Instant Genius - Why giraffes are undergoing a silent extinction

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

There can be few animals that are as iconic and instantly recognisable as giraffes. But despite their unique, almost mystical appearance and enduring worldwide popularity, their numbers are dwindling. According to researchers, they are undergoing something known as a silent extinction. In this episode we catch up with Dr Sam Penny, a conservationist and lecturer based at Bristol Zoological Society. He tells us about the current thinking on the existence of not one but several different giraffe species, how they only have one remaining genetic relative, and goes on to talk about his own conservation work in Cameroon’s Benoue National Park. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. There can be few animals that are as iconic and instantly recognisable as giraffes, but despite their unique, almost mystical appearance and enduring popularity, their numbers are dwindling. According to researchers, they are undergoing something known as a silent extinction.

In this episode, we catch up with Dr Sam Penny, a conservationist and lecturer based at Bristol Zoological Society. He tells us about the current thinking on the existence of not one but several different giraffe species, how they only have one remaining genetic relative, and then goes on to talk about his own conservation work in Cameroon's Benaway National Park. So today we're talking about giraffes. So first off, let's kick off with the quick giraffes 101 to nail down some facts as they're very unusual animals. So I think the best place to start then is which countries do wild giraffes live in?

So giraffe are found across around 21 countries, so they only live in Africa, and they stretch in sort of a wide arc from sort of Niger in the west of Africa, through to central Africa, places like Cameroon, or cross into East Africa, and then down into southern Africa. So really anywhere that there's sort of savannah and woodland habitat, which is draft's sort of favorite habitat, the other kind of places we'd expect to see them. Yeah, so you mentioned the habitat there. So savannah, what does the savannah look like? So it's kind of your sort of classic African savannah. If you've watched any sort of nature documentary where you get sort of open grassland with

a small amount of trees between them. So draught are reasonably resilient. They'd be found in quite dense woodland in some cases. as long as there's some open areas between them, and also in a few sort of more arid areas. But their typical sort of favourite habitat, so to speak, is somewhere in between grassland and woodland where there's both trees that they can eat, but also space for them to move around. So I think if you were to cross somebody in the streets and say, can you describe a giraffe in five words? Probably the first one or two things they would say is they're tall.

So how tall exactly can they grow? So Draft are the tallest land animal, and the males can grow up to 5.5 meters tall. The female's about 4.5 meters tall. So if you compare that to an elephant, another huge terrestrial animal, elephants only grow to about four meters tall. So yeah, the tallest living animal on land. It's even true for the calves. So when calves are born, there are about 1.8 meters tall as well.

So sort of coming off the back of that, a key feature of draughts, of course, is their long neck. But I understand they only have the same number of vertebrae within their neck as a human does. So how does that work? Yep, so you're absolutely correct there. Draft have got seven neck vertebrae, or cervical vertebrae, as we call them. So that's the same as pretty much every other mammal. So interestingly, all mammals, aside from a very few specific examples, have got exactly seven neck vertebrae. So it probably leads on saying, well, which animals don't?

Well, actually, surprisingly, it's slopes and manatees only have six neck vertebrae. Everything else has seven. So you might wonder how they could possibly support their 100 kilogram necks with just seven vertebrae. And it all comes down to the size. So in a human, our own neck vertebrae are about 1.5 centimetres if you measured them from the sort of posterior to anterior. axis, so from bottom to top, compare that to a draught, and draught neck vertebrae are about 30 centimetres long. So again, compare that to a similarly weighted animal, like a buffalo, which weighs about the same as a draft, about 1,000 kilos or more, and their neck vertebrae are only about

