Richard Conniff's Blog, page 100

The Water is Not Fine

Anyone who has ventured alone in remote and difficult corners of the planet knows that discovering new species entails a considerable dose of danger and also tedium, wonder and also absurdity, discomfort and also loneliness.  My book The Species Seekers is full of such stories, but I just came across a couple that ended up on the cutting room floor:

Fossil-hunter Louis Leakey described the experience of sharing a water hole with large animals at his camp in East Africa's Olduvai Gorge this way:  "We could never get rid of the taste of rhino urine even after filtering the water through charcoal and boiling it and using it in tea with lemon."

And botanist Joseph Banks contemplated his own death in a ship, The Endeavour, hung up on the Great Barrier Reef, in June 1770: 

"The most critical part of our distress now approached … if (as was probable) she should make more water when hauld off she must sink and we well knew that our boats were not capable of carrying us all ashore, so that some, probably the most of us, must be drownd:  a better fate maybe than those would have who should get ashore without arms to defend themselves…"

The indomitable Capt. James Cook eventually managed by considerable effort to get Endeavour off the reef and into a safe harbor for repairs, and Banks made it back to London alive.

As to the taste of rhino urine, I am pretty sure Leakey just learned to live with it.

Why Babies Still Take Daddy's Surname

Why do kids still typically get their Dad's surname, 50 years after the rise of feminism?  Today's New York Times offers an explanation that hadn't occurred to me:

Traditional practices grew out of a male-dominated culture and a need for simple rules. But there is another, less obvious motive: to hold men accountable for their offspring.

"How do you attach men to children?" said Laurie K. Scheuble, a senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University who has done several studies on naming practices. Names are "a very functional and practical way" to do so.

The article goes on to suggest that "perhaps, in an age when men wear BabyBjorns, it is no longer always necessary."  But despite our delusions of modernity, the writer inadvertently reveals that  even college professors apparently still rely on another ancient means of keeping restless and paternity-insecure  males attached to family:  Jocular talk about how much the kiddies look like them..

When Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, 32, an English professor who lives in Portland, Ore., married Laura Rosenbaum, he toyed with the idea of a creative synthesis.

But "Rosenpollackpelznerbaum sounded like a weapon of mass destruction," he said. When they had a son, giving him Daniel's last name seemed too complicated, so they gave the baby Laura's.

Mr. Pollack-Pelzner initially worried that having a different name would arouse suspicions, leading to airport frisks and other indignities. But since his son was born, "I've hardly thought about it at all." No one has ever challenged whether he is the toddler's father: "The poor guy is cursed to look just like me."

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Beware of Seducers Bearing Gifts

Some male spiders deceive the females they mean to seduce with wedding gifts that look good but don't offer much beyond the wrapping, according to a new paper just out in BMC Evolutionary Biology.  I wrote about the delicate negotiating of gifts between male and female in my book The Natural History of the Rich.  I also did an NPR commentary on the topic a few years ago.

But beware, reader, I am trying to seduce you with a gift:

When evolutionary psychologists talk about human sexual behavior, they tend to draw analogies from the animal world and they particularly like to talk about hangingflies.  These inch-long predators live by the thousands in the temperate forests of North America.  They specialize in catching other insects, injecting digestive enzymes into them, and sucking out their innards.  So the analogy to the behavior of rich people may seem remote.  But when a male hangingfly wants romance, he goes out and catches an even bigger insect than usual and advertises his catch to the female world.   Male and female pair off in the undergrowth, hanging by their forelimbs face-to-face like trapeze artists about to attempt an aerial minuet.  (One can imagine the billionaire balloonist Richard Branson in this position, all banked blond hair and eager teeth.)  He clutches the dead insect in his hind legs and holds it up to her as a nuptial gift–or to put it in human terms, he buys her dinner and she allows sex to follow.

But neither male nor female is a patsy in this partnership.  If the dinner is too small, she throws him out before he can do much good.  It's a variation on the "diamonds are a girl's best friend" theme, and bigger diamonds, or dead insects, make better friends.  It takes twenty minutes of vigorous copulation to get her to lose interest in other males and lay her eggs–and he only gets twenty minutes if he brings her a big gift.  On the other hand, when his twenty minutes are up, the male may grab back his nuptial gift and fly away with it to seduce other females.

Does this begin to sound terribly familiar?  You are probably already thinking of offensive analogies.  For instance, when Donald Trump's prenuptial agreement offered second wife Marla a piece of the real money after five years of marriage, and he then dumped her in year four, was he not managing his reproductive assets in a manner and with a timeliness worthy of a hangingfly?

