A genetic study of living and extinct elephant species generated proof forest elephants and the savanna elephants are indeed two separate species – an issue that has been a scientific debate for many years. The scientists behind the study hope that these findings help boost separate conservation efforts for both species of African elephants. Elephants are the…
Many people find caves scary, and they get even more scary when you encounter orange creatures with blazing red eyes. “It was maybe two or three meters from me and the eyes were bright red, reflecting my light. I was so frightened,” Olivier Testa, a cave expert recently said in an interview with CNN. Tesla…
In a special episode of her television show, American television superstar Ellen DeGeneres has just celebrated her 60th birthday and was moved to tears by a special gift from her wife, Portia de Rossi. The meaningful present is establishment of The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda. “It’s your 60th…
As much as 150 million rural households across the Global South may be involved in bushmeat hunting, new studies led by the University of Copenhagen find. Hunting is prevalent in the 24 countries surveyed but only providing a small contribution to households and mainly for subsistence rather than for trade. The studies thus contradict earlier…
A wildlife crime case review has highlighted the remarkable impact of Malawi’s new court initiatives, with the percentage of custodial sentences passed rising from 3% to 77% since the launch of court monitoring and public-private prosecutions in July 2016. The results indicated that the court programme was also effective in isolation from other initiatives recently…
More than 70% of Africa’s national parks have been affected by war in recent decades, and wildlife has suffered as a result. That’s according to a new study by researchers from Yale and Princeton universities, which looked at data on 253 populations of large herbivores from 126 protected areas in 19 countries across the continent….
When Josh Daskin traveled to Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park in 2012, its iconic large animals were returning from the brink of extinction. Gorongosa, among Africa’s most spectacular wildlife preserves until the 1970s, had been devastated by an anti-colonial war of liberation followed by a ghastly 15-year civil war — a one-two punch that exterminated more…