My Science School

A National Farmers Database is being created. This is subsequent to the announcement made by Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar in Parliament on July 27, 2021.

What is its objective?

The Centre has developed a National Farmers Database with records of 5.5 crore farmers which it hopes to increase to 8 crore farmers by the end of this year with the help of State governments.  The objective of building a farmers' database, according to Mr. Tomar, is to enhance the efficiency of the agriculture sector, help offer proactive and personalised services to farmers, and increase their income. He said agriculture has to be linked with digital technology, scientific research, and knowledge.

Features

 The majority of farmers in the country have limited access to advanced technologies that can help improve output. The farmers’ database is expected to play an important role in the formulation of policies for the sector, in targeted service delivery, and in selecting beneficiaries of government schemes. The initiative seeks to ensure ease of farming, reduction of input costs, improvement of quality, and better prices for produce. The database is envisaged to facilitate online sign-in facilities for universal access and to provide personalised services such as direct benefit transfer, soil, plant health, and weather advisories, irrigation credit, and insurance facilities. Besides, it will provide information on seeds, fertilizers, and logistics available in the vicinity.

How is it created?

The federated farmers' database is being created by taking the publicly available data and linking them with the digitised land records. A federated database is a system containing a collection of self-sustained databases that facilitate sharing of data among themselves. The national farmer’s database is being created by taking data from existing national schemes such as PM-KISAN, soil health cards, and the insurance scheme PM Fasal Bima Yojna. So far, 5.5 crore farmers have been identified in this way. The Centre has urged the States to create their own databases of farmers using the federated national database and allow linkage to land record databases maintained by States.

According to reports, the Agriculture Ministry is creating a digital ecosystem called "Agristack" to focus on farmers and the farm sector. The farmer’s database will serve as the core of the Agristack.

At present, the farmers’ database will include only farmers owning agricultural land as it will be linked to digitised land records. In due course, each land-owning farmer will get unique IDs. There are, however, concerns over creating the database as many farmer organisations fear the move would compromise their data privacy.

Picture Credit : Google

The Chandrayaan-2, the second lunar exploration mission after Chandrayaan-1 that has been developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has been in orbit around the moon for over two years now. During a Lunar Science Workshop that was held early in September 2021, ISRO chairman K Sivan stated that the spacecraft has completed over 9.000 orbits around the moon

Launched on July 22 2019, the Chandrayaan-2 mission consisted of a lunar orbiter, along with the Vikram lander and the Pragyan lunar rover. Having reached the moon's orbit on August 20 2019, it then positioned itself for Vikram's landing.

Landing failure

The landing, scheduled for September 6 2019, however, turned out to be a failure. Even though Vikram was on track and performed as expected till, kilometres away from the lunar surface, it then lost communications with the ground stations and had a hard landing on the moon. The landing failure thus meant that the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rovers were a failure. Even though the landing phase of the Chandrayaan-2 mission was a failure, the orbiter continued to go around the moon. This means that the eight instruments onboard have been able to study the moon, both using remote sensing and in-situ techniques.

Chromium and manganese

One of the most important findings from these observations for over two years is the presence of chromium and manganese on the moon's surface. Not only were the presence of these elements revealed, but the weight of these components as a percentage of the weight of the moon was also determined.

Apart from revealing these findings in the workshop in September 2021, it was also conveyed that raw data is continuously being made available in the public domain. Sivan made it clear that Chandrayaan-2's data is "national property" and has urged the entire scientific community of the country to put it to good use and further our knowledge of the moon.

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On September 15, SpaceX’s first private flight launched into space successfully. Called Inspiration4, it was the first time a spacecraft circled Earth with an all-amateur crew and no professional astronauts. It's yet another milestone in the space tourism market. Earlier this year, billionaire businessmen Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos went above Earth's atmosphere in their own space vehicles. (SpaceX's next private trip, early next year. will see a retired NASA astronaut escorting three wealthy businessmen to the space station for a week-long visit. The Russians are launching an actress, a film director and a Japanese tycoon to the space station in the next few months.) Want to learn more about the Inspiration4 mission? This week's Five Ws and One H will get you all the details.

What is Inpiration4?

