Farming snails to save the world's rarest gorillas

In a place of poverty and hunger, how do you save a species on the edge of extinction? A difficult question that conservationists have long-been working to tackle, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has come up with a new plan to protect the world's most endangered gorilla, the Cross River gorilla, from poachers by providing locals with an alternate and better income from farming snails.

In a new initiative funded by Great Apes Program of the Arcus Foundation, WCS has selected eight former poachers from four villages to become snail farmers. But why farm snails?

In Nigeria, snails are a highly sought-after delicacy and provide enough to support a family. According to WCS, operating costs to run a snail farm run about 87 US dollars, whereas profit from 3000 snails sold annually runs about 413 US dollars, leaving the snail farmer 326 US dollars a year. On the other hand, poaching a gorilla for bushmeat brings in only about 70 US dollars. Unlike poaching, income from snail farming is reliable and regular.

How to apologize to an orangutan

In the rare mid-April sun of drizzly, seaside Seattle I was watching orangutans at the zoo communicate.

It was a good day because the orangutans, each in their own way, in their own time, was letting the keeper Andy Antilla know that his apology was accepted.

Orangutans remind us of rudimentary courtesy and moral behaviour. If we forget, it damages the relationship with them, as it would with us.

Hope for survival as isolated orangutans joined by rope bridge

Researchers in the Malaysian state of Sabah in Borneo are joyful after receiving confirmation that a young male orangutan used a rope bridge to cross a river, which has separated one orangutan population from another. Due to logging and clearing forests for oil palm plantations, which cover 18 percent of land in Sabah, orangutans on the Kinabantangan River have been cut into fragmented populations.

"Over the years we have received numerous local eye witness reports of the orangutans using these rope bridges but this is the first time we have received photographic evidence which clearly shows a young male orangutan using the first rope bridge we constructed in 2003 to cross over Resang river, a small tributary of Kinabatangan," explains primatologist, Dr. Isabelle Lackman, Co-Director of the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project (KOCP) in a press statement.

Photos of a male orangutan using the rope bridge were captured by Ajirun Osman, who says that after the male spent twenty minutes at the rope bridge, he crossed: "it seemed like once he decided to cross, he did so very fast going over in about three minutes from the Pangi Forest Reserve into Lot 1 of the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary."

Finding forest for the endangered golden-headed lion tamarin

Brazil's golden-headed lion tamarin is a small primate with a black body and a bright mane of gold and orange. Listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List, the golden-headed lion tamarin (Leontopithecus chrysomelas) survives in only a single protected reserve in the largely degraded Atlantic Forest in Brazil. Otherwise its habitat lies in unprotected patches and fragments threatened by urbanization and agricultural expansion. Currently, a natural gas pipeline is being built through prime tamarin habitat.

A new study in the open access journal Tropical Conservation Science sought to find forest patches large enough to contain sustainable populations of the golden-headed lion tamarin even under threats such as fire.