5 centimetres long. So you can really see how draft have got these extended bones in their neck, and then surrounding that is, of course, all of the musculature and tissue to actually hold those necks upright. And another distinctive feature of drafts is these horn-like protrusions that they have on the top of their heads, but they're not actually horns, are they? So what you're talking about is osicones. So giraffe is slightly different to other antelope and cervid species, so in deer. They obviously have sort of these horn and bone antlers that grow from the skull outwards. Compare that to the draft. They actually start out as small sort of cartilaginous soft, protrusions, both sexes actually happen from birth, and then they're slowly ossified,

which means they develop bony sort of plates and structures between them and eventually joined to the skull, I think, around age three. In terms of their function, why do they actually have these ossocones? It's related to fighting, we think. So particularly in males, where you find the osicones are much bigger, males often also have a third osicone, so rather than just a pair, They have a median osicone, you could call it, in the middle of their head. And these probably concentrate force when draft hit each other. So draft are quite interesting, if you ever watch them socially. Males will show a behaviour known as necking, which believe it or not relates to swinging their necks and heads at one another in combat. So it's this sort of ritualised fighting where male drafts will establish a dominance hierarchy between them, which then establishes breeding rights in turn. And they're swore. their heads and their extremely heavy skulls at one another. And then the bashing behavior of that is basically their primary fighting means. So those osicones on top of the head, obviously two single points will concentrate the force of those blows, basically these giant knobbed clubs,

into one another as they hit them. So another interesting fact about osicones is there a brilliant way to distinguish male draft from female draft. So aside from them being slightly bigger in male draught, they're also often hairless. So they don't start out that way. All osicones are covered by fur and hair, which is another distinguishing feature from, say, other antelope, horns. But in the males, because they are basically

in this necking behaviour, over time, you lose the tufts and the hair on these osocones. So if you ever look at a draught closely, look at the top of their osocones, if you can see tufts of hair on those osocones, chances are it's either a female or a juvenile, If it's hairless and almost bold, then you're probably looking at a male draught.

So you mentioned there the necking behaviour. So I find that interesting. So that actually sounds sort of tame. But for anyone who's seen it, it's really brutal, isn't it? Yeah, no, absolutely. So the necks can weigh, I think about 150 kilos or more. Again, add that onto the head, probably another 50 kilos to a sort of 70 kilos. So extremely heavy.

It's got quite dense bony skulls on top too. So the amount of force that they can sort of transfer onto one another is incredible. So they swing their necks at one another. They sort of stand side to side, often staring forward. And as well as trying to sort of bash each other, they'll also dodge out the way. So you'll see these sort of swinging necks moving backwards and forwards as part of that. And like I said, the force is really incredible. There's been cases documented of drafts being found lying unconscious, having been knocked out by a competitor.

It's kind of sort of a thing of last resort when we see these sort of large battles. Often maybe sort of just pushing or shoving, but in extreme battles, often if a, say, a stranger or an unknown draught enters into an area where there's a set or dominant hierarchy, that's when the top male and this strange draft are more likely to fight. So another distinctive sort of iconic aspect of the giraffe, at least its appearance, is the distinctive patterns. So what purpose do they serve? Yeah, very good question. So, yeah, we all know Draft are blotchy and covered in patches. So the main predominant theory behind that is that it's simply a means of camouflage. So it acts to break up their outline in sort of Savannah Woodland.

And that's particularly important for young Draft as an anti-predited event. So a side effect of that is that all draft have got individual spot patterns. So a bit like a human fingerprint, each draft is unique. So that serves two purposes. In terms of draft, this theory that theories as well as anti-camouflage patterns, there's also some degree of individual recognition. So they might be able to recognize kin, but also other individuals. We talked about draft in dominance hierarchies and how they need to know, sort of, if a draft is someone they battled before, let's say. And then there's a side effect of that. My second point was that's really interesting and useful for conservationists,

because we can identify individual draft and actually track their populations. There's a few other theories that are less proven, and that relates to thermoregulation. So beneath the draft spots, the darker spots in this case, they have a dense network of capillaries, similar to sort of what you see in an elephant's ear. So the thought is that they undergo vasodilation and constriction to help regulate draft temperature, bring that blood up to the skin, and encourage heat loss. again, less well-supported than the anti-camouflage theories. But to be honest, they probably have a range of functions acting several of these ways.

