Mongabay · Page 22

COLOMBO — Beneath Sri Lanka’s serene waters, a pearl oyster cherished her pearl, living in harmony. But disaster struck when a blazing ship sank, poisoning the sea. Entangled in debris, she lost her treasured pearl. Desperate, she started to search despite…

A Mongabay investigation that revealed an illegal cattle boom amid a record-high number of killings of Indigenous Guajajara has been cited by Brazilian authorities to remove thousands of head of cattle from the Arariboia Indigenous Territory in the Amazon…

A pair of Galápagos tortoises in their 90s recently made headlines for successfully producing offspring for the first time. The female tortoise, aptly named Mommy, at Philadelphia Zoo is now considered the oldest recorded first-time mom for the Western Santa…

One unusual characteristic of Latin American nations is their proclivity to adopt new constitutions that reflect periodic swings in political philosophies. These documents are notable for their length and the proliferation of sections addressing specific…

Studying insect-eating bats isn’t easy: they’re tiny, fly at night, and navigate using ultrasonic frequencies far above human hearing range. But experts in India have come up with a potential solution to make long-duration bat research easier: they’ve…

Several cities across India saw temperatures top 40° Celsius, or 104° Fahrenheit, this past week, with some areas exceeding 46°C (114.8°F). Delhi experienced a heat wave for three consecutive days, recording its warmest April night in three years, with…

This is the fourth story in the Mongabay Series – Protected Areas in East Africa. Read Part One, Two and Three In 1889, the British journalist Henry Morton Stanley stumbled out of the forests of Central Africa into the town of Katwe, a settlement on the…

SINGAPORE — A cloud of condensation rises as Shangari Sekar, the assistant laboratory manager for Mandai Wildlife Group, carefully lifts a ladle filled with vials from the center of a cryo tank. She moves slowly as the cargo is precious: within the vials are…

Few people working in wildlife conservation in the 1980s could have imagined a future where breeding wolf packs roam the Netherlands and Denmark — but this is now part of Europe’s new reality. Over the last 30 to 40 years, European wildlife has undergone a…

The large leaves of the aguaje, a tropical palm tree that grows in the peatlands and other seasonal wetland areas in tropical South America, form a rounded crown on its head from which its oval-shaped fruits hang heavily in bunches from December to June. When…

Most of what’s known about the deep-sea painted swellshark, was learned when researchers found specimens in the fish markets of Bali and Lombok, Indonesia back in the early 2000s. However, a recent survey in Timor-Leste used low-cost deep-sea cameras to…

UGGUBSENI and ISBERYALA, Guna Yala, Panama — “Our ancestors fought for this land,” says Jair Goporas, 21. He leans forwards into the dim glow of a bare bulb, his eyes shining from a face streaked with red and black paint. “Our ancestors told us:…

About 90 kilometers (56 miles) southeast of Cape Town lies the tranquilly-named town of Betty’s Bay in South Africa, home to less than 2,000 people. But it’s not the people that draw Nik Sekhran’s eye. “I enjoy watching the African oystercatchers,”…

JAKARTA — With the Islamic month of Ramadan now over, a familiar sight has returned to the streets of daytime Jakarta: street vendors serving up chicken porridge, and everyone from office workers to delivery drivers perched on plastic stools around the…

Unprecedented numbers of emaciated dugongs have washed up dead along Thailand’s Andaman Sea coast over the past three years, prompting marine scientists to urgently investigate what’s driving their decline. Thailand’s Department of Marine and Coastal…

Time is running out for the great Indian bustard. In the wild, fewer than 150 of these critically endangered ostrich-like birds survive, mostly in India’s Rajasthan state. But a captive-breeding program, making a last-ditch attempt at preventing complete…

ROKAN HULU/PADANG/CENTRAL ACEH, Indonesia — In separate incidents in early March, officials across three Indonesian provinces rescued a critically endangered Sumatran tiger with its leg amputated, arrested six people for butchering another of the big cats,…

BARDIYA, Nepal — Ram Raj Dhakal, 22, jolts awake to an alert on his phone. A wild elephant has strayed into a village near Thakurdwara, on the fringes of Bardiya National Park. At 11 p.m. in Nepal’s southern jungles of Bardiya, the air is finally cool…

Across continents, “sacrifice zones” resemble wounds carved deep into the fabric of our planet. These are regions where ecosystems and livelihoods have been ravaged by fossil fuel and other industries that promise progress but leave devastation in their…

VALPARAI, India — Frequent interactions between humans and wildlife define life in Valparai, a town in India’s Tamil Nadu state, where the surrounding dense forests of the Western Ghats are fragmented by sprawling tea estates. These forests are home to…