Antarctica’s blue whales all feed in the same place. But a new genetic analysis suggests they are actually three separate populations that breed in different parts of the globe.
Land clearing rates in Queensland tripled since 2010.
Martin Taylor
Australia may have reputation for vast areas of wilderness, but in reality the continent’s ecosystems have been chopped and diced. Now we need to protect what’s left.
Curiosity saved the butterfly.
Paul Ritchie/Flickr
The government is set to restrict green groups’ right to challenge environmental approvals in court. But the law isn’t doing its job in protecting Australia’s plants and animals anyway.
An icon, and perhaps casualty, of California’s contentious water policies.
US Fish & Wildlife Service
Peter Alagona, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Endangered Species Act may stave off extinction for the Delta smelt in California, but will it help this threatened fish – or any other at-risk species – recover and thrive again?
Humpback whale populations have leapt on both Australia’s east and west coasts.
Ari S. Friedlaender (under NMFS permit)
Chalk it up as a rare conservation win: humpback whales have bounced back so strongly since the whaling era that there is no longer a need to include them on Australia’s official threatened species list.
Feral cats are thought to be responsible for the decline of many Australian species.
Melissa Jensen
Feral cats are highly adaptable and highly variable, hence we must continue to search for their Achilles Heel and invest in a wide range of control methods.
Sensationalized shark attacks skew the facts.
'Shark' via www.shutterstock.com
The 20-year-old agreements that are supposed to safeguard much of Australia’s forests, are not working. Now they are up for renewal, and it’s time for a complete rethink, writes David Lindenmayer.
Hefty problem: a local council was left with a huge clean-up bill after a dead whale washed up in Perth last year.
AAP Image/City of Stirling
Dead whales can cost beachside ratepayers a lot to clean up. The alternative is to tow them away before they wash up - but the legal question of who does the job is far more complex than it sounds.
The Bramble Cay melomys - the latest in a long line of extinct Australian mammals.
Queensland Government
Last July, the federal environment minister, Greg Hunt, announced the appointment of Gregory Andrews as Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner. His mission: to help avert the extinction of a…
The quoll, one of the mammal species that calls Kakadu home.
Jonathan Webb/supplied
Kakadu National Park in Australia’s tropical north is one of the world’s premier conservation reserves. However, it is partly failing in one of its principal purposes. The past two to three decades have…
Zoos provide succor for species having a tough time of it in the wild.
B. A. Minteer
Today, many zoos promote the protection of biodiversity as a significant part of their mission. As conservation “arks” for endangered species and, increasingly, as leaders in field conservation projects…
The Amur tiger, like its cousin the Amur leopard, is among the world’s rarest cats.
Appaloosa
The Amur tiger (Panthera tigris ssp. altaica), also known as the Siberian Tiger, is among the world’s rarest and most endangered cat species. The largest and northernmost tiger, it is believed only around…
US TV presenter Milissa Bachman caused a stir with this pic, but she is one of many trophy hunters.
Melissa Bachman/Instagram
There has been a huge increase in attention recently to the problem of wildlife poaching, mostly from the stream of grisly stories from Africa about rhino and elephants illegally killed for their horn…