BARDIA NATIONAL PARK, Nepal: Chayan Kumar Chaudhary flicked through photographs captured on a hidden camera in the jungle, hoping his favorite big cat — dubbed “selfie tiger” for its love of the limelight — had made another appearance.
Thousands of camera traps have helped conservationists track Nepal’s wild tiger population, which has nearly doubled in recent years as the big cats claw their way back from the verge of extinction.
After a nine-year push to protect tigers, an exhaustive census across 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles) of Nepal’s lowlands completed earlier this year revealed the population has grown from 121 in 2009 to an estimated 235 adult cats today.
On the frontline of the painstaking survey were trained locals like Chaudhary in western Nepal’s Bardia National Park where tiger numbers have grown nearly fivefold.
The 25-year-old helped track and record wild tiger movements through the park by scanning images taken by cameras hidden in the jungle’s undergrowth.
“It was very exciting when we checked the (memory) cards and found photos of tigers,” Chaudhary said.
“It felt like we are part of something big.”
Nepal’s southern lowlands, home to five national parks, were mapped into grids, each fitted with a pair of camera traps to record any tiger activity.
More than 3,200 of these special camera traps were installed, some by field workers on elephants to navigate the dense jungle.
“It was not an easy process and risky as well,” said Man Bahadur Khadka, head of Nepal’s department of wildlife and national parks.
These cameras were equipped with sensors that triggered a click whenever any movement or a change in temperature was detected.
Soon the photos started to trickle in: lone tigers walking past, mothers with their playful cubs and the occasional tiger feasting on a fresh kill. And Chaudhary’s favorite: a big cat that seemed to enjoy preening in front of the lens.
The census began in November 2017 and by the following March, more than 4,000 images of tigers had been collected.
“We then began analyzing the photos,” Khadka said. “Just like our fingerprints, tigers have unique stripes. No two tigers are alike.”
Conservationists say that behind Nepal’s success was a strategy to turn tiger-fearing villagers — who could earn thousands of dollars for poaching a big cat — into the animal’s protectors.
A century ago, Nepal’s lush jungles were a playground for the country’s rulers and visiting British dignitaries who came to hunt the Royal Bengal tiger.
In 1900, more than 100,000 tigers were estimated to roam the planet. But that fell to a record low of 3,200 globally in 2010.
Nepal’s tiger numbers hit rock bottom following the decade-long civil war, which ended in 2006, when poachers ran amok across the southern plains.
In 2009, the government changed tack, enlisting community groups to protect the animals. Hundreds of young volunteers were recruited to guard Nepal’s national parks, patrolling against poachers, raising awareness and protecting the natural habitat.
“Tigers are our wealth, we have to protect them,” said Sanju Pariyar, 22, who was just a teen when she joined an anti-poaching group.
“People understand that if our tiger and rhino numbers grow, tourists will come and bring opportunities. It is good for us.”
Armed with a stick, Pariyar regularly goes out on patrol to search for traps laid by poachers.
The locals have also become informants, alerting park officials if they see anything, or anyone, suspicious.
Nepal has tough punishments for poachers — up to 15 years in jail and a heavy fine — and it has recently started a genetic database of its tigers to aid investigations.
In March, police arrested a poacher who had been on the run for five years after being caught with five tiger pelts and 114 kilos of bones.
The contraband was believed to have been destined for China, a top market for wildlife smugglers, where rare animal parts are used in traditional medicine.
In 2010, Nepal and 12 other countries with tiger populations signed an agreement to double their big cat numbers by 2022. The Himalayan nation is set to be the first to achieve this target.
“If a country like Nepal — small, least developed, with lots of challenges — can do it, the others can do it,” said Nepal’s WWF representative, Ghana Gurung.
But conservationists are aware that rising tiger numbers are also good news for poachers and the lucrative black market they supply with endangered animal parts.
Tiger poaching is difficult to track because unlike with rhinos, nothing of the cat is left behind after it is killed.
“It is now more important than ever to stay vigilant,” said national park warden Ashok Bhandari.
Crouching tigers, hidden cameras: Nepal counts its big cats
Crouching tigers, hidden cameras: Nepal counts its big cats
- Thousands of camera traps have helped conservationists track Nepal’s wild tiger population
- Nepal’s tiger numbers hit rock bottom following the decade-long civil war, which ended in 2006
NASA powers down two instruments on twin Voyager spacecraft to save power
NEW YORK: NASA is switching off two science instruments on its long-running twin Voyager spacecraft to save power.
The space agency said Wednesday an instrument on Voyager 2 that measures charged particles and cosmic rays will shut off later this month. Last week, NASA powered down an instrument on Voyager 1 designed to study cosmic rays.