So we've just talked about the patterns there and how they vary from animal to animal. But I think probably a lot of people won't be aware that there are actually several different species of giraffe. Yep, very good question. So historically, draught have been considered just to be a single species. So we call them giraffe a camelopardis, which is the Latin, which means draught, camel leopard. So historically, to go on a bit of a tangent, back to Roman times they were called Camelopardis,

which directly translates as camel leopard. And that was simply because they had long necks like a camel and spots like a leopard. But to answer your question about the number of species, modern genomic analyses have found that individual populations of draught, as well as being somewhat geographically separated, which prevents interbreeding, also have quite sort of divergent genetic sequences.

So their genomes are slightly different from one other. And when they look at that data and they look at how related draft are to one another, it appears that there's four quite distinct populations. So there's potentially four species of draft according to this modern sort of genomic data. So currently, according to the IUCN, the International Union of Conservation of Nature, they still consider this to be one draft, but there have been revisions of similar species or different species to account for updated data. So the perfect example of that is the African elephant. So until even 10 years ago, we considered there to be African elephants and Asian

elephants. Modern conservationists and scientists have now split the African elephant into two species. So we now have the forest elephants and the savannah or bush elephant. Now, beyond academic merit and the point of this, there can be some quite strong conservation outcomes of whether you split or group species. So giraffe has a single species, according to the IUCN Red List, which basically classifies how threatened the species is, draft are vulnerable, which means that they're declining and will continue to decline without further help. But there's different levels on the IUCN red list, from vulnerable to threatens to endangered to, of course, critically endangered, which we often hear about different species.

With draft, if we were to split them into four species, suddenly rather than them being just sort of at low risk or some degree to be threatened, we start to see different population trajectories come out in that data, where if we take, say, the northern, populations of draft, which could be known to the northern draft species, they become critically endangered, where they've seen a huge amount of decline in recent years and in quite a perilous situation that could ultimately lead to extinction. You can compare that to the southern draft populations, which is again one of the suggested species names, the southern draught, and they are more least concern. And this is a reflection of sort of where they're living and the threats that they're exposed to. So, yeah, it really depends.

on the population and how we group them or not can help direct both conservation funding, but also education and awareness. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

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This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners, just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology, and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist's focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. for yourself at a focal-powered-by-name boutique. Visit focal-powered by name.com for more information. So do these different species look any different? So there are some broad differences that are visible to the human eye in terms of morphology. So the sort of more northern draft populations have more defined spot patterns. So sort of more distinct patches with sort of borders that are quite

visible between them. If you compare that to the southern draft populations, it often blotchier. So this network of patches, when they're quite defined, we call it a net-like pattern, which actually comes to the name reticulated. So you might have heard of reticulated draft. It's either a subspecies or a species of draft, again, depending on your definition. And that refers to the patches themselves. So you either get these defined sort of draft spots or these blotchier patterns, but also everything in between. So the problem with relying, on morphology alone, which is why perhaps it's taken so long to decide whether draft should be split into other species or not, is because there's often as much individual variation within

a herd of draft as they're in between even a sort of geographically disparate population. So even in a sort of single herd, we might see everything from sort of less to find blotchy sort of mottled patterns all the way through to these sort of more obvious distinct patches. So it is a lot of. So it is a quite hard to rely on morphology, but there is general trends we can use to identify them. I'll also see with giraffe how, with age, particularly in the males, they become darker. So they're also changing colouration as they grow as well. So winding that out then, are there any other living animals that giraffes are related to? Yep. So there's a single species that are closely related to giraffe called the Ocarpi.

So Ocarpie diverged from draft about 12 million years ago. They do share some similarities in looks. They've got this sort of upper, sort of taller on the front legs and the back behind limbs. They've also got very small osicones and some sort of spotted patterning as well. They're herbivores like draught and they're found in more restricted habitat types. So dense of Boris types, specifically in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa. Aside from that though, draught don't have any other similar currently extant, which means living close relatives. So historically, there's lots of transitioning fossils and examples of the ancestors of Draf. But today we only see one closely related species, which, as I said, is the Ocarpi.

So I've read that they have really great vision. So what do we know about that and how they see the world? Yep, so you're completely correct. If you've ever been lucky enough to see Draft in the wild, you might have observed that the draft usually see you first. So their vision is legendary in terms of how well they can see. You could be sort of a kilometre away walking through the savannah, and you'll see a whole herd of draft just turned on the spot staring right at you. So the function of that, there's a few theories.

