Northern Mariana Islands

United States

U.S. Minor Outlying Islands

U.S. Virgin Islands

Guam

American Samoa

Puerto Rico

US & Territories

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in a fiery global catastrophe. But we know little about how their successors, the mammals, recovered and took over the world. Now, hidden inside ordinary-looking rocks, an astonishing trove of fossils reveals a dramatic new picture of how rat-sized creatures ballooned in size and began to evolve into the vast array of species—from cheetahs to bats to whales to humans—that rule our planet today.

Amazing fossils reveal how mammals took over after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

Rise of the Mammals

NOVA Wonders What Are Animals Saying? Hero

From singing whales and squeaking bats to thumping spiders and clicking dolphins, the world is filled with the exotic sounds of our fellow creatures. What are they saying? While we believe language sets us apart, some animals demonstrate they can learn our language—like Chaser the dog, who recognizes hundreds of words, and Kanzi the bonobo, who appears to have a sophisticated understanding of spoken English. But can we decode their own communications? NOVA Wonders follows researchers around the globe who are deciphering an amazing array of clues that reveal how animals share information critical to their survival. Will we one day be able to write the bat dictionary or decode the hidden sign language of chimps? And what can these findings tell us about the roots of our own language?

Can we crack the code of animal communication?

What Are Animals Saying?

A seven-mile-wide asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, triggering a chain of events that coincide with the end of the dinosaurs. But experts have long debated exactly what happened when the asteroid struck and how the giant beasts met their end. Now, scientists have uncovered compelling new clues about the catastrophe—from New Jersey to the wilds of Patagonia—and an international expedition of scientists has drilled into the impact crater off the coast of Mexico, recovering crucial direct evidence of the searing energy and giant tsunami unleashed by the asteroid. Join NOVA as scientists piece together a chillingly precise unfolding of the Earth’s biggest cataclysm, moment by moment, and discover how our early mammalian ancestors managed to survive and repopulate the Earth. (Premiered December 27, 2017)

Experts drill into the impact crater of an asteroid that created a worldwide cataclysm.

Day the Dinosaurs Died

Koch Foundation

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Draper

Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was once one of the most species-rich places in Africa.
By protecting lions from traps and snares, veterinarians, park rangers, and ecologists are working together to restore this feline&#x27;s population in Gorongosa National Park.
Lions Return to Mozambique&#x27;s Gorongosa National ParkPublished: November 2, 2020Onscreen: Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was once one of the most species-rich places in Africa. But like the rest of the country, the park was decimated by a long and bloody war.Antonio &quot;Tonecas&quot; Paulo: (Translated from Portuguese) The war brought misery and unemployment. Many people died of hunger, because they were unable to grow crops. They were always on the move trying to escape the fighting.Paola Bouley: Armies had to eat, elephants were killed, tusks were sold to buy guns. So, everything just pretty much got wiped out.Onscreen: After the fighting ended, some herbivore species quickly rebounded. But the only top predators to survive were a handful of lions. By the time Paola Bouley arrived in 2012, the war had been over nearly 20 years. Bouley: When I got here, nothing was known about lions. There had never been any formal research on carnivores. So, people had, you know, casual observations about how many lions and where, but we really had no data.I thought I saw something back there.The first thing you want to do is count. You want to know how many and where.Where is everybody?But we had a hell of a time in the beginning, actually finding lions in this wilderness. It&#x27;s mostly roadless, it&#x27;s long-grass habitats, so we worked in the beginning just to be able to see lions.He’s a beautiful lion…And then, we took it a step further and began to put GPS collars on prides and coalitions – so, groups of females, groups of males – and those, in turn, took us deeper into the story. And what we quickly found is that lions were still being killed.People were setting wire snares in the landscape to catch warthogs and waterbuck and buffalo, but they were also, they were catching lions. Lions are by-catch in those traps.Jinga lost his foot in a gin trap in February.And the numbers were showing 1 in 3 were either maimed – like losing actual limbs – or killed in these snares. I came here as an ecologist, as a scientist…Start the timer....but quickly had to switch gears, because when we saw the trends for lions here and other species we had to intervene.That was the leap that we made as a team. We went from being scientists – purely scientists just collecting data – to intervening and really trying to get the population jumpstarted.So, we’ll collar him so we can monitor his progress and keep treating him.So, we had to stop the illegal hunting. We had to create a refuge for these species to naturally recover.Paulo: (Translated from Portuguese) When I started working here, the situation with traps was traumatic. It was a very serious problem. The area was full of traps and snares. That’s when we started training our rangers to clean up and remove wire snares and traps from places where the lions roamed.Bouley: The rangers are the ones on the ground, and we put technology in their hands – high resolution satellite imagery – and we paired their patrols with GPS data we were getting from the collars. So, those satellite collars at our lions send us positions every few hours, so we know where lions are, we know where the core habitats are, and so we know where to focus strategic patrols. In the first two years we saw a complete turnaround in the situation. Lion poaching declined by 95%. We haven&#x27;t had a lion snared in over a year already and believe me, I look.Paulo: (Translated from Portuguese) Now, it is possible to go through a whole year without any animals getting caught in a trap. And for us that’s a fantastic result. Now, we have to preserve what we have.Onscreen: The current estimated Gorongosa lion population is around 150. Bouley: In the past three years, we&#x27;ve had 13 cubs and seven of those have been female. And that&#x27;s the beauty of lions. If you give them the opportunity, they grow. They breed almost every two years, the survival is very high in Gorongosa, there&#x27;s a lot of food, there&#x27;s a lot of space. So, they&#x27;ve done very well. We understand from the science and the data that we’ve collected that we could have three times as many lions in this park than we currently have and so that’s a target. That’s a goal. And so, we use the science and the data to really guide us towards those. What we&#x27;re trying to do here is heal the ecosystem. Put the pieces back together.Onscreen: In 2017, Gorongosa was considered safe enough to reintroduce African wild dogs to the park. Bouley: Lions took us straight to the heart of a problem, and once we solved their problem, it laid the ground for all these other species to come back too. It really was just a matter of letting nature do what it does best, and we did that by just taking the human factor out of the situation. So, where before humans were having a negative impact on populations – by setting snares, by shooting animals – you remove that, and you just step back and you let nature take its course. And in a system as robust and resilient as Gorongosa, you can let that happen.

