Biodiversity

Animals

Perspective | Giant Catch in the Mekong Reveals Mysteries of Biodiversity Hot Spot

The Mekong River, the longest waterway in Southeast Asia, is often called the world’s most productive river because it holds a greater abundance of freshwater fish than any other river basin on the planet. From an ecological standpoint, there is one stretch of the river, in ...

Stefan Lovgren, special to Circle of Blue

How the race for a Covid vaccine enriched monkey poachers and endangered macaques

Gary Tucker was attending a conference on monkeys used in medical research when he spotted some uninvited guests: agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.  As they walked in and out of the Colorado hotel, Tucker, an executive at a monkey import company, hid in ...

Rich Schapiro, Anna Schecter, Andrew W. Lehren and Anton L. Delgado

Cambodia’s Mekong dolphin is dying despite efforts to save it

The fishing gangs visit the river at night and the rangers do nothing to stop them. Working in large groups, the boatmen use fishing methods that have long been outlawed in this part of the mighty Mekong River like gillnetting, which uses nets that hang like ...

Saqib Rahim

China, Vietnam, Laos are hotspots for the criminal wildlife trade: does Asia really care about biodiversity?

Pangolin scales at US$160 a kilogram, monkeys and wild cats for sale – the online trade in protected and rare species is thriving in Laos, a key Southeast Asian gateway to the insatiable Chinese and Vietnamese markets for animal products. As world leaders gather in Egypt ...

Aidan Jones

Tiger seizures up in parts of Asia despite conservation efforts - report

Wildlife authorities in some Asian countries are seeing an increase in seizures of tigers and tiger parts despite efforts by conservationists to protect the endangered animal, according to a report by wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC. Tiger numbers globally have been decimated by poaching, trade, and habitat ...

Reporting by Rozanna Latiff Editing by Ed Davies

In Vietnam, farmers show a willingness to work with the elephant in the room

Solving human-wildlife conflict is a complex issue and a pressing concern for a wide variety of endangered species, none more so than the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). People living around Vietnam’s Dong Nai Biosphere Reserve, however, want to foster coexistence with elephants, not conflict. That’s ...

Sean Mowbray

Two-week old dolphin calf spotted in Mekong

A dolphin calf, about two weeks old, was spotted on Sunday in one of the Mekong River’s deep pools in Kratie province by the research team of the Fisheries Administration and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), who confirmed the sixth calf recorded this year. Ouk Vibol, Director ...

Torn Vibol

Vietnam loses sacred cranes after habitat change

Twenty years ago, Nguyen Van Liet took scientists to the wetlands near his hometown of Tram Chim on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta to find sarus cranes, a vulnerable bird species according to the IUCN Red List, native to Southeast Asia, South Asia and Australia. “We had to ...

Tran Nguyen

Cambodian people urged to help end snaring and wildlife trafficking

The Cambodian government and wildlife conservationists have urged the people to help end the snaring crisis and combat wildlife trafficking. They called upon all Cambodians to stop buying, selling, and consuming wildlife as this would bring an end to the notorious practice of snaring wild animals. According ...

New Straits Times

Baby boom: the endangered wildlife revival at Cambodia's Angkor Wat

The melodic songs from families of endangered monkeys ring out over the jungle near Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple complex — a sign of ecological rejuvenation decades after hunting decimated wildlife at the site. The first pair of rare pileated gibbons were released in 2013 as part ...

Agence France-Presse (AFP)

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