The leap from hangingflies to humans is of course perilous.  In our species, both males and females typically consider the resources a potential long-term mate can bring to the relationship.  Upper class men of past generations weren't merely seeking good bloodlines when they did their dating mainly out of the pages of The Social Register or Debrett's, nor when they asked one another that odd question, "What does her father do?"  "I won't say my previous husbands thought only of my money," the Woolworth department store heiress Barbara Hutton once remarked, "but it had a certain fascination for them."  And yet in study after study, human females demonstrate a far more pronounced inclination to seek a partner with resources.  Contrary to feminist expectations, women with good prospects of their own tend to place even greater emphasis on a man's financial status.  Or as a Dallas commercial real estate saleswoman put it, commenting on rich men in general:  "They have a little caption over their head that says, 'Let's go!'"  Feminists believe the urge to "marry up" the social ladder is cultural, a byproduct of economic discrimination and the blighted sensibilities of commercial real estate saleswomen.  Evolutionary psychologists say it's also biological:  Women make a huge parental investment in their offspring, so in our evolutionary past there was a significant survival advantage in finding a helpmate who could provide compensatory effort and resources.

The evidence for the parental investment argument in other species is strong.  Where females bear most of the cost of rearing offspring, they are exceedingly scrupulous about choosing males who demonstrate greater fitness or, like the hangingfly, provide valuable resources.  Insisting that the male put some food on her plate isn't the animal equivalent of prostitution, a simple quid pro quo food-for-sex exchange.  It's a way for the female to get the energy she needs to reproduce, and also a way to judge the merits of a prospective mate.  In common terns, for instance, courtship feeding of his mate is a reliable indicator of a male's subsequent parental feeding of their young.

In humans, biology puts the cost of reproduction almost entirely on females.  The father's contribution equals the mother's in just one regard, which happens to be the payoff:  He provides half the child's genome.  Otherwise, the disparity in effort is appalling.  A woman produces just 400 eggs in a lifetime, a man four trillion individual sperm, which works out to about 125 million a day, or to carry this to a ridiculous extreme, which is after all the male way, a little more than 86,805 potential human beings a minute.  This means that his opportunity cost–what he gives up in choosing one mate over another–is almost nil.  And her cost is almost infinite.  On top of that, the woman must then invest 80,000 calories in her pregnancy, roughly the energy it would take her to run from New York to Chicago, plus another 182,000 calories to nurse the baby for a year, almost enough energy to plug onward to San Francisco.  Or bust.  Meanwhile, the male's direct contribution from his single intrepid sperm is about .000000007 of one calorie, or not quite enough energy to roll over in bed and fart loudly.  Is it therefore any wonder that women like men who demonstrate an ability to help out?  Or that somewhere in our benighted past, male earning power became a useful gauge of reproductive potential, much as men still gauge female reproductive potential primarily on the basis of pretty faces, or nice money-makers, well-shaken?

As Rhinos Go Extinct, Asia Keeps Buying

An update on the new war against rhinos, from the New York Times:

Authorities at the Hong Kong International Airport made a record seizure of illegal rhino horns last week, estimated to be worth about $2.2 million, officials said.

Customs agents confiscated 33 rhino horns, 758 ivory chopsticks, and 127 ivory bracelets concealed inside a shipping container from Cape Town, South Africa. The concealed animal parts were labeled as "scrap plastic," an increasingly common trick for smuggling horns and ivory out of Africa and into Asia.

Tom Milliken, a program coordinator at Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network, said the rhino horns were likely bound for Guangzhou, China, where the largest waste processing industry in the world is located. "Unfortunately, Guangzhou also has a very large ivory carving industry," he said.

In this case, airport scanners revealed the presence of hidden rhino horn and elephant ivory, but conservationists have no way of telling how many illegal goods slip under the radar. "We don't really understand exactly how much ivory goes undetected," Mr. Milliken said, but added that new seizures in Africa and Asia are made every week.

Since July, customs officials in Malaysia made three major seizures, uncovering thousands of elephant tusks.

According to Traffic, rhino and elephant poaching has reached epidemic levels in Africa: 366 South African rhinos were poached in 2011, compared to 13 in 2007. "There's been an uninterrupted upsurge in illicit trade in ivory and rhino horns," Mr. Milliken said.

In October, Vietnam's Javan rhino was declared extinct in the country, and in November, East Africa's Western Black Rhino was declared extinct in the wild.

Elephant ivory is often sought for Chinese sculptures, name seals and jewelry. For rhinos, killings have escalated because of rising demand in Vietnam, where the horns are used by practitioners of traditional medicine, despite no evidence of any health benefits. Conservationists at Traffic are concerned that last week's seized shipment was destined for China, and not Vietnam, indicating that the Chinese market for rhino horn may also be on the rise.

