A new study by WCS, El Colegio de Frontera Sur, Washington State University and other key regional partners has found that the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), one of the last large herding mammals of the Americas, has been eliminated from 87 percent of its historical range in Mesoamerica.
University of Wisconsin–Madison scientists have made a fresh attempt to untangle the scorpion family tree using not the shape and structure of the arachnids’ bodies, but the shape of their venom.
Fires in the African savannah – planned by national park staff to regenerate the preferred grasses of grazers such as wildebeests and zebras – are killing the few foods that endangered black rhinos love to eat.
Conservationists released an incredible video today showing the successful re-introduction of 24 zebras into Tanzania’s Kitulo National Park in the Southern Highlands region last week – part of a bold effort to re-wild this once pristine landscape.
Now, after more than 50 generations of selective breeding, a new Cornell University-led study compares gene expression of tame and aggressive silver foxes in two areas of the brain, shedding light on genes responsible for social behavior.
A team of scientists led by Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Roehampton can jump as fast and as high out of the water as their cousin, the famously powerful and predatory great white shark.
Anyone who peruses relationship settings on social media knows that our interactions with other humans can be intricate, but a new study in Nature: Scientific Reports suggests that researchers may be overlooking some of these same complexities in the social relations of our closest primate relatives, such as chimpanzees and macaques.
Are Laikipia’s recovering lions turning to endangered Grevy’s zebras (Equus grevyi) for their next meal?
Among pet snakes and lizards, the biggest-selling species are also the most likely to be released by their owners – and to potentially become invasive species, according to a Rutgers study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology. The study by Rutgers University–New Brunswick ecologists provides new clarity on how and why the exotic pet trade has become the primary venue by which reptiles and amphibians arrive in non-native lands, the first step to becoming ecologically damaging invaders.
Under warming conditions, arctic wolf spiders’ tastes in prey might be changing, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis, initiating a new cascade of food web interactions that could potentially alleviate some impacts of global warming.
A team of scientists is the first to confirm the movement patterns and seasonal migrations of baby white sharks in the north Atlantic Ocean. They put the New York Bight shark nursery theory to test by deploying satellite and acoustic tags on 10 baby white sharks (less than 1 year old) off Long Island’s coast. Results provide novel insights into the distribution of this vulnerable early stage of life that complements recent work on larger white sharks.
New fossil evidence shows that ancient primates – including one of the oldest known, Teilhardina brandti – had specialized grooming claws as well as nails. The findings, published online in the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest the transition from claws to nails was more complex than previously thought.
Identifying bottlenecks — i.e. places where birds concentrate on migration — helps bird conservationists know what areas to focus on and get the most bang for their buck, since a large percentage of a species’ population can pass through these small areas.
Unlike related hummingbird species, Costa’s perform their dives to the side of females, rather than in front of them. In a paper published today in Current Biology, researchers at the University of California, Riverside show this trajectory minimizes an audible Doppler sound that occurs when the Costa’s dive.
Through a detailed genetic study of kinship, an international team is the first to demonstrate that just like human societies, beluga whales appear to value culture as well as their ancestral roots and family ties. They have demonstrated that related whales returned to the same locations year after year, and even generation after generation.
Sea turtles use their flippers to handle prey despite the limbs being evolutionarily designed for locomotion, a discovery by Monterey Bay Aquarium researchers published today in PeerJ.
Logging activities in biodiverse forests can have a huge negative impact on wildlife, particularly large species such as big cats, but a new study proves that the Western Hemisphere’s largest cat species—the jaguar (Panthera onca)—can do well in logging concessions that are properly managed, according to conservationists from the San Diego Zoo Global and the Bronx Zoo-based WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).
UAlberta researchers first to observe red squirrels killing other males’ pups when females produce two litters.
A new study by scientists from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and other groups predicts that the effects of climate change will severely impact the Albertine Rift, one of Africa’s most biodiverse regions and a place not normally associated with global warming.
A new study almost 20 years in the making provides some of the strongest evidence yet of the "speciation reversal" phenomenon in two lineages of Common Ravens.
For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic peninsula, has been steadily declining—or so biologists have thought. A new study however, is providing new insights on this species of penguin.
A student in New Mexico State University’s Biology Department recently published a paper in “Condor,” a scientific journal, about the nesting and populating of Cooper’s hawks in urban areas.
Scientists from Rutgers University–New Brunswick and elsewhere documented fewer than 10,000 red knot shorebirds in Chile in January, down from more than 13,000 a year earlier.
Beluga whales that spend summers feeding in the Arctic are diving deeper and longer to find food than in earlier years, when sea ice covered more of the ocean for longer periods, according to a new analysis led by University of Washington researchers.
High-speed recordings of Egyptian fruit bats in flight show that instead of using a primitive form of echolocation, these animals actually use a technique recently developed by humans for surveillance and navigation.
Three nests of the Critically Endangered Red-headed vulture were found in January in Chhep Wildlife Sanctuary by conservationists from the Ministry of Environment (MoE), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and local communities. The population of this species in Cambodia is possibly less than 50 individuals. These nest discoveries give hope that conservation efforts may save this species from extinction.
