Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

YOU KNOW WE LOVE ANIMALS here at National Geographic, and indeed this month’s cover story is about some of our favorites. But this time we’re considering some of the planet’s, well, less attractive creatures. While they may not be cuddly or regal or dazzling, their unusual talents, grotesque appearances, and other “nonconformities” make them all the more fascinating. Our new series, Underdogs (streaming on Disney+), takes you into their world, and so we took the opportunity to celebrate them here, warts and all. We are equally interested in human culture, though, and people’s efforts to maintain it. In this issue are compelling looks at protecting the vivid tapestry of experiences across our globe. We consider a rural corner of Romania, where residents have for centuries maintained a pastoral and communal way…

NEAR THE SOUTHERN EDGE of the Sahara desert, millions of people in some 20 West and Central African countries share a way of life. Year after year, they take part in the ancient practice of nomadic pastoralism, herding livestock across increasingly hot, arid lands of the Sahel region in search of fresh grasslands and accessible water as the seasons change. From the western coast of Senegal to the eastern shorelines of Sudan, herders follow different migratory routes that can cover hundreds of miles. Most of these pastoralists share another important distinction: They are Fulani, an Indigenous people who have a broad cultural identity shaped by such traditional journeys. These groups are vast and varied, and many are traveling in new directions. In fact, the majority of these predominantly Muslim people…

FOR SEVEN decades, Sir David Attenborough has traversed the globe to document the kaleidoscopic diversity of Earth’s eco-systems. At the age of 99, he’s narrated so many television programs that his voice has become synonymous with the wonder of the natural world. But in his long career full of wild encounters, one memory still stands out. In 1957, when Attenborough was in his 30s, he traveled to a shallow warmwater cay on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where, for the first time in his life, he donned scuba gear to examine corals up close. “It was a sort of sensory overload,” he says. “The countless tiny fish swimming between coral branches; the differences between the different coral structures. It opened up for me a whole new appreciation of the intricacies of…

Long before European powers carved up West Africa and independent African states inherited their contemporary borders, a great nomadic tradition began—one that continues and evolves today. Around November, as the rainy season ends and the southern fringes of the Sahara desert begin to dry and brown again, hundreds of thousands of Fulani herders gather to drive millions of cattle, goats, and sheep toward cooler subtropical savannas. This annual movement has made the Fulani one of the largest nomadic groups on Earth, but it has also helped exclude them from politics: Despite their large numbers, the transient herders are less likely to be counted by states. An added obstacle to representation is the fact that many of the region’s governments are more invested in farming than herding. That diminished political sway…

Noriko Hayashi, p.80 The Tokyo-based photographer shadowed a new generation of swordsmiths for this issue’s story on modern-day blademakers. An Explorer since 2023, she has had work published in the New York Times, Stern, and Granta. Ross Perlin, p.114 The linguist author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York contributed to this month’s feature on his home city’s vast linguistic diversity, warning of its threatened future. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Learn more about the Society’s support of Explorers at natgeo.com/impact. Luján Agusti, p.104 Based in Ushuaia, Argentina, Agusti boarded an Antarctic research vessel to photograph Explorer Kim Bernard, whose work studying krill is…

ON A SUMMER DAY in central London, a 44-year-old woman named Lucy Peel descended a slippery stairway on the bank of the River Thames to crouch on her hands and knees over a particularly intriguing pile of mud. It was low tide, and the waters of the river had receded substantially. Ignoring the obvious tangles of trash—plastic bags, vape pens, broken glass—Peel painstakingly scanned the exposed riverbed until she spotted something nestled in the sand that could easily be mistaken for a leaf. After carefully prying it loose, she held up a wafer-thin ceramic shard and had a familiar feeling that she was holding a piece of ancient history. Later, an archaeologist would confirm her suspicion: It was a fragment of Roman pottery. “Even though it’s so fine, somehow it’s…

WHEN SHAHRUKH SHAH was a boy, the small, dusty city of Gangapur, India, wasn’t known for much. It was an agricultural town, a hub for the region’s many farmers, and Shah’s family grew corn and wheat on three acres nearby. But farming was never easy on the plains of central Rajasthan—India’s largest state and among its driest—and as Shah got older, it became tougher still, with the rainy seasons more erratic, droughts more frequent, and water for irrigation harder to come by. Then, around 2014, when Shah was a teenager, his father decided to give up farming during the parched four-month summer in favor of the business that has since put Gangapur on the map: ice cream. More precisely, Gangapur has become a hotbed of ice cream truck manufacturing. A…

Reporting in this article is presented by the National Geographic Society in partnership with Rolex under the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions. ONE NIGHT LAST DECEMBER, National Geographic Explorer Kim Bernard was stirring her Earl Grey tea in the galley of a research ship off the coast of Antarctica, preparing for a long night of observing a remotely operated vehicle as it surveyed the seafloor. When the marine ecologist looked up to a monitor showing a live video feed sent by the ROV from a depth of more than 3,000 feet in the Southern Ocean’s murky waters, something caught her attention. “I see this tiny little thing come in on the right-hand side of the screen and dart out,” she said. To the other scientists aboard, it probably…

Seke is an endangered language originally spoken in five villages of northern Nepal, but its future may depend on a handful of vertical villages: apartment buildings in the middle of Brooklyn, New York. How did a little-documented, oral-only language used by no more than 700 people in the high Himalaya come to the concrete jungle? Rasmina Gurung, in her 20s one of Seke’s youngest speakers, learned the language from her grand mother in the village but soon moved to the country’s capital, Kathmandu, and eventually New York—where she estimates at least a quarter of her people have ended up. Here they join speakers of dozens of other endangered languages from across the Himalaya, all forming new communities while getting by in an ever evolving mix of Nepali, Tibetan, English, and…