A male panther leaps over a creek at Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Florida. The rarely seen cats, which number only around 200, are reclaiming territory north of the Everglades, but their habitat is threatened by suburban sprawl. In June, Florida enacted sweeping protections for wildlife corridors critical to their survival. (From “How America’s most endangered cat could help save Florida,” March 2021.)
A view from the center of a locust swarm at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya depicts a frenzied scene. Swarms can range from less than half a square mile to 460 square miles, with 40 to 80 million locusts. Since late 2019, clouds of locusts have shrouded the Horn of Africa, devouring crops and pastureland—and triggering a ground and air pesticide-spraying mission spanning eight countries. These chemicals, however, may be devastating to wildlife. (From “A locust plague hit East Africa. The pesticide solution may have dire consequences,” March 2021.)
A pika in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park heads out of the sun and into a rocky den, where it’s cooler. Adapted to survive high-elevation winters, pikas are especially sensitive to warming summers. With the help of volunteers, the Colorado Pika Project aims to gather as much data as possible to better protect the beloved native species. (From “This adorable rabbit relative sounds an alarm for global warming,” August 2021.)
Every February, before they begin a grueling trek north, wildebeests—along with the many zebras that travel with them—gather to graze and calve on the short-grass plains near the southern border of Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. Half a million young wildebeests are born here each year, an average of 24,000 a day. Calves can walk within minutes of birth. Some 1.3 million wildebeests each year follow seasonal rains in a clockwise loop from Tanzania into Kenya and back—the largest land migration on the planet. (From “Why the wildebeest is the unlikely king of the Serengeti,” November 2021.)
Guides in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve have dubbed them the “Magnificent Five.” These male cheetahs hunted together for more than four years. Males normally are competitors, but the species is social and highly adaptive. These animals stayed together for as long as they benefited from the alliance. (From “The urgent need to protect the Serengeti’s intricate web of life,” November 2021.)
For meerkats—a kind of mongoose—in southern Africa’s Kalahari Desert, survival is a group effort. Sentries scan for danger, and lower-ranked adults, mostly females, feed and mind the senior female’s pups. It’s not clear how climate change will affect meerkats in the Kalahari, but hotter, drier summers may reduce their numbers. (From “Rising heat puts the Kalahari’s ecosystem on the edge of survival.” July 2021.)
Off Marseille, 256 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, narwhal shrimp float in forests of black coral. (The coral is named for its black skeleton, but the living tissue is white.) The shrimp are around four inches long and send signals by touching antennae. In the Mediterranean bits of plastic have been found in their guts.
Emerging from their burrows after dark, ground pangolins will each eat about 15,000 ants and termites in a night—5.5 million in a year. Insect abundance depends on healthy grasses, the thread that binds life on the Kalahari’s nutrient-poor sands. Without summer rains, the greening will fail. The desert is a climate change hot spot: As temperature increases change rain patterns, animals like the pangolin face an uncertain future. (From “Rising heat puts the Kalahari’s ecosystem on the edge of survival.” July 2021.)
Swimmers throughout the North Atlantic flee at the sight of this jellyfish, Pelagia nociluca, commonly known as the mauve stinger. Stinging cells cover its tentacles and entire body. But a black coral has paralyzed this one, off La Ciotat, in southern France. (From “They spent 28 days under the sea—and found another Earth,” April 2021.)
Simon’s Town, South Africa, is home to a large breeding colony of African penguins. Some have become habituated to humans, settling in domestic gardens and wandering into homes. A few guesthouses are capitalizing on this, using the penguins’ presence as a selling point, but penguin experts warn that this habituation leads to the birds crossing roads or being struck by cars. Peak tourism season coincides with the birds’ annual molt, a summertime event when the birds are unable to forage for several weeks, potentially making them more vulnerable to stress. (From “Africa’s only penguins face an uncertain future,” October 2021.)
Iridescent orchid bees, tropical cousins of bumblebees and honeybees, were among the multitude of new and unusual insects that entomologists collected at a 131-foot observation tower in Manaus, Brazil. Most entomologists study life on the ground. Instead, these scientists looked up—and found a staggering diversity of new creatures. (From “Hundreds of new and unusual insects discovered in the Amazon’s canopy,” March 2021.)
