A male orangutan was found dead by villagers in East Kutai district in Indonesian Borneo. His body had been riddled with air gun pellets, some 130 shots in all. The ape had also been attacked with a machete. “We found pellets all over its body. There were also a number…
Microplastics may seem innocuous enough. They are barely visible plastic beads that are the size of sand grains. What harm could they do? Plenty. Microplastics have spread far and wide in the world’s oceans, entering food chains. Even table salt has been contaminated by these tiny pollutants. A myriad of…
Chalk one up to Malaysian palm oil companies. In late January, European lawmakers approved a new energy plan for the 28-member economic zone that included an impeding ban on the use of palm oil in motor fuels on the continent from 2021 onwards. Malaysian palm oil producers and their allies…
Malaysians, or most of them at any rate, are notorious wastrels. In case you still harbor doubts about the truth of this, here is a shocking fact: in Kuching, Sarawak, residents degerate 800 grams of waste on average every single day. That level of wastage amounts to 690,000kg of waste…
The orangutans of Borneo are among the smartest creatures on Earth. Yet just how astute they can be continues to surprise us. Take this bit of news: the apes, it turns out, self-medicate by using specific plants. Experts have observed forest-dwelling orangutans on the island treating inflammation of their joints…
Microwave ovens are handy kitchen appliances. They help us cook up fast meals within a matter of minutes. Yet they aren’t as harmless to the environment as they may seem. According to a groundbreaking study by researchers at the University of Manchester, the millions and millions of microwaves in use…
Bees. Don’t we love them? Well, many of us certainly don’t. They have an annoying habit of hovering around our sugary drinks with their sting at the ready when you try swatting them away. Yet these flying insects perform invaluable functions in ecosystems by pollinating flowers, thereby helping plants to…
Often it seems we’re drowning in waste. In some cases, literally so. In the world’s seas and oceans, plastic waste has been accumulating at alarming speeds, engulfing large swathes of water and choking marine life in the process. On land too, there is way too much waste, putting great strains on…
Bornean pygmy elephants, the planet’s smallest living elephants, are a unique subspecies whose origins have long puzzled experts. The million-dollar question is when and how Asian elephants got to the island, there to split off into a subspecies of their own over time. Now a group of scientists say they…
Coral bleaching is bad news for fragile marine ecosystems. Mass bleaching of corals on a wide scale is worse news still. Yet bleaching en masse reefs around the seas are, according to scientists who have surveyed bleaching records of 100 reefs collected between 1980 and 2016 from around the tropics….
There is already so much excess CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere that it won’t be enough for us to stop our current carbon emissions from growing in future. To make a real impact on Earth’s climate for the better, we will need to start sucking large amounts of CO2 out…
Facebook is a handy social media platform for keeping touch with friends and relatives and for keeping abreast of developments. Sadly, the site has also become a convenient tool for wildlife traffickers to reach an ever wider pool of potential buyers for their ill-gotten fare. This has long been the…
Chinese New Year is just around the corner and lots of Malaysians are gearing up for the days-long festivities. The festive spirit of New Year will pay homage to the idea of renewal, yet sadly some time-honored old practices are bound to persist across Malaysia. Take the use of disposable…
For a while it seemed that the condition of Malaysia’s last female Sumatran rhino was touch-and-go, but it appears now that Iman is now on the mend. According to a senior wildlife official in Sabah, she has regained some of her appetite and is responding well to treatment at the…
Recently 4,515 hectares of a permanent forest reserve was degazetted in Terengganu, allowing for it to be turned into an oil palm plantation by a government-linked company, TDM Berhad. That means that on an area the size of more than 4,500 football fields where now trees stand will soon be lost,…
In vying for votes, political parties in Malaysia routinely tout similar agendas on their platforms: boosting the economy, eliminating corruption, helping their constituents in various ways. Few of them, though, campaign seriously on pledges to protect local environments better. In Penang, that should change, insists the homegrown conservationist group Pelindung…