Biodiversity

For some time, the bee population has been steadily declining worldwide, and this is most directly attributed to the negative impact of pesticides. Now, there's a lot of buzz around a recent study by Dutch researchers, which has found that the toxic chemicals we use are having a ripple effect farther up the food chain, causing insectivorous birds to rapidly decline in number. The study was the collaborative effort of researchers with the Radboud University Institute of Water and Wetland Resea

President Obama used his executive authority on June 17 to create the world's largest marine sanctuary. This has huge implications for the environment, as it bans commercial fishing, mining, and oil exploration in a major portion of the Pacific Ocean. The move will bypass Republican lawmakers who have long acted as roadblocks to environmental struggles, and could protect up to 800,000 square miles of the south-central Pacific from commercial and corporate exploitation. To this end, the Obama

The elephants in northern Mozambique survived the country’s bloody civil war, but now they are being killed by the hundreds every year. An aerial-survey, commissioned by WWF-Mozambique, shows that between 480 to 900 elephants died in the area between 2011 and 2013, with the majority of the deaths being blamed on poaching. “The elephant deaths are probably due to illegal hunting and the losses are likely to be devastating to the population,” said Anabela Rodriguez, Country Director of WWF-Moza

A new study warns that we are on the brink of another mass extinction, with species of animals and plants becoming extinct up to 1000 times faster than they did before humans populated Earth. “We are on the verge of the sixth extinction,” said Stuart Pimm, the study’s lead author and biologist of Duke University to AP. “Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions.” Great extinctions that have wiped out the majority of life has struck Earth at least five times before. The dinosaurs w

The California Fish and Game Commission voted on June 4 to grant endangered species protections to gray wolves. This is the first time the state has stepped into the issue over the species, which is losing protection and being killed in several states, and which is expanding to territories it had not inhabited for decades in others. One such territory might be the Golden State itself, where a gray wolf pup was spotted in the northern part of the state in 2011. Environment authorities believe

British Columbia's controversial annual spring grizzly bear hunt began on Apr. 1, with an estimated 1,800 hunting authorizations being issued - one of the highest numbers in recent years. Grizzlies, which are considered "threatened" by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, do not have the population numbers that black bears do, and activists including conservation groups, animal rights supporters, and First Nation tribe members have serious qualms about the hunting of these bears for pure sport. T

The UN's International Court of Justice has ordered Japan to halt its yearly whale hunt, a cruel practice that gives no consideration to the welfare of the animals. Japan is one of several countries that persisted in this practice after whaling was banned worldwide in 1986, in this case using "scientific research" as an excuse. But there is nothing scientific about whale killing, and the UN has called them out on it. Currently, Japan's whaling program is killing about 1,000 whales a year unde

At least 250 dolphins have been tortured, many of them brutally killed, in Japan's Taiji Cove in the past seven days. Some of these mammals will be collected and shipped off to aquariums, but a large number will be harvested for their meat. Dolphin hunting is also known as drive hunting, and involves driving the animals together with boats and trapping them. It is increasingly seen as a cruel, inhumane, and entirely unnecessary practice. Now, animal rights groups and other activists worldwide ar

Is the polar bear, pictured above, one of the first documented cases of a polar bear dying because of the devastating effects of man-made climate change? Dr Ian Stirling, renowned polar bear expert, thinks so. A new climate report released yesterday shows that the Arctic lost record amounts of sea ice last year. And this is forcing animals to travel further away from their natural territories in search of food. Especially hard-hit are polar bears who feed almost exclusively on seals which the

Unlike the European Union, which in 2010 banned having chimps put in science laboratories, the U.S. remains one of the only nations that still conducts invasive scientific experimentation on the animals. More than 900 are still used as little more than test subjects. But on June 26, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would cut funding for the majority of these experiments, and retire at least 310 of the 360 federally-owned chimpanzees currently in labs, moving them to a sanctua

South Korea has said that they plan on hunting endangered whales that are protected by a global moratorium. Just like Japan, the South Koreans are trying to justify this by claiming that the whaling is done for scientific reasons. In 1982 the International Whaling Commission (IWC), an international body set up in 1946 with the mission to regulate the whaling industry, adopted a global moratorium on commercial whaling. But due to a loophole in the treaty it is possible for countries

Loggers in Brazil have reportedly burned a young tribe girl alive in an effort to scare the local indigenous population from its land. The girl, who the Telegraph report was around the age of eight, came from one of Amazon's last uncontacted tribes. The gruesome murder is said to have happened in October or November last year. Apparently the girl had wandered away from her Awá tribe village, which consists of around 60 members who all live in complete isolation with the modern world, when she

