The research team began their search in the forested areas around Chilpancingo, the capital city of Guerrero, where the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit was first documented by Edward William Nelson in 1904. However, they turned up rabbit-less. A year or so later, they shifted their focus to high-elevation conifer forests where they were more confident they would be successful, especially after locals in the area told the team that they regularly hunt Omiltemi cottontail rabbits before handing over several carcasses.

When the hunted rabbits were compared to museum specimens and Nelson's original description, the fur colour, body measurements and cranial characteristics were a match. All that was left to do was strategically set up remote camera traps to confirm the find. The area's Omiltemi cottontail rabbits came to the party. They hopped into frame in seven of the ten areas that the expedition team surveyed. The find marks the 13th species rediscovered as part of Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species – a global effort to find and protect species that have not had a scientifically documented sighting in at least 10 years, but are not considered extinct.

“Just knowing that it had been 100 years, and no other scientist had seen a live [Omiltemi] rabbit is incredible,” Almazán-Catalán told Re:wild. “It's totally different from the regular cottontail, and I was completely amazed and very happy to have had that opportunity to see one.”

The rabbit's name is something of a red herring. Omiltemi cottontail rabbits don't have cottontails. In fact, their tails are short and black, a physical feature that sets them apart from many other rabbits, along with their smaller stature and less elongated ears.

Of course, there is still much to learn about a species that scientists hadn't seen in over a century. The team are hoping to glean more info about the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit's behaviour, ecology and population size.

“Eighty percent of the objectives of this project have been achieved,” said Almázan. “However, we still need to learn more about the natural history of this species; especially information about what it does between January and June, which is its reproductive season and when the greatest numbers of the species have been recorded. In addition, we need to better understand the local knowledge of the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit and the role the species plays in its distribution area. It’s also going to be important to design conservation proposals with local residents, municipal authorities and the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP).”

Local community members are keen to help protect the species if research indicates that poaching and subsistence hunting are damaging populations. The rabbits seem to be more abundant in summer with both locals and the expedition team themselves spotting more of the animals during warmer months.

“This search was full of unexpected turns and employed everything from interviews to drones to find this little rabbit,” said Christina Biggs, lost species officer for Re:wild. “We applaud these tenacious and comprehensive efforts as they provide crucial updates for our partner IUCN Red List assessors to better make recommendations for species survival. Alberto and his team are helping fill a huge knowledge gap to make sure that the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit is never lost to science again.”

Story by Skylar Knight | Photographs by Carl Jan Risberg and Pål Hermansen

As the 65-foot Nanny rolls 20 degrees to port and then to starboard, the half dozen or so hunting dogs aboard look alarmed. It’s hard to blame them. The wooden boat is making a rough winter crossing from Torekov, a small Swedish fishing village-turned-getaway for the well-to-do – including actor Hugh Grant – to Hallands Väderö, a speck of an island off the country’s southwestern coast.

But when we arrive, the dogs tug at their leashes in anticipation of their task: hunting a subspecies of mountain hare called the heath hare, or mohare in Swedish. The 30 or so people who debark belong to the Väderö Hunting Club, which aims to preserve the island’s natural beauty, in part by keeping its mix of species in balance. The hunting party divides into three groups, and I join the one moving south through a rare old-growth beech forest. The towering, moss-covered silver trees shelter us from heavy wind, blowing over ground that’s bare of snow and strewn with rain-dampened leaves.

“The fact that this forest is here is one of the reasons it is important to keep the hares down to a reasonable number,” says Magnus Tenfält, a physician and the leader of the hunt. “If food gets rare in the winter, they start chewing on the bark,” which hurts the trees.

The forest isn’t the only evidence that the 100-plus-year-old club’s conservation efforts are working. Despite the island's size – just a hair smaller than New York City’s Central Park – it remains so rich in wildlife that the Swedish government has maintained it as a nature reserve since the 1950s. The dense forests support a number of threatened insects and lichens, while the rocky coastlines and sandy beaches shelter nesting shorebirds. And sprawling scrublands provide protection and sustenance for finches, warblers, and wagtails.

Heath hares are among the island’s handful of native land mammals. Their powerful back legs are so long and sinewy that when they hop, the animals slope forward like runners crouching at the starting line of a race. Under the hunters’ watch, the hares here have thrived despite disease outbreaks and the arrival of invasive predators. The hunters like the hares – larger and less social than rabbits – in part because they nest on the surface of the ground in thickets and brambles rather than in burrows, making them excellent game.

We emerge from the forest, slog through marsh, and scramble over centuries-old stone walls that shepherds still use during the milder months to contain grazing sheep. The clouds part to reveal a pale January sun near the apex of its arc for the day – just an outstretched hand’s height above the horizon—and the hunters fan out to form a loose pentagon around a patch of juniper. The handlers release the dogs into the middle of the tangle. After 15 minutes, there’s a bark, then a shout, then a shot.

When I approach, I see a hare laid out on a rock, a cold breeze ruffling its unusual fur. Most mountain hares in Sweden belong to the northern subspecies, Lepus timidus timidus, which turns from brown to white in winter for camouflage on snow. But heath hares like the ones on Hallands Väderö belong to the southern subspecies, Lepus timidus sylvaticus, and they turn from brown to blue-grey. That’s an increasingly important distinction. As climate change leads to shorter winters with less snow on the ground, the heath hare’s darker colour allows it to hide better in plain sight, while white hares blaze like beacons against the snowless ground, which makes them easier targets for eagles, foxes, and other predators.

Heath hares, then, have become unwitting reservoirs of genetic resilience. Sweden’s climate has already warmed by 1°C and could warm by as much as 7°C by century’s end. Recent studies have found that climate change has already shrunk the range of snowshoe hares, a distant North American cousin of the heath hare, and also threatens the survival of other animals that seasonally change colour, such as the alpine rock ptarmigan. If the country’s winters become so snowless that winter-white mountain hares can no longer survive, the genetic adaptability of the heath hare could provide a pathway for the species’ persistence as a whole.

Unfortunately, both subspecies of mountain hare have been displaced across mainland Sweden and elsewhere by non-native European brown hares (Lepus europaeus). Mountain hares now exist only in remnant populations in high-altitude locations in the Alps, fragmented forests in Poland, small pockets of the Scottish Highlands and English countryside, and a sub-Arctic band of habitat from Scandinavia across Finland to eastern Russia. And those are likely to become even more vulnerable to displacement by brown hares as snowpack retreats. In Sweden, the heath hare subspecies, once widespread across the southern part of the country, has likely been extirpated from the mainland. Today it remains mostly on a smattering of small islands, including this one. And island populations are much more vulnerable to extinction.

Carl-Gustaf Thulin, a biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala who has studied Sweden’s mountain hares for nearly three decades, sees one potential way forward. In a 2021 paper, Thulin proposed a “reservoir island” strategy that would enlist hunters like Tenfält to periodically capture and translocate heath hares from one island to another. By limiting inbreeding, they would preserve genetic diversity across all of the islands – and preserve the heath hare’s status as a potential fur-based insurance policy for the entire mountain hare species.

“You could combine this geographic feature of being remote from the mainland and remote from the brown hares with the enthusiasm that is among the hunters for this subspecies,” Thulin says. “Allow them to hunt these populations, but also allow them to move them around and make good for the hares.”

On a grey January day, I meet Thulin at his office in Uppsala. Wearing jeans and cowboy boots, he looks more like a rancher than an academic. A lifelong outdoorsman and nature lover, he’s as comfortable talking about shooting a wild boar as he is discussing the intricacies of hare biology. Among the books and papers heaped on his desk, a book on the conservation status of the European buffalo edges up against a copy of the Swedish hunting code.

Thulin began studying mountain hares by accident. “I more fancy rabbits,” he had joked during a previous conversation. But as a student, he was interested in what genetics can reveal about animals, and his PhD studies in the 1990s gave him the opportunity to apply those interests to the mountain hare.

Mountain hares have a long history in Sweden. Fossils show that they’ve lived there for at least 10,000 years, arriving from central Europe after the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded from Scandinavia. As glacial meltwater raised sea levels, inflows of water stranded some populations of hares on islands big and small, from Ireland to Hallands Väderö.

The animals were already struggling when Thulin began to study them. His review of prior research and decades of hunting records revealed that brown hares were likely the primary cause of the decline, alongside other factors. Native to central and southern Europe, the European brown hare once coexisted with the mountain hare, each in its own ecological niche. Brown hares, which remain mottled brown in winter, thrived in open, low-altitude landscapes, while the mountain hares made their homes in forested and snowier high-altitude and high-latitude climes.

As humans converted European forests into farmland and rural and urban development boomed, the European brown hare expanded its range into that of the mountain hare. Wherever the two species overlapped, the brown hare’s generalist diet allowed it to outcompete the mountain hare. Worse, some hunters favoured the European brown hare because of its larger size and preference for open terrain. In the mid-19th century, those hunters started actively introducing the species to places where it had never been, including Sweden and Ireland.

Because the European brown hare's coat doesn't change in winter, snowy places remained refuges for northern mountain hares with their white camouflage. In the south, however, where snowfall was less steady, the heath hares found themselves quickly outcompeted by the wave of newcomers. By the 1990s, in the words of Thulin and his research collaborators, there had been a “complete niche replacement” of the heath hare by the brown hare in Sweden.

No one knows exactly how many islands harbour the last of the heath hares, nor how many of the animals remain. Conducting a comprehensive survey takes time and resources, which are as hard to come by in Sweden as they are anywhere else where conservation needs are great and budgets are thin. Thulin has yet to submit a formal proposal for his reservoir island approach to Sweden's Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees wildlife management and conservation efforts. But he says the idea has gotten only a tepid response from his contacts at the agency.

That may be because Sweden prefers a more hands-off approach. According to Robert Ekblom, a biologist at the Swedish EPA who works on species management plans, conservation in Sweden primarily focuses on habitat restoration and monitoring rather than on recovering specific species. Only in rare cases, when an animal is on the brink of disappearing altogether or is of particular importance to its ecosystem and other creatures, does the Swedish government intervene with actions such as captive breeding programs or translocations. Furthermore, it is much more likely to mount such efforts at the species level, with subspecies receiving formal management plans on a case-by-case basis.

The agency’s reticence is understandable. Short of culling the brown hare, which would be both ethically and logistically fraught, there is little hope of successfully reintroducing the heath hare to the mainland anytime soon. This means that the long-term survival of the subspecies would depend entirely on the island populations.

For now, at least, mountain hares remain relatively abundant across their global range. As a result, the influential International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists the species as a whole as of “least concern,” its lowest ranking. But that label obscures the worrisome downward trends at the local level. In Sweden, the heath hare is near extinction – and many local populations of its cousin, the northern mountain hare, are in decline.

This situation and others like it have led some scientists to argue that using species classification as a way to guide conservation isn’t always precise or useful enough. Climate research has revealed more information about what traits might be particularly beneficial to help species persist in the world we’ve given them. In addition, advances in technology have expanded scientists’ understanding of the genetic variation within species, which opens up new ideas and possibilities for conservation. Thulin and others wonder whether the calculus that agencies use to determine whether to help an animal like the heath hare should focus on a much more basic form of diversity.

Since Sweden’s most famous scientist, Carl Linnaeus, first set out to categorise the diversity of life on Earth, species have reigned supreme as the way Western science makes sense of nature. Known as the “Father of Taxonomy” – the branch of science dedicated to naming and classifying life into nested categories, including species – Linnaeus was convinced that there was a divinely ordained order to life on Earth waiting to be discovered. “If I only knew how many teeth and of what kind every animal had, how many teats and where they were placed,” Linnaeus wrote after stumbling upon the jawbone of a horse, “I should perhaps be able to work out a perfectly natural system for the arrangement of all quadrupeds.”

His Systema Naturae, published in 1735, provided the foundation for the formal process by which scientists still describe new species today, with a scientific paper and an official Latin name. Intentionally or not, it also gave scientists a species-based benchmark for protecting the planet’s life. “God creates and Linnaeus organises,” Thulin tells me, quoting a phrase Linnaeus himself is said to have used. “This is kind of a religious framework that we’re still working in, in a way.”

These days, though, with the advent of next-generation sequencing and machine learning algorithms, teeth and teats have given way to DNA and genes. Thulin believes the heath hare embodies the dilemma conservationists now face. Using traditional metrics, a struggling subspecies of a wide-ranging and relatively robust species might be passed over for conservation work, in favour of allocating scant resources elsewhere. But when considered at the level of mountain hare genetics, the heath hare becomes an important asset for a species that is likely to suffer in a warming world.

The heath hare isn’t the only unintended victim of conservation’s fixation on species over genes. Conservation policies have long lagged behind scientific advances, says Linda Laikre, an expert on conservation genomics at Stockholm University. There is even a term for the mismatch: the conservation-genetics gap. In theory, many national and international conservation efforts, including the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which 196 countries have ratified, are intended to protect all levels of biodiversity, including ecosystems, species, and genetics. Yet genetics is often overlooked, Laikre says: “We have this knowledge from science, but it’s to a very limited extent used in practice.”

Laikre and her colleagues recently examined thousands of populations representing more than 900 species to determine their genetic health and how it corresponds with their IUCN conservation listing. Out of the 765 species for which they had sufficient data, the researchers found that more than 100 show alarmingly low levels of genetic diversity on at least one measure, despite being listed as “least concern.” For each of those species – yellow-bellied toads, white-backed woodpeckers, and silver-spotted skippers, for instance – their conservation listing, determined predominantly by their perceived abundance, may belie their real risk of extinction from inbreeding or an inability to adapt to our rapidly changing planet.

Sweden is further along than most countries when it comes to accounting for genetics in conservation. In a series of EPA-funded pilot studies, researchers, including Thulin with the mountain hare, have worked to better understand genetic variation between different populations of the same species. “The idea is, in the long term, to be able to identify functionally important genetic variation and to monitor how such variation is maintained in the population over long time periods,” says EPA’s Ekblom. He acknowledges that the heath hare's conservation status in Sweden could evolve as more information comes to light. Presently, though, the Swedish EPA is hesitant to commit further resources to help the animal’s case.

Back in Uppsala, Thulin flips through photos from a recent hare hunt on Hallands Väderö. In one, Thulin and another researcher lean over a heath hare that they’ve spread on a picnic table turned makeshift lab, taking tissue samples. Thulin grabs a small test tube and shows me the pale pink pellet of skin and muscle inside. Relying on this and other preserved tissue samples stacked in his filing cabinet and stored at another facility, Thulin and his collaborators sequenced the genomes of three heath hares, two northern mountain hares, and two European brown hares. In 2022 they published a paper sharing their results and identifying the places where the genetic code of each group differs. Using this as a guide, scientists may eventually be able to zero in on which genes are responsible for heath hares' unique colouration, as well as find other functional adaptations that the northern mountain hare lacks.

Thulin is also working with county-level government biologists to gain a better understanding of which islands currently have heath hares and which might be well-suited for translocations to start new populations or reseed old ones. Anna Karlsson, a regional county administration ecologist in western Sweden, tells me that a small island called Hållö used to have around 250 heath hares until a 1970s population crash. In their absence, maintaining the island’s meadow ecosystem has largely fallen on regional land managers, who use prescribed burns and manual labour to thin the heather and spur new growth. Translocations would be beneficial on Hållö, Karlsson says. “If you have a population that is big enough, they can do the grazing on the island,” she explains. "This means you don’t have to do any manual work to keep the flora intact.”

As for the hunters, Thulin says they remain ready to help translocate the hares if the Swedish EPA approves the reservoir island project. “It’s nostalgia,” he says of himself and the other hunters. “There is something about our identity that connects to the hare.”

The hunting party boards the Nanny for the return trip from Hallands Väderö to Torekov around three in the afternoon – almost sunset this time of year. Low-angle light illuminates the thin marine layer of clouds, giving them the uncanny appearance of tufts of blue-grey fur. Twelve dead hares, legs outstretched, lie in several tight lines scattered around the deck. A typical winter hunt can bring twice as many, but Tenfält isn’t disappointed. “That is hunting,” he says simply, chuckling. “It is non-negotiable.” As we hunch into our coats against the cold, he recounts the history of the island and the plight of the heath hare with a depth of knowledge that rivals that of the academic experts I’ve spoken with. He’s excited about the prospect of a new “genetic refreshment” that he hopes the Swedish EPA will approve.

Later, when I’ve thawed in my hotel room, I flip through a book given to me by Lars Isacson, another of the hunters on the trip. It was written by his father, who was also a member of the hunting club. Part natural-history text, part record of hunts past, the book is a physical embodiment of how dearly those in the Väderö Hunting Club hold both the heath hare and the island.

Near the beginning, a poem by a former hunting club president reads like a wish for Hallands Väderö’s future:

[Y]ou are still full of living life.

We can still rejoice at neighboring pheasants and the blue-white wool of hares.

May Flora and Fauna enjoy together, our fellow hunters, to their heart’s content.

Every biodiversity loss – be it at the level of ecosystem, species, or gene – makes nature less resilient. But for the people tied to a particular animal, plant, or place, such losses are harder to define – a rearranging of identity that reveals the ways one’s world can depend on something as simple as a blue-white hare.

As part of this ambitious initiative, in June this year, 120 southern white rhinos were translocated to reserves represented by South Africa's Greater Kruger Environmental Protection Foundation (GKEPF). This was the second successful move to happen under Rhino Rewild, African Parks' bold project that aims to de-risk the future of the species by establishing or supplementing strategic populations across Africa.

Rhino poaching began to escalate around 15 years ago driven by a surge in demand for rhino horn for use in traditional Eastern medicine. South Africa, home to the world's largest population of southern white rhinos, was particular vulnerable and suffered huge losses in rhino numbers as governments and conservation organisations grappled with effective tactics to curb the killing. Dehorning, increased anti-poaching initiatives and rhino translocation all form part of the broader strategy to safeguard the imperilled animals.

Without rhinos to keep grasslands open for grazers, ecosystems are significantly altered and this can impact overall ecology as well as ecotourism. Returning rhinos to landscapes where they once roamed, or boosting populations in areas where they have been depleted, is crucial for the future of the species, but it's not without its challenges.

There's a lot that can wrong when moving a two-tonne animal. The rhino must first be sedated, a task that is complicated by its size and sensitivity to potent opioids. A ground team must work quickly to safely secure the sedated rhino and monitor its vitals, while it's tagged and collared. Each rhino is dehorned to reduce the future risk of poaching, a procedure that does not hurt the animal and may need to be performed every few years as rhino horns grow back over time, much like fingernails. Next, the rhino is carefully guided onto a truck, ready to be driven to its new home. It's a challenge that requires planning, teamwork and experience. But the rewards of high-risk relocations justify the costs and challenges.

“Moving 120 rhino under the Rhino Rewild initiative to GKEPF will augment the existing rhino population in the Greater Kruger and ensure that these rhino are fulfilling their role in their natural environment, which has been our vision from the start,” says Peter Fearnhead, CEO of African Parks. “Despite significant pressures, GKEPF members have played a critical role in the conservation of the Greater Kruger landscape providing an important buffer to the Kruger and we support their commendable progress in protecting rhino populations in their native range.”

In the late 1800s, following years of unregulated hunting, southern white rhino populations came perilously close to extinction. The Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in South African's KwaZulu-Natal province was proclaimed and served as a safe haven for the imperilled species. By the 1960s, the reserve had enough rhinos to begin translocating animals to areas where populations had been depleted or eradicated. Operation Rhino, as the initiative was known, laid the groundwork for understanding the complexities of rhino relocation and opened up the possibility for private and government reserves to introduce or reintroduce this keystone species to the landscape.

Since then, the mammoth task of rhino relocation (and that of other large mammal translocations) has been refined as conservationists grow their understanding of the risks and challenges involved. The moving of 120 rhinos led to “many, many sleepless nights” explained Sharon Haussmann, CEO of GKEPF, not to mention the costs and time involved. African Parks, which receives funding from governments, multi-lateral institutions, conservation organisations, family foundations and individuals, donated the animals to the reserve, with GKEPF donors contributing to the translocation costs and the subsequent ongoing monitoring of the rhinos.

Although poaching continues to pose a significant threat to all rhino species, extensive anti-poaching initiatives are making an impact. The population of Southern white rhinos increased from 15,942 in 2022 to 17,464 in 2023, while populations of black and greater one-horned rhinos remained relatively unchanged. The increase in southern white rhino numbers is, however, marred by a slight increase in the number of animals poached. A total of 586 rhinos were killed in Africa in 2023, an increase from 551 reported killings in 2022. Overall, poaching numbers have decreased across the continent since peaking at 1,349 rhinos killed in 2015.

KwaZulu-Natal's Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park recently reported an 80% reduction in rhino poaching in the last six months following a concentrated dehorning project in the reserve. Conservationists are hopeful that through a combination of collaborative conservation strategies the tide is turning for this keystone species.

Top header image: Matthew Rogers, Flickr

Trouble in Lemur Land

‘Trouble in Lemur Land’ follows two men – an American primatologist and a Malagasy conservationist – on their quest to protect Madagascar's endangered silky sifakas, at the same time providing a glimpse into the life of this extraordinarily beautiful and graceful animal.

Airing free from 5pm BST on Earth Touch TV

WiLDEBEEST: BORN TO RUN

Nature is both beautiful and brutal, a contrast that comes to the fore in dramatic fashion every year during East Africa's wildebeest migration. 'Wildebeest: Born to Run' chronicles the journey of a calf named Neo who must navigate through predator-rich savannahs and waterways on a quest to new grazing grounds.

Airing free at 6pm BST on Earth Touch TV

life in the blue

In a 10-metre deep band of water, just below the surface of the ocean, a world of wonder awaits. Many species use this section of water to migrate and hunt while others have developed ingenious ways to stay hidden where there appears to be no shelter. 

Airing free at 7pm BST on Earth Touch TV

EPIC OCEANS

This Earth Day celebrate the enduring beauty of our epic oceans as we explore three different marine environments and highlights the challenges faced by a variety of species as they battle to survive in a changing world.

