For more than ten years, a rumour persisted among hunters and villagers in the remote eastern highlands of Angola: somewhere in the peat bogs and miombo woodland above 4,000 feet, a small band of elephants was living almost entirely unseen. Locals called them ghost elephants. Conservationists doubted such a population could exist so far from…
New research published this month indicates that lion populations in Africa may be lower than current estimates suggest. The research, a collaboration involving University of Queensland and Griffith University, published in Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution,and Ecological Solutions and Evidence, found that current lion counting methods for research/conservation purposes may be overestimating lion numbers and densities. Lead author…
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…
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…