Welcome to Wild Wins – where we share positive stories from the natural world, proudly supported by Coral Expeditions, Australia’s pioneering cruise line.
WINNING NUMBERS
$200,000 boost for Australian conservation
50 years since the last nabarlek sighting, now two have been spotted
2 major supermarkets remove krill oil tablets from shelves
100+ nangur tiny skinks bred in captivity after population shrank to 26 in 2023
Read more about each of these Wild Wins below – proudly supported by Coral Expeditions, Australia’s pioneering cruise line.
Image credit: Giovanni Portelli
Meet the Awards for Nature winners
The Australian Geographic Society has announced its 2026 Awards for Nature recipients, sharing $150,000 across five outstanding conservation projects – and making a surprise additional $50,000 donation to the Invasive Species Council to support Australia’s H5N1 bird flu response.
Announced at the Australian Museum in Sydney on Thursday 10 September with Presenting Partner, Coral Expeditions, the awards are now in their third year and back projects that combine rigorous science, community participation and measurable on-ground action.
With this year’s recipients, the Society has invested $400,000 across 13 conservation projects since the program launched in 2024.
The five award winners include:
- Gold ($50,000): SeedReady Communities, Australian Seed Bank Partnership
- Silver ($30,000): Christmas Beetle Monitoring Network, Invertebrates Australia
- Silver ($30,000): Operation Crayweed, UNSW Sydney and Partners
- Bronze ($20,000): Raukkan Community Conservation Project, Regenerate Australia and Raukkan Community Council
- Bronze ($20,000): Shorebird Stewards, BirdLife Australia
“Across Australia, extraordinary conservation work is being carried out quietly, effectively and often against considerable odds. These awards put meaningful funding into the hands of people who know how to make a difference,” said Society Chair, Chrissie Goldrick.
“But our support goes beyond the cheque. Australian Geographic can also shine a light on their work, tell their stories and connect them with a much larger community. We want to help good conservation ideas prove themselves, grow and ultimately create lasting impact.”
Help defend nature with a donation today! If you’d like to support the Australian Geographic Society in its mission, visit the Society page here.
Image credit: Ian Bool
Needle in a haystack… found!
After more than 50 years of silence, Australia’s second smallest wallaby, the nabarlek, has been found alive and well on mainland Australia.
Conservationists are thrilled, because finding a nabarlek (Petrogale concinna) is no easy task.
At just 36cm long – roughly the length of a loaf of bread – the macropod lives in remote, rocky terrain in the Kimberley, looks almost identical to two other wallaby species, and hadn’t been recorded on the mainland since the 1970s.
Researchers from Australian Wildlife Conservancy, working alongside Dambimangari Aboriginal Corporation, have confirmed the presence of the nabarlek at not one but two new mainland sites on Dambeemangaddee Country, the Kimberley’s west coast.
Image credit: courtesy Australian Wildlife Conservancy
They used a painstaking combination of camera traps, scat collection and DNA analysis to be absolutely sure of what they’d found.
Images and scats verified the presence of the 1.2kg wallaby on Yampi Sound Training Area, one of 20 priority places in the federal government’s Threatened Species Action Plan.
It’s a discovery that hints this secretive little marsupial may be holding on in pockets across the Kimberley mainland.
“We heard that the nabarlek didn’t exist anymore on the mainland,” said Inga Pedersen, Dambeemangaddee Traditional Owner. “So it’s good to know that they’re there. It shows their Country is healthy.”
Aisle be damned! Krill oil products removed
Two-thirds of Australia’s supermarkets are now krill oil-free after Coles and Woolworths both confirmed they’ve stopped selling the Antarctic-extracted supplement.
It’s a big win for one of the ocean’s most important and underappreciated species.
“These animals act like giant fertilisers, scooping up krill in one area and pooping them out in another, moving masses of nutrients around the Southern Ocean,” wrote Dr Vanessa Pirotta recently in Australian Geographic (see Earth View, AG 192).
Krill oil tablets have recently become a popular health supplement as a source of omega-3 despite the widespread availability of alternatives, such as omega-3 supplements derived directly from algae.
Image credit: Gerald Corsi/Getty Images
Despite the move from the major supermarkets, the supplement is still sold in many smaller retailers and pharmacies.
Some estimates suggest krill numbers around the Antarctic Peninsula have dropped by as much as 80 per cent since the 1970s due to industrial extraction to feed market demands.
“The 2025 documentary Ocean with David Attenborough visually shows the seriousness of such activity and the bizarre and out-of-place imagery of these giant vessels hanging out with whales in Antarctica,” Dr Pirotta said.
“I’m no human doctor, but as a whale scientist, I know krill shouldn’t be found on pharmacy shelves. They should be left in the ocean, and especially not taken from Antarctic waters.”
The decision from the two supermarkets has been welcomed by environmental groups that have been campaigning strongly to curb the krill fishing industry.
Image credit: courtesy Zoos Victoria
Neither fluffy nor famous, but fighting back
Most Australians have never heard of the Nangur spiny skink.
It lives in a single patch of rainforest near Gympie in south-east Queensland, fits in the palm of your hand, and by 2023 its entire wild population had shrunk to just 26 individuals.
But things are changing. More than 100 Nangur spiny skinks (Nangura spinosa) have been bred in captivity – a remarkable turnaround for a lizard that just two years ago was staring down extinction.
Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary has joined a captive breeding program alongside Queensland’s Department of the Environment, taking in 35 of the armoured little lizards and giving them a purpose-built home behind the scenes.
The results are already encouraging. More than 100 have now been bred in captivity, and a wild release from Lone Pine is planned for later this year.
And at the end of the day, conservation isn’t just about the animals on our postcards.
“If we truly want to protect biodiversity, we have to care about the tiny skinks under rocks, the frogs in creeks, the insects in leaf litter,” said Frank Mikula, Wildlife Curator at Lone Pine.
“Healthy ecosystems depend on all of them.”
Image credit: courtesy Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary
Wild Wins is proudly supported by Coral Expeditions, Australia’s pioneering cruise line.