On November 25, a healthy male Sumatran rhinoceros was born at a western Indonesian sanctuary. This birth is welcome news for the critically endangered species. There are less than 50 Sumatran rhinos left, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

[Related: Rhino horns are shrinking, and humans are to blame.]

A seven-year-old female rhino named Delilah gave birth to the 55 pound calf at the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary in Way Kambas National Park (SRS TNWK) on the island of Sumatra. According to officials from the sanctuary, a conservation guard found her laying next to her calf early on Saturday morning. The birth was about 10 days before the baby’s expected due date. The baby’s father is a rhino named Harapan who was born at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio before coming to Sumatra. 

“You never know if a first-time mom will know what to do, but Delilah brought that calf into the world and started nursing it with no fuss or fanfare. It’s an incredible event that gives hope to the future of this critically endangered species,” International Rhino Foundation executive director Nina Fascione said in a press release. 

Sumatran rhinos are the smallest of all rhino species at about 1,000 to 2,100 pounds and three to four feet tall. They have two horns that are dark gray to black. The horns are usually very smooth and form a slender cone that is curved backwards in the wild. Poaching, illegal trading of rhino horns, and climate change have pushed these mammals to the brink of extinction. According to the IUCN Red List, they are currently extinct in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, India, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, according to the Red List. It is uncertain if they are still present in Myanmar. 

Successful births like this one are also rare. In 2012, a male rhino named Andatu born at Way Kambas became the first Sumatran rhino born in an Indonesian sanctuary in over 120 years.

“Two years ago there was only one captive Sumatran rhino pair in the world able to successfully produce offspring. Now there are three pairs–six rhinos–who are proven breeders. Those are much better odds for the long-term survival of this species,” said Fascione.

According to Indonesian Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar, this still-to-be-named calf is the fifth born under a semi-wild breeding program at the park. The new addition brings the rhino herd at Way Kambas up to 10 animals and follows the birth of another calf in September. 

[Related: Rhinos pay a painful price for oxpecker protection.]

The sanctuary is part of a special zone in the national park where all of the rhinos are protected and looked after by local experts.

“The main objective is to produce Sumatran rhino calves to maintain the survival of the Sumatran rhino species which is now threatened with extinction,” sanctuary Director General of Natural Resources and Ecosystem Conservation Satyawan Pudyatmoko said in a statement. “The Sumatran rhino calves are the result of a breeding program. In the future, at SRS TNWK they can be released back into their natural habitat.”

Veterinarians from the Rhino Foundation of Indonesia (Yayasan Badak Indonesia) and animal care staff will continue to closely monitor Delialah and her new calf as they bond.

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Piping plovers are showing signs of recovery from major population losses in the state of Massachusetts. They’re listed as threatened in Massachusetts, due to habitat loss from increasing human impacts. According to Mass Audubon, they’ve identified roughly 1,145 breeding pairs nesting in the state this year. When the organization first started to monitor and protect the species in 1986, there were less than 200 breeding pairs in the Bay State. That’s a 500 percent increase in three decades.

[Related: Remembering Monty and Rose, the Chicago shorebirds that became the face of a movement.]

“While Piping Plovers remain a federally threatened species, this season’s data shows that these iconic birds are making real progress toward recovery in Massachusetts,” Mass Audubon officials wrote in a statement. “Massachusetts Piping Plover populations have recovered at a faster rate than those of most other states along the Atlantic Seaboard. As a result, approximately 50% of Piping Plovers worldwide now nest in Massachusetts. That makes coastal conservation even more important in our state—we’re responsible for safeguarding a huge portion of this threatened species’ worldwide population.”

Piping plovers are small migratory shorebirds that nest in sand and gravel beaches and mudflats across North America. There are three main populations of the endangered birds. One lives along the shores of the Great Lakes, one in the lakes and rivers of the Northern Great Plains, and another along the Atlantic coast. These roughly six to seven inch tall birds eat marine mollusks, beetles, worms, fly larvae, crustaceans, and other small marine animals. Piping plovers have a tendency to run for a short distance, stop, and then tilt forward to pull an insect or worm up from the sand. Raccoons, skunks, and foxes are their primary natural predators. 

Their main threat is habitat loss. According to the US Fish & Wildlife Service, human development on beaches has reduced the amount of suitable areas for the birds to spend the winter months. Disturbance by humans and domestic animals like cats and dogs can also force migrating and wintering birds to expend unnecessary energy, which can lead breeding plovers to abandon their nests and young.

They have been listed as endangered or threatened since 1985 and piping plovers living in other states are also seeing some success and cautious optimism.  

In Maine, breeding pairs increased for the sixth consecutive year. Maine Audubon saw 157 breeding pairs in 2023, with some new nesting areas. However, the chick survival rate was the lowest since 2007.

[Related: Endangered sea turtles build hundreds of nests on the Outer Banks.]

“When monitoring an endangered species population, it is always good to proceed with caution. Despite an increase in our breeding pairs, the low fledge rate we saw this summer could be a cause for concern,” Maine Audubon wrote in a press release. “Piping Plovers migrate as far south as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for the winter, then have to make the trek all the way back up to Maine for the breeding season. A lot of variables are at play that are in nature’s hands during these long migrations.”

In the Midwest, 80 unique breeding pairs were counted across all five Great Lakes with a total of 85 nests. There are eight more pairs than 2022 and and the most since the species was first added to the federal Endangered Species List. Scientists with the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa in High Island, Michigan have been monitoring the island’s plovers as they nest and fledge for two decades. 

“This is the best year that we’ve had for monitoring as far as the total number of adults observed and the number of nests and chicks produced,” Bill Parsons, a scientist in the tribe’s natural resources department, told MLive in August. “We’ve definitely, over that 20 years, seen that the population is slowly, incrementally successful, but we’re nowhere near the target for rehabilitation of the population.”

Some general ways to help protect piping plovers include reporting nest locations to state or federal wildlife officials, keeping dogs on a leash during walks to protect nests, and leaving any driftwood or algae found on beaches for the birds. 

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North Carolina’s Outer Banks saw a busy sea turtle nesting season this year. The barrier islands stretching from Ocracoke Island north to the Virginia state saw 459 total nests between May and October, according to reporting from The Virginian-Pilot and three conservation groups in the state dedicated to sea turtle nesting.

[Related: This waddling robot could guide baby turtles to the sea.]

There are six species of sea turtles native to the United States—green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley. All six species are protected by the Endangered Species Act and four of them are known to nest in North Carolina. Human activities are the biggest threats to sea turtle species around the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that their biggest threats are being caught in fishing gear, nesting and habitat loss, pollution and marine debris, boat strikes, climate change, and the direct harvest of sea turtles and eggs.

During the early to middle of the summer in the Outer Banks, female turtles return to the same beaches where they hatched to dig nests into the sand. They use their back flippers to dig a hole in the ground to deposit the eggs, and then cover it back up with sand. According to the National Park Service, the nesting process takes about one to three hours to complete. 

The tiny turtles hatch a few months later and follow the light of the moon to the ocean. However, their journey from their nests is quite hazardous, as they can be misdirected by artificial lights from homes and streets, crushed by human activity, or eaten by predators on their way to the ocean. 

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore, this year tied with 2022 as the second-busiest nesting season on record with 379 reported nests. The area covers more than 70 miles and stretches from Ocracoke Island north to Nags Head. The National Park Service says that the first nest was found on May 12 and the most recent was seen on October 29. The nests comprised 324 loggerhead turtles, 51 green turtles, three Kemp’s ridleys, and one leatherback. The leatherback nest was the first one seen on Hatteras National Seashore in 11 years.

Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge on the northern end of Hatteras island reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2009. The refuge covers about 13 miles and saw 43 sea turtle nests this year. By species, 37 nests belonged to loggerhead turtles and six were green turtle nests, according to data from the Sea Turtle Nest Monitoring System.

The nonprofit Network for Endangered Sea Turtles (NEST) also reported its third-busiest nesting season since 2015. Vice President Susan Silbernagel said 30 nests belong to loggerhead turtles and seven were green turtle nests. The all-volunteer organization covers about 50 miles from Nags Head up to Virginia. 

[Related: Safely share the beach with endangered sea turtles this summer.]

To better protect the endangered turtles, volunteers and scientists have been regularly monitoring the region’s beaches since 1997. Staff members and volunteers at Cape Hatteras will establish a buffer zone around the nests for added protection. 

“We could not manage and monitor sea turtle nesting without the help of over 50 dedicated volunteers that assist with monitoring of our nests and reporting and responding to sea turtle strandings,” Michelle Tongue told The Virginian-Pilot. Tongue is the deputy chief of resource management and science for the National Park Service’s Outer Banks Group. 

Sea turtles spend the vast majority of their lives in the ocean and are among the largest reptiles in the world. Kemp’s ridley and green sea turtles weigh about 75 to 100 pounds, while leatherbacks can weigh about 2,000 pounds. Sea turtles are set apart from their pond or land-dwelling relatives by their flippers. Instead of these appendages, land and pond turtles have feet with claws. 

Continued monitoring and vigilance during the 2024 nesting season will hopefully increase survival rates for these endangered reptiles.

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ON A COMPUTER MONITOR, in a laboratory half the size of a galley kitchen, I’m taking a look at the future. But the grainy object on the screen isn’t all that remarkable. It’s just a horse egg in a petri dish, blown up to the point where I can see the outline of its outer membrane. That’s when a white-coated scientist directs my attention to the device at my right: a high-powered microscope projecting the image of the horse egg, with two metal spikes the size of syringes angled at each side of the plate. Beneath me on the floor is an orange pedal I’m instructed to press with my foot. Suddenly, on the screen, I see a laser beam carve an incision into the membrane of the horse egg, like a hot knife going through butter.

In a few more years, the same laser-guided system will be used to punch a hole into an egg taken from an Asian elephant, remove the nucleus of that cell, and insert a nucleus containing edited genes required for surviving arctic temperatures, such as fuzzy hair and extra fat—all in the pursuit of creating the closest animal to a woolly mammoth to walk the Earth in many millennia.

The lab is one stop on my tour of the bioengineering facility of Colossal Biosciences. Co-founded in 2021 by Harvard geneticist George Church and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal is the world’s first de-extinction company. Its purpose? To rewild lost species. In June, I traveled to Dallas to get an in-person look at the 26,000-square-foot research facility where the startup’s innovative might is brought to bear. 

Colossal’s plan is to design a hybrid of a prehistoric woolly mammoth—which Church has described as “the cuddly version of a velociraptor”—as well as the thylacine, a marsupial from Australia and Papua New Guinea that died out in 1936, and the quintessential symbol of human-made extinction, the dodo, the last of which was snuffed out on its native island of Mauritius in 1662. 

De-extinction as an idea is not new. Church has discussed engineering a new lineage of woolly mammoths from frozen genetic material since 2008. The nonprofit organization Revive & Restore harbors aspirations of returning the extinct passenger pigeon to the skies. Scientists at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance hope to make gametes from cryopreserved skin cells of northern white rhinoceroses, a subspecies down to its last two members. What makes Colossal unique is its unicorn status: It has raised $225 million in investment capital in just two years and is now valued at $1.45 billion. Peter Thiel, Chris and Liam Hemsworth, the Winklevoss twins, Paris Hilton, and even the not-for-profit partner of the Central Intelligence Agency have all chipped in. (So has Matt Sechrest, co-founder of Recurrent Ventures, which owns Popular Science.)

Which raises a thorny question: What happens when you venture-fund nature?

Lamm, an energetic 41-year-old with a shoulder-length mop of dark hair, is well versed in this space. He comes from the tech world and has founded six different companies in his native Texas. (One of them, an artificial intelligence defense platform that counts the US Space Force and NASA as customers, was just acquired by a Texas-based private equity firm in August.) But the focus on money and investors belies the larger point. De-extinction, Lamm says, is a way to return keystone species to degraded ecosystems while developing the techniques to support future conservation projects. If we can genetically engineer a dodo, for example, what’s to stop us from breeding a more disease-resistant offshoot of Hawaiian honeycreepers, who are currently being decimated by avian malaria?

“[Some of] the technology advances that are going to be necessitated to de-extinct a creature are exactly the same technologies that will be necessary to help creatures not fall over the brink,” says Kenneth Lacovara, a paleontologist and geologist at Rowan University who agrees with Colossal’s mission.

Critics, meanwhile, say it’s misguided to scrape the natural world for genetic material to fulfill scientific whims. Why de-extinct obsolete species when there are more than 1,300 endangered and threatened ones in the United States alone that need protection? Observers also argue that introducing the genetic traits of dead creatures into modern analogs is not a means to conservation when the habitats of still-living endangered animals are continually under threat.

“We should protect species and do what we can,” says Lamm. “But that current model of just putting our arms around it, protecting it, just doesn’t work at the same speed at which we are destroying environments.”

The pioneering work Lamm speaks of will take decades. The company expects to birth a mammoth-like calf in about five years and then build up to a whole herd of woolly proxies. But in Colossal’s vision, the reintroduction of lost species is not only a way to right the wrongs of humanity but also a way to generate significant scientific know-how—so we can sustain species currently at risk in an increasingly inhospitable world, lest they perish forever.

THAT AN EARTHBOUND CREATURE like a woolly mammoth could vanish was once utterly unbelievable. French naturalist Georges Cuvier eventually delivered the sobering truth. He made his bones in 1790s Paris studying elephant fossils. Concluding that the remains were too distinct to be directly related to modern-day elephants, Cuvier posited the notion of espèces perdues, “lost species.” It was clear to him that the skeletons belonged to another megafauna that had vanished. Voilà: Extinction became a dilemma for modern science to solve.

Lamm’s fascination began with an introductory call to Church in 2019. His business acumen lay in using artificial intelligence for satellite software systems, and he wondered if the machines could also help with synthetic biology—the practice of building living systems from DNA and other small molecules. At the end of the call, after he idly asked Church what else he was working on, the mammoth comeback came up. “I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I stayed up all night reading” everything Church had written about his quest, recalls Lamm. Soon he teamed up with the geneticist to form Colossal, where he is now CEO. In September 2021, the company launched with $15 million in seed funding and announced its plan to revive a version of the woolly mammoth.

Colossal widened its focus to the thylacine after Lamm was introduced to Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne, who had already been conducting research on the marsupial and now consults on the company’s project on the species. More money came in, at which point investors asked the obvious question: What can we do for extinction’s mascot, the dodo? Beth Shapiro, who co-directs the Paleogenomics Lab at the University of California at Santa Cruz and has studied the flightless bird’s genome for almost two decades, advises Colossal’s avian genomics work. A few years ago, she and collaborators from other institutions had assembled the first complete genome of the dodo.

To any expert in this field, the tools in Colossal’s Texas labs aren’t unfamiliar. There are desktop gene sequencers and centrifuges. Hooded substations in a tissue culture lab for manipulating bits of animals. Computers that peer into sequenced DNA and analyze nucleotide bases. The laser-guided microscope I saw in the embryology lab is a proprietary device Colossal invented. In a company of 116 people, more than 60 are cell engineers and geneticists using these tools daily.

What’s important to understand, however, is that despite its talk of de-extinction, not to mention the graphics peppering its website, Colossal will never resurrect an animal. There’s no way to truly reanimate an extinct species by synthesizing its DNA from scratch—even with cutting-edge technology and living cells from an organism, and there are no such cells of a mammoth, dodo, or thylacine. 

“It’s still not possible to bring an extinct species back to life if what you mean is an exact copy,” says Shapiro. “What we’re working to do is to create proxies for these extinct species using some of their traits.”

Colossal’s real aim is to take existing species closely related to extinct animals, modify their DNA to give them traits similar to the company’s de-extinction targets, and place them in ecological settings that are as similar as possible to where previously extinct species once lived. For the dodo, it may be the Nicobar pigeon, a living cousin that inhabits islands in southeast Asia. For the thylacine, it’s the fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial that resembles a rat. Modern-day elephants are also in the mix: Although the woolly mammoth has been gone for anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 years, it has a close relative in the Asian elephant—so close, in fact, that more than 99 percent of the animals’ genomes are identical.

“A mammoth to an Asian elephant is more closely related than an African elephant is to an Asian elephant,” says Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, who works closely with Church out of his lab in Boston and supervises the mammoth work.

What Colossal scientists are trying to do is understand links between genotype and phenotype: how the sequence of letters in DNA code translates to how an animal looks and behaves. Hysolli says they are targeting about 65 sequences in the mammoth genome that confer various cold-adaptive traits, like subcutaneous fat, woolly hair, and dome-shaped craniums. In the genome engineering lab, computers compare the ancient DNA of the mammoth to that of the Asian elephant to identify areas of the elephant genome that must be modified in a future hybrid to express extinct characteristics. 

“Are all the phenotypes there? Are all the ecological functions there? That is, for us, what we’re saying is de-extinction,” says Matt James, a former director of animal care at the Dallas Zoo, now chief animal officer at Colossal. “We de-extincted critical genes for these species.”

To do that, Colossal is trying out pluripotent stem cells, which are capable of turning into any adult cell type. Those are created inside the company’s tissue culture lab from Asian elephant cells donated from various sources. (Colossal partners with 11 zoos across the US.) This is where genome engineering and cell manipulation will eventually intersect. There are two ways to insert mammoth genes into an elephant cell: use the ever-popular CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool to insert enzymes that make changes to nucleotide bases along the Asian elephant’s genome, or make multiple sequence changes at once, a process known as multiplexing, with the help of other molecular tools. 

Finally, to complete the mammothification of an Asian elephant, a nucleus from a regular elephant egg would be swapped with the nucleus from a cell modified with snippets of the mammoth genome—something they are planning for by early 2026 so Colossal can meet its projected date of 2028. Known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, it’s the same technique scientists used to make the famous clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. Colossal’s scientists are already practicing with gametes from animals like cows and horses. 

Once the hybrid egg develops into an embryo, it will be implanted into a female Asian elephant. The gestation period for a mammoth is the same as for an Asian elephant: around 22 months. And if that fetus survives long enough to be born, it should, hypothetically, be adapted to cold weather because it possesses mammoth traits. It probably won’t have massive tusks, but it will be 200 pounds of flesh, fat, and protective fur.  

James is confident that Colossal will be able to produce a mammoth by implanting a modified embryo into a surrogate. To increase its chances, though, he says the team will develop multiple eggs and work with a couple of female elephants. Even so, the first generation of mammoth hybrids won’t go anywhere near the wild. “They will be in what we would call a managed care facility,” says James, which means a sanctuary or some other facility where their anatomy, physiology, and behavior can be studied regularly. The mammoths will have to prove they have the skills to live and thrive independently in the wild. 

Skeptics might say the means, in this case, don’t justify the end. “It’s not necessarily accurate to say that the animals will benefit more by being brought back to life rather than just staying dead,” says Zohar Lederman, a physician and bioethicist at the University of Hong Kong. 

Others are much more strident. “It seems like a terrible idea to me,” says Karl Flessa, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona who centers his research work on conservation biology and habitat and species restoration. “Why are you bringing back a Pleistocene animal as the world continues to warm and all of the habitats that were once available for mammoths are pretty much gone? Why would you want to do that?”

IN AN OP-ED for Rolling Stone in July, Colossal CEO Lamm argued that the company’s efforts are absolutely essential to sustaining the biodiversity of the planet. “I came to the conclusion,” he wrote, “that the question is no longer should we practice de-extinction science but how long do we have to get it right.”

Global authorities continually point out that Earth is currently in the middle of an extinction crisis. In 2019, the United Nations published a landmark report stating that one million animal and plant species are close to dying out, which is more than ever before in our history. A subsequent report issued in 2020 by the World Wildlife Fund found that wildlife populations had decreased by two-thirds in the last half-century alone, mainly due to human activities like deforestation, insecticide use, and poaching. In May, four researchers published a study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution linking climate change to another mass extinction. They evaluated almost 36,000 species on land and in the ocean and used climate models to show that 15 percent of those organisms will experience dangerous and potentially fatal temperatures if the planet warms by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Lamm, Church, and the rest of Colossal’s corporate chain contend that those sorts of numbers animate the underlying principle of the company: that their lab-made proxies aren’t just some well-funded science project—they can legitimately be used to build resilience in species by pushing them toward the right adaptations in a changing world. The mammoth-elephant hybrid is the classic example. Asian elephants are listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Merging snippets of woolly mammoth genome with the Asian elephant might give the big mammal a chance to inhabit a place like Pleistocene Park, a large tract of tundra in Russian Siberia that’s free from our interference.

“People say we should be working on endangered species. That’s exactly what we’re working on,” Church told me via video call the day after I toured Colossal’s lab. “One of the advantages of making a hybrid starting from an endangered species is that you give that endangered species a whole new place to live, which is much larger and less encumbered by human conflict than their current location.”

At the same time, the genomic sequencing Colossal currently leads is being put toward the development of a vaccine for a herpesvirus—the primary cause of death of young Asian elephants in zoos in North America.

But geneticist Stephan Schuster remains incredulous. Schuster was part of the Pennsylvania State University team that, in 2008, was the first to sequence nearly a full genome of an extinct animal when it assembled 2.9 billion base pairs from the genome of an 18,000-year-old woolly mammoth found in Siberia. “If there is a single person on the planet that I would trust to get the project accomplished, it is George Church,” he says. But, he adds, talk of resurrecting a mammoth has gone on for a decade, without much to show for it.

Schuster has a long list of queries about Colossal’s methodology. Will changes made to Asian elephant DNA lead to unpredictable mutations elsewhere on the genome? How many elephant pregnancies must happen to create one transgenic animal? How do you implant a mammoth-hybrid embryo into the uterus of an Asian elephant, which is deep inside the animal? “Just show success,” says Schuster. “All the rest, it’s just blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Another one of the scientific community’s main criticisms of Colossal is money versus impact. A $225 million capital fund for species restoration is nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, based on an analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity and other conservation groups, the US Fish and Wildlife Service requires a total of $841 million to fully fund all recovery efforts under the Endangered Species Act. The agency’s 2023 budget for protection efforts is just $331 million.

Colossal retains the exclusive license to commercialize any biotechnology that emerges from its de-extinction projects. Lamm assures me that anything that might be applicable to human healthcare—for gene therapy and the like—will be strictly proprietary. The one exception is how the instruments, like its laser-guided embryo-editing tool, are employed for various species preservation projects. “We may open-source some of the technology for its application to conservation,” he says.

The proxies themselves, once born, are also likely to be wholly owned by Colossal, at least for a while. Early hybrids will live in a vast fenced-in area like a nature preserve. Once there are enough members of each de-extincted target that can live and survive in the wild, they will start being released. And that’s when, Colossal says, ownership transfers to the natural world.

“They would become more of a natural resource for the area where they’ve been rewilded,” says chief animal officer James. It would be similar to how we might view elephants already existing in the wild. A specific country doesn’t own an African elephant—although it might be argued that those countries do have a responsibility to protect wildlife. (One location that Colossal is considering for future mammoths is North Dakota; the state development fund invested $3 million in the company earlier this year.)

Skeptics of Colossal’s overall strategy also wonder what will happen should de-extinction efforts prove successful. Creatures that have been gone for tens, hundreds, and thousands of years would suddenly emerge into a vastly different world—one that, by the very metrics Colossal cites, is already far too dangerous for the organisms that are still alive.

“Having mammoths isn’t going to solve any of those problems,” says Ronald Sandler, director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University. “It’s not going to reduce habitat loss. It’s not going to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not going to help us prevent a currently extant species from going extinct.”

Take the infamous flightless dodo, which could be an inspiration for shoring up vanishing populations of endemic island pigeons. The scientific process for creating its replacement is different from those for the mammoth and thylacine proxies. Currently, there’s no way to genetically edit a living bird. Scientists can manipulate the egg cell of a mammal when it’s ready to be fertilized because its nucleus is easy to get to—but the yolk of a bird egg makes that impossible. Instead, Colossal plans to create primordial germ cells, which can become sperm or egg cells, and inject them into developing embryos of a living bird. One prime candidate is the Nicobar pigeon. A male and female Nicobar would each then grow up with gametes containing the edits required to birth offspring with the characteristics that so distinguished the dodo, like its flightlessness, S-shaped body, and hooked beak. Say that works multiple times over, enough to generate a population of dodo proxies. What good does that do if its historic home of Mauritius is filled with invasive predators and may be flooded in 100 years?

“I’m critical of de-extinction, but I also do think it has a role to play,” says Tom Gilbert, a paleogenomics researcher at the University of Copenhagen. He also worked with Shapiro to produce the dodo genome and is a member of Colossal’s scientific advisory board. In his eyes, releasing “a bad mutant mismatch of something else not adapted to the environment” doesn’t strike him as an effective means of ecosystem restoration. “But if you can excite a generation of young people using crazy de-extinction projects to love nature and get into science, that is going to save the world,” he adds. “If it requires a mutant mammoth-elephant hybrid to get the people excited, that is a valid reason to do it.”

THE BIGGEST OPEN QUESTION is whether Colossal can and will use the bioengineering toolkit it’s developing for the greater conservation good. The startup certainly claims it will: It recently joined forces with Thomas Hildebrandt, another member of its scientific advisory board, who currently leads BioResponse, an international consortium attempting to create a new population of northern white rhinoceroses. Colossal’s supporting role will be to gather DNA from museum specimens of the near-extinct species, analyze the data, and then use its gene-editing tools to help create more diverse northern white rhino embryos. The genetic variation should, in theory, help protect the rare mammals from disease in captive-breeding programs and, eventually, in the wild.

Still, there is no hybrid mammoth, thylacine, or dodo to point to at the moment. For Lamm, generating those ancient species is the priority. “If Colossal does nothing else in conservation or de-extinction, and we cure elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus and are responsible for saving elephants, that was a pretty good day,” he tells me just after our walk-through of the lab. “But fundamentally…if we aren’t successful in our de-extinction efforts, I will personally not see it as success.” 

Yet there is a danger in pursuing ghosts and still-fictional creatures. Mammothlike elephants or big-beaked pigeons or fiercer dunnarts could overshadow wildlife teetering on the precipice of oblivion right now. After all, who cares, really, about the orangefoot pimpleback, an endangered freshwater mussel, or the Oahu tree snail?

When I present paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara with that conundrum, he deems it a false choice. “Yes, we have to do everything we can to conserve species that are on the brink,” he says. “And yes, we should try to bring back species that have gone extinct that were pushed into extinction by humans. I think that’s justice. Those two things are not at odds with each other.”

Maybe not. Could the return of a mammoth-like beast backed by millions of dollars in capital funds stabilize an ancient Arctic ecosystem that traditionally helped trap greenhouse gases deep inside the frozen tundra? “When a species is introduced to a landscape, you can’t always predict what every one of the consequences is going to be,” says Shapiro.

But we certainly know what happens when a species is removed from where it belongs, be that the fault of overzealous humans or larger environmental degradation. Consider the reintroduction of gray wolf packs to Yellowstone National Park, perhaps the preeminent example of the positive ecological effects born from restoring fauna in their native habitats. As one of the top predators in the region, wolves helped bring other wildlife and natural cycles back into balance. 

We don’t know what will happen if a woolly mammoth hybrid makes its debut in the 21st century. But the future that Colossal envisions is one in which the act of protecting the animal kingdom goes beyond building fences, zoos, or preserves—one in which humans invest in and invent tools that could prime species for survival, including those that haven’t been dead for thousands of years. 

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The endangered Texas ocelot is in serious trouble due to a combination of over-hunting, habitat loss, inbreeding, and getting hit by cars. Only two populations of these bobcat sized spotted and striped carnivores remain in Texas and they’re isolated from a larger population living in northwestern Mexico by highways and buildings. 

[Related: Watch bobcats, bears, and even birds use fallen logs as bridges.]

One conservation measure to help endangered ocelots and other animals near busy roads are special wildlife exits. A study published October 13 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution found that 10 mammal species use these special structures, which could help prevent more collisions with traffic.

Chain-link fencing along Texas highways has been used to reduce wildlife mortality from colliding with cars and trucks. However, this fencing can trap animals that get on the highway if they jump over or burrow under the fencing. In 2018, the Texas Department of Transportation built 10 exits for the endangered ocelots in an effort to keep the animals from getting trapped. The openings in the fencing are about 18 inches across and 23 inches wide and are funnel shaped to encourage the ocelots to move away from the highway and into the surrounding habitat. 

This new study tested if these wildlife exits are used by medium-sized carnivores in Texas. Two automatic cameras were installed at each of the 10 wildlife exits along a 7.3-mile stretch of State Highway 100 between Los Fresnos and Laguna Vista. The cameras were inspected every month between February 2019 and November 2020 and a team of scientists downloaded the images and sorted them into species. 

They found that the wildlife exits were used by 10 mammal species to get off the highway. The species ranged from the smaller black-tailed jackrabbits and Virginia opossums up to bobcats and coyotes. For the coyotes and bobcats, their activity peaked around 10 PM and then again between midnight and dawn.

“Here we show that a range of species, including middle-sized carnivores such as bobcats and coyotes, successfully use wildlife exits, a new type of mitigation structure specifically designed for the US endangered ocelot,” study co-author and former University of Texas Rio Grande Valley graduate student said in a statement. 

While the ocelots themselves were not photographed using the exits due to their small numbers, other automatic cameras near the highway saw them. About 43 percent of bobcats, a surrogate species for the ocelot, used the exits. According to the team, observing bobcats and coyotes using the exits implies that the endangered ocelots are likely to do so as well. 

[Related: Grizzlies are getting killed by roads, but the risks are bigger than roadkill.]

“We anticipated that the extreme rarity of ocelots would limit the amount of data collected on that species,” study co-author and conservation biologist  at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Kevin Ryer said in a statement. “For this reason, we also focused on more common bobcats and coyotes, as they have similar habitats, diets, body sizes, and behaviors as ocelots, with overlapping home ranges between them.”

The largest local species including white-tailed deer, nilgai, and javelina, could not use the narrow wildlife exits. Tunnels and crossing girds are the best methods for helping these bigger animals avoid traffic collisions. 

While the exits appear to function as designed, additional research could create improvements that prevent wildlife from going in the wrong direction. These wildlife exits also have the potential to be a valuable conservation measure on Texas highways.

“Wildlife collision mitigation is less expensive to implement during the construction phase of highways than retrofitting mitigation after construction,” study co-author and University of Texas Rio Grande Valley biologist Richard Kline said in a statement. “Although the entire wildlife community near the highway should be considered when planning mitigation, endangered species should be the focus.”

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the late 19th century, whalers, settlers, and pirates changed the ecology of the Galapagos Islands by poaching some native species—like Galapagos giant tortoises—and introducing others, like goats and rats. The latter species became pests and severely destabilized the island ecosystems. Goats overgrazed the fruits and plants the tortoises ate while rats preyed on their eggs. Over time, the tortoise population plummeted. On Española, an island in the southeast of the archipelago, the tortoise count fell from over 10,000 to just 14. Along the way, with goats eating all the plants they could, Española—once akin to a savanna—turned barren.

