Malawi Parliament last month passed new regulations that place an additional 216 species under protection. The regulations form a critical secondary law to the National Parks and Wildlife Act (NPWA), which came into effect in 2017, and which most notably increased the maximum penalty for wildlife crime to up to 30 years in prison. Illegal…
A new study has found that hornbills, vultures and eagles are being hunted for bushmeat in Cameroon in much greater numbers than previously thought. Researchers estimate that people living around the proposed Ebo National Park in Cameroon’s Littoral region consumed an average of 29 hornbills and eight raptors per month. But they remain unsure how…
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…
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…
Adjusting communication to take into account information available to one’s audience is routine in humans but has been assumed absent in other animals. This assumption may be premature. Scientists Catherine Crockford and Roman Wittig from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and Klaus Zuberbühler from the University of Neuchatel show that wild…
The population of chimpanzees in West Africa has declined by over 80% in the last 20 years and in September 2016 they were classified as a critically endangered sub-species by the International Union of Nature Conservation (IUCN). As a result of this dramatic decline, the Government of Guinea has decided to implement its objective of…