South African ungulates, or hooved mammals, react differently to different species of predators. Experiments by a research team have demonstrated that the behavioural responses of ungulates to large predators can shape ecosystem structure and function. Most such studies have concentrated on the impacts of either just one large carnivore, or all as a whole, rather…
Ngo Manyama Déborah, a fresh fish trader, is still at the popular Youpwe fish market in Douala, Cameroon, at 3 p.m. on Friday, May 27. She complaints she’s been waiting for buyers who haven’t shown up. Buyers are being scared away by the high prices of fish, fuelled by a scarcity of fish. “I need…
A University of Cape Town (UCT) study set out to investigate the effect of climate change on the breeding success of southern yellow-billed hornbills in the Kalahari Desert found that they could be wiped out by 2027. The study found that the breeding success of the hornbills collapsed over a decade-long monitoring period (2008 –…
A major challenge in evolutionary science has been the reconstruction of the evolution of language in the world. Given that language does not fossilise, a key line of research has been focusing on comparing the communication systems of animals with that of humans. Unique to human language is the capacity to flexibly recombine a limited…
Akashinga or The Brave Ones, is a conservation anti-poaching unit founded on the principles of women’s empowerment as the main driver for social, economic and environmental change. Despite their worldly anti-poaching popularity, what makes Akashinga tilt the scale of Zimbabwe’s perceived gender roles, to bravely defeat poachers and bravely face their own cultural values? The…
Poaching rare wildlife for teeth, tusks, fur, horns and other body parts is a crime which threatens many species with extinction, but the evidence which could incriminate traffickers is often difficult to access, hard to interpret, or piecemeal. To discover more about the criminal networks sustaining this trade, researchers in the US, Kenya and Singapore…
The COVID-19 pandemic, affecting all countries, with millions of cases and deaths, and economic disruptions due to lockdowns, also threatens the health and conservation of endangered mountain gorillas. For example, increased poaching due to absence of tourism income, led to the killing on 1st June 2020 of a gorilla by a hungry community member hunting…
Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered evidence that giraffes are a highly socially complex species. Traditionally, giraffes were thought to have little or no social structure, and only fleeting, weak relationships. However in the last ten years, research has shown that giraffe social organisation is much more advanced than once thought. In a paper…
Tourists could be spreading the virus causing COVID-19 to wild mountain gorillas by taking selfies with the animals without following precautions. Researchers from Oxford Brookes University examined 858 photos posted on Instagram from 2013-2019 under two hashtags — #gorillatrekking and #gorillatracking — and found most gorilla trekking tourists were close enough to the animals, without…
As they roam around the African savanna in search for food, giraffes and elephants alter the diversity and richness of its vegetation. By studying the foraging patterns of these megaherbivores across different terrains in a savanna in Kenya, scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and collaborating institutions discovered that these large mammals prefer…