Focus: Wildlife Channel Featured Story 2

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The Huallaga River in the Andes of central Peru extends for 1,138 km, making it the largest tributary of the Marañón River, the spinal cord of the Amazon River.

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A new study provides insight into where chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) avoided climate instability during glacial and interglacial periods in Africa over the past 120,000 years.

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A new study published by researchers from the University of Georgia suggests competition for food from coyotes—a relative newcomer to the Southeast—may be putting pressure on foxes, particularly the gray fox.

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Woods Hole, MA (August 3, 2021) – A new study published today in Global Change Biology provides valuable new data that highlights how species extinction risk is accelerating due to rapid climate change and an increase in extreme climate events, such as glacial calving and sea ice loss. The study, led by Stephanie Jenouvrier, associate scientist, and seabird ecologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and co-authored by an international team of scientists, policy experts, ecologists, and climate scientists, provided pivotal research and projections tailored for use by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS). Their work proposed that emperor penguins be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and this week, USFWS submitted that listing proposal.

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Shark Week is many things.

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The Arctic is warming at approximately twice the global rate. A new study led by researchers from McGill University finds that cold-adapted Arctic species, like the thick-billed murre, are especially vulnerable to heat stress caused by climate change.

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The Cornell Wildlife Hospital helped care for a litter of baby beavers, whose parents were trapped in the Adirondacks, nursing three of the surviving five back to health before sending them for rehabilitation.

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Why did the deer cross the road? According to research from the University of New Hampshire to keep going and going and going. Researchers have discovered the longest distance ever recorded by an adult male white-tailed deer—300 kilometers, or close to 200 miles, in just over three weeks. The finding has important implications for population management and the transmission of disease, especially chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological disease.

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A new study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions predicts massive range declines of Africa’s great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos – due to the impacts of climate change, land-use changes and human population growth.

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Bears are known for being devoted and protective of their baby cubs, but research from the University of New Hampshire shows that they may also play a significant role in shielding gray fox from predators like coyotes, who compete with the fox for food and space. The research is one of the first studies to show how black bears provide a buffer to allow other, smaller carnivores to safely co-exist.

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Orangutans are closely related to humans. And yet, they are much less sociable than other species of great apes.

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Elephants and lions are iconic species that help raise substantial funds for conservation. However, they also pose significant threats to people, crops, and livestock, and are themselves threatened with extinction.

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A giant saber-toothed cat lived in North America between 5 million and 9 million years ago, weighing up to 900 pounds and hunting prey that likely weighed 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, scientists reported today in a new study.

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Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings will be published in Science Advances.

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A new study suggests the white shark population for the eastern north Pacific, especially those listed in the Gulf of California, might be underestimated. Researchers found that the mortality rates for these white sharks might be underestimated as well, as an illicit fishery for the species was uncovered in the Gulf of California, suggesting that fishers were killing many more white sharks than has been previously understood.

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Atlantic bluefin tuna have returned to UK waters and can once again be seen during the summer and autumn months.

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Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Congo Program and the Nouabalé-Ndoki Foundation found that female putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans) use males as “hired guns” to defend from predators such as leopards.

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In the decade since a tsunami washed over the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, triggering the second-largest nuclear disaster in history, the surrounding towns have struggled to return to normal. But that’s not the case for the wildlife living in the area.

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A new study in the journal Diversity by researchers from Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) finds that bird communities in two rapidly developing rural landscapes react differently to increased “rural sprawl.”

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When it comes to saving endangered species of a certain size, conservationists often have to think outside the box. This was reinforced by a recent study published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases, led by faculty in the College of Veterinary Medicine, which analyzed the effects of hanging tranquilized black rhinoceroses upside down by their feet.

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Chimpanzees, one of the closest relatives of humans, cooperate on a group level - in combative disputes, they even cooperate with group members to whom they are not related. Those involved in fights with neighbouring groups put themselves at risk of serious injury or even death.

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A new study indicates that the earliest evidence of mammal social behavior goes back to the Age of Dinosaurs. A multituberculate that lived about 75.5 million years ago, Filikomys primaevus engaged in multi-generational, group-nesting and burrowing behavior, and possibly lived in colonies.

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Mountain gorilla groups are friendly to familiar neighbours - provided they stay out of "core" parts of their territory - new research shows.