Obviously, we never really know what a draft can see. It's impossible to know that. But we know what draft do. So we talked already a little bit about the potential for individual recognition. So perhaps having good eyesight helps them recognize one another. there's obviously going to be anti-preditor elements to that. So Draft aren't really attacked by many sort of predators, unless when they're juveniles. But of course, mothers need to be able to protect juveniles from things like lions too. On occasion, adult drafts do get eaten by lions, but it's quite rare.

So the anti-preditor side is important. Some aspect of individual recognition, but we also think it probably helps with feeding. So Draft are sort of quite selective feeders, really. They pick out individual leaves or buds amongst the thorns of trees that they want to eat. And this sort of good binocular vision that they possess with this discriminatory eyesight is probably quite useful for that. So another fun fact about draught is that they've got these really long tongues. So we call them prehensile tongues because they can essentially move and grasp a bit like a human hand. So they can be 50 centimetres long and sort of blue or black in colour, which we think is sort of a sun protection property. My point being that links to eyesight in that they need to be able to pick out which leaves they actually want to grasp and then they can pull those away and eat them.

So one more thing then before we move on to your work as a conservationist. I think a lot of people who've never been lucky enough to see a draft either in the wild or in the zoo would like to know what do they sound like? Yeah, a very good question. So draughts are often thought of to be silent. They're not silent. They will make the occasional noise. So the calves will make mewing calls to sort of reach out to call the attention of their mothers. The mothers themselves can actually make a loud bellowing call if the draft goes too far away,

almost like a roar. It's not so well studied though. So I think some recent studies have found that draft might even let out some low rumbles or infrasound type noises or below the frequency of human hearing because they are far from silent, like I said, and there is communication happening between draft. But as I said, it's sort of an under-researched area. And yeah, if you see a giraffe in the wild or the zoo, the chances are you won't hear anything. Yeah, so let's move on to the conservation aspect of our conversation then. So you mentioned earlier the varying degrees of the endangered status, depending on whether you view the subspecies or as a species as a whole. So what's affecting giraffe populations at the moment? So giraffe are sometimes undergoing what we call

a silent extinction. So the only reason we call it that is because it's often little known by people. Compare that to something like elephants or rhinos, even tigers. The general public in particular are pretty aware of that. People know that these species are threatened and declining. D giraffe are declining too, unfortunately, which is something that we think has increased quite substantially over the last few decades, or decreased, I should say, in terms of numbers. So as recently as the 1980s, there are probably about 155,000 draft roaming across Africa. Today, we think there's probably more like 120,000. So that's an almost 30% drop that we've seen in recent years. So they are declining, and certain populations are declining much faster than others. So draft populations today are

quite fragmented. So they're individually separate. There's been habitat loss. There's been population loss that separated these groups out. We've already talked about different species, but also different subspecies, be more threatened than others. We've seen in some populations declines of as much as 95%. And what's the sort of driving these declines are several things. There's habitat, destruction, degradation and fragmentation. So that's where we've seen a loss in suitable draft habitat that can be from increased urbanisation, its populations increase, increased development, roads built, infrastructure built, agricultural conversion of land, collection of firewood, all of these general things that feed into sort of habitat destruction.

There's also more direct things, such as illegal hunting or poaching, where some draft populations are usually targeted for sort of meat, so bushmeat and the bushmeat trade. We see that in some populations more than others. So the population that I work on are the cordofan draft. So cordofan draft are found in Central Africa, countries like Cameroon, Chad, and Central African Republic. So this population of Draft, I think numbers as few as 2,000 individuals. So it's a distinct subspecies, so it's a critically endangered subspecies. And we think that this population in particular has been highly impacted by illegal hunting, which partly comes about due to the sort of general instability of some of the regions that they're found in. So you get sort of more sort of water on or instable regions,

