In their 1965 survey of dugongs on the north-east Australian coast, Dr. Colin and Dr. Kate Bertram made the welcome discovery that these aquatic mammals, whose numbers were seriously reduced throughout their range in the last century and the early decades of this, are now holding their own here and may even in a few places be increasing. Dugong meat and oil are highly valued by some Australian native people, and the animals fill an important ecological niche as consumers of aquatic plants in shallow water.

Rabies in human beings is always fatal. The commonest source of human infection is the domestic dog, which in turn is infected by wild carnivorous animals. As a result of the widespread outbreak of rabies in recent years in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas there have been demands for wholesale slaughter of certain wild animals. The recently published fifth report of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Expert Committee on Rabies recommends control of certain vector species. The danger, as Michael Woodford points out in this assessment of the report, is that the methods used will almost certainly involve the killing of other harmless wildlife.

Even at the time that Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick whalers were alarmed at the decline in whale stocks. To-day the situation is so serious as a result of overhunting that the whaling industry, which could produce more than half a million tons of meat and edible oils a year, is destroying itself. John Gulland, of the Fisheries Research Laboratory at Lowestoft, was one of the Committee of four scientists appointed by the Whaling Commission to investigate the whale stocks. Their report last summer showed how serious the depletion had been. Nevertheless, die recommendations for cuts in the whale quotas were rejected by the four whaling countries. In this article, originally broadcast by the B.B.C., Mr Gulland suggests an ingenious solution which he regards as the only hope for saving both whales and whaling.

For successful game management and research, immobilising drugs, which make it possible to handle even rhinos and elephants, are essential. The latest drugs, in the discovery and use of which Dr. Harthoorn, of the University College in Nairobi, has played a leading part, make it possible to drug an animal sufficiently for it to be docile but at the same time able to get to its feet and walk unaided. Simple and safe, they have proved their value, for example, in the removal of over 100 square-lipped rhino from Natal without a single casualty due to drug effects.

So great are the advantages of a light aeroplane for all aspects of game management, including anti-poacher operations and research, that the effective management of the 5,000-square-mile Serengeti National Park, in Tanzania, now depends on the plane. The running costs are considerably less than those of a Land Rover. The authors, who have been engaged on this work since early 1962, describe some of their observations on wildebeest migration which could only have been made from the air, and their methods of co-operating with ground-based rangers for effective anti-poacher control. Incidental advantages of the plane include its ability to swoop down and “buzz” the meat-carrying poachers, and its speed in discovering the “lost” tourist who has run out of petrol in the park.

In the summer of 1966 Dr Kaszab, Director of the Zoological Department of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, was invited by the Mongolian and Hungarian Academies of Science to lead an expedition, his fourth, to western Mongolia, in the course of which the members had the good fortune to sight eight Przewalski wild horses.

Many people want to conserve wildlife and the countryside for purely aesthetic and moral reasons, because they look nice and are part of our natural heritage, not because conservation has any intrinsic importance or practical value. But conservation is a strictly scientific concept, meaning the maximisation of the flow of energy through any area, so there are also good scientific and economic reasons for conservation, which Richard Fitter, who is Honorary Secretary of the FPS, discusses here.

Aldabra, one of the few islands left in the world with a distinctive fauna undisturbed by man, is threatened with the installation of an air base and a radio station that would without doubt ruin its scientific value and probably exterminate several rare, and some unique, birds. The author, a member of die Bristol University Seychelles Expedition of 1964–65, spent two months on Aldabra, which lies 630 miles south-west of Seychelles and 230 miles northwest of Madagascar. He describes some of the interesting animals and birds and the unique opportunity for scientific study that the island offers, and points to Assumption Island as a “grim warning” of what human interference can do to such an island.

The ancient volcanic crater of Ngorongoro in Tanzania, 10 miles across and 2,000 feet deep, is one of the show places of East African wildlife. Formerly a part of the great Serengeti National Park, it was separated in 1959 on the recommendation of a Government Committee of Enquiry, and, together with the Eastern Serengeti, established as a Conservation Area with a total area of 3,200 square miles. This followed Professor Pearsall's ecological survey of the Serengeti in 1956, financed by the FPS, the report of which was published in ORYX, August 1957. In this article the retiring Conservator of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area describes how, helped by money from the British Government, Ngorongoro has developed in five years from “a doubtful starter” to one of the successes of East African conservation. Members of the FPS East African tour will visit the Crater in February.

The two animals most seriously threatened by development in the Malay peninsula are the Sumatran rhinoceros and the seladang. The author, who has extensive knowledge of the peninsula, puts the rhinos at ten known individuals, with a probable total population of thirty, but many areas are still unexplored and information is far from complete. The seladang or Malayan gaur, the huge wild ox standing as high as six feet at the shoulder, is even more vulnerable than the rhino. Seladang unfortunately prefer habitats that are suitable for cultivation, and since the war some herds of thirty or more animals have completely disappeared. Two projected dams, which will destroy the greatest concentration of salt licks in Malaya, are a new and serious threat to the seladang.

The human race is setting itself some formidable problems by both increasing at an unprecedented rate and raising its living standards at an even faster rate. Have we the resources to feed, house, clothe, let alone provide leisure and culture, for all? What, for example, are the untapped food resources of the sea, of rivers and lakes, of wildlife? Nobody knows. The task of the International Biological Programme is to find the answers. Dr. Worthington, deputy director of the Nature Conservancy, and scientific director designate of the IBP, explains the task, and outlines the methods.