The great barrier reef that harbours a substantial amount of aquatic life is under threat from climate change and a careless disregard for the environment. As one of the one of the seven wonders of the world and being the largest living organism on this planet, the great coral barrier reef is home to many […]
Melaka – The expanse of sand stretches hundreds of meters in both directions, featureless and flat, its dusty monotony alleviated only by the excavators, trucks and dredgers that dump sand and rocks into the sea and smooth out the newly-created land. Billboards surrounding one site tout an aspirational dream of stylish apartments, luxury hotels and […]
Sometimes life really does imitate art. In the fourth season of the hit TV show, Breaking Bad, police put GPS devices on barrels of methylamine to try and track the show’s protagonists to their meth lab. Inspired by the episode, Kim Williams-Guillen, a conservationist with Paso Pacifico, decided to take the concept one step further: […]
For a while now I’ve been trying to learn my turtles. There aren’t too many species to see here, but they all look so similar to me it’s hard to tell them apart. But these Peninsula Cooters are frequently seen at Mead Gardens, and they often sit in beautiful settings. […]
Last week I led a nature walk in Central Park for the American Museum of Natural History’s Membership Department. Even though I got rained on twice, there was a lot to see. Here are some of the wild creatures that were in the park on Wednesday. Turtles were basking in The Lake. Red-eared sliders are […]
For thousands of years turtles have been used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat a wide variety of ailments and diseases. Originally published in the journal Radiata and recently republished HerpDigest David S. Lee and Liao Shi Kun write, “[In Chinese culture] turtles are symbolic of long life, personal wealth, fertility, strength, and happy households.” […]
Biologists recently documented one of nature’s least-known, big events. On the banks of the Purus River in the Brazilian Amazon, researchers witnessed the mass-hatching of an estimated 210,000 giant South American river turtles (Podocnemis expansa). The giant South American river turtle, or Arrau, is the world’s largest side-necked turtle and can grow up to 80 […]
Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is only 25 miles from New York City in Vernon, New Jersey. It’s a great place for a day of strolling and wildlife spotting.There are duck blinds,roads and trails, wildflower fields, and boardwalks over marshes. Wood ducks and eastern bluebirds are some of the wildlife rock stars that breed in […]
A Florida police officer saved nearly 100 baby sea turtles when he gathered the newly hatched creatures from a hotel parking lot and street and released them into the Gulf of Mexico. Sarasota officer Derek Conley was on patrol at 1am Saturday when he saw sea turtle hatchlings crawling toward the front door of the […]
The fate of a species is resting on the shells of two turtles at China’s Suzhou Zoo.In June, researchers collected eggs from the last mating pair of the critically endangered Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) in the hopes that at least one will be fertile. The 220-pound (100-kilogram) freshwater giant, which spends most of […]
Central Park is full of pleasant spring sights right now.
The world’s largest sea turtle, the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), is vanishing from its most important nesting sites in the western Pacific, according to a new study in Ecosphere. Scientists found that leatherback turtle nests have dropped by 78 percent in less than 30 years in the Bird’s Head Peninsula on the island of New Guinea. […]
Grab forty winks. Saw logs. For a species that’s habitually short on shut-eye, we humans sure have come up with myriad ways to talk about it. We also spend a lot of time and money studying sleep, or the lack thereof. Yet, in spite of decades of inquiry, researchers still don’t have a good fix […]