The Inspiration4 mission w the brainchild of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of Shift4 Payments, a online payments company, who bought all four seats aboard the Dragon Capsule for an undisclosed hefty sum from SpaceX (Some reports put the price at $50 million per seat). The mission blasted off in the Falcon 9 rocket. The Dragon capsule, where the crew sat during the orbit, was modified for this flight. A huge glass done the largest ever space window was installed  to offer passengers a 360 degree view of space. The dome replaced the al mechanism used on Dragons to dock with the International Space Station (ISS)

The Dragon capsule orbited earth for three days at a high altitude of 585 km 160 km higher than the 155. The mission was commanded by lsaacman, who is also an accomplished pilot and adventurer.

What is the aim of the flight?

The trip was designed with the explicit intent to benefit St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which treats and researches childhood cancers and other diseases. Started by an initial $100 million gift from Isaacman to St. Jude, inspirations has fundraising goal to raise $200 million through February 2022 to help accelerate rah advancements and  save more children worldwide. The mission has a commitment of more than $130 million with auction items related to the mission.

Why is the mission special?

The inspirations mission marks several historic milestones for human space exploration. It was the first  all-civilian crew to orbit earth, the first free flight Crew Dragon mission, and the first orbital human spaceflight mission that did not dock with a space station since the final Hubble mission on STS-125 in 2009.

Who are the crew members?

Joining the mission commander Jared Isaacman (38) on the trip are crew pilot Sian Proctor (51), who is a geoscientist, science communicator and artist Hayley Arceneaux (29), a childhood bone cancer survivor who works as a physician assistant where she was treated - St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee; and mission specialist Chris Sembroski (42), a U.S. Air Force veteran and a data engineer from North Carolina. Sian Proctor was, in fact, a finalist to become a NASA astronaut more than a decade ago.

How were the crew members selected? Isaacman donated two of the seats to St. Jude hospital. For one seat, the hospital selected Hayley Arceneaux and for the other, it conducted a raffle as part of a campaign to raise funds for the hospital. An undisclosed person from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University ultimately won the raffle, but decided for personal reasons to give the seat to his friend, Sembroski, who was also one of 72.000 entrants in the raffle. Sian Proctor was selected by Shift4 Payments through a competition that rewarded the best business idea to make use of Shift4's commerce solutions.

What did the team do on the flight?

The crew took part in a health research initiative to increase humanity's knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body. Once in orbit the crew performed carefully selected research experiments on human health and performance. The crew members' sleep, heart rate, blood and cognitive functions were analyzed during the mission in order to study how rookies react in space.

A series of tests through an app to assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance were done. This is the same app that is currently used by astronauts in NASA-funded research studies.

Markers of immune function and inflammation were monitored. Balance and perception tests pre-flight and immediately post-flight were measured to study the sensorimotor adaptation during changes of gravity. In addition, SpaceX collaborated with investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to perform a longitudinal, multi-omic analysis of the crew, including genome and spatial transcriptome analysis.

These samples and data will be added to a planned Biobank that will hold samples of the human, microbial, and environmental specimens that are collected before, during, and after missions and enable long-term research and health monitoring for astronauts and space travellers.

How did the crew undergo training?

Though the capsule is automated, the four Dragon riders spent six months training for the flight to cope with any emergency. It included centrifuge training, Dragon simulations, observations of other launch operations, Zero-G plane training and altitude training.

Picture Credit : Google

Nitrogen is crucial to plant life, and nitrogen-based fertilizers were essential for crops at the start of the 20th Century to produce more food. Even though there is limited supply of usable nitrogen on the Earth's surface, its atmosphere is an inexhaustible source that can be tapped into. Fixing nitrogen from air was a long-sought-after objective by chemists - something that was finally accomplished by German chemist Fritz Haber.

Born into a well-off German-Jewish family in 1868, Haber displayed an early inclination towards chemistry. Studying in several universities and earning a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1891, Haber went on to master physical chemistry during his time as an instructor at a polytechnic in Karlsruhe.

Growing anti-Semitism

By 1901, Haber had married Clara Immerwahr, a brilliant chemist and the first woman to obtain a doctorate from Breslau University. Even though she also converted from Judaism to Christianity like Haber, the couple were still subject to anti-Semitism (discrimination against Jews).

