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Polar bears are classified as marine mammals, like a seal or a walrus, which might come as a surprise given that they’re usually pictured on land. But polar bears spend a lot of their time in the waters of the Arctic, fishing or swimming among the sea ice. They may look awkward in the water, [...]
The 2012 Annual Underwater Photography Contest winners announced this week were chosen from a field of 700 images. See more photography from the contest hosted by the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science here.
I could barely make out Steve Sanderson over the winds howling into the satellite phone. Sanderson, the head of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), was calling from Tierra del Fuego in Chile, an island off the very southernmost tip of South America. Other than Antarctica, you can’t get further away from civilization and still be [...]
From the jungles of Borneo to the markets of Jakarta, illegal wildlife trafficking in Indonesia is growing. But recent jail sentences might change that.
An animal apocalypse is happening right beneath our noses in the Northeast. Since 2006, bats throughout New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Jersey, Indiana and other states have been infected with a deadly white-nose fungus that has decimated animal populations. But because it is hard to track bat numbers—and because the disease causes afflicted bats to [...]
From the Nature Is Scary file: researchers from San Francisco State University announced this week in a new study that honeybees are being turned into “zombies” by parasite flies. The fly—known as Apocephalus borealis—deposits its eggs inside the abdomen of a bee. The action is fatal for the bee, as fly larvae eventually hatch and [...]
My weekly Going Green column—one day late because of the New Year’s holiday—is up on the Time.com mainpage. Prompted by holiday films like We Bought a Zoo, I’m exploring the role of wild animals in Hollywood, asking whether lions and tigers and chimps really belong behind the camera. Many experts believe that wild animals are [...]
In the days before Amazon Prime, your Christmas gift-giving options were somewhat more limited. So it that the three wise men in the Biblical account brought local gifts to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem: gold, frankincense and myrhh, each a proper offering for a king—if, perhaps, not all that useful for an infant. (Maybe someone [...]
I have a Going Green column over on the Time.com mainpage today, and it’s a review of a new collection of essays called Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Readers of this blog are probably familiar with the editors, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, a couple of Bay Area bomb-throwers best known for their [...]
No one knows what will follow the apparent death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. The Hermit Kingdom remains a black box to experts—especially Americans—and while early reports suggest that Kim’s third son Kim Jong-un will succeed his father, we can’t tell how long he’ll remain in power, or whether the onetime Swiss boarding [...]