A century later, conservationists set out to restore the Galapagos giant tortoise on Española—and the island ecosystem. They began eradicating the introduced species and capturing Española’s remaining tortoises and breeding them in captivity. With the goats wiped out and the tortoises in cages, the ecosystem transformed once again. This time, the overgrazed terrain became overgrown with densely packed trees and woody bushes. Española’s full recovery to its savanna-like state would have to wait for the tortoises’ return.

From the time those 14 tortoises were taken into captivity between 1963 and 1974 until they were finally released in 2020, conservationists with the NGO Galápagos Conservancy and the Galapagos National Park Directorate reintroduced nearly 2,000 captive-bred Galapagos giant tortoises to Española. Since then, the tortoises have continued to breed in the wild, causing the population to blossom to an estimated 3,000. They’ve also seen the ecology of Española transform once more as the tortoises are reducing the extent of woody plants, expanding the grasslands, and spreading the seeds of a key species.

Not only that, but the tortoises’ return has also helped the critically endangered waved albatross—a species that breeds exclusively on Española. During the island’s woody era, Maud Quinzin, a conservation geneticist who has previously worked with Galapagos tortoises, says that people had to repeatedly clear the areas the seabirds use as runways to take off and land. Now, if the landing strips are getting overgrown, they’ll move tortoises into the area to take care of it for them.

The secret to this success is that—much like beavers, brown bears, and elephants—giant tortoises are ecological architects. As they browse, poop, and plod about, they alter the landscape. They trample young trees and bushes before they can grow big enough to block the albatrosses’ way. The giant tortoises likewise have a potent impact on the giant species of prickly pear cactuses that call Española home—one of the tortoises’ favorite foods and an essential resource for the island’s other inhabitants.

When the tortoises graze the cactus’s fallen leaves, they prevent the paddle-shaped pads from taking root and competing with their parents. And, after they eat the cactus’s fruit, they drop the seeds across the island in balls of dung that offer a protective shell of fertilizer.

The extent of these and other ecological effects of the tortoise are documented in a new study by James Gibbs, a conservation scientist and the president of the Galápagos Conservancy, and Washington Tapia Aguilera, the director of the giant tortoise restoration program at the Galápagos Conservancy.

To study these impacts up close, they fenced off some of the island’s cactuses, which gave them a way to assess how the landscapes evolve when they’re either exposed to or free from the tortoises’ influences. They also studied satellite imagery of the island captured between 2006 and 2020 and found that while parts of the island are still seeing an increase in the density of bushes and trees, places where the tortoises have rebounded are more open and savanna-like.

As few as one or two tortoises per hectare, the scientists write, is enough to trigger a shift in the landscape.

Dennis Hansen, a conservation ecologist who has worked with the tortoises native to the Aldabra atoll in the Indian Ocean, says that while the findings line up with what conservationists expected, it was nice to have their suspicions confirmed. The results bode well for other rewilding projects that include giant tortoise restoration as a keystone of their efforts, he says, such as those underway on other islands in the Galapagos archipelago and on the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean.

But on Española itself, though the tortoises have been busy stomping shoots and spreading seeds, they have more work to do. In 2020, 78 percent of Española was still dominated by woody vegetation. Gibbs says it may take another couple of centuries for Española’s giant tortoises to reestablish something like the ratio of grasses, trees, and bushes that existed before Europeans landed in the archipelago. But that long transformation is at least underway.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Eight years ago, I first met with researchers from the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program (STDP) in Tasmania, Australia, to learn about their work to protect the endangered marsupials. Since then, I’ve continued to follow this story, including tracking how the Forestier Peninsula devils—the focus of my original article published in late 2015—fared in their “new life.”

Contagious cancers like devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) are virtually unheard of in vertebrates, yet understanding how they’re transmitted and how they evade immune systems has implications for both conservation and oncology. For that research to take place, there needs to be a healthy population of Tasmanian devils. That’s why in late 2015 and early 2016, the STDP released 49 devils bred in captivity on the isolated Forestier Peninsula, to join the estimated 30 wild devils already living on the adjacent Tasman Peninsula. Establishing a new, managed, disease-free population of devils (with another already existing on Maria Island, located just off the east coast of Tasmania) would buy researchers more time to develop a vaccine.

Their release should have been a moment of hope for the endangered species, but it was marred by a discovery some 50 kilometers west, across the sea, on another Tasmanian peninsula. A local spotted a devil with a large facial tumor: the calling card of DFTD.

Routine tests returned an unsettling result—it was a new cancer.

Called DFT2, the new disease is genetically distinct from DFT1 (the original cancer). Its method of transmission and symptoms are the same, and it poses a severe additional threat to the species.

The discovery of DFT2, however, provides a critical clue to the cancer’s puzzle. Devils, it turns out, aren’t victims of bad luck—they are particularly prone to DFTD. There are three known wild infectious cancers in vertebrates in the world, and Tasmanian devils have two of them.

“It was a big surprise. We thought that transmissible cancers were really rare—like lightning striking—and that devils were just a very unfortunate species,” says Elizabeth Murchison, who researches genetic and transmissible cancers at the University of Cambridge in England. It’s likely that DFT1 and DFT2 weren’t the first cancers to emerge in devils and are unlikely to be the last.

The habit the devils have of biting each other helps spread the disease, and their low genetic diversity creates ideal conditions for the cancers to evade the marsupial’s immune system. Another factor in the devils’ inability to fight the infections could be an issue with their peripheral nervous systems, where both DFT1 and DFT2 seem to originate. What’s likely not to blame, however, is environmental pollutants as suggested in my original article. According to Murchison, the imprint mutations left on devil DNA indicate the two cancers are natural occurrences. “There’s nothing to suggest any external exposure to a chemical or radiation or anything like that,” she says.

Fortunately, the discovery of the second cancer hasn’t slowed vaccine development. Andrew Flies—a senior research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research—says the cancers have similarities that will make it easier for his team to develop a vaccine for both. In 2024, tests on an experimental DFT1 vaccine will begin, with the development of a vaccine that targets both cancers already underway. To reach devils, officials will distribute bait drops containing the vaccine through Tasmania’s vast wilderness.

Rollout is still several years away, but devils no longer appear to be at imminent risk of extinction. Exact numbers are unknown, but thanks in part to pilot projects to improve genetic diversity through the release of healthy devils, their population is holding strong in many areas—at least for now.

“Disease doesn’t really make a species go extinct. Diseases push the species to the very edge, and then everything else just comes along and takes them out,” says Carolyn Hogg, a researcher at the University of Sydney, who has been working with threatened species in Australia, including Tasmanian devils, for over 25 years.

For devils, “everything else” includes low genetic diversity, loss of habitat, and road fatalities. The nocturnal scavengers can’t resist the lure of rotting roadside carcasses, easy pickings in the roadkill capital of the world. In 2021, motorists killed more than 100 devils on just one 25-kilometer stretch of road in northwest Tasmania.

“If you’ve only got five breeding females in a small population and two get hit by cars on the road, you’ve lost 40 percent of your breeding population in one event,” says Hogg.

That’s exactly what happened to the Forestier Peninsula devils I wrote about in my original article. Drivers killed 16 of the 49 individuals within six weeks of their release. Through subsequent tracking, Hogg and her team discovered that devils raised in captive facilities for generations were more likely to use roadways than wild devils.

“You can’t release them anywhere near any major road systems, because behaviorally they’re used to the sound of vehicles,” says Hogg.

Since then, the STDP has done 11 more releases of healthy Tasmanian devils throughout the state to improve genetic diversity of existing wild populations. What’s changed is that instead of releasing devils bred in captivity, it now relies on the wild offspring of the disease-free population on Maria Island. A national park where there are no cars (save for those used by park rangers), Maria Island has wild devils that aren’t habituated to the sound of traffic and are more likely to survive.

Relying on Maria Island’s wild devils is the best option for building up a population of wild devils until a vaccine is developed. But the introduction of the marsupials to the island—which was devil-free until 2012—still has critics, much as it did back in 2015. In 2021, BirdLife Tasmania reported that over a decade, the introduced devils wiped out the island’s 3,000 breeding pairs of little penguins. Little penguins are found in abundance in the wild: Tasmania has hundreds of offshore islands, with an estimated 110,000 to 190,000 breeding pairs.

“We knew that was going to happen,” says Hogg. A risk assessment, she says, determined that the benefits of having a place to breed wild devils disease-free and improve their genetic diversity was “greater than the loss of the birds.”

The news, however, is not all bad. Researchers believe that introducing the carnivore has allowed Maria’s population of eastern barred bandicoots—listed as an endangered species on the mainland—to thrive, by pushing predatory possums up into trees. Cape Barren geese—which dropped in numbers following the marsupial’s introduction—have also learned to coexist with devils. As for the population of little penguins? The Maria Island population began to decline around the same time as one on a neighboring island, suggesting additional environmental factors were likely at play.

Yet, the conservation of endemic species and how to best manage them—from little penguins to Tasmanian devils—remains both a controversial and emotional topic in Australia. It’s rumored that conservation “vigilantes” are covertly rewilding Australia’s mainland with devils smuggled from Tasmania. But Hogg says any mainland devils are just as likely to develop a new cancer, given how susceptible they are to the disease. And without the protection of natural barriers that isolate populations of devils—like the narrow isthmuses on the Forestier and Tasman Peninsulas or the waters around Maria Island—preventing the cancer from spreading is impossible.

For now—until a vaccine is deployed—Maria Island’s disease-free population will be what stands between the devils and extinction.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Earth’s amphibians are in serious trouble, but there is still time to save this unique class of animals. A study published October 4 in the journal Nature finds that two out of five amphibians are threatened with extinction and they continue to be the most threatened class of vertebrates. However, the new research also found that since 1980, the extinction risk of 63 species has been reduced due to conservation interventions.

[Related: Why you can’t put a price on biodiversity.]

“This proves that conservation works and it’s not all bad news,” Jennifer Luedtke, a study co-author and the manager of IUCN Red List Assessments at conservation organization Re:wild, said during a press conference. “We found that habitat protection alone is not sufficient. We need to mitigate the threats of disease and climate change.”

A check-up for amphibians

The findings are part of Global Amphibian Assessment II, an international series of conservation analyses based on evaluations of the 8,011 amphibian species listed on the IUCN Red List. The first Global Amphibian Assessment was published in 2004 and found that amphibians are Earth’s most threatened class of vertebrates. This second report confirms that the smooth-skinned animals are still more threatened than birds or mammals.

In the study, the team found that 118 species have been driven to extinction between 2004 and 2022. About 40 percent of the species studied are still categorized as threatened. This study also covers about 94 percent of the known amphibian species in 2022. According to Luedtke, about 155 new amphibian species are discovered every year, so there will likely be more species to add to the next Global Amphibian Assessment. 

Climate change and associated habitat loss are the primary driver of these declines. The team estimates that current and projected climate change effects are responsible for 39 percent of status deteriorations since 2004. Habitat loss has affected roughly 37 percent of species in the same period. 

Why amphibians are so vulnerable to climate change

Amphibians’ unique skin puts them in more danger in the face of a changing planet, since they use their skin to breathe. Increased frequency and intensity of storms, floods, droughts, changes in moisture levels and temperature, and sea level rise can all affect their very important breathing sites.

“They don’t have any protection in their skin like feathers, hair, or scales. They have a high tendency to lose water and heat through their skin,” Patricia Burrowes, a study co-author and herpetologist formerly with the University of Puerto Rico, said during a press conference. “The majority of frogs are nocturnal, and if it’s very hot, they will not come out because they will have lost so much water even in their retreat sites that they don’t have the energy to go out to feed. They won’t grow and won’t have energy to reproduce. And that can have demographic impacts.”

[Related: Hellbender salamanders may look scary, but the real fright is extinction.]

Extinctions have continued to increase with 37 documented in 2022. By comparison 23 species were reported extinct by 1980 and 33 in 2004. According to the report, the most recent species to go extinct were the frogs Atelopus chiriquiensis from Costa Rica and western Panama and Taudactylus acutirostris from Australia.

“Amphibians are essential parts of the ecosystem in a variety of ways, one of them being their role in the food web,” Kelsey Neam, study co-author and Re:wild’s Species Priorities and Metrics Coordinator, said during a press conference. “Amphibians are prey for many species and without amphibians, those animals lose a major source of their food and they are preying upon other animals like insects and other invertebrates. Without them to fulfill that niche, we will see a collapse of the food web.”

Amphibian pandemics

The most heavily affected amphibians were salamanders and newts, with three out of five salamander species at risk for extinction. While habitat loss is also the primary threat to salamanders, they are also particularly vulnerable to a disease called chytridiomycosis. It is caused by a fungal pathogen caused by the chytrid fungus that disrupts amphibian’s skin and physiological functions. When infected, amphibians can’t rehydrate properly, which creates an electrolyte imbalance that causes fatal heart attacks.

“Droughts exacerbate the infection intensity,” said Burrowes. “When the frogs have the potential to present some kind of defense mechanism, that defense mechanism is monitored by changes in precipitation and temperature.”

North America is home to the world’s most biodiverse community of salamanders, including a group of lungless salamanders in the Appalachian Mountains. This has conservationists concerned about what would happen if another deadly fungal disease called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or B.sal, arrives in the Americas from Asia or Europe.

‘We know what to do’

The report highlights that the time to help these critical animals is now. The authors point to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by 190+ signatory countries at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in December 2022. The signing nations committed to halting all human induced extinctions, reversing and reducing the extinction risk of species tenfold, and to recovering populations to a healthy level.

“We know what to do. It’s time to really commit the resources to actually achieving the change that we say we want,” said Luedtke. “Amphibians will be the better for it and so will we.”

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In an increasingly noisy world, some primates are pushing to be noticed with another sense. A study published September 20 in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution found that pied tamarin monkeys use scent markings to communicate more often so they can compensate for noise pollution generated by humans. 

[Related: Noise pollution messes with beluga whales’ travel plans.]

Pied tamarins are 11 to 12 inch long monkeys with furry bodies and bare faces. The species is currently listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. They live in a very narrow geographic range in central Brazil. Most of their territory now lies within the city of Manaus, a port city of about 2.6 million residents. The expansion of the city has restricted individual groups of monkeys to small patches that are surrounded by noisy urban spaces. 

Communicating with other groups of monkeys is crucial for their survival, so in addition to long vocal calls, pied tamarins use multiple types of scent markings to send messages. The scent markings have different functions, including passing along territorial and reproductive information. Pied tamarins have special glands above their genitals and near their stomachs that emit these scents that leave behind an olfactory message to other monkeys. This practice is also not unique to pied tamarins. Domestic and wild felines can use their famously pungent spray to mark territory, as do dogs and red pandas to name a few other mammals.

In the new study, a team from the Universidade Federal do Amazonas in Brazil and Anglia Ruskin University in England looked at the behavior of nine separate groups of wild pied tamarins. They followed each group for 10 days using radio tracking and the most common source of anthropogenic noise was road traffic. There was also noise pollution from park visitors, aircraft, and military activity.

The team found that the frequency of scent marking directly increased with decibel levels, which suggests that scent marking is being used more frequently as their vocal communication becomes more drowned out by human noise. 

“Many species depend on acoustic signals to communicate with other members of the same species about essential information such as foraging, mate attraction, predators, and territorial defense,” study co-author and Universidade Federal do Amazonas biologist Tainara Sobroza said in a statement. 

Their long vocal calls are generally used to mark territory and for communications between members of the group. In Manaus, they are important since the forest landscape is fragmented and urban areas are encroaching on their territory. The authors believe that this increase in scent marking is directly tied to this increase in urbanization. 

[Related from PopSci+: Why your dog needs to smell the world.]

“Humans have contributed many additional stimuli to the soundscapes that animals have evolved to deal with, and anthropogenic noise is increasingly drowning out natural sounds,” study co-author and Anglia Ruskin University behavioral ecologist Jacob Dunn said in a statement. “The increased use of scent marking by pied tamarins is likely to be a flexible response towards this environmental change. This is an interesting result from a conservation perspective as it shows pied tamarins are adapting their behavior in response to city noise.

One of the advantages scent marking has over vocal communication is that the information can be passed on over several days, instead of just after making a call. On the other hand, vocal calls are a better way of communicating over long distances. 

“As the pied tamarins’ range is becoming more fragmented and groups are becoming more isolated, this could potentially have a detrimental impact on a species which is already critically endangered,” said Dunn.

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The world’s oldest living aquarium fish is actually even older than scientists initially believed. According to an analysis by the California Academy of Sciences, the Steinhart Aquarium’s beloved Australian lungfish named Methuselah is estimated to be about 92 years old, with a high-estimate of over 100.

[Related: Hogfish ‘see’ using their skin.]

Meet Methuselah

Native only to two river systems in Australia, this type of lungfish can actually breathe air. They use a single lung when the streams they live in are more dry than usual or when the water quality changes, according to the Australian Museum. They typically have olive green, black, or brown scales and a body shaped like a torpedo with a flattened snout. While the species is over 100 million years old, they are listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. They are very sensitive to human-caused changes to its habitat, primarily damming, that can increase sediment levels in the water. 

Methuselah first arrived at the San Francisco aquarium in 1938, aboard a Matson Navigation Company liner. She has outlived the 231 other fish from Australia and Fiji that arrived with her, back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was in his second term as President of the United States and Back to the Future’s Christopher Llloyd was only a baby. 

In the many decades since, Methuselah has become famous in the area for not only her advanced age, but a seemingly charming personality and a puppy-like love of belly rubs. The knowledge of her age is helpful in the context of a larger study on how to more accurately determine the age of lungfish in the wild and help conservation efforts. She was previously estimated to be about 84 years old.

“Although we know Methuselah came to us in the late 1930s, there was no method for determining her age at that time, so it’s incredibly exciting to get science-based information on her actual age,” Steinhart Aquarium’s Curator of Aquarium Projects Charles Delbeek, said in a statement. “Methuselah is an important ambassador for her species, helping to educate and stoke curiosity in visitors from all over the world. But her impact goes beyond delighting guests at the aquarium: Making our living collection available to researchers across the world helps further our understanding of biodiversity and what species need to survive and thrive.”

[Related: Trumpetfish use other fish as camouflage.]

How scientists determined the age of the oldest living aquarium fish

Estimating ages for ancient and long-lived fish like lungfish is technically challenging and has traditionally relied on more invasive and sometimes lethal methods to determine the age of fishes, including removing scales and examining inner ear bones called otoliths. The new age detection method used to estimate Methuselah’s age only uses a small tissue sample from a fin clip and the team believed that this method can be applied to other threatened species, without impacting threatened populations or the animal’s health.

The DNA analysis for this new estimate was led by Ben Mayne of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and David T. Roberts of Australian water authority Seqwater. Their upcoming study included Methuselah, two other lungfish belonging to the California Academy of Sciences (ages 54 and 50), and 30 other lungfish from six institutions in Australia and the United States. It created a catalog of living lungfish with the goal of advancing more accurate DNA-based age clocks for the species native to Australia.  This new analysis also found that she could be as old as 101.

“For the first time since the Australian lungfish’s discovery in 1870, the DNA age clock we developed offers the ability to predict the maximum age of the species,” said Mayne. “Accurately knowing the ages of fish in a population, including the maximum age, is vital for their management. This tells us just how long a species can survive and reproduce in the wild, which is critical for modeling population viability and reproductive potential for a species.”

Their original paper detailing how this age prediction method works was published in June 2021 in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources and offers a description of how threatened fish can be safely aged with DNA methylation methods.

“Methuselah’s age was challenging to calculate as her age is beyond the currently calibrated clock. This means her actual age could conceivably be over 100, placing her in the rare club of fish centenarians. While her age prediction will improve over time, she will always live beyond the calibrated age clock, as no other lungfish we know is older than Methuselah,” said Roberts.

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A fish with “hands” might seem like an evolutionary oddity—until you remember that all limbs formed from fins. Spotted handfish, which are related to anglerfish, aren’t known so much for their swimming, but instead walk around on the seafloor with modified pectoral fins that look like little fingered flippers. They also use their strange human-like appendages to clean and care for their eggs. The species is so rare today, only 2,000 or so left in the wild in places like the lower Derwent River estuary and Frederick Henry Bay in southeast Australia, according to CSIRO research technician Carlie Devine. 

“We may only see one or two fish over a 60-minute dive, and sometimes none,” Devine said in a recent press release by the Australian government’s science agency. This is why it was such a big deal when runner Kerri Yare bumped into one on the beach in Primrose Sands, Tasmania. The spotted handfish is one of seven handfish species local to Tasmania and one of 14 in the world. But up until this discovery, the spotted handfish was believed to be extinct in Primrose Sands because there hadn’t been a sighting in nearly 20 years.

[Related: An endangered fish’s story follows the vanishing waters of the Rio Grande.]

Beyond their endearing, all-over freckles and unique method of locomotion, spotted handfish are also known as the first marine fish to be flagged as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Prior to the 1990s, it was a pretty common creature in Tasmanian waters, but has since been split up into nine isolated populations. The biggest threat to these walking water beasts is dredge fishing boats in the area searching for scallops, and simultaneously, wrecking the handfish’s habitat and turning them into bycatch. Dredging is also a problem for dolphins, sea turtles, and other marine life. Invasive species like the North Pacific sea star, which love to snack on bottom-dwelling scallops, oysters, and mussels, have only made things worse for the spotted handfish by targeting the sea squirts that they wrap their eggs around. 

Thankfully, dedicated scientists like Devine are keeping the species from teetering into extinction through methods like artificial spawning habitats and in-lab breeding programs. “We also have what we call an insurance population: fish that we collected from the wild that live in commercial aquariums,” Devine said in the statement. “This is so we can keep the species from going extinct. But [it’s] also to breed the fish, keep the juveniles safe until they are a bit older, and put them back in the river in hopes we can increase numbers in the wild. Through this program we’ve already released a small number of juveniles into the wild, and we are excited to see the ongoing impact of our work. We’re not done yet.”

Correction (September 15, 2023): The article previously stated that North Pacific sea stars prey on spotted handfish and their eggs, rather than just the substrate for their eggs.

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Climate change is often in the form of extremes in weather like sweltering heat domes, devastating inland flooding or record breaking wildfire seasons, which puts lives and livelihoods at risk for humans. However, the world’s animals who are on the front lines of an ever changing planet experience these changes a little differently. 

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

“When we see climate change in the news, we often think of big storms or major weather events but animals are vulnerable to the smallest changes,” wildlife filmmaker and host Bertie Gregory tells PopSci. 

In the new series “Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory,” viewers can get a look into these subtleties and changes. In one episode, the team is searching a dive spot in Indonesia for the elusive devil ray, when a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish approaches.

“Avoiding their stingers was like playing a video game! We were told that huge jellyfish plumes like that were becoming a more regular sight in these tropical waters, which is not a good sign,” Gregory says. 

When Gregory checked the dive thermometer, it read 87.8 degrees Fahrenheit, in water that should have been about 82 degrees. A few degrees might not always sound like much, but has an outsized impact on animals.  “Jellyfish are thought to tolerate climate change better than other species, hence their huge numbers on that day. For us, it meant no other signs of life,” says Gregory.

[Related: Maine’s puffins show another year of remarkable resiliency.]

The series spans the planet and uses high-tech drones and cameras that Gregory calls a “game changer” for wildlife filmmaking. The tech allows the filmmakers to catch a glimpse of the outer lives of animals and even some of their more inner workings.

“We also used a military grade thermal imaging camera to film elephants at night in the depth of the jungle in the Central African Republic—it uses heat to “see” in the dark and elephant ears look incredible as you can see all their veins!” says Gregory.

The series also captures just how difficult it is for terrestrial animals like the pumas of Patagonia and marine mammals like Antarctica’s orca whales to get a solid meal and how climate change continues to threaten vital food sources. 

An episode features a group of Antarctic orcas known as the B1s during what Gregory says was the warmest Antarctic trip he has ever experienced. These killer whales are known for a unique strategy to hunt seals resting on the ice that might remind some orca enthusiasts of the hydroplaning killer whales near Argentina’s Valdés peninsula who thrust their 8,000 to 16,000 pound bodies up onto the beach to catch seals. 

Instead of using surf, sand, and rocks like their Argentinian cousins, these Antarctic killer whales work together as a team to create waves that wash the seals into the water. 

“We witnessed and filmed the staggering intelligence and adaptability of a group of killer whales. There are thought to be just 100 of these unique killer whales in existence, and during filming it was clear they were struggling to ‘wave wash’ seals from ice because there wasn’t much ice,” says Gregory.

[Related: Orcas are attacking boats. But is it revenge or trauma?]

The whales had to constantly adapt their strategy just to get a single seal, sometimes risking an escape from their prey in order to teach the younger whales strategies to carry on to the next generation. 

These constant struggles offer up sobering reminders of the macro and micro ways that the planet is changing and making life more difficult for almost every living thing.. Over one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. The  United Nations agreed upon a biodiversity treaty at the end of 2022 pledging to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only about 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

The same location in Indonesia where Gregory and his team encountered the stingy jellyfish swarm is home to the Misool Marine Reserve. Despite climate change’s constant challenges, the area is a conservation success story thanks to community-led initiatives to protect the area from overfishing by implementing specific parts where fishing is allowed.

“Now, Misool is one of the few places on earth where biodiversity is increasing. What they’ve managed to do could be a blueprint for how we can protect oceans around the world and proof that if given the chance, nature can make an amazing comeback,” says Gregory. “It’s good news for wildlife and good news for people.”

“Animals Up Close with Bertie Gregory” premieres September 13 on Disney+.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

In 2008, polar bears had the dubious distinction of being the first animal placed on the United States’ endangered species list due to climate threats, specifically the loss of Arctic sea ice. 

But that same year, President George W. Bush’s Interior Department adopted a new policy that prevented federal agencies from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears, despite those emissions being the main driver of the climate threat to the keystone Arctic predators. Every new ton of emissions leads to more melting of the sea ice that the bears live on. 

The policy-setting 2008 memo was written by Dave Bernhardt, a former fossil fuel industry lobbyist then working as solicitor for the Interior Department who would go on to be President Donald Trump’s secretary of the interior. It required that the projected emissions impacts to polar bears from new proposals, like pipelines or drilling permits, be separated from the effects of historical cumulative emissions.

That set what seemed an impossibly high scientific bar at the time because researchers hadn’t yet fully identified the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions from specific projects on threatened species. But science has cleared that hurdle, said Steven Amstrup, an adjunct biology professor at the University of Wyoming and co-author of a new peer-reviewed paper in Science that could help “close the loophole” in the Endangered Species Act by showing how emissions from new projects on federal lands result in more days during which polar bears can’t feed because of declining sea ice.

The paper establishes a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and cub survival rates using a methodology that can “parse the impact of emissions by source,” said Amstrup, also the chief science officer for Polar Bears International, a nonprofit conservation organization.

For example, the new paper notes that the hundreds of power plants in the U.S. combined will emit more than 60 gigatons of carbon dioxide over their 30-year lifespans. By calculating the amount of warming that carbon will drive, and the amount of Arctic sea ice that heat will melt, they estimate that those emissions will reduce polar bear cub recruitment in the Southern Beaufort Sea population by about 4 percent. By using that formula, they can measure how greenhouse gas emissions from a new project would affect polar bear populations, a calculation that wasn’t as clear when polar bears were listed as vulnerable. 

And the same type of analysis could be applied to measure the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on habitat and demographic changes for other species listed as endangered, Amstrup said.

Emerging Science Supports Climate Lawsuits

Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said a current legal challenge to the Willow oil and gas drilling project in northern Alaska uses a similar argument. 

“Our view is this,” Burger said. “Science supports drawing a causal connection from emissions from specific sources to climate change impacts in specific places. Studies like this one without question reinforce the argument.”

The specific impacts of greenhouse gas emissions are “particularly evident” when it comes to loss of sea ice and the impact on polar bears, the Sabin Center noted in an amicus brief submitted in support of plaintiffs challenging the Willow project, he said.

In the brief, the Sabin Center alleges that the Bureau of Land Management ignored the effect of greenhouse emissions on endangered and threatened species due to the “misconception” that science could not establish “causal links” between emissions and impacts to at-risk species. But since 2008, when the Interior Department’s memo tried to ban consideration of greenhouse gas impacts on listed species, research has made the causal connections more clear, he added. 

“What’s more, climate models and detection and attribution methods can be used to quantify the relative contributions of specific GHG sources to climate change impacts,” Burger wrote in the brief. In some cases, he said, it’s even possible to isolate the per-ton effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as was the case with a 2016 study showing that each additional metric ton of carbon dioxide results in the sustained loss of about 3 square meters of September sea ice in the Arctic.

A 2021 report from the Sabin Center summarizes the scientific findings about the impacts of climate change on endangered species, and the new study “provides useful new methodologies and evidence,” to describe those effects, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental law expert and co-founder of the Sabin Center.

Scientists and legal scholars have been telling federal agencies for quite some time that the Bernhardt Memo is incorrect, said Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute with the Center for Biological Diversity. There are pending lawsuits that have raised that point, but no rulings yet, and the new paper adds extra scientific support to such cases.

“It is a very big deal,” said Siegel, who wrote the petition for listing polar bears as endangered species in 2004. “It’s the first time scientists have actually done the analysis and published their findings in one of the world’s leading scientific journals.”

Amstrup did the original research for the U.S. government that supported the listing of polar bears, she said. The science was so clear that the George W. Bush administration had no choice but to list the species.

But the lack of any meaningful action to protect polar bears since then has been frustrating to Siegel.

“I’m feeling a lot of grief, and I’m feeling a lot of anger, like a lot of people,” she said. “But what keeps me going is that there is still time to make a difference. There’s nothing more important than the actions taken right now to reduce greenhouse pollution.”

She said the failure of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which implements the Endangered Species Act, to properly analyze the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on polar bears and other listed species is “a form of climate denial. It’s going against the science, and it is breaking the law.” 

“Hopefully the publication of this paper will finally convince the Biden administration to follow the science and the law,” she added.

In 2021, scientists and law professors petitioned the Biden Administration to rescind any rules that prevent agencies from considering the impacts of greenhouse gases. Failing to consider them “leaves the government blindfolded in its effort to protect threatened species,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation scientist at Duke University who signed the petition. 

Shaye Wolfe, climate director for the Center For Biological Diversity,said the polar bear is an example of how rules like Bernhardt’s memo have weakened climate action. Without such policies, which the Trump Administration tried to further enshrine in 2019 when Bernhardt was secretary of the interior, “agencies would have another mechanism to consider and reduce carbon emissions,” Wolf said.

“Greenhouse gases are no different from mercury, pesticides or anything else that accumulates in the land, air or water and harms species,” she added. “It’s simply ridiculous not to take them into account.”

Global Warming Increasing Mass Extinction Risk

Right now, there are 1,497 animals on the U.S. endangered species list and the best available science shows that nearly every one of them faces climate-related threats, as do 1 million other species on the planet. 

The number, distribution and density of species—biodiversity—is declining rapidly in an unfolding mass extinction that could equal dramatic die-offs recorded in fossil records and attributed to planetary system-changing events like ice ages, meteor crashes or intense, massive and persistent volcanic eruptions. 

The current wave of species declines and extinctions could have profound impacts on human societies. Food security will be threatened if pollinators, seed-spreading birds or important food fish disappear. About 4 billion people rely primarily on natural medicines for their health care, while about 70 percent of drugs used to treat cancer are natural or are synthetic products inspired by nature. 