Airing free from 8pm BST on Earth Touch TV

Story by Jessica Craig | Photographs by Marcus Westberg and Jessica Craig

John Kahekwa vividly remembers the first time he saw a gorilla.

It was October 1983, the start of the rainy season. Kahekwa was 20 years old. He had just finished six months of paramilitary training to become a park ranger, and started work at Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the tangled Congo rainforest rises into the montane jungle of the Albertine Rift.

Kahekwa had followed a tracker and another ranger off a dirt road and into a bamboo thicket. His job was to translate the lead ranger’s instructions from French and Swahili into English for tourists from around the globe who had come to the park to glimpse the critically endangered eastern lowland gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), a subspecies endemic to the eastern DRC. The group walked through dense underbrush that, in places, rose higher than their shoulders. The tracker and lead ranger hacked a path forward with machetes. Then they stopped to listen: silence punctuated by leaves rustling and branches snapping. Something large moved up ahead. The ranger relayed a message to Kahekwa, who translated for the tourists: The gorillas were near.

“Get ready your cameras; don’t run away,” Kahekwa said, hiding his own excitement. The tracker slashed at the bush, opening a window into a clearing. There, just feet away, was Maheshi, the silverback, the gorilla family’s male leader.

“Oh, my first sight! A huge, huge, so big, silverback! Unbelievable! I sweated. My heart was shaking,” Kahekwa told me later.

Eastern lowland gorillas, also known as Grauer’s gorillas, are the world’s largest living primates. Silverbacks can weigh more than 500 pounds and stand over six feet tall, with stocky bodies, deeply arched backs, and long, muscular arms. Eastern lowland gorilla families typically have only one silverback and multiple females. This family’s alpha female, weighing around half what a silverback does, sat next to Maheshi. There were a dozen other females and babies further on. Most slept, some groomed each other, some grunted, deep and rumbling.

Kahekwa was mesmerized; he and the tourists watched for hours. “I said, ‘This is my kingdom now!’”

During Kahekwa’s 23-year ranger career, he would log thousands more sightings and guide hundreds of tourists—among them Bill Gates and Al Gore—to see the gorillas. With tips he earned from tourists, Kahekwa purchased books, pencils, and a kerosene lamp so that he could write down every interaction and observation each night after his shift. He learned how to tell gorillas apart by their characteristic behaviors and the unique wrinkle patterns above their nostrils, called nose prints. He named the gorillas—Lambchop and Cimanuka and Pole Pole (pronounced polay polay, meaning “slowly slowly” in Swahili)—and mapped out their genealogies.

But something was amiss. Kahekwa noticed that many gorillas lacked fingers or hands. One September morning in 1992, he found out why: He found a three-month-old male named Chi (“tea” in Swahili) dangling from a tree, his right hand caught in a snare and his family in a frenzy around him. “The father was suffering, the mother was suffering, I was suffering,” Kahekwa recalled. Kahekwa eventually witnessed more than two dozen gorillas caught in hunting snares that locals had set to capture antelope and bush hogs for meat. Five died—a meaningful number, given that the latest estimate suggests only a few thousand eastern lowland gorillas remain in the wild, most within Kahuzi-Biega National Park.

The 1.5-million-acre preserve was established in 1970 by the Belgian conservationist Adrien Deschryver, Kahekwa’s uncle by marriage, to protect eastern lowland gorillas and the mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) that live at higher elevations on the park’s extinct volcanic slopes and in surrounding mountain ranges that straddle the DRC-Rwanda border. During the park’s creation, the Congolese government evicted several hundred Indigenous people—mostly     Batwa, an ethnic group thought to be one of the earliest inhabitants of central Africa—and passed laws forbidding anyone from living or hunting within the park’s borders. At the time, officials thought these measures were necessary to protect not only gorillas, but the other 130 or so mammal species that live in the park, including chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis), and forest buffalo (Syncerus caffer nanus).

Yet as Kahekwa later learned, the park struggled to adequately protect wildlife because it failed to account for the wellbeing of the people it had exiled and those living in nearby communities. Around Kahuzi-Biega, extreme poverty, unemployment, and malnutrition forced many people to rely on resources inside the park, pitting human survival against wildlife conservation. The forest within Kahuzi-Biega was a lifeline, one of the only sources of food, building materials, traditional medicine, and income. Without alternatives, local people continued to illegally lay down snares, cut trees, harvest food, and dig up gold and other minerals.

“At that time conservation wasn’t able to mobilize local communities,” Kahekwa explained. “Conservation was a dictator.”

This pattern has played out globally. Since 1872, when then-U.S. President Ulysses Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act and established the world’s first official national park, more than 4,000 nature reserves and parks around the world have been created to protect nature and biodiversity, including more than 10 in the DRC. Research suggests that many—though not all—have helped conserve critical habitat for wildlife. Yet human rights activists increasingly point out that they have done so at great cost. Many protected areas are predicated on the idea that “pristine” wilderness does not include the Indigenous people who safeguarded or co-existed with wildlife for millennia. And once Indigenous communities are evicted, other abuses frequently follow. In some instances, human rights organizations have accused rangers—including those in the DRC—of torture, mass rape, and extrajudicial killings. Human rights groups often refer to the national park model as “fortress” or “colonial” conservation.

“There is a very violent history to these parks,” said Maud Salber, senior project coordinator of Conservation and Human Rights at the nonprofit Rainforest Foundation UK. “Nowadays conservation organizations are trying to distance themselves from this, rightly so, but the truth is, it's still deeply ingrained, this idea that you need to separate people from nature to keep it pristine for the benefit of foreign tourists.”

In recent years, government agencies and major national park supporters have begun to question the long-held approach of fortress conservation and have taken the first steps toward replacing it with other approaches that more effectively address human and wildlife needs. But as Kahekwa learned, untangling the knot between conservation and colonialism in Kahuzi-Biega continues to be complicated by war, violence, poverty, and the difficult human relationships underlying one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems.

The Congo Basin is the world’s second largest rainforest, spanning six African countries and 500 million acres. Researchers estimate that the basin provides food, water, and shelter to as many as 75 million people, as well as some 1,000 bird species, 400 mammal species, and 10,000 species of tropical plants, 30 percent of which are endemic. The Congo rainforest is nicknamed the “lungs of Africa,” because each year it absorbs more than a billion tons of carbon dioxide—some 4 percent of global emissions—and helps regulate rainfall and temperature across the continent. Its importance, in other words, stretches beyond the human and wild communities within its immediate vicinity. But its protection necessarily begins with them.

More than 60 percent of Congolese people live below the international poverty line, earning less than $2.15 per day. The Ministry of Labor and United Nations estimates that more than 50 percent of the country’s population is underemployed. Across the country, more than 40 percent of children are malnourished. That rate rises to more than 65 percent in South Kivu Province, where Kahuzi-Biega National Park is located.

In the DRC, most people earn a living by making use of the country’s natural resources—through agriculture, fishing, hunting, or mining. But around Kahuzi-Biega, access to natural resources is largely blocked by the national park boundary. With few alternatives and virtually no social assistance from the Congolese government, locals do what they must to survive. Each year, Global Forest Watch estimates that people cut down about 1.2 million acres of forest in the DRC, primarily to make way for farmland. In Kahuzi-Biega alone, local people razed nearly 2,500 acres of forest between 2019 and 2021, according to park staff.

In some ways, the economic desperation that forces people to rely on resources from protected lands can be traced to the country's violent colonial past. Through the late 19^th and much of the 20^th century, Belgium controlled the DRC and exploited it for cheap labor and natural resources. When the DRC gained independence in 1960, the inequality, environmental destruction, and dissolution of ethnic boundaries that had occurred under Belgian rule had lasting effects. The DRC descended into crisis as several political groups vied for power. Civilian rebellions, military mutinies, coups, and economic upheaval—often encouraged by foreign powers—plagued the country.

It was against this backdrop that Kahekwa tried to convince locals to help him protect eastern lowland gorillas. After seeing Chi injured, he drew from his small personal savings and hired informants from nearby villages to find out who was hunting in Kahuzi-Biega. When the park’s anti-poaching teams arrested people for hunting, mining, or harvesting honey or timber, Kahekwa visited them in makeshift jail cells at the park’s headquarters. He recognized many of the men and women from his home village, Miti (“tree” in Swahili), which lies on the park’s southeastern border. Kahekwa asked why they were destroying the park's forest and threatening the gorillas. The answer was always a variation of the same proverb: “Empty stomachs have no ears.” 

In 1992, while still working as a park ranger, Kahekwa founded a grassroots conservation organization called the Pole Pole Foundation to fill the gap between residents’ needs and the forest’s supply. He bought tree seeds and saplings, and with the help of a few locals, etched out space in Miti for tree nurseries, where villagers could cut trees to supply some of their firewood and lumber needs. When he asked locals to carve gorilla statues out of wood to sell to tourists, he was shocked that most didn't know what a gorilla looked like. 

“I said, ‘Guys, have you ever seen any gorillas?’ They said, ‘Us? How can we see the gorillas? Who are we?’” Kahekwa recalled. He invited 16 people from Miti to visit the park, paid their $20 entrance fees—an exorbitant sum in such an impoverished area—and took them to see gorillas. 

It was the first of what would become the Pole Pole Foundation’s community tourism program. “When they saw the gorillas, I remember one of them said, ‘Ah! Look at this one! This one has no right hand!’” Kahekwa recalled. He explained how gorillas sometimes got caught in the snares meant for other animals. “I saw the deep shock they had in their heart. These people are harming the gorillas because they didn’t know,” Kahekwa told me.

Kahekwa intended to expand his community outreach to other villages, but in 1996, Ugandan and Rwandan armies invaded eastern DRC in search of Hutu militants who had perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The invasion sparked the First Congo War, which was followed about a year later with a second invasion and the Second Congo War.

Still, amid the turmoil, Kahekwa slowly built the Pole Pole Foundation. In 1999, it constructed a school in Miti and developed a traditional curriculum with a focus on conservation. It taught children and adults about the park, the Congo rainforest, and how to grow their own food to reduce their need to hunt for meat in the protected area. But the reach of even these efforts was limited by the ongoing conflict: For more than five years, eastern DRC was engulfed in battles. Kahuzi-Biega and other national parks nearby fell entirely within the war zone, and refugees, internally displaced people, rebel fighters, and soldiers flooded the rainforest. Civilians and armed groups cleared land for homes, farmland, military bases, and gold and cobalt mines. Illegal hunting and ivory trading flourished. Conservation became nearly impossible.

A UNESCO report published in 2000 found that staff could only access 5 to 10 percent of the total area of the park during the wars. That made collecting data on wildlife difficult, but anecdotally, the populations of several species seem to have crashed. Kahekwa and his team, who were among the few people who worked in the park during the wars, collected the skeletons of hundreds of chimpanzees, bush elephants, and gorillas—including Chi, Ninja, and Masassi—killed by poachers. Ironically, the gorillas in Kahuzi-Biega were particularly easy targets because Kahekwa had helped habituate the animals to people. Although gorillas are primarily vegetarians, silverbacks can be lethally aggressive if they or their families are threatened, so Kahekwa and other rangers had worked to get the park’s gorillas used to people by spending months with them, mimicking their behaviors and standing their ground when a silverback charged them. During the wars, this meant the gorillas did not flee when armed groups hunted them.

By 2003 when the Second Congo War officially ended, more than 5 million people had been killed. Eastern lowland gorillas had also died in droves. Although ongoing political instability and armed conflict have made population surveys challenging, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and other organizations estimated in 2015 that the population of gorillas in the eastern DRC had declined  77 percent since 1998, from 16,900 to just 3,800. The chimpanzee population also declined by an estimated 20 percent, and the bush elephant population by nearly 50 percent. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature designated the eastern lowland gorilla a critically endangered species, making it the fourth of six great apes to be one step away from extinction.

Today, although the Congolese government has retaken control of large swaths of Kahuzi-Biega, another form of violence has emerged: Park rangers and the Congolese military have been accused of a slew of human right abuses in Kahuzi-Biega and across the country, all in the name of conservation.

In April 2022, the London-based non-governmental organization Minority Rights Group International, or MRG, published findings from a nine-month investigation of human rights abuses against Batwa people living in and around Kahuzi-Biega. Since they were evicted in 1970, Batwa communities have suffered from disproportionate poverty, discrimination, and marginalization with little or no government support. In 2018, several Batwa groups started clearing bits of forest and building small villages on what they deemed their ancestral land within the national park. In response, park rangers and the Armed Forces of the DRC mounted three operations between July 2019 and December 2021 to again evict these communities.  Robert Flummerfelt, a journalist who led the MRG investigation, reported that the rangers and Congolese military personnel burned down villages, shot and killed at least 20 civilians, and raped more than a dozen women at gunpoint.

The Institute for Nature Conservation, a Congolese government partner agency that helps manage the park, launched its own investigation and was largely “unable to corroborate” that such abuses had occurred, though MRG and other critics find this unsurprising given the Institute’s conflict of interest. The Institute for Nature Conservation didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment but have admitted that park rangers and the military conducted operations targeting civilians and that one Indigenous woman was killed. And in 2020, a Congolese military court separately found five park rangers working at Salonga National Park guilty of murder, rape, and torture. Salonga is also co-managed by the Institute for Nature Conservation.

Lara Dominguez, a strategic litigation officer with MRG, notes that park rangers and managers, government agencies, and international donors typically deny allegations of similar atrocities in parks around the world, from Nepal to Cameroon to South America. “It's one of the reasons that MRG commissioned an in-depth investigation that would carefully and systematically document what had been happening so that it would be almost impossible to just say it's not happening flat out,” Dominguez explained.

Despite this, Kahekwa categorically and angrily denies that the atrocities took place. Although he officially left his park ranger job in 2005 to focus on the Pole Pole Foundation, he continues to visit the park frequently and has trained many of its rangers. “We are all one family here,” he said, in response to the MRG report. “No ranger has ever raped a Pygmy woman.” Further, some of the park rangers and park employees themselves are Batwa, blurring the boundaries between ethnic conflicts, human rights, and conservation even more. Kahekwa—with one foot firmly rooted in the fortress conservation model and another in supporting local communities—finds himself caught between all of them. He supports the notion that law enforcement is necessary to protect gorillas, and points to the devastation of the war years as evidence that people and gorillas cannot co-exist. At the same time, he recognizes that more must be done to address the needs of local communities.

“There will never be a fair conservation [if] the communities are put aside,” he said. “Arresting people, dropping them in jail, forcing them to pay fines: That is policeman conservation. Community conservation is, ‘let’s conserve all together.’”

Each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a group of about 20 women, many of whom were previously arrested for poaching timber or animals in the forest, gather at the secondary school that Pole Pole built in Miti, which now serves as the foundation’s headquarters. On a June day in 2022, some shaped a mash of clay and locally grown cork into round “ecological charcoals” meant to replace firewood. Others pieced together clay and metal stoves, knitted rugs, sewed oven mitts and clothes, or stirred batches of soap to sell at local markets. At one end of the courtyard, on the porch of what Kahekwa hoped would one day be the library, some women repaid microloans they had received from the foundation. Since 2020, when the microloan program began, 130 women have received sums of up to $100 and have successfully started small businesses—cultivating beans or selling food and sundries.

Merciline, 60, is one of the foundation’s beneficiaries. Since childhood, Merciline and her family had hunted, collected medicinal plants, and harvested honey from the forest near Miti. After much of it became a national park, her family continued to rely on it. “I knew it was bad to enter illegally to the park, but I didn’t have [a] choice,” Merciline said, speaking in Swahili as Kahekwa’s son, Eddy, translated. “Otherwise, I would die.” In 2015, Merciline recalled, she and her husband were collecting honey in the park. Around mid-day, she sat down to rest and prepare a lunch of cassava roots. Park rangers surrounded her. “One of the rangers said, ‘Oh, look at this woman, let us shoot her, just kill her!’ Another said, ‘No, let’s just punish her,’” Merciline recounted. The rangers pinned her down and beat her: 12 lashes with a wooden stick. Then they let her go, with a warning to never return.

A week after this first encounter with the park rangers, Merciline returned to the park to harvest more honey. “While they were beating me, I swore I would not return, but once outside of the park, I [felt] hungry again and didn’t know what to do. I went back,” she explained. Once again, the rangers caught her, beat her, and threatened to send her to jail in Kinshasa, DRC’s capital located about 2,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the west. She might have taken her chances, except that a few months later, Kahekwa invited her to one of the Pole Pole Foundation’s community tourism events. For the first time in her life, Merciline saw gorillas.

“I had thought the park belonged to people overseas and wealthy people,” Merciline said. After her visit, she joined the foundation’s women’s group and learned to make rugs, handicrafts, and homebrewed beer. From that, she earns nearly $25 per month. Although her income still falls below the international poverty line, she feels fortunate. She doesn’t have to risk going into the park, and she can support herself and help send her 12 children and grandchildren to school.

Other efforts to provide alternate sources of income and food for local and Indigenous communities around the park have also emerged, says Marie Bwami, the regional coordinator for The Coalition of Women Leaders for the Environment and Sustainable Development. Bwami’s organization trains Batwa people in agriculture, beekeeping, and cuniculture (raising rabbits as livestock), and also maintains wild tree nurseries and medicinal plant gardens to lighten human pressure on the rainforest. Other organizations focus on purchasing land outside the park for Batwa people or securing citizenship rights for the many Indigenous communities who lack the necessary documents and state-issued identity cards. And in other parts of the DRC, a more comprehensive community-based conservation strategy is taking root. Since 2017, the Congolese government has formally granted ownership of nearly 5 million acres of rainforest from Salonga National Park on the country’s western border to local and Indigenous communities to manage and protect.

Early evidence suggests this approach is working. Rainforest Foundation UK reported that in 2019, the deforestation rate in plots of land granted to these communities was 23 percent lower than the national average.

So far, though, no one has attempted to replicate Indigenous-led conservation in Kahuzi-Biega. In April 2022, the Wildlife Conservation Society, headquartered in New York City, became a co-manager of Kahuzi-Biega and promised to implement changes, including strengthening mechanisms for reporting and investigating human rights allegations. A Wildlife Conservation Society spokesperson did not respond to requests to detail how the organization was implementing such changes. But according to Dominguez, so far, little has changed. Batwa communities continue to assert their right to live in the park, and rangers still carry out attacks and evictions at gunpoint.

One cool and sunny morning in June 2022, a handful of men and women from Miti arrived at the Kahuzi-Biega visitor center. Near the entrance was a worn wooden table stacked with animal skeletons, most poached during the first and second Congo wars. There were thin antelope skulls with curved, grey-brown horns, and an elephant limb some three feet long and nearly a foot wide. In the center were three gorilla skulls with large, deep-set eye sockets, hollowed noses, and long snouts.

Kahekwa had revived the Pole Pole Foundation’s community tourism initiative in 2017, and I’d joined the latest batch of local people he’d brought to see park wildlife. He instructed the young men and women to hold the bones. Then he explained the devastating impact of the wars and ongoing hunting and deforestation on the creatures whose bones the visitors now cradled in their hands.

When he was finished, the group gently replaced the remains, and we packed into a white Toyota Land Cruiser. A concussively bumpy 10-minute drive down a dirt road pocked with potholes brought us to a trailhead. The lead ranger, whom Kahekwa trained years ago during his tenure at the park, explained that we would hike to see one of a dozen or so gorilla families living in the park. This family had three females and four babies, including twins, and was led by a silverback named Bonne Année, a French salutation for the new year. Kahekwa, whose kidneys at age 59 can no longer handle prolonged hikes through the Congo, left the group in the care of the rangers.

A Batwa gorilla tracker slung an AK-47 over his back and entered the rainforest on a small, overgrown path. The lead ranger followed with a foot-long machete, and the tourists fell into a single-file line behind them. The green underbrush soon swallowed us.

The group wove through the forest on a trail about a foot wide, descending slick muddy hills, hopping across streams, and slogging through sucking swamp. We saw three army ant mounds; the skeletal remains from a small, unidentified rodent; and spiky “tickle leaves” that the rangers warned us not to touch. After two strenuous hours, the tracker and lead ranger halted, and we followed suit. The ranger reminded us to stay calm and avoid sudden movements. Deep rumbling grunts echoed through the silence. The tracker and ranger cut away a screen of thick reedy leaves and there, just feet away, was Bonne Année, sitting with his back to the group. He seemed indifferent to our presence, tearing plants from the root and raising them to his mouth. He made another grunting sound, communicating something to the rest of his family.

Moments later, there was a rustling behind him and a female emerged, her right hand missing from an incident with a snare years before. We watched, mesmerized by the primates’ sheer size and power.

“Before I just heard the name, ‘Kahuzi-Biega National Park’ but I didn’t know the importance,”  Augistine Bisimwa, a 29-year-old secondary school teacher and youth community leader, told me later. “I wondered why and how we can lack timbers, firewood, and the park is full of trees,” he said. He thought the government should just let people cut down the trees. Seeing the gorillas himself, though, and learning about the park’s significance to Congolese heritage and the rainforest’s contributions to slow global warming shifted his perspective, he explained. “The community tourism makes locals ambassadors for the wildlife, and slowly, it is changing the local mentality.”

As they watched the silverback munch his shoots and leaves, and the females drift in and out of view, one of the twin baby gorillas emerged from the brush. He looked curiously at the group of people looking back at him, then melted back into the safety of the jungle.

The reporting of this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.

They go by many names – pigs, hogs, swine, razorbacks – but whatever you call them, wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the most damaging invasive species in North America. They cause millions of dollars in crop damage yearly and harbor dozens of pathogens that threaten humans and pets, as well as meat production systems.

Although wild pigs have been present in North America for centuries, their populations have rapidly expanded over the past several decades. Recent studies estimate that since the 1980s the wild pig population in the United States has nearly tripled and expanded from 18 to 35 states. More recently, they have spread rapidly across Canada, and these populations are threatening to invade the U.S. from the north.