particularly in sub-Sahara and Sahel Belt of Africa, where it's difficult to protect Draft, even when they are found in national parks. As you say, this is the sort of bread and butter of what you do. So how did you begin studying giraffes? Yeah, good question. So my background actually is in rhinoceros, so another threatened savannah species that has similar impacts from illegal hunting

and habitat degradation and things like that. So that's actually what I studied. That's what my PhD was on, white rhinoceros. But the last few years, obviously, been working on other threatened savannah species, such as draft. So at Bristol Zoological Society, which is the organisation I work for, we've been working to conserve draft since about 2018 in Central Africa. So here we've got a project that's specifically focused on boosting draft numbers in Benway National Park. So it's an area

in northern Cameroon. And we've had a project the last two years that have been looking to increase draft population numbers by decreasing illegal activity in the park. So the park, so the park suffers from a lot of things like legal hunting, but also a lot of cattle herding. So you might think, well, how does cattle herding affect draft numbers? Well, the actual cattle herders will cut down some of the branches that are draft's favourite sort of food crops. So there's a tree called Absalia and they're chop off the tops in the dry season, so it's an evergreen tree to actually feed their cattle with. So we don't know how or if it's even really affecting draft numbers, but we know that they are disturbing draught.

So where we see cattle, we often see less draught. And there's also sort of huge impacts from population movement and increasing populations in the area, which relate broadly to climate change, where increased desertification in the north. Again, this saddle belt of some Sahara in Africa has led to sort of a refugee crisis, really, where populations are on the move,

moving into historically good draft habitat, which is, of course, having this knock-on effect on draft numbers. So how do you go about studying all of this? Do you use a lot of technology? So our current draft conservation work is partly funded by the IEC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and specifically it's called Save Our Species Africa Project. And what this has allowed us to do is to increase the amount of technology we use to conserve draft. So we've got basic things like providing GPSs and laptops and computers to the anti-poaching staff out there, which means when they go on patrols, They can log where these threats are, log where they're detecting illegal activity, which then allows us to make predictive maps about where they should target these patrols.

So that's the sort of anti-poaching side of it. And also, we need to know where the draft are and how many there are in order to send these patrols to the areas where they're most needed. So to do that, we've been using camera traps. So the park itself is about 1,800 square kilometres. So that's about the size of Greater London, where we've been deploying cameras in a sort of systematic way, basically a grid pattern across the park. We can then detect which wildlife species we see, including draught, tie that to things like habitat quality, but also to where that illegal activity is happening and start to make sort of predictive maps about where giraffe are, but also where we think they're likely to be. draft are particularly conducive to being studied in this way because of their individual spot patterns.

So you can't just see where they are. You can also work out how many there are. So you do this, of course, by looking at whether you see the same draft on multiple occasions, the time there is between them and the number of draft that are new that you've not seen over that time period. So it sort of relies on probability. Once we have those photos, we also use sort of other new technologies. So rather than having to trawl through these photos by hand and say, well it's got that top left next spot, I think that's the same spot that we saw on draft number 52. We can actually upload this into certain software types and packages.

So we use something called draft spotter. You can actually go on the draft spotter website and see how that works, but it basically uses automatic sort of detection tools where it distinguishes patterns between the draft using AI. So we can use machine learning to basically distinguish different draft. It still needs to be checked by AI. but it helps us to work out exactly how many draft we've got, not just where they are. The problem with camera traps, though, is that they're at risk of vandalism and theft.

So the places we want to put the cameras are where we have the most illegal activity often. And obviously, if you're out there poaching or hunting draft, you don't want to be detected by camera. So what we have seen, unfortunately, is a high degree of vandalism and theft of those cameras. So although it works well in theory, in practice, we often don't get as much data as we want. So currently at the moment we are very much reliant on the camera track records, but also what the EcoGuard see on the anti-poaching patrols. But we are working with new groups and new technologies to try and develop drone-based survey techniques. So we're doing this as part of a consortium of universities and other NGOs. So us as Bristol's, who areological society, are working

with other groups and partners, groups such as University of Bristol, in this case. And actually, rather than working with conservationists, we're working with their engineering and computing departments. So what we're trying to do through this program called wild drone. You can go on the website, it's wild drone. EU and see the types of stuff we're trying to do. But broadly, if we could fly drones overdraft habitat for long periods of time, to text them with cameras, use machine learning technology to identify them, we could almost have a real-time survey that would be far more robust than using cameras. This is still, though, in very sort of early technological development, but hopefully in time it could lead to best.

