SENTINEL ANIMALS The IT of anti-poaching
It’s late on a quiet Waterberg afternoon. The sun is just starting to dip behind the hills when a herd of grazing zebras suddenly clusters together on the grassland. As one unit they accelerate, walking faster than usual in a straight line towards the rocky slope of a hill, which they ascend before disappearing beneath the branches of an acacia thicket.
For 20 minutes the movement of the herd is aligned: they move in the same direction, at the same speed. The zebras remain together in a part of the landscape that requires them to spend more energy than they consume – there’s not much grazing on the rocky ground under those trees – until, some 47 minutes after the herd clustered together, the zebras filter back to the grasslands.
Just more than 13 000km away at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the researchers who’ve tracked these animals for 11 months know that this is not normal zebra behaviour, and that this particular movement pattern could have been triggered by only one thing: a human carrying a rifle. They have algorithms based
