For those watching this amazing series, you will have see the beautiful animal – looking rather like a fox on stilts, the maned wolf is a species that lives on the plains of the cerrado in South America. It is unfortunately greatly under threat. Time will tell what will happen in the future.
These animals are heavily under threat, and as such, it is essential that locals see them as a benefit. This means that tourism to this region will help their long-term future.Â
It is a particularly difficult issue for those who are concerned, because while we want to cut our carbon emissions, we must also find a way for enough people to visit, to warrant their long term protection.
We have a page for the maned wolf, and we have embeded a video from a bbc wildlife documentary on this species from a few years ago (though you can also watch a good clip of it from planet earth 3 episode 3)
The Algonquin wolf, also known as the Eastern wolf is a species which has been discovered in the eastern USA and Canada (click on the bold name above, to visit the species page).Â
Perhaps, understandably, it is hard to find a new species in the USA unless it is already pretty rare. This species is only thought to have around 500 individuals, throughout its range (eastern USA and north into Canada).
South-eastern Canada has been known for a race of wolves and coyotes, that do not appear quite right for some time. This study suggested that this group of wolves split from the rest of wolves around 67,000 years ago. This appears to recent to give rise to the significant genetic differences, but it appears that this population also bred with coyotes around 37,000 years ago, and has continued to have genetic exchange between both species (on occasion) since.
As such, it is suggested that the Eastern wolf largely owes its appearance to hybridization between all three.
Has this lead to a more successful species? Well, one may well suggest not, given the small number of these wolves that survive at this time.
However, this is a well settled part of North America, suggesting that in fact it could be down to human hunting rather than natural forces.
At the current time, countries in the region in which the COP is held will chose a president. In theory, that is fine, however, in practice if this is going to continue then the middle east should be banned from hosting the conference.
So, what precisely did Sultan Al Jaber say, which was so troubling?
Firstly, he claimed that a ‘phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves'”.
He then claimed that there is ‘no science’ to suggest phasing out fossil fuels is the only way to achieve 1.5C.
After being laughed at, over this utterly insane statment, he suggested that the comment had been misinterpreted. It should be noted, that this was in response to a question from a woman, which he was relatively rude about.
Do you think this woman misunderstood?
He even had the gall to suggest that the misrepresentation was undermining his desire to reduce carbon emissions (perhaps if this is true, it can start with his huge fossil fuel company can show this?). More than 100 countries are already supportive of this.
The worlds uptake of electric cars must accelerate. This is partly underway – last year around 67 million cars were sold, but 14% of these were electric, up from just 9% the previous year. The uptake is accelerating.
It should also be noted that apart from extreme heat in the UAE, continued global warming will also damage the UAE in extreme ways. The UAE economy is 0.5% of the global economy, in the end, places like this may refuse to accept the end of oil, and will have to be bankrupted, as cars move to 100% and many other industries clean up their act.
This bear was filmed, gnawing on a bone from a takin, a species of wild cattle.
For a species which is thought to survive exclusively on bamboo, this would be strange behaviour.
However, pandas do not survive exclusively on bamboo as roughly 1% of their diet comes from other foods. In fact, their digestive system is typical of a carnivore, so the remaining 1% of their diet can include eggs, small animals and carrion – like this bone. Pandas are also known to forage in farmland for pumpkin, kidney beans, wheat and domestic pig food.
The thing is, pandas eat up to 38kg a day, which means that during the week, they eat around 3kg of food that is not bamboo. This is significant, and while much of this may well be other vegetation, if the time spent on other food sources was around 1% of the time, it would suggest at least 1 hour a week spent eating other things.
One must remember that their intelligence is on a par with Chimpanzee and gorilla -like other bears, so they are capable of working things out.
As if it is needed, here is a list of evidence that global warming is true, laid out by someone with a doctorate in the subject material. Do share with friends who have suggested that there is not.Â
It is simple, the world is warming and we are causing it by burning fossil fuels. We are responsible and so we can do something about this.
At a time, when there is a high probability that someone who denies all obvious facts on this subject, is leading the race to return to the white house, we need to stop debating facts and fix the problem.
USA, you are currently a pariah around the world, because you cannot pass meaningful climate action. You have 4.23% of world population, emit around 16 tonnes per head on average – which amounts to 14% of global emissions or around 1/7. It is true that China (29.18% of global emissions), however India emits just 7.09% of global emission. Yet the per capita emissions of these countries are 7.44 in China and just 1.89 tonnes in India.
The UK, a similarly developed country, only has emissions of 5.6 tonnes per head
We’re hoping to return to a more normal amount of blogposts in the near future. Time is currently going into building a database of species of the world.
