Are humpback whale groups sharing their songs?
"I'm excited!" Climate action star Rev Yearwood on the UN, youth and women's
leadership & more
Sept. 4, 2019
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Reverend Lennox Yearwood about the upcoming UN Climate Summit in New York City and what it’s going to take to pass legislation and policies that can effectively tackle the enormity of the...
For an encore edition during this show's brief hiatus, we replay one of our most popular Field Notes interviews of all time, featuring Australian researcher who's doing trailblazing work with superb lyrebirds. Listen to her recordings of...
Urban pests like rats have been in the news due to the US President calling Baltimore “rat and rodent infested.” He isn’t the first American politician to use this kind of rhetoric to demean communities that are predominantly made up of people...
Celebrated author David Quammen on inspiring ecological restoration,
evolutionary science, and more
July 23, 2019
David Quammen is an award-winning science writer, author, and journalist covering the most promising trends in conservation and evolutionary science for the past 30 years. We invited him on the show to discuss his latest feature for National...
Jessica Crance is a research biologist who recently discovered right whales for the first time. While some whales like humpbacks and bowheads are known for their melodious songs, none of the three species of right whale has ever been known to...
New CITES boss discusses reining in online wildlife trafficking, the next COP,
and more
June 25, 2019
We speak with Ivonne Higuero, new Secretary General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora — better known by its acronym, CITES. The first woman to ever serve as Secretary General, we discuss how her...
Jim Breheny is the director of the Bronx Zoo in New York City and joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss the contributions zoos make to global biodiversity conservation. While many question the relevance of zoos in the 21st century, he argues...
Gabriel Melo-Santos studies Araguaian river dolphins in Brazil — that the species is much chattier than we’d previously known, and could potentially help us better understand the evolution of underwater communication in marine mammals....
Ecologist Julian Bayliss used satellite imagery, drones, and technical climbing to make last year, an untouched rainforest atop a virtually unclimbable mountain in Mozambique (an “inselberg” or “island mountain”) that contains species new to...
Kinari Webb founded Health in Harmony, providing healthcare to people to save Indonesian rainforests. She realized that most illegal deforestation happens when villagers have to pay for medical care, because they have little to generate cash with,...
Primatologist Cleve Hicks leads a research team that has discovered a new tool-using chimp culture in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. After 12 years of research, their findings include an entirely new chimpanzee tool kit featuring four different...
Dr. Rebecca Cliffe joins us to challenge myths about sloths like the popular perception of them as lazy creatures: moving slowly is a survival strategy that has been so successful in fact that sloths are some of the oldest mammals on our planet. But...
How do you study a marine mammal that lives in waters so murky that it can hide from you in plain sight, even in shallow water? On this episode we speak with marine biologist Isha Bopardikar, a researcher using one technique, bioacoustics, to unlock...
“The uncontacted and isolated tribes represent a true treasure,” National Geographic writer and author Scott Wallace says in this episode. “Their knowledge of the rainforest, of the medicinal properties of the plants, of all the animals, their...
On this episode we speak with Oliver Metcalf, lead author of a new study using bioacoustics and machine learning (artificial intelligence or "AI") to study a very rare bird in New Zealand. We play some recordings of the beautiful hihi bird that...
On this episode we hear from Mongabay's Mexico City-based contributor Martha Pskowski who recently traveled to central Mexico during the winter 'high season' when tourists flock to see monarch butterflies covering the trees. Her was...
The IUCN is probably best known for its Red List of Threatened Species, a vital resource on the conservation statuses and extinction risks of tens of thousands of species. But the IUCN does much more than just maintain the Red List, as Inger Andersen,...
Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett A. Butler joins the podcast to discuss the biggest rainforest storylines to watch in 2019, and a he co-authored in Science that looks at how bioacoustics can monitor forests for greater assessment of conservation goals...
On this episode, the largely untold [and very heartwarming] story of how 96 critically endangered sea turtle hatchlings survived this past summer in New York City—with help from dedicated scientists and a cozy office closet. In July, Big Apple...