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A new University of Washington and NOAA Fisheries study found that sea lions have the largest negative effect on early-arriving endangered Chinook salmon in the lower Columbia River. The results of this study will publish Oct. 18 in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

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A new study from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology highlights specific features of urban green spaces that support the greatest diversity of bird species. The findings were published today in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning. The study focuses specifically on parks in New York City. It uses observations submitted to the eBird citizen-science database from 2002 through 2019 to estimate the variety of species found on an annual and seasonal basis. Bottom line: the more green space available, the greater the diversity of birds. Models show that Increasing the area of green space by 50% would result in an 11.5% increase in annual and an 8.2% increase in seasonal species diversity.

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In late March, as communities began to issue shelter-in-place orders, it seemed animals came out of hiding.

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Every year thousands of monarch butterflies are caught, tagged and released during their fall migration by citizen scientists helping to track their movements. But how do the monarchs themselves feel about being handled by humans?

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The world's animal distribution map will need to be redrawn and textbooks updated, after researchers discovered the existence of 'Australian' species on Christmas Island.

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A natural experiment created by an active volcano gives new insight into the long-term negative impacts of human colonisation of tropical forest islands. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal, Journal of Ecology.

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Climate change affects ecosystems not only through warming, but also by delivering more extreme weather events

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By connecting small, restored patches of savanna to one another via habitat corridors at an experimental landscape within the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a nearly 20-year-long study has shown an annual increase in the number of plant species within fragments over time, and a drop in the number of species disappearing from them entirely.

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Moose are picky eaters, and that’s a good thing for their ecosystems.

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Mackerel sharks (Lamniformes) are a group consisting of some of the most iconic sharks we know, including the mako shark (the fastest shark in the world), the infamous great white shark and Megalodon, the biggest predatory shark that has ever roamed  the world’s oceans.

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A mass die-off of seabirds in the Bering Sea may be partially attributable to climate change, according to a new study publishing May 29 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE

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Global warming has caused twice as many ocean-dwelling species as land-dwelling species to disappear from their habitats, a unique Rutgers-led study found. The greater vulnerability of sea creatures may significantly impact human communities that rely on fish and shellfish for food and economic activity, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

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Climate change could contribute to the demographic collapse of the painted turtle, a species that undergoes temperature-dependent sex determination. An Iowa State University scientist is sounding the alarm about the painted turtle’s future in a new study.

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By analyzing troves of genetic data and considering a vast number of possible ways to examine it, University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists now have a high degree of confidence that horseshoe crabs do indeed belong within the arachnids.

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Annual blacktip shark migration season is in full force along South Florida’s Atlantic coast as thousands of them head south for warmer weather. FAU shark researcher has been tracking the migration patterns of these top predators by air and by sea. Now, the latest addition to his arsenal of tools is providing personal and intimate details about them.

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American kestrel. Chinese mantis. Candleflame lichen. The highly diverse list of species spotted at Rutgers University may be unique globally. Indeed, more than 1,600 kinds of animals, insects, plants and other life forms have been reported so far at 24 Rutgers campuses and properties across New Jersey as part of a new long-term “Flora and Fauna of Rutgers University” biodiversity project.

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Though red wolves were declared extinct in the wild by 1980, a team of biologists has found their DNA in a group of canines living on Galveston Island off the coast of Texas.

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Researchers used 3D computer modeling to simulate heat exchange in dinosaurs

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Cal State Fullerton (CSUF) paleontologists have described a new genus and species of walrus and named it after CSUF Titans and Orange County, where the extinct, tuskless fossil was discovered.

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The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) welcomed a litter of three cheetah cubs Sept. 22.

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The Duke of Cambridge, Prince William visited Tanzania’s College of African Wildlife Management (CAWM), Mweka, as part of his current visit to Africa as President of United for Wildlife. While there, the Duke took part in an exercise as part of SMART training at the college being supported by United for Wildlife and implemented by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

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Monarch butterfly caterpillars living next to roads may be stressed by the sound of passing cars and trucks, according to a new study from the University of Georgia.

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A massive decade-long study of Western Equatorial Africa’s gorillas and chimpanzees has revealed that there are one third more western lowland gorillas and one tenth more central chimpanzees than previously thought. The bad news: the vast majority of these great apes (80 percent) exist outside of protected areas, and gorilla populations are declining by 2.7 percent annually.

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More than one in five fawns of white-tailed deer – the most economically important big-game mammal in the United States – can contract a malaria parasite, making fawns susceptible to diseases and death, a new study co-authored by a University of Florida researcher shows.