better survey data, which then feeds into better anti-poaching patrols. Yeah, great. So what discoveries have you made so far? So our most recent research, our outputs in the park, based on our data collected so far, have done a sort of preliminary estimate of draft within that park. So this is within Benway National Park in North Cameroon. And unfortunately, we think there's as few as about 27 draft found across this vast area of the park. We then looked at modeling of those draft that are found there, so population modeling, to look at under a variety of different trajectories what we thought would happen to that population. So this is things like looking at

if you have one draft poached per year or four draft poached per year, looking at things like changes in habitat quality, whether draft are moving in or out of the park. So we modeled a whole range of different scenarios to try and look at what we thought would happen to this draft population. and we found that poaching is the biggest factor on whether they're likely to go extinct. And in fact, just losing two individuals a year could lead to this population of draft, which is a crucial key population, so the quarterfanned draft that not really found anywhere else, could lead to this single population going extinct within 15 years. So what this tells us is that we really need to uptick how we're combating illegal activity in the park,

specifically illegal hunting, that has the biggest impact on this population, and other giraffe populations in the region. And really, if we were to do anything, rather than, say, sort of translocating new draft, which would then just get hunted, or even increase habitat quality, what we first need to do is to get on top of poaching and to reduce the numbers being lost over time. So, you know, we've covered an awful lot there. And kind of by way of closing, after we've listened to all of that, would you say you're optimistic about the future of giraffe conservation? So broadly, yes, certain populations, we're doing some really great work in. There's lots of NGOs, lots of African conservation charities in particular, working on boosting draft numbers.

We've seen draft recolonising areas. They've not been seen for decades, thanks to translocations, increases in protection for national parks. But it really is sort of a two-part picture, where certain populations are doing quite well now and are expanding. But other populations, particularly these populations in sort of more unstable regions are still seeing this decline. In terms of individual populations, some of these are sort of a tipping point really, where if we don't increase our conservation actions there now, they probably will go extinct, but a lot of these can still be saved with these conservation interventions and direct improvements in anti-poaching patrolling and protective measures.

Of course, it doesn't just depend on anti-poaching. what we really need to see is the drivers of these things. So we're talking about poverty, talking about sustainable development, where by simply stopping people from poaching, you're not really tackling the source of that. So what we need to see is continued and improved sustainable development opportunities in large parts of Africa, particularly places like North Cameroon, where we work, Bristol-Syological Society, where, as well as by tackling sort of the illegal activity, we're also providing sustainable development opportunities, so increased alternative livelihoods that actually provide people with an alternative to say, poaching and hunting draught.

But broadly, as long as these things happen, and we continue to see funding given to these conservation NGOs, I'm reasonably optimistic that some differences and improvements can be made. So is there anything individual listeners can do if they want to help with giraffe conservation themselves? So yeah, brilliant question. So in terms of sort of indirect impacts that you can have, of course, doing the usual things in conservation, like reducing your carbon footprint, supporting conservation NGOs, lobbying politicians, all these sort of small things, where really these charities need funding. So we have to carry out their work. But also in terms of education, educating other people in particular. If you want to learn more about draft, there's obviously lots of brilliant resources on various websites. And there's obviously Bristol Zoological Society's site themselves. other groups such as the Draft Conservation Foundation that have some really interesting material. And then physically, if you're a UK listener, you can come along to Bristol Zoo Project,

which is our actual zoo site found in Bristol in the UK, where we've got a recreation of Benway National Park, the park that we work in, including sort of information on how we work with these draft in the wild and why they're so important to say. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Sam Penny, a conservationist and lecturer based at Bristol Zoological Society. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store.

You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at Name Audio.com.

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shaped by people who have lived interesting lives and aren't finished yet. So it doesn't feel like a change. It feels like a continuation. Explore your options at canesley Manor.org, a non-profit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family.