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When we misuse or overuse artificial light at night, we create nighttime light pollution, which makes it harder to see the night sky and causes negative effects on wildlife and human health. For example, sea turtle hatchlings usually wait until night to emerge from their nests to reduce exposure to daytime predators.
“I’ve got something special to show you,” said our guide Issac. I couldn’t imagine what it could be.
On a recent morning game drive in Botswana’s Chobe National Park, our group happened upon a pack of wild dogs. “Are those hyenas?” someone in our vehicle whispered. The resemblance was obvious. Both animals are medium-sized carnivores with patchy fur and a canine appearance.
Visit the Galapagos Island of Española in April and you may experience firsthand one of the most interesting and elaborate courtship rituals in the entire animal kingdom. Each spring, tens of thousands of waved albatrosses—nearly the entire worldwide population—return to Española to find mates and breed.
There’s nothing common about the common hippo. Yet, compared to elephants, rhinos and the big cats of Africa, they are generally underappreciated. This is a shame, considering their declining numbers and the critical role they play in creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems.
Orcas (Orcinus orca) are among the ocean’s most intelligent and enigmatic predators. As the largest members of the dolphin family, they are a blend of power, agility and intricate social intelligence.
By Nat Hab Expedition Leader Eddy Savage Humpback whales are among the most widespread and successful cetaceans inhabiting Earth’s oceans. These baleen whales lack teeth, possessing instead dozens of rows of keratin protein aligned in fibrous plates along the roofs of their mouths. Humpbacks have between 270 and 400 baleen plates.
If you’ve ever been on safari in Africa for any length of time, there’s a good chance you’ve seen some of the continent’s most iconic wildlife, including elephants, giraffes, and zebras. Maybe you observed a lion resting after a feed or a striped hyena wandering across the plains.
For many people, our first encounters with vultures are as dark, shadowy, even menacing figures in fairy tales. That’s a shame, because vultures play helpful, even indispensable, roles maintaining ecological balance across five continents. They contribute to human health and even anti-poaching efforts in remarkable, rarely lauded ways.
On the surface, gophers and wolves don’t seem to have much in common. Gophers are small (just a few inches long), burrowing rodents that primarily consume bulbs, roots and other underground plant parts; while wolves (which can reach several feet in length) are much larger predators that hunt and primarily eat meat.
Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, manatees were part of our lives. We’d see them in marinas and on school field trips.
In 2024, I started the year by writing about nature: CO2 emissions, temperatures and the optimism a lot of us felt about clean energy technologies with consistent cost declines.
