Zoo welcomes 11 Humboldt chicks, its highest number in a decade, including Thistle and Daffodil

In previous years Chester zoo’s new penguin chicks have been named after crisps – Frazzle, Wotsit – and local football club owners – Ryan, Rob – but the names p … p … p … picked this year are notably less frivolous.

“We’ve decided to go with plants,” said Zoe Sweetman, the penguins and parrots team manager at the zoo. Two of the spikier new arrivals have been named Nettle and Thistle while two others with “colourful personalities” have been named Daffodil and Tulip.

Female pair are third litter born at Blair Drummond under endangered species breeding programme

A Scottish safari park has announced the birth of two female lemur pups native to Madagascar.

Nova and Evie, who are living at Blair Drummond safari and adventure park, near Stirling, were born on 14 April, and the park has now publicly announced their birth.

The loss of the ecosystems, which are vast stores of carbon, would ‘be disastrous for nature and people across the globe’, says IUCN

Half of all the world’s mangrove forests are at risk of collapse, according to the first-ever expert assessment of these crucial ecosystems and carbon stores.

Human behaviour is the primary cause of their decline, according to the analysis by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), with mangroves in southern India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives most at risk.

Scientist discovers a cast of recurring characters using burrows in the aftermath of bushfire, after sifting through more than 700,000 images

First came a picture of an inquisitive red-necked wallaby, then an image of a bare-nosed wombat, followed by a couple of shots of the wombat’s burrow with nothing else in the frame.

By the time research scientist Grant Linley had looked through a further 746,670 images, he had seen 48 different species visiting the 28 wombat burrows that he had trained his cameras on.