It's possibly the most jump-out-of-your-seat moment in the second instalment of the Hunger Games saga: the attack of the fanged, screeching and spectacularly vicious monkeys deep within the jungle arena where Catching Fire’s supercharged 75th-anniversary games play out. Without giving too much away, the murderous primates are just one in a tangle of entrapments devised to make these latest games far deadlier than the last. In fact, Katniss & co barely escape with their throats intact in the confrontation that ensues (or do they?).

Their massive size and extreme bloodlust are cinematic invention, but it’s also clear that Catching Fire's monkey mutants do have their real-world counterparts. According to an interview with the film's visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs, the design of the creatures was inspired by two closely related species of African monkey: the mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) and drill monkey (Mandrillus leucophaeus). Sirrs tells fxguide: “While filming in Atlanta, we did discover the city zoo actually had a drill in captivity, and we did film that for reference, albeit from a distance behind some plexiglass." The team also brushed up on its primatological knowhow to ensure the digital creations moved and looked the part.

And it’s easy to see where inspiration was drawn. For the digital creatures' sheer size and vivid hue, the mandrill (neon face, on the left) is a model monkey, being not only the world’s largest monkey species but also the most colourful – in the words of Darwin, “no other member in the whole class of mammals is coloured in so extraordinary a manner as the adult male mandrills.”

The drills (right) may be slightly smaller and a good dose less gaudy (lilac testicles and other colourful posterior bits aside), but just a flash of canines from the males of either species (each tooth about the size of your thumb) reveals exactly where Catching Fire’s digital monkeys got their fearsome fangs.

And while mandrills are not at all prone to attacking humans and you’re therefore unlikely to find yourself surrounded by a Hunger Games-style mob aiming fangs at your throat, it is true that mandrills love a good horde. Yep, 'horde' is the official term. Primatologists working in the Lope Reserve of Gabon in Central Africa have in the past recorded far-ranging hordes made up of an astounding 1,350 individuals – the largest aggregations of nonhuman primates ever observed! (Drills, too, sometimes converge to form large super-groups, although these rarely number over 100 individuals.)

But while Catching Fire's monkey attack is dominated by fearsome males, real-life congregations are often predominantly female, with males showing up to vie for attention come breeding season – which is when Hunger Games-style violence is most likely to rear its ugly head as rivals compete for access to mates.

Sadly, cinematic incarnations of mandrills and their kin may soon be all we have left. Vanishing rainforests in central west Africa and a dramatic increase in hunting for the illegal bushmeat trade have already caused mandrill populations to decline by 30% just in the past three decades, according to the IUCN. And the two threats work in tandem: widespread logging opens up previously inaccessible areas of habitat to hunters, who find the large and noisy troops easy to track down and wipe out en masse.

For drills, the situation is even more dire. Considered one of Africa's most endangered primates (and identified by the IUCN as the African primate with the highest priority for conservation action), the species has already suffered drastic declines thanks to overhunting, with as few as 3,000 drills surviving in the wild. 

More recent studies suggest climate change poses another major threat as warming temperatures steadily dry out the drills' remaining rainforest habitat. The increasingly rare primates also happen to be some of the world's least studied, which means scientists have little information to go on when it comes to launching conservation projects to effectively protect the species.

So, when Catching Fire's terrifyingly entertaining monkeys have you perched on the edge of your seat, you may want to spare a thought for the natural world that inspires our movie monsters – it's a source of inspiration that is at serious risk of drying up for good.

Then the tale of the mantis took an interesting turn. To help identify the species, Blanco consulted a mantis expert. After a bit of speculation and a trip into the annals of entomology, the little moss mantis was tentatively indentified as the elusive Pogonogaster tristani, a Costa Rican species described in an early twentieth-century text written by Rehn as well-camouflaged “with its multi-lobed abdomen, its gnarled stick-like pronotum and limbs, and its dull yellow-green coloration.” Rehn's description seems pretty spot on. Unfortunately, he didn't include any photographs or illustrations of the species in his early description, so the identification has to remain an educated guess. 

Right. Interesting stuff. Cased closed. Well, not quite ... Fuelled by his rare find, Blanco sought out the unique mantis and, with the help of a hawk-eyed friend, managed to find another specimen on October 6th, 2013. This time Blanco spent a bit more time with the unusual creature and captured what may be the only existing video footage of Pogonogaster tristani. Kudos to you for citizen science, Oscar! 

