This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Black rhinos are notoriously aggressive, not just to humans but also to their fellow black rhinos. Aggression is so prevalent that injuries sustained after fighting with another black rhino are a common cause of death.
Because of this aggression and their solitary nature, black rhino social behavior has been largely unexplored. Yet it may be key to conservation of this critically endangered African icon. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there were an estimated 6,788 black rhinos in the whole of Africa in 2024.
That year, 516 rhinos were killed by poachers, 81% of them in South Africa. One of the most important tools in conservation of the species is translocation, where managers move individuals from established populations either into existing populations that would benefit from the introduction of new genetics or into unoccupied regions to establish new populations. But aggression between local black rhinos and newcomers, or between individuals introduced together, can make translocation risky.
If managers know more about aggression and how to avoid it, translocation could become more successful. One project that has successfully translocated black rhinos is the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project, a partnership between the World Wide Fund for Nature South Africa, the provincial conservation agencies Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism, and numerous reserves. For more than 20 years, the project has worked to establish new breeding populations across southern Africa.
These efforts also benefit the populations that provided the animals, because black rhinos survive and breed more effectively when their populations are less dense. When I arrived at the University of Pretoria in November 2024 to work with herbivore ecologist Adrian Shrader, studying this project's black rhino populations, the animals were described to me as being solitary and aggressive. Local South Africans, scientists and students at the university, rhino project managers and the scientific literature all agreed.
But as I read and spoke to more people, I noticed something unexpected. Many people, and many scientific papers, described seeing black rhinos in apparently peaceful groups. In a 1967 paper, biologist John Goddard described a group of 13 individuals in Tanzania that, after two hours together, quietly separated into smaller groups or moved away individually without fighting or being aggressive toward each other.
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