Endangered Species
Frog Fiction
Amphibians may not be canaries in a coal mine after all
Served Rare
Wildlife farming increases appetite for threatened species
Sick Puppies
Prairie dogs served up Jell-O spiked with ‘black death’ vaccine
Troubled Teens
A new generation of unruly adolescent wildlife has some experts wondering whether what we’re missing isn’t so much habitat as adult supervision.
The (Un)Natural Order of Things
Have we unwittingly exchanged the language of the living world—the names of real plants and animals—for a vocabulary of Tony the Tigers and Geico geckos?
Telltale Stripes
Wrapping virtual skins on 3-D models helps track individual tigers
Scat from Space
Penguins tracked down by their “mark” on the ice
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Rising sea levels are erasing familiar boundaries. In fact, conservationists may find themselves fighting for lands that will soon be under water. With little room to maneuver between encroaching development and rising waters, it may be time to consider proposals that run headlong into conventional environmental wisdom.
Story by Jim Robbins
Illustration [...]
A womb of one’s own
Artificial uterus designed to increase shark populations
You’d think one womb would be enough. Not for female gray nurse sharks, which house dozens of embryos in two wombs and then sit idly by as the baby sharks eat each other in utero. The two strongest (or at least hungriest) sharks, one from each uterus, are born [...]
Under Siege
War zones and biodiversity hotspots overlap
Hanson, T. et al. 2009. Warfare in biodiversity hotspots. Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01166.x
Not even conservation areas are safe from war. Eighty percent of the 146 armed conflicts occurring between 1950 and 2000 took place within the world’s biodiversity hotspots, according to a study in Conservation Biology.
To reach this conclusion, researchers [...]