Lions Return to Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park Hero

Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was once one of the most species-rich places in Africa.

Lions Return to Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park

Hear what it’s like to be a vet for wild animals.
“To be a veterinarian in one of the best conservation areas in the country [of Mozambique] is to have the best office in the world,” Dr. Tonecas Paulo says.
Meet Gorongosa National Park’s Head VeterinarianPublished: November 2, 2020Tonecas Paulo: (Translated from Portuguese) My name is Tonecas Paulo. I&#x27;m from Búzi, Sofala province, very close to Gorongosa. I&#x27;m a veterinarian at Gorongosa National Park.To be a veterinarian in one of the best conservation areas of the country is to have the best office in the world.Breathing the fresh air every day and getting to share the space every day with wild animals, living with them in a natural way to really understand what the animals need from us and to help save them. It’s a challenging job and a fantastic one. Onscreen: Gorongosa National Park is in central Mozambique. It is recovering from a long war that wiped out 95% of the park’s large animals. Herbivore populations have already rebounded. Now, the park is trying to bolster its large predator populations, including African wild dogs.Tonecas Paulo: When the wild dogs first arrived last year, I was a bit nervous because it was the first time I had any direct contact with them and I was also aware of the great responsibilities facing us. The park needs the wild dogs because having too many herbivores without predators can lead to overgrazing. As a veterinarian, I am responsible for ensuring the good health of those wild dogs and also for monitoring them every day.My inspiration to become a veterinarian came from my grandmother. She was very fond of household animals, especially cats. I began to love animals, and then I discovered I could study veterinary medicine. I could take care of animals.I went through five years of training at Eduardo Mondlane University here in Mozambique. My first idea was to be a veterinarian working with domestic animals, but then this opportunity came along to join the Gorongosa team, and that led to a new passion, to conserve the environment.We are able to see animals in Gorongosa today because there were people who looked after them. Now, I have this noble mission of protecting and caring for the animals that need us so much. Here in the wild, each day is different from the next. For a veterinarian working with domestic animals, the patients go to the veterinarian, but here in the wild, we have to chase after the patients. Our work has no routine. Normally in a day, I work two hours with the wild dogs, two hours with lions, three or four hours with the pangolins. But it changes every day. There is no kind of routine. Every day brings us surprises. We must always be ready to attend to any type of emergency. The pangolin project was created to respond to illegal trafficking. The pangolin is at risk of extinction. They are the most trafficked animals in the world. This concerns us very much, which is why we created this center to try to return this species to nature.When the pangolins arrive here at Gorongosa, they arrive with wounds, signs of abuse and exhaustion. We treat and then return them to the wild. Pangolins have great ecological importance. They consume around 70 million insects annually. They also help with the aeration and fertilization of the soil.Onscreen: So far, the Gorongosa Pangolin Project has saved the lives of nearly 40 pangolins rescued from traffickers.Tonecas Paulo: It&#x27;s been a year and two months since we reintroduced the wild dogs to Gorongosa National Park. And since then, many things have happened. The most important milestone we&#x27;ve had is one that happened about two and a half months ago. A historical birth for the first time since the civil war.The birth of these wild dog pups brings me great hope. It is like a light at the end of the tunnel that in the very near future this population can grow and stabilize here in the park. Onscreen: The land surrounding Goronogsa National Park is home to some 200,000 people. The median age in Mozambique is 17.Tonecas Paulo: I am proud to be a young man who came from a community similar to the communities around the park taking on a job with such huge responsibilities. I think that it’s extremely important that the people who live around the park understand Gorongosa’s mission and the work we do daily. Gorongosa’s fundamental objective is the conservation of biodiversity while promoting development in the communities surrounding the park.We have a lot of hard conservation work to do so that the next generations can come here to Gorongosa, to see for themselves what a lion really is, an elephant, a hippopotamus, a crocodile, and not just to see them in cartoons or photographs. For that reason, we have to do what we can to protect this ecosystem.What motivates me to work so hard is to achieve the objectives of the Gorongosa Restoration Project in support of the animals lost during the 16-year war. I want young people to see me as a model so that they can believe it is possible to be a veterinarian in a conservation area right here in Mozambique. To bet on their training and to fight for this opportunity.

