Category Archives: Wildlife

Thailand’s ‘sweetheart’ dugong dies with plastic in stomach

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Vets say plastic caused orphan mammal’s infection and should serve as warning about pollution

An orphaned dugong named Marium, who became an internet star after being rescued in Thailand in April, has died.

Veterinarians caring for the dugong off the island of Koh Libong, in south Thailand’s Trang province, said an infection caused by ingesting plastic contributed to her death. They added that the loss of the animal, named “the nation’s sweetheart” by Thailand’s department of marine and coastal resources (DMCR), should serve as a warning about the effects of plastic waste on wildlife.

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Giant river animals on verge of extinction, report warns

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Populations of great freshwater species, from catfish to stingrays, have plunged by 97% since 1970

Populations of the great beasts that once dominated the world’s rivers and lakes have crashed in the last 50 years, according to the first comprehensive study.

Some freshwater megafauna have already been declared extinct, such as the Yangtze dolphin, and many more are now on the brink, from the Mekong giant catfish and stingray to India’s gharial crocodiles to the European sturgeon. Just three Chinese giant softshell turtles are known to survive and all are male. Across Europe, North Africa and Asia, populations have plunged by 97% since 1970.

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Berlin’s bumbling beekeepers leave swarms without homes

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Inexperienced hobbyists force bees to search often in vain for suitable habitats across the city

Humans are not the only ones in Berlin struggling to find accommodation. A beekeeping boom has led to swarms of bees forming novel new hives using anything from motorbikes to balconies in the German capital.

Germany’s beekeeping association has been forced to dispatch a growing band of swarm-catchers – or schwarmfänger – reachable via telephone hotlines, to deal with a deluge of incidents in which thousands of bees cluster round objects while scout bees go in search of suitable homes, such as a tree hollow, more often than not in vain.

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Big cats and exotic birds: Colombia’s rescued animals – in pictures

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Most of the animals at the Santa Cruz Foundation in San Antonio, Colombia, have been rescued from traffickers and circuses. The multimillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is the fourth-largest in the country after drugs, guns and human trafficking

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Turf it out: is it time to say goodbye to artificial grass?

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It’s neat, easy – and a staggering £2bn global market. But as plastic grass takes over our cities, some say that it’s green only in colour

If your attention during the Women’s World Cup was on the pitch rather than the players, you might have noticed that the matches were all played on real grass. That was a hard-won change, made after the US team complained to Fifa that they sustained more injuries on artificial turf.

In private gardens, however, the opposite trend is happening: British gardens are being dug up and replaced with plastic grass. But this isn’t the flaky, fading stuff on which oranges were once displayed at the greengrocer. Today’s artificial grass is nearly identical to the real thing.

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Fewer than 19 vaquita porpoises left – study

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Calls for Mexico to crackdown on use of illegal fishing nets after further decline of species

There are fewer than 19 vaquita porpoises thought to be left, according to a study.

In 2016, estimates of the vaquita population stood at just 30, but research published in Royal Society Open Science suggests the figure has fallen further.

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Hungry herons and the great otter comeback: the wildlife of canals

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A guide to species you might spot on Britain’s urban waterways

Canals are often seen as a kind of second-class version of a river. Perhaps that goes back to their industrial history, but from a wildlife point of view canals and rivers are more or less interchangeable.

Visit a city canal on a fine, sunny day in spring or summer, and you’ll see plenty of dragonflies and damselflies on the wing. Some, such as the red-eyed damselfly, banded demoiselle and scarce chaser, have a special preference for the slow-flowing water of a canal, sometimes perching on waterlilies in the sunshine.

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Dreaming of Antarctica: where beauty and fragility meet

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Rona Mcseveny, a former patient of UCHL, is showcasing her photos of the continent at the hospital’s Street Gallery. The exhibition is a thank-you to the NHS for the treatment she received. Below, she details the spellbinding sights she captured on her trip

  • Dreaming of Antarctica is at the Street Gallery from 18 July to 4 September 2019
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Indian villagers beat tiger to death after attacks on locals

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Mobile phone video of incident goes viral as one of nine people attacked dies of injuries

Indian police have arrested four people after a mob of villagers brutally beat to death a tiger that had attacked local people.

Mobile phone footage of the incident went viral on social media, and officials said one of nine people injured by the animal earlier had died in hospital.

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Don’t stare too long: why our feral, polluted canals are so beguiling

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An urban waterway is more than just a short cut through the city – it’s a testament to the power of nature over neglect

The roar of the road is receding with each step down and with it the light is changing; it is dancing, mirrored and then dappled in the ripples of the water. One layer down and the city has become an entirely different place.