A leopard seal drifts next to an iceberg off the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Air bubbles released from the melting ice stick to the lens of the underwater camera. For these seals, ice floes are a place to breed and molt, and they provide habitat for krill, an important prey. (From “An icy world is in meltdown, as penguin population shifts signal trouble,” October 2021.)
The bullet ant, Paraponera clavata, native to Latin America, has one of the most painful stings of any insect.
Another member of the Camponotus genus, an extremely large and complex group of ants found worldwide, comprised of more than 1,000 species.
Carla Heras, a volunteer at Santuario Gaia in Camprodon, Spain, cradles Laietana the duck. Laietana is one of 1,500 animals—most rescued from the streets and the farming industry—living at the center. Gaia is among a few dozen sanctuaries in Spain providing a home to animals that had been farmed for food. (From “In Spain, sanctuaries give forever homes to rescued farmed animals,” April 2021.)
A whiteout of coral eggs and sperm swirls above Moore Reef, part of the Great Barrier Reef. This annual “broadcast spawning”— triggered by the lunar cycle, water temperature, and day length—gives corals a way to reproduce sexually and maintain genetic diversity. More than a quarter of the world’s known corals are threatened by extinction. “Joy and relief is swimming through a blizzard of coral spawn rising from survivor corals,” photographer David Doubilet says. (From “How coral reefs might survive climate change,” April 2021.)
Ndakasi the mountain gorilla passes away in her caregiver's arms after a prolonged illness on September 26, 2021. Andre Bauma and others at the Senkwekwe Mountain Gorilla Center have cared for Ndakasi and other orphans for the last 14 years.
Anthony Caere, a pilot for Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, cradles Felix and Mara as he flies them to Lwiro Primates Rehabilitation Center. The babies’ families were killed by poachers. Caere, who survived a plane crash in 2017, says helping to rescue chimps gives him purpose.
Hayes photographed a coin-size juvenile cowfish off Indonesia’s coast. Doubilet likens this style of night diving—being carried by the currents—to drifting through space. “The only way to know which is up is to watch which direction the bubbles are going,” he says.
A juvenile jack hides behind a jellyfish—driving it like a motorboat. As the jellyfish provides protection from predators, the juvenile fish may feed on parasites that have latched onto its host. “You rarely run into something that doesn’t fascinate you,” Hayes says. “It really is a new macroscopic lens into the sea.”
A seven-month-old cheetah in the back of an SUV hisses at a rescuer’s outstretched hand. Authorities intercepted the cub, later named Astur, before he could be sold to a smuggler. But every year scores—perhaps hundreds—of mostly very young cheetahs are trafficked out of Somaliland to Persian Gulf states to be sold as pets.
Siblings Link and Zelda were among 10 cubs rescued last October after the high-profile arrest of Cabdiraxmaan Yusuf Mahdi, better known as Cabdi Xayawaan, on wildlife trafficking charges. Named after characters in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, the pair are inseparable—even when Link annoys Zelda with his roughhousing.
Called “Nose” in Somali, San is another of the cubs rescued in Cabdi Xayawaan’s case. She had a badly injured nose and cried at first, but since she’s been housed with Link and Zelda, she’s settled down.
In a noisy, slurpy affair, orphaned elephants at Reteti get a bottle of formula about every three hours. The switch from baby formula to a goat milk-based diet has been good for the calves’ health, says Katie Rowe, co-founder of Reteti.
Embryos of the Wiley’s glass frog (Nymphargus wileyi), endemic to Ecuador’s eastern Andes, hang from the tip of a fern leaf. When the eggs hatch into tadpoles, they’ll fall into the stream below to continue their development.
The Manduriacu glass frog (Nymphargus manduriacu) was scientifically described just a few years ago. The rare yellow-spotted frog is an opportunistic hunter, waiting until its prey—a small insect or spider—walks by, and then pouncing.
A team of rescuers made up of people from the Ruko Conservancy, the Kenya Wildlife Service, Save Giraffes Now, and the Northern Rangelands Trust ferry Asiwa to a newly built sanctuary on the mainland, using a homemade barge constructed from metal drums, steel beams, and tarps.
