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Night-time collisions with robotic lawnmowers are a significant animal welfare and conservation problem for hedgehogs as these often suffer serious or even fatal injuries. In order to make the operation of robotic lawnmowers hedgehog-safe, the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), the specialist crash test company CTS and the computer magazine c't are developing special hedgehog dummies and standardised tests to prevent fatal collisions. National and international experts will be discussing the latest developments in this project and many other topics related to hedgehog research, animal welfare and conservation at two conferences organised by the Leibniz-IZW in Berlin from January 16 to 19, 2025.

Bats depend on open bodies of water such as small ponds and lakes for foraging and drinking. Access to water is particularly important for survival in the increasingly hot and dry summers caused by climate change, the time when female bats are pregnant and rear their young. A scientific team from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) has now shown that access to drinking sites is hampered by wind turbines in agricultural landscapes: Many bat species avoid the turbines and water bodies located close to the turbines for several kilometres. These results have been published in the scientific journal “Biological Conservation”.

The BioRescue project develops and pioneers advanced assisted reproduction technologies (aART) for biodiversity conservation, especially for rhinos. In a paper published in the journal “Reproduction” in October 2023, the team evaluated ovum pick-up (OPU) and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures and showed that aART in white rhinos is safe for the donor females and can reliably yield viable embryos. This scientific paper now received the prize for best research published in the journal in 2023, awarded by the Society for Reproduction and Fertility. BioRescue furthermore announces the production of five additional embryos from northern white rhino Fatu in the second half of 2024, adding to the outcome of five years of work since the first OPU in 2019.

Insectivorous bats such as the common noctule find less food in cities than in the countryside – yet their diet is more varied. This was demonstrated by a scientific team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in an article published in the journal “Landscape and Urban Planning”. Using genetic analyses of faecal samples, they showed that common noctules in Berlin consumed 55 per cent more insect species than their conspecifics in the surrounding rural regions. Also, urban bats consumed twice as many ‘pest’ insect species and six times as many ‘nuisance’ species such as mosquitoes than their rural counterparts.

Scientific investigations before and during the COVID-19 lockdown in Berlin in 2020 show that urban red squirrels are extremely flexible in adjusting their diurnal activities to the presence of humans, domestic dogs, domestic cats, and predators such as beech martens. With the help of wildlife cameras, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and citizen scientists recorded red squirrel activities in private gardens and properties over longer periods of time and compared them between the different times of day and seasons. In a paper in the scientific journal “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution” the team describes the spatial and temporal niches occupied by the red squirrels, found that they were more active during the lockdown than before and conclude that red squirrels fear domestic cats in particular.

In order to use remote locations to record and assess the behaviour of wildlife and environmental conditions, the GAIA Initiative developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that reliably and automatically classifies behaviours of white-backed vultures using animal tag data. As scavengers, vultures always look for the next carcass. With the help of tagged animals and a second AI algorithm, the scientists can now automatically locate carcasses across vast landscapes. The algorithms described in a recently published article in the “Journal of Applied Ecology” are therefore key components of an early warning system that can be used to quickly and reliably recognise critical changes or incidents in the environment such as droughts, disease outbreaks or the illegal killing of wildlife.

Swallows infected with parasites move less and in smaller ranges than healthy ones – with detrimental effects on their foraging success and their survival. As a result, infected individuals foraged in less productive areas, such as cultivated farmland, clearly avoided by their healthy conspecifics. Although infected swallows show no externally recognisable signs of infection, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the University of Potsdam now demonstrate the negative effects of these infections using the high-resolution tracking system ATLAS. This system records precise position data of swallows at intervals of one second using ultra-light transmitters. The results were published in the journal “Communications Biology”.

Since wolves returned to Germany 20 years ago, they have spread quickly in many parts of the country. The rapid increase in the number of wolves was due to high survival and reproduction rates in areas with favourable environmental conditions. This is the result of an analysis carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in collaboration with the LUPUS Institute, the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), and the Senckenberg Center for Wildlife Genetics. The probability of survival for wolves during the period analysed was higher than anywhere else in the world. However, the expansion phase will end as soon as the carrying capacity of suitable German landscapes are reached – at which point survival rates can be expected to fall, according to the scientific team in a new paper in the scientific journal “Wildlife Biology”.