The journal Nature recently reported that modern methods of measuring animal populations are too simple and often do not take into account the complexity of what influences species numbers. Professor Stephen Hubbell, from California, and Professor Fangliang He, from China, found that existing mathematical models for measurement were flawed: present figures overestimated rates by up to 160 percent, showing that calculations must be updated and made more accurate. Nevertheless, Hubbel

The Guardian reports that the famous Amazon rainforest activist Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva has been killed in an ambush near his home in Brazil. Six months after predicting his own murder, a leading rainforest defender has reportedly been gunned down in the Brazilian Amazon. Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva and his wife, Maria do Espírito Santo, are said to have been killed in an ambush near their home in Nova Ipixuna, in Pará state, about 37 miles from Marabá. According to a local newspa

Al Jazeera English takes a closer look at the forests in Latvia which are being cut down at an unsustainable rate in one of their recent episodes of People & Power. "The Baltic nation of Latvia is blessed with some of the most beautiful forests in the world, millions of square kilometres of pristine woodland that support a complex biodiversity of rare species of animals and plants. [...] As the UK aims to become one of the greenest countries in Europe, we expose its role in th

Today the European Parliament voted 550 to 49 in favour to ban the trade of all seal products (such as fur and omega-3) within the European Union. The new EU-wide legislation is meant to send a clear signal to Canada that their annual commercial slaughter of seals is "inherently inhumane." "The legislation follows lobbying by animal welfare groups, which have long argued that the clubbing of seal pups by hunters is barbaric. Canada kills about 300,000 seals annually o

">" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="550" height="338"> The annual seal massacre in Canada has started. This year the Canadian government has set a target of over 280000 baby seals to be clubbed to death and skinned to provide coats, hats, handbags and other accessories for the fashion market. This seal hunt is the largest commercial hunt for marine mammals in the world and has been met with protests fro

Photo credit: pixie_bebe If the ice continues to shrink (due to man-made climate change) at its current pace the Emperor Penguins will become extinct within 100 years, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts warns. "Emperor Penguins are one of only two open-sea Antarctic penguin species and depend on the sea ice for survival. After breeding, Emperor Penguins feed among the coastal pack ice where stretches of water are exposed. As a result of disap

Ask me where I am from, and more than likely, I will say Lake Erie. Or the Great Lakes. I love Pennsylvania, for sure, but I feel I have more in common with someone from Toronto or Chicago than someone from Philadelphia (though I love that city and lived there many years of my youth). I also love central Pennsylvania, being a Penn State girl.  But the hills and valleys feel somehow wrong to me. My eyes crave the flat land, as it reaches toward a low and long horizon. And I truly feel st

According to a newly released report by the IUCN Primate Specialist Group says that "almost 50 percent of the world's primates are in danger of extinction." The report points out that habitat destruction and hunting are the two main threats. "We've raised concerns for years about primates being in peril, but now we have solid data to show the situation is far more severe than we imagined," said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International (CI) and the longtime chairman of t

White rhinoceros in Kruger Park. Photo by Esculapio. It wasn't long ago since the Caribbean monk seal was officially listed as extinct by the US Government. And now the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, reports that the Northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is "on the brink of extinction". According to older reports the only remaining population of Northern white rhino is restricted in the wild to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Iceland has killed two polar bears since the U.S. Department of Interior formally listed the polar bear as a "threatened" species a few weeks ago. The first polar bear, named Björn Björnesson, came to Iceland in the beginning of June this year. The polar bear was shot as soon as he was spotted for fears he would get into the nearest village. According to the hunters, killing the polar bear was the only solution as it would take to long to get the anaesthetic that was on the other side of th

Photo from "The Fisheries and Fisheries Industries of the United States", by George Brown Goode (1887). The Caribbean monk seal has gone "the way of the dodo" and been officially listed as extinct by the US Government. The Caribbean monk seal is, so far, the only seal species to go extinct due to human causes. "Humans left the Caribbean monk seal population unsustainable after overhunting them, Unfortunately, this led to their demise and labels the species as the only seal to go extinct f

During a nighttime robbery, the horn of a 120-year-old stuffed rhinoceros was stolen, from the museum where it was displayed. Museum authorities warned that using this horn as a traditional medicine on the Asian black market could have lethal consequences because it was preserved by the use of the deadly arsenic and DDT. But causing immidiate death should not be the only concern. The fact that DDT is still in use is really alarming, since it is a substance that causes accumulation. As an envi

Today the U.S. Department of Interior formally listed the polar bear as a "threatened" species. Environmental organisations have called for the polar bears to be listed on the "endangered" species list hoping it could lead to actions to combat climate change. Unfortunately interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne wouldn't want to label the polar bears as "endangered" but rather as a "threatened" species. That means they've successfully downplayed the threat to polar bears from climate change and