"Before, we'd been looking at Vietnam as the epicenter of rhino horn consumption," Mr. Milliken said, "but this is a surefire indication that Chinese consumer dynamics are kicking in as well."

Scientists at the University of Pretoria in South Africa hope to compare DNA samples from the rhino horns to records in their African rhino database to identify the poached rhinos. This would help to pinpoint the location of the crimes and could help to narrow an investigation into the poachers' identity.

Mr. Milliken says arrests and convictions for illegal wildlife trade crimes don't occur frequently because of a number of challenges, including misinformed or corrupt officials and a lack of collaboration between supply countries, like South Africa and Tanzania, and demand countries, like China and Vietnam.

Conservationists at Traffic say they view the seizure as a way to enforce more smuggling crimes and protect rhinos from the ongoing poaching crisis.

"This is not an unlimited supply," Mr. Milliken said. "These are finite resources that, in many cases like with rhinos now, are down to the brink of extinction."

Gift Guide: Best of Science

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Jennie Erin Smith put together a gift guide for holiday reading.  It's a nice list, not least because it includes The Species Seekers.  (One notable omission, for obvious reasons, was Smith's own highly praised  Stolen World:  A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers and Skulduggery.)  Here are Smith's recommendations:

What would our lives be like if we were as immersed in nature as we are in technology? Measurably better, says Richard Louv, whose 2005 book, "Last Child in the Woods," advanced the idea of a "nature-deficit disorder" afflicting young people. In "The Nature Principle" (Algonquin, 317 pages, $24.95), Mr. Louv lays out a patchwork of scientific findings and personal anecdotes to contend that adults, too, suffer from what he defines as "an atrophied awareness, a diminished ability to find meaning in the life that surrounds us."The good news, Mr. Louv says, is that it's never too late to correct your NDD. Set up a bird feeder, join a hiking club, grow food locally, or plant a butterfly garden and you're on your way to becoming a "high-performance human"—saner, leaner, longer-lived and more enterprising. Mr. Louv's diagnosis rings true, but his prescriptions can sound shallow and fashionably "green." Many proven, traditional avenues into lifelong engagement with nature—hunting, fishing, sketching, specimen collecting, journaling—are given little or no attention. There's something beside the point, too, about Mr. Louv's promotion of ¬nature-as-therapy, like saying that Zen meditation tones the inner thighs.

Might there be a deeper value in old-fashioned naturalist pursuits, something greater than the sum of their side effects? Several outstanding recent books argue unequivocally that there is.

In an essay collection titled "The Way of Natural History" (Trinity, 204 pages, $45), a group of writers—mostly biologists but also poets, a guitarist, a Buddhist theologian and a former prisoner—discuss why they became naturalists and how they practice their craft. A surprising number got started as adults. One learned the ecology of Big Sur as a soldier, while stationed nearby; another took up birding to lessen the boredom of touring with his band. Most subscribe to the general idea of "nature-deficit disorder," but the recommendations for reversing it are fairly rigorous compared with Mr. Louv's.

To become a naturalist—that is, someone with "a working knowledge of a broad slice of the biota, and how the parts fit together with one another and their physical setting," as contributor and butterfly expert Robert Michael Pyle explains it—requires copious reading and long days outdoors, exploring and observing. None of this will necessarily lower your cholesterol or make you a better executive, if that even matters. "Must any sort of practical justification really be invoked?" Mr. Pyle asks. "Isn't it enough that the pursuit of deep natural history is one of the surest paths toward an entirely earthly state of enlightenment?"

For a sustained dose of inspiration toward that end, a would-be naturalist can fill a Kindle with enough 99-cent natural-history classics—by Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Alexander von Humboldt—to last years. Harder to find are the obscure gems of natural-history writing contained in "The Essential Naturalist" (Chicago, 534 pages, $39), a collection of lost or dimly remembered articles unearthed by the book's assiduous editors.

A pirate, a rural French bug collector, a Soviet mineralogist and a Holy Roman Emperor count among this volume's contributors. Prince Albert I of Monaco recalls an 1895 whale hunt in which he found himself "gripped down to the marrow" by the sight of the bleeding, suffering beast—until it conveniently vomited up some scientifically valuable giant squid. Ernst Mayer's account of his youthful expedition to New Guinea in 1928 is studded with jarring references to its "primitive" and "inferior" natives.

