There are only two northern white rhinos left worldwide, both of them female. Saving this representative of megafauna from extinction seems impossible under these circumstances, yet an international consortium of scientists and conservationists just completed a procedure that could enable assisted reproduction techniques to do just that. On August 22, 2019, a team of veterinarians…
Forest elephant extinction would exacerbate climate change. That’s according to a new study in Nature Geoscience which links feeding by elephants with an increase in the amount of carbon that forests are able to store. The bad news is that African forest elephants – smaller and more vulnerable relatives of the better known African bush…
Gorillas have more complex social structures than previously thought, from lifetime bonds forged between distant relations, to “social tiers” with striking parallels to traditional human societies, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the origins of our own social systems stretch back to the common ancestor of humans and gorillas, rather than arising…
Logging roads are expanding dramatically in the Congo Basin, leading to catastrophic collapses in animal populations living in the world’s second-largest rainforest, according to research co-led by a scientist at James Cook University in Australia. Just as worrying is that the rate of forest destruction caused by new roads in the Congo Basin has risen…
With a passion that is inextricably linked to the natural world, conservation artist Pooja Gupta works with the language of video, illustration, graphics, animation and everything in between to translate thoughts, concepts and stories into visuals. Pooja travels around the globe to document the natural world and communicate conservation through a range of creative mediums. For the last…
Kampala and Goma – Nearly 50 civil society organizations (CSOs) from Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and their partners have written to the presidents of Uganda and the DRC calling on them to avoid sensitive ecosystems in the planned and ongoing oil exploration licensing round in the Albertine Graben. The CSOs made the…
A team of Princeton ecologists took advantage of a rare opportunity to study what happens to an ecosystem when large carnivores are wiped out. “Large carnivores play a critical, and disproportionate, role in their ecosystems, and their populations are declining worldwide,” said Justine Atkins, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. “However,…
New or upgraded roads in the Greater Serengeti Ecosystem around Serengeti National Park will not reduce growing pressure on the ecosystem, a study shows. A proposed Northern Serengeti all-weather tarmac road that will bisect Serengeti National Park, a World Heritage site, has sparked considerable debate. Opponents say that the road could disrupt the migration of…
Language, music, and art often vary between adjacent groups of people, and help us identify not only ourselves but also others. And in recent years rich debates have emerged and spawned research into culture in non-human animals. Scientists first observed chimpanzees using tools more than half a century ago. As this complex behaviour appeared to…
Pangolins, a group of unique African and Asian scaly mammals, are considered to be one of the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world. They are hunted and traded for their meat, scales, and other body parts, and used as traditional medicines in parts of Africa and Asia. Of the eight pangolin species, four…