The specimen in the video below is believed to be a nymph of the species (although it's unlikely that the adults grow much bigger). Without a stabilising rig, it proved tricky to zoom in without a bit of shakiness and Blanco apologises in his video description for the unstable camerawork. Considering you may have captured the only footage in the world of this unique species, we'll let that detail slide, Oscar! 

Photos by Oscar Blanco

H/t: The Featured Creature

But unlike the rhino itself, the news story of its 2011 extinction keeps coming back to life. Just in the past week, it’s reappeared in countless social media posts and more than one news article (see here, here and here). So why all the confusion? Perhaps because extinction stories involving rhinos are just what we’ve been expecting. With a poaching onslaught of massive proportions sweeping across Africa and Asia, those of us who care about these rapidly vanishing pachyderms have been in a state of unhappy anticipation of precisely this sort of news story. And when one resurfaces somewhere, it’s carried along on a wave of social sharing that often loses sight of details (like dates) and can be difficult to dam up (extinctions might be grim and sad events, but they make for dramatic and very sharable news).

But we can also blame taxonomic trickiness and the difficulties involved in defining precisely what extinction means. Members of the black rhino (Diceros bicornis) ‘family’, past and present, are not easy to tally up. Depending on which classification system you go with, up to eight different subspecies once lived under its taxonomic umbrella – but some authorities, like the IUCN, recognise fewer than that. Within that taxonomic tangle, extinctions have come and gone. Some of the subspecies vanished more than a century ago, wiped out by relentless hunting and habitat loss at the turn of the twentieth century. Others are today critically endangered and clinging to survival on small strips of leftover habitat. Unless you're a rhino expert, keeping track of which ones are still with us and which we've lost for good can be almost impossible (and when a rhino extinction story surfaces, it can be hard to remember whether we've heard it before).

To all that confusion we can add the problem of pinpointing exactly what the extinction label means. At its simplest, it should mean that every last member of an animal group has died … but there's a bunch of complicating factors to consider. Extinctions can be merely regional – where an animal has disappeared only from a portion of its former range. They can be functional – where tiny populations still exist but numbers are so low that successful reproduction and continued survival are virtually impossible. A species can go extinct in the wild, but still endure in artificial settings like zoos.

In the case of the black rhino species as a whole, more than a few regional extinctions have taken place and some big branches of the family tree have been lost, including the one that's caused all the confusion: the western black rhino subspecies. Although it once roamed across a vast territory that stretched across a chunk of the African continent, including Sudan, Chad and Nigeria, its populations were whittled down to just a tiny cluster of survivors in northern Cameroon. By 2006, that cluster was gone.

If you prefer your information visualised, here's a graphic showing the remaining black rhino subspecies recognised by the IUCN, as well the extinct western black rhino (habitat ranges are coloured in: black = former range, red = remaining range). 

So, yes, the western black rhino is very much extinct. There's just nothing new about that bit of news. But with poaching levels at an all-time high (825 rhinos have been poached in South Africa just this year), it's not all that unlikely that other subspecies will soon follow the western black rhino down the road to extinction. And that will make for some very sad news indeed.  

Unless you’re familiar with New Zealand’s unique environmental woes, it can be hard to imagine how closely linked these two things are. Since their introduction in the country in the 1850s (to establish a fur industry), brushtailed possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) have become an invading force to be reckoned with. Without any natural predators to hinder their march of progress, possums began breeding with all the fervour their marsupial genes could muster, wiping out the country's beloved birds along the way. About 70 million are now spread out over more than 90% of the landscape. If kiwis, keas and kakapos are few and far between, it's likely because a hungry possum has eaten all their food, gobbled up their eggs and feasted on their newborn chicks.*

So what does a nation of passionate bird lovers do when faced with a furry plague of this magnitude (one that could potentially wipe out the very emblem of its national identity – the kiwi)? It wages war. Bird sanctuaries have been ringed with pest-proof fences, hunting possums is a growing industry, traps deliver piston blows to the head and drivers have been known to swerve whenever a possum dares to cross the road. Even school kids take part in the onslaught with possum-throwing contests and postmortem possum dress-ups.

But the battle-ax of choice in this war on invasives is 1080 – or sodium monofluoroacetate. Lethal nuggets of cereal and carrot laced with the poison are placed in bait stations or airdropped over target areas for unsuspecting possums to ingest. On the surface, 1080 does appear to be the perfect possum control: it’s relatively cheap, allegedly biodegradable and highly effective against mammals (making it pretty ideal for use in a country with many mammal invasives and only two native mammal species). 

