Want to see the world? Here are highlights of this week’s news stories and blogs about wildlife and nature from each of the seven continents.
South America
Planning to visit Brazil? Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology provides a tour of diverse bird species you can observe without even leaving suburban Rio de Janeiro.
Asia
Watch what you buy and sell in Indonesia, certainly not an orangutan or a sun bear. Illegal wildlife trade flourishes in Sumatra according to an account on Mongabay.com by Birchard Kellog.
Africa
The Nature documentary Great Zebra Exodus may be free to view online elsewhere; not here in Canada. However this Q&A with filmmaker Andrian Bailey presents intriguing insight into a species we can all see in our mind’s eyes, but seldom give a second thought.
Antarctica
A new study of the Antarctic ice sheet, reported in Nature World News, reveals it to be melting primarily from the bottom up. This stands the conventional idea—that Antarctic ice is lost mostly by glaciers calving from the edges—on its head, and indicates the sheet is melting much faster than previously thought.
Australia/Pacific
A BBC News clip discusses the plight of the world’s smallest and most endangered species of dolphin. The Featured Creature blog delves into how New Zealand is ignoring international pressure to save the 55 surviving Maui dolphins, and links to a WWF petitition to protect them.
Europe
You might want to postpone a tour of the Danube, Elbe and Vlatava rivers. Catastrophic floods have stricken five Central European countries and killed at least 21 people. See last week’s roundup analyzing bad weather and climate change.
North America
An international panel is calling for cleanup of the Mackenzie River back home in Canada. As reported by nature.com, Canada’s longest river drains into the Arctic Ocean. Its globally significant ecosystems are mostly intact but at risk from climate change and resource development.
Photo courtesy of Birger Kühnel via Flickr Creative Commons.
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