Scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature have taken snow leopards off the Red List. According to the IUCN, snow leopards are no longer "endangered."

Now, the predatory cats are considered "vulnerable," a less severe classification.

The snow leopard first joined the Red List in 1972, but the species' numbers have stabilized over the last four-plus decades.

In order for a species to be considered endangered, there must be less than 2,500 specimens in the wild or they must be experiencing an extreme rate of decline. A three-year assessment -- featuring input from scientists in academia and researchers from a variety of conservation groups, including Panthera, the Snow Leopard Conservancy and the Wildlife Conservation Society -- determined the snow leopard meets neither benchmark.

The snow leopard isn't necessarily recovered, or safe, but conservation efforts have succeeded in preserving a significant amount of the cat's preferred habitat. Still, scientists estimate there are less than 4,000 in the wild.

"The species still faces 'a high risk of extinction in the wild' and is likely still declining -- just not at the rate previously thought," Tom McCarthy, executive director of Panthera's snow leopard program, said in a news release.

The snow leopard's range stretches across some of the largest mountain ranges in the world, including the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Tien Shan and Altai ranges, as well as small ranges throughout Asia.

Snow leopards continue to lose habitat and prey, and face the threat of retaliatory killings by livestock herders. Global warming will also likely shrink the snow leopard's range.

"Continuing threats include poaching for its thick fur and overhunting of its wild prey," said Peter Zahler, coordinator of the WCS snow leopard program. "There is also an increasing number of domestic livestock raised by local people in these high mountains that degrades the delicate grasslands, disturbs wild sheep and goats, and drives them into less productive habitats."

Conservationists say more work needs to be done to protect snow leopards from these threats.

"It is important that a change in status is not misinterpreted -- this change does not mean that the snow leopard has been 'saved' and efforts on its behalf can stop," Zahler said.

Fox squirrels organize their nuts by quality, quantity and preference
Washington (UPI) Sep 13, 2017 - Like a child sorting Halloween candy, fox squirrels organize their loot using what's known as "chunking." Chunking describes the process of dividing a large number of items or information into smaller groups.

A new study -- published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science -- offers the first evidence that squirrels use chunking to divvy up their nuts.

A single eastern fox squirrel collects between 3,000 to 10,000 nuts each year. The nuts aren't lobbed haphazardly into a hole. Instead, they're organized by type.

"This is the first demonstration of chunking in a scatter-hoarding animal, and also suggests that squirrels use flexible strategies to store food depending on how they acquire food," Mikel Delgado, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a news release.

Delgado hypothesizes that chunking helps squirrels recall what they hid and where.

"Squirrels may use chunking the same way you put away your groceries. You might put fruit on one shelf and vegetables on another," said Lucia Jacobs, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. "Then, when you're looking for an onion, you only have to look in one place, not every shelf in the kitchen."

For two years, Delgado and Jacobs tracked the nut-stashing patterns of 45 male and female fox squirrels. Every day, researchers gave each squirrel 16 nuts -- a combination of almonds, pecans, hazelnuts and walnuts. Researchers varied the order of the distributed nuts and location at which the nuts were distributed. GPS devices helped the scientists track where the squirrels carried and buried each nut.

Squirrels who foraged in a single location tended to organize their caches, or groups, by nut type, while squirrels who foraged a several locations tended to prioritized spatial separation among their caches, never burying nuts close to the place where they retrieved them.

"These observations suggest that when lacking the cognitive anchor of a central food source, fox squirrels utilize a different and perhaps simpler heuristic -- problem-solving approach -- to simply avoid the areas where they had previously cached," researchers concluded.

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Sophisticated international trafficking of ivory in central Africa is being fuelled by high levels of corruption, according to a report published Thursday. The study by wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic said weak governance, corruption and shifting trade dynamics are seriously undermining efforts to control ivory trafficking throughout Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Congo-Br ... read more

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