For those who visit this website regularly, there will be periods where it looks like I am not active. While there are periods where I am away from the computer, more often than not it is because I am concentrating on other aspects of the website. In recent times, I have been working hard on the list of species that the website lists.
The long-term aim of the website, is still for it to become a one-stop shop for wild travel. We continue to work towards this. Do look at the Species watch page.
Gibbons are lesser apes – lesser than the great apes, anyway. This means that they generally need far less space per individual. Unfortunately, so much of their forests have been lost, that they are increasingly isolated in small scraps of the forest, unable to socialize or breed.
It is becoming clear that in many parts of the world, the survival of specific animals is going to rely on humans regularly translocating animals – that is, we will have to treat the whole population as one large population, and connecting artificially by transporting the animals. The success of this, is perhaps most noticeable in South Africa, where there are many small reserves. Cheetah survive in these reserves and the surrounding areas, but find it hard to connect with their own kind. By regular translocation, the cheetah population grew substantially, as well as their health. In other countries lions leopards, and many other species are likely to require this in the near future.
Each had been kept as pets, with one handed over voluntarily, and the other 4 were seized. While the park is not vast (covering around 200 square km) it would be able to support a significant number of this endangered primate.
There needs to be a change in these countries so that it is no longer acceptable for people to keep these as pets.
In Zimbabwe, elephants started dropping dead, no-one knew why. This has now been solved, but were not any nearer to ending the problem, and now its spreading.
It is unfortunately a fact, that in the majority of instances, sudden deaths from an unknown illness are impossible to prevent until we know more.
In total, 300 died in Botswana with another 35 dying in Zimbabwe just 2 months later. 50 more elephants have died since in Botswana.
It turns out that these animals have fallen as a result of an obscure bacteria, and scientists are concerned that it could spread to other species.
Should something similar happen amongst, say the lions of an area, we could quickly see all the lions die.
It took 3 years but a wildlife veterinarian at the Victoria Falls wildlife trust has worked out what happened. Although initially thinking it was anthrax, it was spreading in a strange way, and killing to many animals.
It turns out that a bacteria called Pasteurella Bisgaard taxon 45 was responsible. It is relatively rare, and had not been known to kill elephants. Unfortunately, in previous heatwaves, similar issues have been known to jump the species barrier and kill large numbers of antelope – particular during a heat wave. This bacteria caused blood poisoning, and mostly killed recently weaned young, which are generally weaker anyway.
It is unfortunate that outbreaks like this are so easily linked to high temperatures, as our behaviour means that these high temperatures occur more often – so deaths like this may become a way of life. Given the slow rate of reproduction in elephants, this could threaten populations if not dealt with rapidly.
The same bacteria is thought to have been responsible for 200,000 saiga antelope dying on the steppe of Kazakhstan in 2015.
Oddly, this bacteria is thought to live happily in the mouths of a variety of animals from elephants and antelope, to lions tigers and even chipmunks. If all it takes for this bacteria to become deadly is an increase in temperature, we have a hard task ahead of us.
Currently, there are 350,000 savannah elephants in Africa, but this number is already declining by around 8% a year (around 26,000 animals each year, or the equivalent of twice the total elephant population of the Kruger national park – one of the largest in the world. While it is possible to turn this around it is not easy.
Back in 2019 NASA wrote an article, talking about planting trees as a way of doing part of the work for mitigating climate change. By looking at satellite images they looked at areas that were recently deforested, or areas which would be easily turned into forests. They came up with an incredible number of 900 million hectares (2.2 billion square acres). If all these areas were reforested with the right trees for each area. Apart from suddenly increasing the worlds forests, and giving breathing space for many species on the verge of extinction, the calculations suggest that these lands would take around half a trillion trees – it would increase forest cover by 25%.
Calculations suggest that the carbon that would be emitted would account for around 200 gigatons of carbon, or reducing carbon emissions in the atmosphere by around 25%. Now alarmingly, this is only around 20 years of current emissions, so it is not the only thing that we would have to do.
Even planting half a trillion trees is not an end of climate change – this is how much emissions we have emitted – but it would be a fantastic start.
This 1.5 degree Celsius target has been talked about as increasingly impossible to meet. However, this target is essential – many of the worlds low level islands long-term survival leans on this.
Here, an expert is suggesting that we might survive. This is some positive belief that we have been in short supply of, in the last few years.
“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than i felt two years ago” he added “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said that they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investiment in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase”.
We are by not yet there, it is very much the case that we need to keep working hard.
The targets that he set, include a tripling of clean energy by 2030 and a 75% reduction in methane emissions by the same date, and a desire to see these targets come out of the COP28.