And if global warming changes the reproductive cycles of fundamental organisms like plankton, bacteria and fungi, it would have a huge effect on how much carbon dioxide oceans, fields and forests remove from the atmosphere, potentially driving even faster warming of the climate. 

Some groups of animals have been particularly hard hit, with 40 percent of amphibians and about a third of corals and marine mammals facing possible extinction, according to a 2019 United Nations global biodiversity report, which acknowledged that “Nature is essential for human existence and good quality of life.” 

“Most of nature’s contributions to people are not fully replaceable, and some are irreplaceable,” the report added.

Seen as a global call to action, the report concluded that nature is deteriorating worldwide. “The biosphere, upon which humanity as a whole depends, is being altered to an unparalleled degree across all spatial scales,” the report noted. “Biodiversity—the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems—is declining faster than at any time in human history.”

There are numerous scientific red flags. A 2022 study showed that the current rate of ocean warming could bring the greatest extinction of sea life in 250 million years. And it’s also clear that the loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis must be addressed hand-in-hand, as a 2021 report from the United Nations noted. Global warming is an overarching threat to nearly all species, and if biodiversity collapses, some of the planet’s best natural mechanisms to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and slow atmospheric heating will fail, the report explained.

Every Ton of CO2 Brings New Misery, and Not Just to Polar Bears

Research shows that Human activities are responsible for declining polar bear habitat and most of the damage to the rest of the life-sustaining web of ecosystems and species, and those activities often intensify each other’s effects. Land impacts like urban development and industrialized agriculture strip away carbon-sequestering vegetation and destroy habitat. Greenhouse gas emissions are making parts of the ocean too hot for many fish and melting the snow that sustains wolverines high in the Rocky Mountains of the western United States.

Research like the new study could provide scientific support to get more protection for the few remaining wolverines that depend on a deep mountain snowpack for denning, said Matthew Bishop, the Rocky Mountains office director with the Western Environmental Law Center. 

Climate models and observations show most of those snowfields retreating rapidly, making it crucial to protect any remaining pockets as climate refugia. But despite the models, the federal government claims it doesn’t know enough about how wolverines will respond to the shrinking snow to act on the science, Bishop said. 

“We know they are snow dependent species and that snow is going to be gone,” he said. “That’s enough and the court agrees, but the agencies keep coming back and saying they need to know more.” At some point soon, it’s going to be too late for wolverines and many other climate-sensitive species, he added. 

“When in doubt, any kind of uncertainty should err on the side of protection for the species, and doing what we can to limit all the non-climate stressors,” he said. “Let’s give them a chance to make it. Ultimately, it may not matter. But let’s do everything we can in our power to make sure they stay on the landscape.”

For polar bears, like for wolverines, that means protecting parts of their habitat that might persist for the next 50 or 100 years, even if the outcome beyond that is uncertain. But most of all, as last week’s paper in Science emphasized, it means cutting greenhouse gas emissions immediately and quickly. 

Pairing a biologist and a climatologist for the new paper on how greenhouse gas emissions affect polar bears seemed a logical choice, said co-author Ceclilia Bitz, a scientist at the University of Washington, who studies the connection between climate, sea ice and wildlife habitat.

Focusing on the direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear habitat makes the paper policy relevant and helps paint a clear picture of the impacts of sea ice decline, she said.

“We’re saying that every additional 23 gigatons of CO2 that we emit as a world causes an additional day that the polar bears have to fast,” she said. “Currently we’re emitting about 50 gigatons per year as a planet.”

That increases the time polar bears go without eating by more than a day each year in each of their populations, she said.

“That’s huge. Imagine if you’re already hungry, going an extra day without eating,” she said. “It’s relentless. As humans, we’re emitting so much CO2 that it’s having these really perceptible and serious consequences.”

Amstrup said the new study gives people one more reference point for understanding the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.

“Polar bears depend on thresholds,” he said. “If they fast for over a certain amount of days, they simply can’t survive.”

The findings again show how closely linked the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are, Siegel added. “They cannot be separated,” she said. “The survival of all life on Earth, including ours, is at stake.”

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New Zealand’s quirky and critically endangered kākāpō have begun to return to the country’s mainland for the first time in almost 40 years. Kākāpōs are the heaviest parrots in the world, with some exceeding six pounds, and they have a lifespan of up to 90 years. Like penguins and ostriches, they can’t fly, so kākāpōs climb trees and forage on the ground for nuts and seeds to eat.  

[Related: A flightless parrot is returning to mainland New Zealand after a 40-year absence.]

The big, green, nocturnal birds used to be widespread across New Zealand, but were hunted to near extinction and threatened by non native predators like cats and dogs. Popular Science magazine described these “curious” green birds as already being “doomed to early extermination” all the way back in April 1895. 

The roughly 250 or so individual birds that are left are managed by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) and the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu tribe on five islands that are free of predators. Now equipped with 21st Century genetic science, research platform Genomics Aotearoa is funding high-quality genetic sequencing of almost the entire kākāpō population. The results of an early study of how these full genomic sequences will help manage the health of these iconic birds was published August 28 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Establishing genetic sequencing methods is not expected to only play a part in kākāpō survival, but other endangered species throughout New Zealand and the rest of the world. Conservation genomics is part of a growing trend in the field. In 2019, a team from San Diego and the University of Hawaii used advanced DNA sequencing technology to create a nearly complete genome assembly for Hawaii’s only remaining lineage of the crow family ‘alalā (Corvus hawaiiensis). The sequencing gave conservationists critical clues into the disease susceptibility, population-level diversity, and genetic load of the alalā to better inform their policies.

The same information could help the kākāpō thrive. This work over the last year has produced two very significant outcomes. First, it has given the team an in-depth understanding of kākāpō biology. It has also produced a high-quality code and reusable pipeline, which allows other researchers to rapidly use these methods in their own work and advanced New Zealand’s genomic capability.

“Kākāpō suffer from disease and low reproductive output, so by understanding the genetic reasons for these problems, we can now help mitigate them,” Andrew Digby, the DOC’s Science Advisor for Kākāpō Recovery, said in a statement. “It gives us the ability to predict things like kākāpō chick growth and susceptibility to disease, which changes our on-the-ground management practices and will help improve survival rates.”

[Related: Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them.]

Diby added that the Kakapo125+ project is another example of how genetic data can assist population growth. The 125 refers to the number of kākāpō living when the project began in 2015. “The novel genetic and machine learning tools developed can be applied to improve the productivity and survival of other taonga under conservation management,” said Digby.

The sequencing technique was developed by University of Otago microbial scientist Joseph Guhlin and an international team of researchers and could have impacts outside of New Zealand. 

“Using technology created by Google, we have achieved what is likely the highest quality variant dataset for any endangered species in the world,” said Guhlin. “This dataset is made available, through DOC and Ngai Tahu, for future researchers working with kākāpō.”

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For the second year in a row, the Atlantic puffins living on the rocky islands off Maine’s coast had a rebound year for fledgling chicks, all in the face of record warm waters due to climate change. This second consecutive rebound year is welcome news, after 90 percent of nesting puffins failed to raise a single chick in 2021 while the climate change in New England has put this species, and others like humpback whales and the zooplankton at the base of the Gulfs food web, in jeopardy.

[Related: Cyclones can be fatal for seabirds, but not in the way you think.]

The Gulf of Maine and its bays are among the world’s fastest-warming bodies of water. Since the early 1980s, it has warmed about four degrees Fahrenheit, while the global ocean has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the same period of time. The rising heat has affected the fish stocks in the area that puffins and other species rely on. Haddock used to make up a large portion of puffin diets, but populations have fluctuated in recent years, first increasing in 2017 due to federal management to this year showing signs of a decrease. 

However, a small eel-like fish called the sand lance has been abundant this year. The fish are only about four to eight inches long, but are high in fats and make them a great forage fish for seabirds. A 2020 study found that 72 Atlantic Ocean animal species from whales to bluefish to gannets eat sand lances in the waters from Greenland to North Carolina. 

According to the Maine Monitor, the sand lance were less abundant in the region by mid-July, but the puffins were found feasting on a mixture of haddock, hake, and redfish depending upon where they were. Don Lyons, the director of conservation science at National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, told the Maine Monitor, “I can’t offhand recall such a seamless transition from one fish to another. It tells you a lot about the resourcefulness of puffins and at the same time, it’s a reminder of how much we still don’t know of when and where food is for seabirds, and how fast that all can change.”

Lyons estimated that there are now as many as 3,000 puffins in Maine, what he calls a stable population. In 2022, about two-thirds of the puffins fledged—or developed wing feathers that are large enough for flight. While they didn’t reach that number this year, they had a better season than the catastrophic 2021 season despite a rainy and hot summer. The Audubon Society’s Project Puffin has been monitoring the population for 50 years and uses decoys, mirrors, and recordings to attract the birds to suitable nesting sites to raise the next generation of birds.

Maine’s puffin population was once as low as 70 pairs on Matinicus Rock 25 miles off the coast. They were hunted for their feathers and meat in the early 20th Century, but by the 1970’s Audubon conservationists worked to grow puffin colonies in the state, by bringing chicks from Canada to Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock. Puffins still call that tiny rock home, in addition to Seal Island and Petit Manan Island. Live cams keep an eye on them and volunteers and scientists monitor their progress every year.

Currently, Maine’s population are the only breeding Atlantic puffins in the United States. The species lives in areas of the North Atlantic from Maine and Canada eastward to Europe. Iceland, a country well known for its puffins, has seen the puffin populations decline by 70 percent in 30 years largely due to lack of food due to warming oceans.

[Related: Emperor penguins suffer ‘unprecedented’ breeding failure as sea ice disappears.]

While this ability to reproduce despite huge environmental changes does speak to their resiliency as a species, puffins are still at risk of long term dangers from marine heat waves, sea level rise threatening nesting sites, and a loss of food.  

“The problem with climate change is these breeding failures and low breeding productivity years are now becoming chronic,” Bill Sydeman, president and chief scientist of the California-based Farallon Institute, told the AP. “There will be fewer young birds in the population that are able to recruit into the breeding population.”

Some of the ways to help Maine puffin population and other coastal birds in the face of this constant uncertainty include Audubon’s adopt-a-puffin program and advocating for your local seabirds by contacting regional elected officials.

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This article is republished from The Conversation.

Armed with scrub brushes, young scuba divers took to the waters of Florida’s Alligator Reef in late July to try to help corals struggling to survive 2023’s extraordinary marine heat wave. They carefully scraped away harmful algae and predators impinging on staghorn fragments, under the supervision and training of interns from Islamorada Conservation and Restoration Education, or I.CARE.

Normally, I.CARE’s volunteer divers would be transplanting corals to waters off the Florida Keys this time of year, as part of a national effort to restore the Florida Reef. But this year, everything is going in reverse.

As water temperatures spiked in the Florida Keys, scientists from universities, coral reef restoration groups and government agencies launched a heroic effort to save the corals. Divers have been in the water every day, collecting thousands of corals from ocean nurseries along the Florida Keys reef tract and moving them to cooler water and into giant tanks on land.

Marine scientist Ken Nedimyer and his team at Reef Renewal USA began moving an entire coral tree nursery from shallow waters off Tavernier to an area 60 feet deep and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) cooler. Even there, temperatures were running about 85 to 86 F (30 C).

Their efforts are part of an emergency response on a scale never before seen in Florida.

The Florida Reef – a nearly 350-mile arc along the Florida Keys that is crucial to fish habitat, coastal storm protection and the local economy – began experiencing record-hot ocean temperatures in June 2023, weeks earlier than expected. The continuing heat has triggered widespread coral bleaching.

While corals can recover from mass bleaching events like this, long periods of high heat can leave them weak and vulnerable to disease that can ultimately kill them.

That’s what scientists and volunteers have been scrambling to avoid.

The heartbeat of the reef

The Florida Reef has struggled for years under the pressure of overfishing, disease, storms and global warming that have decimated its live corals.

A massive coral restoration effort – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mission: Iconic Reef – has been underway since 2019 to restore the reef with transplanted corals, particularly those most resilient to the rising temperatures. But even the hardiest coral transplants are now at risk.

Reef-building corals are the foundation species of shallow tropical waters due to their unique symbiotic relationship with microscopic algae in their tissues.

During the day, these algae photosynthesize, producing both food and oxygen for the coral animal. At night, coral polyps feed on plankton, providing nutrients for their algae. The result of this symbiotic relationship is the coral’s ability to build a calcium carbonate skeleton and reefs that support nearly 25% of all marine life.

Unfortunately, corals are very temperature sensitive, and the extreme ocean heat off South Florida, with some reef areas reaching temperatures in the 90s, has put them under extraordinary stress.

When corals get too hot, they expel their symbiotic algae. The corals appear white – bleached – because their carbonate skeleton shows through their clear tissue that lack any colorful algal cells.

Corals can recover new algal symbionts if water conditions return to normal within a few weeks. However, the increase in global temperatures due to the effects of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities is causing longer and more frequent periods of coral bleaching worldwide, leading to concerns for the future of coral reefs.

A MASH unit for corals

This year, the Florida Keys reached an alert level 2, indicating extreme risk of bleaching, about six weeks earlier than normal.

The early warnings and forecasts from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Network gave scientists time to begin preparing labs and equipment, track the locations and intensity of the growing marine heat and, importantly, recruit volunteers.

At the Keys Marine Laboratory, scientists and trained volunteers have dropped off thousands of coral fragments collected from heat-threatened offshore nurseries. Director Cindy Lewis described the lab’s giant tanks as looking like “a MASH unit for corals.”

Volunteers there and at other labs across Florida will hand-feed the tiny creatures to keep them alive until the Florida waters cool again and they can be returned to the ocean and eventually transplanted onto the reef.

Protecting corals still in the ocean

I.CARE launched another type of emergency response.

I.CARE co-founder Kylie Smith, a coral reef ecologist and a former student of mine in marine sciences, discovered a few years ago that coral transplants with large amounts of fleshy algae around them were more likely to bleach during times of elevated temperature. Removing that algae may give corals a better chance of survival.

Smith’s group typically works with local dive operators to train recreational divers to assist in transplanting and maintaining coral fragments in an effort to restore the reefs of Islamorada. In summer 2023, I.CARE has been training volunteers, like the young divers from Diving with a Purpose, to remove algae and coral predators, such as coral-eating snails and fireworms, to help boost the corals’ chances of survival.

Monitoring for corals at risk

To help spot corals in trouble, volunteer divers are also being trained as reef observers through Mote Marine Lab’s BleachWatch program.

Scuba divers have long been attracted to the reefs of the Florida Keys for their beauty and accessibility. The lab is training them to recognize bleached, diseased and dead corals of different species and then use an online portal to submit bleach reports across the entire Florida Reef.

The more eyes on the reef, the more accurate the maps showing the areas of greatest bleaching concern.

Rebuilding the reef

While the marine heat wave in the Keys will inevitably kill some corals, many more will survive.

Through careful analysis of the species, genotypes and reef locations experiencing bleaching, scientists and practitioners are learn valuable information as they work to protect and rebuild a more resilient coral reef for the future.

That is what gives hope to Smith, Lewis, Nedimyer and hundreds of others who believe this coral reef is worth saving. Volunteers are crucial to the effort, whether they’re helping with coral reef maintenance, reporting bleaching or raising the awareness of what is at stake if humanity fails to stop warming the planet.

Michael Childress is an associate professor of biological sciences and environmental conservation at Clemson University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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California’s Sierra Nevada is now home to a newly identified pack of gray wolves. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), this new pack is roaming at least 200 miles away from the nearest known pack. It joins three known gray wolf packs living in Northern California: the Beckwourth Pack, the Whaleback Pack, and the Lassen Pack.

[Related: Snowy weather could determine life or death for Wisconsin’s poached gray wolves.]

In July, CDFW received a wolf sighting report from a spot in Sequoia National Forest. They found wolf tracks and other signs that wolves were present and collected 12 feces and hair samples from the area. 

DNA analysis determined that the samples are in fact from wolves and also revealed the sex, coat color, individual identity, relation to one another, and the pack’s origin. All 12 samples were confirmed to belong to gray wolves and the pack consists of at least five individuals that have not previously been detected in California. One of the adult females is a direct descendant of the first wolf documented in California’s recent history (a male named OR7) and four offspring (two females, two males). They did not detect any samples of any adult males, but the genetic profile indicates that the breeding male is a descendant of the Lassen pack.

Gray wolves are native to the state,, but were hunted to near extinction in California by the 1920s. Sometime in late 2011, OR7 crossed the state line from Oregon into California and became the first gray wolf in nearly a century to include the Golden State in its range. OR7 eventually returned to Oregon to form the Rogue Pack.

[Related: Wolves and beavers can have magical ecosystem effects—if they have space to thrive.]

In California, gray wolves are considered a recovering endangered species and are protected under California’s Endangered Species Act and the federal Endangered Species Act. While both laws mean it is illegal to kill them, wolves remain unprotected across much of the Northern Rockies, following decades of lawsuits over these regulations and concern from farmers. Researchers have advocated for an expansion of protected lands for the gray wolves, saying that they are important to the ecosystem’s overall health as a keystone species. 

Gray wolves are carnivores and their primary sources of prey are large native species such as deer and elk. They will also eat birds and reptiles, opportunistically scavenge carrion and may prey on large livestock. They can weigh anywhere between 70 and 120 pounds and can run in short bursts of up to 35 miles per hour. Their fur also comes in many colors including white, tan, black, brown, and the name “gray” refers to the color of their undercoat that can be visible before the warmer summer months. 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Vetea Liao was late. Two or three times a week, the Tahitian-born marine scientist heads out for an early-morning dive. He likes to start just as the first rays of light break the horizon. But that morning, in November 2014, the sun was already warming the lagoon off Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island in French Polynesia, when Liao hit the water. Peering down, Liao spotted the familiar branches of Porites rus, a common coral around the archipelago’s western islands that looks a little like ginger root studded with strawberry seeds. He also saw something else: something he’d never seen before. A delicate fog was rising up from the reef. It looked like the coral was smoking.

Liao sought out his colleagues at Moorea’s French Centre for Island Research and Environmental Observatory (CRIOBE). No one had ever seen anything like it. But one offered a lead: maybe the coral was having sex? It was a bold hypothesis.

Coral reproduction is thought to be largely a nighttime activity. In response to environmental cues—the full moon, temperature fluctuations, even the duration of darkness—corals simultaneously release clouds of tiny eggs and sperm into the water, which are fertilized and then float with the current and eventually settle on a new patch of reef. Scientists had witnessed corals spawning in daylight just a handful of times before 2014, but never in French Polynesia. Could the P. rus Liao had seen really be doing it, too?

For years, though he returned to the lagoon many times, Liao didn’t see the coral haze again. Then, in 2018, a friend spotted misty waters from her deck, which overlooks a different lagoon in Tahiti. As with Liao’s initial sighting, it was just a few hours after dawn. With confirmation of when to search, Liao soon got proof that the haze was what his colleague had suspected: the sure sign of coral spawning in daylight. Within the next two years, he and a dozen others recorded daytime spawning events across Tahiti, Moorea, and four other islands in the archipelago. P. rus sex, he eventually found, occurs like clockwork: five days after the full moon, from October to April, about two hours after daybreak—roughly 7:00 a.m. in French Polynesia. On deeper reefs, P. rus does the deed later, around 10:00 a.m.

Liao now has a team of more than 100 locals—families, schoolkids, fishers, and volunteer divers—who have reported 226 daytime spawning events by P. rus, surveying more than 100 reefs on 14 islands, including several remote atolls. “Without citizens, it would have taken ages to know all this,” Liao says.

In 2020, marine biologist Camille Leonard witnessed the precision of daytime spawning at CRIOBE, where she was monitoring P. rus coral growing in tanks at the same time that divers were surveying a nearby reef. “The Porites spawned at the exact same minute [in the two places],” Leonard says. Liao’s timing was spot on. “I thought, Okay, he knows what he’s doing,” says Leonard.

That remarkable synchrony extends far beyond Polynesia. In December 2022, after reading about Liao’s work on Facebook, coral scientist Victor Bonito with Reef Explorer Fiji P. rus recorded coral spawning two hours after sunrise in Fiji, more than 3,000 kilometers away. The same is true near the island of Réunion, 15,000 kilometers away in the Indian Ocean. In general, though, observations of daytime spawning remain staggeringly rare. Liao hasn’t yet published his research, which he conducts through the nonprofit Tama No Te Tairoto (Children of the Lagoon in Tahitian) outside his full-time job developing sustainable pearl farming for French Polynesia’s Department of Marine Resources. Publishing is secondary, he says, to sharing knowledge with the locals who have helped survey the reefs.

The team’s work is impressive. “I have not heard of such an extensive citizen science project for coral spawning before,” says James Guest, a coral researcher at Newcastle University in England who launched the Coral Spawning Database. Liao’s contributions to the database, which gathers and shares data on coral spawning times in the Indo-Pacific, filled scientific gaps about Porites corals. “In the Indo-Pacific particularly,” Guest says, “there’s so much focus on Acropora [corals].”

Equally impressive is that this new discovery is already being put to work for the coral’s benefit. Thanks to Liao’s research, two of the biggest environmental consulting companies in French Polynesia now recommend that developers stop all work in nearby coastal areas during the P. rus spawning period to avoid disturbing reproduction.

As the climate continues to change, says Guest, it’s possible that corals in the Porites genus will begin to dominate reefs in the Indo-Pacific. Porites corals are tough, he says. They can handle conditions that challenge other corals, including heat, ocean acidification, and murky water. They also spawn more frequently. “It’s fair to say they are a bit more resistant,” Guest says. But “if [their reproduction] is disrupted, reef recovery could be slower or nonexistent,” he adds.

What actually triggers the special spawn timing of P. rus, though, is still unknown. It could be a certain amount of solar radiation, a precise rise in temperature, both, or something else. But Liao isn’t done investigating. Using some of Tama No Te Tairoto’s limited funds, he recently installed light meters on reefs to investigate if spawning is related to a specific wavelength of light. “Maybe it will remain a mystery,” he says. Whether or not Liao can pinpoint the triggers, corals around the world continue to do it, right on cue, in the light of day.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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While the pink river dolphins of the Amazon Basin may look like the latest part of the marketing campaign for the smash-hit summer blockbuster Barbie, they are in fact very real freshwater mammals that live in some of the Amazon’s most inhospitable locales.

[Related: When humans and dolphins fish together, they both win.]

Along with their counterparts the tucuxi dolphins, the rare pink river dolphin is under threat from a number of forces. But listening in on their echolocation might be a key part in conserving the unique species, according to a study published July 27 in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Freshwater dolphins are under threat from climate change and human activities: overfishing, construction of dams, and illegal mining, and very little is known about their distribution and behavior when they enter the forest at the floated season,” study co-author and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona bioacoustician Michel André tells PopSci. “The pink dolphin is the most ancient species of dolphins on Earth and presents unique adaptations to a freshwater habitat and to rainforest.”

During the region’s wet season (April to August) the tucuxi and the pink river dolphin–or boto in Portuguese–move into the floodplain forests called the várzea that border river channels in pursuit of freshwater fish to eat. This floodplain and its dense vegetation make it extremely challenging for scientists like André to survey the dolphins using boats or drones .

In the study, the team used five hydrophones submerged between 9.8 and 16 feet deep to survey 308 square miles of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil where the Japurá and Solimõesrivers meet. They took recordings from river channels and confluence bays, floodplain lakes, and flooded forest at various times throughout the wet and dry seasons between June 2019 and September 2020. 

After obtaining the recordings, the authors used deep learning algorithms called a convolutional neural network and sound data from boat surveys to automatically classify the detected sounds as either echolocation clicks from dolphins, boat engine noises, or rain. The analysis could detect echolocation with 95 percent accuracy, boat engine noises with 92 percent accuracy, and rainfall with 98 percent  accuracy. 

The team detected that the presence of dolphins increased from 10 percent of the bay to 70 percent in the bay and river channels when the water levels rose between November and January. They believe that the dolphins could be using these waterways as a way to enter the floodplain. Additionally, the boto adolescents and females with calves tended to spend more time in the floodplains than male dolphins, possibly due to the abundance of fish and other prey or as a shelter against the more aggressive behavior from males. 

[Related: This dolphin ancestor looked like a cross between Flipper and Moby Dick.]

The results provide “a confirmation that monitoring dolphin populations in a rainforest habitat is feasible and essential for biodiversity,” says André. 

The team hopes to develop low-cost bioacoustic equipment that can be permanently placed in the forest to better understand the relationship between aquatic and land environments. This constant monitoring could provide scientists with a better idea of the dolphins’ habitat preferences and conserve the region’s vital biodiversity.  

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For the first time in almost 40 years, New Zealand’s quirky and critically endangered kākāpō will return to the country’s mainland. Kākāpō are large flightless parrots that used to be widespread across New Zealand, before being hunted to near extinction. The birds last lived on mainland New Zealand in the 1980s. The last time they were present on the North Island was in the 1960s when five of the birds were living in captivity, according to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

[Related: Researchers release more than 5,000 snails in the Pacific.]

Currently, kākāpō only live on five offshore islands: Pukenui (Anchor Island) and Te Kakahu o Tamatea (Chalky island) in Fiordland, Whenua Hou (Codfish Island) and Pearl Island near Rakiura Stewart Island and Hauturu-o-Toi (Little Barrier Island).  

The Department of Conservation in partnership with the South Island’s Ngāi Tahu tribe is moving four male kākāpō from Whenua Hou near Rakiura Stewart Island to Maungatautari (Sanctuary Mountain) in Waikato. The four kākāpō are not intended to breed at Maungatautari. The main focus of the project is learning what types of new habitat, outside of the established offshore islands, that the kākāpō can live in.

This translocation follows decades of conservation work through the Kākāpō Recovery Programme. The effort utilized modern science and Māori matauranga (knowledge) to help bring the iconic species back from extinction. The population doubled to reach a high of 252 birds between 2016 and 2022.

Returning this critically endangered nocturnal ground-dwelling parrot back to the mainland is significant for the whole country and a shared success story for all partners involved, according to the team. 

“Kākāpō are one of Aotearoa’s [New Zealand’s] most iconic and rare species, recovering from a population low of 51 birds in 1995,” Department of Conservation Manager for Kākāpō Deidre Vercoe said in a statement. “Until now, kākāpō have been contained to a few predator-free offshore islands, so to have them now returning to the mainland is a major achievement for all involved.”   

Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu Deputy Kaiwhakahaere (manager) Matapura Ellison added that this is a key aspect of the translocation is the iwi to iwi (people to people) transfer of the four birds from Ngāi Tahu to Ngāti Koroki Kahukura, Raukawa, Ngāti Hauā, and Waikato.

“This is a milestone translocation, and we are thankful for our iwi partners who will keep our taonga (treasured) kākāpō safe at their new habitat on Maungatautari,” Ellison said in a statement. “The whanaungatanga [forming relationships] between our iwi is strengthened further through the shared kaitiakitanga of these precious manu.”

[Related: This three-foot-tall parrot proves New Zealand is the mecca of giant weird birds.]

This translocation is a new phase in the recovery of this marks a new phase for the recovery of this  taonga (treasured) species. Returning them to their natural range on the mainland in unmanaged populations has long been a goal, but they need a habitat that is free of introduced mammalian predators such as rats from escaped ships. 

The translocation will be marked with a Maori welcoming ceremony called pōwhiri and celebration at Pōhara Marae followed by the release at Maungatautari. The ceremony is set to acknowledge the many people and groups that played a part in kākāpō conservation and the work to make the mountain a “kākāpō-proof” and predator-free inland sanctuary. It will also mark the transfer of care of these four founding birds between peoples.

Kākāpō are experts at camouflage, and the team believes it is unlikely that visitors to the sanctuary will come across them. Visitors could, however, hear their distinctive ‘booming’ calls for the first time in several years. 

“Sanctuary Mountain is a large space, with plenty of good habitat for kākāpō, but it’s still unknown whether they will successfully establish here long-term,” said Vercoe.  “The main focus of this translocation is to learn if kākāpō can thrive in a fenced sanctuary, while taking pressure off the islands ahead of future breeding seasons.”

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Green sea turtles could be putting even the pickiest eaters to shame. Generations of them have returned to the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of northern Africa to feast for roughly 3,000 years, according to a study published July 17 in the journal PNAS.

[Related: Endangered green turtles are bouncing back in the Seychelles.]

When baby green sea turtles hatch on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea, they clumsily make their way into the ocean. Their parents have already left the shallows for a long migration, and baby sea turtles are not able to navigate this long trip, so they float around for a few years. During this awkward stage, they are typically not picky eaters. The youthful turtles are even considered omnivores, eating worms, insects, and crustaceans along with seagrasses. At about five years-old, they trek to the same areas where their parents traveled to eat the more seagrass-exclusive diet of herbivores.  

While scientists have known that sea turtles migrate between specific eating and breeding locations, seeing how far back this activity stretches highlights the importance of conserving sea grass locations that are suffering the effects of climate change the same way that nesting habitats are protected. 

“We currently spend a lot of effort protecting the babies, but not the place where they spend most of their time: the seagrass meadows,” study co-author and University of Groningen marine evolution and conservation PhD student Willemien de Kock said in a statement. 

The study from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands combined archaeological findings with modern data. De Kock used boxes of sea turtle remains from archaeological sites in the Mediterranean Sea. By analyzing the bones, De Kock could distinguish two species within the collection: the green sea turtle and the loggerhead turtle. 

From there, De Kock was also able to identify what both species had been eating and found that they relied on bone collagen in the plants. She used a mass spectrometer to inspect the bone collagen in the turtle remains and found what types of plants the sea turtles ate. 

“For instance, one plant might contain more of the lighter carbon-12 than another plant, which contains more of the heavier carbon-13. Because carbon does not change when it is digested, we can detect what ratio of carbon is present in the bones and infer the diet from that,” De Kock said.

Satellite tracking data from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom revealed the current traveling routes and destinations of sea turtles. The team from Exeter had also been taking tiny skin samples from the sea turtles, which revealed similar dietary information that was present in the ancient bone samples. De Kock could then draw conclusions by connecting the diets of turtles from thousands of years ago to specific locations. The study found that for about 3,000 years, numerous generations of green sea turtles have been feeding in the same seagrass meadows along the coasts of Egypt and West Libya. 

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

Loggerhead turtles showed a more varied diet than the green sea turtles, so their results were less specific. 

Understanding more about how a species eats over past generations can help counteract shifting baseline syndrome. This is when slow changes to a larger system, like animal populations, are unnoticed since each new generation of researchers may redefine what the natural state was based on how the environment was at the start of their careers. 

“Even long-term data goes back only about 100 years. But tracing back further in time using archaeological data allows us to better see human-induced effects on the environment. And it allows us to predict, a bit,” De Kock said. 

Recent models have forecasted a high risk of widespread seagrass loss right where green sea turtles have been migrating for generations. Losing these food resources could be detrimental to the green sea turtle, and future conservation efforts can include supporting seagrass planting efforts, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and building better signs and markers so that boats do not weigh anchor in seagrass meadows. 