At the turn of the century, there was a growing murmur  especially among scientists, that the world wouldn't be able to cope with the increasing food demand of humanity's rising population. While it was well-known by this time that nitrogen-based fertilizers would be able to enhance crop-yield and thus meet the upcoming demand, fixing nitrogen from air was yet to be achieved.

Fixing nitrogen

Atmospheric nitrogen is rather inert, meaning that it doesn't react easily with other chemicals to form compounds. Nitrogen fixation is the process by which molecular nitrogen in the air is converted into ammonia or other related nitrogen compounds, either in the soil, aquatic systems, or even industrially.

It was Haber who came up with a method that let nitrogen gas directly react with hydrogen gas under high pressure and a catalyst to produce ammonia. On September 27, 1910, Haber received a U.S. patent for the production of ammonia.

"Bread out of thin air”

The ammonia thus produced could be put to industrial use creating huge amounts of fertilizers. The agricultural fertilizers stepped-up the crop yield to a large extent, putting to rest the fear of famines and producing enough food to sustain humanity's growing needs. "Brot aus luft, which literally meant "bread out of thin air, was the popular German catchphrase used at the time to refer to this miraculous turnaround.

Haber always wanted to prove his patriotism and he therefore threw his efforts behind the German cause during World War 1. He experimented with chlorine gas and developed a new weapon, poison gas, which he believed would shorten the war.

Haber supervised the first deployment of his methods at Ypres, Belgium in 1915 and he was promoted to captain in the German army. On the night he celebrated his promotion at a party in his home in Berlin, Clara, who condemned her husband's weapon works and was becoming frustrated with d life at home, died by suicide.

His wife's suicide didn't delay his deployment as he rushed back to the war front. But many others started voicing their opinion about Haber's wartime role and what they saw as the promotion of a barbaric weapon. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements, it naturally didn't go well with everyone.

Flees Germany

While Haber continued to strive patriotically, he could sense that he was still caught in the web of anti-Semitism. When the Nazis were growing in power, he was still perceived as a Jew and his position soon became untenable He fled Germany and went into exile, but was unable to find any work or a place to settle, dying eventually of a heart attack in 1934.

Apart from the poison gas.,Haber's research was also later developed into the Zyklon process This was used by the Nazis to kill millions of people in their concentration camps, including some of Haber’s own extended relatives.

Despite the importance of his work to produce ammonia, which still aids agriculture around the world, Haber left behind a complicated legacy, largely because of his efforts on the war front German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein summed up his friend's life and his relationship with his homeland in the following way: "Haber’s life was the tragedy of the German Jew- the tragedy of unrequited love."

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Stegosaurus also had spikes at the end of its flexible tail, which pointed outward from the sides. Scientists began informally calling the spikes thagomizers after a pop culture reference in 1982, when a "Far Side" cartoon showed a group of cavemen calling the sharp spikes thagomizers "after the late Thag Simmons," according to New Scientist.

Experts think these spikes were used for defense against predators because of two lines of evidence. For one thing, about 10 percent of spikes found are damaged at the tip, Carpenter said. Additionally, scientists have found allosaur fossils (Stegosaurus's main predator) with puncture wounds from thagomizers.

Stegosaurus' long skull was pointed and narrow. It had an unusual head-down posture because it had forelimbs that were short in relation to its hind legs.

This leg-length imbalance suggests the dinosaur couldn't move very fast, because the stride of its back legs would have overtaken its front legs.

Stegosaurus was an herbivore, as its toothless beak and small teeth were not designed to eat flesh and its jaw was not very flexible. Interestingly, unlike other herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs (including Triceratops and the duck-billed Hadrosaurids), Stegosaurus did not have strong jaws and grinding teeth. Instead, its jaws likely only allowed up and down movements, and its teeth were rounded and peglike. It also had cheeks, which gave it room to chew and store more food than many other of dinosaurs.

As a result of its short neck and small head, it most likely ate low-lying bushes and shrubs and other vegetation, including ferns, mosses, cycads, fruits, conifers, horsetails and even fallen fruit. Some scientists believe Stegosaurus could have stood on its hind legs to reach some taller plants, but this idea is debated.

