Latest news with #WildlifeConservationSociety
New York Post
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Bronx Zoo's fascinating World of Darkness exhibit reopens after 16-year hiatus
The spotlight is back on New York's darkest exhibit. World of Darkness, the Bronx Zoo's 'groundbreaking' shadowy attraction showcasing more than two dozen rare and unusual nocturnal animals, is back after a 16-year hiatus. 4 World of Darkness, the Bronx Zoo's 'groundbreaking' shadowy attraction showcasing animals such as the sand cat (above), is back after a 16-year hiatus. Terria Clay / Bronx Zoo The revamped exhibit, which opened to the public Saturday, offers a glimpse into the behaviors and adaptations of 25 species across the world, from two-toed sloths and cloud rats to sand cats and vampire bats. Entry to the 13,000-square-foot, 21-habitat exhibit is included with the purchase of a Bronx Zoo ticket. 4 Aye-ayes also are part of the exhibit. Bronx Zoo 'The opening of the new World of Darkness will once again provide Bronx Zoo visitors with a unique immersion experience to observe amazing creatures that have evolved to live and thrive in darkness,' said Bronx Zoo Director and Wildlife Conservation Society Executive Vice President of Zoos & Aquarium Jim Breheny in a statement. The first World of Darkness exhibit at the zoo opened in 1969. It served as the first major zoo exhibit to feature nocturnal animals in a 'reverse light cycle' so that onlookers could watch the nocturnal world in action during daytime hours, officials said. The new modernized exhibit – the first iteration since the original closed in April 2009 because of financial issues – will continue on the legacy of creative lighting design, zoo officials said, with a new set of programmable LED lighting systems that simulate 'soft' sunrise and sunset transitions. 4 The modernized exhibit features creative lighting designs, zoo officials said. Bronx Zoo The 'reimagined' nocturnal house also offers 'immersive soundscapes, interactive elements, and meticulously recreated habitats' from tropical forests and wetlands to deserts and caves, the zoo said. Visitors can expect hands-on educational consoles, outdoor photo-op stations and up-close views of blood pythons, tarantulas and naked mole rats. The exhibit also serves as the zoo's only permanent bilingual attraction, with all signage, graphics and interactive elements in both English and Spanish. 4 A broad-snouted Caiman lays in wait at the Bronx Zoo's World of Darkness exhibit. Julie Larsen / Bronx Zoo The revitalized exhibit also features species rarely seen in zoos, including cloud rats, fat-tailed leumurs, and Guatemalan beaded lizards. 'Many New Yorkers have great memories of the exhibit which originally opened in 1969,' Breheny said, adding the zoo has 'updated all aspects of the experience to ensure an amazing opportunity to enter a shadowy world rarely seen.'
The Hindu
17-07-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Citizen groups release open letter condemning ‘colonial conservation' model in Nagarahole
Several citizen groups came together to release an open letter in front of the Wildlife Conservation Society office in Bengaluru expressing concern regarding the ongoing tensions inside the Nagarahole Tiger Reserve. The letter expressed solidarity with the 52 families of Karadikallu who have been demanding the recognition of their forest rights. The signees of the letter condemned 'the historical violence and threats the communities continue to face in the name of conservation.' They termed the actions of the Forest Department 'deliberate attempts to deny the communities their rights'. 'Anti-people and anti-environment' On June 18, 2025, around 250 Forest Department officials, with the police personnel and armed special tiger task force members, demolished six makeshift huts of the Jenukuruba tribal families in Karadikallu. This was following the re-entry of the tribals into the forests of Nagarahole Tiger Reserve in May 2025 'to reclaim their ancestral land'. The Jenukurubas have been in a long-drawn dispute with the Forest Department officials who, according to them, have repeatedly rejected their claims under the Forest Rights Act. 'Underlying these actions is a model of conservation witnessed in Nagarahole over the past decades, touted nationally and globally as a 'successful model', led by organisations like Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and prominent conservationists Ullas Karanth, Krithi Karanth, late K.M. Chinappa, that is viciously anti-people and anti-environment,' read the letter, which alleged that the model has turned Nagarahole into a militarised conflict zone. 'Fact-finding missions and widespread documentation on media and social media highlight that 'forest conservation' in forests like Nagarahole has come to mean violence, militarisation, persecutional AI-based, and digital surveillance, forced evictions, displacement and deprivation for the tribal and other vulnerable forest communities who have lived and nurtured the forests for centuries,' it further said. 'Criminalising natives' The letter said that several portions of the forest have been replaced by timber plantations, and eco-tourism has been popularised to allow entry of tourists and resorts into the forests, while denying tribals their customary rights. It also noted that the conservation model criminalises local forest communities by terming them 'encroachers'. 'It has been widely documented that what is termed by the WCS and the Forest Department as 'voluntary relocations' is anything but that... while conservationists like Chinnappa seek to minimise human interference in the forest to restore biodiversity, the latest science shows that lands managed by indigenous communities tend to be the most biodiverse, more than areas managed under 'wildlife reserves' or 'protected areas',' it said. The letter has been signed by the representatives of Community Network Against Protected Areas, Fridays For Future, All India Students' Association Karnataka, and Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties, among others.
