Counting animals by recording their voices – frontiers for young minds
Across the world, our wildlife is under threat. Global warming, farming, fishing, buildings, and roads are eating up or damaging wild spaces where animals live. Animals like the vaquita, the world’s rarest marine mammal, are on the brink of extinction. To look after the wildlife that we still have, conservationists need to know how many animals there are, and how populations are changing over time. But how do you work out how many gibbons are left in the rainforest, or how many porpoises there are in the sea, if you cannot see them? We work out population sizes by recording and counting the calls or songs animals make. We then use this information to help conservationists make better decisions about how to look after some of our rarest and most endangered species, now and into the future.
