The Elephant Listening Project is a bioacoustics research effort that aims to preserve rainforests of Central Africa--and the biodiversity found in those forests--by listening to forest elephants, and on this episode we hear those animals' calls, rumbles, and trumpets with ELP researcher Ana Verahrami.
Verahrami has spent two field seasons in the Central African Republic collecting behavioral and acoustic data vital to the project & joins us to explain why forest elephants’ role as keystone species makes their survival crucial to the wellbeing of tropical forests and its other inhabitants, and to play some of the fascinating recordings that inform the project’s work.
Helping frame the discussion is Terna Gyuse, Mongabay's Cape Town-based Africa Editor.
ELP is part of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whose bioacoustics research team we’ve featured several times in the past, listen to these episodes for more fascinating bioacoustics studies that feature the calls, songs, and sounds of diverse animals what they may mean for them and for conservation:
• How listening to individual gibbons can benefit conservation
• What underwater sounds can tell us about Indian Ocean humpback dolphins
• The superb mimicry skills of an Australian songbird
• The sounds of tropical katydids and how they can benefit conservation
Photo of forest elephants at Dzanga bai in Central African Republic © Ana Verahrami, ELP.
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Another pandemic is currently on the march, and it's got salamanders in its sights. You may not have heard about 'Bsal' before, but it nearly wiped out a population of salamanders in Europe, and scientists worry it could invade the United States--the home of the world's greatest diversity of salamanders--next.
Is the U.S. ready for Bsal, and can a pandemic in this global salamander hotspot be prevented, unlike the one that's currently crippling human societies globally? What's being done, and what would it mean to lose salamanders on a landscape-wide level in North America?
This first bonus episode of the Mongabay Newscast tackles these important questions, just as spring and salamanders emerge in the North.
For the next couple months, this special series made possible by our Patreon supporters called Mongabay Explores will dive into a recent project our writers and editors produced on the topic, to learn what's known about this issue now.
More reading from Mongabay on this topic:
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Australia’s fire season may have just ended, but most of the world’s tropical forest regions will soon enter their own.
We look at what’s driving the intense fires in the Amazon, Indonesia, and elsewhere in recent years with three guests, who discuss what we can expect from the 2020 tropical fire season while sharing some solutions to this problem, which has huge effects on biodiversity, indigenous peoples, forests, and climate change.
Joining us are Rhett Butler, Mongabay’s founder and CEO, who provides a global perspective; scientist Dan Nepstad, who worked in the Brazilian Amazon for more than three decades; plus Aida Greenbury, an Indonesian sustainability consultant for projects like the High Carbon Stock Approach to forest protection.
If you enjoy this show, please invite your friends to listen and subscribe via Android, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever they get podcasts.
More reading from this episode:
Rhett Butler for Mongabay: "Rainforests in 2020: Ten things to watch," December 2019
"Amazon deforestation increases for 13th straight month in Brazil," May 2020
Dan Nepstad for the New York Times, "How to help Brazilian Farmers Save the Amazon," December 2019
See all our latest news from nature's frontline at Mongabay's homepage: news.mongabay.com or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by searching for @mongabay.
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At a time when so many people are trying to make photographs of wildlife -- to break the pandemic lockdown blues, or to share on social media -- we speak with two guests about how to do this without harassing, exploiting, or harming them.
Internationally renowned wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas shares her experiences and advice, saying that the most important practices are both better for wildlife and capture the most compelling images.
This is “kind of a win-win,” Eszterhas says, because "we’re treating the animals with kindness and respect and we’re not affecting their lives in a very negative way" while delivering superior photos.
Also joining the discussion is environmental journalist Annie Roth, who recently wrote an in-depth article for Hakai Magazine exploring how wildlife pay the price when humans get too close in order to snap a few pics that they hope will score them likes on social media.
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Please visit www.patreon.com/mongabay to pledge a dollar or more to keep this show growing, Mongabay is a nonproft media outlet and all support helps! Supporting at the $10/month level now delivers access to Insider Content at Mongabay.com, too, visit the link above for details.
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Episode artwork of jackal pups courtesy of Suzi Eszterhas.
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What does it mean to celebrate the 50th Earth Day amidst a pandemic? Our guests for this episode provide options and inspiration to mark this important anniversary in the face of a global virus outbreak, which ironically has roots in the destruction of nature.
