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All tagged conservation
A biotech company in Dallas says it has brought back an extinct animal that last walked the Earth nearly 13,000 years ago. Colossal Biosciences, the startup that’s also trying to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth and the dodo, announced this week that they’ve brought three dire wolves into the world.
Last week conservationists in the Pacific Whale Watch Association spotted an orca calf with its mom and more than a dozen other killer whales in the Salish Sea, the waters between Seattle and Vancouver. The mother, known to the whale watchers as “Sedna,” comes from a historic line of orcas rescued from SeaWorld.
The lowly blobfish, long recognized as the world’s ugliest animal, has resurfaced this week to win a comelier title: Fish of the Year. New Zealand environmental group Mountain to Sea Conservation Trust holds the annual contest to raise awareness for freshwater and marine life.
A pair of young bison bulls in a UK sanctuary have been taught to self medicate, specifically by vaccinating themselves. The staff at Wildwood Trust in Kent say the animals have been trained to lean into needles, which is less stressful than the typical procedure: shooting darts into them.
It’s that time of year again. This weekend animal shelters and zoos around the world are fundraising by encouraging people to perform symbolic acts of vengeance against their exes. The “anti-love” campaigns can take many forms.
We usually think of pollinators – the yentas of the animal kingdom that “marry” male and female plants by transmitting pollen between them – as flying insects, birds, sometimes bats. Biologists have now identified another unusual matchmaker in the field, the Ethiopian wolf.
US zoos have paid millions to China for the privilege of housing pandas, with the expectation that China invests the money in panda conservation. A New York Times investigation reveals that the funding has been spent on projects unrelated to pandas, while American zookeepers look the other way.
The giant pandas Qing Bao and Bao Li arrived in Washington, DC on October 15 after their long journey from Sichuan, China. Now the National Zoo is preparing the pandas and their habitat for the big public debut on January 24, 2025.
Thousands of giant spiders are on the prowl in the UK and that’s a good thing, according to the Chester Zoo, which is responsible for setting the arachnids loose.
A brutal drought in southern Africa threatens food supplies across at least six countries. Among them, Namibia and Zimbabwe have recently announced plans to cull hundreds of wild animals, including nearly 300 elephants, as they struggle to feed their populations.
This week the Bureau of Land Management finalized plans to protect the Gunnison sage-grouse, a threatened species in western Colorado and eastern Utah.
Just a few years ago the population of the Florida grasshopper sparrow, a “critically imperiled” species and the most endangered bird on the continent, was hanging by the thread.
A guiding principle of the Bird Photographer of the Year contest is “celebrating bird life from around the world,” but this year’s overall winner instead focuses on avian death. Patricia Homonylo’s “When Worlds Collide” depicts thousands of dead birds, victims of building collisions, arranged in concentric circles.
A herd of elephants has come to New York City’s Meatpacking District. The Great Elephant Migration is a traveling art installation and fundraiser centered on 100 life-sized elephant sculptures.
When the population of vultures in India collapsed in the early 2000s, their absence led to the deaths of some 500,000 people, according to new research published in the American Economic Review.
In places where bat populations have collapsed in the US, infant mortality has gone up. A new study by economist Eyal Frank, appearing in the journal Science, explains the connection.
The northern bald ibis had been extinct in Central Europe for four centuries, but a dedicated conservation and research group has reintroduced a small population into the wild. The only problem: the birds have no clue how or where to migrate when seasons change, so the humans are teaching them.
On the day before her 19th birthday, Ying Ying the panda delivered two cubs, making her the oldest giant panda ever to give birth for the first time. The new arrivals, tiny and pink and as yet unnamed, are also the first pandas born in Hong Kong.
Marine scientists in Australia have deployed eight sea lions to film the seafloor and map the remote, aquatic ecosystems around Kangaroo and Olive Islands. The deep diving animals captured a lot of cool footage while the scientists published their work in Frontiers in Marine Science.
It may not sound like much to go from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” but for the Iberian lynx, the change augurs very good news for the species. Though still among the rarest cats in the world, the lynx’s rebound from near-extinction just two decades ago is evidence that conservation works, especially when all stakeholders are included in the effort.
