These 14 carnivores
are dashing back and forth along the fence of their open air enclosure.
They sense that something is about to happen.
They're African wild dogs,
the most successful predators of the sub-saharan region.
And yet, they are among the most endangered mammals on earth.
More than 30 years ago, African wild dogs were completely
wiped out here in Mozambique.
The end of a long period of extermination.
But today is the day of their return.
Back to their lost homeland.
Back to their legitimate prey.
Back to the ecosystem they once fundamentally shaped.
This is the beginning of an experiment that seeks to do
nothing less than turn back time!
It was a long and exceptional journey:
back in 2018, when the first pack of 14 wild dogs
was reintroduced to Gorongosa national park in Mozambique.
Heavily sedated, they didn't notice their flight
or anything else of a trip that lasted nearly 12 hours.
The dogs had been relocated from a reserve in South Africa
and brought directly to their future home.
But why would you fly animals like
this across the country?
The answer lies in the troubled past of the African wild dog.
Wild dogs have been found across much of sub-Saharan Africa
since about 3.9 million years ago.
But since the continent's colonization, they have undergone a sustained decline.
Perceived as a threat to domestic livestock,
many colonial administrations officially declared them vermin.
Some countries even paid rewards for each animal killed.
Agricultural magazines outlined methods on how to eliminate them most efficiently.
What began as nearly 500,000 wild dogs
was reduced to an estimated 11,800 individuals by 2010.
No matter the fact that the IUCN had already listed them
as globally endangered in 1990
and their unhappy story continues into the present day,
they have encountered rapid and severe habitat loss and fragmentation
direct persecution by ranchers and pastoralists,
accidental killings in snares laid for the illegal bushmeat trade.
Road accident and infectious disease.
Today there are only an estimated 6600 left.
In Gorongosa National Park, the Civil War of the 1980s and 90s dealt an unprecedented blow
to the resident wild dog population.
The park turned into a battlefield
and by the war's tragic end there were no wild dogs left.
These 14 will soon be waking up to kick off a new chapter in Gorongosas wild dog history.
After they've been unloaded from the airplane,
the wild dogs are brought to their prerelease enclosure.
The Boma.
Wild dogs are very social animals.
They live in a pack, hunt in a pack and even share nursing care.
But these individuals have come from different packs.
There could be some friction when they wake up.
So the reintroduction team uses a smart tactic:
artificial bonding, rubbing their scents on each other
so they will be less aggressive when they wake up.
By now, the wild dogs have been in the Boma for three months,
giving them crucial time to acclimatize and form a new pack.
And then the day of freedom comes.
The doors open.
Yeah. Let's go.
Let's go.
The dogs start to explore their new territory!
Out in Gorongosas wilderness they will find prey in abundance.
With a kill rate per chase of more than 85%.
Africa's most successful predator is back.
They bring urgently needed support for the lions of Gorongosa.
For 30 years, lions have been the only meat eaters here
responsible for keeping herds of grazing mammals in check.
The herbivores clearly assumed the majority following the civil war.
By 2018, their populations had recovered by 95%.
But the carnivores didn't keep pace, which is not what nature
originally intended for the ecosystem in Gorongosa.
Or what it was like before the war.
Theory predicts that when apex predators disappear,
large herbivores will become less fearful, occupy new habitats
and modify those habitats by eating new kinds of plants.
Researchers in Gorongosa have been observing just that in action:
Bushbucks, which had historically been confined
to woodland with good tree cover and known escape trails
that helped them avoid detection and capture by predators
We're observed venturing onto the open flood plain.
There, they foraged on a substantial number of higher quality plants,
which offered them even better conditions than they'd had in the woodlands.
But for the plants, this change resulted
in a strong suppression in growth and reproduction.
The so-called landscape of fear
had changed into a landscape of fearlessness.
But just four years after the return of the wild dogs,
researchers working in Gorongosa National Park are cautiously optimistic.
Anecdotally, they have observed
that bushbucks are now much more difficult to find than they were before 2018.
The wild dog is likely to have played its part.
Its reintroduction has spun the trophic cascade
in Gorongosa back in the right direction.
Today, an impressive number of 122 wild dogs roam the area.
The next pups are expected to emerge from the den soon.
And also elsewhere there are positive developments
In 2021 Gorongosa National Park sourced a reintroduction project in Malawi
with its wild dogs, bringing back the species after 60 years of extinction.
Population numbers and genetic diversity are also increasing in South Africa.
There, safe space for wild dogs almost doubled from 2018 to 2021
and in Botswana, a new scientific approach has achieved first successes
in preventing well-known human wild dog conflicts from happening again.
Packs use shared scent marked latrines to communicate and organize their use of space.
And researchers of the Bio Boundary Project are taking advantage of just that fact.
They add artificial scent marks to the latrines
to keep wild dogs from entering cattle areas.
With the help of projects like these and a little luck, the cloud of negative
associations may soon move away from the African wild dog.
It's always amazing to see how a species comes back from the brink,
so check out the link in the description below for more content like this.
See you there.