The editors have struck many tables and statistics from the original articles, leaving a volume heavy with emotion, surprise and wonder. "The book of nature has no beginning, as it has no end," advises contributor Jim Corbett, late hunter and photographer of man-eating tigers. "Open the book where you will, and at any period of your life … No matter how long or how intently you study the pages your interest will not flag, for in nature there is no finality."

A fine companion to such a stimulating anthology is Richard Conniff's The Species Seekers (Norton, 464 pages, $27.95), a rollicking group-biography of men and women who collected scientific specimens between the 17th and early 20th centuries. The awful fates of so many of these hardworking field naturalists—shot through with arrows, sickened by parasites, snubbed and slandered by envious museum curators—offer a sobering corrective to Mr. Louv's prediction that a life engaged in nature will be healthier and more prosperous. And yet, like naturalists today, the species seekers were motivated most of all by "the sense of private joy in small moments of discovery," Mr. Conniff says, which mitigated the "hunger, loneliness, disease and other hardships of field life."

If you're feeling inspired by now, another exceptional collection of essays, "Field Notes in Science and Nature" (Harvard, 297 pages, $27.95), offers practical tips for the born-again naturalist, who, after all, is useless without a notebook. Here biologists, geologists, anthropologists and scientific illustrators open notebooks from all stages of their lives, showing how they record and organize their observations. Some sketch, others paint, some combine graphs and cryptic scrawl making a glorious mess. The point is that their observations don't go unrecorded and that many seemingly random notations, made during routine or aimless forays, have led to important discoveries. "If there is a heaven," writes contributor E.O. Wilson, "I will ask for no more than an endless living world to walk through and explore. I will carry with me an inexhaustible supply of notebooks."

Why Raindrops Don't Kill Those Damned Mosquitoes

I've always been puzzled by the mystery of mosquitoes flying through rain without getting splattered.  The conventional wisdom in the past was that they somehow dodged the raindrops, which we should have realized was an impossibility.  Now a physicist has come up with a better explanation.  (Note:  I find the analogy of a falling boulder hitting a falling human somewhat disturbing.):

Newswise — Mosquitoes, which thrive in hot, humid climates, are as adept at flying in rainstorms as under clear skies. That's puzzling: Why aren't the bugs – which each weigh 50 times less than a raindrop – battered and grounded by those falling drops?

In fact, say David Hu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his graduate research assistant Andrew Dickerson, mosquitoes are hit by raindrops. Hu, Dickerson, and colleagues measured the impact forces of drops on both free-flying mosquitoes and custom-built mosquito "mimics" (small Styrofoam spheres of mosquito-like size and mass), and captured the interactions using high-speed video.

The researchers found that because the bugs fly so slowly (a maximum of 1 meter per second) compared to the drops (which fall at velocities ranging from 5 to 9 meters per second), "they cannot react quickly enough for avoidance, and likely cannot sense the oncoming collision anyway," Dickerson says. But, he adds, "under low-wind conditions, the insects fly slowly enough that frontal impacts are infrequent, similar to us running in the rain. Instead, transverse impacts on the body and wings dominate."

The mosquitoes' low mass and speed – and thus low inertia – means that the raindrops are largely unaffected by the collisions. Thus, the drops don't splash on the bugs. "The most probable impact is one that rotates the mosquito instead of pushing it vertically downward," Hu says.

Indeed, Hu and company's video analysis shows that, after pushing past the mosquitoes, falling drops have lost very little speed. "Consider this analogy," Hu says: "A falling boulder hits a slowly falling human. The human, unless hit square-on, will be pushed aside quickly, and continue falling at a speed similar to pre-impact. Should the same boulder hit the earth, the boulder will break into many pieces."

Hu discusses the findings and their implications for the development of flapping micro-aircraft in a talk at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting, which will take place Nov. 20-22, 2011, at the Baltimore Convention Center in the historic waterfront district of Baltimore, Maryland.  The talk, "How mosquitoes fly in the rain," is at 2:10 pm on Sunday, Nov. 20, in Room 309.

Apes in Elevators

I'm at a hotel in Chicago today, riding the elevator with my eyes fixed on the floor.  Primatologist Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago invited me to visit yesterday for a talk about my book The Species Seekers.  Dario has a new book of his own coming out next year, Games Primates Play (Basic Books), and his first chapter offers a very nice explanation of our odd behavior in elevators:

In horror movies, more people are probably murdered in elevators than in any other closed space, including the shower. In real life, the probability of being the victim of a deadly attack in an elevator is virtually zero. Yet, the way people act towards others when they ride together in an elevator suggests that they have serious concerns about their own safety.

