Endangered Rhinos: Radiant Horn

Over a million rhinos once roamed the African savannah.

Today, 150 years later, there are only about 25,000 animals left in the wild.

First the hunt by the Europeans, then the unrestrained poaching of the past decades have severely damaged the stocks.

Due to great conservation efforts, the population had initially stabilized.

The numbers even rose again.

But for some time now, poaching has increased significantly again.

Environmentalists see the species in danger again.

There are two species of rhinoceros on the African continent, the

rhinoceros (

) and the

rhinoceros (

). The former is classified as potentially endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with around 20,000 animals, the latter with only 5,000 specimens as critically endangered. Most of the animals now live in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Kenya, the majority in game reserves and protected areas. Rhinos play an important role in African ecosystems: As grass-eaters, they devour enormous amounts of vegetation and thus keep the steppe in balance. Rhino poaching had increased enormously, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. On the Asian market, the horn is regarded as a valuable remedy with a wide range of uses - from hangover to fever to cancer. Vietnam in particular has a great influence on the horn trade today:There the possession of rhino horn is simply a sign of wealth and good position.

Although the corona pandemic has put a strong damper on poaching in 2020, the decline is very unlikely to be permanent.

In the Kruger National Park alone, the population figures are said to have fallen by 70 percent in the past decade.

The poachers are well equipped and use state-of-the-art technology such as helicopters, night vision devices and veterinary medicines.

This confronts governments, which are bound by their respective financial budgets, as well as non-governmental organizations, with the difficulty that at least as much effort and technology have to be put in to keep the poachers in check.

Horns are marked with radioactive isotopes

A research group in South Africa has now started a pilot project that aims to reduce poaching activities in southern Africa and protect rhinos in a completely new way. In cooperation with the Australian Organization for Nuclear Science and Technology, the University of Colorado, the Russian State Agency for Nuclear Science, called Rosatom, and the South African Society for Nuclear Sciences, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg initiated the "Rhisotope Project". Radioactive isotopes are to be injected into the horns of the animals, which make the horn easily detectable on the transport routes, while the isotopes should not have any effects on the health or behavior of the rhinos. Isotopes are types of atoms with the same number of protons,but which have different numbers of neutrons and thus have different ordinal numbers. Some of them are radioactive. The idea: If the method is used on a large scale, the probability that there is at least one treated horn among an illegal delivery of horns is very high.