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All in Conservation
Nzou was only two years old when her family was slaughtered by ivory poachers in Zimbabwe. Rescuers tried to reintroduce Nzou to other elephants, but she never fit in. “Her need for a family never faded,” intones Natalie Portman, narrating National Geographic’s new series, Secrets of the Elephants, “So she took matters into her own hands …”
How do you keep elephants and humans apart? In Africa it’s an urgent problem, as human populations grow and encroach on elephants’ wild habitat. Now conservationists are trying out a novel form of deterrence: “technologically generated bee sounds.”
Scientists have discovered that the great Pacific garbage patch, the 620,000-square-mile vortex of trash in the ocean, is rife with thriving communities of sea creatures, most of them more naturally at home on the coasts.
Australia has a few million too many cats: feral cats, which kill an estimated two billion animals annually; and outdoor house cats, which whack some 83 million native reptiles and 80 million native birds every year. To address the latter carnage, many municipal councils are imposing nighttime curfews on the furry murderers.
Due to climate change and related factors, a dozen or two bird species have expanded their ranges into New York City. Among them: The black vulture, a grim looking fellow with a five-foot wingspan who, in the old days, never strayed this far north.
Researchers from the University of Western Australia and Japan have plumbed the depths – five miles of depth – to spot and film the deepest fish ever seen. Using a remotely operated submersible in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench not far from Japan, the scientists spied a snailfish at a record-breaking 27,349 feet deep. The species is unknown, but it likely belongs to the genus Pseudoliparis.
Cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar has been dead for thirty years but at least part of his legacy lives on in the form of voracious hippopotamuses, which the Colombian government now has to deal with.
A young female osprey made a shocking transatlantic journey from Scotland to Barbados recently, becoming the first UK osprey ever observed in the Americas. The intrepid bird had been tagged last summer in Clyde Muirshiel Regional Park in Renfrewshire.
The Apuan Alps in Tuscany, Italy, is world-renowned for its marble mines, with about 160 active quarries in the Massa Carrara and Lucca regions. The quarries, many of them decommissioned, are also home to the endangered Italian alpine newt (Ichthyosaura alpestris apuana), whose recent discovery here has mobilized the locals.
The National Park Service in Kula, Hawaii, announced this week that they will soon be releasing millions of mosquitoes in Haleakalā Park in an effort to combat the avian malaria that is endangering forest birds.
This week Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo announced the arrival of its newest resident, a five-foot-seven, 108-pound female giraffe. Her mother is 8-year-old Zola, the father is Jawara, 14.
This week Wired questions the ethics of the next big thing in food production, insect farming. The nascent industry already slaughters trillions of insects each year, and the practice is expected to expand exponentially. But we don’t even know if the bugs feel pain.
The Endangered Species Act turns fifty this year and it has had a pretty good run. Thank Richard Nixon who launched the ESA (along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act).
There’s a class of chemicals used to manufacture all kinds of consumer products that, in humans, are linked to cancers, reduced immune function, and other ailments. A new study reveals that the nasty pollutants are causing problems in nonhumans as well, and they’re everywhere.
Researchers in Tanzania's Ukaguru Mountains have stumbled upon a new frog species notable for its silence. The Ukaguru spiny-throated reed frog (Hyperolius ukaguruensis) does not croak, sing, or ribbit.
A student from Southern Illinois University Carbondale may have accidentally discovered a way to track the invasive Burmese pythons plaguing south Florida. Graduate student Kelly Crandall was examining how human activities influence the movements of raccoons and possums in and around Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Key Largo. Crandall and her colleagues captured 30 possums and raccoons, fitted them with GPS collars, and set them loose.
The Prague Zoo has announced the arrival of a brand new Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), the first birth of the critically endangered species in captivity in Europe. The newborn had a rough start but is doing well, according to the zoo.
Herds of wild pigs – dubbed “super pigs” for their size, intelligence, and hardiness – have been spotted within 10 miles of the US border and North Dakota. Invasive pigs have had a foothold in Canada since the 1980s, when farmers began breeding domestic pigs with wild boars imported from Europe. But there wasn’t much of a demand for the new breed of Canadian bacon and the Frankenpigs were turned loose.
Good news for the wood stork. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed to remove the big bird from the federal list of endangered and threatened species. Forty years ago the wood stork population was down to fewer than 5000 nesting pairs, most of them in south Florida’s Everglades and Big Cypress ecosystems. Today there are twice that number, and the birds have spread to the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
For the first time in over 40 years a Peruvian Diving-petrel chick has hatched on Chile’s Chañaral Island. The rare seabird once thrived here but was pushed out by invasive species. Now a concerted effort by environmental groups and the Chilean government to make the island habitable again have paid off.