The wild pigs in Canada are unique because they were originally crossbred by humans to be larger and more cold-hardy than their feral cousins to the south. This suite of traits has earned them the name “super pigs” for good reason. Adults can reach weights exceeding 500 pounds, which is twice the size of the largest wild pigs sampled across many U.S. sites in a 2022 study.

As a wildlife ecologist, I study how wild pigs alter their surroundings and affect other wildlife species. Early detection and rapid response is of utmost importance in eradicating an invasive species, because invasions are more manageable when populations are small and geographically restricted. This is especially true for species like wild pigs that have a high reproductive rate, can readily move into new areas and can change their behavior to avoid being captured or killed.

Omnivores on the hoof

Much concern over the spread of wild pigs has focused on economic damage, which was recently estimated at about US$2.5 billion annually in the United States.

Wild pigs have a unique collection of traits that make them problematic to humans. When we told one private landowner about the results from our studies, he responded: “That makes sense. Pigs eat all the stuff the other wildlife do – they just eat it first, and then they go ahead and eat the wildlife, too. They pretty much eat anything with a calorie in it.”

More scientifically, wild pigs are called extreme generalist foragers, which means they can survive on many different foods. A global review of their dietary habits found that plants represent 90% of their diet – primarily agricultural crops, plus the fruits, seeds, leaves, stems and roots of wild plants.

Wild pigs also eat most small animals, along with fungi and invertebrates such as insect larvae, clams and mussels, particularly in places where pigs are not native. For example, a 2019 study reported that wild pigs were digging up eggs laid by endangered loggerhead sea turtles on an island off the coast of South Carolina, reducing the turtles’ nesting success to zero in some years.

And these pigs do “just eat it first.” They compete for resources that other wildlife need, which can have negative effects on other species.

However, they likely do their most severe damage through predation. Wild pigs kill and eat rodents, deer, birds, snakes, frogs, lizards and salamanders. This probably best explains why colleagues and I found in one study that forest patches with wild pigs had 26% fewer mammal and bird species than similar forest patches without pigs.

This decrease in diversity was similar to that found with other invasive predators. And our findings are consistent with a global analysis showing that invasive mammalian predators that have no natural predators themselves – especially generalist foragers like wild pigs – cause by far the most extinctions.

New estimates indicate #wildpigs are causing 2.5 billion in US agricultural damages each year...
👇👇👇https://t.co/C55epogJQm pic.twitter.com/622gYrGGVq

— UF DEER Lab (@UFDEERLab) December 13, 2023

Altering ecosystems

Many questions about wild pigs’ ecological impacts have yet to be answered. For example, they may harm other wild species indirectly, rather than eating them or depleting their food supply.

Our work shows that wild pigs can alter the behavior of common native wildlife species, such as raccoons, squirrels and deer. Using trail cameras, we found that when wild pigs were present, other animals altered their activity patterns in various ways to avoid them. Such shifts may have additional cascading effects on ecosystems, because they change how and when species interact in the food web.

Another major concern is wild pigs’ potential to spread disease. They carry numerous pathogens, including brucellosis and tuberculosis. However, little ecological research has been done on this issue, and scientists have not yet demonstrated that an increasing abundance of wild pigs reduces the abundance of native wildlife via disease transmission.

Interestingly, in their native range in Europe and Asia, pigs do not cause as much ecological damage. In fact, some studies indicate that they may modify habitat in important ways for species that have evolved with them, such as frogs and salamanders.

So far, however, there is virtually no scientific evidence that feral pigs provide any benefits in North America. One review of wild pig impacts discussed the potential for private landowners plagued with pigs to generate revenue from selling pig meat or opportunities to hunt them. And it’s possible that wild pigs could serve as an alternative food source for imperiled large predators, or that their wallowing and foraging behavior in some cases could mimic that of locally eradicated or extinct species.

But the scientific consensus today is that in North America, wild pigs are a growing threat to both ecosystems and the economy. It is unclear how invading super pigs would contribute to the overall threat, but bigger pigs likely cause more damage and are generally better predators and competitors.

While efforts to control wild pigs are well underway in the U.S., incursions by Canadian super pigs may complicate the job. Invasive super pigs make for catchy headlines, but their potential effects are no joke.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 26, 2019.

Marcus Lashley, Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 A similar birth likely took place about four million years ago in the forests of the northern Indochina and South China region, when the original member of the Sumatran rhino genus, Dicerorhinus, took their first stumbling steps. Since then, the story of this species has been one of radical change and uncertainty, finally culminating in the existential vulnerability we see today.

Beginning in the early Pleistocene, about two million years ago, the Sumatran rhino population suddenly increased dramatically. Researchers believe this was the point when the rhinos began expanding their range from north Asia into south Asia and Sundaland – an emergent landmass comprising of the areas around Sumatra, Java, and Malaysia. After this initial spread – about 950,000 years ago – Sumatran rhino numbers peaked at about 60,000 individuals.

Various estimates place the current Sumatran rhino population at less than 80 individuals, of which there is perhaps only one reproductively viable group living in the wild. As an IUCN critically endangered species, efforts are being made to save them from extinction. The successful birth of this latest international star, who is now five days old, is the result of an undergoing re-population initiative by the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary (SRS) – a 250-acre semi-wild facility in the middle of the Way Kambas National Park. At the SRS, 10 Sumatran rhinos are cared for around the clock and are part of a core program to produce a genetically diverse source of rhinos which can eventually repopulate Indonesia’s forests and lowland swamps.

A research paper published in 2017 suggests that the decline in Sumatran rhino populations is the result of a continuous decrease in their genetic diversity. Once the rhinos had spread throughout their maximum range during the Pleistocene, volatile climatic conditions isolated different groups. As forest-dwellers, various rhino populations were separated from one another when a savannah-like belt stretching through the middle of Sundaland, between what are today the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, emerged. This barrier-effect was compounded by periods of rising sea levels which submerged great expanses of land. When populations become fragmented and are unable to exchange genetic material, mutations increase in prevalence and reproductive viability declines.

The genetic diversity of today’s Sumatran rhinos is worryingly low. In fact, it is comparable to the levels of recently extinct mammals like the mammoths of Wrangel Island. SRS is tackling this issue by breeding individuals from different populations. For example, Rosa, who gave birth in the sanctuary last year, was a wild rhino living in Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park before she was transported to SRS after repeatedly visiting local villages in search of food. Harapan, the father of the most recent newborn, was born in the Cincinnati Zoo in the United States. In fact, he was the last Sumatran Rhino to live in the western hemisphere. Delilah, the calf’s mother, was born at SRS, daughter to Ratu, a ‘local’ from the Way Kambas National Park (and who gave birth for the third time two months before her daughter!). The SRS program is essentially mixing genetic pools which have likely been isolated from each other for quite some time.

It wasn’t only a changing climate which contributed to the threatened existence of Sumatran rhinos we see today, although it definitely set the groundwork. There is evidence that already in the late Pleistocene (which ended 11,700 years ago) humans were hunting the Sumatran rhino. They began clearing forests – the preferred habitat of these rhinos – soon after. Most recently, poaching served to almost eradicate the species entirely.

Happily, this little calf’s birth is the latest in a string of hopeful news. It's the second birth in less than two months at SRS and now the fifth which has taken place at the facility. The new arrival confirms the reproductive viability of one more breeding pair, bringing the total to six. Given the species densely vegetated habitat and the exceeding low population numbers, poaching does not seem to pose a significant threat to the species.

Whether or not the newest Sumatran rhino will manage to reverse a trend which has been progressing for hundreds of thousands of years remains to be seen. Nevertheless, he is raising important awareness and support for the imperiled species and likely reinforces the Indonesian government’s support for his species' conservation.

Header image: Stephen Belcher

Trophy hunting is contentious. It typically involves paying for and pursuing a specific wild animal, often a large or iconic species, with the goal of killing it to obtain a trophy, such as the animal’s head, horns, or hide.

Popular public opinion is largely in favour of ending the killing of wild animals for sport. However, the topic is hotly debated by policymakers and academics because of the potential financial incentives it can provide to local communities and landowners to support conservation efforts.

Against this backdrop, we set out to test whether visitors to South Africa would be willing to pay a “lion protection fee” at border entry points. Our idea was that this could compensate for any lost revenue from trophy hunting were it to be banned.

We chose lions because they have wide appeal and are one of the most readily recognised trophy hunted animals.

We spoke to 907 people who were visiting, or planned to visit, the country. We found that a high percentage – over 80% – were in favour of the idea of a lion protection fee. And we calculated, on the basis of two scenarios, that the amount they were willing to pay could generate enough funds to equal, if not exceed, those currently generated by trophy hunting in South Africa.

Our findings come at an important time. South Africa is opening a public policy consultation on how the country can adopt a more sustainable and ethically driven approach to wildlife conservation.

A complex debate

The competitive nature of trophy hunting, in particular, has raised serious animal welfare concerns. Animals may experience huge stress as they’re pursued for days and separated from their family groups. Some hunting outfits use methods which may inflict prolonged and undue animal suffering.

From a conservation perspective, some advocate for trophy hunting because, for example, income generated may help mitigate human-wildlife conflicts, support anti-poaching efforts, and prevent land containing wildlife from being converted to other uses. They believe that banning it could negatively affect conservation and community livelihoods.

Others, however, argue that trophy hunting could negatively affect conservation. For instance the specific targeting of certain animals – like males – could have a harmful effect on species population dynamics and social structures. Questions have also been raised as to whether funds from trophy hunting always reach local communities or those on the frontlines of conservation.

Ultimately, these discussions come down to a single issue: popular public opinion is against trophy hunting, but how could the financial revenue that it generates be replaced?

Lion protection fee

We surveyed people who had previously visited South Africa, or who would consider visiting in the future. We drew respondents from overseas countries and from the African continent.

Respondents were shown a statement saying that a total ban on trophy hunting in South Africa would help protect lions by preventing them from being hunted and killed as trophies. And that such a ban could be funded by introducing a “lion protection fee”, added to the visas of incoming tourists.

They were then asked questions to gauge what daily fee would be acceptable and how likely  they would be to visit South Africa under different daily fee scenarios.

Of 907 respondents, 84.2% stated that being charged a “lion protection fee” was a “great” or a “good” idea. A minority (7.5%) had a negative view. Only two respondents (0.2%) indicated a pro-trophy hunting attitude.

We used this survey to create initial estimates of the maximum price ranges tourists would be willing to pay.

There were two main fee scenarios.

In the first scenario, overseas visitors would pay between US$6 and US$7 for every day they’re in the country for a maximum of six days. Southern African tourists would pay between US$3 and US$4. We worked on tourist numbers which we sourced from Statistics South Africa. Our calculations were based on around 2.6 million overseas visitors and 12.3 million southern African tourists.

In the second scenario, fees would be collected as a one-off departure tax of US$6 for all foreign visitors leaving by land or sea, and US$33 for air passengers. Once again, we used tourist numbers from the Statistics South Africa. Our calculations were based on around 10.5 million foreign visitors leaving by land, 70,000 leaving by sea, and  3.4 million flying out.

Our calculations show that in both scenarios enough funds could be generated to at least equal, but potentially exceed, the US$176.1 million currently generated by trophy hunting of all the iconic species in South Africa a year. These calculations are based on numbers of visitors from different traveller categories multiplied by the median number of days those traveller-types stay.

Based on the number of respondents who said they would rather not visit because of the fees, we calculated that there would be a 15% decrease in the number of tourists willing to visit South Africa. But we argue that these decreases could be partially compensated for by increased visits from travellers previously deterred by trophy hunting – 13% of those who did not wish to travel to South Africa cited trophy hunting as a reason.

A 2021 survey of European Union citizens backs up our findings. It showed that 84% of 10,687 respondents were either somewhat or strongly opposed to “the trophy hunting of wild animals found in Africa”.

Replacing trophy hunting revenue

Our findings could pave the way for a responsible transition away from trophy hunting without unintended repercussions for wildlife and the communities that rely on them.

The practical implementation would need diligent deliberation. For example, administrative logistics and sensitivity to fluctuations in visitor numbers must be taken into account.

In addition, while the idea of channelling these funds towards landowners and communities for wildlife conservation holds promise, there are concerns about public trust in institutions. Such funds must be carefully managed.

The types of tourism taxes we propose are not new. Twenty-two countries around the world currently charge a tax on tourists to preserve their natural and cultural heritage.

This is a pivotal moment for the future of South Africa’s biodiversity and ethical wildlife tourism. The question now is whether the country seizes this opportunity to redefine its approach to conservation and chart a new course towards a more sustainable and compassionate future.

The authors extend their thanks to Dr Tom Moorhouse for his collaboration on this research and informative insights on this article.

Neil D’Cruze, Global Head of Wildlife Research, World Animal Protection, and Visiting Researcher, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), University of Oxford; Angie Elwin, Wildlife Research Manager at World Animal Protection and Visiting Research Fellow, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Herbert Ntuli, Senior Lecturer, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Story by Dyna Rochmyaningsih

One dawn in 2010, the sound of adzan from the mosque reverberated among the wooden houses of Seumanah Jaya, a village in Indonesia’s Aceh province, on the north end of the island of Sumatra. The call to prayer woke up a 50-something-year-old woman named Rusmiati, who immediately went to her crude bathroom to take wudhu – the Islamic ritual of washing face, hands, and feet before prayer. With her face still wet, Rusmiati (who, like many older Indonesians, does not use a surname) came back to her room and spread out her praying mat on the pale wooden floor.

It was still dark outside but her heart was hopeful. The fruits from her 2-hectare oil palm plantation were ready to harvest. It had been three years since she and her husband, Ibrahim, had planted the palm seedlings, and bunches of reddish black fruits had finally emerged from the top of each trunk. For the couple and their five children, who sometimes ate only rice and salt to survive, the harvest held the promise of a better life.

When early sunlight sneaked through her window, Rusmiati put on her hijab and gathered empty glass bottles from her kitchen. She planned to hang them around the trees as a kind of windchime to deter the Indonesian wild boars (Sus scrofa vittatus) that sometimes uprooted the trees. From her backyard, a narrow, uneven path led downhill to her family’s small plantation a kilometer away. But as she walked down the path, she ran into Ibrahim, who had already visited the field. He saw the bottles she held. “There’s no use,” he said. Rusmiati’s heart sank.

When she arrived at the family plantation, she found disaster. It was as if a cyclone had ravaged the area. The tree trunks had been pulled entirely out of the ground and the fruits were gone. Out of 260 trees, only four were untouched. “Is it Datuk again?” Rusmiati asked. Ibrahim was silent. Rusmiati knelt down and burst into tears.

It was the third time Datuk had eaten their oil palm crops in ten years. Datuk, the Acehnese designation for a noble human, is also the title of respect given to the critically endangered Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatranus), which can grow to over 12,000 pounds and some 10 feet tall. Although scientists and government officials in the country have struggled to count how many Sumatran elephants are left, the Indonesian Elephant Conservation Forum estimates that as of 2019, between 924 and 1,359 individuals remained in the wild, down from about 2,800 in 2007 and as many as 4,300 in the 1990s. About a third of the surviving elephants live in Aceh, a politically conservative Islamic province that historically has seen less deforestation than the central and southern parts of the island, where industrial oil palm and pulpwood plantations have largely replaced wild forests.

Since the 1990s, Sumatra has lost up to 80 percent of its lowland tropical rainforests to these plantations. Recognizing Aceh’s role as one of the final refuges for elephants and other wildlife, the provincial government has tried to limit the development of new oil palm plantations. But illegal loggers and oil palm companies are encroaching into elephant habitat, forcing the animals into human settlements like Seumanah Jaya. Eighty-five percent of the Sumatran elephant’s current range extends beyond protected areas.

Before illegal loggers and corporate palm oil plantations began destroying the forests of East Aceh, Ibrahim recalls, people here used to live in relative harmony with elephants. His children would play in the forest; if they encountered an elephant, each would cautiously move away. But over the past two decades, dangerous encounters with wild elephants have become common. Rural Acehnese swap stories of elephants wandering through villages, injuring and permanently disfiguring people, or sneaking into someone’s kitchen to eat salt and rice. Elephants occasionally destroy people’s homes in the process, and sometimes the results are deadly: Between 2012 and 2017, elephants in Aceh killed eight people and injured 11.

Livelihoods have been upended as well, such as when the animals raid residents’ small palm oil, chocolate, or nut plantations. Devastated and infuriated by the loss of crops they rely on for survival, some villagers retaliate by shooting or poisoning elephants; government officials found some 25 dead elephants in East Aceh alone between 2011 and 2021. This one-two punch of habitat loss and poaching is pushing Sumatran elephants ever closer to extinction.

Despite the tensions, Rusmiati still has the utmost respect for Datuk and doesn’t dare speak ill of elephants. “I was scared of him. I could only cry,” she recalls, speaking about that fateful morning in 2010.

As Ibrahim watched his wife’s despair, he knew he needed to act. “At that time, I promised to solve that problem. No matter what” he says.

Over the next decade, Ibrahim has helped turn Seumanah Jaya into a model for other Acehnese villages that have recently found themselves struggling to co-exist with animals they have lived among and respected for thousands of years. With the Indonesian government more focused on economic development than with managing human-wildlife conflicts in one of its more remote provinces, small-scale, locally led efforts may be key to conserving Sumatran elephants – along with the Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), Sumatran rhinoceroses (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae), and many other animals whose fates are intertwined with the giants of the forest.

Initially, Ibrahim had no idea how to fulfill his promise. But he and Rusmiati agreed that the solution wouldn’t involve harming elephants. They knew that the animals are intelligent and sentient beings; Rusmiati recalls a time she spoke to a wild female elephant who surprised her on her way to a palm oil plantation. “Datuk, please let us go,” she whispered. The animal seemed to understand and gently backed away.

“Our ancestors say they are humans too,” Rusmiati says.

Rusmiati’s ancestors weren’t far off. Studies have shown that Asian elephants (of which Sumatran elephants are a subspecies) are highly intelligent animals, able to perform “complex learning skills and behaviors” such as forming intricate social webs and recognizing hundreds of individual elephants. Much like humans, Sumatran and other types of elephants live in family groups, pass important information from generation to generation, and can remember things that happened decades earlier. Asian elephants can recognize their own reflection in a mirror, an ability some scientists consider proof of their self-awareness. They use sticks to shoo away flies and to scratch their own bodies. Scientists have even observed elephants gently touching the bones of their dead, pausing at sites where family members have died, and coming to the aid of other elephants who are suffering – possibly demonstrating the capacity for grief and compassion.

Elephants are also incredible ecosystem engineers on Sumatra, says Wishnu Sukmantoro, deputy head of the Indonesian Elephant Conservation Forum. To sustain their massive bodies, the animals eat up to 230 kilograms of fruits, grasses, leaves, and roots from up to 69 species of forest plants in a single day. They also defecate 16 to 18 times per day – an act that recycles nutrients and helps maintain Sumatra’s mindbogglingly rich biodiversity. Scientists have found that seeds in a ball of elephant dung are more likely to germinate than seeds that have not been consumed by elephants, likely because elephant dung acts as a natural fertilizer. And given that elephants’ natural home range can span some 100,000 hectares of unfragmented forest and can carry seeds more than 50 kilometers from their source, they play a critical role in seed dispersal.

Over centuries, Sumatran elephants helped shape what is known today as the Leuser ecosystem, home of the last remaining old-growth forests in Sumatra. Covering an area roughly half the size of Aceh – about three times larger than Yellowstone National Park – the Leuser is home to not only elephants, tigers, rhinos, and orangutans, but also lar gibbons (Hylobates lar), Sumatran slow loris (Nycticebus hilleri), Sunda clouded leopards (Neofelis diardi), Asian golden cats (Catopuma temminckii), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), and many other mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, as well as more than 500 species of birds and an estimated 10,000 species of plants. All of them depend, at least in part, on elephants to save their vast home. “Sumatran elephant is a flagship species. If we conserve them, we conserve the rest of the species in their home range,” says Sukmantoro.

One night, while traveling by canoe to a conservation organization’s basecamp to report on elephant conservation, I experienced a sliver of the undisturbed Leuser. In the darkness, the light of a full moon illuminated a small river bordered by lush rainforests. Elegant dipterocarp trees reached toward the stars, while the grasses and bushes on the muddy soil below hosted an orchestra of frogs. Although we didn’t see them, swamp crocodiles lurked beneath the surface, and deadly venomous snakes slithered on the tree branches above. One had fallen from the tree and bit an unfortunate villager who was fishing in the same river a few days earlier. The Leuser is a place where beauty and danger live side by side.

In the weeks following the elephants’ destruction of his small palm oil plantation, Ibrahim visited the office of the nearest environmental NGO, called Save Nature and its Flora Fauna, or SILFA. He offered his help as an elephant patrol volunteer, chasing elephants away from human settlements and farms with lights, noisemakers, and captive elephants ridden by mahouts. The experience opened his mind to the world of elephant conservation, but he came to believe that there must be more effective strategies to solve this conflict. Although one 2017 study found that community-based crop-guarding was about 90 percent effective at keeping elephants out of crops in Lampung, the southernmost province of Sumatra, it’s a labor-intensive solution, and impoverished small farmers like Ibrahim can’t afford to volunteer indefinitely.

Instead, Ibrahim dreamed of establishing an electric fence system along the village border that would give elephants an uncomfortable shock and keep them away – a strategy already employed in parts of Sri Lanka. “This is a problem felt by many farmers in Aceh. We need to find an effective solution,” he says. Yet to fence in all 23 villages in Ranto Peureulak district, where Seumanah Jaya is located, Ibrahim calculated they would need some 40,000 meters of electric fencing and cost nearly 5 billion rupiah, or $328,000. Where would he get that kind of money?

“I am going to Banda Aceh,” Ibrahim said to Rusmiati one day in 2013.

