The tiger, a creature of almost mystical, magical, and majestic allure and the subject of Blake's famous 1794 poem Tyger, is battling for survival in its final refuges in Thailand and Myanmar in Southeast Asia. The populations of tigers in the neighboring countries of Cambodia,...
The Wilderness Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on September 3, 1964. The USA system of wilderness areas now includes over 800 areas covering more than 110 million acres. Currently, all but six states—Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, and Rhode Island—have...
Impact of Climate on Human HealthOn April 5, 2024, the World Bank released a brief on the impact of climate change on human health. According to the report, a warmer climate could result in at least 21 million additional deaths by 2025 due to five...
In 1980, Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney and Peter Marler published a paper in Science reporting that a vervet monkey troop in Amboseli National Park in Kenya used three different alarm calls to signify danger respectively from eagles, leopards and snakes. According to Snowdon, this paper...
How animals migrate reliably from one place to another yearly has been an enduring puzzle. Donald Griffin, the discoverer of bat echolocation, also investigated bird migration to determine how birds could navigate the ocean. He and his colleagues tracked migrating flocks using a repurposed military...
On December 19, 2022, representatives from 188 countries adopted a new agreement on biodiversity, now known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The 2022 GBF aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by adopting four overarching global goals and 23 targets, including conserving 30%...
Following the release on September 4, 2023, of a report by IPBES on the adverse impact of invasive alien species on global biodiversity, the Australian Government announced that it was again “declaring war” on cats (the Government declared war on cats in 2015, pledging to...
In 1992, Brewster Bartlett, a science teacher at Pinkerton Academy in New Hampshire, started a citizen science project encouraging his students to use email. Driving back to the school one day, he passed a dead skunk on the side of the road. He decided that...
New York City has more than its share of celebrity residents. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that the city may also find itself all atwitter because of the presence of avian celebrities. Pale Male, a red-tailed hawk who took up residence on one of...
In 1700, so many beaver pelts were stored in Montreal warehouses that they threatened to glut the market, something that traders had already experienced in previous years. So, fearing that prices in Europe would crash, orders were given to pile up and burn fully three-quarters...
