Elephants, turtles, grizzly bears and some of the world’s rarest frogs are among the endangered species in the news this week. Worst News of the Week: Armed gunmen entered the Dzanga Bai World Heritage Site in the violence-plagued Central African Republic this week and slaughtered at least 26 elephants. The site is known as the [...]

Central Africa has become increasingly inhospitable to forest elephants, according to a study published March 4 in PLoS One that found that 62 percent of the species was killed by poachers between 2002 and 2011. The study—by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and more than a dozen other institutions—also found that 30 percent [...]

Last year I wrote somewhere around 150 articles about endangered species. I could have easily written closer to 1,000. One blog simply can’t cover all of threatened species around the world, as hard as I try. But I hate letting news items (not to mention species) fall through the cracks. And so, here is the [...]

As go the elephants, so go the trees. That’s the message of a new study published in the May 2013 issue of Forest Ecology and Management that found more than a dozen elephant-dependent tree species suffered catastrophic population declines in new plant growths after forest elephants were nearly extirpated from their ecosystems. The fruit-bearing trees [...]

When wildlife officials in Borneo first encountered a three-month-old pygmy elephant on January 25, he was surrounded by death. Four members of his herd lay on the ground around him, their bodies cold and bloody. The baby was nudging his dead mother with his trunk, trying to get her to rise and feed him. Tragically, [...]

African elephants face two terribly contradictory threats: In some parts of the continent the animals are being hunted into extinction for their valuable ivory tusks, but in other countries elephants are so heavily overpopulated that they pose a threat not just to themselves but to entire ecosystems. South Africa faces the latter problem. There are [...]

Ivory to ashes, tusks to dust…. Nearly 5,000 kilograms of elephant tusks and ivory carvings went up in flames on Wednesday in the west African nation of Gabon, sending a powerful message to the international community that poaching and wildlife crime will no longer be tolerated in that country. “Gabon has a policy of zero [...]

Less than a month ago Bouba N’Djida National Park in northeastern Cameroon was home to 450 elephants. Today, at least half of those elephants are gone, slaughtered by armed horsemen who traveled hundreds of kilometers, probably from Sudan, to kill the animals for their valuable ivory tusks. So many elephants were killed during a two-week [...]

Earlier this week we looked at the growing problem of elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade, which has risen to its highest levels since the 1989 international trade ban on ivory products went into place. Today we look at a positive project in India, one meant to rescue some captive Indian elephants (Elephas maximus [...]

Poaching of elephants and the illegal trade in their tusks and related ivory products were out of control in 2011, with more than 2,500 animals confirmed killed and thousands of kilograms of tusks seized by customs officials around the world. This was the worst year on record since the international ivory trade ban was established [...]

Why not bring elephants to Australia? That’s the proposal made by biologist David Bowman of the University of Tasmania in a comment published February 2 in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The pachyderms could help to polish off gamba grass, introduced from Africa to Australia in the 1930s as fodder for [...]

The illegal trade in elephant ivory is booming. African elephants are being slaughtered at rates exceeding the former peak in the late 1980s, before Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES (pronounced SITE-ees), banned all trade in elephant products. The ban—as well as a worldwide public outcry against the slaughter—helped to stabilize the [...]

Way back in November 2010 a remarkable photo appeared online, showing an adult Nile crocodile Crocodylus niloticus biting the trunk of an adult female African bush elephant Loxodonta africana (a plague upon those bloggers and others who identified the crocodylian as an… alligator. Duh). You’ve almost certainly seen the photo already: it was widely features [...]

By Jason G. Goldman and Matt Soniak Humans have a complicated relationship with our non-human cousins. Some animals we invite into our homes, and treat as members of our families. Indeed, in November of this year singer Fiona Apple made headlines when she announced that she would cancel the South American segment of her tour [...]

In 1976, psychologists John and Sandra Condry of Cornell University had 204 human adults view videotaped footage of an infant boy named David and infant girl named Dana, and asked them to describe the infants’ facial expressions and dispositions. They described their findings in an article in the journal Child Development. In the video, infants [...]

What information is contained in the call of a mammal? Some calls might reflect the internal emotional state of the animal, like fear or anxiety, or they can refer to an external object, agent, or event, like the presence of a predator. Rhesus monkeys, lemurs, baboons, and guinea pigs, for example, will produce calls when [...]