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…
A Cameroonian government decree allowing logging in a forest that is home to the rare Ebo gorilla and other endangered species, like chimpanzees, forest elephants and grey parrots, has been cancelled. The decree, which was signed mid-July, had sparked outrage among local communities and conservation groups. In total 68,385 hectares of virgin forest would be…
The predation of livestock by carnivores, and the retaliatory killing of carnivores as a result, is a major global conservation challenge. Such human-wildlife conflicts are a key driver of large carnivore declines and the costs of coexistence are often disproportionately borne by rural communities in the global south. While current approaches tend to focus on…