look back at recent Mongabay reporting highlighting how innovative science, climate-ready habitat, and community-centered conservation are helping these big cats share mountain […]
Loss of a rare lake reveals how warming has hit the Canadian Arctic’s ‘planetary fridge’
When an ice shelf blocks a polar fjord, it sparks the creation of an ecosystem like no other: the epishelf lake. Meltwater pools up behind the ice shelf, floating above the denser seawater, with both freshwater and marine species found in distinct layers within the same water column. But Canada’s last known epishelf lake, at […]
Experts tested whales’ teeth for nuclear fallout – and accidentally found the oldest killer whale on record
By analysing the teeth of five whales who died on Scottish shores in the past three decades, researchers created a ‘dental time machine’ – allowing them to reconstruct the life stories of the animals and identify one of the oldest male killer whales on record. The study, which relied on traces of radioactive fallout trapped in […]
“It seems to be a lively business…” Just how do sharks mate?
Sex is a staple of wildlife documentaries, to the point that the ins and outs of the love lives of a multitude of mammals, birds, reptiles and invertebrates have been revealed in all their intimate detail. And yet the private lives of fish have remained largely just that – private. There are at least two […]