The energy-saving moves were necessary to extend their missions, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.
The twin spacecraft launched in 1977 and are currently in interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn’s moons, and Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune.
Each spacecraft still has three instruments apiece to study the sun’s protective bubble and the swath of space beyond.
Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth and Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (20.92 billion kilometers) away.
X-ray shows diamond earrings swallowed by theft suspect during arrest, police say
- An X-ray of the suspect’s torso showed what the Orlando Police Department believed to be the diamond earrings
- “These foreign objects are suspected to be the Tiffany & Co earrings taken in the robbery but will need to be collected ... after they are passed,” the department's arrest report said
FLORIDA: A suspected thief gulped down two pairs of diamond earrings during his arrest on the side of a Florida Panhandle highway last week, detectives say, leaving them with the unenviable task of waiting to “collect” the Tiffany & Co. jewelry worth nearly $770,000.
An X-ray of the suspect’s torso showed what the Orlando Police Department believed to be the diamond earrings — a white mass shining brightly against the grey backdrop of his digestive tract.
“These foreign objects are suspected to be the Tiffany & Co. earrings taken in the robbery but will need to be collected ... after they are passed,” the department’s arrest report said. Handwriting on an order of commitment document filed Monday said “outside medical,” suggesting he was at a medical facility.
The 32-year-old man from Texas is accused of forcibly stealing the earrings from an upscale Orlando shopping center last Wednesday.
Orlando police spokeswoman Kaylee Bishop said Wednesday she was checking with the lead detective on whether the earrings had been recovered yet. The earrings’ status also wasn’t known to a deputy who answered the phone but wouldn’t give his name in the rural Panhandle county where the suspect was arrested near Chipley, Florida.
During the theft, the man allegedly told Tiffany sales associates he was interested in purchasing diamond earrings and a diamond ring on behalf of an Orlando Magic basketball player. Sales associates escorted the man to a VIP room where he could view the jewelry. A short time later, he jumped out of his chair, grabbed the jewelry and tried to force his way out of the door.
One of the sales associates was injured trying to block him but managed to knock the diamond ring, valued at $587,000, out of his hands.
Detectives obtained the license plate of the suspect’s car through shopping mall security footage and believe he was driving back to Texas. State troopers tracked the car from tag readers on the Florida Turnpike and Interstate 10 until he was pulled over for driving without rear lights in Washington County, almost 340 miles (550 kilometers) away, the Orlando police report said.
As he was being taken into custody, he swallowed several items troopers believed were the earrings.
The suspect was charged with first-degree felony grand theft and robbery with a mask, a third-degree felony. Court records showed no attorney for him, and he was listed as being in police custody in Orange County Florida, which is home to Orlando, as of Wednesday morning.
Scientists genetically engineer mice with thick hair like the extinct woolly mammoth
- Scientists have been genetically engineering mice since the 1970s, but new technologies like CRISPR “make it a lot more efficient and easier,” said Lynch
WASHINGTON: Extinction is still forever, but scientists at the biotech company Colossal Biosciences are trying what they say is the next best thing to restoring ancient beasts — genetically engineering living animals with qualities to resemble extinct species like the woolly mammoth.
Woolly mammoths roamed the frozen tundras of Europe, Asia and North America until they went extinct around 4,000 years ago.
Colossal made a splash in 2021 when it unveiled an ambitious plan to revive the woolly mammoth and later the dodo bird. Since then, the company has focused on identifying key traits of extinct animals by studying ancient DNA, with a goal to genetically “engineer them into living animals,” said CEO Ben Lamm.
Outside scientists have mixed views about whether this strategy will be helpful for conservation.
“You’re not actually resurrecting anything — you’re not bringing back the ancient past,” said Christopher Preston, a wildlife and environment expert at the University of Montana, who was not involved in the research.
On Tuesday, Colossal announced that its scientists have simultaneously edited seven genes in mice embryos to create mice with long, thick, woolly hair. They nicknamed the extra-furry rodents as the “Colossal woolly mouse.”
Results were posted online, but they have not yet been published in a journal or vetted by independent scientists.
The feat “is technologically pretty cool,” said Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University of Buffalo, who was not involved in the research.
Scientists have been genetically engineering mice since the 1970s, but new technologies like CRISPR “make it a lot more efficient and easier,” said Lynch.
The Colossal scientists reviewed DNA databases of mouse genes to identify genes related to hair texture and fat metabolism. Each of these genetic variations are “present already in some living mice,” said Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro, but “we put them all together in a single mouse.”
