The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on Wednesday urged the public to dust off their vuvuzelas and participate in “Make a noise for rhino” day on September 22.
It was part of a campaign to support the country’’s “rhino warriors”, the men and women who risked their lives daily against gangs who ran the illegal rhino trade, said WWF spokesperson Joseph Okori.
This year, 188 rhino had been poached in South Africa.
The campaign to raise awareness about saving rhinos would start on September 22, which will also be the first day of rhino month.
This article was published by news24.com
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A growing, wealthier middle class in East Asia and a communication boom are some of the causes for the increase in rhino poaching, conservation agencies said on Wednesday.
“There is a growing middle class in East Asian society that can afford to buy rhino horn… which they use as medicine,” World Wildlife Fund (WWF) spokesperson Joseph Okori told reporters in Johannesburg.
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Caption Competition 24
Author: Admin
Submit a caption and you could win a 6-month subscription to Africa Geographic:
Send us a caption for the picture below and the wittiest entry will win the prize.
Albert Froneman captured this charming image.
Send your caption(s) to captions@africageographic.com, to reach us by 7 September 2010.
Alternatively, you can also submit your entry as a comment below, and on our facebook page.
Winner will be announced on 7 August 2010.
The winner of Caption Competition #23 is Robyn Gwilt with “Kids to feed, cell phone gym contracts to pay – pls don””t send us back to Zimbabwe!!”
Congratulations Robyn! To claim your prize, contact captions@africageographic.com
Powdered material called “dry water” could provide a new way to store carbon dioxide in an effort to fight global warming. Photo: Ben Carter.
An unusual substance known as “dry water,” which resembles powdered sugar, could provide a new way to absorb and store carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, scientists reported at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It’s coming up to that time of year again where Collect-a-Can will embark on their eco-friendly, record-breaking mission to get into the Guinness World RecordsTM Book for collecting the most cans in a single month. The record attempt happens every year in October and this year Collect-a-Can will not only be encouraging schools to help them break their record, as has been the case in previous years, but would like to encourage organisations within the community to join in as well. Participants will not only become a part of history by joining this initiative but will also stand the chance to win some great prizes.
Collect-a-Can was mentioned in the Guinness World RecordsTM Book for the first time in 2007 when the campaign roped South African schools into a massive collection drive to set a record for the most cans collected in a single month. A total of 2 million cans were collected, making Collect-a-Can the first record holders of this attempt. The cans collected accounted for almost 10% of the total can production in South Africa for 2006.
“In 2008 we managed to sustain the record and in 2009 we broke our own record with a collection of 2.2 million cans,” says Mathabo Phomane, Marketing and PR Manager for Collect-a-Can. “Having achieved a new record for the most steel cans collected in one month, we have now set our sights on an even bigger and better can recovery in 2010. For our attempt this October we are encouraging institutions such as old age homes, orphanages, homes for the handicapped and animal shelters as well as schools from across the country to participate,” Phomane summarises.
To encourage participation in their Guinness World RecordsTM attempt, Collect-a-Can runs an annual Guinness World RecordsTM attempt competition, awarding schools that help them collect the most used beverage cans in October with book and cash prizes. Schools participating in the National Schools Competition, MySchool, are automatically entered into this competition. Publishing company Pan Macmillan South Africa a division of Macmillan South Africa has been a dedicated sponsor of this competition since its inception and will again be sponsoring book prizes to the schools that help collect the most cans. Macmillan is known for its high-quality academic, scholarly, educational, fiction, non-fiction and reference publishing.
This year a second category has been introduced to the competition. This category will encourage the collection all types of cans including used food cans, aerosol cans, oil cans, paint cans and beverage cans. Collect-a-Can is in the process of sourcing additional prize sponsors for this category and would welcome the assistance from any corporate organisations who can assist to make the competition exciting and rewarding for all who participate.
MySchool will again act as media partner to Collect-a-Can by assisting in getting the message of this exciting competition out to the schools on their database.
Collect-a-Can looks forward to an exciting Guinness World RecordsTM attempt in October and hopefully a mention in the 2010 Guinness World RecordsTM Book as well.
Contact the Collect-a-Can head office on (011) 466 2939 for more information, visit the Collect-a-Can website www.collectacan.co.za.
Photo: http://www.whale-shark.org/
ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2010) — How do female whale sharks meet their perfect mates and go on to produce offspring? While little is known about the reproductive behavior of these ocean-roaming giants, a newly published analysis led by University of Illinois at Chicago biologist Jennifer Schmidt reveals new details about the mating habits of this elusive, difficult-to-study fish.
People often have misguided images of sustainable lifestyles involving sacrifice and giving things up.
Tom Levitt and Kara Moses suggest that misguided images of sacrifice may be putting people off living more sustainable lifestyles. But reversing that may require policymakers to start encouraging wider metrics of success and happiness.
Photo by Suzi Eszterhas, from the article “Hanging with Hyaenas”, as published in the July 2010 issue of Africa Geographic.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) — High-ranking mothers provide their sons with a privileged upbringing and this increases their son’s success after leaving home. This was now demonstrated for the first time in a social mammal, the spotted hyaena, by a research team lead by scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW).
Shaun Smillie reports that weapons of a 64 000-year-old hunting scene in KwaZulu-Natal have been found, and that these quartz segments still carry the traces of blood and tissue of the prey.
What that prey was has been lost to time, but the evidence of the kill is what Dr Marlize Lombard can see when she peers into her laboratory microscope.
There is a reddish-brown blob of animal tissue, white bone fragments still clinging to the stone-age tool, and there is the coppery tinge of a prehistoric blood smear, 64-millennia old.
This forms part of the evidence that has enabled a team of South African scientists to deduce the quartz segments are the earliest-known examples of stone-arrow heads.
This, at a time when mammoths and Neanderthals still roamed Europe.
The team’’s findings were published last week in the journal Antiquity.
The tools were excavated in Sibudu Cave, near Ballito, and the possible presence of such technology in the deep stone age, is making academics reassess just how complicated and modern-human-like our ancestors really were.
These arrow heads could be at least 2 000 years older than a bone arrow that was discovered at the cave, two years ago.
“It is like piecing together a crime scene and we were following multiple lines of evidence,” says Lombard, who uses the jargon of a modern-day forensic investigator.
Lombard, an archaeologist at the University of Johannesburg, and other members of the research team have been able to replicate these impact fractures, using-modern day replicas of bows and spears and thrusting them into carcasses of wildebeest and other game.
But it is not just blood and animal tissue Lombard found on the tools, she also observed the remains of what the team believe is gum-based resin, used to glue the tips to the shafts.
It is the use of this prehistoric glue that would have required following a recipe and intricate multi-staged planning that has academics wondering.
Lombard said manufacturing such bows and arrows would have demanded a high level of cognitive reasoning and thought to understand how to make rope and know how to tie a good strong knot.
“We are convinced they were *or* were at least similar to us cognitively and behaved like us too,” says Lombard.”
What Lombard cannot tell is whose blood is on the arrow heads, but other researchers working at the cave have drawn up a list of likely suspects.
“We have come across blue duiker, bush pig and buffalo,” explains Lombard.
The presence of yellowwood shows that the environment then was wetter, but colder and the makers of those stone-tipped arrows would have hunted in a forest.
This article was originally published on page 2 of The Mercury on August 30, 2010.
The Wilderness Foundation, which led the successful campaign to halt titanium mining in St Lucia, has added its voice to the environmental groups wanting to stop coal mining on the border of the Mapungubwe National Park (a World Heritage Site) in the Limpopo Province.