Obituaries and tributes
To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show
Obituaries and tributes
Norlan Pagal knew the waters of Tañon Strait from a lifetime spent fishing them. By the early 2000s he had watched catches decline as commercial boats entered waters reserved for small fishers and destructive fishing practices damaged reefs. In 2002 he joined the bantay dagat, the volunteer sea patrol that
Obituaries and tributes
To Monica Montefalcone, the sea was a place to study: its plants, reefs, hidden habitats and seasonal changes. A meadow of Posidonia oceanica was not just a patch of green beneath the water. It provided nursery habitat, shelter, carbon storage and coastal protection. To most swimmers it might have looked
Obituaries and tributes
Ted Turner, who died today, liked to present himself as a businessman who had simply applied the same habits to a larger subject. First he bought a struggling billboard company and made it work. Then he built a television empire, beginning with CNN in 1980. After that, he turned much
Obituaries and tributes
In the open ocean, the sunfish appears almost improbable—rounded, truncated, adrift in ways that seem to resist explanation. For Thys, that improbability was an invitation. A small photograph sparked a line of inquiry that would shape decades of her life, not only in studying the fish itself, but in
Obituaries and tributes
Over more than six decades, he helped reshape how scientists understand the natural world—not as a set of isolated species, but as a network of relationships. His work on coevolution, developed with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, showed how plants and animals shape one another over time. It remains
Obituaries and tributes
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
Obituaries and tributes
“One of the great tragedies of the 21st century,” Schaffer once said, “will be humanity’s homogeneity.” The remark was less a warning than a diagnosis. In a world where landscapes were being simplified and species reduced to remnants, she concerned herself with what would be lost when difference itself
Obituaries and tributes
For much of the late 20th century, oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon proceeded with little restraint. Wastewater and drilling residues were discharged into rivers or left in open pits. Forest was cleared. Communities downstream relied on contaminated water for daily use. Over time, residents reported rising rates of illness,
Obituaries and tributes
There are moments in natural-history films when the camera seems improbably close: a polar bear’s breath fogging the lens, a seal pausing to look back, an orca pod moving beneath broken ice. The impression is of nearness without disturbance. In practice, such images depend on time, restraint and
Obituaries and tributes
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,
Obituaries and tributes
Birutė Galdikas, orangutan researcher and advocate, has died, aged 79 In the early 1970s, orangutans were poorly understood and rarely observed in the wild. Their forests in Borneo and Sumatra remained extensive, though early signs of logging and land conversion were already visible. At the same time, a small group