We’re thrilled to report that the herds of wild horses that roam North Carolina’s Outer Banks have emerged from Hurricane Florence unscathed. Cape Hatteras National Seashore and Corolla Wild Horse Fund both confirmed on social media over the weekend that their equine populations are safe and sound following Hurricane Florence’s lashing last week. Corolla Wild Horse Fund herd manager Meg Puckett told The News & Observer that the wild herd found higher ground and grouped together against the wind and rain. People on the island also kept an eye on them.

Launching a People's Manifesto for Wildlife, broadcaster Chris Packham said the UK is witnessing a "mass extinction in our own backyards" due to a lack of regard for the environment - such as building roads and houses through natural habitats and using pesticides in farming. A staggering 38,000 mountain hares have been killed on hunting estates across Scotland, and the manifesto warns the animals could become extinct in our lifetime.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

A scientific mission into the secret ocean lair of California’s great white sharks has provided tantalizing clues into a vexing mystery — why the fearsome predators spend winter and spring in what has long appeared to be an empty void in the deep sea. A boatload of researchers from five scientific institutions visited the middle-of-nowhere spot between Baja California and Hawaii this past spring on a quest to learn more about what draws the big sharks to what has become known as the White Shark Cafe, almost as if they were pulled by some astrological stimulus.

Wasps are being wiped out as quickly as bees - and their disappearance will be just as disastrous, according to new research. But the plight of wasps is going under the radar compared to that of their close cousins - because of their unpopularity. Nature's unloved insects are best known for ruining picnics - and leaving a painful sting when we try to swat them away.

Mosquito larvae that grow up in water contaminated with plastic accumulate the litter in their bodies – and some of it remains there even after the larvae emerge as adult flies. The mosquitoes may exacerbate the problem of plastic contamination when they are eaten by animals living on land.

An unusual visitor has been hanging out in the St. Lawrence River for the past three years: A narwhal, more than 1,000 kilometres south of its usual range. But the lone narwhal is not alone — it appears he has been adopted by a band of belugas. The narwhal — thought to be a juvenile male because of its half-metre-long tusk — was filmed in July playing among a pod of young belugas, thought to be mostly or all males.

In the 1800s, there were so many bighorn sheep in Wyoming that when one trapper passed through Jackson Hole, he described “over a thousand sheep in the cliffs above our campsite.” No such sights exist today. The bighorns slowly fell to hunters’ rifles, and to diseases spread from domestic sheep. Most herds were wiped out, and by 1900, a species that once numbered in the millions stood instead in the low thousands.

Videos abound on the internet of people using customized hats and other tools to hand-feed the tiny fliers. Here’s what you need to know if you’d like to try it.

Durban - A specialised unit, set up to fight poaching have made great strides in their bid to stamp out rhino poaching. Over the last six months, a total of 365 rhino poachers have been convicted and an additional 15 men aged between 33 and 50, have been arrested. National police spokesperson, Brigadier Vish Naidoo said the 15 were nabbed following sting operations in Mpumalanga. He said police recovered four unlicensed firearms and ammunition.

Dozens of nature reserves have helped wild pandas to breed, aiding the bears' move from endangered to vulnerable.

“It was hiding there, peeking down at us." By Sara C. Nelson.

Very comprehensive video of this misunderstood mammal.

Last winter, unforgettable video footage online showed a starving polar bear, struggling in its Arctic hunting grounds. Because of global warming, the ice was thin and the food supply was scarce. The video generated a wellspring of sympathy for the plight of this poor creature, and invigorated calls for stronger efforts to combat climate change – and rightly so.

Researchers say an endangered killer whale thatcarried her dead calf on her head for more than two weeks has finally abandoned the calf’s body and is back to feeding and frolicking with her pod. The Center for Whale Research in Washington state says it watched the orca, known as J35, chase a school of salmon in Haro Strait west of San Juan Island, between the US mainland and Vancouver Island, on Saturday afternoon.

Residents are battling illness, plummeting tourist numbers and piles and piles of dead fish. By Katherine Hignett.

At a time when the giraffe population is plummeting in the wild, the sale of products made with giraffe skin and bone is booming. According to a report to be released Thursday by Humane Society of the United States and its international affiliate, more than 40,000 giraffe parts were imported to the United States from 2006 to 2015 to be made into expensive pillows, boots, knife handles, bible covers and other trinkets.

After roaming Europe and Asia for more than a hundred thousand years, cave bears died out some 24,000 years ago, after a millennia-long death spiral possibly spurred by hunting, natural climate change, and competition with humans for habitat.

The news coming out of East Africa's Virunga Mountains these days would have made the late (and legendary) conservationist Dian Fossey very happy. According to the most recent census, the mountain gorillas introduced to the world in Gorillas in the Mist, Fossey's book and the film about her work, have grown their ranks from 480 animals in 2010 to 604 as of June 2016. Add another couple hundred apes living in scattered habitats to the south, and their population as a whole totals more than 1,000. Believe it or not, this makes the mountain gorilla subspecies the only great apes known to be increasing in number.