If the elevator is crowded, everybody stands still and stares at the ceiling, the floor or the button panel as if they've never seen it before. If two strangers ride together in the elevator, they stand as far as possible from each other, don't face each other directly, don't make eye contact and don't make any sudden movements or noises.

Much of people's behavior in elevators is not the result of rational thinking. It's an automatic, instinctive response to the situation. The threat of aggression is not real, yet our mind responds as if it is, and produces behaviors meant to protect ourselves.

Elevators are relatively recent inventions, but the social challenges they pose are nothing new. Close proximity to other people in restricted spaces is a situation that has occurred millions of times in the history of humankind.

Imagine two Paleolithic cavemen who follow the tracks of a large bear into the same small, dark cave. There is no bear in there, only the other hungry caveman ominously waving his club: clearly an awkward situation that requires an exit strategy. In those Paleolithic days, murder was an acceptable way to get out of socially awkward situations, much in the way we use an early morning doctor's appointment as an excuse to leave a dinner party early. In the cave, one of the cavemen whacks the other over the head with his club and the party is over.

Similarly, when male chimpanzees in Uganda encounter a male from another group, they slash his throat and rip his testicles off — just in case he survives and has any future ambitions for reproduction.

Our minds evolved from the minds of the cavemen, and their minds, in turn, evolved from the minds of their primate ancestors — apes that looked a lot like chimpanzees. Some of our mental abilities appeared very recently in our evolutionary history — like our ability for abstract reasoning, language, love or spirituality. But the way primate minds respond to potentially dangerous social situations hasn't changed in millions of years.

Evolution has been so conservative in this domain that the minds of humans, chimpanzees and even macaque monkeys — whose ancestors began diverging from ours 25 million years ago — still show traces of the original blueprint.

When two rhesus macaques are trapped together in a small cage, they try everything they can to avoid fighting. Moving with caution, acting indifferent and suppressing all the behaviors that could trigger aggression are good short-term solutions to the problem. The monkeys sit in a corner and avoid any random movements that might inadvertently cause a collision, because even a brief touch could be interpreted as the beginning of hostile action. Mutual eye contact must also be avoided because, in monkey language, staring is a threat.

The monkeys look up in the air, or at the ground, or stare at some imaginary point outside the cage. But as time passes, sitting still and feigning indifference are no longer sufficient to keep the situation under control. Tension between the prisoners builds, and sooner or later one of them will lose her temper.

To avoid immediate aggression, and also to reduce stress, an act of communication is needed to break the ice and make it clear to the other monkey that no harm is intended or expected. Macaque monkeys bare their teeth to communicate fear and friendly intentions. If this "bared-teeth display" — the evolutionary precursor of the human smile — is well received, it can be a prelude to grooming. One monkey brushes and cleans the other's fur, gently massaging the skin and picking and eating parasites. Grooming can both relax and appease another monkey, virtually eliminating the chance of an attack. (You wouldn't bite your masseuse, would you?)

So, if you are a rhesus macaque and find yourself trapped in a small cage with another macaque, you know what to do: Bare your teeth and start grooming. If you are a human and find yourself riding in an elevator with a stranger, I recommend you do the same: Smile and make polite conversation.

One morning when I was living on the 20th floor of a high-rise building I rode the elevator with a middle-aged man who seemed to be particularly intimidated by my presence. As I stepped in, he smiled nervously and started talking immediately. He talked nonstop and managed to give me his entire medical history, complete with symptoms, diagnoses and treatments, before we reached the ground floor. I doubt that this man expected to receive medical advice from me. Rather, he was clearly an insecure and emotionally vulnerable person who used massive verbal grooming to appease a perceived potential aggressor in a risky situation.

Not all my experiences are like this, of course. When I ride in an elevator with an attractive woman, I'm generally treated with indifference, which in this case is not a sign of fear or intimidation. When my girlfriend rides in an elevator with a man, the man often strikes up a conversation with her and ends up asking for her phone number. People's responses to potential mating opportunities are just as predictable as their responses to potentially dangerous situations.

The beauty of human nature, however, is that although the average behavior of human beings can be scientifically predicted, there is a lot of unpredictable variation above and below the mean. Once, on the way up to my apartment, I met an old lady who got in the elevator on the second floor, pressed all the buttons from the third through the 22nd floor, and got out on the third floor with a grin on her face.

Heroes and Villains in the War on Rhinos

San-Mari Ras with young poaching victim

Park rangers are the unsung heroes–underpaid, overworked, and routinely facing considerable risk to their lives, especially in areas where poachers do their dark work.  When I was in South Africa early this year, San-Mari Ras, a section ranger at  Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal, told me about arresting one of the notorious Van Deventer brothers in 2006.   "I was standing in front of the vehicle with a semi-automatic weapon saying, 'Get out of the car!'" she said.  "And he was reaching for something under the seat.  The guy I was with reached in and snatched him out of the car.  It turned out there was a .38 snub-nosed under the seat that he was trying to reach."

