Fishing boats on the Tamil Nadu coast are landing fewer adult devil rays than they did in the early 2010s, which matters because these animals produce roughly one pup every two to three years.
India has no sloths at all, yet one of its best-known forest animals carries the name of one, thanks to a zoologist who guessed wrong more than two centuries ago.
Two blind fishes living in village wells in Assam have been described as new to science, offering a look at a groundwater world that pollution and over-pumping could erase before anyone has catalogued it.
The world’s first progress report on its 2030 promise to halt and reverse the loss of nature finds that fewer than half of the national targets assessed so far are on track.
Forest officials have vaccinated two female leopards against pregnancy and released them back into the wild, in a trial meant to ease conflict with people without killing or removing any animals.
Numbers of the Kashmir markhor, a wild goat of the north Kashmir mountains, have risen about 71 per cent since 2005, although the latest count adds only a handful of animals to the 2023 figure, which keeps the focus on grazing pressure in its habitat.
The endangered lion-tailed macaques of the Western Ghats carry roughly twice as many kinds of parasite when they live beside human settlements, many of them species that normally infect cattle, and researchers think the burden may be one reason so few young macaques survive in the region’s shrinking forest patches.
A man-made reservoir built 68 years ago for the residents of a planned city has been recognised as a wetland of international importance, even though silt has taken more than half of its water-holding capacity.
Young gharials appear to take their cue to start basking each morning from the light in the sky, a finding that raises questions about what artificial light along riverbanks does to a species with a recovery score of just 19 per cent.
Nearly every form of the goddess worshipped through Navratri comes with an animal, from lions and a tiger to a bull and a donkey, and several of those animals still live in India’s forests, wetlands and deserts.