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Four large sharks have been killed in Australia after a woman and a 12-year-old girl were attacked at a popular Great Barrier Reef tourist spot.

The number of rhino killed for their horns by poachers in South Africa dipped by 26 percent in the first eight months of the year, officials said on Friday.

Over the last ten years, it's estimated there has been a 360% rise in veganism in Britain – around 542,000 people have "gone vegan". As a nation of animal lovers, with around 44% of homes owning a pet – and somewhere in the region of 8.5m dogs in the UK…

The many threats to our planet's biodiversity posed by illegal wildlife trade are as varied as they are daunting, and you could be forgiven for feeling deflated after reading the first installment of this two-part blog. But that was only half the story.…

Indian authorities Friday ordered a probe into the deaths of a dozen endangered wild Asiatic lions, half of them cubs, over the last 10 days, officials said.

It's an invasion of rats! Some remote islands are crawling with these rodents, and even the coral reefs are suffering from it.

An international research team, led by scientists from the German Primate Center, the Robert Koch Institute, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, McGill University, Masaryk University, the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute…

A new study of house sparrows' genes has found the first evidence of animals adapting to lead contamination in heavily polluted areas of Australia.

Barely heard of a couple of years ago, quinoa today is common on European supermarket shelves. The hardy plant thrives even in saline soils. Researchers from the University of Würzburg have now determined how the plant gets rid of the excess salt.

The mighty Heera marched through a crowded slum chewing bamboo, oblivious that freedom from life as one of Delhi's last six elephants at work in the polluted city could be just around the corner.

Land-based bird populations are becoming confined to nature reserves in some parts of the world—raising the risk of global extinction—due to the loss of suitable habitat, according to a report led by UCL.

The ability to acquire manganese during infection is essential for the virulence of Enterococcus faecalis in animals, according to a study published September 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by José Lemos of the University of Florida College of…

Over the past several years, CRISPR-Cas9 has moved beyond the lab bench and into the public zeitgeist. This gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 holds promise for correcting defects inside individual cells and potentially healing or preventing many human ailments.…

Hookworms exploit a live fast/die young strategy in their South American fur seal pup hosts, report Morris Animal Foundation-funded researchers at the University of Georgia. As a result, they often kill their host, rather than finding a happy equilibrium.…

Body organs such as the intestine and ovaries undergo structural changes in response to dietary nutrients that can have lasting impacts on metabolism, as well as cancer susceptibility, according to Carnegie's Rebecca Obniski, Matthew Sieber, and Allan…

Scientists have challenged the theory of "love at first sight" after discovering that they can boost the reproductive success of zebrafish by pairing them by personality, rather than appearance.

A species of seed-feeding fly is critically damaging the seed production of multiple orchid species, as revealed by a group of Japanese researchers. If the damage caused by this fly is occurring long-term and across Japan, these already-endangered orchid…

Today's kiwifruit, a member of the Chinese gooseberry family, contains about as much vitamin C as an orange. This extra boost in vitamin C production is the result of the kiwifruit's ancestors' spontaneously duplicating their DNA in two separate evolutionary…

We are all exposed to a vast and dynamic cloud of microbes, chemicals and particulates that, if visible, might make us look something like Pig-Pen from Peanuts.

By studying the genome of a kind of octopus not known for its friendliness toward its peers, then testing its behavioral reaction to a popular mood-altering drug called MDMA or "ecstasy," scientists say they have found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary…

Dozens of farmers and local officials stormed out of a meeting with France's new environment minister on Thursday as he confirmed two more bears would soon be released into the Pyrenees mountains.

Despite many decades of annual brook trout stocking in one northcentral Pennsylvania watershed, the wild brook trout populations show few genes from hatchery fish, according to researchers who genotyped about 2,000 brook trout in Loyalsock Creek watershed, a…

Traditional artisanal fishing has been harmed by EU fishing policies that favour big businesses and ignores other more sustainable approaches to conserving fish stocks, according to new research from the University of Kent.

A collaborative team of marine biologists has discovered that basking sharks, hundreds of which are found off the shores of Ireland, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Scotland, can jump as fast and as high out of the water as their cousins, the famously powerful…

Hans Slabbekoorn, researcher at the Institute of Biology Leiden, is one of the editors of the latest volume of the Springer Handbook of Auditory Research (SHAR). This book is filled with everything known about the effects of sound on vertebrates. Slabbekoorn's…

For ferrets, sex is a prolonged affair. In total, the act of mating might last up to three hours. Fortunately for the males of the species, they are packing a secret weapon to help them through this daunting task. Some modern mammals (including ferrets, mice,…

Commonly known to predate on insects, praying mantises have occasionally been observed to feed on vertebrates, including small birds, lizards, frogs, newts, mice, snakes and turtles. Mostly, such records have either not been scientifically validated or have…

Brandon Samuels plans to set up cameras this January in hopes of catching footage of birds crashing into windows across campus. Honestly, he really is a nice guy – it's for science.

A staple of summer—swarms of bugs—seems to be a thing of the past. And that's got scientists worried.

Species are going extinct all over the world: Scientists believe that Earth is losing between 200 and 2,000 species every year. That number is squishy, partly because there are so many species for which they lack good data—particularly those living in the…