They picked the two traits because these mutations are likely related to cold tolerance — a quality that woolly mammoths must have had to survive on the prehistoric Arctic steppe.
Colossal said it focused on mice first to confirm if the process works before potentially moving on to edit the embryos of Asian elephants, the closest living relatives to woolly mammoths.
However, because Asian elephants are an endangered species, there will be “a lot of processes and red tape” before any plan can move forward, said Colossal’s Lamm, whose company has raised over $400 million in funding.
Independent experts are skeptical about the idea of “de-extinction.”
“You might be able to alter the hair pattern of an Asian elephant or adapt it to the cold, but it’s not bringing back a woolly mammoth. It’s changing an Asian elephant,” said University of Montana’s Preston.
Still, the refinement of precision gene-editing in animals could have other uses for conservation or animal agriculture, said Bhanu Telugu, who studies animal biotechnology at the University of Missouri and was not involved in the new research.
Telugu said he was impressed by Colossal’s technology advances that enabled scientists to pinpoint which genes to target.
The same approach might one day help fight diseases in people, said Lamm. So far, the company has spun off two health care companies.
“It’s part of how we monetize our business,” said Lamm.
60% of adults will be overweight or obese by 2050: study
- Number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose to 2.6 billion in 2021 from 929 million in 1990
- More than half the world’s overweight or obese adults already live in just eight countries
PARIS: Nearly 60 percent of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050 unless governments take action, a large new study said Tuesday.
The research published in the Lancet medical journal used data from 204 countries to paint a grim picture of what it described as one of the great health challenges of the century.
“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” lead author Emmanuela Gakidou, from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), said in a statement.
The number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose from 929 million in 1990 to 2.6 billion in 2021, the study found.
Without a serious change, the researchers estimate that 3.8 billion adults will be overweight or obese in 15 years – or around 60 percent of the global adult population in 2050.
The world’s health systems will come under crippling pressure, the researchers warned, with around a quarter of the world’s obese expected to be aged over 65 by that time.
They also predicted a 121-percent increase in obesity among children and adolescents around the world.
A third of all obese young people will be living in two regions – North Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean – by 2050, the researchers warned.
But it is not too late to act, said study co-author Jessica Kerr from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia.
“Much stronger political commitment is needed to transform diets within sustainable global food systems,” she said.
That commitment was also needed for strategies “that improve people’s nutrition, physical activity and living environments, whether it’s too much processed food or not enough parks,” Kerr said.
More than half the world’s overweight or obese adults already live in just eight countries – China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt, the study said.
While poor diet and sedentary lifestyles are clearly drivers of the obesity epidemic, “there remains doubt” about the underlying causes for this, said Thorkild Sorensen, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen not involved in the study.
For example, socially deprived groups have a “consistent and unexplained tendency” toward obesity, he said in a linked comment in The Lancet.
The research is based on figures from the Global Burden of Disease study from the IHME, which brings together thousands of researchers across the world and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As warming climate hammers coffee crops, this rare bean may someday be your brew
- The tree’s deep roots, thick leaves and big trunk help it thrive in extreme conditions where other coffees cannot
- Earth’s warming climate is causing problems for big coffee producers everywhere and some are looking to a rarely cultivated species that may stand up better to drought and heat
NZARA COUNTY: Catherine Bashiama runs her fingers along the branches of the coffee tree she’s raised from a seedling, searching anxiously for its first fruit buds since she planted it three years ago. When she grasps the small cherries, Bashiama beams.
The farmer had never grown coffee in her village in western South Sudan, but now hopes a rare, climate-resistant species will help pull her family from poverty. “I want to send my children to school so they can be the future generation,” said Bashiama, a mother of 12.
Discovered more than a century ago in South Sudan, excelsa coffee is exciting cash-strapped locals and drawing interest from the international community amid a global coffee crisis caused mainly by climate change. As leading coffee-producing countries struggle to grow crops in drier, less reliable weather, prices have soared to the highest in decades and the industry is scrambling for solutions.
Experts say estimates from drought-stricken Brazil, the world’s top coffee grower, are that this year’s harvest could be down by some 12 percent.
“What history shows us is that sometimes the world doesn’t give you a choice, and right now there are many coffee farmers suffering from climate change that are facing this predicament,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London.
Excelsa could play a key role in adapting.
Native to South Sudan and a handful of other African countries, including Congo, Central African Republic and Uganda, excelsa is also farmed in India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The tree’s deep roots, thick leathery leaves and big trunk allow it to thrive in extreme conditions such as drought and heat where other coffees cannot. It’s also resistant to many common coffee pests and diseases.