Credit : Live Science

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Dinosaurs were extinct before humans even walked the Earth – apart from Miranda’s prehistoric pals in Dinosaur World Live of course! – so how do we know so much about them?

Fossils are dinosaur remains that help us understand what these amazing creatures were like back in the time when they roamed the planet. Information can be gathered from sources such as old bones, footprints, stomach stones, eggs and even feces! These are all considered fossils.

Dinosaur fossils have been found on every continent of Earth, including Antarctica but most of the dinosaur fossils and the greatest variety of species have been found high in the deserts and badlands of North America, China and Argentina.

Western North America has been one of the greatest sources of dinosaur fossil finds. Paleontologists like Miranda’s parents still routinely pull complete skeletons from digs in the Western United States, from Texas to Montana. A layer of rock below the Earth called the Morrison formation is the most productive source of these fossils on the continent, and is where most of the popular dinosaurs, such as Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus were first found, according to the National Geographic Society.

Credit : Dinosaur World Live

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Clocked at speeds in excess of 68 mph, some experts consider the sailfish the fastest fish in the world ocean. Easily recognized, sailfish are named for the spectacular sail-like dorsal fin that extends for nearly the entire length of their silver-blue body. Additionally, the sailfish's upper jaw is far longer than its lower jaw, forming a distinctive bill that looks like—and sometimes acts like—a spear.

Often working together in groups of two or more, swift sailfish thrash at and disrupt schools of smaller fish such as sardines and anchovies, thus allowing each sailfish to more easily snag its meals. The sailfish's spear-like bill also comes in handy for slashing at larger prey fish, which stuns them into submission. Together, sailfish engage their huge dorsal fins, creating a fence around their prey to prevent their victims from escaping their clutches.

Sailfish are a type of billfish, which also includes marlins, swordfish, and roundscale spearfish. Billfish are pelagic and prefer the warmer waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. They are often found in groups, feeding on smaller fish, crustaceans, and cephalopods (octopus, squid, and cuttlefish).

Though popular with sport anglers, sailfish cannot be taken commercially in U.S. waters except as incidental catch in Pacific longline and gillnet fisheries. Possession of sailfish is prohibited on commercial fishing vessels in the Atlantic.

Credit : Ocean Service

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Snow leopards have powerful legs and can jump as far as 50 feet. The mountains the snow leopards call home are rugged and extremely cold in the winter. But these cats have some amazing body parts that make living in the area no big deal. In addition to camouflaging them, a snow leopard’s soft, dense fur keeps it warm in the bitter cold. Their large paws work like snowshoes, letting the cat walk on snow without sinking. And their long, heavy tail helps them keep their balance while they’re chasing prey. At night, the cats curl their tails around their bodies like a cozy scarf to keep warm—and to stay hidden while sleeping. 

Snow leopard experts need to gather more information about the secretive cats’ lives to help protect them. To do that, researchers use high-tech tools to spy on the shy animals. They gently trap the wild cats to examine them and put on satellite radio collars to track where the cats roam. Motion-activated digital cameras capture images of snow leopards, exposing many new details about how many there are, how they live, and what threatens their survival.

Credit : National Geographic

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Far bigger than any dinosaur, the blue whale is the largest known animal to have ever lived.

An adult blue whale can grow to a massive 30m long and weigh more than 180,000kg - that’s about the same as 40 elephants, 30 Tyrannosaurus Rex or 2,670 average-sized men. But this giant among giants started as something far smaller.

Like all whales, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) evolved from a four-legged mammal that lived on land some 48 million years ago. This ancient ancestor, Pakicetus, was only 1.8m long. It foraged in streams and some of its descendants became adapted to living in water. This eventually led to a completely aquatic creature called Dorudon ("Spear-Tooth"), which lived 37 million years ago and grew 4.5m long.

Blue whales can dive for up to an hour at a time, going to a depth of 100m, so they need highly efficient lungs to survive. Two enormous blowholes, big enough for a small child to crawl into, allow the fast and efficient exchange of oxygen. Blue whales exchange between 80 and 90 per cent of oxygen in their lungs each time they breathe, compared to just 10 or 15 per cent in humans. 

