Biodiversity

I came across these incredible videos by John J. King II (AleutianDream on YouTube) and I just had to share them. These snorkelers are in such close and peaceful contact with wild humpbacks and sperm whales in waters near the Dominican Republic, and Dominica respectively.

The latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species was published Monday and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t good news. The Red List, the global inventory of species, now identifies 22,413 species as threatened with extinction around the world.

This last month has been extremely stressful for all of us at Sikundur research station in North Sumatra while we've been following two of our favorite orangutans, Suci and her 3-year-old infant Siboy.

Her Deepness. The Sturgeon General. And now: Glamour Girl. On Monday night, renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle earned a new moniker when she joined eight others in receiving a 2014 Glamour Woman of the Year Award at a celebrity-packed Carnegie Hall.

The island of Madagascar is home to a pretty amazing and diverse collection of geckos, with nearly 70 species from 10 different genera. Now you can add one more species to the list: Paroedura hordiesi, a highly camouflaged nocturnal gecko that was recently discovered in northern Madagascar.

How’s this for irony?: A newly discovered plant named after the reserve in which it is supposedly found is endangered because the reserve isn’t actually located where people thought it was.

Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]

This savannah in Brazil is being swallowed up by industrial farming

Conservationists go to war over whether humans are the measure of nature's value

Experts share their priorities for what must be done to make protected areas more effective at conserving global biodiversity

In 2001 a few tigers in Russia started to show signs of obvious distress. Endangered Amur (or Siberian) tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) were underweight, weak, disoriented and incapable of hunting as a result.

Scientists recently confirmed what anglers have known for centuries—there's something special about a big mama fish. The bigger the fish, the better the bragging rights—and often, the bigger paycheck or prize.