I, like many, am using the canal as a quiet cut-through. It smells different down here; there’s the dankness of the water, for sure, but there’s a wealth of green filtering the fumes from above. And the soundscape changes – song birds, the curious grunt of a bank of geese eyeing me and the dog warily, the lap of the water’s edge and the groan of metal sidings that are there to repair the bridge.

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The canal revolution: how waterways reveal the truth about modern Britain

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The remarkable transformation of canals is a global phenomenon and the ultimate symbol of how our cities have changed – for good and ill

Every second Monday of the month, a small group of volunteers meets in the training room of a Birmingham supermarket. They discuss what has long seemed to many of their friends a crazy and probably doomed idea: how to excavate a contaminated 40-year-old waste dump, create an urban marina, restore three miles of derelict canal and build several new bridges and locks.

Last month, however, the meeting of the 18-strong Lapal Canal Trust committee was joyous. After 20 years of trying to restore this short stretch of the 200-year-old Dudley No 2 canal, permission had finally been granted, they were told.

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Make environmental damage a war crime, say scientists

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Call for new Geneva convention to protect wildlife and nature reserves in conflict regions

International lawmakers should adopt a fifth Geneva convention that recognises damage to nature alongside other war crimes, according to an open letter by 24 prominent scientists.

The legal instrument should incorporate wildlife safeguards in conflict regions, including protections for nature reserves, controls on the spread of guns used for hunting and measures to hold military forces to account for damage to the environment, say the signatories to the letter, published in the journal Nature.

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Give endangered jaguars legal rights, Argentina campaigners ask court

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With fewer than 20 left in the South American country’s Gran Chaco forest – the big cats could be classed as a ‘non-human person’

Argentina’s supreme court has been asked to recognize the legal rights of the South American jaguar, of which fewer than 20 individuals remain alive in the country’s Gran Chaco region.

The largest cat in the Americas once roamed the continent as far north as the Grand Canyon, but is now in decline across the entire western hemisphere.

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Country diary: a house of God open to heaven and house martins

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Segenhoe, Bedfordshire: The birds are stacked in the air above a shallow trench, taking turns to skim insects from it

A flying congregation had assembled by the church gate. We approached on foot, coming on the coffin route, a straight path through fields along which pall bearers had once carried the dead from the nearby village of Ridgmont.

Mourners might have walked through this meadow after the hay had been cut, as we did, and looked down at the grass laid out in strips to dry where it fell. Did a passage from the Bible come to mind? “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”

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Baby dugong becomes Thailand’s national sweetheart – video

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A baby dugong that has become attached to humans after getting lost in southern Thailand’s ocean is being nurtured by marine experts in hopes that she can one day fend for herself. The female dugong – named Marium, which roughly translates to “lady of the sea” in local dialect – has become an internet hit in Thailand after images of marine biologists embracing and feeding the aquatic mammal milk and sea-grass spread across social media.

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‘The nation’s sweetheart’: Thailand falls in love with orphaned baby dugong

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Marium, who is five months’ old, was rescued off Thailand’s southern Krabi province after she was separated from her mother

She eats sea grass, drinks milk from a rubber glove, snuggles up to passing canoes and frequently beaches herself. But these idiosyncrasies have not stopped an entire nation from falling in love with her.

Thailand has a new national sweetheart – an orphaned baby dugong called Marium.

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Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore

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Temperatures lead to what appears to be largest local die-off in 15 years, raising fears for broader ecosystem

In all her years working at Bodega Bay, the marine reserve research coordinator Jackie Sones had never seen anything like it: scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked.

A record-breaking June heatwave apparently caused the largest die-off of mussels in at least 15 years at Bodega Head, a small headland on the northern California bay. And Sones received reports from other researchers of similar mass mussel deaths at various beaches across roughly 140 miles of coastline.

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Lift ‘unfair’ ban on ivory trade, southern African leaders urge summit

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Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and Namibia call for embargo suspension to allow sale of hugely valuable stockpiles

Southern African leaders have renewed calls for a lifting of the ban on the ivory trade as debate over the “unfair” embargo escalates.

At a wildlife economic summit in Zimbabwe, leaders of the five countries that make up the Kavango-Zambezi conservation area – Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and Namibia – raised the issue ahead of the August conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Two whales flown from Shanghai aquarium to sanctuary in Iceland

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Female 12-year-old beluga whales Little Grey and Little White arrive at Klettsvik Bay

Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium have arrived in Iceland to live out their days in a unique marine sanctuary that conservationists hope will become a model for rehoming 3,000 of the creatures currently in captivity.

Little Grey and Little White, two 12-year-old female belugas, left behind their previous lives entertaining visitors at the Changfeng Ocean World and were flown across the globe in specially tailored containers.

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