Fast Company
16-07-2025
- General
- Fast Company
NYC Fishmongers are turning butcher paper into a call to action
One hundred miles off the coast of New York City, there is an underwater canyon teeming with marine life. Seabirds soar overhead as whales, sharks, dolphins, sea turtles, and fish gather around Hudson Canyon. With so many species calling the canyon home, the Wildlife Conservation Society wants Hudson Canyon to be designated a National Marine Sanctuary. The designation, awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, would protect the ecologically diverse area from companies hoping to mine the seabed for oil, gas, and minerals. It's not just the endangered species WCS is hoping to save from disruptive and dangerous mining—it also wants to save the fish you eat for dinner. With a striking new campaign created by the advertising agency McKinney, WCS is calling on seafood lovers to sign its petition urging NOAA to protect Hudson Canyon, home to the creatures that stock seafood markets in New York City and beyond. [Image: courtesy Hudson Canyon] 'We're protecting the species out there, we're protecting their health, but we're also protecting the economic viability of our waters,' says Christine Osekoski, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Subscribe to the Design newsletter. The latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters To help communicate the importance of Hudson Canyon to the people who enjoy the spoils of commercial fishing there, McKinney took an analog-first approach to the campaign. They printed the petition right onto the butcher paper that seafood markets wrap around the fish they sell. [Image: courtesy Hudson Canyon] 'What better way to get the actual cause, actual information, and actual petition into people's hands . . . than at the moment you are consuming the very thing that is being threatened?' asks Omid Amidi, chief creative officer at McKinney. To create an eye-catching design on the butcher paper, McKinney's team members used a Japanese printing technique called gyotaku, brushing the types of animals found in the Hudson Canyon with blue ink and pressing them onto paper. The process yields nearly perfect impressions of the very same creatures the campaign is trying to save—black sea bass, scallops, and crabs, for example. [Image: courtesy Hudson Canyon] The fish prints are paired with maps of the Hudson Canyon, copies of the petition text, and QR codes to sign it. These elements, all in blue, are overlaid with blocky red letters reading 'Quit Floundering, Then Save the Canyon' and 'Save the Scallops, Then Sear Them,' among other sayings. The simple layouts and contrasting blue and red ink are meant to evoke the advertising and storefront design choices of old New York fish markets. The end product is a far cry from the plain brown butcher paper that markets traditionally use to wrap seafood. [Image: courtesy Hudson Canyon] 'The design itself is just meant to stop you in your tracks,' Amidi says. 'Even though it's a light piece of paper, it has the weight of all the work and all the care we put into it.' Adding to the campaign, McKinney designed window clings and counter cards for participating markets, as well as created signage displayed at the New York Aquarium and online videos featuring local fishmongers supporting the effort. advertisement [Image: courtesy Hudson Canyon] The campaign launched June 9, the day after the United Nations' World Oceans Day. Since then, participating seafood markets in the New York City area have wrapped their fish in WCS's petition and stirred up support among customers. Six markets are participating in the campaign: Mt. Kisco Seafood, Greenpoint Fish and Lobster, Metro Seafood, Mermaid's Garden Sustainable Seafood, Marty's Gourmet Seafood, and Lobster Place at Chelsea Markets. 'We definitely have a crew of loyal customers who are into sustainability,' says David Seigal, culinary director at Lobster Place at Chelsea Markets. 'But we also have a lot of customers who want to know where their food is coming from, and I think those are the people who are most interested in this.' Some participating fish markets are already asking for more shipments of the paper, Osekoski says, as more people see the design and sign the petition. This show of support is an important step in the process toward Hudson Canyon being designated a National Marine Sanctuary. Soon, NOAA will release its draft of the designation documents and solicit comments from the public before ultimately choosing whether to make the area a sanctuary. By the end of the public comment period, WCS hopes its petition will have 25,000 signatories—and the nonprofit is already one-third of the way there. For Seigal, also an avid fisherman who frequently travels to the Hudson Canyon, protecting the area is a cause especially close to his heart. 'We're in business with Mother Nature, when it comes down to it,' he says. 'Any threat to Mother Nature is a threat to, at a minimum, our business, but really to our existence as a human race.'
