Showing posts with label animal conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animal conservation. Show all posts

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world; NPR, October 4, 2025

, NPR ; Opinion: Jane Goodall helped humans understand their place in the world


[Kip Currier: Jane Goodall's 1960 keen-eyed field observation of chimpanzees using tools in the wild was a game-changer in how humans think about primates. It's also one of the great moments of scientific research in the past century. We should deeply consider what other scientific insights we are likely to miss when cuts to scientific research are made and the pursuit of knowledge is devalued.]


[Excerpt]

"Outside the Field Museum in Chicago, a bronze sculpture by artist Marla Friedman captures a moment a friendship was made.

It's called "The Red Palm Nut." A young woman sits barefoot on the ground, reaching out her hand to a chimpanzee, who sits about a yard away. And he lightly, seemingly shyly, takes her human fingers into his own. A bright, red palm nut has dropped on the soil between them.

The woman in the sculpture is the great primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, at the moment she first earned the trust of a wild chimp. "He reached out and he took and dropped that palm nut," she later remembered. "But then very gently squeezed my fingers and that's how chimpanzees reassure each other. So in that moment we understood each other without the use of human words, the language of gestures."

Jane Goodall called the silvery-chinned chimp David Greybeard. She met him when she was in her 20s, a former secretary from Bournemouth, England, who saved cash tips she'd earned as a waitress to journey to Africa, where she talked herself into a job as assistant to the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey.

She had no college experience. But Jane Goodall convinced Leakey she would be just the person to live among and study a group of chimpanzees he had discovered on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

And on what she recalled was a rainy morning, November 4, 1960, she saw David Greybeard and other chimps take twigs from a tree, pluck their leaves, and use them as sticks to pierce a termite mound and slurp the insects off the end — almost like how those primates called human beings might lick peanut butter off a spoon.

What she saw and documented was startling: the chimps had made the twigs into tools. When she wrote about it to Louis Leakey, he famously replied, "We must now redefine man, redefine tools, or accept chimpanzees as humans."

By the time Jane Goodall died this week, at the age of 91, she'd been honored around the world for her work with chimps and people, and established animal sanctuaries and forest conservation programs.

David Greybeard, I think she'd want us to note, died in 1968. Jane Goodall and her friend saw strangers in a jungle, reached out their hands, and began a friendship that changed how humans understood our place in the world."

Friday, October 3, 2025

Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas; The Guardian, October 2, 2025

 The Guardian; Dogs and drones: how scientists are saving Washington’s endangered orcas

"Dressed in a bright orange lifejacket – and sometimes goggles – Eba perches atop Giles’s research boat, scanning the wind. When she catches a whiff of orca faeces, she raises her nose, sometimes whimpering or wagging her tail to point Giles in the right direction. Orca-detecting dogs have become an unlikely ally in the fight to save the whales.

“We wanted to use Eba because it allows us to stay really far away from the whales and not stress them out,” says Giles, a member of the marine conservation organisation SeaDoc Society.

Through the study of whale faeces, researchers can uncover a wealth of biological insights from a single sample, including diet, hormone levels, exposure to toxins, pregnancy, gut microbiome composition and the amount of microplastics in their system, as well as the presence of parasites, bacteria and fungi...

Out on the boat with Giles are James Sheppard, a scientist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and Charlie Welch, an SDZWA volunteer and head of Proper Voltage, a company focused on sustainable battery technology. Together, they have spent a decade developing conservation drones that can capture samples of the cloud-like plumes of breath from orcas’ blowholes with mounts holding petri dishes.

Sheppard says: “We need to get data that is robust and as close to real-time as possible, so that we can find out if there’s a real problem. Then the animal-care staff can go in and stage an intervention if it’s needed.”"

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Eyes in the sky: why drones are ‘beyond effective’ for animal rights campaigners around the world; The Guardian, March 26, 2024

, The Guardian ; Eyes in the sky: why drones are ‘beyond effective’ for animal rights campaigners around the world

"Over the past decade, drones have become irreplaceable tools in activist and conservation circles. In 2013, the animal rights group Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) launched a drone campaign tracking illegal bowhunting in Massachusetts.

Since then, drones have been used to record factory farm pollution in the American midwest, sea lice outbreaks in Icelandic salmon pens, and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Drones are popular because they’re relatively cheap, easy to use and extend a person’s range in difficult or inaccessible terrain. They also provide a bird’s-eye view of the scale of an issue, such as an oil spill or illegal logging...

In some cases, the drones capture the secret lives of animals hidden from view, such as Romeo the manatee in Miami...

“Conservation can be a very dangerous occupation to be in and there are more environmentalists killed every year,” says Ager. “Drones are a perfect way to study something without putting yourself in harm’s way and then decide whether it’s worth the risk.”"

Thursday, February 29, 2024

How scientists are using facial-recognition AI to track humpback whales; NPR, February 29, 2024

 , NPR; How scientists are using facial-recognition AI to track humpback whales

"Photographs are key for counting whales. As they dive deep, humpbacks raise their tails out of the water, revealing markings and patterns unique to each individual. Scientists typically identify whales photo by photo, matching the tails in a painstaking process.

Cheeseman figured that technology could do that more quickly. He started Happy Whale, which uses artificial intelligence-powered image recognition to identify whales. The project pulled together about 200,000 photos of humpback whales. Many came from scientists who had built large image catalogs over the years. Others came from whale watching groups and citizen scientists, since the website is designed to share the identity of a whale and where it's been seen."