Later, Van Deventer told police that he'd already been to prison once and was determined never to go back.   It's not clear if he was intending kill Ras or himself.  In any case, one brother ended up with a five-year jail sentence, and the other got 10.  "These two brothers were responsible for the deaths of 25 rhinos," said Ras.

Now they are speaking out about their crimes, probably in a bid for early parole.  Here's the report from investigative journalist Ian Michler:

The poachers

We never liked doing what we did and telling our story will help the public be aware of how to catch other poachers,' says Rhino One, the name the older brother goes by in prison. 'We are relieved it's over because we were always stressed. I lost perspective on life,' added Rhino Two, his younger brother. Involved from the very beginning, Rhino Two is serving a 10-year sentence, with two years suspended after admitting that he continued to poach after his first arrest in May 2006. The older brother was given five years, with two-and-a-half years suspended for his role as an accomplice towards the end of the killing spree.

Crime syndicates

Criminal activity that involves trade in ill-gotten goods and services of high value is usually carried out through syndicates. In essence, these operate as loose or informal associations, founded on the basis that members with the ability to distribute cash carry the most power and influence. Ostensibly the smart guys, they get others lower in the network to do the dirty work and take the greater risks. And finding people who are willing to take those risks in return for immediate payment is never a problem.

High rewards – Heavy punishments

It is common knowledge that dealing in rhino horn involves big money, but it also comes with the threat of harsh jail sentences and heavy fines. These range in severity from a minimum of five years imprisonment or a R50 000 (US$6 700) fine in North West province to 15 years or a R250 000 (US$34 000) fine in Limpopo. With this type of risk-reward profile, rhino poaching and the smuggling of horns are perfectly suited to syndicates. In this particular case, the brothers who are sitting in jail were the bottom feeders, and they got involved because they needed the money, sometimes desperately.

According to them, they were taking instructions, and the cash, from middlemen higher up the network. Amongst those arrested and charged in relation to this case are a number of well-known members of the South African hunting community, the youngest brother of the two convicted brothers, a prominent captive-predator breeder from the Free State and a private investigator. And then there is the 'mule', a customary and crucial player in the work of syndicates. Mules are used, often unwittingly, to carry out risky drop-off assignments. The handler is often nowhere near the vicinity of the assignment and step-by-step instructions will be passed on via cellphone. For example, a mule may be instructed to go to a park or restaurant, pick up a bag lying in the toilets and then catch a flight to a particular city. Upon arrival, they will then be told to book into a certain hotel and leave the bag in a specific place before checking out at a given time.

The bag, containing the rhino horn, will then be picked up by someone else, and so the trail continues. In one instance, an unemployed person from Port Elizabeth was arrested for doing the donkey work between those charged and the end users, thought to be a group of wealthy Vietnamese, who took delivery of the horn outside South Africa.

19 rhinos killed – 8 in Kruger National Park

Between December 2005 and August 2006, when the brothers were caught at the gates of KwaZulu-Natal's Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, they claim to have shot 19 white rhinos. Eighteen died within close proximity to where they were shot and one escaped wounded. Of the total, 16 were adults and three were calves, killed because they kept milling around their dead mothers. Eight of the rhinos were shot in the southern reaches of the Kruger National Park, two in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi and the rest on private game farms owned by people known to the syndicate members.

Recruited by hunting community

Rhino Two believes that he was recruited by members of the hunting community to do the shooting because of his marksmanship and tracking skills. Using a variety of weapons, mostly illegal loans from gun shops and fellow hunters, he pulled the trigger on every rhino killed. His choice of weapon for the first few operations was a compound bow, but he soon found that its benefit of silence was outweighed by the need to get extremely close, and he switched to a light rifle, a seven-millimetre Mauser, fitted with a silencer. For the last few operations, a heavier calibre 30-06 was used, simply because it was made available to him.

Broad daylight – Modus operandi

Every animal was shot within just 100 metres of a road, some as close as 15 metres, and all during broad daylight. In the Kruger Park, busy roads were chosen to avoid arousing suspicion. During two operations that took place on private land, the brothers claim that a light aircraft was used to spot the rhino from the air before they went in on foot. For Rhino One and Rhino Two, locating animals and pulling the trigger was the easiest part of the operation. Removing the horn and escaping the scene undetected was much harder.