Meet Gorongosa National Park’s Head Veterinarian Hero

Hear what it’s like to be a vet for wild animals.

Meet Gorongosa National Park’s Head Veterinarian

<div class="related"></div>
 

 
 In July 2013, Krishnamurthy Ramesh, head of the monitoring program at Panna Tiger Reserve in central India, received a security alert. Someone was attempting to access his email account from a location more than<a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131010-poaching-technology-tigers-endangered-animals-science/"> 600 miles away from his office</a>. Sitting in Ramesh’s inbox was an email reporting the encrypted coordinates of an endangered Bengal tiger.
 

 
 Tigers are considered “walking gold” on the black market. Although leading Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) organizations have <a href="https://bit.ly/3jGDvgg">banned the use of tiger parts</a>, a robust illegal market that values tigers as luxury items—particularly their bones and pelts—still exists.
 

 
 However, the demand for wildlife products is not limited to tigers. Elephants, rhinos, pangolins, sharks, and many other species are part of this massive illicit trade. The world of wildlife trafficking and poaching is orchestrated by highly organized crime syndicates which rake in profits<a href="https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Environmental-crime/Wildlife-crime"> exceeding $20 billion</a> per year. It is the fourth most profitable illegal enterprise behind<a href="https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/corruption/wildlife-and-forest-crime.html"> narcotics, weapons, and human trafficking</a>, and is considered a significant contributor to the<a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/24/13596"> sixth mass extinction</a>.
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Tiger_Ranthambhore_May2015_Rupa Gandhi_WTI (4).jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="535" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Tiger_Ranthambhore_May2015_Rupa_Gandhi_WTI_4.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Less than 4,000 tigers remain in the wild. Image courtesy of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) <div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 Although the suspicious log-in attempt was thwarted by Ramesh’s server, and the tiger’s exact location was encrypted, the cybersecurity breach exposed the threat of an endangered animal’s GPS coordinates falling into the wrong hands.
 

 
 Today, emails are encrypted by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6FanLhvsEs">coded email programs</a> to prevent others from reading them. However,<a href="https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvcy-sci-cybercodes/cyber-codes/"> not all online activity is encrypted</a> and in some cases browsing history, text messages, and data from apps can be intercepted. Emails are normally encrypted when they are sent, but can sometimes be decrypted before they reach their recipient. Cybersecurity news often focuses on how hackers access personal information, bank accounts, social media, and government data. But what if “cyberpoachers” started targeting information on the locations of endangered species through their animal tracking data?
 

 
 <h2>The Rise of Wildlife Cybercrime</h2>
 

 
 The illegal wildlife trade has transformed with the growth and accessibility of the internet. Animals that used to be sold in physical markets are now sold by <a href="https://www.ifaw.org/press-releases/tech-companies-wildlife-trafficking-online">anonymous online vendors</a>. As a result, a largely<a href="https://www.ifaw.org/journal/hot-on-the-trail-of-cyber-enabled-wildlife-traffickers"> unregulated online market</a> allows criminal enterprises to sell illegally acquired wildlife products, and transport them around the world. The consumer-to-consumer marketplace has made buying shark fins, pangolin scales, and rhino horns as easy as click, pay, ship.
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Updated Pangolin Graphic .jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="618" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Updated_Pangolin_Graphic_.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Infographic courtesy of IFAW<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 The 2018 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) report <a href="https://www.ifaw.org/resources/disrupt-wildlife-cybercrime">Disrupt: Wildlife Cybercrime</a> identified more than 5,000 advertisements spread across more than 100 online marketplaces and social media platforms, cataloguing close to 12,000 endangered and threatened specimens worth almost $4 million. These items were completely accessible to the public; the report did not include items advertised in closed or private Facebook groups, password-protected websites, or the hidden part of the internet—the <a href="https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/the-truth-about-the-dark-web-kumar.htm">dark web</a>.
 

