National Geographic

New megadams threaten world’s biggest fish

There was a time when scores of some of the world’s largest freshwater fishes swam up the Mekong River, past the Laotian town of Luang Prabang, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Giant catfish the size of grizzly bears, seven-striped barb, giant pangasius, and other huge fish once made ...

STEFAN LOVGREN

Plastic gets to the oceans through over 1,000 rivers

The problem with plastic waste just got more complicated—and so did the effort to stanch its flow into the world’s oceans. Rivers are the primary conduits for plastic waste to the seas. In 2017, two separate groups of scientists concluded that 90 percent of river-borne plastic ...

LAURA PARKER

This Thai village created a tiny fish reserve years ago. Today, it's thriving.

IN 1998, PEOPLE in Na Doi, a quiet village in northwest Thailand, noticed that their fish catches in the nearby Ngao River were declining. The fish they did manage to net were also getting smaller. Together, Na Doi’s 75 households decided to try a radical solution: ...

RACHEL NUWER

Cambodia’s biggest lake is running dry, taking forests and fish with it

Hun Sotharith recalls when he moved to Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake to become a fisherman. It was the early 1990s, and the freshwater swamp forest where he fished was so dense that it could take Sotharith, a former soldier, a day and a half to ...

STEFAN LOVGREN

Hunting for particles of gold in the jungles of Southeast Asia

Walking across the world, you encounter human beings engaged in various repetitive behaviors. Raising babies. Fixing machines. Boiling tea. Planting crops. Posting videos on TikTok. Looking for gold. Our species’ pervasive quest for gold is ancient and tireless. Along my 11,000-mile trail out of Africa, I have ...

PAUL SALOPEK

New monkey species found hiding in plain sight

FOR MORE THAN a century, scientists considered banded langurs, a type of reclusive, tree-dwelling monkey, to be a single species—but new research points to three separate ones. They’ve been hiding in plain sight, due to differences that couldn’t be readily observed. Found throughout Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, ...

RACHEL NUWER

Southeast Asia’s most critical river is entering uncharted waters

For months now, a single, rare Irrawaddy river dolphin, apparently entangled in a fishing net and disoriented, has been spotted in Southeast Asia’s struggling Mekong River, far from its normal habitat in northern Cambodia. Conservationists are scrambling to come up with a plan to help the ...

Stefan Lovgren

Earth’s largest freshwater creatures at risk of extinction

Some have survived for hundreds of millions of years, but many of the world’s freshwater megafauna—including sumo-sized stingrays, colossal catfish, giant turtles, and gargantuan salamanders—may soon find themselves on the brink of extinction, according to a new study published. For the first time, researchers have quantified the ...

Stefan Lovgren

Mekong River at its lowest in 100 years, threatening food supply

A severe drought that has caused water levels in Southeast Asia’s Mekong River to drop to their lowest in more than 100 years could have devastating consequences for fish, as well as the tens of millions of people living and working along the river, experts warn. The ...

Stefan Lovgren

First global look finds most rivers awash with antibiotics

EACH YEAR, HUMANS produce, prescribe, and ingest more antibiotics than they did the year before. Those drugs have done wonders for public health, saving millions from infections that might otherwise have killed them. But the drugs’ influence persists in the environment long after they’ve done their duty ...

Alejandra Borunda

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