Despite having barely enough money to cover bus fare for the 427-kilometer trip to the capital city of Aceh, Ibrahim convinced his wife that the trip was necessary – not for their own sake, but to solve the elephant problem for the entire community. Over the previous three years, he had gotten more than 200 farmers in Seumanah and neighboring villages to sign a letter urging the government to fund their plan for electric fencing. Local government officials had already turned down the plan numerous times; getting approval from the governor in Banda Aceh was Ibrahim’s final hope.

But a few days later, Ibrahim returned home empty-handed. “They said it was such a big money,” he says.

For villagers in Aceh, the presence of government in handling human-elephant conflicts is rarely felt. Animal conservation falls to the Ministry of Forestry and Environmental Affairs, headquartered in Jakarta. The Ministry maintains a regional office in Banda Aceh called the BKSDA Aceh, and seven Sumatran elephant conservation response units (CRU). If a village experiences human-elephant conflict, a CRU worker is supposed travel to the village to guard people’s crops and usher the elephants back to the forest. But Ibrahim says people from BKSDA Aceh have never visited Seumanah Jaya. People from North Aceh, the neighboring district, also say they’ve gotten no response from BKSDA about elephant crop raiding.

Nurdin, the field worker for BKSDA Aceh, says that’s because the agency lacks sufficient staff to intervene in all cases. Aceh is twice the size of Belgium, and across that expanse there may be as many as seven conflicts per day. With only a few people working at each conservation response unit, BKSDA simply can’t respond to all of them. Nurdin says he frequently has to drive for hours on muddy roads in the middle of the night only to be scolded by villagers for his slow response. “Like the villagers, we too are sleepless,” he says. Just as importantly, mitigating human-elephant conflicts will be of little use to the elephant conservation if logging continues to decimate the forests.

In Aceh alone, the Leuser ecosystem lost nearly 50,000 hectares of forest habitat between 2015 and 2021, according to data from Forest Nature and Environment Aceh. And the rate of deforestation here is accelerating. Nusantara Atlas, an online platform that tracks landscape changes in Indonesia, suggests that nearly half of the total loss of forest habitat since 2001 occurred in those seven years. Using locations from radio-collared elephants Nurdin and his colleagues have found that some of that forest loss occurred along the animals’ seasonal migration routes.

Over years since I began reporting on environmental issues in Indonesia, numerous conservationists (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told me that tangled regulations governing Indonesian land management is one of the main factors driving the animals closer to extinction. Indonesia, a country of over 13,000 islands, is governed by a central government in Jakarta. To help ensure that development projects would be evenly distributed, the Indonesian government granted autonomy to provincial authorities to manage their lands in early 2000s. But it was not full autonomy: The central government still has power to control and create regulations over land use, which means there are often two agencies governing land use. The Ministry of Forestry defines the protected and unprotected forest areas, while the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning determines land use and land ownership status.

In Aceh, for example, the lowland forest falls within the border of Leuser ecosystem, which ought to be protected by the Ministry of Forestry. But it can still be cleared for plantations because it is classified as an “Area for Other Use” by the Agrarian Affairs agency. This means that in addition to illegal forest clearing, local governments can legally sell forested land to wealthy buyers, who usually have a direct connection to people in power.

Smallholder oil palm farmers like Rusmiati and Ibrahim are largely unaware of this tangled bureaucracy. For them, planting oil palms is the hope of a better future, and their impact on the forest feels benign compared to the multinational corporations competing with them. Although small farms of 2 hectares or less make up 40 percent of the oil palm plantations in Indonesia, most are on already-cleared land, as small farmers lack the equipment and money needed to fell tracts of old-growth forests. Palm oil companies, meanwhile, can clear 5,000 hectares of forest in one swoop. They also pay local workers the meager sum of 400 rupiah (0.03 USD) per kilogram of oil palm fruits they gather, despite the risks inherent in the job, including being injured or killed by an elephant or tiger.

In comparison, a small plantation protected by electric fencing that would allow them to pocket their own profits seemed like a way for Ibrahim and Rusmiati to break free from their dependence on large oil palm companies. It could also allow them to again live in harmony with elephants. But when the government refused to fund Ibrahim’s fence idea, it seemed the villagers would have to blaze a path back to co-existence on their own.

This wasn’t the first time the people of Seumanah Jaya had lost trust in government officials. Thoyyib, a young man from the village and an ex-combatant of Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a separatist militant movement that fought for Aceh’s independence from Indonesia, had felt betrayed when the governments, military, and GAM officials were involved in illegal logging business after reaching a peace agreement in 2005. The intact forest, which used to be a hiding place for GAM combatants and a safe place for wild elephants, was opened for exploitation.

In 2007, Thoyyib took out the long gun that had been lying unused in a closet since his years as a GAM combatant. He loaded it with bullets. Other young men followed his lead, hunting elephants and selling the ivory. In 2013, after witnessing Ibrahim’s failure to get government support to solve conflicts with elephants, Thoyyib felt his move was justified. “We took this extreme step because of the government’s ignorance. It was a frustration,” he says. Between 2007 and 2015, men from Seumanah say they killed at least seven elephants every year; East Aceh and nearby Aceh Jaya came to have the highest rates of both deforestation and elephant conflict in the region. Seumanah Jaya became known as the village of elephant hunters.

As their habitat shrank and poachers decimated their herds, the elephants around Seumanah also seemed to grow increasingly aggressive. Villagers reported that an elephant killed a hunter in the forest, while others crushed people’s motorcycles or stomped down the village’s dusty dirt road where children played, rearing and trumpeting. Violence begat violence.

Each night, as the sun sank behind the horizon, Seumanah’s men geared up to protect the village from elephants. They lit bonfires along the village border, facing abandoned oil palm plantations that were being reclaimed by forest – the place where the elephants were most likely to emerge. But often the elephants managed to sneak into the village before dark. When this happened, the farmers of Seumanah set off firecrackers to scare the elephants away. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t, and the elephants ate their crops. Women and children stayed indoors, afraid to venture outside.

From the early 2000s to late 2020, the sound and display of firecrackers decorated the sky above Seumanah every night. “We were all sleepless,” says Salim, another resident. It’s fair to say that the elephants probably were as well. And then, just when it felt like the people and the elephants couldn’t live in close proximity any longer, Ibrahim’s persistence began to pay off.

In 2014, Ibrahim’s vocal attempts to solve the human-elephant conflict in Seumanah attracted the attention of Rudi Putra, an Acehnese biologist and rhino tracker who in 2013 founded a nonprofit called the Leuser Conservation Forum (FKL). Putra came to Ibrahim’s house and recruited one of Ibrahim and Rusmiati’s sons, Junaidi, to work with him. In 2019, FKL began helping villagers in Seumanah set up an electric fencing system.

At first, “FKL only provided the solar cells, wires, and wooden poles,” says Hidayat Lubis, FKL’s field manager in East Aceh. But Junaidi knocked on the door of all 50 homes in Seumanah and asked his neighbors to pitch in to cover construction costs. He came back with 13 million rupiah, or about $831 USD. “It wasn’t enough to cover everything. So we asked the villagers to participate in installing the fence,” Junaidi says. The villagers were glad to lend a hand. One even donated land for the solar power station that provides the fence’s electricity.

Together, the people of Seumanah and FKL – which partners with international conservation groups such as the Rainforest Trust and Global Conservation – installed a 17.4 kilometer-long wire powered with low-volt electricity along the border of Seumanah. This along with GPS technology that allows wildlife managers to track the whereabouts of collared elephants is helping to protect the village from elephants, and the elephants from villagers. FKL also collaborates with government officials to collect radio-collar data on wildlife presence and destroy illegal hunting snares. It has begun helping villages develop alternative sources of income, such as harvesting wild honey from intact forest. Perhaps most significantly, the organization has also restored thousands of hectares of forest once occupied by illegal palm oil plantations. FKL now employs 300 staff and volunteers, making it the largest locally-led conservation organization in Indonesia. “Working with local communities is the strength of FKL,” says Lubis.

One starry night in September 2022, seven young men in black T-shirts and blue jeans gathered on the porch of Ibrahim’s home. Some sat on a dusty wooden bench; others lounged on the porch floor. The smoke of their cigarettes filled the air, as did their laughter. Today, firecrackers are a thing of the past, and friendly chatter has replaced the tense atmosphere. “Thanks God, we finally have a power fencing system,” says Ibrahim.

The group had assembled this night to patrol the electric fence’s power station uphill from Ibrahim’s house. A few hours before, data from GPS-collared elephants had showed that a group of about 30 animals had gathered about 2 kilometers from the fence. The men were there to make sure the elephants didn’t come any closer.

As the young men set off, Lubis, Ibrahim, and Junaidi remained, moving inside to the living room floor. “We’re counting on FKL,” says Ibrahim to Lubis, who peeled peanuts while listening.

“It’s the other way round. We’re counting on the villagers too,” Lubis replied.

According to Lubis, recruiting young locals is key to FKL’s strategy for mitigating human-elephant conflicts in Aceh. In addition to the regular patrols they conduct, the young men are also better able to reason with villagers who are frustrated with the elephants, because they are part of the community too. And having a team member who lives in each village in East Aceh makes it easier for Lubis to respond quickly and launch a patrol when a conflict does arise. Since FKL installed the electric fence in 2019, there have been no human-elephant conflicts in Seumanah. (Previously, Rusmiati says she heard about near-daily conflicts, though there’s no official data to back this up.)

But because of the cost and the ongoing maintenance that villagers must take on themselves, few other villages have implemented electric fences. Today, Seumanah is still the only village in Aceh with an effective electric fence system.

“We have limited financial and human resources, so we haven’t expanded our program to other districts,” says Lubis. As a result, villagers outside Seumanah continue to experience what Ibrahim and Rusmiati faced 12 years ago. And elephants are still being killed by angry men with few other options for income. But Seumanah Jaya, at least, shows that with an upfront investment and ongoing effort, coexistence is possible.

Today, most people in Seumanah support elephant conservation. Thoyyib, the former elephant hunter, turned in his long gun to a local police station in 2016; he now works in an East Aceh Conservation Response Unit and has formed a close bond with a captive female elephant who was injured in a conflict with a person. He also manages a boarding school that teaches Islamic environmental values. Ibrahim and other villagers regularly weed shrubs and bushes along the electric fence, making sure it’s in good working order. And Rusmiati finally has her own oil palm plantation, which allows her to feed her family meals like Sumatran chicken curry or fried fish with chili sauce in addition to rice. The living room inside her home is now tiled, and the family even has a parabolic antenna that can capture international TV channels. Every evening, Ibrahim uses it to watch a nature documentary.

As she walked through her palm oil plantation one day in early September, Rusmiati paused to look up at a 10-meter-tall tree. “It was one of the survivors,” she says, recalling the morning in 2010 when she knelt among the wreckage of her hard work and cried. Around the survivor, shorter oil palm trees were thriving, sprouting bunches of reddish black fruits. These are the fifth batch of oil palm trees she and Ibrahim planted, and the first that survived long enough to be harvested.

Although she doesn’t discount the value of her husband’s perseverance, she also believes that her family’s respect for Sumatran elephants has blessed their life and brought prosperity. As her ancestors did, Rusmiati – and a growing number of her Islamic neighbors – believe that anyone who harms elephants will be punished. “They are giants,” she says, “and we are so small.”

Story by Ben Goldfarb

Ocelot 331 embarked on his life’s most perilous journey on January 25, 2020 – a warm night, scattered clouds against moonless sky. He was five years old, and like young males of most species, he was restless. The ocelot – a feline no larger than a bobcat, clad in a leopard’s bewitching spots and blotches – had spent his short life roaming the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas; he’d shied from coyotes, pounced on rats, blundered into box-traps, and worn the tracking collars that biologists buckled around his neck. This scrubby patch of forest had sustained him. But cats are inclined toward wanderlust, particularly mate-seeking males. Thus OM 331 – O for ocelot, M for male – decided, that January night, to leave his shard of forest and seek his fortune in the refuge’s southern reaches.

This was dangerous for one principle reason: OM 331 would have to cross a road. A road that humans knew as FM 106 funneled traffic through the refuge, and busier highways loomed beyond. Cars are the leading cause of death for Texas’s tiny population of federally endangered ocelots, responsible for around 40 percent of all mortality, and impetuous, lovesick males like OM 331 face the most risk.

But OM 331 had advantages that past ocelots had lacked. As he approached FM 106, he reached a chain-link fence that blocked him from slipping onto the road. Instead he turned 90 degrees and followed the fenceline to a tunnel. Although built expressly for his kind three years earlier, the dark, concrete-walled culvert was unnerving. OM 331 likely paused to sniff the traces of other travelers: raccoon, javelina, armadillo, opossum. He took a tentative step forward, then another and another, at last emerging at the tunnel’s south exit. Where other cats had perished, he’d found passage.

As 331 exited the tunnel, he broke the invisible beam of a camera trap, which snapped his photo, his shoulders hunched and eyes agleam. When researchers checked the camera, they discovered they’d documented history: the first American ocelot known to have strolled through a wildlife crossing. “It was kind of the shot heard ‘round the world,” Hilary Swarts, then a refuge biologist, told me.

Swarts and her colleagues had reason to be thrilled. Wildlife crossings and fences represent the most reliable solution to roadkill, which claims an estimated million vertebrates per day in the United States alone. Around the world, biologists and engineers have built tunnels, underpasses, culverts, and bridges to guide animals from European hamsters to African elephants across highways. Texas’s ocelots seemed likewise to be adapting to the road’s dangers by using the passages humans had installed for their benefit.

Yet OM 331’s story isn’t unambiguously cheery. Although the state of Texas began building ocelot crossings in the 1990s, the passages had long gone unused; a fair response to the news that an ocelot had walked through one might be, What took so long? Moreover, crossing a single road hardly guarantees an ocelot’s long-term survival: One biologist has described the highways, towns, and farms beyond the Laguna Atascosa refuge as an “ecological killing-zone.” Wildlife crossings have likely made South Texas safer for ocelots – but what will it take to sustain America’s rarest cats?

Few wild felines are as adaptable as Leopardus pardalis. Ocelots slink through landscapes as diverse as Mexican deserts, Brazilian rainforests, and Andean slopes, picking off rodents, reptiles, birds, even the occasional deer fawn. At one time they roamed Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, before the usual cataclysms – fur trapping, habitat loss, the indiscriminate slaughter of predators – shrank their U.S. range to a few patches of forest in the Lone Star State. Today fewer than 100 ocelots likely survive north of the Mexican border, in only two areas. One is a collection of private ranchlands that have escaped development, and the other is Laguna Atascosa, a reserve perched on the state’s southern tip.

I went in search of ocelots on the refuge one March morning with Daniel Scognamillo, a biologist at the Caeser Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. After driving for two hours past cottonfields, lethargic cows, and wind turbines, we turned into the refuge and were promptly enveloped by thornscrub – a forest type native to Texas that’s as forbidding as its name suggests. Mesquite, hackberry, ebony, acacia, and other low trees and shrubs formed an inhospitable weave of needles, spines, and briars. A year earlier, Scognamillo had captured a big male ocelot, dubbed the Duke, whose face was etched with scars – wounds he likely sustained during skirmishes with other ocelots in heavy brush. “You can see in the Duke’s face how much it takes to survive in this patch,” Scognamillo said admiringly.

Although no one knew precisely how many ocelots shared Laguna Atascosa with the Duke, Scognamillo hoped to find out. He’d scattered camera traps around the refuge to photograph ocelots and thus estimate their numbers. (The hypnotic patterns that adorn ocelot fur also permit scientists to differentiate individual animals.) “The idea is to capture the flank,” Scognamillo explained: the more spots he could see, the more easily he could tell one ocelot from another.

Scognamillo parked along a dirt road. Up close, the thornscrub seemed less hostile: creaturely trails and apertures punctured the understory, and it was easy to picture a small, furtive cat weaving through dappled light. We pushed into a pebbly clearing where Scognamillo had set two cameras. He opened one and flicked through motion-triggered photos. “Raccoon, opossum, rabbit, opossum, armadillo, coyote, bobcat,” he droned.

A thin smile creased his tanned face. He handed me the camera. “What do you think of this?”

On the screen: an ocelot, head raised, round ears lifted, the universal posture of the curious feline. A constellation of spots and rosettes swirled across his flank, a pattern somehow both random and artful – the delicate play of sunlight and shade rendered on fur. Where form and function converge, there lies the ocelot.

Scognamillo glanced around, as though the animal would suddenly appear. He’d been studying wild cats for three decades, from pumas in his native Argentina to leopards in Botswana. In Venezuela he’d been charged by a jaguar after his tranquilizer dart missed, and a massive paw had raked his lip and hand; like the Duke, he still bore the scars. I’d thought he might be indifferent to a mere photo of such an unimposing cat. Yet there was something about the ocelot – its elusiveness, its beauty, its grit – that left Scognamillo smitten. “It was right there,” he said with wonder. “We were standing in the same spot.”

We spent that day and the next inspecting cameras around the refuge. Ocelots appeared at two more sites, including, thrillingly, a mother and kitten. Scognamillo couldn’t yet estimate their numbers, though past surveys had pegged the local population at fewer than fifteen cats. They were clinging to life, yet they remained marooned within a terrestrial sea of agriculture, development, and roads, and tended to die not long after setting paw beyond the refuge. “We need to create a landscape that is safer for them to move,” Scognamillo said.

The refuge’s ocelots represent a classic conservation crisis: a tiny, isolated cluster of animals teetering on the precipice of local extinction. Ocelots need more of everything – more space, more security, more opportunity to mingle and breed. If the problem is straightforward, however, the solution is anything but simple.

As recently as the 1980s, no one knew whether ocelots still lived in the United States. When a biologist named Michael Tewes set out to look for them, many researchers assumed they’d been extirpated; one professor bet Tewes a fifth of Jack Daniels that he wouldn’t find one. Tewes won the bottle on March 2, 1982, when he caught a live ocelot in a padded leg-hold trap. Over the next two years, he captured 11 more in box traps baited with chickens.

While he’d proven that ocelots persisted, however, he didn’t know how many survived, nor their range. “It was this big black hole of information,” recalled Tewes, Scognamillo’s colleague at Texas A&M.

The black hole posed a particular challenge for the Texas Department of Transportation. Every time the state upgraded a road in ocelot country, it was bound by the Endangered Species Act to protect the cats. Unfortunately, nobody knew where ocelot country was. Alleged sightings and old roadkill records suggested that their range might extend 150 miles north of the refuge. Erring on the safe side, TxDOT began including wildlife crossings on practically every road reconstruction in the region. In the 1990s and 2000s, it built 33 ocelot underpasses.

This was a sound strategy, but for one detail: None of these early crossings was anywhere near a flesh-and-blood ocelot. As Tewes affixed more ocelots with tracking collars, he discovered that their range was smaller than he’d thought. Texas’s crossings might be helping raccoons and opossums, but they weren’t doing anything for their target species. Between 1983 and 2002, Tewes and his colleagues tracked 80 ocelots, more than a third of whom were killed by cars. One collision hotspot, where eight ocelots died over several years, lay more than 15 miles from the nearest underpass. The irony was cruel: Texas had built plenty of crossings where ocelots didn’t need them, and none where they did.

Gradually, that began to change – thanks in part to the brutal guidance provided by roadkill itself. In 2017, TxDOT completed a dozen crossings beneath FM 106, the road that runs through Laguna Atascosa’s heart, and Highway 100, where ocelots often died as they tried to disperse south from the refuge. Altogether, the new underpasses cost $8 million. The agency later added more passages along FM 1847, which flanks the refuge to the west. Ocelot habitat and ocelot crossings had finally begun to overlap.

Despite that progress, the region’s roads remain perilous. Although the state better understands where to situate crossings, it tends to install them only in combination with other maintenance or road upgrades – “partly because they are less expensive when carried out as part of a construction project,” a TxDOT spokesperson told me in an email. This cost-conscious approach means that many roads remain treacherous, including one highway that cleaves ocelot populations on private ranches and prevents the cats from mixing.

“Crossings there would promote landscape and demographic connectivity,” Tewes told me. “It’s a shame we have to wait for road modifications to do it.”

The day after my visit to Laguna Atascosa, I climbed into a Ford F-250 pickup with Thomas Yamashita to tour the highways fragmenting ocelot country. Yamashita was a PhD candidate in the same research group as Scognamillo and Tewes, and had the grisliest assignment: to survey roadkill along fifty miles of U.S. 77, a highway being upgraded into a massive interstate. The road’s facelift will include 10 new crossings, and Yamashita was tasked with pre-construction monitoring. You can’t tell whether underpasses are saving animals unless you know how many are dying in the first place.

The research was straightforward, albeit gruesome. We cruised the highway at 55 miles per hour, stopping to note crushed bobcats, barn owls, deer, opossums, and, surreally, nilgai, a huge Asian antelope introduced for hunters and since gone feral. (We didn’t find any ocelots, though we didn’t expect to: They’re so rare that, in more than a year of weekly surveys, Yamashita had only seen one.) We paused at each carcass to record species, location, and other data; then an undergraduate dashed through traffic to mark the body with orange spray paint so that it wouldn’t be counted in future surveys. Yamashita had once been interrogated at a Border Patrol checkpoint, where he informed the agent he was studying roadkill. The agent’s face lit up. “Oh,” he said, “you’re the ones painting all the dead animals!”

As well as tallying roadkill, Yamashita took me to visit some of TxDOT’s newer wildlife crossings. All of the underpasses adhered to the same basic principles – a passage beneath a road, flanked by fencing – though the design details varied. Some crossings were so capacious you could have driven a Hummer through, others so low and narrow that even a toddler would’ve had to crawl. Some were shrouded by thornscrub, others lacked cover; some were floored in dirt, others had muddy streams coursing through them. Several boasted elevated concrete shelves, which allowed animals like bobcats to walk through without wetting their paws.

