Topic
Encounters and friction between people and wild animals over shared space, resources, or safety, spanning crop raids, urban wildlife, and aggressive encounters.
Wild African savanna elephants gesture intentionally, finds an Animal Cognition study that logged about 840 gestures in two South African parks. Its behavioural tests of intent put elephants, a lineage evolutionarily distant from primates, beside the apes in research on how gesture evolved.
Reality
Researchers surveying 94 farms in Algeria's Bejaia province found a third abandoned over crop losses to endangered Barbary macaques. Their data on when and where the monkeys raid give deterrent and conservation plans specific targets.
Reality
Two UMass Amherst studies put numbers on shark behaviour that managers can act on, mapping a nurse shark mating ground only 150 meters long and surveying Northeast anglers who lose hooked fish to predators.
Reality
A content analysis of more than 3,000 New South Wales press reports published between 1804 and 1954 tracks how complaints about bandicoots moved from hunting to crop damage to ticks. Its firmest number is the nearly 19,000 scalps one bounty board took in 1906.
Reality
A Frontiers in Conservation Science analysis of Parks Canada conflict records from 2010 to 2023 puts elk at 62 percent, well ahead of grizzlies and black bears, with townsites the setting that concentrates them.
Reality
A University of Washington team identified 213 individual coyotes from 842 droppings, giving a city that has run on sighting reports an actual density figure -- a snapshot rather than the trend line that management questions need.
Reality
A study built on 22,000 hours of den footage finds temperature and day length interact to time black bear hibernation, which puts warm-winter bears out of step with their food.
Reality