The arrest of a key member of an ivory-trafficking group is a bright spot in an otherwise complicated season for African elephants. PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK ROBERT / SYGMA / GETTY
We wish conservation was always all about warm and fuzzy topics, but it is not. We are mostly confronted with habitat loss, climate change and other human-initiated causes of threat to species’ survival. The worst of all, from a jolting immediacy perspective, but probably the simplest to counter, is the poaching. Men take animal lives only for body parts that have a mystique–medicinal, ornamental, or whatever–to people in faraway lands willing to pay a price that poachers cannot say no to. That is the problem.
Stories like this one below are too seldom to allow us to have confidence in the underdog winning. The underdog in this game is many points behind, and the clock in this game is ticking down very quickly. We vigilantly watch for stories like this in hope that the elephants beat the buzzer:
By Peter Canby
Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, in northern Republic of Congo, consists of sixteen hundred square miles of Central African rain forest and is jointly administered by the Congolese ministry of forests and the Wildlife Conservation Society, of the Bronx.
Lying just east of the Sangha River, the park is home to significant populations of western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, giant forest hogs, and, above all, to some five thousand forest elephants. Like elephants everywhere in Africa, those in the park are, increasingly, under siege. Two years ago, when I visited, the park’s technical adviser, Tomo Nishihara, told me that the numbers of elephants in the park and its surrounding buffer zones had fallen from ten thousand to five thousand in just five years. “That gives us five more years before they’re gone,” he said. Continue reading →
From the macro to the micro, some detailed reporting on a topic we need to be more informed about; in this book review of the recent book by Ed Yong (science reporter, another of our frequent fliers; see his recently filmed lecture on the topic below):make you wonder what you mean by “you.” Your human cells come from a single fertilized egg with DNA from your mother and father. Microbes began mingling with those human cells even before your first breath, the first kiss from your mother, your first taste of milk. And your human cells could not have built a healthy body without intimate help from all those trillions of immigrant microbes — your other half. Continue reading
Organikos 