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now, new research finds that male elk’s bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat and bird calls have regional dialects, too, but a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate. 

Hearing elk bugle in Rocky Mountain National Park decades ago inspired Clarke to investigate the sound. “My graduate students and I started delving into the library and could find nothing on elk communication, period,” she said. That surprised her: “Thousands of people go to national parks to hear them bugle, and we don’t know what we’re listening to.”

Her research, published earlier this year in the Journal of Mammalogy, dug into the unique symphony created by different elk herds. While most people can detect human dialects — a honey-thick Southern drawl versus a nasal New England accent—differences in regional elk bugles are almost imperceptible to human ears. But by using spectrograms, a visual representation of sound frequencies, researchers can see the details of each region’s signature bugles. “It’s like handwriting,” Clarke said. “You can recognize Bill’s handwriting from George’s handwriting.”

Pennsylvania’s elk herds were translocated from the West in the early 1900s, and today they have longer tonal whistles and quieter bugles than elk in Colorado. Meanwhile, bugles change frequency from low to high tones more sharply in Wyoming than they do in Pennsylvania or Colorado.

Clarke isn’t sure why the dialects vary. She initially hypothesized that calls would differ based on the way sound travels in Pennsylvania’s dense forests compared to Colorado and Wyoming’s more open landscapes, but her data didn’t support that theory. Clarke hopes to find out whether genetic variation — which is more limited in Pennsylvania’s herd — might explain differences in bugles, and whether those differences are learned by young males listening to older bulls.

“It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic’. It’s an interplay between both.” 

Clarke’s research adds a small piece to the larger puzzle of animal communication, said Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. “It’s not as though a song or vocal learning is ‘all environmental’ or ‘all genetic,’” he said. “It’s an interplay between both.” Blumstein, a marmot communication researcher, added that the mechanisms behind these vocal variations deserve more study.

These unanswered questions are part of the larger field of bioacoustics, which blends biology and acoustics to deepen our understanding of the noises that surround us in nature. Bioacoustics can sometimes be used as a conservation tool to monitor animal behavior, and other studies are shedding light on how it affects animal evolution, disease transfer, cognition and culture.

Elk are not the only species with regional dialects. In the United States, eastern and western hermit thrushes sing different song structures, and the white-crowned sparrow’s song helps ornithologists identify where it was born. Crested gibbons and Campbell’s monkeys also have localized dialects in their songs and calls, as does the rock hyrax, a mammal that looks like a rodent but is actually related to elephants.

Similar differences exist underwater, where whale songs have unique phrases that vary by location. Sperm whales in the Caribbean have clicking patterns in their calls that differ from those of their Pacific Ocean counterparts. Orcas in Puget Sound use distinctive clicks and whistles within their own pods, while also using universal sounds to communicate with orcas in other pods.

Clarke also studies the vocalizations of ptarmigan, flying foxes and Tasmanian devils. Her next research project will shed light on how bison mothers lead their herds and communicate with their calves. “They’re the heart of the herd,” she said. “What are they talking about?”   

Kylie Mohr is an editorial fellow for High Country News writing from Montana. Email her at kylie.mohr@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 

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The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail camera’s frame. In another, a mule deer stops munching wildflowers, backs away and takes off in the opposite direction. In a third, a moose doesn’t move at all but stands there, vigilant. 

All three animals were reacting to sound bites from boomboxes in the woods, part of a study measuring the effect of outdoor recreationists’ noise on wildlife. The sounds included people chatting, mountain bikers spinning down trails—even just quiet footfalls. Each clip lasted less than 90 seconds.

The new study, currently underway in Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton National Forest, adds to mounting evidence that the mere presence of human sound, no matter how loud or quiet, fast or slow, changes how animals behave.

Don’t start feeling guilty about going for a hike just yet, though. Researchers are also trying to understand the significance of those reactions. For some species, hikers and bikers may be little more than a sideshow in a forest full of natural disturbances. For others, recreationists could have an impact similar to that of terrifying predators, invading habitat where food can be found, resulting in lower birthrates and even increasing deaths.

“The whole point of the study isn’t to vilify recreationists,” said Mark Ditmer, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station and one of the study’s co-leaders. “It’s to understand where and when we cause the most disturbance.”

The idea that we must know and love the outdoors in order to protect it has held sway for over a century. Recreation built a constituency that helped protect wild places. But even decades ago, there was evidence that using wilderness—whether formally designated or otherwise—as a human playground caused its fair share of collateral damage. Trails crisscrossed woods without rhyme or reason; used toilet paper clung to bushes in the backcountry. Groups like Leave No Trace began reminding people to pack their garbage out with them, leave wildlife alone and poop responsibly.

Still, “non-consumptive recreation,” the wonky term for enjoying oneself outdoors without hunting or fishing, has generally been considered a net good. At best, outdoor recreation connects people to the land and sometimes inspires them to protect it—to write lawmakers, attend land-use meetings, support advocacy groups, perhaps remind others to stay on trails. At worst, it seems harmless.

“The whole point of the study isn’t to vilify recreationists.” 

But recent studies show otherwise. There’s one out of Vail, Colorado, showing that increased trail use by hikers and mountain bikers disturbed elk so much the cows birthed fewer calves. Another out of Grand Teton National Park showed that backcountry skiers scared bighorn sheep during winter when food was scarce, with potentially lethal consequences. A 2016 review of 274 articles on how outdoor recreation affects wildlife revealed that 59% of the interactions were negative.

But most of the research looked the impacts of random encounters with hikers, backcountry skiers and others. Few questioned what exactly it is about humans that bothers wildlife so much, whether it’s the way we look, how we smell, or the sounds we make.

“Wildlife, more often than not, probably hear us before they see us, and so we can rarely observe if it is a negative response,” said Kathy Zeller, a co-leader on the new study and a research biologist with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute and Rocky Mountain Research Station.

Ditmer and Zeller decided to record people biking and hiking in the woods. Last summer, they carted boomboxes of those recordings into the forest and set them up on game trails away from heavily traveled areas.

On and off for about four months, whenever a motion-sensitive camera at one end of the trail detected an animal, a boombox about 20 yards away played human sound bites—nothing like a ’90s dance party, just recordings of two hikers chatting or walking quietly, or of large and small groups of mountain bikers. Two more cameras near the boomboxes and one at the other end of the trail recorded wildlife reactions. They also played forest sounds and even blank tracks to be sure the animal wasn’t simply reacting to sudden noises or the almost imperceptible sound of a speaker turning on and off.

“Wildlife, more often than not, probably hear us before they see us, and so we can rarely observe if it is a negative response.”

Judging by an initial analysis of last summer’s data, large groups of mountain bikers were the most likely to cause animals like mule deer and elk to flee. Smaller groups of mountain bikers and hikers talking also triggered a response. The animals paused and listened to people walking, but didn’t flee as often.

Researchers are still figuring out how harmful those reactions are. Joe Holbrook, a University of Wyoming professor who was not involved in the study, suspects that it depends on the species and the time of year. He and his team have spent years studying wolverines’ reactions to backcountry skiers and snowmobilers. His most recent work shows that female wolverines don’t linger to feed on carcasses if backcountry recreationists are nearby. That suggests they’re losing access to good habitat, but he still doesn’t know if that means they’re also having fewer babies or dying more often.

And some wildlife gets accustomed to the presence of humans: the herds of elk that wander the streets of Mammoth, Montana, the mule deer that munch roses in towns across the West, the pronghorn that wander onto golf courses and through subdivisions. Ditmer and Zeller found that in areas with more recreation, some species became less likely to flee.

Not all wild animals adapt to humans, though, and Ditmer said that planning for trails and other projects should take into account the impacts we have on them—whether we can see them or not.

Christine Peterson lives in Laramie, Wyoming, and has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Outdoor Life and the Casper Star-Tribune, among others. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Some people may be picky eaters, but as a species we are not. Birds, bugs, whales, snails, we’ll eat them all. Yet our reliance on wild animals goes far beyond just feeding ourselves. From agricultural feed to medicine to the pet trade, modern society exploits wild animals in a way that surpasses even the most voracious, unfussy wild predator. Now, for the first time, researchers have attempted to capture the full picture of how we use wild vertebrates, including how many, and for what purposes. The research showcases just how broad our collective influence on wild animals is.

Previously, scientists have tallied how much more biomass humans take out of the wild than other predators. But biomass is only a sliver of the total picture, and researchers wanted a fuller understanding of how human predatory behavior affects biodiversity. Analyzing data compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers have now found that humans kill, collect, or otherwise use about 15,000 vertebrate species. That’s about one-third of all vertebrate species on Earth, and it’s a breadth that’s up to 300 times more than the next top predator in any ecosystem.

The predators that give us the biggest run for our money, says Rob Cooke, an ecological modeler at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology and a coauthor of the study, are owls, which hunt a notably diverse array of prey. The Eurasian eagle owl, for instance, is one of the largest and most widely distributed owls in the world. Not a picky eater, this owl will hunt up to 379 different species. According to the researchers’ calculations, humans take 469 species across an equivalent geographical range.

Yet according to Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and a coauthor of the study, the biggest shock isn’t how many species we affect but why we take them. The “ta-da result,” he says, “is that we remove, or essentially prey on, more species of animals for non-food reasons than for food reasons.” And the biggest non-food use, the scientists found, is as pets and pet food. “That’s where things have gone off the rails,” he says.

There is some nuance to this broad trend. When it comes to marine and freshwater species, our main take is for human consumption. For terrestrial animals, however, it depends on what kind of animal is being targeted. Mammals are mostly taken to become people food, while birds, reptiles, and amphibians are mainly trapped to live in captivity as pets. In all, almost 75 percent of the land species humans take enter the pet trade, which is almost double the number of species we take to eat.

The problem is especially acute for tropical birds, and the loss of these species can have rippling ecological consequences. The helmeted hornbill, a bird native to Southeast Asia, for example, is captured mainly for the pet trade or for its beak to be used as medicine or to be carved like ivory. With their massive bills, these birds are one of the few species that can crack open some of the largest, hardest nuts in the forests where they live. Their disappearance limits seed dispersal and the spread of trees around the forest.

Another big difference between humans’ influence on wild animals and that of other predators is that we tend to favor rare and exotic species in a way other animals do not. Most predators target common species since they are easier to find and catch. Humans, however, tend to covet the novel. “The more rare it is,” says Cooke, “the more that drives up the price, and therefore it can spiral and go into this extinction vortex.”

That humans target the largest and flashiest animals, Cooke says, threatens not only their unique biological diversity and beauty, but also the roles they play in their ecosystems. Of the species humans prey on, almost 40 percent are threatened. The researchers suggest industrialized societies can look to Indigenous stewardship models for ways to more sustainably manage and live with wildlife.

Andrea Reid, a citizen of the Nisg̱a’a Nation and an Indigenous fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, notes that people have been fishing for millennia. “But the choices that shape industrial fishing,” she says, like how people consume fish that were caught far away from their own homes, “are what contribute to these observed high levels of impact on fish species.”

If we want wild species—fish and beyond—to survive, Reid says, we need to reframe our relationship with them, perhaps from predator to steward.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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If you don’t know what a pangolin is, then today is your lucky day. Primarily found in tropical regions of Africa and Asia, the tiny, adorable, sadly endangered creature is the only mammal known to be covered completely in overlapping scales composed of durable keratin—the same material that makes up your nails and hair. When needed, the flexible scales’ structure allows a pangolin to curl up into a defensive ball—a novel evolutionary design that recently inspired a team of engineers’ newest invention.

[Related: The Pangolin Finally Made It Onto The List Of The World’s Most Protected Animals.]

As described in a paper published on June 20 with Nature Communications, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany created a robot that could mimic a pangolins’ roly-poly resiliency. Instead of doing so for protection, however, the miniature robot uses its scaly design to quickly traverse environments while simultaneously carrying small payloads. With an added ability to heat to over 70 degrees Celsius (roughly 158 degrees Fahrenheit), the team’s barely two-centimeter-long robot shows immense promise for delivering medication within patients, as well as helping in procedures such as mitigating unwanted internal bleeding.

The pangolin-inspired robot features a comparatively simple, two-layer design—a soft polymer layer studded in magnetic particles, and a harder exterior layer of overlapping metal scales. Exposing the robot to a low-frequency magnetic field causes it to roll into a cylindrical shape, and subsequently directing the magnetic field can influence the robot’s movement. While in this rolled shape, the team showed that their pangolin-bot can house deliverables such as medicine, and safely transport them through animal tissues and artificial organs to a desired location for release.

[Related: These 2D machines can shapeshift into moving 3D robots.]

Exposing their robot to a high-frequency magnetic field, however, offers even more avenues for potential medical treatment. In such instances, the pangolin robot’s metals heat up dramatically, providing thermal energy for situations such as treating thrombosis, cauterizing tumor tissues, or even stopping internal bleeding. “Untethered robots that can move freely, even though they are made of hard elements such as metal and can also emit heat, are rare,” reads a statement from the Planck Institute, adding that researchers’ new robot “could one day reach even the narrowest and most sensitive regions in the body in a minimally invasive and gentle way and emit heat as needed.”

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Just about anywhere you look, there are birds. Penguins live in Antarctica, ptarmigan in the Arctic Circle. Rüppell’s vultures soar higher than Mt. Everest. Emperor penguins dive deeper than 1,800 feet. There are birds on mountains, birds in cities, birds in deserts, birds in oceans, birds on farm fields and birds in parking lots.

Given their ubiquity — and the enjoyment many people get from seeing and cataloging them — birds offer something that sets them apart from other creatures: an abundance of data. Birds are active year-round, they come in many shapes and colors, and they are relatively simple to identify and appealing to observe. Every year around the world, amateur birdwatchers record millions of sightings in databases that are available for analysis.

All that monitoring has revealed some sobering trends. Over the last 50 years, North America has lost a third of its birds, studies suggest, and most bird species are in decline. Because birds are indicators of environmental integrity and of how other, less scrutinized species are doing, data like these should be a call to action, says Peter Marra, a conservation biologist and dean of Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute. “If our birds are disappearing, then we’re cutting the legs off beneath us,” he says. “We’re destroying the environment that we depend on.”

It’s not all bad news for birds: Some species are increasing in number, data show, and dozens have been saved from extinction. Understanding both the steep declines and the success stories, experts say, could help to inform efforts to protect birds as well as other species.

The bad news

On his daily walks at dawn along a trail that snakes by several reservoirs near his home in central England, Alexander Lees typically sees a variety of common waterfowl: Canada geese, mallards, an occasional goosander, a type of diving duck. Every once in a while, he spots something rare: a northern gannet, a kittiwake or a black tern. Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom, records each sighting in eBird, an online checklist and growing, global bird database.

Lees studies birds for a living, but the vast majority of those who track the world’s 11,000 or so bird species, either on their own or as part of organized events, do not. Hundreds of thousands of them participate each year in the Great Backyard Bird Count, launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in 1998: For four days each February, people tally their sightings and the data are entered into eBird or a related identification app for beginners called Merlin.

The North American Breeding Bird Survey, organized by the US Geological Survey and Environment Canada, has enlisted thousands of participants to observe birds along roadsides each June since 1966. Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, which began in 1900, encourages people to join a one-day bird tally scheduled in a three-week window during the holiday season. There are shorebird censuses and waterfowl surveys, all powered by citizen scientists.

This wealth of longitudinal recordings started to turn up signs of distress as far back as 1989, Marra says, when researchers analyzed data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey and concluded that declines were occurring among most of the species that breed in forests of the eastern United States and Canada, then migrate to the tropics.

Thirty years later, Marra and colleagues reassessed the situation using multiple bird-monitoring datasets from North America along with data on nocturnal bird migrations from weather radars. They found stunning losses. Since 1970, the team reported in Science in 2019, the number of birds in North America has declined by nearly 3 billion: a 29 percent loss of abundance. The paper used several methods for estimating changes in population sizes, Marra says, and “they all told us the same thing, which was that we’re watching the process of extinction happen.”

More than half of the 529 bird species assessed by the study have declined, the team reported, with the steepest drops in grassland birds, which have suffered from habitat loss and our use of pesticides. Declines are widespread among many common and abundant species that play important roles in food webs, Marra adds.

And it’s not just North America. In the European Union, a 2021 study of 378 species estimated that bird numbers fell by as much as 19 percent from 1980 to 2017. Data are scarcer on other continents, but reports are starting to chronicle concerns elsewhere, too. At least half of the birds that depend on South Africa’s forests have experienced shrinking ranges (with population trends yet to be assessed).

In Costa Rica’s agricultural areas, an assessment of 112 bird populations found more are declining than are increasing or remaining stable, according to a 12-year study of coffee plantations and forest fragments that was published in 2019. Meanwhile, at 55 sites in the Amazon, 11 percent of surveyed insect-eating birds have experienced shrinking ranks, some of them dramatically, over more than 35 years of tracking. Of 79 species on which there were enough data to compare historical and recent numbers in primary forests, eight have dwindled by at least 50 percent.

And in India, using citizen science data from eBird, a 2020 report estimated shrinking numbers in 80 percent of the 146 species examined — nearly half with declines of more than 50 percent. Overall, 13 percent of birds worldwide are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, a comprehensive source of information on the extinction risk of the world’s plant, animal and fungus species.

Recently, Lees and colleagues pulled together all the data they could find on the state of the world’s birds, publishing in the 2022 Annual Review of Environment and Resources. It was an attempt to, for the first time, synthesize research from across the world to create a comprehensive picture of global changes in bird abundance. “Looking across all taxa, there are big signals for declines everywhere,” Lees says. “There are some species which are increasing, but more species are declining than are increasing. In our attempts to halt the loss of global bird biodiversity, we’re currently not succeeding.”

Silver linings

Even as they reveal a downward slide, bird surveys offer some hopeful signs. Wetland species in North America have grown by 13 percent since 1970, according to the 2019 Science study, led by a 56 percent rise in waterfowl numbers. The paper credits billions of dollars allocated to the protection and restoration of wetlands, often for the sake of hunting. In India, 14 percent of assessed bird species have been growing in abundance. Those successes, scientists say, show that it is possible to reverse population declines.

There are plenty of examples of birds that have been saved from extinction by people, adds Philip McGowan, a conservation scientist at Newcastle University in the UK. To assess the impacts of conservation actions, he and colleagues made a list of bird and mammal species that were listed as endangered or extinct in the wild on the IUCN Red List at any point since 1993.

For each species, they collected as much information as they could about population trends, pressures driving the species to extinction, and key decisions or actions taken to protect them. Over daylong Zoom calls, small groups of researchers hashed out the details before everyone assigned each species a score indicating how confident they were that conservation actions had influenced the species’ status.

For some birds, the researchers were able to definitively link conservation efforts with species survival. The Spix’s macaw, for example, has continued to exist only because it has been kept in captivity. And the California condor clearly benefited from the ban of lead ammunition, as well as captive breeding programs and reintroductions, among other measures.

But for other species, there was less certainty. The red-billed curassow of eastern Brazil, for one, faces threats of habitat fragmentation and hunting. Protected areas intended to safeguard it aren’t always well enforced, making it probable but less clear that conservation has helped the species.

Overall, the researchers reported in 2020, as many as 48 species of birds and mammals were saved from extinction between 1993 and 2020 (McGowan says that is likely to be an underestimate). The number of extinctions, the calculations showed, would have been three or four times higher or more without human intervention.

Those findings should offer hope and motivation to help more species, McGowan says. “If we look at what has worked, we know that we can avoid extinctions,” he says. “We just need to scale that up.”

Forging ahead

In 2020, the year after Marra and colleagues reported a loss of nearly a third of North American birds, they partnered with several conservation groups to launch the Road to Recovery Initiative. The project has identified 104 species of birds in the United States and Canada that need immediate help and, of those, 30 that are highly vulnerable to extinction because of extremely small population sizes or precipitous declines.

For each species, Marra says, it will be important to learn what’s behind their shrinking populations. Currently, he says, “we’re not approaching conservation from a species perspective. And people are nervous about doing that … they view it as being just too difficult. But I maintain that we can figure it out, just like we’ve done with … all the species that almost disappeared because of DDT. We have the power and the understanding with new science and with new quantitative skills to identify the causes of decline and to figure out how we can eliminate those.”

It will take political will to set aside resources and enact widescale changes, such as reducing chemical use on farms, Lees says. Saving more birds, he adds, would ideally entail focusing as much energy on woodlands and agricultural areas as governments have allocated to wetlands, as well as implementing conservation measures well before the point where a species is about to disappear. “What we’re not succeeding at doing,” he says, “is stopping lots of species from getting rarer.”

Policies need to acknowledge the interests of local communities, adds McGowan. That’s a key focus of a new international agreement that was forged at the end of 2022, when representatives from 188 governments met in Montreal for the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) and adopted a set of measures to stop biodiversity loss, restore ecosystems and protect Indigenous rights.

Involving local people can benefit biodiversity while respecting communities, McGowan says. In South America, for example, the yellow-eared parrot nearly went extinct, in part because people decimated palm groves, which are prime nesting habitats for the birds, to use the fronds in Palm Sunday processions. Successful conservation actions have included a community outreach campaign that encouraged people to stop cutting down wax palms and cease hunting the parrots. In 2003, the head of Colombia’s Catholic church halted a 200-year-old Palm Sunday tradition involving wax palms, and parrot numbers have since increased. “Working with local people meant that threat could be reduced,” McGowan says. Conservation, he says, should target the species that need action most urgently while ensuring that local people are not disenfranchised.

Better population estimates would help to inform conservation efforts, says Corey Callaghan, a global ecologist at the University of Florida in Davie. As it stands, wide margins of error are a problem, in part because estimating abundance is challenging and the sampling data are full of biases. Large birds are overrepresented in some types of citizen science data, Callaghan found in a 2021 study. And since contributors to the North American Breeding Bird Survey stand on the sides of roads in the daytime, Marra says, they miss nocturnal birds, marshland birds and birds that live in untouched landscapes.

Understanding and accounting for these biases could lead to better estimates, says Callaghan. In one example of how far off counts can be, total estimates of shorebirds called Asian dowitchers ranged from 14,000 to 23,000 — until a survey in 2019 tallied more than 22,000 of the birds on a single wetland in eastern China. Researchers can’t assess changes if they don’t have accurate baseline estimates, says Callaghan. To that end, he argues for more open sharing of databases and more integration of observations collected by researchers and citizen scientists. “If we want to preserve what we have around us,” he says, “we need to understand how much there is and how much we’re losing.”

As more data emerge, researchers urge optimism. “It’s really important not to have a doomsayer sort of position,” Lees says. Conservation has saved very rare species from extinction, he notes, and reversed declines in once-common species.

“Conservation,” he says, “does work.”

Amid the bad news, some bird success stories

Despite widespread signs of trouble, some birds are doing great.

Take, for example, the black-browed albatross, a seabird with a range throughout the southern oceans that encompasses Chile, Antarctica and Australia. Albatrosses like to hang around fishing boats and they often die after getting tangled up in baited hooks. But simple measures — like shielding hooks or putting colorful strings on fishing lines to scare the birds away — have dramatically reduced the accidental snagging of these birds in some places, including by more than 90 percent in South Africa. Today, some half a million pairs of black-browed albatrosses breed on the Falkland Islands alone, according to BirdLife International. Worldwide, there are 1.4 million mature adults, and numbers are growing.

The Cook’s petrel, a resident of New Zealand, is another seabird that has benefited from conservation measures — in this case, the eradication of rats, cats and other invasive predators from the bird’s small breeding islands. It is still classified as vulnerable because its range is small, but success of the birds’ fledglings has increased from 5 percent to 70 percent, and the population is rebounding.

In India, community outreach ended the unsustainable hunting of more than 100,000 Amur falcons each year, stabilizing what is thought to have been a rapidly declining population. And Kirtland’s warbler numbers rose from 200 to 2,300 breeding pairs after protections were enacted both in their breeding grounds in Michigan and their wintering grounds in the Bahamas. In 2019, the birds were removed from the US Fish and Wildlife Services endangered species list.

These and other stories of rebound and growth show that the actions we take can make the difference between a struggling species and a thriving one, says Alexander Lees, a conservation biologist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. “There are lots and lots of exciting examples of success.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: ten golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the last few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.

An international team of scientists recently took a close look at the lumps, which had been first collected more than a century ago by resin traders and then housed at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Many of the insects encased within them were stingless bees, tropical pollinators that can get stuck in the sticky substance while gathering it to construct nests. Three of the species still live in Africa, but two had such a unique combination of features that last year, the scientists reported them to be new to science: Axestotrigona kitingae and Hypotrigona kleineri.

Species discoveries can be joyous occasions, but not in this case. Eastern African forests have nearly disappeared in the past century, and neither bee species has been spotted in surveys conducted in the area since the 1990s, noted coauthor and entomologist Michael Engel, who recently moved from a position at the University of Kansas to the American Museum of Natural History. Given that these social bees are usually abundant, it’s unlikely that the people looking for insects had simply missed them. Sometime in the last 50 to 60 years, Engel suspects, the bees vanished along with their habitat.

“It seems trivial on a planet with millions of species to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, you documented two stingless bees that were lost,’” Engel said. “But it’s really far more troubling than that,” he added, because scientists increasingly recognize that extinction is “a very common phenomenon.”

The stingless bees are part of an overlooked but growing trend of species that are already deemed extinct by the time they’re discovered. Scientists have identified new species of bats, birds, beetles, fish, frogs, snails, orchids, lichen, marsh plants, and wildflowers by studying old museum specimens, only to find that they are at risk of vanishing or may not exist in the wild anymore. Such discoveries illustrate how little is still known about Earth’s biodiversity and the mounting scale of extinctions. They also hint at the silent extinctions among species that haven’t yet been described — what scientists call dark extinctions.

It’s critical to identify undescribed species and the threats they face, said Martin Cheek, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, because if experts and policymakers don’t know an endangered species exists, they can’t take action to preserve it. With no way to count how many undescribed species are going extinct, researchers also risk underestimating the scale of human-caused extinctions — including the loss of ecologically vital species like pollinators. And if species go extinct unnoticed, scientists also miss the chance to capture the complete richness of life on Earth for future generations. “I think we want to have a full assessment of humans’ impact on nature,” said theoretical ecologist Ryan Chisholm of the National University of Singapore. “And to do that, we need to take account of these dark extinctions as well as the extinctions that we know about.”

Many scientists agree that humans have pushed extinctions higher than the natural rate of species turnover, but nobody knows the actual toll. In the tens of millions of years before humans came along, scientists estimate that for every 10,000 species, between 0.1 and 2 went extinct each century. (Even these rates are uncertain because many species didn’t leave behind fossils.) Some studies suggest that extinction rates picked up at least in the past 10,000 years as humans expanded across the globe, hunting large mammals along the way.

Islands were particularly hard hit, for instance in the Pacific, where Polynesian settlers introduced pigs and rats that wiped out native species. Then, starting in the 16th century, contact with European explorers caused additional extinctions in many places by intensifying habitat loss and the introduction of invasive species — issues that often continued in places that became colonies. But again, scientists have a poor record of biodiversity during this time; some species’ extinctions were only recognized much later, most famously the dodo, which had disappeared by 1700 after 200 years of Europeans hunting and then settling on the island in the Indian Ocean island it inhabited.

Key drivers of extinction, such as industrialization, have ramped up ever since. For the past century, some scientists have estimated an average of 200 extinctions per 10,000 species— levels so high that they believe they portend a mass extinction, a term reserved for geological events of the scale of the ordeal that annihalated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Yet some scientists, including the authors of those estimates, caution that even these numbers are conservative. The figures are based on the Red List compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, a bookkeeper of species and their conservation statuses. As several experts have noted, the organization is slow to declare species extinct, wary that if the classification is wrong, they may cause threatened species to lose protections.

The Red List doesn’t include undescribed species, which some estimate could account for roughly 86 percent of the possibly 8.7 million species on Earth. That’s partly due to the sheer numbers of the largest species groups like invertebrates, plants, and fungi, especially in the little-explored regions around the tropics. It’s also because there are increasingly fewer experts to describe them due to a widespread lack of funding and training, noted conservation ecologist Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ocampo-Peñuela told Undark that she has no doubt that many species are going extinct without anyone noticing. “I think it is a phenomenon that will continue to happen and that it maybe has happened a lot more than we realize,” she said.

Studies of animal and plant specimens in museum and herbaria collections can uncover some of these dark extinctions. This can happen when scientists take a closer look at or conduct DNA analysis on specimens believed to represent known species and realize that these have actually been mislabeled, and instead represent new species that haven’t been seen in the wild in decades. Such a case unfolded recently for the ichthyologist Wilson Costa of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who has long studied the diversity of killifish inhabiting southeastern Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. These fish live in shady, tea-colored acidic pools that form during the rainy season and lay eggs that survive through the dry period. These fragile conditions make these species extremely vulnerable to changes in water supply or deforestation, Costa wrote to Undark via email.

In 2019, Costa discovered that certain fish specimens collected in the 1980s weren’t members of Leptopanchax splendens, as previously believed, but actually represented a new species, which he called Leptopanchax sanguineus. With a few differences, both fish sport alternating red and metallic blue stripes on their flanks. While Leptopanchax splendens is critically endangered, Leptopanchax sanguineus hasn’t been spotted at all since its last collection in 1987. Pools no longer form where it was first found, probably because a nearby breeding facility for ornamental fish has diverted the water supply, said Costa, who has already witnessed the extinctions of several killifish species. “In the case discussed here, it was particularly sad because it is a species with unique characteristics and unusual beauty,” he added, “the product of millions of years of evolution stupidly interrupted.”

Similar discoveries have come from undescribed specimens, which exist in troves for diverse and poorly-studied groups of species, such as the land snails that have evolved across Pacific Islands. The mollusk specialist Alan Solem estimated in 1990 that, of roughly 200 Hawaiian species of one snail family, the Endodontidae, in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum, fewer than 40 had been described. All but a few are now likely extinct, said University of Hawaii biologist Robert Cowie, perhaps because invasive ants feasted off the snails’ eggs, which this snail family carries in a cavity underneath their shells. Meanwhile, Cheek said he’s publishing more and more new plant species from undescribed herbaria specimens that are likely already extinct in the wild.

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to identify species based on individual specimens, noted botanist Naomi Fraga, who directs conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden. And describing new species is not often a research priority. Studies that report new species aren’t often cited by other scientists, and they typically also don’t help towards pulling in new funding, both of which are key to academic success, Cheek said. One 2012 study concluded it takes an average of 21 years for a collected species to be formally described in the scientific literature. The authors added that if these difficulties — and the general dearth of taxonomists — persist, experts will continue to find extinct species in museum collections, “just as astronomers observe stars that vanished thousands of years ago.”

Museum records may only represent a fraction of undescribed species, causing some scientists to worry that many species could disappear unnoticed. For some groups, like snails, this is less likely, as extinct species may leave behind a shell that serves as a record of their existence even if collectors weren’t around to collect live specimens, noted Cowie. For instance, this allowed scientists to identify nine new and already-extinct species of helicinid land snails by combing the Gambier Islands in the Pacific for empty shells and combining these with specimens that already existed in museums. However, Cowie worries about the many invertebrates such as insects and spiders that won’t leave behind long-lasting physical remains. “What I worry about is that all this squishy biodiversity will just vanish without leaving a trace, and we’ll never know existed,” Cowie said.

Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that it’s precisely the newly described species that tend to have the highest risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now being discovered because they’re rare, isolated, or both — factors that also make them easier to wipe out, said Fraga. In 2018 in Guinea, for instance, botanist Denise Molmou of the National Herbarium of Guinea in Conakry discovered a new plant species which, like many of its relatives, appeared to inhabit a single waterfall, enveloping rocks amid the bubbly, air-rich water. Molmou was the last known person to see it alive.

Just before her team published their findings in the Kew Bulletin last year, Cheek looked at the waterfall’s location on Google Earth. A reservoir, created by a hydroelectric dam downriver, had flooded the waterfall, surely drowning any plants there, Cheek said. “Had we not got in there, and Denise had not gotten that specimen, we would not know that that species existed,” he added. “I felt sick, I felt, you know, it’s hopeless, like what’s the point?” Even if the team had known at the point of discovery that the dam was going to wipe it out, Cheek said, “it’d be quite difficult to do anything about it.”

While extinction is likely for many of these cases, it’s often hard to prove. The IUCN requires targeted searches to declare an extinction — something that Costa is still planning on doing for the killifish, four years after its discovery. But these surveys cost money, and aren’t always possible.

Meanwhile, some scientists have turned to computational techniques to estimate the scale of dark extinction, by extrapolating rates of species discovery and extinctions among known species. When Chisholm’s group applied this method to the estimated 195 species of birds in Singapore, they estimated that 9.6 undescribed species have vanished from the area in the past 200 years, in addition to the disappearance of 58 known species. For butterflies in Singapore, accounting for dark extinction roughly doubled the extinction toll of 132 known species.

Using similar approaches, a different research team estimated that the proportion of dark extinctions could account for up to just over a half of all extinctions, depending on the region and species group. Of course, “the main challenge in estimating dark extinction is that it is exactly that: an estimate. We can never be sure,” noted Quentin Cronk, a botanist of the University of British Columbia who has produced similar estimates.

Considering the current trends, some scientists doubt whether it’s even possible to name all species before they go extinct. To Cowie, who expressed little optimism extinctions will abate, the priority should be collecting species, especially invertebrates, from the wild so there will at least be museum specimens to mark their existence. “It’s sort of doing a disservice to our descendants if we let everything just vanish such that 200 years from now, nobody would know the biodiversity — the true biodiversity — that had evolved in the Amazon, for instance,” he said. “I want to know what lives and lived on this Earth,” he continued. “And it’s not just dinosaurs and mammoths and what have you; it’s all these little things that make the world go round.”

Other scientists, like Fraga, find hope in the fact that the presumption of extinction is just that — a presumption. As long as there’s still habitat, there’s a slim chance that species deemed extinct can be rediscovered and returned to healthy populations. In 2021, Japanese scientists stumbled across the fairy lantern Thismia kobensis, a fleshy orange flower only known from a single specimen collected in 1992. Now efforts are underway to protect its location and cultivate specimens for conservation.

Fraga is tracking down reported sightings of a monkeyflower species she identified in herbaria specimens: Erythranthe marmorata, which has bright yellow petals with red spots. Ultimately, she said, species are not just names. They are participants of ecological networks, upon which many other species, including humans, depend.

“We don’t want museum specimens,” she said. “We want to have thriving ecosystems and habitats. And in order to do that, we need to make sure that these species are thriving in, you know, populations in their ecological context, not just living in a museum.”

Katarina Zimmer is a science journalist. Her work has been published in The Scientist, National Geographic, Grist, Outside Magazine, and more.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Out in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 100 kilometers off the northwest coast of Africa, lies an archipelago known as the Canary Islands, created millions of years ago by intense volcanic activity. The biggest and most populated island, Tenerife, rises from the deep-ocean floor to a series of peaks, one of which is the third-largest volcano in the world. Tenerife’s interior highlands are a moonscape, while its coastline of lava rock and sheer cliffs is pounded by surf. In contrast to most of the island’s stark geology, north of the island’s capital, Santa Cruz, is a long crescent-shaped beach of soft yellow sand, with groves of palm trees and a calm bay created by a long breakwater. This is Playa de las Teresitas, a magnet for northern European tourists craving winter sun.

But most of the people sunbathing on Teresitas are likely unaware of what lurks in the shallow waters lapping the shoreline. The bay—engineered and less than 10 kilometers from the Canaries’ second-largest city—is a surprising haven for pups of one of the world’s most critically endangered fish: the angelshark.

When the Spanish took control of the Canaries in the 1400s, they began cultivating cash crops: cochineal and sugar cane in the beginning, and later adding bananas, tomatoes, and other valuable commodities. For centuries, the islands’ economy thrived, but it was a fragile wealth. Over the years, livelihoods were threatened by cycles of crop disease, competition from cheaper markets, and lava flows that wiped out harvests and turned good agricultural land into barren terrain. In the 1950s, the boom in package tourism showed promise as a new cash crop. But while the islands had the sunshine, warm climate, and ease of access from Europe needed for this new industry, they were missing a vital element: picture-postcard sandy beaches.

Cue planners on Tenerife, who concocted an audacious plan to make over one of the island’s exposed lava-rock beaches. They chose a stretch of coastline close to Santa Cruz and expropriated the avocado farms and other smallholdings. Earthmovers leveled the foreshore and intertidal zone, and they constructed a breakwater over a kilometer long. And then, from the Western Sahara on Africa’s northwest coast, they shipped in the pièce de résistance: 240,000 tonnes of sand.

By 1973, this gargantuan project, environmentally questionable from today’s viewpoint, was complete. As anticipated, tourists arrived. Unanticipated was what their presence gave to one of the world’s most endangered fish species—visibility. Maybe angelsharks always gathered here, but until recently, no one really knew.

Along Playa de las Teresitas, rows and rows of tourists lounge on beach chairs under umbrellas or pad across soft sand to cool down in the water. The breeze creates tiny sapphire-tipped waves on the water’s surface, a magical cover for what lies beneath—an angelshark nursery.

Female angelsharks regularly migrate to these ideally sheltered waters to give birth to anywhere between eight and 25 live pups, who remain in the shallows for about a year. Feeding on cuttlefish and other small prey, they grow to around 50 centimeters, about the same length as a newborn baby. Then they disappear for years until they are mature. Where they go is a mystery.For centuries, angelsharks had been common along the Atlantic coast of North Africa and Europe, as well as the Mediterranean. The ancient Greeks fished them; Pliny the Elder described the use of their skin to polish wood and ivory. On the British Isles, they were called monkfish for their resemblance to a monk’s hooded robes. With the advent of industrial bottom trawling in the late 1800s, they were easily caught and became a common food fish. By the 1960s, aggressive fishing of angelsharks, coupled with their extremely low reproductive rate, led to a dramatic decline in their populations. Targeting them eventually became commercially unviable and the name monkfish was relegated to another species, the anglerfish.

But angelsharks were still by-catch in other fisheries, and by the early 1970s, as developers barged Saharan sand to Tenerife, the fish were pushed close to extinction in most parts of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

In the European Union and the United Kingdom, it has become illegal to fish or retain angelsharks. If one is accidentally caught, fishers must return it alive to the sea. But the main threat to angelsharks remains the powerful bottom-trawling industry, which accounts for over 30 percent of fish landed in the European Union.

The story in the Canary Islands is slightly different. Michael Sealey, a marine biologist with the Angel Shark Project (ASP) in Tenerife, says that bottom trawling has never been as viable in the Canaries as in most of Europe and the Mediterranean. The seabed is mostly too deep, he explains, the underwater topography laced with jagged seamounts and reefs where fishing gear can get hung up. On top of that, the European Commission has halted all trawling in the Canaries since 2005.

But biologists only became aware about a decade ago that the Canaries host an angelshark population. Subsequently, in 2014, the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Museum Koenig Bonn, and Zoological Society of London collaborated to establish ASP. The project’s goal: to gather data on critical habitats, movement patterns, and reproductive biology of angelsharks, and work with local communities and officials to protect the fish. Life history information is crucial for developing effective conservation strategies and protecting valuable, if improbable, habitat—like Playa de las Teresitas.

But angelsharks are not the easiest of research subjects. They are masters of disguise, so spotting them is a challenge. They have a peculiar flattened shape and spend most of their time lying on the ocean bottom partially covered by sand. Their coloring—reddish- or greenish-brown scattered with small white spots—helps them blend into the seabed.

Gathering data on such elusive animals, with low population densities spread over a huge area, is labor intensive. Help has come in the form of citizen science: everywhere in the Canary Islands, recreational divers and fishers are invited to make online reports of any sightings or accidental catches of angelsharks. Through an ASP initiative, dive operators conduct friendly competitions to see which company can record the most sightings, thereby increasing data collection, particularly from citizen scientists.

Rubén Martinez, a dive instructor in Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Canaries, is a keen advocate of angelsharks and regularly volunteers for ASP surveys. He helps with procedures such as tagging the fish with either spaghetti tags—an easily attached plastic loop—or acoustic tags. Both are done on the spot without having to catch the fish or lift it out of the water. “We work in a team and practice beforehand,” Martinez says. After an angelshark has been spotted in the sand, the team places a mesh attached to a sturdy frame over the animal. They take a small sample of fin for DNA analysis and attach a tag to the base of the dorsal fin. The whole procedure, when done properly, takes less than a minute.

Surveys have shown that other beaches in the Canary Islands are also potential nursery sites. Interestingly, most of them have been altered, like Teresitas, to make them more attractive to people. On Lanzarote, Playa Chica boasts another long sweep of imported sand. It’s a magnet for divers—as well as a spectacular and easily accessible site—so the number of sightings of mature angelsharks off this shoreline is one of highest in the whole archipelago. How do the sharks react to these shoals of wetsuited humans? Alba Esteban Pacheco, a biologist and former dive instructor with Euro Divers Lanzarote, admits that while there have been instances of divers getting too close to the sharks, most dive companies are sensitive in this regard and brief their clients well. They have little choice: in 2019, Spain introduced legislation in the Canaries that made disturbing the sharks or harming their habitat and breeding grounds a criminal act subject to large fines.

Pacheco is very clear that she keeps her dive clients at least the recommended one meter distance from any angelsharks they find hiding in the sand. “Also,” she says, “these days, with everyone videoing everything and posting it on social media, it’s hard for divers to step out of line.”

But is this enough? Eva Meyers, a cofounder of ASP, acknowledges that the diving community plays a crucial role in conservation of the species. But she adds that much more needs to be done to ensure the long-term survival of angelsharks in areas like Playa Chica.

A recovery plan ASP developed with local authorities is in the final stages. It will include measures such as signage along sensitive coastlines and establishing a code of conduct for divers throughout the Canaries.

Among international dive communities, the word is out about the chance to see mature angelsharks in the Canaries, and this is a growing part of the tourism sector. Indeed, shark diving all over the world is a boon to economies. It generates over US $24-million yearly in the Canaries. Globally, shark-diving tourism generates over $300-million yearly, and local communities benefit much more from shark diving than from shark fishing. In some cases, this has led to the creation of marine reserves, such as in Fiji, which help other marine species as well.

Many divers may now be cognizant of the fragility of the angelshark population, but what about all those people splashing about and swimming in the all-important nursery areas just off the beaches? Sealey thinks that human activity in the shallow nursery areas influences angelshark behavior. On busy beaches like Teresitas, juveniles normally retreat to deeper water during the day when lots of people are around. During the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions kept people off the beach. After almost two years of peace, angelsharks seemed unprepared for the people wading back into the water, as swimmers reported an unusual number of bites soon after restrictions lifted. The fish rely on their camouflage for protection, but when stepped on, they might lunge up from their hiding place and bite, though they usually swim away. Known locally as “gummings,” the bites are not serious and rarely draw blood. But the increase in gummings was an indication that the juveniles had adapted to remaining hidden in the shallows 24/7 to conserve energy. Post-pandemic, angelsharks have adapted again, by heading into deeper water earlier in the day and avoiding interactions with humans, as do many other urban wildlife species.

Back in the 1970s, did angelsharks also adapt to the Canaries’ headlong efforts to redesign itself for tourists? It’s intriguing to think that the massive, environmentally disruptive projects to remake beaches could have accidentally enhanced the habitat for one of the world’s rare fish species. But what’s clear is that after the breakwater was built and the sand arrived, people followed, and in the calm, shallow waters they began to see baby angelsharks. And unlike how many an association between humans and wildlife ends—in conflict and dead animals—this time it led to conservation.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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On May 9, a baby California condor hatched at Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation, education, and conservation organization in Phoenix, Arizona. The hatching is a ray of hope and welcome good news for the struggling species that was only recently brought back from the brink of extinction. 

Only 22 condors were believed to be alive during the 1980s after a maelstrom of habitat loss, poaching, lead poisoning accidents with power lines, and the insecticide DDT. Currently, about 275 wild birds are cruising the skies about California, Utah, Arizona, and Baja California, Mexico, more than 160 are in captivity, and more than 400 live worldwide. 

[Related: Inside the Yurok Tribe’s mission to make critically endangered condors thrive.]

The largest bird species in North America and a crucial part of the ecosystem, California condors are considered sacred to many indigenous peoples. The Yurok Tribe of the Pacific Northwest call California condors “prey-go-neesh,” and say the birds have been tied to the Yurok Hlkelonah, or the cultural and ecological landscape, since the beginning of time. The tribe has officially been a driving force on condor reintroduction since 2008. 

Now, these sacred and important birds face a grave threat in the form of a tiny pathogen. Highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1), also called bird flu, is threatening condors at an alarming rate. It was first detected in the California condor in late March, and more than 20 are known to have died since. 

“It is scary particularly for endangered species like the California condors. It has the ability to wipe out an entire species,” Liberty Wildlife’s Animal Care Coordinator Jan Miller tells PopSci. 

One of the birds that succumbed to the disease was the new hatchling’s mother, part of a breeding pair of wild California condors. The mother was found acting suspicious in a cave near the Grand Canyon and was brought to Liberty Wildlife due to suspected bird flu. She died eight days later.  

“Using telemetry, it was assumed that she had laid an egg, probably between March 13 and March 17, and it was predicted to hatch between May 9 and May 17,” Liberty Wildlife’s Executive Director Megan Mosby tells PopSci. “The limited movement of the male led to the assumption that he was trying to incubate an egg.  The biologists at the Arizona Vermilion Cliff site decided that it wasn’t safe for the male, a known breeder, to attempt to raise a chick solo and feed himself, especially in a dank, cool cave … a perfect place for flu contamination.”

[Related: Spy tech and rigged eggs help scientists study the secret lives of animals.]

Biologists brought the egg back to Liberty Wildlife, where it was monitored in a structure called a brooder.  When the egg began to “pip,” the Los Angeles Zoo’s propagation team advised Liberty Wildlife on best practices for monitoring the hatchling’s progress. The team noticed that the chick was in the wrong position in the egg due to where it had pipped, or poked through its membrane, and that it would need assistance in order for the hatch to be successful. 

“Veterinarian Dr. Stephanie Lamb assisted in the freeing of the baby from the egg and the operation was successful.  After a health check, a swab to test for Avian Flu was obtained, and the chick was placed in an incubator with a surrogate (stuffed animal) ‘mother’ condor,” Miller says. 

The hatchling was negative for bird flu and continued to eat solid food and bond with her surrogate plush parent. According to Mosby, the team was excited to find out she was female because 11 of the 21 condors that have died due to bird flu were breeding age females.

On May 17, she was flown to The Peregrine Fund in Boise, Idaho. There she will be raised by foster parents so that she can one day be released back into Arizona’s skies.  

“At this age it is very easy for the chick to imprint on humans so getting her with her own species is critical to her releasability,” says Miller. “The Peregrine Fund has a very advanced propagation department with proven foster parents to help raise chicks for release into the wild. It is a very large operation with proven results.”

According to the team, vultures like the California condor are not only intelligent, but are incredibly necessary to help clean up the environment since they handle dead and decaying animals that can spread disease. 

“Vultures are part of the natural cleanup crew in nature. They deserve every fair chance they can get to continue to survive and be a part of this world,” says Miller. 

In addition to this welcome hatchling’s continued success this week, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service approved the emergency use of bird flu vaccine on May 16. The Yurok Tribe called this move, “a huge step in the effort to combat this virulent threat, but still a long road ahead.”

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Scientists in Australia have just begun vaccinating wild koalas against chlamydia. This field trial in the state of New South Wales is an effort to protect one of Australia’s most beloved animals against the disease that can cause blindness, infertility, and death. The chlamydia epidemic in koalas has been ravaging populations of the marsupial since the 1990s. 

[Related: A new vaccine may curb the koala chlamydia epidemic.]

Koalas along the east and southeast Australian coasts have been particularly affected, with some populations having infection rates of up to 100 percent. In 2021, Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital veterinarian and research coordinator Amber Gillett called chlamydia one of the most significant threats to koalas and treatment after infection is not enough to save them. “Although many koalas with chlamydia can be treated using traditional antibiotics, some animals cannot be saved due to the severity of their infection. Having a vaccine that can help prevent both infection and the severity of the disease is a critical element in the species’ conservation management.”

While origins of the disease is koalas aren’t fully confirmed, but scientists believe that marsupials possibly caught the disease from exposure to the feces from infected cattle and sheep. Chlamydia then spread via sexual contact or was passed from mother to offspring.  

This single-shot vaccine has been designed just for koalas and was tested in a few hundred fluffy specimens in wildlife rescue centers. For this new field trial, the team hopes to catch, vaccinate, and subsequently monitor about half of the koala population living in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales–about 50 koalas. 

“It’s killing koalas because they become so sick they can’t climb trees to get food, or escape predators, and females can become infertile,” Samuel Phillips, a microbiologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast who helped to develop the new vaccine, told the Associated Press.

The first koalas were caught and vaccinated in March, and the effort is expected to last for three months. To find them, the team spots koalas in eucalyptus trees to then build circular enclosures around the base of the trees with doors that lead into cages. Eventually, the koalas climb down from one tree to get more eucalyptus leaves from another tree and wander into the traps.

They are then given a check-up to assess their health and given anesthesia before getting the vaccine. They are kept under observation for 24 hours after waking up to check for unexpected side effects, according to Jodie Wakeman, the veterinary care and clinical director at Friends of the Koala. The nonprofit organization runs a wildlife hospital where the koalas are getting vaccinated.

[Related: How to handle a koala-chlamydia epidemic.]

The koalas are marked with a pink dye on their backs so that the same animals are not caught twice before being released back into the wild. 

Australia’s federal government declared that the koalas in the eastern regions of New South Wales, Queensland, and the Australian Capital Territory were endangered. A 2020 report from the New South Wales government found that the unique creatures could become extinct by 2050 due to disease, road collisions, and habitat loss. Climate change is only exacerbating the problem.

The trial was approved by multiple Australian governing bodies balancing the risk of disturbing the marsupials against the danger of allowing chlamydia to continue to spread unchecked. It is one of only a few worldwide examples of scientists attempting to inoculate endangered wildlife for the purposes of conservation. In 2016, a team began to vaccinate Hawaiian monk seals morbillivirus and in 2020, biologists in Brazil started vaccinating golden lion tamarins against yellow fever.

“Vaccination for wildlife is certainly not routine yet,” Jacob Negrey, a biologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine told the AP. “But whether it should be used more often is a fundamental question that conservation biologists are really wrangling with right now.”

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It wasn’t snakes on a plane to the Pacific islands of Tahiti and Moorea, but some very special snails. Over 5,000 of partula snails bred and raised at zoos in London, Scotland, and Missouri were flown over 9,000 miles to be reintroduced in the wild. 

[Related from PopSci+: Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering.]

These ‘extinct in the wild’ partula snails (also called Polynesian tree snails) eat decaying plant tissue and fungi. They also play an important role in maintaining forest health. When invasive African giant land snails took over some islands in French Polynesia, the rosy wolf snail was introduced to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the rosy snails hunted down the native partula snails instead.

Returning partula snails back to the wild, in coordination with the French Polynesian Government’s Direction de l’environnement, is a step towards restoring some ecological balance in these islands.

“Despite their small size, these snails are of great cultural, ecological and scientific importance— they’re the Darwin’s finches of the snail world, having been researched for more than a century due to their isolated habitat providing the perfect conditions to study evolution,” the London Zoological Society curator of invertebrates Paul Pearce-Kell said in a statement. 

The nocturnal snails that measure less than an inch long were individually marked with a dot of red reflective paint before being released, so that the conservationists can track them better. The team reintroduced eight species and subspecies classified as Extinct-in-the-wild, Critically Endangered, or Vulnerable.

In the early 1990s, the last few surviving individuals of several Partula species were rescued and brought back to the London and Edinburgh Zoos for an international conservation breeding program that brought together 15 zoos. 

“After decades of work caring for these species in conservation zoos—and working with the Direction de l’environnement to prepare the islands for their return—we began releasing Partula snails back into the wild nine years ago,” said Pearce-Kell.

[Release: Large, destructive snails have invaded Florida.]

Eleven snail species have since been saved, including the last known individual of the Partula taeniata sumulans. This lone snail was brought to Edinburgh zoo in 2010 and was bred back to several hundred individuals. Unfortunately, the Partula faba wasn’t as lucky. The nine individuals at Edinburgh could not successfully breed in captivity and the species became extinct in 2016.

The zoos worked with the French Polynesian government to prepare the islands for their return to the wild nine years ago.

“Since then, we’ve reintroduced over 21,000 Partula snails to the islands, including 11 Extinct-in-the-wild species and sub-species: this year’s was the largest reintroduction so far, thanks to the incredible work of our international team efforts with collaborators,” said Pearce-Kell.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

From the brightly colored poison frogs of South America to the prehistoric-looking newts of the Western US, the world is filled with beautiful, deadly amphibians. Just a few milligrams of the newt’s tetrodotoxin can be fatal, and some of those frogs make the most potent poisons found in nature.

In recent years, scientists have become increasingly interested in studying poisonous amphibians and are starting to unravel the mysteries they hold. How is it, for example, that the animals don’t poison themselves along with their would-be predators? And how exactly do the ones that ingest toxins in order to make themselves poisonous move those toxins from their stomachs to their skin?

Even the source of the poison is sometimes unclear. While some amphibians get their toxins from their diet, and many poisonous organisms get theirs from symbiotic bacteria living on their skin, still others may or may not make the toxins themselves — which has led scientists to rethink some classic hypotheses.

Deadly defenses

Over the long arc of evolution, animals have often turned to poisons as a means of defense. Unlike venoms — which are injected via fang, stinger, barb, or some other specialized structure for offensive or defensive purposes — poisons are generally defensive toxins a creature makes that must be ingested or absorbed before they take effect.

Amphibians tend to store their poisons in or on their skin, presumably to increase the likelihood that a potential predator is deterred or incapacitated before it can eat or grievously wound them. Many of their most powerful toxins — like tetrodotoxin, epibatidine and the bufotoxins originally found in toads — are poisons that interfere with proteins in cells, or mimic key signaling molecules, thus disrupting normal function.

That makes them highly effective deterrents against a wide range of predators, but it comes with a problem: The poisonous animals also have those susceptible proteins — so why don’t they get poisoned too?

It’s a question that evolutionary biologist Rebecca Tarvin took up when she was a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Tarvin opted to study epibatidine, one of the most potent poisons of the thousand-plus known poison frog compounds. It’s found in frogs such as Anthony’s poison arrow frog (Epipedobates anthonyi), a small, ruddy creature with light-greenish-white splotches and stripes. Epibatidine binds to and activates a receptor for a nerve-signaling molecule called acetylcholine. This improper activation can cause seizures, paralysis and, eventually, death.

Tarvin hypothesized that the frogs, like some other poisonous animals, had evolved resistance to the toxin. She and her colleagues identified mutations in the genes for the acetylcholine receptor in three groups of poison frogs, then compared the activity of the receptor with and without the mutation in frog eggs. The mutations slightly changed the receptor’s shape, the team found, making epibatidine bind less effectively and limiting its neurotoxic effects.

That helps to solve one problem, but it presents another: The mutations would also prevent acetylcholine itself from binding effectively, which would disrupt normal nervous system functions. To address this second problem, Tarvin found, the three groups of frogs each have another mutation in the receptor protein that again changes the receptor’s shape in a way that allows acetylcholine to bind but still rejects epibatidine. “This is a series of very slight tweaks,” Tarvin says, which make the receptor less sensitive to epibatidine while still allowing acetylcholine to perform its usual neural duties.

Tarvin, now at the University of California, Berkeley, is researching how animals evolve to cope with toxins, using a more tractable experimental organism, the fruit fly. To that end, she and her colleagues fed food containing toxic nicotine to two lineages of fruit flies that differed in their ability to break down nicotine.

When the researchers exposed fly larvae to predators — parasitic wasps that laid eggs in the flies — both groups of flies were protected by the nicotine they ate, which killed off some of the developing parasites. But only the faster-metabolizing flies benefited from their toxic diet, because the slower-metabolizing flies suffered more from nicotine poisoning themselves.

Tarvin and her students are now working on an experiment to see if they can induce the evolution of adaptations, such as those she identified in the frogs’ proteins, by exposing generations of flies to nicotine and wasps, then breeding the flies that survive.

Fishing for poisons

Poisonous animals must do more than survive their own toxins; many of them also need a way to safely transport them in their bodies to where they’re needed for protection. Poison frogs, for instance — which obtain their toxins from certain ants and mites in their diet — must ship the toxins from their gut to skin glands.

Aurora Alvarez-Buylla, a biology PhD student at Stanford University, has been trying to nail down which genes and proteins the frogs use for this shipping. To do so, Alvarez-Buylla and her colleagues used a small molecule she describes as a “fishing hook” to catch proteins that bind to a toxin — pumiliotoxin — that the frogs ingest. One end of the hook is shaped like pumiliotoxin, while the other end bears a fluorescent dye. When a protein that would normally bind to pumiliotoxin instead latches onto the similar hook, the dye allows the researchers to identify the protein.

Alvarez-Buylla expected her hook to catch proteins similar to saxiphilin, which is thought to play a role in transporting toxins in frogs, or other proteins that transport vitamins. (Vitamins, like toxins, are usually scavenged from the diet and then moved around the body.) Instead, she and her fellow researchers found a new protein, similar to a human protein that transports the hormone cortisol. This new transporter, they found, can bind to multiple different toxic alkaloids found in different species of poison frogs. The similarity suggests that the frogs have borrowed the hormone-transporting system to also transport toxins, says Lauren O’Connell, Alvarez-Buylla’s PhD advisor at Stanford and a coauthor of the paper, which is still to be formally peer-reviewed.

This may explain why the frogs aren’t poisoned by the toxins, O’Connell says. Hormones often become active only when an enzyme cleaves their carrier, releasing the hormone into the bloodstream. Similarly, the new protein may bind to pumiliotoxin and other toxins and prevent them from coming into contact with parts of the frog nervous system where they could cause harm. Only when the toxins reach the right spot in the frogs’ skin would the toxin-carrying protein release them, into skin glands where they can be safely stored.

In future work, the scientists aim to understand exactly how the new protein can bind to several different types of toxins. Other known toxin-binding proteins, like saxiphilin, tend to bind tightly to just a single toxin. “What’s special about this protein is that it’s a little bit promiscuous in who it binds to, but also there’s some selectivity there,” says O’Connell. “How does that work?”

Turning toxic

While poison frogs definitively get their toxins from the food they eat, the source of toxins used by other poisonous amphibians is not always clear-cut. Amphibians such as toads, it appears, may make their own poisons.

To show this, TJ Firneno, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Denver, and his colleagues manually emptied the toxin glands of 10 species of toads by squeezing the glands (“It’s like popping a zit,” Firneno says, and is harmless to the toads), then looked at which genes were most active in those glands 48 hours later. The hypothesis, says Firneno, was that genes especially active after the glands are emptied could be involved in toxin synthesis.

Firneno and his colleagues identified several activated genes that are known to be part of metabolic pathways for creating molecules related to toxins in plants and insects. The genes they identified, Firneno says, can help point scientists in the right direction for further investigations into how toads may make their toxins.

Other amphibians may rely on symbiotic bacteria for their toxins. In the United States, newts of the genus Taricha are among the country’s most toxic animals. Though they look harmless, individual newts from some populations of these ancient creatures contain enough tetrodotoxin to kill numerous people. Many scientists believed the newts made the toxin themselves. But when a team of researchers collected bacteria from the newts’ skin, then cultured individual microbial strains, they found four types of tetrodotoxin-producing bacteria on the amphibians’ skin. That’s similar to other tetrodotoxin-containing species, such as crabs and sea urchins, where scientists agree that bacteria are the source of the toxin.

The origin of the toxin in these newts has broader ramifications, because they — and the garter snakes that eat them — are poster animals for what has been considered a classic example of coevolution. The snakes’ ability to eat the highly toxic newts is evidence that they have coevolved with the newts, gaining resistance so that they can continue to eat them, some scientists think. Meanwhile, the newts, the idea goes, have been evolving ever-greater toxicity to try and keep the snakes at bay. Scientists refer to this kind of escalating competition as an evolutionary arms race.

But in order for the newts to participate in such an arms race, they have to have genetic control of the amount of toxin they produce so that natural selection can act, says Gary Bucciarelli, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis, who coauthored a re-evaluation of the arms race idea in the 2022 Annual Review of Animal Biosciences. If the tetrodotoxin actually comes from bacteria on the newts’ skin, it’s harder to see how the newts could turn up the toxicity. The newts could conceivably coerce the bacteria to pump out more tetrodotoxin, Bucciarelli says, but there’s no evidence that this happens. “It’s certainly not this very tightly linked, antagonistic relationship between newts and garter snakes,” he says.

Indeed, at the field sites where Bucciarelli works in California, he’s never actually witnessed a garter snake eating a newt. “If you follow the literature, you’d think that there are snakes just picking off newts like crazy at the edge of a stream or a pond. You just don’t see that,” he says. Instead, the snakes’ resistance to tetrodotoxin could have arisen for some other reason, or even by evolutionary happenstance, he says.

The newts’ toxin source is far from nailed down, though. “Just because you have bacteria that do something that live on your skin, doesn’t mean that’s the source in newts,” says biologist Edmund Brodie III, who was among the scientists that first put forward the arms race hypothesis between the snakes and newts more than 30 years ago. Brodie notes that other researchers have found that newts contain molecules that, based on their structures, may be part of a biological pathway for newts to synthesize their own tetrodotoxin. Still, Brodie says of the study showing that bacteria found on the newts can produce tetrodotoxin, “it’s the best thing we have so far.”

Brodie’s instinct is that one way or the other, the newts control their tetrodotoxin production, whether that’s by making the tetrodotoxin themselves or somehow manipulating their bacteria. The presence of bacteria as a third player in the newt-snake war would just make it an even more interesting system, he says.

One major barrier in determining whether the newts can make tetrodotoxin on their own is that no full genome has been published for Taricha newts. “They have one of the largest genomes of any animal we know of,” says Brodie.

