The Killing Fields of Ivory -- Infographic

Here's another infographic from visual.ly that spells out the brutal, destructive and lucrative trade of poaching for ivory. The infographic focuses on elephants but poaching of rhinos is equally alarming. (A zoomed view is here.)

by memuco. Learn about infographic design.

Chimpanzees and Facebook

I heard two astonishing statistics this week, both from my students.

The first is that all the chimpanzees in the world couldn't fill Gillette Stadium.

Gillette Stadium can seat almost 70,000 people. Scouting about the Internet, including places like the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation, where the evolutioary tree graphic to the left is from, you find that there are less than 100,000 chimpanzees left in the wild. So, you'd need to sit a bunch of them on the field, but it's astonishing to think that we humans fill football stadiums all over the world on a weekly basis, and our nearest evolutionary relatives, who numbered more than a million just twenty years ago, can barely fill one stadium. And their numbers are falling due to poaching and land conversion.

The second astonishing statistic I heard this week, also during discussion with my students, is that 1 in 8
people in the world is on Facebook. Facebook has 845 million monthly users and there are 7 billion people
in the world. Methinks we should start friending some chimpanzees before it's too late.

The Rhino Horn is Not Medicine

Newsflash: the rhino horn does not cure cancer, nor is it a remedy for fever, headache, impotence, arthritis, pain, or ANY other medical condition. In fact, there is no evidence that the rhino horn has any medicinal value whatsoever. Yet poachers are still killing rhinos in alarming numbers to satisfy the demands of traditional Chinese and Vietnamese medicine. Rhino horn is also used in ornamental handles for daggers in Yemen.

According to Save the Rhino.org, the rhino population among its five species has plummeted from about one million at the turn of the 19th century, to 70,000 in 1970 to fewer than 24,500 today. The rhino has been around for 50 million years and today three of its five species are considered critically endangered and could become extinct within our lifetimes.

Saving Rhinos.org has begun a big campaign to educate us that the rhino horn has no medicinal value.

Education is the first step to improving the situation. Find out how you can help rhinos here; find out ten reasons to save the rhinos here.

It's our planet. These are our species. We need to take care of them.

Here's a short video by Tylor Loposser from the Sixth Extinction in Motion video project:

Black Rhino - Tylor from cmuutk on Vimeo.