Viet Endangered Narratives

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Viet Endangered Narratives

"Viet Endangered Narratives" It suggests a commitment to telling the important stories of the natural world and the need to protect it for future generations.

VEN "Viet Endangered Narratives" conveys a sense of purpose and dedication to raising awareness about endangered species and environmental conservation in Vietnam through the art of storytelling and cinema.

03/10/2026

Different creators. Their followers. 🎥 Every trip ended, but the story didn't.

Epic Trips: Beyond the Journey 🌿

Coming soon...

02/10/2026

Our team went out with macro lenses to film the small world most people walk past.

Insects, plants, and the tiny details of the forest floor are a big part of the ecosystems we work to protect, and macro work lets us show them in a way the eye usually can't.

This footage will feed into upcoming VEN content, so stay tuned for what we found.

📍 Da Nang, Vietnam

30/09/2026

Have you ever seen a snake that always looks... half asleep? Meet the vine snake: the calm, gentle guardian of the forest. 🌿🐍

Built to disappear.
The vine snake is made for life among the leaves – slender, bright green and surprisingly easy to miss. Its shape, colour and slow movements help it blend almost perfectly into its surroundings.

28/09/2026

Meet the red-shanked douc, often called the "Queen of Primates." With its grey body, white forearms, maroon legs, and golden face, it looks like it's dressed for a royal ceremony.

These leaf-eating langurs spend most of their lives high in the forest canopy, and Son Tra Peninsula in Da Nang is one of the few places where you can still see them this close to a city.

They're listed as Critically Endangered, and every sighting is a reminder of how much is worth protecting.

25/09/2026

Mushroom season in Da Nang

When the rains return to central Viet Nam, the forest floor changes fast.
Fungi grow here year-round, but they peak during the rainy season, roughly September to December, when warm temperatures and constant moisture trigger them to fruit.

What you see is only a small part of the organism. The main body of a fungus is the mycelium, a network of fine threads hidden inside soil, leaf litter and dead wood. The mushroom is its fruiting body, built to release spores, and many last only a few days.

A few from this series:

Eyelash cup (Scutellinia sp.): a tiny orange cup fungus fringed with stiff dark hairs. It grows on wet soil and rotting wood.

Fairy inkcap (Coprinellus disseminatus): appears in dense troops of hundreds on decaying wood. Each cap is short-lived and collapses within days.
Bracket fungi: these shelf-like fungi are wood decomposers. Many are white-rot fungi, among the few organisms able to break down lignin, the tough compound that makes wood rigid. Without them, fallen trees would pile up and their nutrients would stay locked away.

Slime moulds: the white branching structures and the orange-speckled spheres are not fungi. Slime moulds are amoeba-like organisms that move across the forest floor feeding on bacteria and fungal spores. When conditions change, they build fruiting bodies like these to release spores.

Never eat wild mushrooms!

Many species can only be told apart with a microscope, and Viet Nam records cases of wild mushroom poisoning every year, some of them fatal.

23/09/2026

Built to blend in

At first glance, it looks like part of the tree.

This small tree frog (Kurixalus sp.) was photographed in central Vietnam, where it is perfectly suited to disappearing among the bark, moss and lichen of its surroundings. Its rough, mottled skin breaks up its outline so effectively that spotting one can feel less like finding an animal and more like noticing that a part of the forest has suddenly moved.

As it is very much a forest frog, Kurixalus is associated with evergreen forests, and has not been observed living in open habitats away from it. This close connection with forest habitat shapes where it can live, making the vegetation around it more than just camouflage – it is the environment the species depends on.

Most of the species are currently categorised as 'Least Concern', thanks to their relatively wide distribution and the fact that parts of their habitats are located within protected areas such as Bạch Mã National Park, Sông Thanh Nature Reserve and Bắc Hướng Hóa Nature Reserve. However, deforestation, particularly for agricultural purposes, does pose an ongoing threat. Forest loss, particularly when natural forest is converted for agriculture, continues to reduce the habitat those frogs are relying on.