We speak with Trammell Crow, the founder of the largest Earth Day event in the world, EarthX, which has big plans with National Geographic for a virtual celebration, and Ginger Cassady, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, an environmental advocacy group that works to end deforestation and respond to the climate crisis.
They share stories of inspiration, challenge, and triumph as we mark 50 years of Earth Day with an eye on what comes next.
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Acclaimed environmental journalist John Vidal joins the show to discuss the current pandemic's links to the wildlife trade and the destruction of nature.
We speak about his recent Guardian/Ensia feature on what we know about the origins of the outbreak, what he’s learned while reporting from similar outbreak epicenters in the past, how the destruction of nature creates the perfect conditions for diseases to emerge, and what we can do to prevent future outbreaks.
See related Mongabay podcast episode: How studying an African bat might help us prevent future Ebola outbreaks
Here’s this episode’s top news:
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The songs, calls, clicks, and bumps of beluga whales, bearded seals, bowhead whales, ribbon seals, and walrus are the stars of this episode, which also features the co-author of a recent study that used bioacoustics to assess how variation in sea surface temperature and sea ice extent affects these animals' populations in the northern Bering Sea.
Dr. Howard Rosenbaum is the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, and his team is creating an acoustic baseline for how marine noise pollution and climate change are affecting large mammals in this area of the Arctic.
Learn more about Dr. Rosenbaum's team's study here and press play to hear the fascinating sounds they captured.
Here's this episode's top news:
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Shah Selbe is a rocket scientist who put his engineering skills into building a lab that uses open-source technologies to empower local communities to solve conservation challenges.
His team has been deploying technologies like drones, sensor networks, smartphone apps, and acoustic buoys to monitor protected areas, wildlife, and biodiversity.
But their big news is the launch of the open-source hardware and online platform FieldKit that anyone can use to deploy a local sensing network and mesh that with remote sensing data for real-time ecosystem monitoring: he joins us to discuss its potential plus the conservation tech he’s currently most excited about.
Here’s this episode’s top news:
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Fred Swaniker is the founder of the African Leadership University, which recently launched a School of Wildlife Conservation to help young Africans develop the skills and knowledge necessary to “own and drive” the conservation agenda on the African continent.
Swaniker sees Africa's natural heritage as a strategic advantage for the continent, and argues on this episode that the immense young workforce can be engaged in its conservation in many ways, from management to filmmaking, science communications and technology. He also shares highlights from ALU’s recent "Business of Conservation Conference" in Kigali, Rwanda.
Here’s this episode’s top news:
Learn more about African Leadership University's School of Wildlife Conservation at its website, www.sowc.alueducation.com.
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‘Without the land, indigenous people cannot exist’ the new leader of Cultural Survival, Galina Angarova, tells host Mike G. in this new episode. Raised in a Buryat community in Siberia, she's had a number of top roles through the years, but her recent appointment to this key indigenous rights organization is perhaps the most important one yet.
She grew up eating wild berries, mushrooms, nuts, wild garlic, deer, and more on the shores of Lake Baikal, and therefore has a strong sense of relationship to the land and how important it is that indigenous peoples like her community are allowed to keep stewarding these places: it's been proven that indigenous communities are the best stewards of land, waters, forests, and animals.
Angarova joins the show to discuss this plus the power of indigenous radio programs, and her idea of the sacred feminine.
Here’s this episode’s top news:
Learn more about Galina and the work of Cultural Survival at their website, culturalsurvival.org.
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Laurel Symes is a biologist who uses bioacoustics to study tropical katydids in Central America, and she joins us to play some of her hypnotic rainforest recordings and say how tracking these insects' interesting sounds can aid rainforest conservation.
Based on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, she uses machine learning to detect and identify these creatures, which are grasshopper-like insects that are important to the rainforest food web, because they eat a lot of plants and are in turn eaten by a lot of other species, including birds, bats, monkeys, frogs, and more.
Here’s this episode’s top news:
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Ami Vitale is an award-winning war correspondent turned conservation photographer, and her iconic images of animals like Sudan the Rhino adorn the pages of National Geographic and other top outlets often. But she's so much more than a woman with a camera, rather, she's a force of nature helping create change and grassroots conservation all over the world through her work, words, and advocacy.
She joins the podcast to talk about the most inspiring and heartbreaking moments from her recent projects (don't miss the beautiful story at the end about the behavior of elephant orphans) and she shares where she finds her seemingly boundless energy and optimism.
Here's this episode's top news items:
Episode artwork of a panda keeper in China is courtesy of Ami Vitale.
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