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In one of the longest migrations of any animal, northern elephant seals spend seven months of the year swimming back and forth from Mexico and Southern California to Alaska and the North Pacific. Along the way, they must eat, sleep, and survive a gauntlet of predatory great white sharks and killer whales. While decades of research have answered most questions about the seals’ habits, such as where they feed and how they raise their pups, there is one big question about the blubbery giants that has eluded observation.
“We know most elephant seals die at sea,” says marine biologist Roxanne Beltran, who has been studying seals for almost a decade. “But we don’t know a lot about how they die.”
Camera traps document wildlife’s return to Gorongosa National Park
Mozambique’s civil war, which raged from 1977 to 1992, took a devastating toll on wildlife in the country’s famed Gorongosa National Park, a 1,500-square-mile reserve at the southern tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. During the war, violence and food insecurity drove many people to hunt wild animals to feed themselves, resulting in the loss of more than 90% of the large mammals in the park.
Nearly three decades later, animal populations have largely recovered, thanks to ongoing conservation and reintroduction efforts in the region. But, according to a new study published online this week in the journal
But that’s where the similarity ends.
“When you take a closer look at the distribution of species, it’s a bit out of whack,” Gaynor said. The large herbivores that were dominant before the war iconic African animals like zebra, wildebeest and hippopotamus were rare. Large carnivores were rarer still, with only lions remaining after the war. The savanna now belonged to baboons, warthogs, bushbuck and especially waterbuck, which dominated the survey.
“Waterbuck have been reproducing exponentially,” Gaynor said, adding that it remained to be seen whether the unchecked population might crash and stabilize, or if their dominance signaled a “new normal” for the park.
Camera traps document wildlife s return to Gorongosa National Park miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.