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The pups actually are are great fun though. They spend a course of hours and hours playing and and um one dog will every day have to sleep near the pups cuz someone’s got to make sure that they don’t do goofy things. Snares. And now the snares that are set for painted dogs, they’re like a noose, a wire noose that’s set like this at about that height. They’re very cleverly disguised. And then they use branches and grass to hide them. You can’t see them. It just closes and it gets tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until the animal’s strangled. And it’s a very horrible, miserable way to go.

Basically, the collars are going to work like this. The animal gets um snared, the wire goes here, and if the wire is catches in here, basically the dog will not get caught. So, the wire catches on this metal plate. The dogs, incidentally, is so strong, they always break the wire. And we’ve had domestic dogs testing these collars, and it 90% of the time it’s catching the wire. Until

I started working with painted dogs, nobody knew that they looked after they’re sick and they’re weak and they’re injured because they’ve got this incredible social system where every dog helps every other dog. But I remember a pack a lion mauled one of my young a young dog. And lo and behold, three months later, the pack dragged that dog away. They licked his wounds clean. They looked after him. And I’m like, what other species in the wild does this? Actually takes care of their sick. I had a dog I I called him Miguelan. And Miguelan was like was the run of the litter. But the pack didn’t treat him like the run. He always was given as much food by the rest of the pups.

And when he was an adult, he was always lost on the hunts. But when he came late on the hunt, they they’d give him food. When it came to babysitting time, guess who got the job? You know, Miguel was the babysitter. And they’re just so good at switching roles, switching jobs. The other thing is that they never fight. You never see arguments within the pack ever. You know, they’ve got these enormous ears, the great big big ears, and this will make Mickey Mouse jealous, you know, exceptional. And when they’re running, when they’re running on on a chase, they keep their ears forward. Now, you think they flap them back for speed, but if you’re going to overheat, and the ears actually catch the air that they’ve got almost like a fan running when they’re running. And and the reason they’re called painted dogs, of course, is because no two are the same. an exceptional camouflage.

So, raising money for these collars to keep some packs alive, at least as many as we can. To raise you, one of these collars as it is, it be about $250. For about $500, we’ll be able to have the same thing, but with good electronics in that will really say where you were, what you’re doing. With the solar power on here, these collars will almost last for six or seven years and still be giving information. So, we need to know where these animals are going, even where they’re picking up the snares and say no more building in that area or we can’t have that highway going through there. We need to know how they’re using the landscape. And we need these things. We’d like your help to raise money for these collars and for the dogs because wildlife doesn’t have a voice. The dogs don’t have a voice. They need our voice. And I’d like to thank Endangered Species Revenge for their help in taking the voice of the painted dog to you, the audience.

Their cubs, they’re quite cute. They have a really interesting chirp which is a ow, ow, ow, ow!

And through mimicry is they look like a honey badger, which is a very aggressive African animal and that’s actually a protection for them when they’re not with their mom all the time.

They kind of fly through the air. And there’s two points to the stride that they are not touching the ground at all when they’re all the way extended, and then when they’re running their tail acts as a rudder for balance.

So they’re just the best hunter in all of the savannah. Cheetahs are built for speed but not power and aggression, so they don’t have big powerful bones and big teeth, or sharp claws. Their claws are more doglike but again not being an aggressive animal. Lions and hyenas, jackals even will take the the cheetah’s food from it.

We’ve  lost about 90% of the cheetahs in the last 100 years, from about 100,000 cheetahs 100 years ago to today, sadly, less than 7,500 cheetahs.

In the middle 70s, I went to Namibia for the first time. And that’s when I found that farmers were killing cheetahs. Farmers were killing cheetahs like flies. They said, “Uh, they’re horrible.” It’s a threat to their livestock.

So, I really wanted to see if there was a way that I could stop the killing. We developed use of livestock guarding dogs. We use a large breed of dog, the Anatolian Shepherd. They come from Turkey. They’ve been used for over 5,000 years to protect the livestock from wolves and bears. We breed them. We place them on the farmers when they are about 10 weeks of age. And we’ve seen a loss in livestock to the farmers that have the dogs by over 80-100%. So they have been very very effective. So that means that the farmers don’t have to kill cheetahs.

Cheetah is not a fighter, and so they will stay far away from a barking dog like that. Just to raise the dogs up and and place them, it’s about $500 per puppy that we place.

And so I’d really like to thank Endangered Species Revenge for the support that they’re giving us to help with our dog program. So it’s dog saving cats or “bucks for pups”, but we’d like to place as many dogs as we can. So please help us help Endangered Species Revenge help the cheetah.