Yamashita had tallied roadkill around many of these passages since their installation, and, in general, they worked. “After about a year, mortalities go way down,” he said. “Animals learn to use these crossing structures. It just takes time.”

Yet the patchwork nature of these lands posed challenges. For one thing, the preponderance of private property along the roadside made it difficult to keep animals off the highway: every driveway represented a gap in the fence that ocelots and other creatures could theoretically exploit. Even worse, ill-advised land management rendered some passages ineffective. At one site Yamashita showed me, TxDOT had installed an underpass where a drainage ditch intersected a road. The dense brush that lined the ditch should have guided animals to the crossing like a trail of bread crumbs, but the local flood control district, perhaps fearing that vegetation would clog the ditch during a storm, had demolished the scrub. Only a few sad brush piles remained, and the underpass was left stranded in an open field.

Even if an ocelot somehow discovered this underpass, would he walk through it? OM 331, and the several cats who’d followed him, had proven that some ocelots used some wildlife crossings, some of the time – but ocelots had been known to shun passages, too. After all, Yamashita pointed out, underpasses and culverts were “just so unnatural”: echoey, concrete-lined, bereft of plants.

Animals do acclimate to these eerie structures over time; in Wyoming, for example, research has shown that migrating herds of mule deer trot through underpasses more readily every year. But while deer encounter the same underpasses repeatedly on their migration routes and teach their fawns to use them, a young ocelot dispersing from the refuge might only stumble upon a crossing once, and never have the chance to habituate to it. In 2019 cameras had recorded an ocelot approaching a crossing on Highway 100, turning away, and slipping beneath a roadside gate onto the highway – never to be seen again.

If ocelots can take comfort in anything, it’s that they’re not alone: They share their vulnerability to roads with nearly all wild cats. Like most carnivores, felines roam large territories that overlap highways, and their naturally low numbers and slow reproductive rates mean that even a few collisions can spell doom. Motorists are responsible for more than 60 percent of Iberian lynx deaths in eastern Spain and, in 2021, more than three-quarters of Florida panther deaths. When a car killed a pregnant Asiatic cheetah named Majrad in Iran this March, conservationists declared it “one of the final nails in the coffin” for her disappearing species.

Against this grim backdrop, wildlife crossings offer reason for optimism. Beginning in the 1980s, the state of Florida installed 37 underpasses and 40 miles of fencing along Alligator Alley, an 80-mile stretch of federal highway that’s notorious for panther roadkill. Cat collisions virtually ceased, and researchers declared that the project had “facilitat(ed) panther population expansion.” Today wild cats are the impetus for the largest critter overpass in the country: the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a bridge, slated for completion in 2025, that will vault over U.S. 101 in California and connect inbred cougars with genetic reinforcements.

“Wildlife crossings are in the public consciousness in a way they never were before,” Beth Pratt, the National Wildlife Federation’s regional executive director who led the campaign to build the overpass, told me. “There should be a future where these are just part of transportation budgets everywhere.”

There’s no doubt that wildlife crossings are vital. But my time in Texas was also a reminder that they aren’t enough. Less than one percent of South Texas supports ocelot habitat; even if a cat did manage to cross beneath Highway 100, he’d find himself lost in a maze of development, sorghum fields, and still more roads. Without adequate land protection and restoration, wildlife crossings can become bridges to nowhere.

Given these immense hurdles, I couldn’t help but wonder: Does it matter whether an ocelot uses an underpass if it merely delays his death? Hilary Swarts, the refuge’s former biologist, countered my skepticism. “It’s not a silver bullet solution, but every action you take that adds some measure of safety or protection counts,” Swarts said. Take Ocelot 341, a dispersing male who slunk through an underpass only to be killed by a car eight months later. Although the crossing hadn’t permanently saved 341, it may have protected him long enough to breed.

“He might have snuck back into the refuge and passed on some of his genetic material in those eight months,” Swarts said. “That wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”

As perilous as South Texas remains, it’s not for lack of conservation effort. Over the past two decades the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and environmental groups have purchased more than 100,000 acres of land in hopes of expanding core ocelot habitat and forming corridors between isolated cats – even, perhaps, linking American ocelots with their cousins in Tamaulipas, Mexico, more than fifty miles away. Whether it’s possible to connect such far-flung populations is a matter of debate; Tewes has opined that we’re better off helping ocelots “shelter in place” on the refuge than facilitating their dispersal into the dangerous lands beyond. Either way, the cats won’t survive without more space – and a lot of it.

One afternoon, I toured Laguna Atascosa with Sergio Vasquez, the refuge’s deputy refuge manager. We stopped first at a sunbaked swath of crop furrows: a one-time sorghum farm of about 3,600 acres that the Fish & Wildlife Service bought in January 2020. Thousands of white plastic tubes picketed the field, each a sleeve that protected a young native tree or shrub – the slender origins of a new thornscrub patch. In the hazy distance, hunched workers planted ebony and prickly ash, a forest being made before our eyes.

We drove a quarter-mile to another erstwhile farmsite where restoration was further along. Waist-high lope bush, Mexican olive, Texas sage, and dozens of other species thrust their arms above the field; orange granjeño berries beckoned fruit-eating birds whose droppings would propagate seeds faster and cheaper than human hands could. Vasquez, who’d grown up hunting on the refuge, inhaled through his nose. “Nothing smells like this place,” he sighed. “That palo verde that’s blooming? Ah, so good.”

I asked Vasquez how long it would take for this site to support ocelots. “As soon as we get something that’s not bare ground, somebody’s going to use it,” he said. Just because ocelots dispersed through these sparse, early-stage plantings, however, didn’t mean that they could live here full-time. It would take years, if not decades, for this forest to mature. “Everyone wants to plant trees, walk away, and say, where are the ocelots?” Vasquez said. Like a true Texan, he compared restoration to barbecue: You couldn’t rush perfection. “Let it do its thing, slow and low, like a big juicy brisket.”

But ocelots may not be able to wait. The landscape around the refuge is among Texas’s fastest-growing regions: Its human population is predicted to double to 3 million by 2050, auguring more houses, more businesses, more cars. A proposed causeway to South Padre Island may someday funnel thousands of vehicles past the refuge daily; gas export terminals servicing Texas’s fracking boom could likewise beckon more traffic into ocelot country. Roads are even being built to accommodate the SpaceX personnel flocking to the company’s Brownsville launch site.

As far as anyone knows, OM 331 – the feline pioneer who first slunk through a crossing in 2020 – hasn’t had to navigate this explosive development. After crossing FM-106, he likely carved out his own territory on the refuge, where he may remain to this day: middle-aged, now, perhaps with a few scars and progeny of his own. As young males like him strike out on their own, it’s imperative that they, too, find habitat where they can thrive. Wildlife crossings may help ocelots traverse highways, but it would be even better to engineer a landscape so large and intact they never have to cross roads at all.

With all the terrible news on climate change, it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening with particular species. So, in case you missed it, a new report has bad news for Earth’s five surviving species of rhino.

Poaching for rhino horn continues to threaten populations of rhino in Africa, and the two smallest and most endangered species of rhino – the Sumatran rhino and the Javan rhino – tread ever closer to being unable to sustain themselves in the wild, due to habitat loss and low population sizes.

While we should never become desensitised to wildlife crime, environmental destruction and species extinctions, there is also some remarkable news. Conservation charity African Parks recently bought the largest private collection of rhino in the world: the Platinum Rhino farm at Klerksdorp, near Johannesburg in South Africa, previously owned by South African businessman John Hume.

African Parks plans to release the total Platinum Rhino ranch population, currently 2,000 rhino (amounting to roughly 15% of the global white rhino population), into the wild across Africa over the next ten years. That is good news. As an ecologist, I don’t see the point in conserving a wild species to keep in captivity. Wildlife belongs in the wild.

Hume’s plan to buy up and breed farmed rhino might have allowed him to sell horns for a profit once legal international trade was permitted. But that didn’t happen.

The international ban on trading rhino horn, enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), has held firm, despite lobbying by Hume and others. These critics were joined by some conservationists who believe that the best or only way to save rhino is by legalising the trade in their horns. The logic here is that legalisation would flood the market with legal rhino horn, devaluing illegal horns and slashing the profits of poachers and wildlife traffickers. With that, the incentive to kill rhino would shrink.

Hume continued to expand his private rhino farm and used his increasing rhino population as leverage in his calls for legalisation. But with the ban on international trade intact, Hume seems to have ran out of patience. The Platinum Rhino collection was put up for online auction in April 2023 at a starting price of US$10 million (£8.1 million). It failed to attract bids.

That may reflect the problem that rhino face: if people can’t make money out of rhino, nobody is going to want to pay to look after them. But it also highlights a problem driven by farming wildlife for profit, otherwise known as game ranching: if the profits fall, what happens to the animals?

Into the wild

After its failure to sell at auction, the largest private collection of rhino in the world was bought by African Parks. But the charity’s plan to rewild these rhino will not be easy.

A number of years ago I was involved in what was, at the time, the largest private translocation of rhino. The team I worked with moved tens of rhino; the African Parks mission is a lot bigger.

African Parks manages an area of 20 million hectares spread across 22 national parks and protected areas over 12 countries. They will contain suitable savanna grassland for releasing the rhino and the charity has already reintroduced rhino to parks in Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi.

Conservation scientists recently said there is “a clear need to scale up rewilding initiatives”. It doesn’t get much bigger than reintroducing thousands of rhino across Africa. Rhino can play a key role in restoring the ecosystems into which they are placed, greatly influencing a network of species around them and healing ecological wounds incurred via people.

This is the nature of rewilding: restoring the linkages that make up ecosystems. Restored megafauna (large herbivorous mammals, in this case) can also help address climate change by enhancing how much habitats naturally store carbon, through dispersing seeds and enriching the soil.

Restoring megafauna is tricky, and in a recent scientific paper conservationists argued for changes in policy to support it. They suggest “a transition from farming to wildlife ranching, combined with ambitious breeding programs for keystone megafauna”. The Platinum Rhino population may well turn out to be a flagship in showing that such an approach is achievable.

Where will the rhino go? Will they be released into areas where rhino are locally extinct, or supplement existing populations? Can they be used to fulfil the role vacated by the functionally extinct northern white rhino (subspecies)?

Time will tell. In the meantime, the farmed rhino need to be prepared to cope with the stress of translocation and release, and for a wild life. They need to be toughened, to find and process food from the natural environments in which they will be placed. They will need to tolerate the challenges of their new environments, such as disease, parasites and predators.

The most dangerous predator of rhino remains the human species. The conundrum of how to stop or even simply reduce the loss of free-living rhino to poachers remains. The soon-to-be-released rhino will have to deal with this – with traditional anti-poaching conservation support. Alongside that, demand reduction efforts must continue in order to bring down the desire for rhino horn.

Top header image: Matthew Rogers, Flickr

Jason Gilchrist, Lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

There are several parallel projects running across the world to save the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum), one of Africa’s captivating and iconic wildlife species. With the death of last male in 2018 and with only two females alive, the species is functionally extinct.

The most famous of these projects is an international research consortium called BioRescue. It was founded in 2019 by a team of scientists and conservationists under the leadership of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo & Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany.

In one of its research lines, the BioRescue team collects mature eggs – scientifically called oocytes – from one of the only two northern white females. They reside in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a privately run wildlife sanctuary. These eggs will be fertilised with frozen sperm that were collected from several northern white male rhinos before their death.

The two remaining females, Najin and Fatu, are not capable of delivering offspring anymore. Najin’s back legs are too weak to carry a pregnancy and Fatu has problems with her uterus. Therefore, the resulting embryos from the fertilised eggs will be transferred into surrogate mothers.

The most suitable surrogate mother would be a southern white rhino as it is the closest related species. But, placing a northern white rhino embryo in a southern white female rhino isn’t an easy task. However, there was promising news in May 2023. Next to the addition of five more northern white embryos – which brings the total to 29 – two wild southern white rhinos were identified as suitable surrogates, as they can still get pregnant and are able to carry the pregnancy through.

The goal of producing a new northern white rhino calf now seems more realistic than ever before.

Sometimes people question the funding and effort spent on one species, but the science behind the rhinoceros story is much bigger. Any species going extinct has huge consequences on the ecosystem, and people’s survival depends on resources provided by this same ecosystem. As a recognisable, impressive and majestic animal, rhinos certainly have a role as a flagship of conservation efforts.

Further, joint efforts on one species can provide scientific knowledge that allows for a multi-species conservation approach. These techniques would not only save the northern white rhinoceros, but also other rhino species, related species with a common ancestor, and all other creatures in need.

Different approaches

Despite the great scientific strides made in efforts to save the northern white rhino, the success rate of embryo transplantation followed by pregnancy to term is extremely low. Parallel initiatives focusing on different conservation approaches are indispensable to ensure the future of this species.

While BioRescue is collecting matured eggs after hormonal stimulation, the Rhino Fertility Project at the University of Oxford in the UK is focusing on growing follicles, which are structures found in the ovary containing an immature egg surrounded by a few layers of supporting cells. These supporting cells provide signals and components essential for the development of the eggs. The idea is to make use of the much greater potential of the ovary by collecting the very small follicles and growing them all in a petridish in the lab.

This would bypass atresia, which is the degradation of follicles that occurs during a natural hormonal cycle. As member of this project, one of us, Ruth Appeltant, was hopeful that this method had the potential to quickly provide a vast number of in vitro-grown oocytes, or mature eggs.

Unfortunately, it became clear that the ovarian tissue of older rhinoceroses contained extremely few to no oocytes. These eggs were needed as the starting material for the project. Without eggs, there is nothing to grow. Ongoing efforts are now looking to establish ways to localise and process the few remaining follicles in old ovarian tissue.

This bottleneck led us to the area of stem cell technologies. At the Gamete Research Centre of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, our group is aiming to produce eggs outside the body from stem cells. These could be used to conserve endangered species like the rhinoceros.

The BioRescue project and a research group at the San Diego Zoo in the US are also aiming to produce artificial eggs from body cells present in tissues.

The common thread is turning cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, which are immature cells generated from mature cells, and that can in turn differentiate into eggs. In fact, this process can transform a skin cell into an egg. The procedure has so far been completed successfully in mice and could already provide a kind of precursor to oocytes in the northern white rhino.

The collection of oocytes is a really tricky process due to the technical difficulties in reaching the site of the ovaries in living animals. Advanced artificial reproductive techniques using body cells, such as skin cells, introduce a spectrum of new possibilities. Most biological samples stored to date consist of small skin samples, but not of oocytes.

A downside to this approach is the fact that scientists first need to succeed in producing stem cells in the species of interest.

At the University of Antwerp’s Gamete Research Centre, we’re not only interested in developing stem cell technologies based on induced pluripotent stem cells, but are currently establishing the in vitro gametogenesis – or “in vitro oocyte-creation” technique – based on stem cells present in the ovary. Due to a scarcity of tissues from endangered species, we are using the pig as a large animal model. This will give us more in-depth knowledge on how to approach egg creation from stem cells already present in the animal, termed endogenous stem cells.

What next?

When we do not have eggs, let’s create them. When we have stem cells, let’s use them. Researchers now know that samples of the northern white rhino individuals currently stored in biobanks have enough genetic variability to establish a viable and sustainable population.

A decade ago, we would have never imagined eggs could be produced from other cells. This is becoming a reality that gives us hope, motivation and energy to save the northern white rhino.

Ruth Appeltant, Assistant research professor, University of Antwerp and Rita L. Sousa, PhD Candidate, University of Antwerp

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rivers have been the lifeblood of human civilization throughout history, and yet we know surprisingly little about what lives in many of them – including the giant creatures that prowl their depths.

While we know the biggest animal in the ocean is the blue whale and the largest marine fish is the whale shark, the identity of the world’s largest freshwater fish species long remained a mystery.

Until 2022, that is, when fishers in Cambodia caught a giant freshwater stingray in the remote reaches of the Mekong River.

Weighing an astounding 661 pounds, the stingray surpassed by 15 pounds a giant catfish caught in Thailand in 2005 that had previously been considered the unofficial record holder.

The discovery marked a milestone in fish biologist Zeb Hogan’s more than two-decade quest to study and protect giant freshwater fish. As a group, these megafish are among the most endangered animals on the planet.

Before releasing the female ray back into the river, Hogan’s research team put an acoustic tracker on her. She has been sending back clues about stingrays’ elusive behavior ever since.

Colossal catfish and gargantuan gars

In a new book, “Chasing Giants: In Search of the World’s Largest Freshwater Fish,” Hogan and I tell the troubling story of the 30 or so fish species that live exclusively in rivers and lakes and can grow to more than 200 pounds or at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) long.

Found on all continents except Antarctica, they are a wonderfully weird bunch of creatures, from colossal catfish and carp to gargantuan gars.

But freshwater vertebrate populations have declined over the past five decades at twice the rate experienced by species within terrestrial or marine ecosystems. Megafish numbers in particular fell by a shocking 94%, according to one study of more than 200 large freshwater species.

One of the largest species, the Chinese paddlefish, is believed to have gone extinct sometime in the 2000s. “This is a fish that had been on Earth for more than 100 million years before disappearing in a flash,” says Hogan, who used to host National Geographic’s “Monster Fish” television show and now leads a University of Nevada, Reno, research project I am involved with called Wonders of the Mekong, supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The importance of very large fish to freshwater ecosystems has been woefully understudied. Many giant freshwater fish are apex predators that can have profound effects on the ecosystems in which they live by keeping their prey populations in check and maintaining biodiversity.

What’s killing off the megafish

The decline of giant freshwater fish is due to human impacts, such as overfishing, dam building and climate change.

Large fish are disproportionately targeted by fishing. Since many of these species are slow to mature, they may never reach the age to reproduce. Dam building is another major threat, because large fish often need to make long migrations to complete their life cycles, and a new dam can block their migration paths.

In the Mekong, where more giant fish species are found than in any other river, climate change is causing more severe droughts and disrupting the monsoon seasons that govern the river’s essential flood regime.

There are signs that interest in freshwater species is gaining momentum, including increasing calls to explicitly include freshwater ecosystems in the 30x30 initiative, a global effort to set aside 30% of land and sea area for conservation by 2030. So far, however, conservation efforts to protect endangered giant freshwater fish species are mostly regional.

Alligator gars and sturgeon make a comeback

Although the outlook for most giant fish remains grim, some species, like the air-breathing arapaima in South America, may be bucking the trend.

The arapaima, a torpedo-shaped giant that can grow to lengths of more than 12 feet, has long been overharvested by fishers in the Amazon, where it’s known as the Amazonian cod. But stricter fishing regulations introduced by Indigenous communities appear to have led to populations’ rebounding in many places.

In the United States, the alligator gar, another air-breathing megafish, was once largely considered a “trash fish” thought to devour game fish, so it was systematically exterminated from much of its southern range. But then scientists began to study the species and found it was an important contributor to ecosystem functions. Today, alligator gar populations have bounced back in rivers like the Trinity in Texas.

A similar case involves the lake sturgeon, one of the few true freshwater sturgeons, whose populations in Wisconsin have benefited from long-term conservation efforts and science-driven management that includes strictly regulated seasonal recreational fishing.

Protecting the giants of the Mekong

Back in Cambodia, our Wonders of the Mekong project is raising public awareness about the plight of the megafish, and we are working closely with local fishers to encourage them to protect threatened species.

In an example of those efforts’ paying off, fishers in early 2023 caught a Mekong giant catfish weighing more than 200 pounds. Instead of killing it and selling the meat for a sizable profit, the fishers decided to release the fish in an elaborate ceremony in which it was sprinkled with flowers before it was let go.

In recent months, our project has also reintroduced into the Mekong rare giant catfish that were captured as young fish and raised in Cambodia, and giant barb, another critically endangered megafish species that historically has grown to 600 pounds.

While giant freshwater stingray numbers have plummeted in other parts of its native Southeast Asian range, the population appears to be relatively robust in the upper stretches of the Mekong River in Cambodia where the record ray was discovered. Data collected from that female, and reported in a study I co-authored, shows it is staying in much the same location, leading researchers to believe the area could be an important refuge for the stingrays and possibly other megafish.

Long-standing plans by the Cambodian government to build two large dams on this section of the river appear to have been scrapped, at least for now. At the end of 2022, the government instead put forth a proposal to turn the biodiverse stretch of the river, which is also home to a critically endangered population of Irrawaddy river dolphins, into a UNESCO World Heritage site.

While the record stingray is big, it might not be the largest of this species of ray in the Mekong. Local fishers speak of rays growing up to 200 pounds heavier.

It’s also possible the giant stingray is not the largest freshwater fish species. Research on the arapaima, for example, suggests it could grow as big, or even bigger, in places like Guyana. But, as Hogan says, “It’s not about finding the biggest fish. It’s about learning more about these amazing creatures to figure out how to better protect them.”

Stefan Lovgren, Research Scientist in River Ecosystems, University of Nevada, Reno

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Humans rely on the ocean for many things, including food, jobs, recreation and stabilization of Earth’s climate. But although ocean resources may seem infinite, human impacts like pollution, overfishing and climate change are creating what United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called an “ocean emergency.” Climate change is pushing ocean temperatures to record levels, many fisheries are overharvested, and plastic waste is accumulating in the deep sea.

These five articles from The Conversation’s archive spotlight urgent challenges for ocean conservation, and describe what researchers are doing to devise effective responses.

A devastating invasion is expanding

Invasive lionfish are aggressive predators, native to the Indo-Pacific Ocean, that feed on smaller reef fish. They have caused heavy damage in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico since they first appeared in the Atlantic in 1985. Now, they’ve spread south to Brazil, which has many rare endemic fish species and is behind the curve in responding.

“As one of many Brazilian scientists who warned repeatedly about a potential lionfish invasion over the past decade, I’m disheartened that my country missed the window to take early action,” wrote Charles Darwin University marine scientist Osmar J. Luiz. “Now, however, marine researchers and local communities are stepping up.”

