Conservationists fear up to 11% of Tapanuli orangutan population perished in disaster that also killed 1,000 people
The skull of a Tapanuli orangutan, caked in debris, stares out from a tomb of mud in North Sumatra, killed in catastrophic flooding that swept through Indonesia.
The late November floods have been an “extinction-level disturbance” for the world’s rarest great ape, scientists have said, causing catastrophic damage to its habitat and survival prospects.
Still rare only 20 years ago, the charismatic animals are in almost every UK river and a conservation success story
On a quiet Friday evening, an otter and a fox trot through Lincoln city centre. The pair scurry past charity shops and through deserted streets, the encounter lit by the security lamps of shuttered takeaways. Each animal inspects the nooks and crannies of the high street before disappearing into the night, ending the unlikely scene captured by CCTV last month.
Wildlife smuggling is serious organised crime that ‘fuels corruption and drives species to extinction’, Home Office says
More than 250 endangered species and illegal wildlife products were seized at the UK border in a single month, new figures have revealed, including spiders, snakes and birds.
The illicit cargo was uncovered as part of an annual crackdown on wildlife smuggling known as Operation Thunder, which is led by Interpol and the World Customs Organisation.
Kolahoi is one of many glaciers whose decline is disrupting whole ecosystems – water, wildlife and human life that it has supported for centuries
From the slopes above Pahalgam, the Kolahoi glacier is visible as a thinning, rumpled ribbon of ice stretching across the western Himalayas. Once a vast white artery feeding rivers, fields and forests, it is now retreating steadily, leaving bare rock, crevassed ice and newly exposed alpine meadows.
The glacier’s meltwater has sustained paddy fields, apple orchards, saffron fields and grazing pastures for centuries. Now, as its ice diminishes, the entire web of life it supported is shifting.
Conservationist who devoted his life to the study and preservation of the African elephant
The British scientist Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who has died aged 83, became the world’s leading authority on the behaviour of African elephants and played a vital part in ensuring their conservation.
His efforts to save the African elephant began in 1965 when, as an Oxford zoology graduate who had also just received his pilot’s licence, he flew his Piper Pacer bush plane from Nairobi down to Tanzania’s pocket-sized Lake Manyara national park. The challenge he had accepted at the age of 23 was how to solve the problem of 450 elephants confined in a space too small to support them.
Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse
A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.
The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.
The emergence of synthetic pigments in the 19th century had an immense impact on the art world, particularly the availability of emerald-green pigments, prized for their intense brilliance by such masters as Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet. The downside was that these pigments often degraded over time, resulting in cracks and uneven surfaces and the formation of dark copper oxides—even the release of arsenic compounds.
Naturally, it’s a major concern for conservationists of such masterpieces. So it should be welcome news that European researchers have used synchrotron radiation and various other analytical tools to determine whether light and/or humidity are the culprits behind that degradation and how, specifically, it occurs, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances.
Science has become a valuable tool for art conservationists, especially various X-ray imaging methods. For instance, in 2019, we reported on how many of the oil paintings at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had been developing tiny, pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Chemists concluded that the blisters are actually metal carboxylate soaps, the result of a chemical reaction between metal ions in the lead and zinc pigments and fatty acids in the binding medium used in the paint. The soaps start to clump together to form the blisters and migrate through the paint film.
Login
