Over the past few posts, hopefully you have gotten a sense of how a combination of increasing demand and general prejudice has led to massive overexploitation of shark populations around the world- some of the information I have passed along is pretty bleak. But I don’t want you to think that it’s all doom and […]
Archive for the ‘southern Africa’ Tag
Going on the offensive for sharks
Where the wild sharks are
My last post presented a pretty bleak view of current shark populations and the challenges they face, so this week I want to focus on the ways that researchers are trying to understand the most important aspects of shark conservation- sometimes the strategies they propose aren’t effective, but still lead to improved shark knowledge and […]
How do you measure an elephant?
As I mentioned in my last post, researchers are still learning about the ways in which elephants, and other large herbivores, impact the environment around them. In many ways, the goal is to figure out how many elephants can fit into an area before their resource needs lead to environmental degradation. One way to do […]
Elephants on a tight-rope
I spent the last week looking through lots of documents on elephants (even a few theses, so there was a mountain of reading), and I’ve learned quite a bit about what elephants eat, how populations have changed, and the impact that these mega-herbivores can have on the environment around them- they definitely live on a […]