In the forest streams of central Vietnam, the rong dat lives within a jump of running water, resting on branches above the current and escaping by dropping into it. That attachment to one narrow strip of habitat also makes it easy to collect, and US import records alone list more than 1.4 million live animals between 1999 and 2018. In 2016, hunters in three hill districts of Thua Thien Hue, the province north of Da Nang now administered as Hue city, took about a tonne of Chin

The Little Tern lays its eggs straight onto open sand at the mouth of the Thu Bon, in a scrape a few centimetres deep. It has chosen the one strip of the Hoi An coast that the sea is eating from the front and the resorts are closing off from behind. A Little Tern weighs about as much as a bar of hotel soap [1]. It hunts by hanging over shallow water on fast, flickering wingbeats, then folding and dropping head-first after a fish the length of a finger. And when it comes to br

Son Tra lost 42 per cent of its coral reef area in a single decade. The small submerged reef off Bai But came through it better than anywhere else on the peninsula - yet almost everything known about it comes from surveys in which it was one stretch of coast among many. In one morning in June 2026, volunteers working off the south shore of the Son Tra Peninsula cut close to 100 kilograms of abandoned fishing net away from a single reef [1]. The reef is called Hon Sup, and it