A single mutation in an immunity gene called Sting might be one reason why bats can resist the worst effects of harmful viruses such as Ebola.

The theme for next month’s World Wildlife Day being celebrated around the world on 3 March will be “Big Cats: Predators under Threat”. World Wildlife Day, led by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), brings together a coalition of conservation organizations – joined this year for the first time by African Parks, Panthera and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The campaign will stress the importance of actions – at the international, national and personal level – to ensure that big cat species survive in the face of a range of largely human-induced threats.

The CMS Secretariat is pleased to announce that the Roadmap for the Conservation of the African Wild Ass has been published as part of our Technical Series documents.

We are happy to announce the publication of the Roadmap for the Conservation of the African Wild Ass (Equus africanus). The object of this Roadmap is to outline in broad terms the geographic range, population, habitat and ecology of African Wild Ass and the threats that they are facing. This Roadmap builds on information discussed at the Range State meeting held in March 2017 in Bonn, Germany, and a commenting process that followed.

In May 2015, the world witnessed the unprecedented death of over 200,000 Saiga Antelopes in Kazakhstan. The mortality hit more than 80 per cent of the population in the Betpak-Dala region of the Central Asian country. Pasteurella multocida bacteria caused the catastrophic decline which left 200,000 animals of the Critically Endangered species dead. This corresponds to a 62 per cent crash in the global population within just three weeks.

The CMS Secretariat is pleased to announce the addition of Przewalski’s Horse, Gobi Bear, and Steppe Eagle, all proposed by Mongolia, to the CMS Appendices at COP12. Przewalski’s Horses were last seen in 1969 in the wild near Mongolian border in Trans-Altai Gobi. The population is currently estimated to consist of more than 50 mature individuals free-living in the wild for the past seven years.

Chimpanzees - which share some 99 per cent of their DNA with us - are in trouble, despite national protection efforts across Africa, says the world-renowned conservationist Ian Redmond. “Although our zoological next of kin with the widest distribution of any ape apart from ourselves, they are an endangered species. Most are declining in number - victims of habitat loss and poaching - and have been extirpated in at least three, possibly five other countries,” he said.

The giraffe may be given international protection under the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), which meets next week in Manila, the Philippines. Reaching up to six metres tall, Africa’s graceful giants are the world’s tallest animals and once roamed throughout the continent’s savannah regions in large herds. Today, giraffe live under threat in fragmented populations across sub-Saharan Africa. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), numbers have plunged by almost 40 per cent over the past 30 years.

Dubbed the ‘Serengeti of the North,’ Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. The vast deserts, semi‑deserts, grasslands and high mountains of Central Asia and adjacent regions, support some of the world’s last remaining large mammal migrations. Yet, unlike its African counterpart, it has been largely overlooked by conservation efforts.