Boston Globe
07-07-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Video from a bat cave in Africa offers clues on how viruses leap between species
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Through a mixture of what he called 'curiosity and luck,' he filmed far more than leopards. Hundreds of nights of footage revealed a steady procession of 13 additional predator species, among them large-spotted genets, African civets, African fish eagles, African rock pythons, L'Hoest's monkeys and baboons. Python Cave is home to as many as 50,000 Egyptian fruit bats, and the predators emerged from the cave with a winged snack, which they either hunted or scavenged, in their mouths. Advertisement 'It was amazing how many animals come to eat bats at that specific spot,' Atukwatse said. He added, 'It's basically a free meal for everybody in the area.' That is significant in part because the fruit bats, including in the area's caves, are known to be a natural reservoir for infectious diseases, including the deadly Marburg virus. Advertisement 'It's a really important observation, because we think speculatively about how wildlife comes into contact with each other, but we rarely ever observe it,' said Jonathan Epstein, a public health researcher with expertise in viral zoonoses and founder of One Health Science who was not involved in the study. 'It helps us paint the picture.' While the Marburg virus does not need an intermediate host en route to infecting humans, other novel viruses could follow such a path of first passing from bat to predator where it mutates into a form that infects humans. Although Atukwatse observed 'how these predators timed themselves in a way that they didn't encounter and disturb each other,' they were, he said, 'actively taking pieces of the bat and dispersing them.' He continued, 'These animals interact with other animals elsewhere in the park.' In a forest full of wildlife, 'there are hundreds of thousands of viruses in there being shared all across the animal spectrum, and they're shedding, eating each other, pooping on each other, sharing saliva,' said Chris Walzer, executive director of health at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. 'The interface that is shown here contributes, like thousands of other interfaces in the forest, to a viral exchange or pathogen exchange.' He added, 'It's a cool example of what's happening all the time and has been for eons.' Epstein said that 'spillover requires a lot of things to line up.' Seeing the direct contact between bats and other predators is valuable because 'that's often something we don't understand very well.' Advertisement 'It is important to understand what other wildlife get exposed,' he continued, 'and the baboons are probably the most interesting here because we know that primates are susceptible to viruses.' He described a scenario in which perhaps a significant baboon die-off in the forest was linked to Marburg virus. 'This observation becomes important because we can look back and see that these baboons are hunting these bats and that explains how they would be infected,' he said. Alex Braczkowski, scientific director of the Kyambura Lion Project and a co-author with Atukwatse, compared it to stumbling upon a crime scene. 'We know we've found something,' he said. 'We are not claiming to know what it means. We just know that it's a portal to somewhere.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
AI helps tell snow leopards apart, improving population counts for these majestic mountain predators
Snow leopards are known as the 'ghosts of the mountains' for a reason. Imagine waiting for months in the harsh, rugged mountains of Asia, hoping to catch even a glimpse of one. These elusive big cats move silently across rocky slopes, their pale coats blending so seamlessly with snow and stone that even the most seasoned biologists seldom spot them in the wild. Travel writer Peter Matthiessen spent two months in 1973 searching the Tibetan plateau for them and wrote a 300-page book about the effort. He never saw one. Forty years later, Peter's son Alex retraced his father's steps – and didn't see one either. Researchers have struggled to come up with a figure for the global population. In 2017, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified the snow leopard from endangered to vulnerable, citing estimates of between 2,500 and 10,000 adults in the wild. However, the group also warned that numbers continue to decline in many areas due to habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict. Those who study these animals want to help protect the species and their habitat – if only we can determine exactly where they live and how many there are. Traditional tracking methods – searching for footprints, droppings and other signs – have their limits. Instead of waiting for a lucky face-to-face encounter, conservationists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, led by experts including Stéphane Ostrowski and Sorosh Poya Faryabi, began deploying automated camera traps in Afghanistan. These devices snap photos whenever movement is detected, capturing thousands of images over months, all in hopes of obtaining a rare glimpse of a snow leopard. But capturing images is only half the battle. The next, even harder task is telling one snow leopard apart from another. At first glance, it might sound simple: Each snow leopard has a unique pattern of black rosettes on its coat, like a fingerprint or a face in a crowd. Yet in practice, identifying