But flip the coin and there’s a darker side. For a start, death by 1080 is not very humane. According to studies on captive possums, it takes on average around 11 hours – and there are uncontrollable muscle spasms, hyperactivity, vomiting, multi-system failure and brain damage somewhere in between. Hated as they may be, perhaps possums deserve a little better? And that’s just the start. A poison that kills mammals like possums will also kill mammals like pets and people – and 1080 detractors say animals outside the mammalian family may also be at risk. Some claim the poison does not biodegrade harmlessly at all, but persists in the water and soil, causing as yet unstudied harm to native species, including endangered frogs and the New Zealand falcon.

Whichever side of 1080 controversy you’re on, one thing seems certain: without measures to control possums, New Zealand’s dwindling bird populations stand little chance of recovery. But perhaps it’s time for a savvier, smarter approach? Developed in the 1940s, 1080 (like the origins of the possum problem itself) seems to belong in a bygone era  … maybe what’s needed to turn the pipe dream of a Pest-Free New Zealand into reality is a uniquely 21st-century solution?

That solution could come in the form of specially concocted (and possum-specific) contraception. It’s not a new idea – even New York’s subway rats are having a go. The ideal fertility vaccine would slash the possum reproductive rate, possibly by disrupting one of the stages of the fertilization process – but it would also need to be cheap, potent and safe. New Zealand’s researchers have been trying for over a decade to find that silver biocontrol bullet … but they need some serious funding: according to 2011 figures, New Zealand spends around $100 million a year on 1080 operations and less than $2 million on developing alternatives. With my possum empathy burning strong (and the swell of 1080 opposition building), let's hope scientific innovation prevails.  

Last year, researchers in South Africa confirmed that a contraceptive vaccine being trialled at several wildlife reserves across the country was working to control problematic elephant populations. Fast forward a few months, and it looks like rodent residents in the Big Apple might be in for a birth-control experiment of their own.

Family planning and the reproductively gifted brown rat do seem like a natural fit. If you take world domination as your yardstick, Rattus norvegicus is probably the earth’s most successful mammal after humans (having conquered every continent aside from Antarctica) and it thrives in the big-city context (according to that infamous statistic, there are more rats than people in NYC, perhaps four per person). But when it comes to elephants, threatened as they are in most parts of Africa by rampant poaching and habitat loss, why would fertility ever be a problem?

Surprising it may be, but elephant populations, particularly in some of South Africa's smaller game parks, do at times require downsizing. When numbers outstrip available space, hungry herds can wreak havoc on their surroundings, mowing down vegetation and raiding nearby areas in search of food. To tackle the problem, some parks that may once have relied on bullets and culling now choose to attack chemically: elephant females are darted from helicopters with a dose of the porcine zona pellucida (PZP) vaccine, which prevents sperm from fertilising their eggs (a strategy that, like culling, is not without its critics). 

Meanwhile, across continents, rats in New York wreak their own brand of havoc, chewing their way through everything from electrical circuits to lead, pilfering garbage, harbouring leptospirosis and just being plain scary (for some unsettling rats-on-the-subway videos, the Gothamist website is your best bet). After waging deadly war with traps and poison, and even launching a Rodent Control Academy, city PMPs (that's pest-management professionals, in case you're wondering) are also ready to go chemical. 

Their new weapon will come in the form of a product called ContraPest that's being developed by biotechnology company SenesTech Inc. The target: the ovary of the female rat. Unlike the elephant vaccine, ContraPest is designed to induce early menopause, effectively sterilising its recipient. But since rats cannot be darted from helicopters (as compelling as that scenario might look in your head), PMPs will need to rely on bait stations stocked with tasty and contraceptive-laced titbits. Nourished as they have been on a wholesome American diet of stale doughnuts, pizza crusts and other fast-food delicacies (according to one renowned rodentologist, chicken nuggets are a particular favourite), the rats may prove tricky to entice.

Whether the test subject is the African elephant or the big-city rat, managing animal populations with birth control may seem like bio-tampering on a dangerous scale -– but over the last decade or so, it's been catching on.

Elk, monkeys, squirrels and kangaroos have all been targeted. And as the subways of New York City begin to fill with the scuttling sounds of chemically sterilised rats, it looks like, for better or worse, wildlife contraception may be here to stay.