Madagascar is home to more than 100 lemur species found nowhere else on Earth, and more than 90% of them face extinction. This week on Robin’s Nest, Dr. Robin Ganzert welcomes back Dr. Jonah Ratsimbazafy, Madagascar’s foremost primatologist, President of the Groupe d’Étude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar (GERP) and a Kiessling Prize finalist for the second time. A year after his first visit, the threats have escalated. Lemurs are being trafficked by the thousand, hunted for bushmeat and exposed to diseases that cross from forests into people. Dr. Ratsimbazafy shares what wildlife crime looks like on the ground, why enforcement alone is not the answer, and how AI-enabled camera traps, genomic research and zoo-based education could change the odds for the species that depend on Madagascar’s forests.

What happens to a rescued animal after you let it go? Néstor Correa wasn't satisfied with not knowing. On this episode of Robin's Nest, Dr. Robin Ganzert sits down with the environmental lawyer turned conservation scientist who founded Panama's first wildlife rescue organization. During the Panama Canal Expansion, he led one of the largest wildlife relocations ever attempted in a tropical forest, moving nearly 2,500 animals across more than 100 species. Then he asked the question the field had been avoiding: not how many animals were released, but how many survived.

To find out, his team put radio trackers on rehabilitated sloths and followed them into the rainforest. The results are some of the first hard evidence of what happens to them after release. Néstor and Robin talk about the rescue, what sloths have taught him, and the Panama Nature Center, a new home for rescue, neonatal care, research and education. He's also a finalist for the Kiessling Prize, which could help him expand that work and build a conservation education center for Panamanian children.

Listen now on Robin's Nest, the podcast where the science of animal welfare meets the heart of humane advocacy.

In 2007, the baiji was declared functionally extinct. Dr. Ding Wang had spent his career trying to save it, and he watched it disappear from the Yangtze River forever. Then he made a decision: it would not happen twice.

Nearly twenty years later, the Yangtze finless porpoise, known in China as the smiling angel of the Yangtze, is the only critically endangered small cetacean on Earth that is recovering. The wild population stopped declining in 2022 and has climbed to 1,426, a 40 percent increase since 2017.

This week on Robin’s Nest, Dr. Robin Ganzert sits down with Dr. Wang, newly named recipient of the Wolfgang Kiessling International Prize for Species Conservation, to talk about four decades on one river, the loss that changed everything, and why he believes the porpoise’s survival depends on whether people are willing to change.