The chances of being discovered or having to abort a mission multiplied substantially if they dropped an animal, but had to spend an anxious night in a camp or lodge, usually under a false name, waiting to return and cut out the horn the following morning. In the beginning, Rhino Two used a large panga to remove the horn, but soon switched to a smaller and sharper butcher's knife. With the panga, it took 20 minutes of grunt work to dislodge the horns, but by the end he was completing the process in less than a minute, using the same technique employed to cut abalone from its shell. In most instances, once the horns were removed, they had enough time to cover the rhino's body with brush and branches.

Rhino horns – $2000 per kilo

The horns, in a state referred to as 'wet', were simply placed in a bag and stored under the seat of the getaway vehicle. According to the two brothers, they cut out at least 85 kilograms of horn during 11 months of poaching. In the underworld, horn for trade is often referred to as harde hout (Afrikaans for 'hard wood') and the prices they received varied between R12 000 and R15 000 (US$1 600 to US$2 000) per kilogram. In general, these prices seem to be above the going rate paid at this level, but the brothers believe this happened because there were fewer ranks in the syndicate and, unusually, most of the members, except the mule and the Vietnamese buyers, knew one an- other. On one occasion, desperate for money, they accepted R6 750 (US$900) per kilogram. As horns were passed up the syndicate ladder, however, the price increased with each transaction. According to the brothers, members just two levels up from them were receiving about R19 000 (US$2 500) per kilogram.

One Place Trophy-Hunting Lions Seems to Work

The December issue of Atlantic Monthly includes my Dispatch on trophy hunting of lions in Namibia:

We were crossing on foot through a scrubby patch of African wilderness when the guide casually noted that all the usual prey animals seemed to have gone elsewhere, a hint of lions in the neighborhood. This particular neighborhood, he added informatively, was home to a pride known for being "Full of shit.  Ballsy.  They don't run away from people, the way lions usually do."

The standard protocol, when hikers and lions bump into each other in the African bush, is for the lions to run, with the dominant male lion fleeing first. (That business about noble lion kings sacrificing themselves for family turns out to be one of the bigger, ballsier lies ever told about the male gender.) The females may stick around briefly, to snarl and show their teeth while the cubs also exit. Sometimes, a lioness will make a stiff-legged charge, skidding to a stop close enough to scatter sand on your shoes. And that's generally as bad as it gets (though alternate endings are always possible). "Never run," the guide advised. "Unless I tell you to."  Discreetly peeing your pants is permitted.

That day, sadly or otherwise, our lions did not rouse themselves, and I was reduced to the standard tourist pastime of watching lions from an open game-drive vehicle. Lumbering diesels do not make the lions skittish, oddly. They lift their heads as if to say, "Oh, those wankers," then flop back down in the dust and fall asleep.

What brought me on my visit early this year to South Africa and Namibia was the continuing controversy over the idea of using trophy hunting as a tool for lion conservation. The lion population in Africa has declined by at least a third over the past 20 years, due to loss of habitat, dwindling prey populations, disease, killings by livestock farmers, and badly managed trophy-hunting programs. Hence, animal-welfare groups petitioned the U.S. Department of the Interior last March to classify lions as endangered, a move that, given the big role of U.S. hunters, would effectively end trophy hunting of the species.

I'm not a hunter, and turning lions into trophies has always struck me as a strange enterprise. But I was inclined to approve of it, in part because of the unequal character of such encounters—on foot, in their territory, with animals that can easily kill us.

The real appeal of the idea, though, is that hunters are inexplicably willing to pay a trophy fee of roughly $10,000 for a lion—plus an equal or greater amount for the services of a professional hunting guide and assorted fees for kudu, springbok, and other species killed along the way. Much of that money goes into the local community, and in theory, it makes predator-hating livestock farmers more willing to tolerate big, scary animals outside their gates.

The idea is especially attractive in Namibia, an arid coastal nation with just 2.1 million people spread through an area more than twice the size of California. Over the past dozen years, Namibia has developed a remarkable system in which community conservancies own their wildlife and decide how to benefit from it. They typically form joint ventures with outside companies to develop safari lodges for camera tourists, but they also set aside separate patches of wilderness for trophy hunters; the hunting concessions are quicker to take off, and provide communities with proof in cash and jobs that wildlife–"our wildlife," as they quickly come to think of it–can be valuable. The result is that populations of most species are now booming there, and Namibia is the only country in Africa with an expanding, free-roaming population of lions.