Could baboons and other mammals worldwide soon need pedometers? Not likely, but a new study to be published in Science reveals that on average, mammals move distances two to three times shorter in human-modified landscapes than they do in the wild.
Male sea turtles are disappearing and not just in Australia. FAU researchers found that 97 to 100 percent of hatchlings in southeast Florida have been female since 2002. They are the first to show why and how moisture conditions inside the nest in addition to heat affect the development and sex ratios of turtle embryos, using a novel technique they developed to estimate sex ratios with a male-specific, transcriptional molecular marker Sox9.
A new study from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and partners reveals for the first time the ways in which wild weather swings and extreme icing events are negatively impacting the largest land mammal of the Earth’s polar realms—the muskoxen. The paper demonstrates that while this denizen of the Arctic and other cold-adapted species have spectacular adaptations, the previously unknown effects of rain-on-snow events, winter precipitation, and ice tidal surges are costly for the animals, if not deadly.
There are more than 8 million species of living things on Earth, but none of them — from 100-foot blue whales to microscopic bacteria — has an advantage over the others in the universal struggle for existence. In a paper published Jan. 8 in the prestigious journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, scientists describe the dynamic that began with the origin of life on Earth 4 billion years ago.
NEW YORK (December 21, 2017) — A group of scientists now considers a little-known dolphin that only lives along the Atlantic coasts of Western Africa to be among the continent’s most endangered mammals, a list that includes widely recognized species such as gorillas, African wild dogs, and black rhinos, according to WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and the IUCN’s (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Cetacean Specialist Group.
The larvae of the fish that live in coral reefs look alike, making it difficult for marine biologists to study reef populations. Now, Weizmann's Prof. Rotem Sorek found a way to “barcode” 80% of fish species known to visit the reefs in a Red Sea gulf.
Logging of the largest trees in the Sierra Nevada’s national forests ended in the early 1990s after agreements were struck to protect species’ habitat. But new research reported Dec. 6 in the journal Diversity and Distributions by University of Wisconsin–Madison ecologists shows that spotted owls, one of the iconic species logging restrictions were meant to protect, have continued to experience population declines in the forests.
A Tulane University researcher has found that a decline in the number of wood thrushes is probably due to deforestation in Central America.
A new study co-authored by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) addresses concerns over the many Arctic shorebird populations in precipitous decline. Evident from the study is that monitoring and protection of habitat where the birds breed, winter, and stopover is critical to their survival and to that of a global migration spectacle.
A new study has revealed a chain mail-like woven microstructure that gives parrotfish teeth their remarkable ability to chomp on coral all day long – the structure could serve as a blueprint for designing ultra-durable synthetic materials.
An unseasonably warm, dry summer in 2015 on Washington state's Mount Rainier caused subalpine wildflowers to change their bloom times and form 'reassembled' communities, with unknown consequences for species interactions among wildflowers, pollinators and other animals.
Human disturbance of tropical rainforests in Madagascar including wildfires, burning and timber exploitation, have led to reduced rainfall and a longer dry season, further pushing the already critically endangered Greater Bamboo Lemur to the brink of extinction.
What began as a Twitter joke between two researchers has turned into a four-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to take 3-D digital scans of 20,000 museum vertebrate specimens and make them available to everyone online.
Different head shapes and different body sizes of hammerhead sharks should result in differences in their swimming performance right? Researchers from FAU have conducted the first study to examine the whole body shape and swimming kinematics of two closely related yet very different hammerhead sharks, with some unexpected results.
Beavers have probably been more influential than humans in altering the ecosystem of the Kabetogama Peninsula which is home to Voyageurs National Park near International Falls, Minnesota.
A new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society-India Program, the Centre for Wildlife Studies, and the University of Florida-Gainesville, shows that cost-effective “sign surveys” can be used to reliably monitor animal distributions in the wild.
A team of scientists analyzed nearly 30 years of revenue and permitting records for individuals fishing in Alaskan waters and tracked how their fishing choices, in terms of permits purchased and species caught, influenced their year-to-year income volatility.
A new study by University of Washington scientists has found that, for dozens of fish populations around the globe, old fish are greatly depleted — mainly because of fishing pressure. The paper, published online Sept. 14 in Current Biology, is the first to report that old fish are missing in many populations around the world.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet committed on September 9th to create a new marine protected area in Admiralty Sound in Tierra del Fuego. The new “Multiple Use Marine and Coastal Protected Area Seno Almirantazgo” will safeguard rich marine wildlife and the area’s rich cultural heritage, while protecting artisanal fisheries and promoting sustainable tourism.
Octopuses are usually solitary creatures, but a new site in the waters off the east coast of Australia is the home of up to 15 gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus) that have been been observed communicating — either directly as in den evictions or indirectly through posturing, chasing or color changes, according to findings reported in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology.
An international team of scientists investigating the effects of six planned or potential Andean dams on the Amazon river system has found that major negative ecological impacts can be expected both above the dams and throughout the lowland floodplains and the Amazon Delta.
Amphibians can evolve increased tolerance to pesticides, but the adaptation can make them more susceptible to parasites, according to a team that includes researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
An endangered bat species with a UK population of less than 1,000 could be further threatened by the effects of global warming, according to a new study led by the University of Southampton.
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