Studying the ways that poison animals adapt and use toxins, just like much basic science research, has inherent interest for researchers who seek to understand the world around us. But as climate change and habitat destruction contribute to an ongoing loss of biodiversity that has hit amphibians especially hard, we’re losing species that not only have intrinsic importance as unique organisms but are also sources of potentially lifesaving and life-improving medicines, says Tarvin.

Epibatidine, tetrodotoxin and related compounds, for example, have been investigated as potential non-opioid painkillers when administered in tiny, controlled doses.

“We’re losing these chemicals,” Tarvin says. “You could call them endangered chemical diversity.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers.

In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls.

Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands to house them.

Indeed, tribal lands are the great wildlife refuges of the prairie. Fort Belknap is the only place in Montana where bison, critically endangered black-footed ferrets and swift foxes, which occupy about 40% of their historic range, all have been restored.

But Indigenous communities can’t and shouldn’t be solely responsible for restoring wildlife. As an ecologist who studies prairie ecosystems, I believe that conserving grassland wildlife in the U.S. Great Plains and elsewhere will require public and private organizations to work together to create new, larger protected areas where these species can roam.

Rethinking how protected areas are made

At a global scale, conservationists have done a remarkable job of conserving land, creating over 6,000 terrestrial protected areas per year over the past decade. But small has become the norm. The average size of newly created protected areas over that time frame is 23 square miles (60 square kilometers), down from 119 square miles (308 square kilometers) during the 1970s.

Creating large new protected areas is hard. As the human population grows, fewer and fewer places are available to be set aside for conservation. But conserving large areas is important because it makes it possible to restore critical ecological processes like migration and to sustain populations of endangered wildlife like bison that need room to roam.

Creating an extensive protected area in the Great Plains is particularly difficult because this area was largely passed over when the U.S. national park system was created. But it’s becoming clear that it is possible to create large protected areas through nontraditional methods.

Consider American Prairie, a nonprofit that is working to stitch together public and tribal lands to create a Connecticut-sized protected area for grassland wildlife in Montana. Since 2004, American Prairie has made 37 land purchases and amassed a habitat base of 460,000 acres (about 720 square miles, or 1,865 square kilometers).

Similarly, in Australia, nonprofits are making staggering progress in conserving land while government agencies struggle with funding cuts and bureaucratic hurdles. Today, Australia is second only to the U.S. in its amount of land managed privately for conservation.

Big ideas make room for smaller actions

Having worked to conserve wildlife in this region for over 20 years, I have seen firsthand that by setting a sweeping goal of connecting 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles, or 13,000 square kilometers), American Prairie has reframed the scale at which conservation success is measured in the Great Plains. By raising the bar for land protection, they have made other conservation organizations seem more moderate and created new opportunities for those groups.

One leading beneficiary is The Nature Conservancy, which owns the 60,000-acre Matador Ranch within the American Prairie focal area. When the conservancy first purchased the property, local ranchers were skeptical. But that skepticism has turned to support because the conservancy isn’t trying to create a protected area.

Instead, it uses the ranch as a grassbank – a place where ranchers can graze cattle at a low cost, and in return, pledge to follow wildlife-friendly practices on their own land, such as altering fences to allow migratory pronghorn to slip underneath. Via the grassbank, ranchers are now using these wildlife conservation techniques on an additional 240,000 acres of private property.

Other moderate conservation organizations are also working with ranchers. For example, this year the Bezos Earth Fund has contributed heavily to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s annual grants program, helping to make a record $US16 million available to reward ranchers for taking wildlife-friendly actions.

A collective model for achieving a large-scale protected area in the region has taken shape. American Prairie provides the vision and acts to link large tracts of protected land for restoring wildlife. Other organizations work with surrounding landowners to increase tolerance toward wildlife so those animals can move about more freely.

Instead of aiming to create a single polygon of protected land on a map, this new approach seeks to assemble a large protected area with diverse owners who all benefit from participating. Rather than excluding people, it integrates local communities to achieve large-scale conservation.

A global pathway to 30×30

This Montana example is not unique. In a recent study, colleagues and I found that when conservationists propose creating very large protected areas, they transform conservation discussions and draw in other organizations that together can achieve big results.

Many recent successes started with a single actor leading the charge. Perhaps the most notable example is the recently created Cook Islands Marine Park, also known as Marae Moana, which covers 735,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in the South Pacific. The reserve’s origin can be traced back to Kevin Iro, an outspoken former professional rugby player and member of the islands’ tourism board.

While some individual conservation organizations have found that this strategy works, global, national and local policymakers are not setting comparable large-scale targets as they discuss how to meet an ambitious worldwide goal of protecting 30% of the planet for wildlife by 2030. The 30×30 target was adopted by 190 countries at an international conference in 2022 on saving biodiversity.

Critics argue that large protected areas are too complicated to create and too expensive to maintain, or that they exclude local communities. However, new models show that there is a sustainable and inclusive way to move forward.

In my view, 30×30 policymakers should act boldly and include large protected area targets in current policies. Past experience shows that failing to do so will mean that future protected areas become smaller and smaller and ultimately fail to address Earth’s biodiversity crisis.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A herd of African elephants stands above a cliff nearly 600 feet tall in the first episode of the new documentary series Secrets of the Elephants. After a brutal dry season in Zimbabwe, an elephant matriarch must guide her herd down the cliff in search of water. Their enormous three-to-four-ton bodies are not built for this kind of expedition—they use their trunks to test the ground. To complicate the descent, they must be mindful of the younger elephants, and reassure and soothe the babies with their tails along the way. Everyone is tense as they navigate the steep path of the gorge, including  the wildlife experts and filmmakers watching from the sidelines. 

“It was amazing, even for me, to see that,” veteran conservationist and elephant advocate Paula Kahumbu tells PopSci during a recent interview. In the 30-something years she’s studied African elephants, Kahumbu had never seen them inching down a cliff this way. In the documentary, she described how just watching the process made her legs feel weak and her body unsteady, and couldn’t imagine what it must be like for these giants of the savanna.

Broken into four episodes—Savanna, Desert, Rainforest, and Asia—Secrets of the Elephants presents the lives and issues that elephants face as incredibly nuanced and interconnected. Human-caused climate change and decades of ivory poaching have taken its toll, but beneath that lies the more complex and interwoven problems of disappearing elephant range, fences that impede their movements, and culling individuals who encroach on farmland. When people are killed or injured by the powerful mammals, Kahumbu says governments are then forced to take actions due to the loss of property or life. 

“Retaliation and intolerance towards elephants is now by far, the number one threat to elephants across east Africa” says Kahumbu. Most of Africa’s elephants live in the eastern and southern part of the continent in various habitats. Both species of African elephants are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature; their latest assessment found that the number of African forest elephants fell by more than 86 percent over the last 31 years, and the population of African savanna elephants decreased by at least 60 percent over the last 50 years. Their Asian relatives are listed as endangered, with an estimated 48,000 to 50,000 left in the wild.

The series explores this tension between two incredibly smart terrestrial mammals, elephants and humans—but more importantly, the striking similarities between them. Their parallel existence goes back millennia, as both humans and elephants evolved out of Africa at the same time. Elephants are incredible problem solvers and mirror human adaptability so well that they can typically figure out any deterrent or barrier that communities devise to keep them out. The elephants then pass the knowledge down generations. 

Their innate intelligence and ability to pass down survival skills can also benefit conservation efforts. As an example, Kahumbu cites successful elephant underpasses that help link one group of elephants found near Mount Kenya with their relatives in the forests, plains, and the Aberdares Mountains, while keeping them away from the area’s enormous wheat farms. “Once the elephants figured out that that’s the safe way to get from this mountain to the other mountain, they started not only using it, but teaching each other to use it. There are very few animals which will teach each other and elephants are one of them,” she explains.

[Related: Ivory poaching has triggered a surge in elephants born without tusks.]

Despite being one of the most studied animals on the planet, elephants keep surprising experts with their unique features and complex behaviors. They rarely get sick, with less than five percent getting cancer compared to about 25 percent of humans, and are even known to self medicate with the plants around them. Female elephants also do not fade into obscurity or die once they are unable to reproduce. In both African and Asian species, they likely play an integral grandmother role similar to that of humans and possibly orca whales. Kahumbu describes elephant matriarchs as the knowledge keepers: They know where to eat and find water, where to rest, and even keep internal maps of the vast landscapes they traverse.

The series depicts the female elephants’ ability to take generational insights and adapt it to the constant challenges and changes, sometimes with bizarre results. In one rare case, an elephant in Zimbabwe named Nzou who lost her entire family to poachers when she was two years old now finds herself the matriarch to a herd of buffalo at age 50. “It’s very hard to say much because it’s just such a one-off strange thing that happened,” Kahumbu explains. “We’re increasingly seeing unusual wild animal behaviors. Adopting buffaloes is kind of funny, and it’s also quite sad.”

She didn’t fit in with other groups of elephants when rescuers tried to rehome her, but she found her place among a more unique family. Now, she has to figure out how to manage an unusual herd without the benefit of the years of living among older female elephants—but her instinct to lead is still strong.  

“In a way, it teaches us that just like humans, there are certain needs we all have, and we’re going to have to get them somehow,” says Kahumbu.

[Related: Elephants and monkeys are fighting climate change in ways humans can’t.]

Another central theme of the four-part series is the value that local people’s wisdom holds for both conservation and science communication. Experts from Namibia in southern Africa and Borneo in southeast Asia made the documentary possible through their historic observations of elephants and guidance. “A lot of things which we filmed have never been filmed or seen on camera before, but actually, a lot of it has been known by local people on the ground for a very long time,” says Kahumbu. “We are asking people for local knowledge, but we’re involving them in the series and getting them on camera as well.”

Engaging communities on the ground and connecting the rest of the world with their stories through film could be a big step in further protecting elephants. Reaching younger and wider audiences, particularly in Africa, is part of why Kahumbu has seamlessly moved from the research space into more policy, advising, and education in an effort to save elephant lives.

“What’s shifted for me dramatically is this realization that we’re running out of time,” says Kahumbu. “I think that unleashing young people with their own creativity to identify how they can help is what I’d love to see happen as a result of this TV series. That connection is very powerful and very important.”

Secrets of the Elephants premieres on Friday, April 21 on National Geographic. All four episodes will stream on Earth Day (April 22) on Disney+ and Hulu. 

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For at least 22,000 years, the African penguin has been struggling to survive because of habitat loss.  Scientists are now peering into the past to learn more about why to better help the lovable feathered creatures  today and in the future. A study published April 20 in the African Journal of Marine Science paints a paleo-historical picture of where these climate change survivors lived and moved to as the last Ice Age came to a close—and how that changed over time. 

According to the study, the African penguin,also called the black-footed penguin, the Cape penguin, or the Jackass penguin, lived on 15 large islands off the coast of southern Africa more than 20,000 years ago. During this period called the Last Glacial Maximum, massive ice sheets dominated a huge portion of the Earth, and it ended about 15 to 20,000 years ago. Upon this climate shift sea levels began to rise as ice melted, effectively sinking the islands. The rising water reduced the suitable nesting habitat for the penguin colonies by tenfold over the next 22,000 years. 

[Related: The march of the penguins has a new star: an autonomous robot.]

To help them paint this picture, the team used topographical maps of the ocean floor to find potential former islands that lay 32 to 426 feet below today’s sea levels. Penguins use islands as breeding spots to escape predators on the mainland and also need suitable foraging grounds for sardines and anchovies within about a 12 mile radius. 

With the assumption that sea levels were lower during the last Ice Age, the team identified 15 large islands that possibly stood off the southwest coast of Africa, with the largest being about 115 miles long and laying 426 feet below the surface of the sea. When taking the rate of sea level rise over the past 15,000 to 7,000 years into account, they found 220 islands that would have been suitable nesting spots for penguins. 

By comparison, some of the largest modern-day islands with penguins off the southwest coast of Africa are Robben Island less than two miles long, Dassen Island less than one mile, and Possession Island also less than a mile long, which all clock in at less than two miles long.

The study estimates that between 6.4 million and 18.8 million individual penguins could have lived among these islands during the Last Glacial Maximum, before the numbers began to plummet. 

These changes in habitat availability over the past 22,000 years “could have had a massive effect on penguin populations,” co-author and Stellenbosch University ecologist Heath Beckett said in a statement. “These populations are now experiencing additional human pressures on top of this in the form of climate change, habitat destruction, and competition for food.” 

According to Beckett, this new paleo-historical image of penguins all over the islands of southern Africa stands in contrast to the current reality of a post-1900 collapse of the African penguin population. Dassen Island was once teeming with about 1.45 million penguins, but South Africa’s entire African penguin population collapsed to 21,000 breeding pairs by 2011. As of 2019, they dropped even further to 13,600, and roughly 97 percent of the current population in South Africa is supported by seven breeding colonies.

[Related: Ceramic ‘igloos’ could keep African penguins cool and cozy.]

“Changing sea levels would have necessitated the need for multiple relocations of breeding colonies of African penguins on time-scales of centuries, if not even shorter time-scales, and intense competition for breeding space as island habitat became greatly reduced in size,” said Beckett. “This historical flexibility of response provides some leeway for conservation managers to make available suitable breeding space, even in mainland sites, as long as appropriate nesting sites are made available.”

Some further questions brought on by this research surround relocation for the penguins, and analyzing just how much more the species can handle as human pressures continue to rise and food competition heats up. 

However, despite the alarming drops in population and their continued struggle, the team points out that these findings highlight the African penguin’s resilience as a species and that this could be leveraged for its conservation and management in an uncertain climate.

“It’s a total survivor and given half a chance, they will hang on,” co-author and Stellenbosch University biologist Guy Midgley concluded in a statement.  “Island hopping saved it in the past, they know how to do this.” 

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In Dick Ogg’s 25 years of commercial fishing, he’s had a few close encounters with whales—mostly while pulling Dungeness crab pots off the ocean floor. “I’ve had whales right next to me,” within about five meters, says Ogg. “They follow me, they watch, they’re curious. And then they go on about their business.”

Ogg is fortunate his interactions have been so leisurely. For nearly a decade, California’s whales and crabbers have been locked in a persistent struggle. From 1985 to 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported an average of 10 whales were entangled in fishing gear each year along the west coast of the United States. But between 2015 and 2017, that number jumped to 47 entanglements per year. Since 2015, most of the identifiable gear found on entangled whales has been from crab pots. For crabbers, efforts to protect whales from entanglement often hit their bottom line.

The Dungeness crab fishery is one of California’s largest and most lucrative; until recently, it was considered one of the most sustainable fisheries in the state. In recent years, managers have sought a balance between protecting whales and ensuring crabbers’ livelihoods. But as climate change transforms the northeast Pacific and whales are increasingly at risk of being entangled in crabbers’ lines, that delicate balance is beginning to unravel.

The 2015 crabbing season was a catastrophe for both crabbers and whales. A marine heatwave nurtured a bloom of toxic algae that pushed anchovies close to shore, and the whales followed. That year, NOAA recorded 48 entangled whales along the US west coast—nearly five times the historical average. The algae also rendered the crabs inedible, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) delayed the start of the fishing season by several months. The federal government declared the failed season a fishery disaster.

In 2017, the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity sued the CDFW over the spate of entanglements, prompting the department to set up a rapid risk assessment and mitigation program that closes portions of the Dungeness crab fishery when whales are nearby. The new approach has decreased entanglements, but it’s come at a high price for commercial fishers.

The CDFW has a handful of other tools they can use to protect whales, such as shortening the crabbing season and limiting the number of traps crabbers can drop. But according to a recent study, the only measure that could have effectively protected whales during the heatwave—shortening the crabbing season—is the one that would have hampered crabbers the most. And even then, these strong restrictions would have only reduced entanglements by around 50 percent.

If a similar marine heatwave hits again, entanglements could spike, too, says Jameal Samhouri, a NOAA ecologist and author of the paper. “It’s going to be really hard to resolve these trade-offs,” he says. “There may be some hard choices to make between whether we as a society want to push forward conservation matters or allow the fishery.”

Every year since the CDFW set up its mitigation program, the fishery has faced closures. Since 2015, the crabbing season has only opened on time once. Though the heatwave is gone, a boom of anchovy has kept whales close to shore.

For Ogg, the most difficult part of the season is waiting to go fish and not having any income. “It’s been really, really tough for a lot of guys,” he says. Another recent study calculates that in 2019 and 2020, whale-related delays cost California Dungeness fishers US $24-million—about the same as they lost during the heatwave in 2015.

Smaller boats, the study showed, were most severely impacted by the closures. It’s a trend Melissa Mahoney, executive director of Monterey Bay Fisheries Trust, has seen firsthand. While a large boat might set hundreds of crab pots in a day, smaller vessels can’t make up for a shortened season. “I just don’t know how long a lot of these fishermen can survive,” Mahoney says.

With climate change, marine heatwaves are now 20 times more frequent than they were in preindustrial times. As the Earth grows warmer, heatwaves that would have occurred every 100 years or so could happen once a decade or even once a year. In this hotter world, balancing the needs of both crabbers and whales will only grow more difficult.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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The Ice Age was kind to large mammals. From about 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago, they had the space—and the time—to roam far. Lions, for instance, were once found around the world. After evolving in eastern Africa, the big cats padded through Europe and Asia and eventually crossed into North America by way of Beringia, a now-sunken continent that once connected Siberia to Alaska and Yukon.

Lions prowled North America for tens of thousands of years before going extinct. Today, no lions lounge in southern Alberta canola fields or chase prey through Yukon grasslands—so what happened?

Cave lions and their larger relatives, American lions, first entered North America during the last ice age, toward the end of the Pleistocene. Already part of the landscape in Europe, humans painted and carved portraits of these enormous lions in caves, including the famed Chauvet Cave in France.

Cave art has provided scientists with information about what these lions may have looked like and how they lived, says Julie Meachen, a vertebrate paleontologist at Iowa’s Des Moines University who specializes in big cats and other mammalian carnivores. The cave paintings depict big maneless lions with reddish coats living in groups.

Fossil evidence also indicates that, as with modern African lions, male Pleistocene lions were significantly larger than the females, Meachen explains. The maximum size of a male American lion was about 420 kilograms, she says, noting that modern lions only get up to 270 kilograms. “They probably would have been able to kill just about anything they wanted to kill—minus a fully grown [male] mammoth,” she says.

Alexander Salis, a vertebrate zoology postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, took a closer look at the story of lions in North America as part of his research at the University of Adelaide in Australia. In collaboration with Meachen and a team of colleagues, Salis analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of 39 Pleistocene lions from North America and Eurasia. He determined that lions migrated into North America on at least three separate occasions. But their adaptability faltered when faced with climate and habitat change.

Each wave of lion migration seemed to correspond to changes in global climate and sea level, Salis explains. As the planet fluctuated between periods of freezing and melting, sea levels rose and fell, and Beringia was exposed and flooded many times. During glacial periods, expanding ice caused sea levels to drop, opening the route into North America, which lions took advantage of—each bringing DNA markers revealing where they came from and when.

The first lions to amble into North America around 165,000 years ago were a lineage of cave lions. When a warmer period led Beringia to flood, the lions were cut off from Asian populations, and they evolved into the American lion, Salis explains. American lions didn’t spend much time in the north and instead headed for what is now the United States, he says. Nearly all American lion remains have been found south of the ice sheets that once covered much of the continent—save for one 67,000-year-old specimen from a Yukon site. Salis identified this as the oldest-known American lion.

About 63,000 years ago, Salis says, a second wave of cave lions crossed into eastern Beringia—now Alaska and Yukon. For some reason, these cave lions stayed above the ice sheets, remaining separate from American lions that had already dispersed south. Salis’s research revealed that this lion lineage went extinct around 33,000 years ago.

That extinction of cave lions in eastern Beringia could be attributed to a warming trend in the region, Salis says. Sea levels rose and damp weather arrived, key ingredients for the growth of peat. The expansion of peatlands in eastern Beringia would have fragmented habitats and altered the vegetation, heavily impacting herbivores and leaving cave lions and other carnivores scrambling to find prey. The American lions that had spread south were unaffected.

Lions reappeared in eastern Beringia’s fossil record about 22,000 years ago when the final wave of cave lions arrived from Asia. But they ran into some bad luck.

At the end of the last ice age, the temperature rose and megafauna across the continent began to die out, helped along by the presence of humans who quickly began to alter the environment. This one-two punch would have triggered vegetation loss and a drop in prey populations, leading to the demise of American and cave lions, Meachen says.

Andrew Cuff, a paleontologist and former lecturer at the University of Liverpool in England who was not involved in Salis’s research, says it makes sense that lions entered North America in multiple waves, taking advantage of the extra territory each time Beringia was passable. He notes that many animals, including dinosaurs, used the route to move between continents.

Cuff adds that it’s nice when the data comes together like this to tell a coherent story that also aligns with glacial, fossil, and DNA records.

Lions weren’t the only cats roaming North America during the Pleistocene. Cougars (also known as panthers, pumas, and mountain lions) and several now-extinct species, including various saber-toothed cats, radiated across the Americas long before lions arrived. North American cougars were a casualty of the post–Ice Age megafauna extinction, but South American populations survived, Meachen says. Once deer and elk began to repopulate North America, cougars returned.

North America was densely populated by an incredible diversity of species before the end of the Ice Age, Meachen says. In learning what has been lost, she hopes more people come to understand the importance of biodiversity and the need to preserve it.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

On a desolate stretch of Namibia’s arid Skeleton Coast National Park, an invisible fence is keeping lions and visitors apart.

Namibia’s Ministry of Environment, Forestry, and Tourism and the nonprofit Desert Lion Conservation Trust (DLCT) created the virtual fence line, known as a geofence, to track lions approaching a 40-kilometer stretch of beach around Torra Bay, a popular fishing and camping area. Each time a lion wearing a satellite collar crosses the geofence, the system records the animal’s GPS coordinates and sends automatic alerts to the DLCT’s lion rangers and managers of the local campsite, who close the area to visitors.

The early warning system is in response to a number of potentially dangerous incidents between lions and people. In one last year, a party of recreational anglers got too close to a lioness on a beach near Torra Bay, and the animal charged their vehicle.

Fortunately, no one was injured, but the odds of aggressive interactions are increasing as Namibia’s desert lions re-establish themselves on the Skeleton Coast.

Lions in Namibia’s northwest, renowned for eking out a living amid the Namib Desert’s harsh gravel plains and endless dunes, have a history of feeding on marine species, such as Cape fur seals, beached whales, and cormorants. Remarkably, they are the only lions known to target marine prey. But in the 1980s, the desert lions abandoned the coast after local farmers wiped out most of the population.

When lions returned in 2002, it was a sign that the population was recovering. But the animals were no longer hunting marine prey, and lion ecologist Philip Stander, who founded DLCT, worried that the population had lost the knowledge.

In the last eight years, though, three orphaned lionesses, known to the researchers as Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie, have led a coastal hunting revival on the beaches around Torra Bay. The resurgence is exciting, but it has also brought risks; it was likely one of these lions—or a fourth, known as Xpl-108—who charged the anglers’ car last year.

The lionesses started targeting coastal prey in 2015, when a drought decimated the park’s mountain zebras, springboks, oryxes, and ostriches. To replace these dietary staples, the young lionesses turned to marine birds, mainly cormorants, flamingos, and red-billed teals.

Then, in 2018, DLCT scientists spotted the lionesses hunting fur seals—some of the first lions to do so in four decades. In a subsequent diet study that spanned 18 months, Stander observed that marine foods, particularly cormorants, seals, and flamingos, accounted for 86 percent of the lionesses’ diet.

“It’s fascinating to follow from a biologist’s point of view,” says Félix Vallat, the DLCT’s project coordinator. “It is knowledge that has been lost. Now it’s slowly coming back.”

One local who’s particularly excited about the lions’ coastal revival is Naude Dreyer.

Dreyer, who runs kayaking safaris in Walvis Bay, 350 kilometers to the south, had longed to see a desert lion since he was five years old. In January 2022, after a three-decade wait, he spotted two of the lionesses separately on the beach near Torra Bay and photographed one as she fed on a fur seal against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean.

“She looked up a few times while eating but didn’t display any aggression,” says Dreyer, who kept his distance.

The lioness Dreyer photographed was likely Xpl-108, who spent more than 30 days in the geofenced area from late November through January. She, Alpha, and Bravo have all been fitted with satellite collars, and the tracking project is as much for the lions as it is to keep visitors safe.

Tourists crowding the beaches during peak seasons, such as southern Africa’s recent December–January holidays, could disrupt the lions’ hunting activity or push the animals inland, toward conflict with farmers.

As a safety measure, the geofence isn’t perfect. One night, Xpl-108 slipped down to the coast and killed a fur seal. The next morning, anglers arrived to fish before the rangers could cordon off the beach and startled Xpl-108, who dragged her meal four kilometers inland to the safety of a rocky outcrop.

But evidence from elsewhere suggests that the project should work. Matthew Wijers, a postdoctoral lion researcher from the University of Oxford in England, who is not part of the desert lion project, says that although costly, geofencing has been effective in other parts of southern Africa.

“This technology, coupled with educational programs that highlight the ecological importance of desert lions as well as the potential dangers to the public, should help reduce the risks of conflict between lions and anglers along the Skeleton Coast,” he says.

Whether the lionesses will continue to hang around Torra Bay is an open question. After nearly eight years, Namibia’s drought appears to have finally broken. In that time, the lion population fell from 150 to 80 animals. Vallat predicts that within a year or two, the lions’ land-based prey—and hopefully lion numbers—should rebound.

In the meantime, Vallat hopes that the geofence will keep everyone safe.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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There’s a case to be made that the world’s greatest forests are not terrestrial. That’s in large part due to kelp. Like their less watery counterparts, kelp forests play an important role in carbon cycling across the planet, converting carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis and sequestering the carbon beneath the ocean’s surface. 

Kelp forests are located in shallow coastal waters across the globe, including in the northeast and all along the Pacific coast in the United States. Despite taking up only a tiny fraction of the ocean, they’re incredibly diverse. Charles Darwin marveled at just how many species are present in kelp forests in his diary while aboard the HMS Beagle. However, they are incredibly fragile ecosystems. Once disrupted, it’s very difficult for the forests to recover.  

[Related: Sea urchin sperm is surprisingly useful to robotics experts.]

With the presence of purple sea urchins off the coasts of the western United States, the destruction of kelp forests has become much faster. But new research from Oregon State University published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that the sunflower sea star, a 24-armed behemoth of a sea star living in kelp forests on the west coast may be a major asset to preserving those important ecosystems, namely by fighting off pesky sea urchins.

Sea urchins are a natural part of the ecosystem, and act as scavengers, feeding on dead kelp and other detritus that falls to the ocean floor. However, when there’s not enough food for them to go around, past research has found that they’ll begin feasting on living kelp. This disrupts the ecosystem, and if not left in check, leads to the formation of an urchin barren, with no kelp to be seen and urchins packed tightly along the ocean floor. Once a barren forms, the rebirth of a kelp forest is all but impossible. Any new kelp growth will promptly be devoured by the urchins, which are able to survive with little food and will live for at least 20 years. 

Marine biologists long ago realized that the predators of sea urchins are part of the problem. Sea otters, considered one of the keystone species of the ecosystem, have been hunted to endangered status. Other predators, like the sunflower sea star, would have to pick up some of the slack. Unfortunately, a sea star wasting disease has decimated the population in the last decade, leaving the population critically endangered. 

This study examined just how effective the sunflower sea star is as a predator of sea urchins by raising well-fed and starving sea urchins in a lab setting. After about six weeks of collecting and raising urchins, the researchers let 24 sea stars free to feed. The sea stars consumed an average of 0.68 urchins a day, and when the urchins were starving, like they are in nutrient-poor urchin barrens, sea stars ate even more. That is a major difference between the sea stars and other predators, like otters, who are picky when it comes to choosing what urchins to eat, preferring healthy urchins that are less common in a barren. 

[Related: A virgin birth in Shedd Aquarium’s shark tank is baffling biologists.]

“Eating less than one urchin per day may not sound like a lot, but we think there used to be over 5 billion sunflower sea stars,” Sarah Gravem, a research associate at Oregon State said in a release. Although there’s no consensus on just how devastating sea star wasting disease has been, most estimates place the loss at around 90 percent of the population. “We used a model to show that the pre-disease densities of sea stars on the U.S. West Coast were usually more than enough to keep sea urchin numbers down and prevent barrens,” Gravem adds.

With this knowledge in mind, future research can focus on how exactly to use sunflower sea stars to keep sea urchin populations in check—and hopefully restore kelp forests in the process.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Packs are to wolves as families are to humans: They’re the species’ most essential social structure. The dynamics of a wolf pack — who its leaders are, how the members raise pups, how they hunt their prey, and how they respond to threats — determine the group’s survival.

But so far, the majority of wolf research has focused on the species’ population as a whole, rather than individual packs. Wolf populations tend to stay pretty steady despite human-caused mortality. But we also know that some wolves avoid busy roads, that heavily hunted wolves have high stress hormones, and that human development fractures wolf habitat. This gap in understanding led a group of National Park Service employees and biologists to ask: How does human activity alter individual wolf packs?

That question inspired a new study, recently published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment. The research analyzed how human-caused deaths — from hunting and poaching to car accidents and research captures — have affected nearly 193 wolf packs in five national parks and preserves. The researchers used data collected in those parks between the late 1980s and the present. Just over a third of the collared wolves living primarily in those protected national parks died of human-causes, and those deaths had negative consequences for some of the packs.

Packs affected by human-caused wolf deaths were less likely to reproduce, while losing a pack leader decreased the chances that the pack stayed together or had pups the next year. The researchers also found that pack size matters: Packs that were smaller to begin with were more likely to dissolve, while bigger packs proved more resilient. “If human families have to deal with the death of family members — like two in a row, or the leader of the family — that would be much more disruptive and harder to get through,” said lead author Kira Cassidy, a research associate with the National Park Service’s Yellowstone Wolf Project. Larger packs have more members waiting in the wings to take over any responsibilities and duties that a sudden void in the pack may leave unfilled.

Cassidy said she recently observed this in Yellowstone. In late 2021, before hunting season, the park’s Junction Butte Pack had 28 members, making it a relatively large group. Hunters outside the park legally killed eight wolves, all of them young. The group rebounded quickly; In the spring of 2022, the pack had four litters of pups, and now has 25 members. A smaller pack may have broken up and dispersed, or not reproduced to that extent. “Socially, they’re fragile,” said co-author Doug Smith, the recently retired Yellowstone senior wolf biologist.

The study shows the importance of tracking wolf packs, rather than just population numbers, said Mark Hebblewhite, a University of Montana professor not involved in the research who studies wolves and ungulates. This new understanding shows wildlife managers that human boundaries can’t always protect wildlife. “This paper recognizes that national park animals like wolves and bison are vulnerable to harvest when they leave the park,” Hebblewhite said. “They spent all summer seeing hundreds of cars and thousands of people, and those people don’t do anything bad to them. And then they leave the park, walk right in front of an outfitter camp, and get hammered by somebody shooting them.”