 
 <div class="ad"></div>
 

 
 “Many of the species preyed upon by wildlife criminals are in danger of approaching a tipping point where their diminishing numbers can no longer sustain their populations,” described Rikkert Reijnen, program director of wildlife crime at IFAW, in the Disrupt report. “Some, such as rhinos, may have already reached that point. Disrupting wildlife cybercrime is a critical component of ensuring the welfare, safety and survival of endangered and threatened animals.”
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Illegal ivory burned - IFAW.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="719" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Illegal_ivory_burned_-_IFAW.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>A wildlife ranger stands guard as towers of confiscated ivory go up in smoke in Kenya&#x27;s Nairobi National Park. The country burned 105 tons of ivory in 2016 to send a stern message: Ivory is worthless unless it is on elephants. Image courtesy of IFAW<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 Unfortunately, illegal online markets aren’t the only “digital threat” to endangered wildlife. In recent years, hackers have exploited the very systems designed to monitor and protect these animals. By decrypting location data from radio tags and GPS collars, hackers can track down animals or reveal their whereabouts to those who would harm them. (Hacking by nature is not good or bad—it is essentially solving problems in creative and innovative ways. Some hackers use questionable methods of acquiring information, whether with intent to help or harm, while others use hackathons to improve existing security protocols by collaborating as a community to solve complex problems.)
 

 
 “Being able to put on a map exactly where animals are in space in time, that’s what one needs to exploit them,” wrote Steven J. Cooke, a biology professor at Carleton University in Canada, in an article in the journal <a href="http://www.fecpl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Cooke_et_al-2017-Conservation_Biology-1.pdf">Conservation Biology</a>.
 

 
 Cooke pointed out that the animal-tracking data scientists use to safeguard animals could potentially be used to harm them by poachers, commercial fishermen, and even nature lovers looking to photograph them.
 

 
 Some of the troubling ways radio tags and collars have been used to “locate, disturb, capture, harm, or kill tagged animals,” Cooke pointed out, include<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/14/researcher-threatens-withhold-information-wa-killing-tagged-sharks"> great white sharks</a> that were killed in Western Australia by individuals who had tracked their radio signals to “reduce human-wildlife conflict,” as well as efforts by “wolf persecution” groups to decrypt data on radio collars to allow them to<a href="https://www.outsideonline.com/1913831/out-bounds-death-832f-yellowstones-most-famous-wolf#close"> hunt down and kill wolves</a> in Yellowstone National Park.
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Wolf watches biologists in Yellowstone National Park - Campbell, William:USFWS.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="553" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Wolf_watches_biologists_in_Yellowstone_Nationa.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>A wolf watches biologists in Yellowstone National Park after being captured and fitted with a radio collar. Image Credit: William Campbell / USFWS National Digital Library <div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 According to wildlife criminologist Monique Sosnowski, there are two primary ways poachers can attempt to access animal tracking data.
 

 
 “First, they can attempt to bribe corrupt individuals such as anti-poaching entities or game guides charged with locating and protecting these species,” Sosnowski says.
 

 
 When it comes to infiltrating the tracking systems themselves, Sosnowski notes that this requires more technical skill and is thus more likely attempted by organized criminal networks.
 

 
 “Cases of this have been reported around the world as poachers have attempted to gain access to GPS data, or capitalize on VHF radio signals,” she says.
 

 
 Tarah Wheeler, an international security fellow at New America, highlighted a third way “cyberpoachers” can track wild animals. If the location setting on your cell phone is switched on when snapping a photo of an animal, that data is embedded in the photo you post on social media, creating a<a href="https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/nvcy-sci-parable/a-cyber-privacy-parable/"> digital roadmap</a> for poachers to track wildlife.
 

 
 “Because of the way cell phones track your location now, you don’t need to critique someone’s photograph to find out where they were at a given time,” Wheeler told <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/your-safari-selfies-are-cute-they-re-road-map-poachers-n1016031">NBC News</a>. “Metadata, including exact longitude and latitude, is stuck to the background of the photo.”
 

 
 <h2>Hack the Poacher</h2>
 

 
 Just as poachers might access animal tracking data through vacation selfies posted from a smartphone, <a href="https://hack-the-planet.io/">Hack the Planet</a> software engineers Tim van Deursen and Thijs Suijten have leveraged mobile phones to create a detection system to turn the tables on poachers.
 

 
 Van Deursen and Suijten designed the <a href="https://www.hackthepoacher.com/">Hack the Poacher</a> system with the intent to deter poachers from protected areas and aid rangers in their ongoing fight against wildlife crime. The system uses sensors placed throughout the target area to detect poacher’s GSM cell phone signals as well as radio frequencies so rangers that patrol poaching hotspots can be alerted to their presence. Hack the Poacher works with individual parks to tailor their technology to the issues that rangers are seeing on the ground in specific poaching hotspots.
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Hack the Poacher.png" class="richtext-image full-width" height="565" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Hack_the_Poacher.width-800.png"/><figcaption>In Zambia, where the Hack the Poacher system has been tested, poachers rely heavily on their mobile phones and radios for navigation and communication with each other to coordinate and organize extraction of ivory. Illustration courtesy of Hack the Poacher.<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 “When your cell phone is on, it&#x27;s always searching for GSM towers,” Suijten says. “The rangers at the park we are working with in Zambia told us that poachers always have a phone on them. Even if there is no GSM coverage, if their cell phone is on, it will always be searching for a cell phone tower and transmitting a strong signal to connect to service.”
 