individuals by these patterns is slow, subjective and prone to error. Photos may be taken at odd angles, under poor lighting, or with parts of the animal obscured – making matches tricky. A common mistake happens when photos from different cameras are marked as depicting different animals when they actually show the same individual, inflating population estimates. Worse, camera trap images can get mixed up or misfiled, splitting encounters of one cat across multiple batches and identities. I am a data analyst working with Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners at Wild Me. My work and others' has found that even trained experts can misidentify animals, failing to recognize repeat visitors at locations monitored by motion-sensing cameras and counting the same animal more than once. One study found that the snow leopard population was overestimated by more than 30% because of these human errors. To avoid these pitfalls, researchers follow camera sorting guidelines: At least three clear pattern differences or similarities must be confirmed between two images to declare them the same or different cats. Images too blurry, too dark or taken from difficult angles may have to be discarded. Identification efforts range from easy cases with clear, full-body shots to ambiguous ones needing collaboration and debate. Despite these efforts, variability remains, and more experienced observers tend to be more accurate. Now people trying to count snow leopards are getting help from artificial intelligence systems, in two ways. Modern AI tools are revolutionizing how we process these large photo libraries. First, AI can rapidly sort through thousands of images, flagging those that contain snow leopards and ignoring irrelevant ones such as those that depict blue sheep, gray-and-white mountain terrain, or shadows. AI can identify individual snow leopards by analyzing their unique rosette patterns, even when poses or lighting vary. Each snow leopard encounter is compared with a catalog of previously identified photos and assigned a known ID if there is a match, or entered as a new individual if not. In a recent study, several colleagues and I evaluated two AI algorithms, both separately and in tandem. The first algorithm, called HotSpotter, identifies individual snow leopards by comparing key visual features such as coat patterns, highlighting distinctive 'hot spots' with a yellow marker. The second is a newer method called pose invariant embeddings, which operates similar to facial recognition technology: It recognizes layers of abstract features in the data, identifying the same animal regardless of how it is positioned in the photo or what kind of lighting there may be. We trained these systems using a curated dataset of photos of snow leopards from zoos in the U.S., Europe and Tajikistan, and with images from the wild, including in Afghanistan. Alone, each model worked about 74% of the time, correctly identifying the cat from a large photo library. But when combined, the two systems together were correct 85% of the time. These algorithms were integrated into Wildbook, an open-source, web-based software platform developed by the nonprofit organization Wild Me and now adopted by ConservationX. We deployed the combined system on a free website, where researchers can upload images, seek matches using the algorithms, and confirm those matches with side-by-side comparisons. This site is among a growing family of AI-powered wildlife platforms that are helping conservation biologists work more efficiently and more effectively at protecting species and their habitats. These AI systems aren't error-proof. AI quickly narrows down candidates and flags likely matches, but expert validation ensures accuracy, especially with tricky or ambiguous photos. Another study we conducted pitted AI-assisted groups of experts and novices against each other. Each was given a set of three to 10 images of 34 known captive snow leopards and asked to use the Whiskerbook platform to identify them. They were also asked to estimate how many individual animals were in the set of photos. The experts accurately matched about 90% of the images and delivered population estimates within about 3% of the true number. In contrast, the novices identified only 73% of the cats and underestimated the total number, sometimes by 25% or more, incorrectly merging two individuals into one. Both sets of results were better than when experts or novices did not use any software. The takeaway is clear: Human expertise remains important, and combining it with AI support leads to the most accurate results. My colleagues and I hope that by using tools like Whiskerbook and the AI systems embedded in them, researchers will be able to more quickly and more confidently study these elusive animals. With AI tools like Whiskerbook illuminating the mysteries of these mountain ghosts, we have another way to safeguard snow leopards – but success depends on continued commitment to protecting their fragile mountain homes. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Eve Bohnett, University of Florida Read more: In protecting land for wildlife, size matters – here's what it takes to conserve very large areas Grizzly bear conservation is as much about human relationships as it is the animals I run 'facial recognition' on buildings to unlock architectural secrets Eve Bohnett receives funding from San Diego State Research Foundation and Wildlife Conservation Society. She is affiliated with University of Florida.