One important control strategy was to create an interactive dashboard where anyone can report lionfish sightings. Other steps are likely to include environmental education, organized culls and genetic research to identify distinct lionfish populations and see where they’re moving. With a similar lionfish invasion underway in the Mediterranean, there’s urgent need for effective responses.

Mining the seabed poses ecological risks

One of the ocean’s potentially most valuable resources hasn’t been tapped yet – but that could be about to change.

Scattered across large zones of the ocean floor, manganese nodules – lumps that look like cobblestones – contain rich deposits of nickel, copper, cobalt and other metals that are newly in demand for manufacturing batteries and renewable energy components.

“A fierce debate is now playing out as a Canadian company makes plans to launch the first commercial deep sea mining operation in the Pacific Ocean,” Indiana University scholars Scott Shackelford, Christiana Ochoa, David Bosco and Kerry Krutilla warned.

Less than 10% of the deep seabed has been mapped thoroughly, and most life forms discovered there have never been seen before. Collecting materials from the ocean floor could harm these species – for example, by burying them in sediments. “We believe it would be wise to better understand this existing, fragile ecosystem better before rushing to mine it,” the authors concluded.

What does seabed mining sound like?

According to new research, a single deep-sea mining site could produce noise extending hundreds of kilometers—impacting marine life far beyond the mine's borders.https://t.co/Rts88scIin

— Pew Environment (@pewenvironment) July 7, 2022

Illegal fishing is common and hard to detect

Illegal fishing – taking too many fish, or harvesting threatened species – causes economic losses estimated at US$10 billion to $25 billion annually. It also has been linked to human rights violations, such as forced labor and human trafficking. But it’s easy to conduct these activities out of sight on the high seas.

By looking at when and where fishing boats turned off their location transponders at sea, academic and nongovernment researchers showed that these silences can be an important signal.

“Vessels frequently went dark on the high-seas edge of exclusive economic zone boundaries, which can obscure illegal fishing in unauthorized locations,” wrote Heather Welch, a researcher in ecosystem dynamics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Ships may also disable their transponders to avoid pirates or avoid drawing competitors to rich fishing sites, so making it illegal to turn their signals off isn’t a practical strategy. But more analysis of where boats go dark could help governments target inspections and patrols, reducing crimes at sea.

Scientists are designing an ‘internet of the ocean’

Just as there are unnumbered life forms in the ocean yet to be discovered, there also are many unanswered questions about its physical processes. For example, scientists know that the ocean pulls carbon from the atmosphere and transfers it to deep waters, where it can remain stored for long periods. But they don’t know how biological and chemical shifts affect this carbon cycling process.

Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts are designing a monitoring system called the Ocean Vital Signs Network that could make it possible to test strategies for storing more carbon in the ocean and tracking how well they work. They envision “a large network of moorings and sensors that provides 4D eyes on the oceans – the fourth dimension being time – that are always on, always connected to monitor these carbon cycling processes and ocean health,” wrote WHOI director Peter de Menocal, a marine geologist and paleoclimatologist.

The network would include intelligent gliders and autonomous vehicles that could collect data and then dock, repower and upload it. It also would use sensors and acoustic transceivers to monitor dark, hidden reaches of the ocean where carbon is stored. “This network makes observation possible for making decisions that will affect future generations,” de Menocal wrote.

Ocean plastic waste has a message for humans

Over the past several decades, plastic pollution has become one of the world’s more widespread environmental crises. Every year, millions of tons of plastic trash end up in the ocean, killing sea creatures, smothering ecosystems and threatening human health.

Georgia State University art professor Pam Longobardi grew up in New Jersey, where her father brought home plastic trinkets from his job at the chemical company Union Carbide. Today, Longobardi collects plastic waste from shorelines around the world and sculpts it into large-scale installations that are both eye-catching and alarming.

“I see plastic as a zombie material that haunts the ocean,” Longobardi wrote. “I am interested in ocean plastic in particular because of what it reveals about us as humans in a global culture, and about the ocean as a cultural space and a giant dynamic engine of life and change. Because ocean plastic visibly shows nature’s attempts to reabsorb and regurgitate it, it has profound stories to tell.”

Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Jennifer Weeks, Senior Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Photographs by Anton Sorokin | Story by Emily Sohn

Anton Sorokin was hiking in the hills near his home in Berkeley California when he came across a pond that was packed full of newts. For a couple of delightful hours, he watched the amphibians swim to the surface for a breath and then plunge underwater again. With a background in herpetology and wildlife photography, Sorokin took some pictures without any particular project in mind. He thought to himself, “Oh, what a great find!”

It was April 2020 and in the ensuing months, Sorokin occasionally drove the 30 minutes from his house to Briones Regional Park, then walked 45 minutes to the pond to see what was happening with the newts. As the season grew warmer, the pond shrank—a typical pattern during the hot, dry summers in this region of California. From his knowledge of the amphibians, Sorokin expected that the water would evaporate eventually and that the newts would strike out for wetter pastures, or else hunker down underground, where some moisture might linger.

By late July, however, the water in the pond turned from muddy brown to vibrant green. Sorokin noticed hundreds of newts sitting at the edge of the water, their heads poking out, seemingly deprived of oxygen by mats of algae. Normally, they absorb oxygen through their skin while swimming underwater, surfacing only occasionally for air, so this was weird.

Concerned, Sorokin returned frequently, sometimes several times a week. In a summer of wildfires and record-setting heatwaves around the area, he watched the pond turn into a field of muddy cracks. Many newts shriveled up and died. When some rain finally came and moistened the mud in November, he watched some survivors hoist themselves out of the cracks and trundle past desiccated carcasses. The next day, all the living newts were nowhere to be seen.

Like many animals, California’s newts are facing new challenges because of climate change, according to growing evidence. Although the animals evolved to deal with drought by delaying reproduction when conditions were extreme, the region has become drier for longer than in the past. These extended droughts and related wildfires are putting an unprecedented level of strain on the amphibians, says Lee Kats, an animal ecologist and conservation biologist who studies newts at Pepperdine University in Los Angeles.

In recent years, researchers have begun to document deteriorating health in the animals, echoing a decline seen in amphibian populations worldwide. Projections suggest that things will get worse, emphasizing the need to rally around these often-overlooked animals and to help preserve their habitat. “For newts, a strategy that has worked for thousands and thousands of years is not going to work in this climate alteration that we're experiencing,” Kats says. “And that's just an incredible tragedy.”

After briefly considering whether he could bring buckets of water to the sickly newts, Sorokin decided the best way for him to help was to document what was happening. He kept taking pictures, hoping to draw attention to the challenges facing newts and other creatures in similar circumstances as a result of climate change. “I don't like seeing animals in a situation where there's no escape for them and where they're clearly in trouble,” he says. “It's not just in far-off exotic locations that this sort of thing is happening. It's happening all around us. And the newts are one example.”

To those who know and admire it, the newt is many things: a marvel of longevity; a paragon of resiliency; a deadly vessel of poison; a model organism for regenerative medicine; a golden-eyed charmer of quiet charisma. Though newts share a flat, slithery body shape with lizards, they are amphibians (a type of salamander), not reptiles. They live an entirely different kind of life. Instead of the lizard’s flighty speed, newts move slowly and deliberately.

Unlike lizards, newts can lose a limb, heart muscle, or even the lens of an eye, and grow it back—a miraculous power that has drawn the attention of scientists working to find better ways of repairing damaged organs in humans. With lives that can last for decades, newts are in no rush, Kats says. They’re chill and approachable, but armed with deadly toxins; they’re also brave, often moving almost casually around much larger creatures. They’re carnivores who live without fear. Their appeal is more subtle than the burly attraction of a polar bear or mountain lion. And that’s what makes them so endearing to those who study them. “It's the charisma that comes with knowledge,” says Kats, who knows them as well as anyone. “I may be too passionate about this animal, but I love it.”

Out of 100 or so newt species around the world, four live in California. Three of them live in the Bay Area. The California newt (Taricha torosa), the kind that Sorokin observed on his hikes, has a range that extends to Southern California, where in the early 1990s, Kats started tagging them in a first-of-its-kind project. He wanted to gather basic information about the animals, so he captured a few dozen, anesthetized them, and implanted rice-sized transponders—like the ones veterinarians use to identify pets—into their abdomens. Over time, the number of tagged newts has grown, allowing Kats and colleagues to recapture, identify, and take measurements of individuals over time.

The results have provided key insights into the lives of newts, their extraordinary abilities, and also their vulnerabilities. Kats found that California newts reappeared around 15 meters of their last sighting, year after year, suggesting that they might not leave their habitats, even if the quality of that environment declines. The tags also revealed extremely long lives. Some of the newts with Kats’s original tags from the 1990s still appear in surveys, and they were already adults when he marked them. It’s not unusual, he says, for newts to live into their 30s and possibly even 40s—a remarkably long life expectancy compared to other amphibians. Many tree frogs live for only three to five years in the wild.

Over millennia, newts developed strategies for surviving California’s notoriously variable weather, and a long lifespan was part of the deal, says Samuel Sweet, a herpetologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The animals, which spend most of their time on land, rely on streams or ponds for mating and laying eggs. Historically, when water dried up during periodic droughts, they could defer the energy-demanding task of reproduction for a few years. And even when the conditions were unusually dry, they could often still find water. Kats remembers how, 30 years ago, streams in southern California continued to flow even during particularly dry periods. While longer droughts were already a concern then, he thought those perennial streams would help the newts persevere.

Starting around 2013, however, streams that seemed like they would flow forever started to dry up in the springtime for what Kats thinks may be the first time in recorded history. By then, he was collaborating in the tagging work with Gary Bucciarelli, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose interests include the neurotoxins that newts harbor in their skin and how these chemicals affect other animals in the ecosystem. (Those toxins are so powerful they killed a 29-year-old man in 1979 after he swallowed an Oregon newt on a dare while under the influence of whiskey, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.)

The scientists had expanded the newt research from L.A.’s Santa Monica mountains south to Orange County and San Diego, east to the San Gabriel mountains, and north to the Bay Area, Mendocino County, and the Sierra Foothills. As the water dried up around L.A., researchers started detecting fewer tagged newts, Bucciarelli says. By the end of 2016, many of the newts that did come back to their streams were looking scrawny and unwell. “You could see their ribs, vertebra, the pelvic girdle,” Bucciarelli says. “Things that you should not see in a healthy population.”

To figure out what was going on, the researchers looked to their large and long-term data set, where they found that what they were seeing was more than a fluke. Between 2008 and 2016, they found a nearly 20 percent decline in a measure of body condition among California newts across 30 breeding sites in Southern California. That period of drastic deterioration in size was more rapid than other studies have documented in any other amphibian species, Bucciarelli says. It also coincided with record-setting high temperatures and what is thought to be the most severe drought in California in 1,200 years.

In northern California, where climate records didn’t show the same extremes, newts appear to have retained their body condition during the same period. But with modeling, the team predicted droughts and related declines would soon catch up to newts and other amphibians in the Bay Area and other parts of Northern California. Newts once inhabited 10 streams in the mountains above San Diego, Sweet says. Now they occupy only three of those streams. In Orange County, he estimates half the newt streams that existed in the 1960s are gone because of drought and development. “What we're seeing in L.A. and San Diego counties, those are going to be the conditions sometime in the not-too-distant future in San Luis Obispo County and Monterey County,” he says.

California newts in Southern California are already classified as a species of special concern by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, an acknowledgment of their vulnerability, although they are not yet listed as threatened or endangered. As environmental stress becomes relentless, experts worry it may be hard for them to hang on. “These newts down here have adapted to deal with drought; that's part of our climate here in Southern California landscapes,” Bucciarelli says. “But what they haven't evolved to deal with is drought simultaneously combined with record warming temperatures, and that's a result of climate change. Now, a double threat is occurring.”

By the time Sorokin was visiting his newt pond in Berkeley in 2020, Covid-19 had upended life for humans, and California’s newts appeared to be experiencing a pandemic of their own. In addition to newts with protruding hip bones and lack of fat stored on their bodies that Kats and Bucciarelli noted, researchers started finding newts with tail lesions so severe that muscle and skin had worn away to expose the tips of their tail bones. Some animals had clouded eyeballs that looked like cataracts. The animals also acted strangely, whirling around in circles. It was the first major disease in Southern California newts in 30 years, Kats says. 


Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey euthanized an emaciated newt to investigate what had sickened it. The researchers found numerous issues, they wrote in a September 2021 report, including lungworms, inflammation in the inner ears, and parasites in its intestinal tract. Yet no single cause could explain all the symptoms. Kats suspects that extended dry spells and high temperatures may have weakened the amphibians’ immune systems, making them more vulnerable to several ordinary infections. “I’m absolutely convinced,” he says, “that the conditions they were experiencing contributed to this major disease outbreak.”

Strange illnesses and dry stream beds aren’t the only challenges facing newts. Invasive crayfish, somehow unfazed by the newts’ toxins, have been spreading in California lakes and decimating newt populations by feeding on egg masses and larvae. Blooms of cyanobacteria may be another problem. These photosynthetic microorganisms, which produce a variety of toxins of their own, have been proliferating in lakes around the world, a trend linked to warming temperatures, among other factors. In the first assessment of two Southern California lakes, published in 2021, a group of researchers from several universities and government agencies found the highest concentrations ever recorded in the region of three cyanotoxins, which have been linked to health issues in people and wildlife, including amphibians. Sorokin suspects that a cyanobacteria bloom explains the greening of that pond near his Berkeley home.

Traffic is another concern. Generally unconcerned with predators because of their poisonous skin, newts move slowly, as if they don’t have a care in the world, Kats says. After spending much of their lives in the woods and waiting on average five years, sometimes longer, to become sexually mature, they often must cross busy roads to get to streams for mating. Drivers don’t usually see them—or else they don’t stop. One of Sweet’s graduate students visited a study site in San Luis Obispo one day after it rained and counted more than 100 road-killed newts. “The average newt there might be 25 or 30 years old,” Sweet says. “They get all ready to breed: ‘I’m going to walk down to the creek and lay my eggs for the first time tonight.’ Squish. They get run over 10 minutes before they do that.”

Habitat fragmentation makes it harder now than in the past for newts to cope with harsh conditions, Sweet adds. When newts experienced changes to the climate in the past, they were able to rebound and expand their range again when conditions improved. But they can’t come back if there isn’t a connected population to replenish them.

Altogether, the cards can seem stacked against a species that has endured its share of environmental stress for thousands of years. “The stuff that amphibians like newts are facing is kind of death of a thousand cuts,” Sweet says. “It’s not any one thing. It's not drought, it’s drought and getting run over when you're 25 years old and half an hour away from laying eggs for the first time. It’s having your eggs die because a septic tank has overflowed, and the stream is full of salt. It's getting eaten by a raccoon that's wandering up and down the creek because somebody has garbage out and there are too many raccoons, and the road department wanted to widen the road and fill in the stream with boulders. It’s all this stuff.”

Despite all they’re up against, it’s not too late for newts, Kats says. Some environmental groups have mobilized to help newts around the world, including in California. In the hills north of San Francisco, volunteers with the Chileno Valley Newt Brigade spend winter nights picking up the amphibians as they make their way to or from their breeding sites, carrying them across roads to protect them from cars. Along the East Coast and in parts of Berkeley, roads frequented by newts are closed annually for the same reason.


Some of the most promising strategies for protecting newts focus on improving and protecting their habitats and ecosystems, and with them, biodiversity more generally, Bucciarelli says. One major effort in the works is California’s 30x30 initiative, an executive order signed by the governor that has a goal of conserving 30 percent of the state’s land and coastal waters by 2030. Because amphibian habitats span much of the state’s land and watersheds, they stand to benefit substantially from the plan.

Habitat protection includes human intervention to mitigate disaster and destruction. Multiple studies in Europe have shown that enlarging and deepening ponds can lead to rapid and major increases in populations of newts, frogs, and toads—a technique that could be useful for removing silt after wildfires, as well. Researchers have also found value in “newt hotels,” human-made piles of stones covered with soil and fabric that mimic the kinds of environments the animals use to overwinter in harsh conditions. And in California, government agencies are actively working to create freshwater ponds that are free of invasive species, such as crayfish, to replace what amphibians have lost.

The California Conservation Genomics Project is another statewide effort to protect amphibians and other creatures, not by protecting habitat but by protecting genetic diversity. The government-funded project aims to sequence the genomes of more than 230 animal and plant species, including some amphibians and reptiles—as a way to identify areas of high and low genetic diversity that should be the focus of conservation work. The newt is not on the sequencing list in part because its genome is gigantic and intractable, Bucciarelli says. But the initiative, which has a goal of producing “the most comprehensive, multi-species, genomic dataset ever assembled to help manage regional biodiversity,” focuses on creatures that share newt habitat. Those animals—and newts—would ultimately benefit from any resulting changes and protections.

Disease surveillance should help, too, by detecting emerging illnesses before they can spread. In the United States, the U.S.G.S. has set up a nationwide program to check newts and other amphibians around the country for signs of a fungal infection that has devastated European salamander populations.

Efforts like these may give newts a fighting chance to do what they do best: persevere. Because newts are so long-lived, seemingly small measures could help them wait out poor conditions until favorable years return, and with those years the right conditions for mating, experts say.

Sorokin has seen this potential for redemption in his Berkeley-area pond over the past two years. When Northern California finally got a real rainy season in late 2021, the pond refilled again. Since then, he has observed plenty of healthy newts and lots of breeding activity. When they come up for air, they sometimes let out a little squeak. Seeing them return has filled him with relief—and also trepidation. He worries about the next dry season and the next generations of newts. He takes photos, he says, to spread his love for newts to a wider audience, and to convince people to care about this animal that doesn’t get its fair share of headlines about the impacts of a changing climate.

As we move deeper into the Anthropocene, more humans need to embrace our role in protecting such animals, and we need to start now, says Bucciarelli. We put them in this predicament. It’s up to us to get them out of it. Solving the puzzle of how to help newts could have benefits far beyond one amphibian, he says—creating a roadmap for how we deal with many other biodiversity issues on a hotter, drier planet.

“There are so many dedicated, talented, and passionate people working collaboratively to come up with viable solutions. We can't fix the problems of drought. We can’t make it rain. But we can figure out ways to manage populations so that they have the highest probability of persisting through this really stressful time,” Bucciarelli says. “I have a lot of hope.”

Story by April Reese

When Salão and Sidra step out of their carrying crates, the first ground the two Iberian lynx feel beneath their paws is warm, tilled earth. It’s a bright day in early May, and a crowd of about 75 people, including government officials, schoolchildren and TV crews, watch from the corner of the fallow farm field as Salão trots by at a languid pace. Sidra follows soon after, at a faster clip. The two young lynx—honey-hued with black spots, ear tufts, and short, ink-dipped tails—disappear into a dense thicket of gum rock rose.

A lot rides on Salão and Sidra’s fate in the mosaic of agricultural lands, hunting estates, and scrublands that make up this part of the Guadiana Valley, in the northeastern stretch of the Algarve region in southern Portugal. For decades, conservationists considered the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) one of the most endangered wild cats in the world. Biologists worried it would become the first wild feline to go extinct in Europe in millennia. The cat once thrived across much of the Iberian Peninsula and parts of southern France, but by the mid-2000s, only a few scattered populations remained, all in southern Spain. Today, though, nearly eight years into a wildly popular reintroduction campaign in Portugal that brought Salão and Sidra to their new home, and a parallel effort in Spain, the Iberian lynx is bounding toward recovery.

The pair—among the first lynx to be released in the Algarve region—were born in captive breeding facilities in Spain about a year ago. Biologists, along with the conservation groups and wildlife officials involved in this collaborative reintroduction program, hope the cats will contribute their precious genes to the growing population they have established in this valley. A 2021 count found 70 new lynx cubs born to 31 breeding females here. And at least 1,400 lynx now roam the whole peninsula. While the diminutive cat remains listed as Endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species, the organization now notes its population trend as “increasing.”

This surprising triumph, while not yet complete, offers real hope not just for lynx but also for the ecosystems that they and many other now-rare species rely on. After years of building relationships and goodwill with landowners and hunters to bring lynx back, biologists now have a better shot at recovering creatures like the black vulture (Aegypius monachus) and Iberian imperial eagle (Aquila adalberti)—among the rarest birds of prey in the world. The tale of how this snowballing conservation achievement came to be is ultimately one of the importance of interconnection—among wild creatures, among people, and between people and wild creatures. And at the heart of it all is another animal entirely, one that can be seen hopping over heathlands, through olive groves, and across roads all over this rural region: rabbits.

As recently as four decades ago, few people in Portugal knew the Iberian lynx existed.

In the late 1970s, a college student named Luis Palma set out to study lynx and its habitat on Malcata Mountain in central Portugal, near the Spanish border. His surveys suggested that paper plantations of eucalyptus and Douglas fir were crowding out the Mediterranean oak forest and scrubland that populations of lynx, Iberian frog and other species there needed to survive. Palma’s attempts to negotiate with the paper company to spare habitat failed, but he found a sympathetic ear in fellow student Jorge Palmeirim, who had recently begun working for a conservation group called Liga para a Protecção da Natureza, or League for the Protection of Nature. Together, they convinced the league to launch a campaign to support the creation of a reserve in the area.

Palmeirim, now a biologist with the University of Lisbon, says that when the campaign began, the activists found little recognition of this native cat outside the few rural places where locals had spotted it. At the time, the nation was a young democracy grappling with the aftermath of a dictatorial regime that had discouraged education—especially in rural areas—and kept illiteracy rates high. “Information did not circulate like it does today,” Palmeirim recalls.

Still, the campaign succeeded: Flooded with signatures supporting the protection effort, local authorities set aside 63 square miles of lynx habitat as the Malcata Mountain Natural Reserve in 1981. “This was a historical moment for conservation in Portugal,” Palmeirim says. “It was the first time that a conservation issue was brought to the general public.” But lynx continued to struggle. New farms, eucalyptus plantations, illegal hunting, growing cities, and vehicle collisions all took their toll. Between 1985 and 2001, the lynx’s range declined by 87 percent. In 2002, fewer than 200 remained in the wild.