Wildlife groups (that is, those devoted to conserving nature in the wild) were conspicuously missing from the petition. Not that they were writing love letters about lion hunters, either. Stalking a lion is "an art form," said one tourism manager. But baiting lions—luring them with a game animal's carcass—is more common, and "the lion comes to you. What's difficult about that?" Lion hunters, who tend to be suckers for male-gender mythology, also typically target the wrong animals. For their money, they want big males with manes, not females or the scrawny subadults that anger farmers by killing livestock.

Harvesting big males might be sustainable, said Craig Packer, who studies lion ecology in Tanzania, but only at a rate that would yield far less in trophy fees—one lion per 1,000 square kilometers in rich habitat. Hunters in Tanzania take up to 10 times that number, shooting their way down the age cohorts, Packer told me, so that the only lions left out there "with a mane and testicles are youngsters." A male lion needs six years to establish himself in a pride and rear a new generation. Overhunting leads to continual turnover in the pride: when a new male takes the throne, he tends to kill the old crop of cubs so he can father his own. But when I asked if he would support a ban on trophy hunting, even Packer demurred.

"It won't do the lions any good," said Garth Owen-Smith, Namibia's leading conservationist. "It will mean that lions have no value to areas where stock farmers live. Lions will have no future except to be shot." Every lion in a conservancy costs about $12 a day in lost livestock and wildlife, added Greg Stuart-Hill, a senior conservation planner for the World Wildlife Fund, and in areas where people live on $1 a day, "we need to give every incentive in the world to get them to tolerate these predators."

Tourists would no doubt be horrified by the notion that trophy fees from hunters are one reason lions, leopards, and other predators are still out there for them to admire. But tourists themselves now tend to indulge in a double standard. They object strenuously to any hint of hunting—and then, said one baffled tourism executive, "they tuck into a gemsbok steak that evening, without a pause." One alternative that WWF hopes to test is getting tourists to behave like hunters and pay a sort of trophy-photography fee—say, an extra $10 for each sighting—to go into a special fund for lion conservation.

Turning the unfenced wilderness of Namibia into a pay-per-view world might sound unduly venal, but it may be the price we need to pay to preserve one of the last places in Africa where lions still roam free.

If It Bleeds, It Misleads

Images of child soldiers reinforce the idea that warfare is getting worse

We tend to think the world is caught up an endless and ever worsening round of bloody warfare.  But in his new book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker argues that the opposite is true.  The Guardian recently headlined its excerpt with a clever twist on an old newspaper rubric:  "If it Bleeds, It Misleads":

Why the gloom? Partly it's the result of market forces in the punditry business, which favour the Cassandras over the Pollyannas. But mainly, I think, it comes from the innumeracy of our journalistic and intellectual culture. If we don't keep an eye on the numbers, the programming policy "If it bleeds, it leads" will feed the cognitive short cut "The more memorable, the more frequent", and we will end up with what has been called a false sense of insecurity.

The pessimism has been inspired by "new wars" involving guerrillas and paramilitaries that plague the developing world, symbolised by images of Kalashnikov-toting teenagers. It has been stoked by the widely repeated (and completely bogus) meme that at the beginning of the 20th century 90% of war deaths were suffered by soldiers and less than 10% by civilians, but by the end of the century these proportions had been reversed. It has fed on the claim that the world learned nothing from the Holocaust, and that genocides are as common as ever. And of course it has been redoubled by the threat of terrorism, which has been said to pose an "existential threat" to western countries, having the capacity to "do away with our way of life" or to end "civilisation itself".

Each of these scourges continues to take a toll in human lives. But it's only recently that political scientists have tried to measure how big a toll it is, and they have reached a surprising conclusion: all these kinds of killing are in decline. Battle deaths per 100,000 of the world population have fallen from 300 during the height of the second world war to the teens in the postwar years, single digits during the cold war, and less than one in the 21st century.

The deliberate killing of civilians has shown a similar bumpy yet downward trajectory. And other than in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, deaths from terrorism in the past decade were far lower than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, with their hijackings and bombings by countless revolutionary fronts, leagues, brigades and factions. A mental model in which the world has a constant allotment of violence – so that every ceasefire is reincarnated somewhere else as a new war, and every interlude of peace is just a time-out in which martial tensions build up and seek release – is factually mistaken.

It's not easy to see the bright side in the world today, where the remnants of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when it undermines claims that are serving as effective propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just because truth is better than error.

The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued newsreaders who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us towards doing things that make people better off, rather than congratulating ourselves on how morally sophisticated we are.

The argument that humans are born to cooperate, to make love, not war, is of course hardly new with Pinker.  Primatlogist Frans de Waal, among others, has made the case repeatedly, and my book The Ape in the Corner Office also emphasized our tendency to exaggerate the importance of conflict.