Credit : BBC Earth

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Paul the Octopus was a common octopus used to predict the results of association football matches. Accurate predictions in the 2010 World Cup brought him worldwide attention as an animal oracle.

Paul was hatched from an egg at the Sea Life Centre in Weymouth, England, and was then moved to a tank at one of the chain's centres at Oberhausen in Germany. Paul's name derived from the title of a poem by the German children's writer Boy Lornsen: Der Tintenfisch Paul Oktopus.

According to Sea Life's entertainment director, Daniel Fey, Paul demonstrated intelligence early in life: "There was something about the way he looked at our visitors when they came close to the tank. It was so unusual, so we tried to find out what his special talents were."

The animal rights organisation PETA commented that octopuses are some of the most intelligent of invertebrates, with complex thought processes, long- and short-term memories, and different personalities. They can use tools, learn through observation, and are particularly sensitive to pain, according to the group. They said it would be cruel to keep Paul in permanent confinement. Sea Life Centres responded that it would be dangerous to release him, because he was born in captivity, and was not accustomed to finding food for himself.

Following Paul's rise to fame, businessmen in Carballiño, a community in Galicia, collected about €30,000 for a "transfer fee" to get Paul as main attraction of the local Fiesta del Pulpo festival. Manuel Pazo, a fisherman and head of the local business club assured people that Paul would be presented alive in a tank and not on the menu. Sealife rejected the offer nevertheless.

Paul was last checked by staff on 25 October 2010, and was in good health, but the following morning he was found dead. He was aged two-and-a-half, a normal lifespan for the species. His agent, Chris Davies, said "It's a sad day. Paul was rather special but we managed to film Paul before he left this mortal earth". Sea Life Centre manager Stefan Porwoll remembered Paul as an octopus who had "enthused people across every continent".

Picture Credit : Google

The longest recorded flight of a modern chicken lasted 13 seconds for a distance of just over three hundred feet.

Domestic chickens are artificially bred to grow large breasts, and the extra weight from this muscle tissue makes it difficult for chickens to fly. Domestic chickens are also trained to stay near the roost and not to fly off, which breeds against developing advanced flying abilities.

The domestic chicken descends from the Red Junglefowl. In the wild, Red Junglefowl forage for food on the ground but roost in trees. These wild fowl are capable of both running and flying reasonably well.

Records indicate the domestication of chickens to have taken place over 10,000 years ago when the Indians and Vietnamese captured and bred chickens for eggs, feathers, and meat. This domestication quickly spread throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa. As a result, the chicken is the prominent farm animal today.

Credit : Reference

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This depends on if the whale wants to remain in the shallows or dive deep. Typically, while swimming at a more shallow depth whales will come up for air every 5-15 minutes. But when making deeper dives or when they need to stay under for longer periods of time, whales will come up for air accordingly and can stay under for 30 minutes, 60 minutes or sometimes longer.

The deepest dive ever recorded was 2,992 meters which is just under 9,820 feet, roughly equating to about 1.8 miles. This record breaking dive was by a Cuvier’s Beaked Whale, which is also the species of whale holding the record for the longest time spent underwater on a single breath! As a comparison, the deepest human scuba dive on record was 1,090 feet deep.

While the Cuvier’s Beaked Whale tends to make deep dives, scientists say that this 2,992 meter dive is not typical and that on average Cuvier’s Beaked Whales tend to only dive to about 2,000 meters down. The sperm whale tends to dive to 1,000 – 2,000 meters, while humpbacks tend to stay above 200 m. 

Whales breathe with their lungs, like all mammals. However whales do not breathe in through their nostrils or mouths like most mammals. Instead, whales have a blowhole located at the top of their head. This blowhole is a specialized nostril that allows whales to inhale air while at the surface.

The blowhole is covered by muscular flaps that cover the blowhole while the whale is under the surface to prevent the whale from breathing in water. The blowhole is connected to the trachea which passes air through to the lungs.

Whales also use their blowhole to exhale, where they will blow out air loudly and sharply, often expelling a stream of mist when they first reach the surface.

