Conservation Facts

At 17 years old, an Indian man named Jadav Payeng started planting trees on a barren sandbar. At age 47, he lives in his own 1360 acre forest which now houses rhinos, tigers, deer, apes and elephants.

By peeing in the shower instead of flushing the toilet, you could save around 2,000 gallons of water per year.

Angelina Jolie never bought Cambodia's 60,000-hectare Samlaut reserve. Cambodia's king declared it a protected forest in 1993, years before Jolie ever set foot there. Her foundation, named for her son Maddox, has funded rangers to patrol it since 2003. By her own account, some of those rangers are former poachers. The people who once hunted the forest now protect it.

When conservationist Lawrence Anthony died, two herds of wild elephants he had rescued walked 12 miles to his home. They stood there for two days. They had not visited in 18 months. Nobody called them. Nobody changed their feeding route. Nobody can explain how they knew. They came back on the anniversary of his death. Every year.

Hundreds of strangers showed up at Ruakaka Beach in New Zealand when 40 pilot whales stranded themselves at dusk. Volunteers dug trenches around the whales, slid fabric sheets beneath their bodies, and lifted them off the sand in coordinated teams - forming a human wall to guide each animal back into the sea. Thirty-six of the forty whales made it home.

An elephant spent 12 hours submerged in a 45-foot well near Tsavo, Kenya - breathing only through his trunk like a snorkel. The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust pumped out 150,000 liters of water, drove a crane from Mombasa overnight, and lowered a vet into the pit to sedate and lift him out. 22 hours later, he walked into the bush on his own.

Pablo Escobar smuggled 4 hippos into Colombia for his private zoo in the 1980s. When he was shot dead in 1993, the animals were abandoned at his estate. They bred freely in the Magdalena River, with no natural predators to slow them. Colombia now has an estimated 170 to 215 feral hippos - the largest population outside Africa - and is spending $10,000 per animal to surgically sterilize them.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is drilled over 100 metres into an Arctic mountain in Norway, keeping more than 1.3 million seed samples frozen - even if the power fails, the permafrost keeps them safe. Syria's conflict made the Aleppo seed bank inaccessible - and researchers made the first-ever withdrawal to rebuild it.

Methuselah, an Australian lungfish at San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium, has lived in the same tank since November 1938 - before World War II began. DNA analysis in 2023 estimated her age at between 92 and 101 years old, making her the oldest living aquarium fish in the world. She still gets belly rubs from her keepers and her favorite treat is fresh figs.

Yacouba Sawadogo was a farmer in Burkina Faso who fought the desert with holes. He spent four decades digging zaï pits by hand. Each pit was packed with compost to capture rainfall and feed the soil below. Cracked, barren land became a living forest of nearly 40 hectares with more than 60 species. He won the Right Livelihood Award - the Alternative Nobel - in 2018.

Rupert Fothergill had just two boats and a handful of rangers. Rhodesia was damming the Zambezi River. Rising water was drowning an entire valley of wild animals. For five years, his rangers roped rhinos onto rafts and guided swimming elephants to shore. A second team worked the far riverbank too. Together, the two crews saved over 6,000 animals.

A brutal freeze hit the Texas coast in January 2026. Sea turtles went stiff and floated like they were dead. It's called cold-stunning, and it happens when the water drops below 50 degrees. This time it hit 42 degrees. Rescue crews combed the coast for days and found 1,126 turtles still alive. Vets warmed them slowly. Crowds later gathered on a Galveston beach to watch over 100 of the survivors swim free.

Steve Irwin's family never walked away. After he died on September 4, 2006, Australia bought 330,000 acres of Cape York, bigger than New York City, and named it after him. Every August they still tag crocs there in the Wenlock River: nearly 300 since 2008, what Australia Zoo calls the world's longest-running croc study. Twenty years on, still out there.

In 2014, Morgan Freeman converted his 124-acre Mississippi ranch into a bee sanctuary. He imported 26 hives from Arkansas, planted acres of clover and lavender, and became a beekeeper himself — all to fight Colony Collapse Disorder. He never wears a protective suit. The bees have never stung him.

Two young Australians bought a lion cub from Harrods for 250 guineas in 1969 and raised him in a Chelsea furniture shop. When he grew too big for city life, they released him into the wild in Kenya. A year later, they flew back to find him. They were warned he might not remember. Christian recognized them and sprinted to embrace them.

The Coco de Mer grows the world's largest seed - up to 25 kg and half a metre long. For centuries sailors found the giant nuts drifting in the Indian Ocean with no tree in sight, so they decided it must grow on a tree on the seafloor. The palm grows wild on just two islands on Earth, and every nut now needs a government permit to leave.