This little frog, almost invisible against the bark, can teach us something important: To protect a species made for the forest, we also have to protect the forest around it.

Kurixalus tree frog
📍 Sơn Trà Peninsula, Da Nang, Vietnam

21/09/2026

Birds. All of them.

Birds come in every shape, size and colour – and almost nothing about them is accidental. A bright feather can attract a mate, a muted pattern can disappear into the landscape, a long beak can unlock a very specific food source, and a powerful call can defend a territory. Different birds, different strategies – all shaped by the places they call home.

18/09/2026

This lizard never leaves the stream.

The Chinese water dragon — rong dat, or ky tom — spends its whole life within a few metres of running water. It rests on branches above the current, sleeps over the water at night, and when something startles it, it drops straight in and swims. Adults perch more than 3 m up; young ones stay low, under 2 m.

It barely travels. Animals followed in central Vietnam moved over an average range of just 4.7 metres.

That is a good arrangement, and it only works if both halves stay: branches over the water, and water under the branches. Clear the bank and there is nowhere to perch. It also makes the animal very easy to find. US import records alone list more than 1.4 million live water dragons between 1999 and 2018, almost 95 per cent of them declared wild-caught, 99.8 per cent from Vietnam.

We went through the surveys, the CITES papers and the trade records to see what is actually known about them here:

https://www.vietendangerednarratives.org/post/chinese-water-dragons-bound-to-thestream-taken-from-it-by-hand

Chinese water dragon, Physignathus cocincinus (rong dat / ky tom). Central Vietnam.

16/09/2026

Look closely — not everything is what it seems. 🌿

Hidden among leaves and branches, some of nature’s most patient predators are waiting.

The giant Asian mantis (Hierodula sp.) 1️⃣ is built for ambush. It can remain almost perfectly still, waiting for prey to move within reach. Those familiar folded front legs may look like they
are held in prayer, but lined with spines and ready to strike, they are powerful tools for catching and holding prey.

Not all mantises, however, are so imposing.
Leptomantella sp. 2️⃣ takes a more delicate form. This small, slender praying mantis with long limbs and subtle appearance can be surprisingly easy to overlook among vegetation. Small in stature, but still very much a predator.

Others take hiding to another level.
The shield mantis (Choeradodis sp.) 3️⃣ almost seems to lose the shape of an insect altogether. Its broad, flattened body creates a leaf-like silhouette, helping it disappear among the vegetation — a predator hiding in plain sight.

Different forms and different strategies, yet all three belong to Mantodea — the order of praying mantises. And they share one particularly effective hunting tool: raptorial front legs
adapted for seizing prey.

But the mantis shape is not exclusive to mantises.

Elsewhere on the insect family tree, evolution arrived at a remarkably similar solution.

The mantisfly (Mantispidae) 4️⃣ belongs to Neuroptera, the order that also includes lacewings. Despite being only distantly related to praying mantises, mantisflies independently evolved their own grasping, raptorial front legs for capturing prey.

This is convergent evolution — when unrelated organisms independently develop similar adaptations in response to similar challenges.

Different evolutionary paths.
A remarkably similar solution.

Sometimes, nature finds a good design more than once. 🔎

🔬 Mantodea: Hierodula sp. | Leptomantella sp. | Choeradodis sp.
🔬 Neuroptera: Mantisfly | Mantispidae

14/09/2026

Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. Blue.

Colour in the wild is rarely decoration. It warns, it hides, it signals a male ready to breed, it copies a leaf so well that nothing looks twice. The same five colours you would pick out of a paint box are doing completely different jobs on a lizard, a snake, a beetle and a bird.

Every frame in this reel is a living animal photographed in Viet Nam. No filters on the colour — that is what it actually looks like out there.

Address

60 Nguyễn Phi Khanh, Thanh Khê
Da Nang
550000

Website

http://vietendangerednarratives.org/

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