Yearly Archives: 2018

There are many organizations monitoring endangered species such as elephants and tigers, but what about the millions of other species on the planet -- ones that most people have never heard of or don't think about? How do scientists assess the threat level of, say, the plicate rocksnail, Caribbean spiny lobster or Torrey pine tree?

Jellyfish undergo an amazing metamorphosis, from tiny polyps growing on the seafloor to swimming medusae with stinging tentacles. This shape-shifting has served them well, shepherding jellyfish through more than 500 million years of mass extinctions on Earth.

Using a new approach to measure chemical contaminants in polar bears, scientists from Canada and the United States found a large variety of new chlorinated and fluorinated substances, including many new polychlorinated biphenyl metabolites. Worryingly, these previously unrecognized contaminants have not declined in the past decades, and many long-chain fluorinated alkyl sulfonic acids have been...

Alarming footage captured by World Animal Protection and the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at University of Oxford reveals the heart-breaking moment a pangolin is brutally killed for its body parts to be sold on the black market in Assam, north-eastern India.

Almost ninety years ago on a freezing January morning, the keepers of the Stockholm Zoo in Sweden discovered a dead seal pup in their seal pond. The pup was immediately recognized as a bastard; a hybrid between species that should not interbreed. Only two grey seal males and one ringed seal female, species belonging to...

Lactation is the production and secretion of milk for the young and is a mammalian attribute. However, there have been few examples of milk provisioning in non-mammals.