DAILY QUICK READ - MAY 28, 2016

Live Chimpanzees as Garden Ornaments 

Poaching doesn't just impact rhinos and elephants.  There is a huge market for live animals.  Often they are used as juveniles and then discarded as adults.

It is hell's roll call. Wild chimpanzee numbers in Benin - none; in Burkina Faso - none; in Togo - none. More yet may join the extinction list.

The illegal wildlife trade goes far beyond the dreadful story of ivory poaching.

The market across the world for live apes - specifically baby chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans plucked from their forest homes in Africa and Asia - is burgeoning.

Also being traded are the heads and skulls of the great apes, destined for markets from Nigeria to the United States. Some are used for black magic, others just as trophies for a mantelpiece.

"The live trade in apes particularly is growing," said Doug Cress of the Great Apes Survival Partnership. "There are a few people in places like the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar who just want a baby chimp or gorilla in their garden. It adds to their status In China the demand comes from zoos and safari parks.

"And for one baby chimp taken from the wild, several adults have to be killed. We work on the principle that 10 adults die for every baby taken."

Human cruelty never ceases to amaze.

Jackals clearly need better PR.

Golden jackals are often seen as a pest, blamed for the death of livestock and wild animals as they move from south-central Eurasia into northern Europe. But they are in fact saving countries millions of euros in waste management services.

Considering the jackal population in Serbia, the researchers estimate that every year they remove 3700 tonnes of discarded animal remains and 13.2 million crop pest rodents, a service that would cost half a million euros a year.

Based on the estimated jackal population in the whole of Europe, the figures could be as high as 13,000 tonnes of animal remains and 158 million rodents, they claim.

Climate Change is a Real Thing

Climate change on Mars hasn't be driven by humans, so the time frame is longer.  Still pretty impressive.

Mars is weird in this respect because ice ages on the Red Planet look a lot different than what we’re used to here on Earth. Unlike Earth’s axis, which stays tilted in a narrow range of 22 to 25 degrees, Mars’ axis wobbles greatly from 25 degrees all the way to 60 degrees. Now, going from one extreme to the other takes a lot of time, but when Mars reaches one of these extremes the equator and poles become practically reversed. Moreover, the orbit is heavily affected by a gravitational tug from Jupiter, which pulls it into an oval-shaped orbit. This way, sometimes the north pole is basking in the sun, while in other millennia it’s the south pole’s turn.

Right now, Mars is in between glacial periods. When the poles are warm, the ice migrates towards low and mid-latitude regions where it can stay stable. Based on predictive models, Mars’ next ice age will occur in about 150,000 years, Smith says.

The Americas' Most Wanted

High in the Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia in early 2015, two guards from Fundación ProAves' El Dorado Reserve found the Blue-bearded Helmetcrest, a hummingbird nobody had seen for 69 years. The rediscovery of such lost birds is not as infrequent as one might guess. Finding them, as other ABC-funded expeditions have done in the past with the Pale-headed Brush Finch and other birds, can be vital to their conservation. It's hard to protect birds if you don't know where they live.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature currently ranks at least 24 species in the Americas as threatened even though the species have no known individuals in the wild nor surviving in captivity. Most of these species should probably be considered extinct. But some may still persist, living in areas that are difficult to search and where few people go.

Is There Any Benefit To A Legal Trade In Rhino Horn?

Swaziland has been accused by one of the world’s leading conservationists of being a puppet of South Africa in a bid to open the floodgates to a potentially calamitous legal rhino horn trade.

South Africa appointed a committee to study the idea of trading horn internationally, which has been banned for more than four decades, but the government backed away from such a proposal in April.

Days later, neighbouring Swaziland put forward a proposal for a legal trade, citing the 1,000-plus white rhino poached in South Africa each year.

Dr Richard Leakey, the chair of the Kenya Wildlife Service which burned the biggest ever stockpile of seized horn last month, told the Guardian: “Swaziland will be seen for what is is, a puppet.” Opponents of a legal trade fear it would stimulate the black market, which is driven by demand in south-east Asia.