Biodiversity crush of the day: the Lowland Nyala!

Native to Southern Africa (Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe), this wonderful antelope species has a stark sexual dimorphism: females have a rufous brown coat and no horns, while males have beautiful spiral horns tipped in yellow and a dark brown or greyish coat. Both have white vertical stripes on their side and a dorsal crest of hair from their neck all the way to the tip of their tail.
They're not endangered, but subjected to poaching because stupid-ass people want the male's head as game trophy.

"Vultures eat anthrax, botulism, rabies, and cholera for breakfast.

Their stomach acid is among the most corrosive in the animal kingdom, with a pH around 1, low enough to dissolve the bones, hide, and pathogens of dead animals that would kill almost anything else.

A vulture eating a diseased carcass isn't a vector for disease, it's a terminus. The disease chain ends in the vulture's gut, and that's pretty hardcore.

When vulture populations crashed in India in the 1990s, rotting livestock carcasses sat where vultures used to clean them.

Feral dogs and rats took over the cleanup, both of which actually do spread rabies. Researchers later linked the vulture collapse to roughly 500,000 deaths in India over the following decade.

The same collapse is now underway in sub-Saharan Africa. Six of eleven African vulture species are threatened with extinction, primarily from poisoned poaching baits.

The animals nobody finds cute are doing more public health work than most of the species we actively protect."