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….
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,…
One of the world’s most notorious wildlife traffickers is now behind bars. Boonchai Bach, a Thai Vietnamese man who operated out of Thailand for more than a decade, has finally been arrested by Thai authorities. “It is like catching one of the Corleones,” enthused Steven Galster, the founder of the…
Malaysia’s own giant panda couple, Liang Liang and Xing Xing, have just welcomed their second cub. The female newborn, which weighed a mere 190gm at birth, is the second daughter and the younger sibling of the two adult pandas’ first cub, Nuan Nuan, who was born on August 18 in 2015…
“Crop apartheid.” It is with this strange neologism that Malaysia’s plantations minister Mah Siew Keong has branded the European Union’s decision to ban on the use of palm oil in biofuels from countries like Malaysia, where the mass cultivation of the crop has inflicted grave and irreversible harm on the natural…
Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) is astounded at the death of yet another wild elephant in Gerik, Perak. The incident occurred on January 3rd when a 40-year-old female elephant was electrocuted by a live wire on a roadwork construction site. Herds of wild elephants come into populated areas while foraging for…
The pictures of several animals at Kemaman Zoo in Pahang are heartrending. The images, which have been shared widely on social media, show chimps, a juvenile orangutan, an elephant, and a tiger kept in what appear to be dismal conditions. Animal rights activists say the photographs, which were taken recently…
Cornered by Malaysian authorities who were in hot pursuit, the Indonesian wildlife smugglers decided to act: They drowned the 300 songbirds in their possession, presumably in a bid to rid themselves of the incriminating evidence of their trafficking activities. Malaysia’s Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) officers managed to apprehend the three…