Sharks caught a break yesterday after the Senate passed a piece of important legislation aimed at reducing the number of sharks finned in U.S. waters. The Shark Conservation Act of 2009 passed the Senate on Monday, strengthening existing legislation by closing a few gaping loopholes in the law, and is now due to move to the House.
The …
There are a lot of perks that come with being a primate. You get to be smart. You get to be social. You get to have opposable thumbs — which are very handy things to have. Most of all, you get to keep living even during hard times. If the history of humans indicates anything, it’s that we’re survivors, and a new study is showing just …
Later this month, heads of state and diplomats from 11 countries will meet in St. Petersburg, Russia for a “tiger summit” to discuss how to stop tigers from going extinct.
It’s the first time heads of state have gathered for a meeting about a single species. But to many conservationists, the meeting shouldn’t have been needed at all.
Getting out of harm’s way isn’t easy when you’re a plant. If the water is rising or a fire is approaching, anything that can run, fly or slither can at least move to higher ground. But trees and other vegetation are pretty much stuck. That’s at least true with high-speed, real-time dangers like floods, but a slow motion disaster—global …
All along the northern coast of Sicily there is evidence of organized crime: empty tonnaros, or tuna canneries, that went out of business last century when the massive blue fin tunas they hauled from the Mediterranean for generations finally disappeared. Sicily’s ghostly tonnaros may not have much to do with the Corleones or the
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Every so often we get a glimpse — a transluscent body with a glowing orb hanging off its forehead, or this dragonfish, with teeth on its tongue and jaws that look like they could take your arm off. These missives from our oceans’ depths are as captivating as they are few and far between – the fruit of long, expensive forays to
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It just got harder to be a fish—at least a Canadian fish. Or at least a Canadian fish looking for a mate. That’s because more and more of the boys keep turning into girls. As with so many other things, it’s humans who are to blame.
The human household environment is awash in chemicals—preservatives, plastics, drugs, cosmetics and …
I find it hard to think of a more depressing finding than this one: writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of international researchers predict that thousands of rare flowering plant species are likely to become extinct before humans discover them.
And that’s just from the current pressure from habitat loss …
In its ongoing campaign to draw attention to Indonesia’s deforestation woes, Greenpeace has released a new report singling out Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), one of the world’s largest paper companies owned by Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas, for sourcing trees from rainforest and peatland that are home to endangered species like the …
When Iceland resumed commercial whaling in 2006, an old whaling station in a deep, beautiful green fjord called Hvalfjordur — or ‘whale fjord’ — was dusted off about an hour’s drive outside the capital of Reykjavik. The company that had lobbied the government to resume commercial whaling was, in fact, the only company that …
