“It’s All Just a Lie”

Big brave hunters shoot tame lions from vehicles.  The word despicable can’t even come close.  It applies to the owners of the private reserves, the guides and the “hunter”.  Yes, trophy hunting generated useful revenue for conservation in Africa, but this part of the industry has to be eliminated.

The guide whistles as the large, dark-maned lion walks just a few metres from the car. It looks around to face the American hunter and a single shot rings out in the South African bush.

The lion cartwheels from the force of the bullet - shocked and confused it roars, turns and quickly limps off into the bush.

"Shoot him again, shoot him again, shoot him again," the professional hunter frantically urges, as the hunter reloads, firing into the trees.

The video cuts to see the lion lying dead and the American walking up to him.

"Hey you," he says, "I'm sorry, but I wanted you," before leaning down and kissing the lion.

Every year hundreds of lions are bred in captivity across South Africa for the purpose of being placed onto private game reserves for hunting.

Grist for the mill.         

"Eight lionesses were released [from captivity] literally the day before the clients arrived - in fact four were released as the plane was landing just down the road," Mr Gobbett told the BBC.

"We shot that first lion probably within half-an-hour," he said.

He explained how the lions appeared to be used to humans - how one was shot while hiding in a hole, another up against a fence.

A new report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) says in the decade between 2004 and 2014, 1.7 million animals were killed for their "trophy".

At least 200,000 of them were threatened species such as elephants, rhinos or lions.

IFAW found that the US was the biggest importer of stuffed animal heads, while South Africa was the biggest exporter - and lions were by far the most traded.

"Right from the start, the guys are told it's very dangerous - that these are wild animals… and of course they take it all in," Mr Gobbett said.

"It's all: 'You got so lucky, that was such an amazing shot.' Slaps on the back: 'You're such a hero, look at what you've done - you have got your king of the jungle.'

"Meanwhile, it's all just a lie."

We are the Asteroid

Mass extinction in the oceans will start with the largest, most complex creatures.  The reverberations could impact the oceans for millions of years.  Oh, yeah, humans are the cause of these extinctions, climate change is likely to take care of many of the smaller species as the oceans warm and acidify.

“The preferential removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, unprecedented in the history of animal life, may disrupt ecosystems for millions of years even at levels of taxonomic loss far below those of previous mass extinctions,” the authors write.

Interestingly, if climate change was the key driver of species losses, you’d expect a more evenly distributed set of risks to organisms.

“I’ve worked on the Permian mass extinction quite a bit, it shows environmental evidence of ocean warming, ocean acidification, and deoxygenation, the loss of oxygen from seawater,” says Payne. These are the very same threats to the oceans that we’re worried about now due to ongoing climate change. But the Permian extinction, some 250 million years ago, did not feature a selective disappearance of large-bodied organisms, Payne says.

Thus, as previous work has also suggested, the current study underscores ecosystem risks are not being principally driven by a changing climate — yet. Rather, they’re being driven more directly by humans which species hunt and fish, and where they destroy ecosystems to build homes, farms, cities, and much more. But as climate change worsens, it will compound what’s already happening.

Tool Users

Corvids are amazing.  Intelligent, tool users and even tool makers.  Unfortunate the 'alalā became extinct in the wild before we understood how amazing they are.

For more than a decade, Rutz has been studying New Caledonian crows, the first member of the genus Corvus known for natural tool use. Without anyone teaching them how, chicks from the Pacific island species would instinctively pick up twigs with their beaks and use them to scrape up food. They could even break off branches and fashion them into hooks or barbs that suited their needs. But — as far as anyone knew — the birds were a biological oddity. Science had found no other crows like them.

Still, "I had a suspicion that there may be undiscovered tool users out there," Rutz said. "There are over 40 species of crows and ravens, and so many of them are understudied, I thought, 'okay, maybe one of them.'"

A quick image search revealed his best target: the large, all-black Hawaiian crow, known on its home island as 'alalā. It has a straight, blunt beak, and though its eyes are relatively small, they are extremely forward-facing, an adaptation that typically allows for depth perception. Rutz called up the program manager at a captive breeding facility in Hawaii run by the San Diego Zoo.

"I said, 'Look this may sound a bit crazy but I have a hunch your birds may be tool users,'" he recalled. "And the guy replied, 'oh yeah, they do all sorts of funny things with sticks.'"

"Now we can cautiously start constructing evolutionary arguments about the origins of tool use," Rutz said. "And of course, ultimately this enables much broader comparisons, with non-tool using species, with primates. We can ask whether similar ecological conditions seemed to drive the evolution of this behavior in different parts of the animal kingdom. That's where it gets exciting."