 
 The Hack the Poacher system can monitor up to 300 square kilometers (115 square miles) with just 30-40 sensors. The founders believe this system could eventually work in tandem with other tech tools like automated camera traps, machine learning, and satellite imagery, sending rangers alerts in real time and keeping them steps ahead of poachers.
 

 
 “Many initiatives in the past focused on optimizing detection of poachers by trying to get eyes on the poacher with, for example, the use of drones, night vision cameras, radar, and satellites,” van Deursen says. “While these techniques can be effective, the costs are often too high to implement on a large scale, or too technologically advanced to be operated by people other than the tech team behind the product.”
 

 
 Hack the Poacher is powered by three agencies:<a href="https://hack-the-planet.io/"> Hack the Planet</a>,<a href="https://www.q42.nl/en"> Q42</a>, and <a href="https://www.irnas.eu/">Irnas</a>. These strategic technology companies work on creating and implementing pragmatic technologies to tackle humanitarian and sustainability challenges. The Hack the Poacher project has also received support from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Google, Green Safaris, No Wildlife Crime (NWC), and Smart Parks.
 

 
 <h2>Using Radical Collaboration to Save Wildlife</h2>
 

 
 Just as Hack the Poacher is working to stop poaching at its source, IFAW is working alongside the world’s largest e-commerce, technology, and social media companies to shut down online marketplaces that deal in the trade of illegal wildlife.
 

 
 “Within IFAW, we have a lot of innovative and unique partnerships that we leverage to address cybercrime and analyze data related to wildlife trafficking,” says Danielle Kessler, acting US director of IFAW. “We are working through the <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/coalition-to-end-wildlife-trafficking-online">Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online</a> to collaborate with 36 tech companies across continents, such as eBay, Google, Microsoft and Tencent, to unite the industry and maximize impact for reducing wildlife trafficking online.”
 

 
 
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="African elephant.png" class="richtext-image full-width" height="721" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Screen_Shot_2020-10-27_at_5.39.36_PM.width-800.png"/><figcaption>African elephants are the largest land animals on Earth and could be extinct in the next decade. Poachers kill an estimated 55 elephants a day. Image courtesy of IFAW<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 
 

 
 When it comes to finding solutions at the nexus of wildlife crime and cybersecurity, hackathons provide opportunities for students to invent and innovate new technology for the good of the planet. This November, the Department of State is co-hosting<a href="http://www.zoohackathon.com/"> Zoohackathon</a> 2020, a global competition bringing together university students, coders, developers, and wildlife trafficking experts to create innovative solutions that address on-the-ground wildlife trafficking issues. Over the course of two and a half days, participants from five regional areas across the globe will compete virtually to address wildlife trafficking challenges, analyze the connections between wildlife trafficking and zoonotic disease in each region, and discuss locally focused case studies.
 

 
 For Suijten, a focus on hard skills such as software engineering are critical, but relationship building and the ability to adapt and respond to circumstances in the field have proven to be invaluable to Hack the Poacher’s success.
 

 
 “It’s amazing how much impact we can have with smart engineers, pragmatic tech, and a bit of duct tape,” Suijten says.
 

 
 As people’s lives become more intertwined with the internet, the opportunities in cybersecurity continue to expand. To learn more about this growing field, visit the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/labs/lab/cyber/">NOVA Cybersecurity Lab</a> to explore stories of real-world cyber attacks, profiles of cybersecurity experts, and short animated videos that explain the need for cybersecurity, privacy versus security, cryptography (cyber code), and the nature of hacking.
 

 
 <div class="newsletter"></div>

Where confiscated wildlife ends up - Moehring, Ryan, USFWS.jpg

Confiscated wildlife ends up in the National Wildlife Property Repository, a 22,000 square foot warehouse near Denver, Colorado that houses wildlife items that have been forfeited or abandoned to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Image Credit: Ryan Moehring / USFWS National Digital Library

The growth and accessibility of the internet has transformed the illegal wildlife trade.

The 21st Century Threat to Wildlife is "Cyberpoaching"

Saplings at Karin Nursery outside Yerevan, Armenia. Image courtesy of the Armenia Tree Project

A four-year fuel blockade in the 1990s threatened the tiny country’s forests. Ever since, it’s been replanting its trees—a task that’s more complicated than expected.

Armenia reckons with climate change and its Soviet past through reforestation

The elephants of Gorongosa National Park are notorious troublemakers: grain tramplers, crop stealers, silo destroyers. Given the chance, they will cross the river that acts as a southern boundary between Gorongosa and the rest of rural Mozambique, and raid nearby villages in search of a snack. The materials the community usually uses to build storehouses are “nothing for an elephant,” says <a href="https://gorongosa.org/dominique-goncalvez/">Dominique Gonçalves</a>, an elephant ecologist at the park.
 

