The tooth-billed bowerbird gave itself away with a not-quite-right call. Suspicious, I’d panned my binoculars toward the sound and there he was, the mimic, high in the canopy of a…
WEST KIMBERLEY, Australia — November marks the end of the dry season in the Kimberley, the northernmost region of Western Australia, the country’s largest state. As the monsoonal rains start to…
JAKARTA — When the STS-50 was seized in Indonesian waters for illegal fishing in April 2018, it became the poster child for global efforts to reveal the true identity behind…
Scientists have completed the first-ever global, high-resolution map of the world’s shallow tropical coral reefs. The map is part of the Allen Coral Atlas, an open-access, user-friendly coral reef monitoring…
BROOME, Australia — A cool breeze blows through the savanna country east of Broome, a small town on the far north coast of Western Australia, Australia's largest state. This time of year is known as Barrgana by the…
At a truck stop along a Western Australian highway, researchers noticed an unfamiliar wild tobacco plant. Covered in sticky hairs, the plant appeared to be a mass grave for small…
For decades, scientists speculated that seagrass seeds served only as a backup to vegetative proliferation; they settled into the sand beneath their parent plants, ready to germinate if anything untoward…
I’m a native of North Queensland. I love Rugby League, an arvo in my tinny angling for coral trout (translation: an afternoon in a fishing boat) and The Reef. These…
The Australian government has moved to create two new marine protected areas that cover an expanse of ocean twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The two…
HOBART, Australia — A dividing line of marking tape separates a clearcut area from intact native forest in the Denison Range of Tasmania, Australia’s southernmost state. An hour’s drive from…
The superb lyrebird has garnered worldwide recognition as nature's greatest voice impersonator. Researchers have found that besides imitating other species’ songs and artificial sounds from the environment, it is capable…
In July 2019, Australian authorities on the island of Tasmania received a report of a footprint spotted by an unnamed individual on a walk up to Sleeping Beauty Mountain in…
Parrots, with their bright colors, charisma and intelligence, are an iconic bird group. They are also at risk, globally. Nearly one-third of parrot species are threatened with extinction. In a…
Today we have two stories about the impacts of mining and some of the new and innovative ways conservationists are attempting to deal with those impacts. Listen here: Our first…
This article is a one year follow up to the award-winning series, The Great Insect Dying published in June, 2019 on Mongabay. The original series documents insect losses in Europe, the U.S. and the tropics — here’s what we know today.
A sighting of one of the deep ocean's most mysterious beings, the bigfin squid, in Australian waters for the first time is creating waves among the scientific community's squid squad.…
People seldom think of wet soil until they step in it, but the Earth’s soggy places quietly do the work of legions: holding together coasts, giving shelter to young fish,…
A hunger for shark fin soup — a brothy, gelatinous dish that’s considered a delicacy in East Asia — is responsible for the deaths of about 73 million sharks each year.…
Researchers have just made a remarkable discovery in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia. While mapping the seafloor off the coast of far north Queensland state, scientists onboard…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the second-largest marsupial in Australia: the wombat.…
About 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Darwin and 14 km (9 mi) northeast of the town of Batchelor lies Woodcutters, an open-cut lead and zinc mine that shut in…
Between 2019 and 2020, turbulent bushfires ripped through Australia, turning green forests into ash, and producing plumes of smoke that hovered over the country like a shroud. While the flames…
In an episode of the Netflix dystopian sci-fi show “Black Mirror,” artificial bees have been deployed to pollinate the world’s plants after a massive pollinator extinction. A great idea, until…
CAPE FERGUSON, Australia — In a lab on Australia’s east coast, scientists are concocting what they hope will be the solution to the steadily worsening problem of coral bleaching. Few…
Habitat loss and climate change are often blamed for the decreasing numbers of migratory shorebirds in a major flyway in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years. But it might be…
There is only one photo of the smooth handfish: an image of a withered, yellowing specimen with pectoral fins that extend like arms, and a triangular crest attached to the…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world:…
Tropical rainforests have an outsized role in the world. Of the Earth’s ecosystems, rainforests support the largest variety of plants and animal species, house the majority of indigenous groups still…
When sea temperatures rise, coral reefs get “stressed out.” They expel a microscopic algae called zooxanthellae from their tissues, and this process causes colorful coral polyps to “bleach” a stark…
From high above, the blue sea looks like it’s speckled with tiny white dots. But a closer look reveals more: each dot is actually a sea turtle swimming toward the…