The authors hope the study spurs more collaboration between national parks and neighboring states to limit humans’ effect on wolves living near the edge of protected areas. “This paper may be useful not only to point out how important packs are, (but also) how important it is for us to understand how we are responsible for impacting another species,” Cassidy said. “I’m pretty proud that this study gives people the information to say, ‘This is our impact.’”

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A citizen science project in Denmark helped researchers find the world’s oldest (or at least scientifically-confirmed oldest) European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus). At 16 years-old, Thorvald the hedgehog lived seven years longer than the previous record holder. On average, the six to 11 inch long animals typically found wooded areas, gardens, and parks and lives around two years. 

The study on the life expectancy of European hedgehogs was published February 14 in the journal Animals. 

While the European hedgehog is a beloved mammal, their populations have declined up to 30 percent in rural populations in the United Kingdom alone. Multiple projects have been launched by conservationists and researchers to monitor populations and inform initiatives that protect the animals in the wild. Citizen science is proving to be an ally in understanding how long these mammals live.

[Related: Citizen science is another great form of nature therapy.]

In 2016, researchers from a citizen science conservation initiative called the The Danish Hedgehog Project, asked people in Denmark to collect data on any dead hedgehogs they encountered in an effort to figure out how long the mammals typically lived. Volunteers found 697 dead hedgehogs from all over Denmark.

The researchers determined the age of the hedgehogs by counting growth lines in thin sections of the hedgehogs’ jawbones, like counting growth rings in trees. Their jaw bones show growth lines because calcium metabolism slows down when they hibernate over winter. Bone growth will reduce or stop completely, resulting in one line that represents one hibernation. 

The second and third place winners of oldest hedgehog were 13 and 11 years-old. The average age was only about two years and roughly 30 percent died before reaching one year old. 

Most of the hedgehogs were killed while crossing roads. About 22 percent of the animals died at a hedgehog rehabilitation center following injuries from incidents like dog attacks, and 22 percent died of natural causes in the wild. 

The male hedgehogs generally lived 24 percent longer than females (2.1 vs 1.6 years), but the males were also more likely to be killed in traffic. The team speculates that this is possibly because male hedgehogs come into contact with roads more frequently due to their longer ranges.

Road deaths also peaked during the month of July for both males and females. July is the height of mating season for hedgehogs in Denmark, and the increase is likely due to the hedgehogs walking longer distances and across more roads to search for mates. 

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification.]

“Although we saw a high proportion of individuals dying at the age of one year, our data also showed that if the individuals survived this life stage, they could potentially live to become 16 years old and produce offspring for several years,” said Sophie Lund Rasmussen, a biologist from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) who leads The Danish Hedgehog Project, in a statement. “This may be because individual hedgehogs gradually gain more experience as they grow older. If they manage to survive to reach the age of two years or more, they would have likely learned to avoid dangers such as cars and predators.”

Rasmussen, also called Dr. Hedgehog on social media, also added that being a male hedgehog is “simply easier”—the animals are not territorial, they rarely fight. Not to mention that female hedgehogs also take on raising offspring alone. 

To investigate if inbreeding influenced their lifespans, the researchers also took tissue samples. Previous studies have found a low genetic diversity in the Danish hedgehog population, an indicator of high degrees of inbreeding which can reduce the fitness of a population. Inbreeding allows hereditary, and potentially lethal, health conditions like lower offspring birth rate and reduced milk production, to be passed down to offspring. 

Much to the team’s surprise, the tests showed that inbreeding did not seem to reduce the expected lifespan of the hedgehogs.

“Sadly, many species of wildlife are in decline, which often results in increased inbreeding, as the decline limits the selection of suitable mates. This study is one of the first thorough investigations of the effect of inbreeding on longevity,” said Rasmussen. “Our research indicates that if the hedgehogs manage to survive into adulthood, despite their high degree of inbreeding, which may cause several potentially lethal, hereditary conditions, the inbreeding does not reduce their longevity. That is a rather groundbreaking discovery, and very positive news from a conservation perspective.”

The results from this study will aim to improve conservation management for a “beloved and declining species.”

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Conservationists in Europe are warning that a population of Eurasian lynx will disappear from France if action is not taken. These elusive wildcats live in the Jura Mountains, a mountain range in eastern France on the border with Switzerland.

After disappearing entirely from France in the 18th century, the wildcats were reintroduced to Switzerland during the 1970s and lynxes moved across the border into France by the end of the decade. A genetic study published February 13 in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science finds that this population needs help and could go extinct within three decades.

[Related: Living with a lynx—for science.]

“Given the rapid loss of genetic diversity, we estimate that this population will go extinct in less than 30 years,” said co-author Nathan Huvier from the Centre Athenas, in a statement. “This population urgently needs new genetic material to become sustainable.”

Not much is known about this population of lynxes. Scientists estimate that it contains a maximum of 150 adults and is poorly connected to the larger and healthier populations that live in Germany and Switzerland. The population is also not growing to a sustainable size. 

The team believes that its population growth has been suppressed by poaching, automobile accidents, and inbreeding depression. Inbreeding depression occurs when insufficient genetic diversity in a population leads to problems with reproduction and survival.

“As there is a lack of genetic monitoring of the lynx in France and we consider that crucial for species conservation, we took the lead and did this work,” said Huvier.

From 2008 to 2020, the team collected genetic samples to try and determine the genetic health of the population. They took samples from lynxes that were dead,  injured, or orphaned to keep from stressing the healthy animals in an already precarious population. 

“For us, this method is more ethical as there is no capture and thus stress induced for DNA sampling only,” explained Huvier.

They compared the genetic samples to references that came from the parent population of lynxes from the Carpathian Mountains in Central and Eastern Europe. The team determined that while the size of the French population of lynxes is believed to be between 120 to 150 individuals, the population of healthy breeding wildcats is only 38 wildcats. However, the team cautions that 38 is likely an overestimate, so the number may be even lower. 

[Related: The curious case of an endangered wildcat and a disappearing fruit tree.]

What they found to be more alarming is that the inbreeding coefficient–a measure of how likely it is that two mating individuals from the same population are closely related– is very high. They found a 41 percent chance that two mates were closely related and that new genetic material is urgently needed to prevent population collapse.

To help save these lynxes, the team suggests using road signs that raise awareness of the presence of lynxes to encourage drivers to remain cautious and more strict enforcement of poaching laws. Replacement of poached lynxes with animals from genetically healthier populations and exchanging orphaned cubs between rescue centers would also help rescue this population from genetic collapse.

“We want this work to support action for lynx conservation,” said Huvier. “Reintroduction, replacement of poached lynxes, and exchange of orphan lynxes between care centers are the best short-term solution for this population to remain alive, and it will give it a chance to develop and connect with other populations in Europe.”

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The first three episodes of HBO’s The Last of Us have a lot to say about fungi. The series begins with a warning, as a gray-haired epidemiologist played by actor John Hannah cautions us that some fungi, including Ophiocordyceps, “seek not to kill but to control” the behavior of the animals they infect. Later, a mycologist at the University of Indonesia, played by Christine Hakim, explains that there is no medicine nor vaccine to fight off such a fungus in humans. What she proposes next—that our only solution to an emerging fungal epidemic is to “bomb this city and everyone in it”—is prime cinematic hyperbole. Although we fight these infections with intravenous therapy, not incendiary devices, there’s still real cause for concern when it comes to fungi.   

The fungi that colonize our vast planet, though mostly a far cry from the phantasmic organisms that transform people into zombies, can pose serious threats to agriculture, biodiversity, and human health, especially in an increasingly warmer world. These fungi are precisely the ones you should be familiar with and, in some cases, fear.

[Related: Ancient frozen viruses don’t pose a threat to your health—yet]

Common human-associated fungi, which the public perceive as “bad” or “gross,” such as the ones that cause athlete’s foot, dandruff, run-of-the-mill yeast infections, and toenail fungus, are not the ones that keep doctors awake at night. But you can’t sell what you can’t see so Hollywood continues to play up the behavior-modifying properties of a few exceptional fungi at the expense of the truly invasive ones that are responsible for hospital stays and a majority of patient deaths. 

“From a clinical perspective, the impact of these fungal diseases is really underappreciated,” says Bridget Barker, an associate professor of mycology at Northern Arizona University. “The patients get really sick before they get intervention.” Because many fungi opportunistically infect already sick patients, it complicates our understanding of their role in patient deaths and probably helps explain their near absence from the public conversation.  

Even for physicians, especially those in many parts of the world where some of these fungal infections are most prevalent, “the biggest challenge is making the diagnosis,” says Ilan Schwartz, a physician at Duke University in North Carolina who specializes in fungal diseases. 

In some places, clinicians still lack even the most basic tests, which can lead to an incorrect determination. By the time they realize a fungus, not a bacterial infection like tuberculosis, is causing the disease, treatment is generally less effective and can unfortunately lead to death.  

But, if caught early enough, therapies can be very effective.             

Tried-and-tested fungal treatments

There are three main classes of antifungals, medications that kill or suppress fungi, according to Schwartz. Of these, only one (azoles) can be taken as a pill outside the hospital setting. The negative side effects of the other two, echinocandins and polyenes, require professional medical oversight. “Any resistance to any one of these classes is hugely important and really restricts our ability to treat patients,” Schwartz explains.      

And just how far-fetched is the emergence of fungi that resist our best drugs? One soil-dwelling fungus that also causes lung infections, Aspergillus fumigatus, shows resistance in 10 to 15 percent of isolates in some locations, Schwartz says. “The azoles they use in the field [to combat plant pathogenic fungi] are structurally very similar to the one we use in the clinic.” So what Joel told Ellie in the third episode of The Last of Us is right: Fungi are mutating. Though many have mastered the art of invading animals long ago, including people, they are becoming harder to fight once they are inside us.                        

Killer fungi outside of fiction

Some might argue that the fungi that live rent-free in our bodies are far more alarming than Ophiocordyceps. This includes fungi that cause Valley Fever, a disease in the southwestern US that is expanding northward and westward as the climate warms. Two closely related soil-inhabiting fungi responsible for this disease, Coccidioides posadasii and Coccidioides immitis (simply called “Cocci”), are a major concern. “We’re already seeing increases in areas in California where they hadn’t seen very many cases,” says Barker, who is among the world’s experts on Cocci. The Onygenales, the larger group of fungi that includes Cocci, are “concerning,” she notes, “because they cause disease in otherwise healthy people.” And because this particular group is co-evolving with mammals, “this is probably where the future threats will come from.”                

Schwartz has his own concerns about Cocci. “The environment that favors the growth of this fungus is also the environment that favors wildfires,” he explains. The epithelial changes that occur with wildfire exposure dramatically increases the risk of Valley Fever.” When the ash settles in our lungs, so too may these fungi.

[Related: Soil fungi are spreading lung infections to new territories]

Cocci is far from the only fungal infection showing up in the clinic. In fact, outside of specific geographic areas where they are endemic, few cases of Cocci or its Onygenales counterparts are reported nationwide. “What I see as a clinician on a day-to-day basis is primarily invasive candidiasis and aspergillosis,” Schwartz says. These fungal diseases affect people with weakened immune systems, many because of cancer or a viral infection, including HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, or flu. The human immune system can also be weakened by treatment with corticosteroids and immunosuppressant drugs, like ciclosporin (coincidentally, a drug naturally produced by a close relative of Ophiocordyceps). “Viruses themselves cause various forms of immunoparesis [or dampened immune response] that then allow secondary infections to come in and basically run amuck,” Schwartz explains.

Lessons from epidemics in wildlife

Fungi infect animals, too—with their own implications for human health. Some recent large-scale fungal disease outbreaks among wildlife include mass die-offs of amphibians, due to chytridiomycosis, and bats, due to white-nose syndrome. An unchecked fungal animal pandemic can look apocalyptic: a dark backwater bloated with hundreds of frogs floating belly up, for instance, with their fungus-stiffened legs rising out of the water.

Prior to the 1990s, only a handful of mycologists knew anything about these bizarre aquatic fungi we call chytrids. The most famous among them, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis or Bd, is responsible for the extinction of some 90 amphibian species with another 124 species experiencing global population declines of 90 percent or more.

[Related: Tri-colored bats are imperiled by deadly fungal disease]

Why should we care about frog-killing fungi? Well, like with human pathogens, climate change can accelerate spread in areas where the fungus was previously kept in check according to Rabern Simmons, a chytrid expert and curator of fungi at Purdue University Herbaria. More importantly, we are just now beginning to see the “hidden human welfare costs” of biodiversity loss, he says. In Costa Rica and Panama, an area hard hit by chytridiomycosis, Bd-driven collapse of amphibians has led to more mosquitoes and malaria cases in humans, as per a 2022 study. “We are seeing human health implications because of a microscopic aquatic mobile fungus that hardly anybody knew about,” says Simmons.

There is nothing fictional about the threat some fungi pose to us. While Ophiocordyceps fungi will continue to manipulate and kill insects, as it has done over millions of years of co-evolutionary history with their invertebrate hosts, the human fungal epidemic on the horizon likely will not bother to modify our behavior. Our history is more likely to intersect with an unassuming mold lurking quietly in the soil or forming a biofilm in a hospital sink: ever adapting to our dwindling lines of defense. Though a world where we do too little to stop a rising tide of fungal pathogens is a horrific prospect, our collective failure to recognize the interconnectedness between pathogens, people, animals, and plants could be more terrifying.          

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Earthlings, get ready for your closeups.

Close-up Photographer of the Year has revealed its fourth annual contest winners, and the results are a doozy. With 11 different categories, the Top 100 features everything from octopuses and Atlas moths, to trails of pheromones and the delicate cross sections of leaves.

The story behind the overall winner (seen above):

“Northern pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea) are carnivorous, allowing them to survive in nutrient-poor bog environments. Here there is no rich soil, but rather a floating mat of Sphagnum moss. Instead of drawing nutrients up through their roots, this plant relies on trapping prey in its specialised bell-shaped leaves, called pitchers. Typically, these plants feast on invertebrates—such as moths and flies—but recently, researchers at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station discovered a surprising new item on the plant’s menu: juvenile spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum).

This population of Northern Pitcher Plants in Algonquin Provincial Park is the first to be found regularly consuming a vertebrate prey. For a plant that’s used to capturing tiny invertebrate, a juvenile spotted salamander is a hefty feast!

On the day I made this image, I was following researchers on their daily surveys of the plants. Pitchers typically contain just one salamander prey at a time, although occasionally they catch multiple salamanders simultaneously. When I saw a pitcher that had two salamanders, both at the same stage of decay floating at the surface of the pitcher’s fluid, I knew it was a special and fleeting moment. The next day, both salamanders had sunk to the bottom of the pitcher.”

– Photographer Samantha Stephens

The next entry period for the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards will open in March. But before you start prepping your cameras, get a little inspiration by scrolling through more of the recent winners below.

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Let’s talk about sex. Partnerless sex that is. While this form of sex isn’t typically associated with reproduction, generating offspring without a partner is common in small, spineless animals like sea stars and stick insects, but it is more rare in vertebrates. Through a process called parthenogenesis, some female animals in the order elasmobranch that includes sharks, rays, and skates can fertilize an egg using their own genetic material. 

This process is usually reserved as a last resort for sharks if there aren’t any mates to go around, but a recent study revealed that female zebra sharks at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois, reproduced by themselves, even though there were healthy males in the same enclosure.

[Related: Shark Week may be hurting, not helping, its namesake creature]

“This changes what we think we know about parthenogenesis and why it occurs,” says Lise Watson, assistant director of animal operations and habitats at Shedd Aquarium and a co-author of the study, in reference to the biological phenomenon behind these partner-less births. “From observing our population for 20 years, we have a long history with them. One thing that we’ve noticed is sometimes the females are not very receptive to males at certain times, or at all.”

While previous studies have detailed parthenogenesis in zebra sharks at other aquariums, the report published in December 2022 in the Journal of Fish Biology is another step in understanding why these births happen. This research focuses on a female zebra shark—a dark fish with yellowish stripes found in the Pacific and Indian Oceans—that lived in Shedd’s Wild Reef exhibition.

In 2008, Watson and her colleagues moved a clutch of eggs to a baby shark nursery behind the scenes, where they could safely hatch beyond the limelight of an aquarium tank.

An analysis of the newly hatched shark pups’ DNA revealed seemingly impossible results. The pups didn’t have any genetic markers with any of the potential fathers. They had identical copies of some alleles, or alternative versions of a gene. This showed that they were getting DNA strands from their mother rather than two different parents. 

“These pups didn’t match any of the mature males that were in the enclosure. But they did match the female that laid the eggs,” says Kevin Feldheim, a biologist and researcher at the neighboring Field Museum and co-author of the study, in a statement. 

Offspring born from parthenogenesis often die young, and the shark pups in this study only survived for a few months.

“We don’t exactly know why they have shorter lifespans,” Feldheim tells Popular Science. “In genetics, in general, inbreeding is bad and what can happen is the expression of a lethal recessive [gene], or the expression of two alleles that essentially cause you to die.” 

But it’s still unclear exactly what causes animals born in this manner to die before sexual maturity, while others will survive. “In one species called the white spotted bamboo shark, an aquarium found that one of their females gave birth by parthenogenesis, and then one of those offspring actually went on to reproduce parthenogenetically herself,” says Feldheim.

The findings in zebra sharks have implications for not only the continued care of zebra sharks in zoos and aquariums, but also for conservation efforts focused on their wild counterparts.

“Sharks studied in the field always face some barriers,” says Sara Asadi Gharabaghi, a PhD candidate at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran and member of Minorities in Shark Sciences, who was not involved in the study. One of those barriers is not being able to access the DNA of all of all adults and offspring to find biological parents.

“Sharks are the same as all animals trying to survive, so it would not be surprising to have pups from virgin birth either in the wild, even if we can’t prove it,” Asadi explains. It’s possible that sharks living in deep sea zones might use the same tactic, she adds

[Related: Baby sharks are eating the birds that live in your backyard]

For scientists studying endangered sharks in the wild and in aquariums, understanding reproduction will help conservation strategies. 

Zebra sharks are listed as threatened on the IUCN Red List, and aquariums like Shedd are working to preserve the species. Their genetic tests are part of a Species Survival Plan, or SSP, which brings together expert advisors to maximize genetic diversity and protect endangered species long-term. 

One aspect of an SSP is to determine “the genetics of the population and the sustainability of that population,” Watson says. Through genetic analysis she and her colleagues can make assumptions about how related an individual shark is to the whole group. From there, they can measure what the population size might look like for the next 100 years. 

“Studying these animals in our care is the foundation of us being able to help this species in the wild,” says Watson. “The care that we do for these animals here is of utmost importance for us.”

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It’s borderline cliché to call Madagascar a biodiversity playground. With over 90 percent of its plants and animals exclusive to the island in the Indian Ocean, it’s a perfect place to study how geographic isolation sparks evolution. Since splitting from the African mainland 150 million years ago and 80 million since it split from the Indian subcontinent, its plants and animals have followed their own evolutionary paths. The island’s multiple types of habitats and smaller gene pool has allowed its mammals to split into different species faster than their continental relatives.

However, the isolation on an island can’t protect its flora and fauna from the over-hunting, habitat loss, and changing climate seen throughout the planet. More than 120 of Madagascar’s 219 known mammal species are endangered, including 109 species of its signature lemurs. Extinction is a distinct possibility if humans aren’t careful.

[Related: Giant beasts once roamed Madagascar. What happened to them?]

A study published January 10 in the journal Nature Communications examined how long it would take Madagascar’s endangered mammals to emerge after extinction and also estimated how long it would take for similarly complex sets of new mammal species to evolve in their place. The answer was far longer than compared to other islands like those in the Caribbean: 23 million years.

“It’s abundantly clear that there are whole lineages of unique mammals that only occur on Madagascar that have either gone extinct or are on the verge of extinction, and if immediate action isn’t taken, Madagascar is going to lose 23 million years of evolutionary history of mammals, which means whole lineages unique to the face of the Earth will never exist again,” said study co-author Steve Goodman, MacArthur Field Biologist at Chicago’s Field Museum and Scientific Officer at Association Vahatra in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in a statement.

One of the costs of Madagascar’s signature biodiversity is that evolution happens faster on islands and so does extinction. Over 50 percent of the mammals living in Madagascar are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

In this study, an international team of Malagasy, European, and American scientists built a dataset of every known mammal species to coexist with humans on Madagascar for the last 2,500 years. They found the 219 known mammal species alive today, in addition to 30 more that have gone extinct over the past two millennia, including a gorilla-sized lemur. These megafauna went extinct between 500 and 2,000 years ago.

[Related: Below Madagascar, cave divers surface secrets of the past.]

The team built genetic family trees that show how all of these species are related and how long it took them to evolve from common ancestors. Then, the scientists were able to figure out how long it took this amount of biodiversity to evolve and come up with an estimate of how long it would take for evolution to “replace” all of the endangered mammals if they go extinct.

It would take roughly 3 million years to rebuild the diversity of land-dwelling mammals that have already gone extinct. The models suggest that if all of the currently endangered mammals go extinct, it would take 23 million years to rebuild that level of diversity.

“It is much longer than what previous studies have found on other islands, such as New Zealand or the Caribbean,” said Luis Valente, a study co-author and biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in a statement. “It was already known that Madagascar was a hotspot of biodiversity, but this new research puts into context just how valuable this diversity is. These findings underline the potential gains of the conservation of nature on Madagascar from a novel evolutionary perspective.”

The team added that this is a tipping point for protecting Madagascar’s biodiversity and that we have about five years to advance conservation efforts on the island, which is hampered by inequality and political corruption that can hamper land-use decisions.

“Madagascar’s biological crisis has nothing to do with biology. It has to do with socio-economics,” said Goodman. “We can’t throw in the towel. We’re obliged to advance this cause as much as we can and try to make the world understand that it’s now or never.”

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

When the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, many wildlife disease researchers like me were not too surprised. Some were intrigued it hadn’t happened sooner; after all, it is our job to observe, describe and study pandemic dynamics in animals.

Amphibians, for example, have been undergoing a global panzootic – the animal version of a pandemic – for decades. In the late 1990s, researchers identified the amphibian chytrid fungus, which causes the often-lethal disease chytridiomycosis, as the probable culprit behind frog and salamander declines and extinctions from Australia to Central America and elsewhere that began 10, 20 or even 30 years before.

Scientists have found this pathogen on every continent that amphibians inhabit, and the extensive global amphibian trade has likely spread highly lethal strains around the world. The amphibian chytrid fungus is widespread in some geographic regions, and, like the virus that causes COVID-19, it can mutate rapidly and take new forms that cause varying disease severity.

Conservation translocation is an increasingly popular way to recover species that have experienced extensive population declines. It involves moving organisms to reestablish populations that have gone extinct, supplement existing ones or establish new ones in areas where the species was not previously present. However, when the amphibian chytrid fungus is prevalent in the landscape, frogs are likely to get sick again, hampering the success of translocation.

To avoid the setbacks of disease, researchers are using a tool often employed against human pandemics: inoculations akin to vaccines.

In our recent study, my research team and I inoculated threatened California red-legged frogs against chytrid fungus before translocation by exposing them to the chytrid fungus in the laboratory. We wanted to see if we could activate their immune systems and give them an advantage over the fungus once they are released. Our results were unexpected.

Nothing a cocktail won’t cure

Since 2017, Yosemite National Park has been actively translocating California red-legged frogs to Yosemite Valley, where the chytrid fungus is already present. We used a small subset of these translocated frogs in our study.

We collected wild frog eggs at a place where the species is thriving, about 100 miles northwest of Yosemite Valley, then raised them in captivity at the San Francisco Zoo. Once they metamorphosed into juvenile frogs, we bathed 20 in a “cocktail” of four live, active strains of the fungus. After three weeks, they were given a bath of an antifungal drug to halt the infection. Another 40 frogs that were not exposed to the fungus were also given a bath of an antifungal drug.

Then we reexposed the 20 previously infected frogs to the fungus a second time, while 20 previously uninfected frogs were exposed to the fungus for the first time. We wanted to see how frogs with a second infection – namely, those that were “vaccinated” – compared with those that were infected only once.

What we found was surprising: 35% of frogs infected only once successfully cleared the infection without vaccination or an antifungal drug. This suggested that they have some measure of innate immunity, meaning their immune system’s first line of defense was able to fight off the fungus. In addition, frogs infected a second time had a 31% overall lower rate of infection than those that were infected only once. This suggested that the vaccinelike treatment also works by stimulating adaptive immunity, meaning their immune system learned to recognize the fungus from their first exposure and fight it off more efficiently. None of the frogs died from their fungal infections.

Before releasing them to the wild, we treated the frogs with an antifungal drug and monitored to make sure they were disease-free. We attached tiny transmitters with beaded belts around their waists so we could track their infections and survival over three months.

Unexpectedly, we found no difference in disease burden between the frogs that had never been infected and those that had been previously infected in the laboratory. This suggests that immunizing this species for chytrid fungus, at least in Yosemite, may be unnecessary to ensure their survival after reintroduction.

Indeed, the California red-legged frogs released into Yosemite Valley are thriving three years after our experiment and six years after their first translocation. They are hibernating successfully through the cold winters and emerging early in the spring for reproduction.

Hope for the future

Our study takes a new approach to the emerging tool of inoculation against the chytrid fungus. By combining ex situ, or laboratory, experiments with in situ, or in the field, implementation, we put lab observations to the test in the real world. This type of work strengthens collaborations between wildlife managers and zoos, which are increasingly needed as the biodiversity crisis accelerates.

Though California red-legged frogs in Yosemite Valley didn’t seem to need vaccinations, this doesn’t mean that other imperiled amphibian species around the world do not. Research on chytrid inoculations in other species have had mixed results, ranging from not improving survival to reducing infection burden associated with increased survival. One of the primary challenges of this approach to conservation is that even if vaccination increases survival after initial release, this immunity does not carry forward to successive generations.

There is hope, however. Researchers are working to identify the genetic signatures associated with immunity to the chytrid fungus. If successful, breeding programs can artificially select for – and perhaps even gene-edit – protective traits to give frogs a leg up on a pathogen that has devastated amphibian populations worldwide.

Andrea Adams is a Researcher in Ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Andrea Adams previously received funding from the Yosemite Conservancy for conducting this research as a postdoctoral researcher at Yosemite National Park. Funding for her current academic appointment is received from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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In the Arctic, the freedom to travel, hunt and make day-to-day decisions is profoundly tied to cold and frozen conditions for much of the year. These conditions are rapidly changing as the Arctic warms.

The Arctic is now seeing more rainfall when historically it would be snowing. Sea ice that once protected coastlines from erosion during fall storms is forming later. And thinner river and lake ice is making travel by snowmobile increasingly life-threatening.

Ship traffic in the Arctic is also increasing, bringing new risks to fragile ecosystems, and the Greenland ice sheet is continuing to send freshwater and ice into the ocean, raising global sea level

In the annual Arctic Report Card, released Dec. 13, 2022, we brought together 144 other Arctic scientists from 11 countries to examine the current state of the Arctic system.

The Arctic is getting wetter and rainier

We found that Arctic precipitation is on the rise across all seasons, and these seasons are shifting.

Much of this new precipitation is now falling as rain, sometimes during winter and traditionally frozen times of the year. This disrupts daily life for humans, wildlife and plants.

Roads become dangerously icy more often, and communities face greater risk of river flooding events. For Indigenous reindeer herding communities, winter rain can create an impenetrable ice layer that prevents their reindeer from accessing vegetation beneath the snow.

Arctic-wide, this shift toward wetter conditions can disrupt the lives of animals and plants that have evolved for dry and cold conditions, potentially altering Arctic peoples’ local foods.

When Fairbanks, Alaska, got 1.4 inches of freezing rain in December 2021, the moisture created an ice layer that persisted for months, bringing down trees and disrupting travel, infrastructure and the ability of some Arctic animals to forage for food. The resulting ice layer was largely responsible for the deaths of a third of a bison herd in interior Alaska.

There are multiple reasons for this increase in Arctic precipitation.

As sea ice rapidly declines, more open water is exposed, which feeds increased moisture into the atmosphere. The entire Arctic region has seen a more than 40% loss in summer sea ice extent over the 44-year satellite record.

The Arctic atmosphere is also warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the globe, and this warmer air can hold more moisture.

Under the ground, the wetter, rainier Arctic is accelerating the thaw of permafrost, upon which most Arctic communities and infrastructure are built. The result is crumbling buildings, sagging and cracked roads, the emergence of sinkholes and the collapse of community coastlines along rivers and ocean.

Wetter weather also disrupts the building of a reliable winter snowpack and safe, reliable river ice, and often challenges Indigenous communities’ efforts to harvest and secure their food.

When Typhoon Merbok hit in September 2022, fueled by unusually warm Pacific water, its hurricane-force winds, 50-foot waves and far-reaching storm surge damaged homes and infrastructure over 1,000 miles of Bering Sea coastline, and disrupted hunting and harvesting at a crucial time.

Arctic snow season is shrinking

Snow plays critical roles in the Arctic, and the snow season is shrinking.

Snow helps to keep the Arctic cool by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space, rather than allowing it to be absorbed by the darker snow-free ground. Its presence helps lake ice last longer into spring and helps the land to retain moisture longer into summer, preventing overly dry conditions that are ripe for devastating wildfires.

Snow is also a travel platform for hunters and a habitat for many animals that rely on it for nesting and protection from predators.

A shrinking snow season is disrupting these critical functions. For example, the June snow cover extent across the Arctic is declining at a rate of nearly 20% per decade, marking a dramatic shift in how the snow season is defined and experienced across the North.

Even in the depth of winter, warmer temperatures are breaking through. The far northern Alaska town of Utqiaġvik hit 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 C) – 8 F above freezing – on Dec. 5, 2022, even though the sun does not breach the horizon from mid-November through mid-January.

Fatal falls through thin sea, lake and river ice are on the rise across Alaska, resulting in immediate tragedies as well as adding to the cumulative human cost of climate change that Arctic Indigenous peoples are now experiencing on a generational scale.

Greenland ice melt means global problems

The impacts of Arctic warming are not limited to the Arctic. In 2022, the Greenland ice sheet lost ice for the 25th consecutive year. This adds to rising seas, which escalates the danger coastal communities around the world must plan for to mitigate flooding and storm surge.

In early September 2022, the Greenland ice sheet experienced an unprecedented late-season melt event across 36% of the ice sheet surface. This was followed by another, even later melt event that same month, caused by the remnants of Hurricane Fiona moving up along eastern North America.

International teams of scientists are dedicated to assessing the scale to which the Greenland ice sheet’s ice formation and ice loss are out of balance. They are also increasingly learning about the transformative role that warming ocean waters play.

This year’s Arctic Report Card includes findings from the NASA Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission that has confirmed that warming ocean temperatures are increasing ice loss at the edges of the ice sheet.

Human-caused change is reshaping the Arctic

We are living in a new geological age — the Anthropocene — in which human activity is the dominant influence on our climate and environments.

In the warming Arctic, this requires decision-makers to better anticipate the interplay between a changing climate and human activity. For example, satellite-based ship data since 2009 clearly show that maritime ship traffic has increased within all Arctic high seas and national exclusive economic zones as the region has warmed.