 
 <div class="related"></div>
 

 
 In a way, this problem is a sign of success. During the Mozambican Civil War, which stretched from the 1970s into the 1990s, Gorongosa lost more than 90% of its 2,500 elephants. But as of 2019, the population had recovered significantly, reaching 600—and some of its younger males had begun to wander out of the park looking for food.As one of Gorongosa’s keystone species, the park’s elephants interact with their environment in a way that is essential to its health. The trees they knock down on their daily walks provide shelter for antelopes and exposed roots for porcupines; the seeds from the huge amounts of greenery they eat are dispersed in their dung, which in turn provides food for dung beetles. Still, “people need their space to have their schools, their markets, their farms,” says Gonçalves, who grew up a few hours away from Gorongosa in Beira. And when people’s ability to meet those basic needs is disrupted, serious conflict can break out. They’re less likely to cooperate with conservation efforts in that case—and in other parts of Africa, communities frustrated by elephants’ raids have killed them in retaliation.The solution Gonçalves and her colleagues found is simple and elegant. Using a technique developed in Kenya, they built a series of fences made from beehives strung with twine across the most heavily trafficked river crossings. “Most things in the natural world are ruled by fear and risk aversion,” Gonçalves says. Elephants are afraid of bees, whose stings can be especially painful on their sensitive ears. A pilot study published this year showed that the presence of a <a href="https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12679">beehive fence</a> reduced the odds of an elephant crossing the river by 95%. This idea—that an animal’s perception of danger influences where it spends time, leading to a cascade of effects on its larger ecosystem—is known as the “landscape of fear.”
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Beehives strung between fence posts" class="richtext-image full-width" height="484" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Beehive_fence_1.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Beehives strung between fenceposts deter elephants from crossing onto farmers&#x27; field near Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. Image courtesy of Dominique Gonçalves<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 Most wild landscapes have certain elements in common: food, shelter, water sources. “Those things are easy in principle to map,” says <a href="https://eeb.princeton.edu/people/robert-pringle">Rob Pringle</a>, an ecologist at Princeton University. “But the other element is, where does the animal feel safe? That is a trickier thing to make tangible.” To put it in human terms, he says, you might avoid a dark alley at 3 a.m. because you perceive it as high risk but find a busy public park at noon to be comparatively safe.
 

 
 As it happens, Gorongosa is also the site of a much bigger project exploring this concept. Elephants were not the only animals in Gorongosa that suffered during the Civil War. Almost all of the area’s large carnivores—hyenas, wild dogs, leopards—had their local populations wiped out. But the landscape itself remained undamaged. That meant the remaining herbivores, including baboons and a variety of antelope species, bounced back fairly quickly once the war ended.The result was an exceptionally low-risk setting for these herbivores, and over the next two decades they began to behave accordingly. Baboons, which normally sleep in trees, began sleeping on the ground. Warthogs stopped digging holes, holes that are normally important habitat for other species. And a type of antelope called a “bushbuck” began leaving the cover of the bush to browse more nutritious plants on wide-open plains that were normally too dangerous. This access to better quality food caused the bushbuck population to skyrocket.
 

 
 <div class="ad"></div>
 

 
 Before Steven Lima and Lawrence Dill <a href="http://gambusia.zo.ncsu.edu/readings/Lima%20and%20Dill%201990.pdf">proposed</a> the landscape of fear theory in the 1990s, prevailing ideas about ecosystem dynamics were much more simplistic: more predators means more prey killed, and fewer predators means more prey survive. “The default idea was that carnivores kept plants healthy by keeping herbivores at low abundance,” Pringle says—and, of course, that’s true to an extent. But that idea, he argues, misses part of the predator-prey dynamic by ignoring how prey animals change their behavior in response to their predators while they’re still alive. The outcomes are similar, but the mechanism is totally different.Looking to substantiate the theory, Oz Schmitz of Yale University famously <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/319/5865/952/tab-figures-data">showed</a> that the presence of spiders in a cage with grasshoppers was enough to modify plant growth as the grasshoppers changed their diets—even when Schmitz altered the spiders’ mouthparts so they couldn’t hunt the grasshoppers. In a similar experiment with <a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/11-0424.1">crabs and snails</a>, just the scent of a crab was enough to cause snails to change their feeding behavior. Many scientists also see this dynamic at play in willow and <a href="https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolves-bring-yellowstone-back">aspen resurgence</a> in Yellowstone National Park after the reintroduction of wolves there in 1994 changed the behavior of the elk that eat those trees. And in Gorongosa, a study by Pringle and several colleagues <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/173">showed</a> the bushbuck could be encouraged to avoid areas of the floodplain with a combination of recorded leopard calls and synthetic big cat urine, a dynamic that intensified when they began reintroducing groups of African wild dogs to the park in 2018.That change, in turn, affected plant life in Gorongosa. Herbivores like bushbuck and elephants shape their environments by transplanting nutrients in their urine and feces, by eating young plants and cropping leaves, by trampling their way through underbrush. And where an antelope feels safe “is where it’s going to spend a lot of time feeding,” Pringle says. “So the impact of that animal on plants is going to be stronger in areas where it feels safe.”
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Girls with tranquilized elephant" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
 src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Girls_with_elephant_Ls8bwR2.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Dominique Gonçalves and girls from a local community gather with a male elephant that has been tranquilized so it can be fitted with a GPS collar. Image courtesty of Dominique Gonçalves<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
 </figure>
 Watching the Gorongosa elephants carefully since the start of the park’s beehive fence project, Gonçalves has noticed some unusual behavior. “Sometimes I’ll see them walking along the fence, touching it carefully, and going away,” she says. “Sometimes they just stand and stare at the fence, and I wonder if they’re analyzing what it’s going to do.”
 

