There are about 300 elephants in this group. They're doing a lot of roaring and trumpeting. It's unusual for them to be so vocal. But with the mating we just witnessed, they've had a lot of excitement. And there are a lot of smells in the air.

Tim, an...

Soila Sayialel of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants is behind the wheel as we drive to headquarters in Amboseli National Park in Kenya for an appointment to pay two men for three cows killed by elephants. The events have been verified by rangers. Why give money? Because when elephants kill...

In Roman times, elephants roamed Africa from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Cape of Good Hope. They were soon hunted out of North Africa. In 1800, an estimated 26 million still inhabited most of the continent.

Now, shrunk from perhaps 90 percent of their former range by sprawling...

BANGKOK -- At the sixteenth conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), delegates in a special committee voted in favor of listing five of the world's most threatened shark species on the Convention's Appendix II. This would allow only regulated, sustainable trade of these species.

Today the staff of Save the Elephants and the Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund sponsored a trip to bring kids from the nearby village of Attan into Samburu Reserve to see elephants.

Most, if not all -- including the teacher -- had never seen an elephant, even...

I watched wild elephants mating today. I don't know about you, but -- first time for me.
I'm in Kenya working on a new book about the lives of animals.

Elephants have a unique mating system. First of all, females live together in families: a matriarch, her grown...

Researchers are trying to build an "alarm collar." It's a new kind of collar that can show if an elephant is up, down, or running. They hope to eventually use that information to more quickly dispatch rangers to try to catch poachers before they get too far.

One of the Trust's keepers comes to me. "You Carl?," he asks in a near-whisper. "When the elephants leave the tourist area, follow me."

I am in Kenya walking in the bush, researching a new book on the lives of animals. Young, orphaned elephants surround me. They are moving and...

A Series: Kenya 1; Visiting the Sheldrick Trust Part One

Today in the course of researching a new book on the lives of animals, I visited the famed elephant orphanage at the Sheldrick Trust. I got a privileged view.

By Daniel Madigan and Carl Safina

This is a personal story. Madigan was part of the team that discovered Fukushima-derived radionuclides in Pacific bluefin swimming in California waters. It was a fascinating story for its science.

But also amazing was the intensity of public reaction to extremely...

In a column elevated by erudition but ultimately marred by muddled thinking, Nicholas Wade, writing in The New York Times tells us that, because U.S. Senator Mark Rubio answered a reporter's question about the age of Earth with a moronic dodge, scientists should respond by admitting that evolution...

Co-authored with Lydia Ball

Stories of luck are mainly what we have as we all recover from Sandy. A neighbor, trudging through waist deep water with her dogs "swimming for their lives," thinking that she might never make it the next half mile to dry ground, was rescued almost magically...

Greetings from my hardship post. I am at North Lake Harbour on Prince Edward Island. I'm here to witness giant bluefin tuna.

Giant? Essentially all the fish weigh between 500 and 1,000 pounds. So, yeah, giant.

I can't remember who dragged me to see the movie Jurassic Park, but one resonant line in that movie was worth the price of admission: "Life finds a way." It popped out at me because it so succinctly summed up a truth behind all of nature's stunning diversity and the...

Co-written by Michael Misner

The Australian government has formed the world's largest network of ocean reserves. The network is anchored by a massive reserve in the Coral Sea. As we say, "Go you, Aussies."

The Coral Sea reserve includes a sprawling no-take zone a little under the size of...

In the Arctic north of Norway, the beach at Gåshamna, Svalbard, is strewn with the debris of old whalers and the bigger-than-dinosaur bones of the great whales.

We pick our footing carefully around the wood and iron, around the shacks. We don't want to damage the ruins.

We walk...

Graduation is always a joyful time. For the students, a lot of hard work has paid off. And for many parents, a lot of hard paying off has worked. So I'd like to share a few commencement remarks.

As a marine biologist who has earned three degrees, working toward a...

So the momometer tells us of another huge news story: bluefin tuna have carried radiation leaked from Japan's tsunami-damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant across the ocean to California, where fishermen are catching them. (The momometer, a Geiger-counter of news magnitude, is my 86-year old-mother, Rose. No computer. When she phones...

All during spring and summer I love to watch the huge fish hawks called Ospreys building up their stick nests, then incubating their eggs, and then raising their chicks. How many chicks, how many Ospreys for that matter, depends on how much food.

The same's true for people. But...

The grapevine reports that to the springtime beach has come a remarkable castaway: a dead whale. To find it, I just drive into the next town, go to the beach, and look up and down the surf line. About a mile away I see what looks like a black-hulled trawler...