Arnaud Desbiez is a conservation biologist who set up the Giant Armadillo Conservation Project in the Brazilian Pantanal in 2010, expanding to the threatened Cerrado biome in 2015.
Giant armadillos are rare, nocturnal and live mostly underground. They are so hard to find that even the show’s narrator WFN Trustee, Sir David Attenborough, had not seen them in the wild 60 years on from his first attempt.
Arnaud worked closely with filmmakers to capture footage, including the first broadcast of a wild giant armadillo’s new-born baby and pictures of inside their six-metre deep burrows.
The documentary demonstrates the importance of the giant armadillo as an ecosystem engineer, with its underground burrows being used by more than 80 different species, from lowland tapir to tamandua, from peccaries to crab eating foxes. Arnaud’s research is providing an insight into this rare and highly elusive species, which is enabling scientists to understand its ecology and behaviour for the first time, and put in place measures to conserve it.
Read more about Arnaud’s Whitley Award project here
Watch his Whitley Award speech here