 
 Not all methods of elephant defense remain effective over time, as the elephants often habituate or learn ways around them. But the fences continue to be effective for now, and Gonçalves and her colleagues hope they will remain so, since pain and fear are such innate and powerful motivators. They’re now working to expand their project, which they hope will grow to involve 600 beehives this winter. (The lengths of the fences themselves vary. Some are just a couple of beehives strung together, but one particularly wide spot involves a dozen.)Fear works better than a plain physical barrier, Gonçalves says, because “it works with the mind, with the behavior of the elephant.” In that way, the project sets an important precedent for future conservation in Mozambique—a non-lethal method of control that doesn’t create unnecessary divisions between the community and the park. “That kind of old, fenced conservation may not be really what we want,” she says, because it sends the wrong message to the people who live next door: “That’s the national park, and that’s us. There’s no connection at all.”The beehive fences also bring alternative income for these communities (which sell the resulting honey), helping to rebuild relationships between them and their elephant neighbors. “As they come with us, they start to realize that these aren’t just ‘park problems,’” she says of the community members who have joined her team. “They start to realize everyone has a role.” She’s especially proud to have recently hired 15 women, when previously there was only one. “We’re very strongly encouraging women to join,” she adds, “to change perceptions about what women can and cannot do; to remind them what it means for all of us to have our natural heritage and this wildlife around us.”
 

 
 

<div class='cove-video'>
 
</div>


 

 
 <div class="newsletter"></div>

Ecologist Dominique Gonçalves observes a female lead elephant in Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park. Image courtesy of Dominique Gonçalves

Scientists use animals’ “landscapes of fear” to set limits and reestablish balance in Gorongosa National Park, where top predators were wiped out.

The secret to peace between elephants and farmers in Mozambique? Bees

What’s the most underrated bird? Most mysterious? Hear Chris Cooper’s opinion.
Christian Cooper, board member of the New York City Audubon, hands out yearbook-style superlatives to numerous bird species and shares some memorable birding encounters.
Christian Cooper&#x27;s Bird Yearbook SuperlativesPublished: September 30, 2020Christian Cooper: Oh, that’s a difficult question!The most overrated bird is the European starling. A lot of people look at them and they think, “Oh, they&#x27;re so pretty, they&#x27;re glossy and iridescent and shiny.” Not a fan. They&#x27;re an invasive species, hurting our native species. Don&#x27;t belong here. Not all that pretty.Most Underrated... I&#x27;m going to go with the mourning dove. They&#x27;re not spectacularly colored, but when you really take the time to notice them, they’re like, made out of satin and all these delicate shades of beige and browns and a hint of blue on the crown and the back of the neck.Mourning here is mourning as in sadness for the dead, m-o-u-r-n-i-n-g. And that&#x27;s because of the sound they make, that, “whoo hoo whoo whoo whoo.” And a lot of people hear it and they think, “Oh, what&#x27;s that owl? I&#x27;m hearing an owl in the daytime.” But they’re actually hearing the mourning dove. But the other reason why I think it&#x27;s so underrated is because it&#x27;s everywhere. I mean, this bird thrives in the middle of Manhattan. It thrives in the deep woods north of here in the Hudson Valley. It thrives in the deserts of California. It finds a way to survive everywhere, it seems. And I find that spectacular and fascinating.Bird with the Most Attitude… Hummingbirds. They just, they don&#x27;t take crap from anybody. You walk into their territory and they&#x27;re like, “Buzzz, who are you, why are you here?” I had a hummingbird feeder, and I had to change the hummingbird feeder with the liquid in it for the hummingbirds. So I took the hummingbird feeder down and I started to walk away with it, and the hummingbird, as I&#x27;m walking away, is flying over and eating from the feeder  like, “No, no, I&#x27;m not done yet. I’ve still got more eating to do.” So I’m like, “OK, waiting for you, waiting for you.” And then the best hummingbird story ever, I was in Palm Springs, I was sitting in the courtyard, so I was spending hours in front of my computer not moving. And all of a sudden, I feel this kind of tingling electric feeling going up and down my leg. And I&#x27;m like, “What the heck is that?” I looked down, there was a female Costa’s hummingbird running its bill up and down my leg as it flew along my leg. The only theory I can come up with is that it was the nesting season. She decided to check out my leg hair as potential nesting material to build her nest with. It was the most awesome thing. It was the best ever. I was just enthralled. I think she was like, “Oh, this soft downy stuff would be great for building my nest.” Thank goodness I don&#x27;t shave my legs.Ooh, Most Mysterious… the nighthawks. They strike me as very mysterious because they&#x27;re so easy to overlook in the daytime, and yet at night, they&#x27;re flying around on these big flapping wings, almost like a ghostly presence. Least Bird-Like Bird… I mean, I gotta go with penguins. They&#x27;re kind of waddling along, making their way down to the ocean and then flopping, throwing themselves in. They don&#x27;t fly, they look like they&#x27;re wearing tuxedos, they spend most of their time in the ocean. They&#x27;ve adapted their wings into flippers and their feet into paddles. And that&#x27;s where they thrive, is in an aquatic, underwater environment.A nemesis bird is… a bird that you really, really, really want to see. And you&#x27;ve come really, really close to seeing it a couple of times, but you haven&#x27;t seen it yet. And it&#x27;s almost like the bird is going “nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah, you can&#x27;t see me.” But the gyrfalcon is the largest falcon on the planet. And it can take down gulls, it can take down ducks, you know, really big birds. But I&#x27;ve never seen one. They are restricted to really, really northern places like subarctic regions. I hate cold weather, hate it, hate it, hate it. So it&#x27;s hard to get me out there birding in those places. I&#x27;ve just never made a trip up there to find one. Though, I have been to Iceland. Twice. Still haven&#x27;t seen the gyrfalcon. And they’re certainly in Iceland, so that&#x27;s incredibly annoying. I’ve seen captive gyrfalcons, I’ve seen falconer’s birds, but I’ve never seen one in the wild, and that’s what counts.Well, the good thing is that birds are everywhere. Whether you have binoculars or not, you’ve gotta start tuning into the birds and try to figure out what you’re seeing. And once you start tuning into it, then you’re really gonna want to know more. Just keep your ears and your eyes open.

