Rhett Ayers Butler
In a zoo, a crisis often begins before anyone names it as such. An animal stops responding to treatment. A pregnancy fails to progress. A procedure goes as planned, yet recovery does not follow. The work is technical and uncertain, and the margin for error is narrow. Outcomes depend on biology, timing, judgment, and factors [Continue reading]
“Let us stop talking about human-wildlife conflict. Some of us live with this reality and we pay a heavy price for sharing space with wildlife.” The remark, made at the 2023 Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia, challenges how conservation is often described. The term “human-wildlife conflict” appears frequently in policy and reporting, suggesting a problem [Continue reading]
In conservation, absence is often the first sign of trouble. A bird not seen for years may still persist in some overlooked corner of its range. Or it may already be gone. The “lost birds” list was created for this gap, marking species that have slipped from view but not yet into extinction. The latest [Continue reading]
In the long arc of conservation, recovery is often slow enough to be mistaken for stasis. Populations dwindle, habitats shrink, and reversal depends less on moments of triumph than on decades of patient observation, persuasion, and persistence. Progress is recorded not in headlines but in ledgers: nests counted, territories mapped, landowners convinced, protections negotiated. For [Continue reading]
Since 2009, no Panamanian golden frog has been confirmed in the wild. The small, luminous amphibian, once common along mountain streams in central Panama, vanished within a few years as chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease, swept through the region. The pathogen attacks the skin, an organ amphibians rely on to regulate salts and water. Infected frogs [Continue reading]
For most of the 20th century, the fate of whales was treated as an industrial question. How many could be taken, how fast, and by whom. Biology entered the discussion late. Ethics later still. By the time international negotiations began to seriously address the problem, many whale populations had already been reduced to remnants of [Continue reading]
Division was four years old when he died, a young age even by the shortened standards now applied to North Atlantic right whales. His body was found in late January, adrift off the coast of North Carolina. The weather was too dangerous for anything more than confirmation. By then, the cause was already understood. He [Continue reading]
The Turtle Survival Center sits far from the places where most turtles are lost. That distance is part of its purpose. The facility, run by the Turtle Survival Alliance, exists to buy time for species that no longer have much of it. Founded in 2013 in South Carolina, the center functions as a high-security refuge [Continue reading]
Author’s note (March 5, 2026): Questions have been raised about the validity of an image included in the Biotropica paper. The authors state that they analyzed the image’s metadata and ran it through an AI detector, but independent analysis has questioned its origin. On India’s railways, stowaways are not limited to ticketless passengers. Some arrive [Continue reading]
Every year brings its small revisions to what humans think they know about animals. 2025 was no exception. Here are some examples compiled by Shreya Dasgupta. Waterfall climbing catfish In Brazil, thousands of bumblebee catfish were seen climbing waterfalls. The fish gathered at the base of cascades on the Aquidauana River, then edged their way [Continue reading]
The death of a well-known wild animal is an odd kind of news. It is intimate, because so many people feel they have met the creature through photographs and video. It is also impersonal, because the animal has no public life beyond what humans project onto it. For elephants, that tension is sharpened by history. [Continue reading]
Every year, science adds names to the living world. The tally is never small. Hundreds of species are formally described, often after years of slow, meticulous work, and often long after the organisms themselves were first seen. Biologists estimate that perhaps only a tenth to a fifth of Earth’s species have been documented. Even among [Continue reading]
Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. This year, a small group of species crossed a final bureaucratic threshold. Following new assessments, they were formally listed as extinct on the IUCN Red List. For science, the [Continue reading]
On the beaches of Topsail Island in North Carolina, sea turtles still crawl ashore in the dark to lay their eggs. For many years, a woman with a clipboard and a steady presence walked those sands before dawn, counting tracks and marking nests. Her reason for being there began with loss. In 1991 her daughter, [Continue reading]
She moved slowly, as if time were something best savored. Visitors leaned over railings or crouched at the edge of her enclosure and watched her stretch her neck toward a leaf of romaine. Children noted she was older than their grandparents. Their parents did the math and realized she was older than the zoo itself. [Continue reading]
In Madagascar’s cities, a quiet but lucrative market is reshaping the future of one of the world’s most imperiled groups of animals. Lemurs—already the most threatened mammals on the planet—are being sold as a kind of urban delicacy, traded through discreet channels that rarely resemble the conventional wildlife markets familiar across Africa or Asia. A [Continue reading]
With the World Conservation Congress meeting this week, I thought it was useful to revisit a study published earlier this year on conservation funding. For decades, conservationists have warned that the planet’s attention—and its purse—are skewed toward the charismatic few. A sweeping analysis of some 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years confirms that bias in [Continue reading]
For millennia, the rhinoceros stood as one of Earth’s great survivors, armored and immense, its bulk anchoring the landscapes of Africa and Asia. Today, it is perilously close to vanishing. A recent report by TRAFFIC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reads like a somber register of loss and resilience. It records [Continue reading]
In 2017, when Vincent Deblauwe joined the Congo Basin Institute in Cameroon to study African ebony, he soon realized the fate of the tree lay with another species. Around campfires and during treks, the Indigenous Baka people told him that the forest elephant was key to ebony’s survival. His fieldwork confirmed their knowledge. In patches [Continue reading]
Officials in southern Brazil are retreating from a practice that, until recently, passed with little notice: serving shark meat in schools, hospitals and other public institutions. A Mongabay investigation by Philip Jacobson and Fernanda Wenzel revealed that among the generic “shark” products ordered in bulk was the angelshark, a group that includes one endangered and [Continue reading]
In the vast machinery of life, few roles are as humble—and as irreplaceable—as those played by the animals that disperse seeds. Their work begins with the unheralded act of consumption: a monkey swallows a fig, a tapir noses through fallen fruit, a bird flies off with a berry in its beak. What follows is a [Continue reading]
Turtles and tortoises have outlived dinosaurs, endured ice ages, and survived the shuffling of continents. Yet despite their evolutionary stamina, these ancient mariners and land-dwellers now find themselves in peril. A sweeping global assessment published in Nature Communications offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of extinction risks facing the order Testudines—and the results are [Continue reading]
In the turquoise shallows of Raja Ampat, Indonesia, a conservation experiment is attempting the rewilding of an endangered shark. The initiative, known as ReShark, seeks to restore populations of the Indo-Pacific leopard shark, also called the zebra shark, to reefs where it has vanished. Led by Re:wild in partnership with the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, [Continue reading]
Ten years ago, I received the unusual honor of having a beetle named after me. The christening took place in a manner befitting the age: through an online auction. Biologist Meg Lowman had secured naming rights to a tiny rhinoceros bark beetle endemic to the cactus-studded valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico. She placed the winning bid [Continue reading]
In a brief but clarifying academic note, conservationists Jim Sanderson and Alex Sliwa draw a sharp linguistic line between “wildcats” and “wild cats”—a distinction with real ecological significance. Wildcats, they explain, refer specifically to three species in the genus Felis: the African wildcat (F. lybica), the European wildcat (F. silvestris), and the Chinese steppe cat [Continue reading]