Particularly alarming, biologists soon realized, was the lack of prey. Iberian lynx evolved to hunt European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus), which make up at least 75 percent of their diet, but that species had suffered major declines of its own. In the early 1950s, European rabbits succumbed en masse to the disease myxomatosis. Then, viral hemorrhagic disease reached Iberia in 1988, further decimating rabbit populations in Spain and Portugal. Without their primary prey, Iberian lynx were starving to death.

“There are places where [rabbits] do not exist anymore,” says Rita Martins, a biologist with the League for the Protection of Nature who has worked for years to recover lynx and their prey. “It’s really sad and dramatic to see that these populations have come to this point.” That’s not just because of the impacts on the rabbits and the lynx; rabbits are also enormously popular with hunters, she adds.

The remote swath of Portugal that encompasses the northeastern Algarve and the eastern part of an adjacent region called Alentejo is one of the most popular areas in the country to hunt rabbits. There, farmers partner with hunting organizations, which manage habitat on their property in exchange for access. When the rabbit population plummeted, so did hunting opportunities.

Most land in Portugal is privately owned, so when conservationists and government biologists set out to reintroduce lynx in the 2000s, they quickly realized the effort would depend on people’s willingness to welcome the cats back onto their property. The stretch of the Guadiana Valley that snakes through eastern Alentejo was a natural place to start, says Pedro Sarmento, a biologist with the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests, the federal agency in Portugal charged with recovering imperiled species and managing forests and protected areas. Remnants of the habitat that supports both rabbits and lynx still existed there. It’s also where some of Portugal’s last few wild lynx had been spotted.

The picturesque region is imbued with history and tradition. Farm fields, Holm oak groves, olive trees, shrublands, sheep pastures and the occasional vineyard rise and fall on luminous hills all the way to the horizon. Small villages of white-washed stone, paved with patterned black-and-white cobblestones called calçadas, appear here and there, some fortified with tall stone walls from the centuries when Portugal fended off invaders from the east and south. “Even though it is a very rich area in biodiversity, it is a cultural landscape,” says Martins.

Martins grew up on a farm—she still lives on her grandmother’s old homestead on the weekends, tending to a few sheep, pigs, and chickens with her parents—and knows working lands better than most. Soft-spoken and focused, she’s as adept at wielding a sickle as she is at parsing population data. Even so, when she and her colleagues started making phone calls and traveling the countryside hoping to win farmers’ support for improving habitat for lynx and rabbits, she felt apprehensive. Some of the properties they intended to visit had been under the care of the same families for centuries; she wanted to be careful not to imply they’d mismanaged their land. Martins would also need to persuade hunters, some of whom worried that the return of lynx would bring new government restrictions, such as prohibiting the use of dogs to hunt wild boar, a popular game species.

One conversation at a time, Martins and other lynx advocates explained the benefits of having the cats around. They would, for example, control populations of red fox, which could help boost rabbit numbers for hunters and protect farmers’ lambs and chickens. Lynx have little appetite for livestock and aren’t a threat to people. And crucially, maintaining a patchwork of open fields and shrubs like gum rock rose for lynx would also help rabbits, since they share the same habitats, further boosting hunting opportunities. On the other side of the border, landowners in Spain were living alongside lynx without incident. So biologists in Portugal arranged a tour for Alentejo landowners, who came home more amenable to the cats.

With a critical mass of local people supporting the lynx’s return, biologists were closing in on their goal of reintroducing the animal. They already had cats: Wildlife officials established a captive-breeding program, begun in Spain in the 2003, which had produced nearly 200 lynx for reintroduction. Now, they just needed to find landscapes with rabbits—and ways to boost their numbers.

Rabbits, it turns out, play an outsized role in the mosaic of Mediterranean forest and shrubland habitats that lynx favor. Their burrows provide shelter and nest sites for animals like the natterjack toad (Epidalea calamita) and little owl (Athene noctua), and their feces spread the seeds of native plants. Besides lynx, dozens of other species rely on them as food, including the Iberian imperial eagle. In a 2008 study, one group of scientists suggested that the European rabbit is so important to parts of the Iberian Peninsula—a global biodiversity hotspot—that it should be called “the rabbit’s ecosystem.” Or perhaps better yet, rabbitat.

Fortunately for the whole system, the rabbits have proved highly adaptable. In recent years, they’ve developed some resistance to the viruses that decimated their numbers. Meanwhile, League and government biologists struck agreements with landowners to reintroduce lynx on farms and hunting estates that had good remnant populations of wild rabbits, and ensured that more than 364 hectares of rabbit-friendly crops were sown to improve wild rabbit habitat. They also built more than 1,200 artificial rabbit warrens—dirt mounds and underground cavities accessible through a hole at the top— across southeastern Portugal between 2012 and 2018. By 2012, rabbit populations had stabilized at a density of about 4 individuals per hectare—the threshold that lynx populations need to successfully reproduce.

With this foundation in place, biologists prepared to introduce the first captive-bred Iberian Lynx onto Portuguese soil. In 2015, on a hunting estate near the village of Sao João de Caldeireiros, government biologist Sarmento and his team built a large acclimation pen with a 2.5-meter-high chain-link fence. There, they released Jacarandá, a female, and Katmandú, a male, to adjust to their new surroundings. A few weeks later, the biologists set the pair free. More releases followed in other parts of Alentejo, typically a few per year, and the cats began to reproduce in the wild—another sign that rabbits were on the rebound.

João Madeira, a sixth-generation farmer of sheep and cows, was among those who welcomed the cats back to his land under an agreement with biologists. The motivation was both emotional and utilitarian, he says. “The lynx was the most endangered feline in the world, so we decided that we would be a part of the effort to resolve the problem. But we also have a huge need to control foxes and mongoose,” which have a voracious appetite for lamb, he says. “In the years that we don’t manage to control that predation, our mortality rates double. We had hope that lynx would control them.”

Some reintroduced lynx in other areas have taken an occasional fallow deer or chicken. But unlike with other imperiled predators, such as Mexican wolves in the Southwestern United States, in most cases the government here doesn’t kill Iberian lynx that attack livestock; instead, it puts them in what Sarmento calls “lynx jail”—the same fenced enclosure used to acclimate the first reintroduced lynxes back in 2015. For his part, Madeira has had no problems with the four lynx that were released on his lands. He does worry that lynx might eventually attack his lambs, but that’s a risk worth taking, he says. “If I have a predator that sometimes can eat a lamb, compared to the damage the foxes represent, perhaps it will not be such a big deal.” Last year, he found a dead fox near a sheep; government biologists confirmed that a lynx had killed it. And for years, there were either too many rabbits or too few on his lands, “but now it’s balanced,” he says—progress he credits to the return of lynx.

Still, maintaining the rabbit densities necessary to achieve the kind of success that Madeira has seen on his patch of lynx habitat is difficult, says Martins. “You need to make a lot of pastures—you need not only good management of the property but also investment and lots of luck.” Further down the valley, a hunting and conservation property owned by the city of Moura called Herdade da Contenda shows both the challenges and the rewards of that work. Over the years, the estate’s managers have created two wild rabbit pens complete with artificial burrows, grasses and shrubs for food, above-ground shelter, water stations, and protective fencing to keep predators out. As in so many other places, disease had largely wiped out the local rabbit population. Manager Pedro Rocha needed more, and in 2020, he found a surprisingly convenient source.

Down the road at the Amareleja solar power plant, rabbits were digging burrows in the soft dirt beneath utility boxes and chewing through wires. Two years later, on a May day perfect for both photovoltaics and rabbit wrangling, Rocha, Martins, League veterinarian David Delgado, and a small team of rabbit catchers gather around a rabbit warren in the shade beneath one of the plant’s massive solar panels. Two workers spread a net over the hole and the surrounding area. Another reaches into a small wooden box, lifts out a ferret by the scruff of the neck and slips it into the hole. A ferret’s natural inclination is to kill rabbits, but this one has been trained instead to scare them out of the burrow.

After about 15 minutes, the first rabbit bolts into the net. A worker carefully disentangles her and hands her to Martins, who places her in a burlap bag. From there, Martins and Delgado walk her over to a makeshift vet station on the tailgate of their white pickup truck. “It’s very important to know the gender and the age, and whether they came from the same family,” because the population needs to be at least 60 percent female to match the ratio in natural populations, and families should be moved together, Martins explains as she hands the rabbit to Delgado for examination. He checks the animal for ferret wounds or signs of disease or other maladies, then loads her into a compartment in a multi-chambered carrier.

In all, the team catches 12 rabbits over several hours—six males and six females— repeating the process with each. It’s stressful business for both the rabbits and their wranglers. There’s a narrow window of time to move them; in a few weeks it will be too hot. European rabbits also breed year-round, so it’s hard to know exactly how many individuals are in the burrow.

Fortunately, the operation is nearly over: When the truck is loaded, the team heads to Herdade da Contenda. One at a time, Delgado and the others gently open each green plastic compartment cover, lift out a wriggling rabbit and set it free on the ground in one of the pens, where it darts into the tall grass and out of sight. If all goes well with this round of rabbits and future additions planned in a few months, they hope to finally have the right conditions to release lynx on Contenda—one of the largest properties in the area. Rocha and previous managers here have already welcomed back Eurasian black vultures, which share the lynx’s taste for rabbits (though they consume carcasses, not live rabbits).

Delgado’s next stop is a bigger pen, for a much larger animal: the black vulture. Delgado steers the truck along the estate’s twisting, guardrail-less dirt roads to another open-topped enclosure, this one on a rise shaded by holm oaks and stone pines. There, he stops, grabs a bag from the back of the truck, and quickly changes his clothes. As strange as it may seem, the practice is required for all who visit this chain-link pen to prevent the potential spread of avian tuberculosis. A 2002 European Union sanitation rule aimed at containing another disease, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, is part of the reason the scavenger is struggling: It required farmers to remove carcasses — a prime food source for several types of vultures — from their fields. To give Herdade da Contenda’s black vultures a helping hand, Delgado and other members of the team leave carrion at a feeding station within the pen. The birds have also taken up residence on new nesting platforms that League and government biologists have constructed here at Contenda and around the region.

These imposing creatures—one of the world’s largest birds of prey, with a wingspan of almost three meters—suffered steep losses in recent decades, in part due to ingesting heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, as well as veterinary antibiotics and other harmful substances, when feeding on carrion. Considered extinct in Portugal by 1980, with no known breeding pairs, the birds are now starting to circle Portuguese skies once again, thanks in part to the lynx’s return.


Building on the successful reintroduction of the cats, and the relationships forged with landowners and hunting groups, League and government biologists were able to win additional European Commission funding to help other species that rely on the same landscape, including the black vulture. In 2019, the Portuguese government unveiled a conservation plan for the bird and other vulture species. The influx of funds supports halting habitat loss, installing new feeding stations and artificial nests and other activities. “If we succeed in lynx conservation, then we’ve succeeded in securing their habitat, which they share with a countless number of other species—including other threatened species, some of which are less charismatic and known and for which it is more difficult to catch attention and funding,” Martins says.

Without the participation of landowners, none of these conservation wins could have happened, she adds. “It’s important to create this community of practice with local communities and landowners and other stakeholders in the region, so that in the long term we can get this to be self-sufficient, through the recovery of ecosystems and getting more sustainable practices in the landscape.”

At the lone cafe in the tiny village of Sao João de Caldeireiros, near the very first lynx release site, a waitress greets Sarmento, the government biologist, like an old friend. Taking a seat on the patio, Sarmento and his guests are allowed to order lunch, even though a sign says seating there is for drinks only. Sarmento has been a frequent visitor since 2014, when he first came to the Herdade das Romeiras hunting estate to ready it for the release of Jacarandá and Katmandú. Today, the two cats’ descendants roam far beyond the estate grounds, and a stone observation deck with lynx reintroduction information placards overlooks the Romeiras release site from the village’s church parking lot high on a hill. It was Jacarandá’s daughter crossing south into the Algarve district from here in Alentejo—likely among the first lynx to colonize Algarve, in one of the region’s best remaining areas for rabbits—that led to the release of Sidra and Salão there this May.

Sarmento’s team released five lynx in 2022, bringing the total to 59 reintroduced to Portugal since the program began in 2014. When the current funding runs out, the EU has already committed to sending more, Sarmento says. Today, after years of habitat restoration work, the montado mosaic landscape that rabbits and lynx prefer in the 21st century—open pasture mixed with shrubs and patches of forest—is more prevalent across Alentejo, and now Algarve landowners are beginning to warm to restoration and lynx reintroduction as well.

Less than a decade after biologists worried that the Iberian lynx would be forever lost, the cats are reproducing on their own so successfully that in some areas, further releases are no longer needed to boost the population, though they’ll likely continue to increase genetic diversity. Today, the focus is on connecting these rebounding populations. And crucially, the Iberian lynx’s favorite prey, European rabbits, are becoming more plentiful on farms and hunting estates around southeastern Portugal.

The cats have also proved more adaptable than anyone expected; a 2016 study of lynx in Spain’s Andújar-Cardeña region found that they will colonize olive tree plantations and other human-dominated landscapes. Lynx have become a symbol of conservation success and civic pride touted in political campaigns, a popular subject for Portuguese artists (a giant lynx made of recycled trash now guards the Lisbon waterfront), and a tourist attraction.

During lunch, the game keeper at the Romeiras property, Carlos Alberto Simaó, stops by Sarmento’s table. “I’m very proud of the [estate’s] contribution to lynx conservation,” he says. And he values the partnership with the government and the other stakeholders. He didn’t expect the lynx’s taste for prey other than the property’s abundant rabbits, but he says that doesn’t change his or the estate owner’s support for lynx conservation.

The paradox of lynx recovery is that, as the population grows amid this human-dominated landscape, new challenges arise. The cats also now face the triple threat of a prolonged, punishing drought, wildfires, and record-breaking heatwaves. Even so, as of mid-December, Portugal had exceeded its lynx population target of 30 breeding females; The latest census, for 2022: 32 — a number that, just a few years ago, Sarmento didn’t think the cats would reach until 2035. Martins is also optimistic about the future of the Iberian lynx — and the rabbits they rely on. “Both populations are healthy,” she says, and will only get healthier, since lynx prey on sick rabbits, which helps control the disease that wiped out rabbits in the past. In one hopeful sign, as of September, all 12 rabbits relocated to Herdade da Contenda in May were still alive. The last epidemic to hit European rabbits in Portugal was in 2014, delaying lynx reintroduction by a year. “Perhaps the decline wouldn’t have been so severe if the Iberian lynx and other top predators were present in their natural habitat,” Martins says. “Happy populations of Iberian lynx, happy populations of wild rabbit.”

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted a conditional license for the vaccine this week, according to Dalan Animal Health, the biotech company behind the preventative treatment. 

"Global population growth and changing climates will increase the importance of honeybee pollination to secure our food supply," explains Dr. Annette Kleiser, CEO of Dalan Animal Health. "Our vaccine is a breakthrough in protecting honeybees. We are ready to change how we care for insects, impacting food production on a global scale."

As much as one third of the world's food supply relies on pollinators such as bees, birds, and bats. With many wild bee species in drastic decline as a result of habitat loss, pesticide use and a changing climate, the agricultural industry has become unusually reliant on managed honeybee colonies, particularly in the US.

These 'service bees' are transported around the country to help propagate an array of crops from blueberries to almonds. Exposure to a variety of diseases has destroyed colonies in vast numbers and led to the need for interventions by beekeepers to sustain their hives. 

The planned vaccine is another weapon in the arsenal to help fight the decline of honeybee populations. It targets American foulbrood, an affliction caused by the bacterium Paenibacillus larvae that can destroy entire colonies by reducing bee larvae to a rancid, brown goo. 

With no known safe or sustainable solution for disease prevention, foulbrood poses a challenge to beekeepers whose only option to treat the problem involves incinerating infected hives and equipment, and treating nearby colonies with antibiotics.

To administer the vaccine, an inactive version of the bacteria that causes the disease is incorporated into royal jelly feed given by worker bees to the queen. Once ingested, fragments of the vaccine are deposited in the queen's ovaries which ultimately work their way down to the larvae, providing them with immunity. 

"This is an exciting step forward for beekeepers," explained Trevor Tauzer, owner of Tauzer Apiaries and board member of the California State Beekeepers Association. "If we can prevent an infection in our hives, we can avoid costly treatments and focus our energy on other important elements of keeping our bees healthy."

Top header image: Brian Hoffman, Flickr

With the dust still settling on the UN climate change summit in Egypt, another round of international talks is beginning in Montreal, Canada. The UN biodiversity conference, otherwise known as COP15, will assemble world leaders to agree on new targets for protecting nature.

The loss of biodiversity – the dizzying variety of life forms from microscopic viruses, bacteria and fungi to towering trees and enormous whales – is accelerating. The last agreement in 2010 yielded the 20 Aichi targets which included halving the rate at which species were being lost and expanding protected habitats on land and in the sea by 2020. Governments failed to meet a single one.

A global assessment in 2019 showed that nature was declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The forces driving more and more species towards extinction – climate change, habitat destruction and pollution – are all trending in the wrong direction. Nothing less than a transformation of how societies work and the relationship between people and the rest of nature will get us on track.

After two years of delay due to the pandemic and difficulties negotiating a new venue with the country that holds the conference presidency, China, many are relieved that COP15 is happening at all. That relief may prove short-lived as there is much to be done in these two short weeks. The grand objective is the approval of a new global biodiversity framework, essentially a plan for how the world’s nations expect to halt the loss of biodiversity and ensure that, by 2050, society is living in harmony with nature.

30% by 2030

One debate which has dominated discussions so far is how much land and sea should be set aside for conservation. The current text aims for 30% by 2030. Some scientists believe this is insufficient, and that preserving half the Earth for nature is necessary. Others are wary of reviving failed ideas which have tried to boost wildlife by expelling people and erecting walls to keep them out.

Negotiators will debate whether a 30x30 target should be met at the national level or globally. The former would mean each country meeting this standard within its own borders. The latter would prioritise Earth’s most important areas of biodiversity (such as tropical rainforests) but oblige countries with large remaining wildernesses (overwhelmingly in developing countries) to shoulder the lion’s share of conservation work. Many poorer countries foresee this stopping their economic development.

There is also disagreement over what level of protection should be given to these areas and how the rights of people living within them should be recognised. These plans would require a doubling of protected areas on land and perhaps as much as a tenfold increase in the oceans. But they could exclude indigenous people and those who make their living from cultivation, forestry and fishing.

Less emissions, less meat, less waste

Instead of concentrating on the total area reserved for nature, recent research highlights the importance of addressing the underlying causes of extinctions and habitat loss, such as greenhouse gas emissions, meat consumption and plastic pollution.

Targeting the processes driving biodiversity loss would shift attention away from where nature is being destroyed to the places where these processes are guided and sustained: boardrooms, trading floors, local planning offices and supermarkets.

The framework under negotiation includes several targets that would restrain the destruction, from eliminating policies subsidising the conversion of forest to cow pasture to halving food waste. These have failed to attract the momentum behind flashier goals like the 30x30 target. Changing how economies and societies function is more contentious and asks more from rich countries with more influence over the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Safeguard nature’s services

Yet another approach would safeguard the services nature generates, including flood protection, wood fuel, climate regulation and food provision. And it would identify the natural assets (wetlands, forests, coral reefs and mangroves to name a few) that must endure for these services to continue. This would mean protecting nature close to where it is most needed. A staggering 6.1 billion people live within one hour of such assets.

Good COP or bad COP?

While everyone gathering in Montreal agrees that a breakthrough is needed, there are different ideas about what that should look like. For many seasoned conservationists, a good outcome will mean more stringent targets for protecting and restoring nature and more expansive protected areas, plus the money and other resources necessary to enforce them.

Businesses, investors, cities, regional governments and the communities they represent want an agreement that mobilises the whole of society. Some companies have asked that all businesses be forced to report the impacts their activities have on nature. Cities and regions have their own pledges and have asked COP15 to formally recognise their role in delivering national plans.

This could bring the protection and restoration of nature into mainstream thinking around how economies develop and societies are organised, and make the case that much of what is important about nature is not to be found on the other side of a fence. This trend is evident in growing enthusiasm around nature-based solutions to climate change.

The recent UN climate summit in Egypt heralded the potential of such solutions, which include restoring peatlands and seagrass beds. These actions tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis together by expanding refuge for wildlife and drawing carbon from the air. Cities, businesses and investors smell an opportunity to meet multiple measures of sustainable development at once.

Some conservationists worry these supposed solutions are greenwashing and allow companies to exploit indigenous people and communities. Other experts argue that, with the right safeguards in place, these fears can be put to rest.

With much at stake, in seeking to straddle different agendas, COP15 risks achieving none.

Harriet Bulkeley, Professor of Geography, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The African nations proposed that money raised from the sale of ivory and rhino stockpiles could benefit conservation efforts, but their bids were dismissed with the vast majority of parties voting against legalisation. No discrepancy was made for horns or ivory attained from animals that died naturally or were euthanised by wildlife officials.

A worldwide ban in the trade of ivory has been in place since 1989, although controversial, once-off sales were permitted in 1999 and 2008. Historically, ivory has been used to produce carvings, figurines and ornaments as well being applied as a healing element in traditional medicine. 

The international trade in rhino horn has been illegal since 1977, but well-connected poaching syndicates continue to smuggle horns out of rhino-range nations to meet demand in Asian countries like Vietnam and China. The current rhino poaching crisis began in 2008 and almost 10,000 rhinos have been killed for their horns in the last decade. In South Africa, where the bulk of the world's remaining rhinos live, 259 of the animals were poached between January and June of this year.