A proposed ivory ban could be extended to protect hippos, walruses and narwhals, the government has said. Ministers have proposed strict legislation to ban the sale of ivory items of all ages, with a few exemptions, as part of efforts to protect elephants from poaching. Around 20,000 elephants a year are slaughtered for their ivory, and wildlife campaigners argue the ban will slow the pace of the killing. But concerns have been raised that the focus on elephants in the ban puts other ivory-bearing animals at increased risk of poaching for their ivory.

A park ranger is grateful to be alive after a terrifying grizzly bear attack outside his home in Bella Coola.Jordan Carbery said he arrived home last Monday night and saw some bears in his headligh…

A bear conservationist says she is shocked by Instagram videos showing two Vancouver-area girls hand-feeding black bears through an open patio door. In one of the videos, the two unidentified girls giggle when a bear cub swats at one of them after she gave it a cracker. Another video shows a girl feeding a cub a cracker through the sliding door. In a third, a man, who appears to be their father, feeds an adult-sized bear a full package of crackers through the same door.

In a southwest Louisiana crawfish pond, two endangered whooping crane chicks peck about for crawfish, insects, plants and other food. They're only 2 months old, but they dwarf the full-grown great egrets nearby. Their tall white parents bugle alarm at an ATV and people across the pond, and all four cranes move farther away.

More than 1,000 species of animals would face serious threats to their survival if U.S. President Donald Trump's proposed border wall with Mexico is built, scientists warned on Tuesday. Iconic creatures such as the Peninsular Bighorn sheep, Mexican gray wolf and the Sonoran pronghorn antelope — all of which are already endangered -- would see their populations dangerously fragmented by a wall, said the letter published in the journal BioScience.

A German cruise line is facing outrage after one of its employees shot and killed a wild polar bear in Norway after the animal attacked another of its employees. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises said its ship was docked at Spitsbergen, the largest island on Norway's Svalbard archipelago, on Saturday when the bear attacked a guard hired to go on shore before passengers to ensure there aren't any polar bears in the area.

The world’s second-largest penguin colony has collapsed in just a few decades, falling from half a million breeding pairs in the 1980s to just tens of thousands in 2017. Breeding colonies of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) occupy unvegetated ground on islands in the Southern Ocean, including the remote Ile aux Cochons.

Florida has an algae problem, and it’s big. This year, an overgrowth in the waters off the state’s southwestern coast is killing wildlife and making some beaches noxious. The toxic algal bloom, known as a red tide, is not unusual. They appear off the state’s coast almost every year. But this one, still going strong after roughly nine months, is the longest since 2006, when blooms that originated in 2004 finally abated after 17 months.

Of all the birds left in the world, 70% are poultry chickens and other farmed birds. When it comes to planet Earth, humans are very tiny. The weight of all 7.6 billion humans makes up just 0.01% of all biomass on Earth, according to a report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Bacteria, by comparison, make up 13% of all biomass, plants account for 83%, and all other forms of life make up 5% of the total weight, according to the report.

A casual chill by the pool for a couple of tourists in South Africa's Kruger National Park became an unexpected up-close moment with nature. The pair were filmed frozen to their sunbeds as three wild elephants popped by for a drink from the swimming pool. Another couple made the recording and told Newsflare it was one of the "most amusing sights we have seen in a long time".

Today, in things you have to see to believe, please peruse this viral video of a grandmother removing two very large, very resistant pythons from a barbecue grill. In a video shared to social media by Channel 7 News Brisbane, an 81-year-old grandma from Down Under who goes by the name Faye Morgan, wrangles, not just one, but two very large pythons from an outdoor grill before kindly depositing them in a large box. While there was a younger man who held open the box for Morgan, Morgan manages to grab both snakes by herself and skillfully put them in the container without any harm to her or the animals. May we all age so gracefully.

Civil war, deforestation, disease and poaching have driven the mighty mountain gorilla to the brink of extinction. Conservation efforts have helped boost population numbers, but humans are still their greatest threat. By Eva de Vries.

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

A petition has been launched to bring a US trophy hunter to justice after he shot a rare snow leopard and was pictured grinning with the body. The picture shows Hossein Golabchi, who is also known by his nickname "Soudy", smiling with the big cat draped over his shoulders.  The animal appears to have been shot at least twice in hind leg. The American hunter, originally from Iran, is believed to have killed the animal in central Asia.

It’s difficult to imagine the voracious great white shark as prey. Could orcas really be overpowering them and removing their livers? By Lauren Smith.

Almost a quarter of British honey samples remain contaminated after a partial ban on neonicotinoid pesticides, new research has revealed. The contamination rate has fallen – it was more than half before the ban – but the study shows that the potent insecticides remain prevalent in the farmed environment and still pose a serious risk to bees and other vital pollinators.