They can be gray, white or bright pink. And the color comes from the capillary that goes near the surface of the skin. So when they have a lot of activity, they become pinker. Like playing, hunting, fishing, mating. It’s like when you make a lot of exercise, you start getting red and you know that’s how they they become so pink. For me, it’s amazing. The mother has to teach the baby somehow through this really muddy and dark waters of the Amazon rivers, how to survive, how what fish to hunt, what dangers to avoid. And that show us that they are very very smart. The babies stay with the mother for more than a year where they’re learning but also they’re drinking milk. They are mammals. So that creates a strong attachment between mother and the baby. So one difference between marine dolphins and rear dolphins is that they have this big forehead. This very prominent forehead full of fat that they use for sonar for navigation. It’s called the melon.

They create a sound that goes and bounces into the prey or trees or anything that is in the way, goes back and hits the melon. And that’s when they interpret all the information and they create this image in the brain. So they can navigate in darkness.

They’re very flexible and they can swim through the forest and move through the trees, make U-turns because their vertebbrates are not fused like marine dolphins. They’re a little bit loose. So that gives them this flexibility and that help them help

all these agricultural changes in the region. They’re changing the main rivers to become irrigation for the crops. So they are taking water from the rivers and the rivers are getting shallow and shallow and they get trapped.

When the rescue happened few years ago, we were able to rescue 26 dolphins. All of them were safe and at the end the all of them were in good shape. We have mother calves, babies all sizes and adults. So it was an entire population. So we went to this remote area by trucks and we had to capture the each individual and that was a lot of work and lot of trouble. So we have to take them out of the water, put them on a stretcher, take them to the tracks that we made nicer with mattresses for the dolphins. So we needed a lot of resources to act quickly. All this rescue in general has a very high cost. The cost of this operation was around $20,000 cuz we stayed there for 15 days with a big big team.

This year was one of the severest droughts in Bolivian history. So, Laaz, the capital of of Bolivia, run out of water. So, people has to make lines to get water. All this lack of rain is caused by climate change. All the glaciers in Bolivia are melting. So, the rivers are going to get and are getting lower and lower. I received information that dolphins are stranded or sometimes they’re dying in on some beaches in the in the rivers in very remote areas and there’s no money to go there. I don’t have the the team to to help me with that and I know that sadly they they died and that’s why we need this this money to to create an emergency fund to be able to react quickly as we receive the information that something is happening. call people, make a team, and go and rescue them. I would like to thank Endangered Species Revenge for all the help and support, and I’m asking you to help me to save the Bolivian pink river dolphin.

Corals are extremely important because they deposit these amazing structures. Corals produce an enormous amount of space and complexity of spaces for other organisms to live in.

But when corals are exposed to increasing seawater temperatures associated with climate change, their tissues will turn pale or white. And that’s what we describe as coral bleaching. And what it really means is that the symbiotic algae that live inside the coral’s tissues and give them their color. They’ve been lost and the coral will eventually die.

75% of the corals are dying as a result of a bleaching event. That’s what you would hear reported in the literature. What the literature doesn’t say is that 25% survive. And they are our super corals. They are the ones that are thriving in conditions that are making others very ill.

When you’re looking at a coral, you’re actually seeing two organisms. One would be the coral itself which is the whole finger here. But living in the coral tissue are the single cell algae which we call symbions.

Corals are the sum total of thousands of tiny polyp. And each of those polyp looks a little bit like an anemone that stretches across the skeleton and joins to the polip next door. The color of the coral reflects millions of tiny algae that are living inside the animal cells.

If we can find out why certain corals survive warmer seawater temperatures, we can potentially grow them on mass in the laboratory and replant them on reefs to grow entire coral reef ecosystems.

Ruth exposes the coral to higher temperatures and identifies which corals best survive the heat. Ruth even measures what DNA is most active in corals when water temperatures rise.

So, one thing we really don’t know is how quickly corals grow. And technology is the answer. These amazing cameras allow us for the first time to start to see how quickly or slowly corals grow, either when they’re young or when they’re old, or when they assemble with others within their species or across reefs that are made up of many different species.

How impactful is it when they interact with fish? We need to understand how they grow so that we can grow them as quickly as possible. and as many of them as possible and start to get the reefs replanted with these corals that can survive climate change warming.

This camera cost $105,000 and to actually get it installed on the reef will take another $20,000 of electronics and solar power. I can’t thank Endangered Species Revenge enough for their donation that enabled us to purchase this first camera and for their continued support that will allow us to deploy this camera on the reef and hopefully to repeat this camera in multiple places across different coral reefs that have different environmental characteristics.

Remember, climate change warming is destroying reefs around the world. We don’t have a lot of time to play here. So, we have to learn as much as we can as quickly as possible. And these amazing cameras allow us to do just that.

So, please help us raise some money so that we can start to put cameras across the reef and understand how corals grow. And that knowledge of course will underpin how we replant super corals on the reef that can survive climate change and persist as reef systems through this warmer future that we know is now inevitable.