In another rhino-related proposal at CoP19, Namibia was successful in their bid to relax trade controls for live white rhinos, creating concern among some conservationists that the animals will be at greater risk. The decision, however, only applies to the sale of live animals which must be kept within their natural, historic range. The WWF stated that the new regulations will "incentivize rhino conservation in Namibia, a country which has been successful in protecting its rhino populations and creating multi-agency law enforcement teams to address the illegal trafficking of rhino horn. It also makes more rhinos available for range expansion which is a proven conservation tool for the recovery of both white and black rhino numbers across the continent."

A bid from ten African nations to effect a total ban on the trade of hippopotamuses was not recommended for adoption. Hippo teeth are a less common alternative to elephant ivory and something that poachers may look to should elephants become scarcer or more stringently protected. "The banning of the trade in hippo teeth would have been a step in the right direction at the moment because [traffickers] do look for alternatives to ivory — things like giant clams, mammoth ivory, hippo teeth — those look-alike products that can be substituted," Stephen Carmody, director of programmes at the Wildlife Justice Commission, told Mongabay." Despite this decision, Carmody – like many other conservationists – felt that the conference was a success.

Sharks and rays fared particularly well with 54 species of requiem sharks, 6 species of hammerheads, and 37 guitarfish species now included in Appendix II of CITES which ensures tighter trade restrictions. Tropical songbirds also received increased regulations as did a number of tree species – although the protections applied to Latin America's Cumaru and trumpet trees will only come into force two years from now at which stage the species may have already been overexploited.

Whether or not the decisions made by CITES in Panama will have a significant impact depends on their implementation.

"Globally cherished mammals such as rhinos, hippos, elephants and leopards didn’t receive increased protections at this meeting while a bunch of wonderful weirdos won conservation victories," Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release. "In the midst of a heart-wrenching extinction crisis, we need global agreement to fight for all species, even when it’s contentious. We’ll leave a very lonely planet for the next generation unless we fight against the extinction of every creature, not just those that are politically easy to protect."

Story by Jess Craig

Just after 4 a.m. on the Diksam Plateau, near the center of Yemen’s Socotra Island, a loudspeaker stirs the locals from their sleep with the day’s first call to prayer. A heavy fog drifts over the plateau, blotting out the stars, and a breeze ruffles a half-dozen green and blue nylon tents—sheltering American and European tourists who, like me, have come to the plateau to glimpse one of the island’s most iconic and otherworldly species: a strange, upside-down tree called the dragon’s blood (Dracaena cinnabari).

As the sun rises, the fog recedes, illuminating a small cluster of buildings standing in stark relief against the rugged, brown landscape—a two-story school building, several houses built of stone, and our campsite, about the size of a football field, encircled by a six-foot-high wall. To the west, a single paved road winds its way past the jagged Hajhir mountains toward the northern coast.

By 6 a.m. the village and campsite have begun to buzz with activity. Tour guides pour heavily sugared tea from plastic thermoses into paper cups; tourists pull on hiking boots and lather on sunscreen; goats and cows graze on sparse patches of grass and prickly shrubs. A group of female Russian tourists climb into a white Land Rover and head out for the day, swirling up dust as they drive out.

The campsite owner, Mohammed Salem Abdullah Masoud—better known by his nickname, Keabanni—kicks off his tan rubber sandals and sits beside me in a clearing in the campsite on a three-inch-thick foam mattress, one of the only pieces of furniture that most local Socotri people own. He is joined by his eldest son—Salem Mohammed Salem Abdullah, a tour guide and local conservationist, who is named in the local tradition of given name followed by the names of one’s father, grandfather, and great grandfather. Both wear sandals, t-shirts, and traditional skirt-like attire called foutas, and sit cross-legged as we eat a breakfast of tea, dates, and a pancake-like bread called malawah smeared with soft white cheese and honey. Keabanni, a boisterous and animated man in his mid-fifties, grows serious as he speaks of the remarkable dragon’s blood tree that grows on the island’s mountains and high plateaus and nowhere else on Earth. “The dragon's blood tree is the heart of Socotra,” he tells me in the Socotri language as Salem translates.

When Keabanni was a child, his great-grandparents told stories of vast forests of dragon's blood trees. Across the plateau, they said, there were so many trees that you could walk from the shade of one to the shade of another without the sun ever touching you. Like his parents and grandparents, they were nomadic pastoralists, moving from place to place to feed and water their cattle. “It was the Bedu lifestyle,” Keabanni explains, referring to the Bedouin ethnocultural group found across the Middle East and North Africa. At night, families set up camp around the trees, and during the day, the trees’ umbrella-shaped crowns of stiff, densely packed leaves cast perfect circles of shade and provided relief from the island’s intense mid-day sun. The bright red resin that seeps from the dragon's blood trunk when it is cut was once a major commodity. Since at least the sixth century BCE, locals harvested the resin, ground it into a fine powder, and sold it to Greek, Arab, and Indian merchants who transported it around the world where it was used in paint and pottery glaze, make-up and nail polish, ointment for cuts and scrapes, or as an elixir to treat anything from diarrheal disease to post-partum bleeding.

In recent decades, however, the pressures of human activity and a changing climate have taken their toll. By the time Keabanni was old enough to understand the family stories, he could see that the vast forests of dragon's blood trees were becoming scarce. They are even scarcer today. Until recently, there was little long-term monitoring of the species’ numbers, and it is not known precisely how many of the trees have been lost. But it is clear that their decline has had, and will continue to have, ripple effects across the island’s entire ecosystem, given its important role in providing habitat and water to other plants and animals. Some scientists predict that the species will experience a steep decline in the next 30 to 80 years, and may be gone altogether several centuries from now, or less. “The long-term future of this species is not hopeful,” wrote Petr Maděra, a professor of forest botany at Mendel University in the Czech Republic, in a 2019 paper he co-authored.

Keabanni, however, is not letting the trees go without a fight. For the past 20 years, his Diksam campsite has served as a sort of dragon's blood conservation headquarters—a nursery and informal research center, with Keabanni leading a small-scale, locally driven project to stave off the tree’s demise.

By mid-morning the damp, cool air has given over to dry heat and scorching sun. Keabanni’s son Salem and I climb into a Land Rover—a decal of Sheikh Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, affixed to the back window—and set out for Firmhin, a plateau north of Diksam where dragon's blood trees are still abundant.

Driving toward the outskirts of Diksam, we come across our first dragon’s blood, a lone tree on an expanse of barren, rocky soil a few feet off the dirt road. The tree is perhaps 15 feet tall, with a thick, ash-white trunk kinked in the middle, scarred from previous resin harvesting. At the top of the trunk, thick and scaly branches terminate in a crown of long, thin leaves that resemble a well-watered bluegrass lawn, stark green against the brown landscape and cloudless, azure sky.

Most trees draw water from the soil and up their roots to the leaves; dragon's blood trees can also do the reverse, taking water from the air and passing it into the soil. Scientists suggest that the unique shape of the dragon's blood tree is an adaptation to life in its arid environment, allowing the trees to capture moisture from the fog and clouds, a process called horizontal precipitation capture. Researchers estimate that each dragon's blood tree can inject several times more water into the soil than the local environment captures as rainfall, providing a critical component of the island’s hydrological system. “One dragon's blood tree brings a huge amount of water into the system,” explains Kay van Damme, a European researcher at Ghent University and Mendel University and the chair of the UK-based volunteer group, Friends of Socotra, who has worked on the island since the late 1990s. “If you lose a tree, you also lose hundreds of liters of water per year that would otherwise go into the system.”

And you also lose many other species that depend on dragon's blood trees. Considered an “umbrella species,” not in reference to its shape but rather to the ecological role it plays, the dragon's blood tree provides critical nourishment and helps support the survival of dozens of other plant and animal species—from geckos and snakes to endemic flowering plants. Over a few months in 2010 and 2011, a group of researchers from the Czech Republic catalogued the types and abundance of various plants found living in the understory of a dragon's blood tree compared to open areas. Of 92 total plant species identified, 32 of them, including seven endemic species, were found to grow exclusively near dragon's blood trees. In a separate study, researchers found that more than half of the island’s known reptile species could be found living on the dragon’s blood tree.

Driving on from the lone dragon's blood, the trees start to become more abundant. We see three or four clustered together; then larger groupings. And then, across a deep gorge, the Firmhin Plateau comes into view. Thousands of dragon's blood trees, a true forest, dot the rocky terrain. We cross the gorge, ascend the Firmhin Plateau, and drive in among the trees. When the driver cuts off the engine, it is still and quiet. The forest climbs steeply uphill from the road, dragon's blood trees and their circular shadows dotting the horizon in every direction. Yet something is still amiss. For every dozen or so living trees, there are several downed trees nearby, white trunks cracked in the middle, the massive crown toppled over, and the white, leafless branches like bones protruding up from the ground.

In Arabic, the dragon's blood tree is known as dam al akhawain or “the blood of the two brothers.” According to local folklore, the first dragon's blood tree grew in the very spot where two brothers, Darsa and Samha, fought each other to the death. But the spectacle and sheer size of the downed dragon's blood trees recalls another origin story that holds that the trees sprouted from drops of blood shed by a dragon while it fought an elephant. In this particular spot, we are surrounded by corpses: The Firmhin Plateau is part forest, part dragon's blood graveyard.

Two major factors are driving the dragon's blood tree—and many of the species that depend on it—to the brink, according to scientists. Climate change is one. Socotra’s tropical desert climate has always been extreme: hot and arid with brief, twice-annual monsoon seasons. But in recent decades, dwindling rainy seasons have caused prolonged and severe droughts, and while mature dragon's blood trees are adept at squeezing water from even the scant humidity in the air, the saplings must absorb moisture through their roots. With less moisture in the soil, the saplings struggle to survive to maturity.

In addition, extreme and unpredictable weather systems, likely fueled by warming oceans, have brought devastating winds and flooding to Socotra in recent years. In 2015, two cyclones, named Chapala and Megh, hit the island within one week of each other and wiped out some 30 percent of Socotra’s trees in what Clare Nullis, then of the United Nation’s Meteorological Organisation, called an “absolutely extraordinary event.” Many of the downed trees in the Firmhin forest were toppled in those two storms. Overgrazing is also a key factor in the tree’s decline. In recent decades, the island’s goat population has exploded, due to poor animal management practices and an increase in the human population here (estimated at approximately 100,000), according to Maděra, who has worked on dragon's blood conservation in Socotra since the early 2000s. Today, there are some 4 goats to every human on the island, he says, and they’re hard to miss. Goats are everywhere we go, in plain sight or bleating from the recesses of a valley or high in the mountains, eating everything in their path, including dragon's blood saplings.

Most of the dragon's blood trees in the wild today are likely hundreds of years old, though their exact age is impossible to calculate, because they have no rings in their trunks. There are few young trees anymore, however. Because of the deadly combination of destructive grazing and dwindling rains, it is now nearly impossible for baby dragon's blood trees to grow in the wild. And without a younger generation to replace them, the current generation could be the last.

At 1,400 square miles—a three-hour drive from west to east; two hours north to south—Socotra is the largest of four islands in the Socotra Archipelago, located just over 200 miles off the southern coast of Yemen. The archipelago is one of the most biodiverse places in the world, nicknamed the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.” In addition to Socotra’s hundreds of land and sea birds, reef-building corals, and coastal fish, an estimated 37 percent of the island’s 825 plant species, 90 percent of its reptiles, and 95 percent of its land snails are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else on Earth.

Island ecosystems are famously biodiverse—islands make up only 5 percent of Earth’s total landmass, but host an estimated 17 percent of the planet’s known species. Yet these ecosystems are also fragile. Some 60 percent of the world’s known extinctions have occurred on islands, many linked to human colonization and expansion, along with a changing climate. To date, Socotra has been largely spared. “Socotra has not had big extinctions in the past,” explains van Damme.

Some researchers have proposed that the island’s poverty and geographic and political isolation may have prevented common drivers of species extinction, such as development, habitat fragmentation, deforestation, and the introduction of invasive species. Strategically located between the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, Socotra has, over the years, been occupied by or host to British, Portuguese, and Russian forces, whose rusted tanks still line the island’s northern coastline. But those occupations came and went. And in 1967—the same year that Keabanni was born in a mountain cave about 10 minutes from his current home in Diksam—the British relinquished colonial control of the southern half of what is now the Republic of Yemen. The new Yemeni government annexed Socotra as a protected military zone, restricting movement on and off the island, even for locals and the biologists who had, since the late 19th century, visited to catalogue the island’s unique flora and fauna. That isolation may in the end have protected Socotra from the ecological destruction common to other island ecosystems. It remained nearly impossible to visit Socotra until the late 1990s, when, after the brief 1994 civil war, southern and northern Yemen reunified and formed the modern-day state.

Van Damme also believes that Socotra’s nomadic pastoralist culture, which fostered a close connection between the people and their environment, may have helped keep the ecosystem intact. “That is why Socotra is really unique. What you see now is how many islands would have looked 300 or 400 years ago when there was still a chance to protect them,” he says.

But the island is changing. After its 1990 unification, the Yemeni government, with assistance from international aid groups and foreign governments, began upgrading the island’s infrastructure. A new road connected the capital, Hadiboh, to major villages along the northern coastline, including those on the Diksam Plateau, where Keabanni served as a guide and fixer for project workers. Schools and health facilities popped up across the island. In 1999, an international airport opened near Hadiboh; before that, visitors had to get to the island by boat. The opening of the island to outsiders ushered in a new wave of scientific research and conservation and ignited major cultural shifts, modernization, and urbanization.

Today, the UN Environment’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies 157 plant species on Socotra as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered—and because many species on the island have not yet been identified or well-catalogued, there may be more at risk. This includes the dragon's blood tree, which the IUCN classifies as a vulnerable species.

Teams are working to document declining tree species on the island. Salem works with the Mendel University research team on a species monitoring project to locate and measure individual dragon's blood trees on the island, along with frankincense (Boswellia spp.) trees—whose resin is used worldwide as a fragrance for perfumes and soaps, and which looks, as a former U.S. consul-general once described it, like “an enormous sea-serpent in the act of shedding its skin.” When Salem comes across a frankincense or dragon’s blood tree, he pulls open a cellphone app, color coded to show the various species and subspecies, and looks to see if the tree has been recorded. If it hasn’t, he collects the tree’s GPS coordinates, measures the trunk’s circumference, approximates the tree’s height, and records relevant data such as the presence of pests or evidence of branch cutting or resin harvesting. When the survey is complete in the next few years, researchers should have a comprehensive baseline for every frankincense and dragon’s blood tree across the island.

The decline of frankincense trees is better documented than the dragon's blood tree, because they grow faster and have more typical plant biology and physiology, such as tree rings documenting age. In 2020, a team of European researchers assessed the decline of one subspecies of frankincense trees in Homhil Nature Sanctuary, east of Diksam. In 1956, the researchers counted 1,187 Boswellia elongata trees there. In 2017, there were only 264.

Despite the grim statistics, however, van Damme is still optimistic that the trees, and Socotra’s larger biodiversity, can be saved. “This may be the only island in the world where we can actually stop it,” he says.

A few steps from the Diksam campsite and Keabanni’s home sits the nursery where, for the last 20 years, he and Salem have been raising dragon's blood saplings that they hope will provide a future for the revered tree. Inside a 6-foot stacked-stone wall that surrounds the nursery, the saplings stand knee high in loose rows spaced a couple of feet apart. Nearly 20 years old now, they look more like spiky bushes than trees at this stage in their growth, big enough to capture horizontal precipitation but still too small to avoid falling victim to goats. Every few days, Keabanni walks over to the nursery to check for goat incursions, slipping in through a narrow net-covered gap in the wall and surveying the perimeter for damage, stopping often to restack crumbling sections of wall, adjust rope netting, and reinforce the barrier with sticks, scrap metal, even an old tin of powdered milk.

When Keabanni first met Maděra and van Damme, in the early 2000s, he was a rising leader in Diksam, in part because of his congenial personality, in part because of his role shepherding the road from Hadiboh to Diksam and his intimate knowledge of the island’s human and ecological communities. “He was a man who [knew] every tree on the island, every species,” Maděra recalls.

The scientists wanted to educate and engage locals in conservation efforts, encouraging them to convert pastureland into protected areas for struggling species, but hoping to avoid earlier, top-down approaches where scientists and NGOs from Western countries displaced and ignored local cultures and the basic needs of the community. “The only way conservation can work is if it is owned by local people,” says van Damme. “They are the experts knowing how to take care of their land, take care of their animals, take care of their plants, because they are living there.”

It was clear that Keabanni would be key to any locally grown effort to set aside land to help restore the dragon's blood trees on Diksam. “He was willing to do it in his village,” Maděra says.

In 2006, Madera, van Damme, and Keabanni mapped out a conservation strategy for the trees. Together, they built the nursery and got to work studying the species’ biology. First, they had to learn how dragon's blood trees grow and how to raise them in a nursery. They tried cutting off branches from mature trees and planting them in the ground, Keabanni recalls—a process that, when successful, is called propagation. But the branches withered and saplings failed to take root. When that effort failed, they collected and planted seeds from mature trees, experimenting with different watering regimes to see what techniques helped the trees grow and thrive. Through this a process of trial and error over the first couple of years, they learned the importance of watering a dragon's blood tree every day for the first year or so, until each one could capture enough horizontal precipitation to sustain itself.

They also learned that dragon's blood trees are exceptionally slow growing. In 2018, Maděra and a team of other scientists reported that dragon's blood trees planted in nurseries grew, on average, only 2.65 centimeters—barely an inch—over a 5-year period. Based on that, they estimated it would take a sapling more than 100 years to grow tall enough to be clear of grazing goats.

In all, van Damme, Maděra, and Keabanni planted about 800 saplings within the nursery enclosure. The Mendel team provided the initial scientific expertise, technical assistance, tools, and funding to build the nursery and pipe water to it, while Keabanni worked day after day looking after the saplings and making sure grazing goats stayed away.

Today, the saplings no longer require regular watering, but Keabanni must still visit every few days to guard against the persistent threat of goats. He estimates that the animals have eaten about 200 saplings over the years, and almost all the 600 surviving plants have been gnawed at the ends. Fortunately, the saplings were too small to sustain damage from the 2015 cyclones, despite the collapse of the wall, which had to be rebuilt.

Once the saplings have grown tall enough to be out of reach of the goats, the dragon’s blood trees will be transplanted from the nursery to the wild. Given their slow growth rate, however, Keabanni knows he will likely never see the fruits of his labor. But perhaps his grandchildren will see a dragon's blood forest once again in Diksam.

In 2008, UNESCO named the Socotra Archipelago a Natural World Heritage Site; other organizations recognize the island as part of the Horn of Africa Biodiversity Hotspot, a Centre of Plant Diversity, and an Endemic Bird Area. Ecotourists began to visit, and locals like Keabanni built campsites to host them. By 2010, some 4,000 tourists were visiting Socotra each year, providing a critical source of revenue for the island. But in 2014, a civil war erupted on the mainland, and in 2015, the Yemeni government halted all flights to the island, bringing both ecotourism and research there to a standstill.

That same year, the twin cyclones hit. Villages, hospitals, and other public infrastructure were flattened; fresh water and food were scarce. With the Yemeni government embroiled in war, the Emirati and Saudi Arabian governments stepped in to help. At first, the governments provided relief and reconstruction, but then their presence grew. They built schools, hospitals, and a fish processing plant. The Saudi government converted the island’s Environmental Protection Agency into a Saudi military base. The Emirati government erected cell towers, and today operates all three of the island’s petrol stations. In 2020, the Southern Transition Council, a secessionist group backed by the United Arab Emirates, retook control of southern Yemen, and military checkpoints cropped up around Socotra, soldiers casually lingering in the shade of tan, camouflaged tanks, the barrels of their guns wrapped in gray blankets. Later that year, the Emirati government also began chartering direct flights from Abu Dhabi to Socotra, in a move to revive tourism on the island.

The unprecedented influx of foreign money has spurred an economic boom. “It is the Wild West of capitalism,” says Nathalie Peutz, an anthropologist who started working on the island in 2009. Locals are moving in droves from the countryside to Hadiboh; the city has grown dramatically in the past five years. Today, no part of the island’s capital is untouched by construction; half-built hotels and homes jostle for views of the coastline; poles and cinder blocks protrude from the tops of existing one-story homes to make way for a second level. Garbage lines the roadways; goats and Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus), a globally endangered species that is abundant on the island, rummage through.

The development hasn’t spared Diksam or Firmhin plateaus. After a week of exploring the island, I return to Diksam, where the heavy fog over the plateau has shifted into a brief, light rain. Keabanni and his family fire off WhatsApp messages to off-island family, friends, and researchers to announce the arrival of rain, however slight. The plateau is also abuzz with news about an Emirati-funded solar farm that would bring electricity to the plateau for the first time. Keabanni had been chosen to oversee the construction of a new stone wall that would encircle the panels, just a few minutes away from the dragon's blood nursery.

I walk with Salem to the site of the future solar farm. “What do you think this place will look like in 10 years?” Salem asks me, waving his hand toward a barren strip of land beyond the nursery. “Maybe a supermarket and houses there,” he says. The Bedu lifestyle is disappearing, Keabanni had told me the day we first broke bread together, and with it the dragon's blood tree. He wondered what else the island and its people might lose if the tree goes extinct. From the solar farm site, Salem and I walk along a footpath carved between rocks and scraggly shrubs. The Hajhir mountains stand to our west, the campsite to the north, and beyond, the last dragon's blood forest on the Firmhin Plateau.

We circle back to the nursery, slipping in again through the net that guards the gap in the thick stone wall. Inside, we inspect the saplings, examining their gnawed outer leaves and their thin, stiff inner cores, dotted with hundreds of tiny land snails—one of the many native species that depend on these trees for moisture and shelter. Perhaps these saplings will live here for another century, the lone future of a beloved species, growing centimeter by painstaking centimeter until they are big enough to survive in the wild. Perhaps Keabanni’s grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, will transplant them somewhere on this stark plateau. Perhaps these trees will one day make another forest.