Yet it comprises less than 1 percent of the global market, well behind the arabica and robusta species that are the most consumed coffees in the world. Experts say excelsa will have to be shown to be practical at a much larger scale to bridge the gap in the market caused by climate change.
Coffee’s history in South Sudan
Unlike neighboring Ethiopia or Uganda, oil-rich South Sudan has never been known as a coffee-producing nation.
Its British colonizers grew robusta and arabica, but much of that stopped during decades of conflict that forced people from their homes and made it hard to farm. Coffee trees require regular care such as pruning and weeding and take at least three years to yield fruit.
During a visit earlier this month to Nzara County in Western Equatoria state — regarded as the country’s breadbasket — residents reminisced to Associated Press reporters about their parents and grandparents growing coffee, yet much of the younger generation hadn’t done it themselves.
Many were familiar with excelsa, but didn’t realize how unique it was, or what it was called, referring to it as the big tree, typically taller than the arabica and robusta species that are usually pruned to be bush- or hedge-like. The excelsa trees can reach 15 meters (about 49 feet) in height, but may also be pruned much shorter for ease of harvesting.
Coffee made from excelsa tastes sweet — unlike robusta — with notes of chocolate, dark fruits and hazelnut. It’s more similar to arabica, but generally less bitter and may have less body.
“There’s so little known about this coffee, that we feel at the forefront to trying to unravel it and we’re learning every day,” said Ian Paterson, managing director of Equatoria Teak, a sustainable agro-forestry company that’s been operating in the country for more than a decade.
The company’s been doing trials on excelsa for years. Initial results are promising, with the trees able to withstand heat much better than other species, the company said. It’s also working with communities to revive the coffee industry and scale up production. Three years ago it gave seedlings and training to about 1,500 farmers, including Bashiama, to help them grow the coffee. The farmers can sell back to the company for processing and export.
Many of the trees started producing for the first time this year, and Paterson said he hopes to export the first batch of some 7 tons to specialty shops in Europe. By 2027, the coffee could inject some $2 million into the economy, with big buyers such as Nespresso expressing interest. But production needs to triple for it to be worthwhile for large buyers to invest, he said.
Challenges of growing an industry amid South Sudan’s instability
That could be challenging in South Sudan, where lack of infrastructure and insecurity make it hard to get the coffee out.
One truck of 30 tons of coffee has to travel some 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) to reach the port in Kenya to be shipped. The cost for the first leg of that trip, through Uganda, is more than $7,500, which is up to five times the cost in neighboring countries.
It’s also hard to attract investors.
Despite a peace deal in 2018 that ended a five-year civil war, pockets of fighting persist. Tensions in Western Equatoria are especially high after the president removed the governor in February, sparking anger among his supporters. When AP reporters visited Nzara, the main road to town was cut off one day because of gunshots and people were fleeing their villages, fearful of further violence.
The government says companies can operate safely, but warned them to focus on business.
“If I’m a businessman, dealing with my business, let me not mix with politics. Once you start mixing your business with politics, definitely you will end up in chaos,” said Alison Barnaba, the state’s minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment.
Barnaba said there are plans to rehabilitate old coffee plantations and build an agriculture school, but details are murky, including where the money will come from. South Sudan hasn’t paid its civil servants in more than a year, and a rupture of a crucial oil pipeline through neighboring Sudan has tanked oil revenue.
Growing the coffee isn’t always easy, either. Farmers have to contend with fires that spread quickly in the dry season and decimate their crops. Hunters use fires to scare and kill animals and residents use it to clear land for cultivation. But the fires can get out of control and there are few measures in place to hold people accountable, say residents.
Coffee as a way out of poverty
Still, for locals, the coffee represents a chance at a better future.
Bashiama said she started planting coffee after her husband was injured and unable to help cultivate enough of the maize and ground nuts that the family had lived on. Since his accident she hasn’t been able to send her children to school or buy enough food, she said.
Another farmer, 37-year-old Taban John, wants to use his coffee earnings to buy a bicycle so he can more easily sell his other crops, ground nuts and cassava, and other goods in town. He also wants to be able to afford school uniforms for his children.
Excelsa is an opportunity for the community to become more financially independent, say community leaders. People rely on the government or foreign aid, but when that doesn’t come through they’re not able to take care of their families, they say.
But for coffee to thrive in South Sudan, locals say there needs to be a long-term mentality, and that requires stability.
Elia Box lost half of his coffee crop to fire in early February. He plans to replace it, but was dispirited at the work it will require and the lack of law and order to hold people accountable.
“People aren’t thinking long-term like coffee crops, during war,” he said. “Coffee needs peace.”