Credit : Wildlife Informer

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The 2015 NBA Finals was the championship series of the National Basketball Association's (NBA) 2014–15 season and the conclusion of the season's playoffs. The Western Conference champion Golden State Warriors defeated the Eastern Conference champion Cleveland Cavaliers in six games (4–2) for the Warriors' first title in 40 years and their fourth in franchise history, becoming the first team since the 1990–91 Chicago Bulls to win a championship without any prior Finals experience from any player on their roster. 2015 also marked the first Finals since 1998 without either the Los Angeles Lakers, the San Antonio Spurs, or the Miami Heat (the latter two teams are in the previous Finals). Golden State's Andre Iguodala was named the Finals Most Valuable Player (MVP).

Both teams entered the series with title droughts of four decades, with the Cavaliers having never won a title since their 1970–71 inception and the Warriors' last title having been in 1975. This was also the first time that both participating teams had first-year head coaches since the inaugural league finals in 1947, when the NBA was known as the Basketball Association of America (BAA).

James also became the first player in NBA Finals history to lead both teams in points, assists, and rebounds for the entire series. He averaged 35.8 points, 13.3 rebounds, and 8.8 assists for the series, although he shot 39.8% throughout the series. Kevin Love missed the entire series due to an injury, and Kyrie Irving missed the final five games of the series due to an injury in Game 1. For the second straight year, the Finals was played in the 2–2–1–1–1 format (Games 1, 2, and 5 were at Golden State, games 3, 4, and 6 were at Cleveland. Had it been necessary, Game 7 would have been held at Golden State). The series began on June 4, 2015, ending on June 16. In the United States, it was televised on ABC and in Canada on TSN.

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The 2014–15 Golden State Warriors season was the 69th season of the franchise in the National Basketball Association (NBA), and their 53rd in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Warriors finished the season 67–15, a new franchise record for wins in a season, beating their previous best record of winning 59 games in the 1975–76 season. They are the tenth NBA team to win 67 games in a season. Golden State reached the 2015 NBA Finals and defeated the Cleveland Cavaliers 4–2, to win their first title in 40 years, and the fourth in franchise history. Their 83 total wins for the season was the third most for a team in NBA history, they went 83–20 combining regular season and playoff games.

Numerous Warriors set individual records over the course of the season. Stephen Curry won the NBA Most Valuable Player Award, the first Warriors player to win since Wilt Chamberlain in the 1959–60 NBA season, when the franchise was still located in Philadelphia. He also broke his own NBA record for made three-pointers in a season of 272, finishing with 286. On January 23, 2015, Klay Thompson broke the NBA record for most points scored in a quarter with 37, finishing the game with a career high 52 points. On April 15, head coach Steve Kerr won his 63rd game with the Warriors and broke the NBA record for most wins by a rookie head coach. Curry and Thompson, dubbed the "Splash Brothers", broke the single-season record for most three-pointers made by a pair of teammates. Both also made the All-Star team, Curry as a starter and Thompson as a reserve. Together, they sank 525 three-pointers over the course of the season, smashing the prior NBA record of 484 (set by themselves in 2013–14).

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The Matschie’s tree kangaroo has a very small home range—it's endemic to the Huon Peninsula of New Guinea. (It's also known as the Huon tree kangaroo.) Spending most of its time in trees, the Matschie’s tree kangaroo is arboreal, living in mid-montane to upper-montane cloud forests at elevations of up to 11,000 feet. On the ground, tree kangaroos are slow and uncoordinated, but in the trees they are bold and agile.

Despite their climbing and jumping abilities, tree kangaroos sleep 60 percent of the time, curling up in whatever tree they happen to be in. Matschie’s tree kangaroos are solitary, live-and-let-live sorts, basically ignoring one another even when sharing the same tree. Females do not share territories. Territory size of females averages 4.5 acres, while males claim overlapping territories of 11 acres. Larger territories increase breeding opportunities for males.

Matschie’s tree kangaroos are folivorous, eating leaves from a variety of forest trees, vines, ferns, orchids, shrubs, and herbs. They might supplement this diet with small amounts of fruit and flowers, tender grasses, and even tree bark!

It is estimated that there are fewer than 2,500 adult Matschie’s tree kangaroos left in their native habitat, and their population is dropping. They are hunted by humans for food and trade. Habitat loss due to expanding agriculture further threatens their population.

Credit : San Diego Zoo

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