EXPLORE WILD HOPE

Plants can’t move on their own, so they usually need a little help to spread their seeds far and wide. Animals that scatter these seeds — often by eating the fruit and pooping out the remains — are known as seed dispersers.

Corals are known for their vibrant hues, but when they get stressed, they turn a ghostly white in a process known as coral bleaching. To appreciate why this happens, you need to understand the unique relationship that forms the basis of coral reefs.

Our relationship with gray wolves is a complicated one, spanning centuries of tension and dating back to the beginning in the 1600s with North American colonization.

Derek Gow has helped bring beavers back to Britain, and their impact on local landscapes and biodiversity has been immense. Now, he’s scaling up a breeding program to export another wetland engineer—the water vole—all across the country.

For years, Derek Gow worked his 400-acres in western England as a conventional sheep and cattle farm. Now, he’s using his experience with British rewilding projects to return his land to what it once was: a healthy, biodiverse ecosystem.

Often the first and most effective strategy to healing a landscape is to pay attention to how ancestral wildlife, like native plants and animals, once shaped and strengthened these natural spaces.

Indigo snakes prey on other snakes—even venomous ones—but are still docile-enough to be handled by young children. Now, a one-of-a kind breeding program is raising these gentle giants and returning them to forests across the southeastern US.

Gopher tortoises create deep burrows that give critical shelter to over 350 species of insects, mammals, birds, and amphibians throughout the southeastern US. Their blood may be cold, but their heart is all warm inside!

In the face of extreme habitat loss, wildlife biologist Dr. Chris Jenkins puts an ambitious plan in motion to save two uniquely American reptiles — the eastern indigo snake and the gopher tortoise — and the longleaf pine forest they call home.

Christopher Jenkins has worked with Wildlife Conservation Society, the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His current projects include land protection in longleaf pine ecosystems, ecology and conservation of timber rattlesnakes and the conservation of giant tortoises.