What happens when you hang a rhino upside down? This is what a group of researchers from Cornell University and the Namibian Ministry of the Environment wanted to find out. So they hung a dozen reassured black rhinos from a crane and won an award for their work.
The scientific humor magazine Improbable Research awarded the studio an Ig Nobel – the launch of the famous Nobel Prize – for transport, one of the ten research projects cited on Thursday “for achievements that first make them laugh and then make them think.”
The study looked at how rhinos turn upside down because that’s how conservationists increasingly move endangered animals, suspended in a 130-foot chain helicopter, while 1,400-pound mammals they are relocated to protect them or to ensure genetic diversity in breeding efforts. According to the researchers, no one had ever checked whether the health of a reassured rhino was compromised when transported by plane upside down.
Namibia Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism
It turns out that the rhinos faced each other very well and better in this unusual position than simply lying on their side or chest. This is probably good news for conservation efforts, as the number of rhinos has been decimated by poaching, in part due to increased demand for rhino horn under the mistaken confusion that it has medicinal qualities. It is estimated that at least one rhino is killed every day and only about 5,500 remain.
Another research that won an Ig Nobel in 2021 includes a study that linked the obesity of politicians in one country to their level of corruption and another that looked at whether humans evolved beards to protect themselves from blows. to the face.