Christian Cooper's Bird Yearbook Superlatives Hero

What’s the most underrated bird? Most mysterious? Hear Chris Cooper’s opinion.

Christian Cooper's Bird Yearbook Superlatives

The purpose of this experiment was to see how Physarum regulates its nutritional needs.
When presented with a buffet of custards with varying ratios of protein to sugar, slime mold selects its optimal food source.This video is an excerpt from <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/secret-mind-of-slime/">Secret Mind of Slime</a>.
The Great Australian Slime Mold BakeoffPublished: September 25, 2020Audrey Dussutour: The purpose of this experiment was to see how Physarum regulates its nutritional needs.So, we had to invent special recipes for Blob.Narrator: …making their Australian laboratory seem more like a British bakeoff.Tanya Latty: We had to do a lot of different mixing and cooking to figure out the ratio of proteins to carbohydrates that the slime mold did the best on, so the ones that maximize their growth.Dussutour: We created these sort of crème brûlées. We called them custards. Thirty-five different recipes; each had a particular ratio of protein-to-sugar.Narrator: To determine which of these recipes was best, the judge in this test kitchen was Physarum.They placed Physarum on each of these 35 mixtures of protein and carbohydrates—basically, sugar—and found that Physarum needed both to survive. But too much protein, and Physarum would split apart; too much sugar proved fatal. With just the right balance, Physarum grew and remained healthiest.Audrey and Tanya had found Physarum’s optimal diet, now they were ready to test if Physarum could find it, when presented with multiple options.Dussutour: So, we offered Physarum a buffet. In this buffet, Physarum had a variety of custards to choose from, each with a different ratio of protein-to-sugar.Narrator: Could Physarum find one with the proper balance, among these seven different ratios of nutrients? Physarum comes to life, unfurling its tendril-like extensions called pseudopods.Latty: It’s detected that food cue and extended a pseudopod out. I get the impression they don’t super like that lighter blue food source.Narrator: In fact, it contains levels of sugar that would be lethal to Physarum, and so, it heads elsewhere.Latty: You can see it’s sort of dividing into a bunch of pseudopods. It’s contacted that one in the middle. I’m not sure if it’s actually chosen that one.Narrator: It’s the best ratio it’s sensed so far.It begins eating, and continues searching.Latty: Slime mold can, and so it does. It will first engulf the food and then send out pseudopods to start looking, because you never know what’s around the corner.Narrator: The slime mold soon abandons that source.Latty: It’s sort of shifted. The slime mold clearly likes the left side better.Narrator: On this side, is the best nutritional balance.Given seven options, Physarum found the optimal ratio of protein to sugar.

The Great Australian Slime Mold Bakeoff Hero

The purpose of this experiment was to see how Physarum regulates its nutritional needs.

Topic: Nature

Hero Feature