For these ecologically sensitive waters, this added ship traffic raises urgent concerns ranging from the future of Arctic trade routes to the introduction of even more human-caused stresses on Arctic peoples, ecosystems and the climate. These concerns are especially pronounced given uncertainties regarding the current geopolitical tensions between Russia and the other Arctic states over its war in Ukraine.

Rapid Arctic warming requires new forms of partnership and information sharing, including between scientists and Indigenous knowledge-holders. Cooperation and building resilience can help to reduce some risks, but global action to rein in greenhouse gas pollution is essential for the entire planet.

Matthew L. Druckenmiller is a Research Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder. Rick Thoman is an Alaska Climate Specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Twila Moon is a Deputy Lead Scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder.

Disclosure statement: Matthew Druckenmiller receives research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Rick Thoman receives funding from NOAA/Arctic Program. Twila Moon receives research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

In the Antarctic, the fur seal population is booming. Having rebounded from near eradication by hunters in the early 20th century, Antarctic fur seals are making their way to new frontiers. Their recovery has been so successful that the animals are pushing beyond their known historical range, causing “unexpected terrestrial conservation challenges” for Antarctica’s fragile vegetation, warns a recent study.

Starting around 2010, fur seals have been expanding from their hub centered on South Georgia island down the Antarctic Peninsula, reaching the southern side of Marguerite Bay. “That’s way farther south than we would have seen them before,” says Peter Convey, an ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the new study. This expansion is led mostly by juveniles and non-breeding males. When they haul out on land, these fur seals trample the fragile coastal vegetation that thrives on Antarctica’s limited ice-free terrain.

Convey points to the damage fur seals have caused on Signy Island, one of the South Orkney Islands, where the landscape, including the fragile mosses and lichens that grow there, has been heavily impacted by seals. In 1977, says Convey, there were around 1,600 seals on Signy Island. By the mid-1990s, there were more than 20,000. As well as trampling vegetation, seals defecating and urinating near the island’s freshwater lakes have contributed to their eutrophication.

Convey and his colleagues are raising the issue to stimulate discussion. He’s concerned that the current plans that oversee Antarctica’s protection—managed by the multi-state Antarctic Treaty—only account for human impacts on the continent. But for him, the scale of the seal’s impact far outweighs that of humans. Convey says the situation gets at a fundamental question: is it the Antarctic Treaty’s job to provide physical protection for the continent’s inhabitants from each other? “There’s no easy answer,” Convey says. But he believes it is a debate that has to be had.

Brian Silliman, a marine biologist at Duke University in North Carolina who wasn’t involved in the research, suggests the seals’ expansion may be a case of recolonization into their full historical range. It’s common when looking at rebounding species to think they are “doing things that we thought they’re not supposed to do,” Silliman says. Studying populations at their nadir after decades of overhunting or loss can give a false impression of their previous range and behavior, he adds.

It is unclear what Antarctic fur seal population levels were, or where exactly they were distributed, prior to historical overhunting. Convey, however, underlines that there is no evidence that seals have ever galumphed their way across these particular coastlines—even prior to their exploitation.

Convey is careful to stress that culling the seals isn’t and shouldn’t be on the table. Yet the question of how to respond to the ballooning fur seal population is a management headache requiring difficult decisions. At its core, the situation asks whether Antarctica’s terrestrial ecosystems should be prioritized over its expanding fur seals.

Claire Christian, executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, an NGO devoted to protecting Antarctica and its surrounding waters, says the Antarctic Treaty System has tough choices to make based on rather limited information. Potentially identifying hotspots of vegetation that should be protected from errant fur seals may be one approach. Convey agrees this is a potential solution. Yet taking steps to safeguard this terrain—such as by installing fences—would be yet another human intervention with possibly unforeseen consequences. Fences have been deployed in some locations, with mixed success.

Another approach, Christian suggests, is to figure out what is needed to make this new normal thrive “instead of trying to make it into what we want to see,” she says.

Ally Kristan, a marine biologist who studied rebounding populations on South Georgia Island while at Louisiana State University and was not involved in the research, is “very wary of implementing control methods on a population that has already been so vastly and disastrously affected by human impact.” Regardless of where they used to live, Kristan says, fur seals are now in an altered ecosystem due to past and current impacts. There is no way to return things to “normal,” she adds.

This lack of simple answers unites those concerned with protecting Antarctica with those working to manage changing environments elsewhere, such as in the Indian Ocean where dwindling shark populations have allowed green sea turtles to rebound swiftly—and to go on to overgraze seagrass meadows. Along the west coast of North America, recovering populations of sea otters have come into conflict with local people. As other marine predators recover, they may do similarly.

Inadvertently or not, humans have been picking ecosystems’ winners and losers for millennia. As populations recover from historical exploitation and struggle to adapt to already altered environments that are further changing because of anthropogenic warming, taking a hands-off approach is seeming less and less viable.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Millions of sharks, rays, and skates are accidentally killed every year as bycatch within the global fishing industry—an especially staggering number when considering that a quarter of all those species are currently considered endangered. Previously, fishers could do very little to discourage the predators from going after the longline bait meant for intended targets like tuna, but a simple and ingenious new technology is showing huge promise in finally changing course. Highlighted via a study published earlier today in Current Biology, a small device dubbed SharkGuard recently decreased the number of unintended shark catches by as much as 90 percent through exploiting one of the animals’ most impressive senses.

The premise behind SharkGuard is relatively simple, but extremely effective: the device is essentially a small, localized electric pulse emitter attached alongside longline lure bait. As fishers draw their many lines through the ocean waters, the invention shoots out an electric field that discourages sharks, rays, and similar predators who hunt primarily through electroreceptors located in their snouts, known as ampullae of Lorenzini. While unpleasant to the sharks, the charges don’t seem to bother tuna much at all.

[Related: Tiger sharks helped scientists map a vast underwater meadow in the Bahamas.]

According to the new study, two fishing boats went on a total of 11 trips off the coast of southern France last year, during which they used 22 longlines deployed with over 18,000 hooks. The resulting hauls showed 91 percent fewer sharks and 71 percent fewer rays, while tuna harvests were barely affected by the SharkGuard additions. Although each SharkGuard currently requires frequent battery recharges and a set of 2,000 costs around $20,000, researchers are currently working to improve the charge times. But when it comes to large-scale commercial tuna harvesting budgets, $20K is, well, relatively small fish.

In the near future, scaling up SharkGuard availability could have an extremely dramatic and near immediate effect on reversing an unnecessary, destructive byproduct of commercial fishing. Until then, keep an eye on those great white shark counts off US coasts—more of them is a good thing, actually.

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In recent years, the monarch butterfly population has decreased by more than 80 percent. A lack of milkweed is one of the major causes of this decline, as the plant is the only food source for the species’ larvae and caterpillars, and the only place monarchs will lay their eggs. 

Planting milkweed in your own outdoor spaces is not only a way to help the butterflies, but it’ll also upgrade your garden or windowsill with beautiful, low-maintenance wildflowers. You can get seeds from marketplaces such as Amazon, but getting them from non-profit organizations like Save Our Monarchs or the Live Monarch Educational Foundation, will allow you to get seeds while supporting conservation efforts at the same time. 

Fall and spring are great times to plant milkweed, and even though this plant has an arguably undeserved bad rap amongst pet owners, there are ways you can incorporate it into your garden safely. 

Any seemingly inhospitable nook, including side yards, alleyways, or patios, can be home to milkweed—even if it’s surrounded by hardscapes like cement slabs. And your neighborhood’s furry residents shouldn’t worry if there are no walls or fencing around the area. Even though milkweed can be toxic to wildlife due to the cardenolide-rich sap it uses as a defense mechanism, it’s only dangerous in large quantities, and bugs that feed on it and become toxic themselves (like the monarchs and their offspring) have bright coloration that warns predators away, van Rees explains. Animals don’t usually eat milkweed unless they’re forced to—like when they’re corraled and have no other food available. Still, if you are neighbors to a lot of pets and wildlife in general, opt for variations such as Joe Pye weed, and stay away from the most toxic kind known as Utah milkweed.

“If you have more waterlogged soils, look for moisture-tolerant species like the swamp milkweed,” he says. These plants “don’t mind wet feet.” 

Next, think about the amount of sunlight your plant would receive. Most milkweed species evolved in open meadows, so they adapted to thrive in full sunlight. Only a few species of milkweed like partial shade, like the purple milkweed (native to Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern United States) or the whorled milkweed (native to eastern North America). 

Regardless of the variety, plant your milkweed seeds under 1/4 of an inch of soil and half an inch apart. Finally, water the area frequently until the plants begin to sprout to ensure they take root.

Some species, like common milkweed, can self-propagate through underground rhizomes, which allows them to spread aggressively even without the help of pollinators. Keeping the plant in a flowerpot can protect your pets’ eyes by preventing milkweed from spreading unchecked to spots your fur babies regularly hang out at. Most milkweed species have a milky white sap that can irritate eyes, Lenhart explains. “But milkweed getting in your dog’s eyes is rare,” and wouldn’t impact your animal’s health seriously, he says. 

To plant milkweed, choose a plastic container. While other materials work just as well, plastic is lighter, which will allow you to move the plant easily indoors for winter storage. Size is also important. Prefer spacious and deep containers around 10- to 12-inches tall and 5-inches wide, as milkweed root systems tend to grow large. You should also make sure your pot has a drainage hole to prevent the plant from becoming waterlogged. 

“Wild animals learn after one bite that milkweed isn’t good to eat,” says Ellen Jacquart, botanist and president of the Indiana Native Plant Society. “Most pets would react the same—that milky sap tastes awful!” 

Still, you should prevent any accidental ingestion of milkweed by fencing off the area. To do this, make sure the fence or protection you install is tall enough to keep pets out. A 24-inch barrier will generally dissuade most dogs from leaping into a patch of milkweed. 

“Native plants offer exponentially more value than plants that are not native,” says Lenhart. This is because native species co-evolved with local animals, learning with time to be best pals with them as they both changed, he explains. 

Variety is also a plus, as grouping different kinds of milkweed together seem to attract more pollinators, Jacquart explains. As long as all the species you choose are native to your area, you can plant as many as you want. 

“It’s important to realize that there are many species of milkweed. All can serve as host plants [for monarch butterflies],” Jacquart says. 

Start your planting now and by Spring you’ll hopefully enjoy a garden filled with beautiful butterflies and other helpful pollinators. You won’t only be getting a pretty landscape, but you’ll also be helping nature thrive. 

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Australia’s famed platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus) is one funky animal with a bit of an identity crisis. They have a pretty unique combination of characteristics: they can lay eggs despite being classified as mammals, the males have venomous spurs that they likely use to compete during mating season, they use electroreception to locate prey like worms, shellfish, and larvae. Not to mention, their fur is biofluorescent.

Native to Australia and mainland Tasmania, platypuses are locally extinct in some parts of Australia. The International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species lists the platypus as Near Threatened, primarily due to threats from bushfires, deforestation, drought, pollution, and predators (including foxes, cats, and dogs).

[Related: Australia’s horrific fires may permanently change the country’s landscape.]

River dams could also be added to that list of threats, according to a study published today in the journal Communications Biology. A team from the University of New South Wales looked at the genetic makeup of 274 platypuses living along nine rivers in New South Wales. Five of the rivers contained a major dam measuring between 278 and 590 feet high and the four remaining rivers in the study were undammed.

The study found that large dams are significant barriers to platypus movements, which led to greater genetic differentiation, or restricted gene flow, between platypuses above and below large dams compared to rivers without dams. The genetic differentiation increased over time since the dam was built, reflecting the long-term impacts of the dam. Since the large dams restrict the movement of the platypuses, there is limited or no flow of genes between groups of animals. This lack of genetic diversity makes these separate populations of platypus increasingly vulnerable to inbreeding depression and loss of adaptive genetic variations. Additionally, it makes it harder for them to recolonize areas where local extinctions have occurred or disperse to areas that have better conditions.

“We extracted the DNA from the blood collected by our Platypus Conservation Initiative researchers at UNSW. By using thousands of molecular markers, we were able to identify a strong signal indicating that genetic differentiation increased rapidly between platypuses below and above these large dams,” lead author Luis Mijangos, a former UNSW PhD student now at the University of Canberra, said in a statement.

This genetic differentiation has increased over time since the dams were built, which shows some of the long-term impacts of the dam and the barriers they create for populations of platypuses.

[Related: Platypus milk might save us from bacterial infections, and that’s not even the best thing about them.]

“This is a profound result with significant implications for platypus conservation,” said Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science and one of the paper’s authors, in a statement. “We’ve long suspected that prey can restrict platypus movements, but this is the ‘smoking gun’. These animals just can’t get around big dams.”

To help the platypus’, the authors recommend that water conservation and management planning should consider alternative approaches to these large dams, including storing water in off-river reservoirs, the artificial relocation of individual platypuses between groups above and below dams, or building platypus passage structures that they could use to travel between dammed and not dammed sections to increase their dispersal.

“We know that platypuses are declining in many parts of their range in eastern Australia, affected by many threats. This study identifies one of the main threats to this iconic species,” said Gilad Bino, leader of the Platypus Conservation Initiative at UNSW Sydney and another author of the study, in a statement. “There is still much we don’t know about the ecology of the platypus, but given its international status as a monotreme, it is increasingly vital that we understand and manage the threats to this unique species.”

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The critically endangered rhinoceros is a crucial part of its ecosystem primarily in present-day South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. Humans have hunted them for centuries, seeing a surge in hunting during European colonization, due in large part to to their valuable signature horns. Rhino horns are still in demand both as a financial investment and for their use in traditional medicines.

After reviewing a century’s worth of photographs, researchers from the University of Cambridge found that the horns themselves have shrunk over time. In the study, published earlier this week in the journal People and Nature, the team measured the horns of 80 rhinos photographed in profile view between 1886 and 2018. The photos, held by the Rhino Resource Center, included all five species of rhino: white, black, Indian, Javan, and Sumatran.

[Related: Does South Africa still need private rhino breeders to fight poaching?]

The team believes that the horns shrunk due to intensive hunting. Shooting the rhinos with the longest horns leaves behind smaller-horned survivors. In turn, these smaller-horned animals reproduce and pass on their traits to future generations. Researchers recorded this phenomenon for other animals before including, in the size of cod and in the antlers of white tailed deer, but this is the first time it has been spotted in rhinos.

Due to their value, studying real rhino horns require strict security protocols. Studying these photographs enabled the team to measure horn length over a long period of time without ever needing to see a real one.

“We were really excited that we could find evidence from photographs that rhino horns have become shorter over time. They’re probably one of the hardest things to work on in natural history because of the security concerns,” Oscar Wilson, formerly a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, first author of the report,said in a statement. Wilson is now based at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Rhinos use their horns for defense, and previous studies have shown that removing horns can have detrimental effects on the animals. “Rhinos evolved their horns for a reason – different species use them in different ways such as helping to grasp food or to defend against predators – so we think that having smaller horns will be detrimental to their survival,” Wilson added.

[Related: Inside the high-tech, last-ditch effort to save the northern white rhino.]

The team also measured their full body length and other body parts to more accurately measure the horn in proportion to body size. But, photographs weren’t the only images they looked at—the researchers analyzed drawings and photographs from over the past 500 years, and noticed a dramatic change in how humans perceived rhinos around 1950. The focus became conservation, not hunting.

“We found that we can use images from the last few centuries to visualize how human attitudes towards wildlife have changed, and how artists have influenced these views,” Ed Turner an associate professor in the Zoology department at Cambridge and the senior author of the report, said in a statement.

A significant number of the photographs in the collection from the late 19th and early 20th century show rhinos shot by hunters. A 1911 photo includes President Theodore Roosevelt, a notorious hunter, sportsman, and specimen collector, standing triumphantly over a black rhino. Some of the other images show rhinos as large and frightening animals, that the team believes were used to help justify hunting.

The researchers say the turn to conservation-based imagery coincides with the collapse of European empires, with multiple African countries becoming independent. European hunters no longer had such easy access to Africa’s wildlife for trophy hunting.

Some of the most recent images in the collection appear to reflect a growing awareness of the threats facing rhinos and the rest of the natural world.

“For at least a few decades now there’s been much more of a focus on the conservation of rhinos – and this is reflected in the more recent images, which relate to their conservation in sanctuaries or their plight in the wild,” said Wilson.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, there were 500,000 rhinos in African and Asia at the beginning of the 20th century. However, by 1970, the numbers dropped to 70,000, with only about 27,000 rhinos remain in the wild today. Due to persistent poaching and habitat loss, very few of these rhinos survive outside national parks and reserves.

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Every year, more than 14 million tons of plastic pollute the ocean and threaten the life of various marine species. About 80 percent of all marine debris is plastic, which demonstrates the extent of global plastic pollution.

Boat builders, sailors, and engineers have developed technological innovations like the Seabin to minimize all sorts of litter floating in the ocean. These mechanical cleanup inventions are fixed-point devices designed to separate and remove marine debris from various bodies of water. They work by sucking water from the surface and intercepting floating debris or lifting trash from the water onto a conveyor belt that gathers everything in a dumpster.

However, they might have a limited benefit in reducing plastic pollution. Research shows the devices may even capture unknowing marine organisms, which is a problem because they threaten marine life.

The rate of waste generation exceeds the rate of litter cleanup

A recent Marine Pollution Bulletin study examined a Seabin in the Southwest United Kingdom and found that it captured an average of 58 litter items per day, mainly consisting of polystyrene balls, plastic pellets, and plastic fragments. The authors also found that the device caught one marine organism—like sand eels, brown shrimps, and crabs—for every 3.6 items of litter captured (or roughly 13 marine organisms per day), half of which were dead upon retrieval.

The marine organisms may be attracted to the device to forage or seek refuge. Their mortality rate also appeared to increase with retention time in the machine. Some died due to being captured, possibly under the weight of the surrounding material, says Florence Parker-Jurd, study author and research assistant in the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

“At its current stage of development, the study found that in the environment examined, the quantity or mass of litter being removed by the device was minimal when considered alongside the risk of by-catch,” says Parker-Jurd. She adds that manual cleaning efforts with nets from pontoons tend to be more efficient and less resource intensive than the Seabin in environments like marinas, harbors, and ports, even though it was designed to operate in these locations.

“Technological innovations have a part to play in reducing marine litter, particularly in coastal environments where they can complement existing cleanup efforts,” says Parker-Jurd. “This study has highlighted the need for robust, formal evaluations of such devices, especially given the increasing use and geographic spread of the Seabin and similar devices.”

[Related: A close look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch reveals a common culprit.]

Although the study only formally evaluated one device, similar issues may apply to other marine cleaning devices. Things like the lack of an escape route, long periods of operation, and the time out of the water to separate marine life from organic matter and litter before it returns to the water can all contribute to the entrapment of marine organisms, says Parker-Jurd.

Moreover, the current capacity of technological efforts to reduce plastic collection is limited in comparison to the extent of the plastic pollution problem. “Though there are no estimates of the overall removal of plastic and other debris from these devices, there is near consensus among experts that the magnitude of trash collected pales in comparison to the amount of waste that enters our environment,” says Meagan Dunphy-Daly, director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory Scholars Program. She was not involved in the study.

There haven’t been many scientific studies on the effectiveness of various technologies in removing plastic pollution from the environment—or their rate of marine by-catch—but self-reported effectiveness is often higher than peer-reviewed reports on the efficacy, says Dunphy-Daly. Weather, current, and the location of the device deployment have to be considered when it comes to the effectiveness of cleanup technologies outside their pilot phases.

Dutch non-profit The Ocean Cleanup went under fire recently for the heap of plastic debris they cleaned from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which some experts say was too clean for plastics that were supposedly in the water for years. The organization argued that there was no visible build-up of algae and barnacles because the water in the garbage patch lacked nutrients. Most of the plastic floated above the water, but conservation experts also refuted that.

“Further studies need to evaluate the types of marine life being captured in these devices to determine population-level effects and weigh the risks and benefits of using these cleanup technologies,” says Dunphy-Daly.

Technology must go hand-in-hand with reducing plastic production and use

Developing and implementing technologies to reduce litter is only part of the solution. When there’s an oil spill, you don’t just focus on removing the oil from the surface of the water—you stop the leak and clean it up, says Dunphy-Daly.

The leak has undoubtedly continued in the case of global plastic pollution. She adds that combating it requires a comprehensive approach that targets all stages of the plastic life cycle, from reducing overall production to cleaning up what has entered the environment.

That said, the invention of cleanup devices effectively draws attention to the problem of marine litter. Last year, Coldplay partnered with The Ocean Cleanup and sponsored an Interceptor, a watercraft or vessel intended to remove plastic from rivers before they reach the ocean.

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

“Hopefully, by generating public interest with these technologies, we can also gain support for targeting other life stages of plastic and reduce overall plastic pollution,” says Dunphy-Daly.

A 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine argued that recycling processes and infrastructures are insufficient to manage the gross amount of plastic waste produced. The authors recommended several interventions to reduce waste generation, like establishing a national cap on virgin plastic production and a ban on specific disposable plastic products.

Mechanical marine cleaning devices can shape perceptions around the issue of marine litter and potentially create a reliance on technological solutions to environmental problems. Therefore, these sorts of interventions should continue to be evaluated, says Parker-Jurd. According to a 2022 Societies paper, there is excessive optimism around technology and scientific advancement. Still, the man-made problems of the planet cannot be solved by modern and efficient technology alone.

Even though the invention of cleanup devices is unlikely to alleviate one’s responsibility for waste and litter completely, evidence of their psychological impacts is currently lacking and should still form a crucial part of future research, says Parker-Jurd. She adds, “our primary focus should remain on implementing a systematic change in the way we produce, use, and dispose of plastics.”

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From federal to local races, conservation can either get a boost or backslide with the results of any Election Day. But this year’s important issues—national auctions for oil and gas leases, wildfire prevention and mitigation, the sheer acreage of protected lands and waters, to name a few—all come down to the same factor: whether Democrats or Republicans have control of Congress after the midterms. 

“We really believe the Biden administration and Congress are just getting started taking action on these issues,” says Leah Donahey, the federal advocacy campaigns director for the League of Conservation Voters, a non-partisan environmental lobbying group that has endorsed and run ads supporting Democratic candidates this election. “We’ve never seen change at this level, and from our perspective, whether it can continue comes down to Congress and a bunch of critical House and Senate races across the country.” 

Right now, Democrats have majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and have passed legislation seen as steps in the right direction by environmental scientists and policy experts. Foremost among these is the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains numerous climate provisions as well as funds for sustainable forestry programs, including ever-important wildfire prevention. 

[Related: The future of American conservation lies in restoration]

The Biden administration has also taken a number of pro-public lands executive actions that haven’t yet been challenged or opposed by Congress. These encompass the America the Beautiful Challenge, which directs $1 billion in federal funds towards conservation projects, executive orders restoring thousands of undeveloped acres to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, and the recent creation of the 50,000-acre Camp Hale National Monument. The White House has also restored the Endangered Species Act to full strength, an important tool for protecting threatened wildlife and habitat that was weakened under former President Donald Trump.  

The major criticism of the Biden administration—besides the question of whether its actions go far enough—are its leases for oil and gas companies to drill on public lands and waters, a reversal of a campaign promise to end the practice. New leases were part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), but auctions for parcels in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Wyoming, and the Gulf of Mexico were held before the legislation was passed this summer. 

Right now, Democrats hold a majority in Congress by a very narrow margin, and close races across the country this election cycle mean it’s possible that either party could win control of the House and the Senate. If Democrats come out with more seats, executive action should be able to proceed and new Congressional legislation supporting conservation and public lands projects could be possible. But if Republicans win a majority in one or both houses of Congress, it might be a very different picture. 

“When [Republicans] have had the majority in the past, we’ve seen lots of bills to expand drilling, leasing, and development on public land,” says Donahey. Measures enacted through executive orders like establishing national monuments would still be possible, she adds, but a Republican-controlled Congress could bog momentum down with oversight investigations and other administrative holdups. “The Biden administration will likely have less capacity to move forward with their proactive programs if we see a suite of oversight investigations,” a tactic that was used by the Republican majority in the legislature during the Obama administration, Donahey explains.

In addition to holding up the executive branch’s conservation agenda, Donahey notes that a Republican-controlled Congress could try to restrict funding for public lands management, something they’ve done in the past. Opening up more oil and gas leases, similar to the ones in the IRA, would likely also be a priority. 

It’s not all-or-nothing, however. Regardless of the outcome of this election, the president will still be a Democrat and be able to carry out at least some of his agenda. The Department of the Interior has also engaged and empowered Indigenous people in land management decisions, something that has not been a priority under previous administrations. 

[Related: Stronger pollution protections mean focusing on specific communities]

As ever, important issues like carbon emissions targets, air, water, and land pollution, and access to natural spaces are also on the ballot at the state, county, and municipal level. The shape and scope varies from place to place, but voters will have the chance to make meaningful choices for their region. With local ballots, conservation issues mostly take the form of bonds or levies, which establish a tax to fund public parks and other lands. People in Salt Lake City, for example, are voting on a Parks, Trails, and Open Spaces bond, which would raise $85 million for recreational areas and greenways. 

It can be difficult to see the on-the-ground impacts of voting each year. But the outcomes of the 2022 midterms will ripple through massive government systems that manage endangered species, essential resources, and livable landscapes for humans and nature alike. Whether it’s funding for your local parks or huge swaths of remote forests, environmental progress is most definitely on the ballot this election. 

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Whatever name you call it—the hellbender, Allegheny alligator, snot otter, devil dog, or even lasagna lizard—the giant amphibian Cryptobranchus alleganiensis may be off-putting at first glance. Its rippled and mucus-y skin can make North America’s largest salamander a creepy sight to behold. 

“It has a face only your mother could love,” says Eric Chapman, director of aquatic science at Western Pennsylvania Conservancy. But the mother of all mothers, Mother Nature, does, in fact, love the hellbender. 

Although this creature might look like the spawn of satan, it is actually quite docile towards humans unless provoked. Plus, the aquatic animal does wonders for its environment as its presence signals water quality and mitigates crayfish populations from running amok. “They’re the canary in the coal mine for streams,” Chapman says, explaining that the rise or fall of Cryptobranchus populations is often an indication of the health of the overall environment. 

But not everyone appreciates the hellbender like Mother Nature does. According to Chapman, misinformation leading to the persecution of these slippery salamanders has been around for centuries. The nasty names originally spread by European colonizers only scratch the surface of what hellbenders have been through in the public eye. They’ve been said to bring bad luck when encountered, while other folklore paints hellbenders as poisonous beasts that decimate populations of large native fish, neither of which is true. 

[Related: Skydiving salamanders have mastered falling with style]

In reality, hellbenders are gentle giants, says Jeff Briggler, state herpetologist for Missouri. Although they may occasionally try to defend themselves when their homes or babies are encroached upon, they are generally harmless—unless you’re a crayfish or a snail. Hellbenders are typically around one to two feet in length, and “the bigger they are, the more gentle they seem to be,” Briggler says. 

Hellbenders spend a lot of time just hiding at home, which for them are under massive rocks in streams that can be as big as the hood of a car, Chapman says. Some hellbenders have been spotted under the same rock year after year, living out the majority of their impressively long lives (25 to 35 years in the wild) all under one rock. And hellbenders themselves are an ancient species. “They’ve been around in the fossil record for millions of years,” Briggler says. “Little has changed over time.”

On the occasions when hellbenders do have to leave their rocky abodes, these big homebodies are rarely seen swimming and instead usually plod along river bottoms with their stubby legs.  The amphibians are typically most active in the fall during mating season. Males come out to do a courtship display and mate with females who will go back under the rocks to lay their eggs. Male hellbenders also guard the nests for weeks without eating, Chapman says. Despite their sacrifice, they might not win the award for best dad of the animal kingdom award, given their tendency to eat their young if the babies don’t flee the nest early enough. 

But far scarier than their names or their debatably ugly mugs are real threats to hellbenders, such as habitat loss and disease. Ozark hellbenders, one of two hellbender subspecies, have faced significant declines in Missouri and Arkansas “In the ‘70s, we estimated there were around 45,000 hellbenders in Missouri. Today we estimate there are about 2,100,” Briggler says. Eastern hellbenders, the other subspecies which live as far north as New York and as far south as Georgia and Alabama, may be seeing population declines, but scientists don’t have as much information about these numbers as they do in Missouri, Briggler says. Still, the eastern hellbender is listed as threatened or endangered in several states, although it has not made it onto the federal endangered species list like the Ozark subspecies.

But even though they reside across 15 states, habitat destruction is suffocating these amphibians. Although they are born with gills and use lungs later in life, hellbenders primarily breathe through their blood-vessel-lined skin. They absorb oxygen through cold water and may occasionally use their lungs to get oxygen from the surface if their streams become too warm, Briggler says. But, as deforestation displaces soil and agriculture erodes land, increased sedimentation can occur in streams, literally choking out hellbenders. Additionally, the spread of amphibian chytrid fungus has been affecting Missouri hellbenders since the 1960s and causing death along the way, Briggler says.

Illegal animal trade has impacted hellbender populations, too. Although learning about these animals is a great way to save them, increased recognition has had adverse effects, Chapman says. When the eastern hellbender was named the Pennsylvania state amphibian in 2019, “it was amazing,” he says. “But it also spurred up tons of calls to the Pennsylvania fish and boat commission from people wanting to have one in a tank at their house.” This is nothing new. A few decades ago, hundreds and thousands of hellbenders were illegally collected from Missouri waters, mostly for sale as pets in southeast Asian countries, Briggler says. If individuals go looking under rocks for these giants in the wild, Briggler warns that the animals may never return.

Now, protections like CITES have helped curtail this trend, although scientists still urge people not to go looking for hellbenders in the wild, as moving their rocks should only be done by highly trained individuals who know how best to preserve the microhabitat underneath. With the help of breeding programs, scientists have been able to release 10,000 hellbenders back into rivers in Missouri. It will likely take decades to bring back hellbender numbers back to where they were before the 1960s, but states like Missouri are starting to see a small resurgence, says Briggler.

“Fifteen years ago, I would have said, ‘I don’t know if we can save this animal,’” he says. “I’m so much more hopeful with the program we have here today. We are buying this animal 30, 40 years while we work on addressing threats.”

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Every three years, Reinhold Hanel boards a research ship and voyages to the only sea in the world that’s located in the middle of an ocean. The Sargasso, bounded by currents instead of land, is an egg-shaped expanse that takes up about two-thirds of the North Atlantic, looping around Bermuda and stretching east more than 1,000 kilometers. Dubbed the “golden floating rainforest” thanks to the thick tangles of ocher-colored seaweed that blanket the water’s surface, the Sargasso is a slowly swirling sanctuary for over 270 marine species. And each year, the eels arrive.

The European eel and the American eel—both considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—make this extraordinary migration. The Sargasso is the only place on Earth where they breed. The slithery creatures, some as long as 1.5 meters, arrive from Europe, North America, including parts of the Caribbean, and North Africa, including the Mediterranean Sea. Hanel, a fish biologist and director of the Thünen Institute of Fisheries Ecology in Bremerhaven, Germany, makes his own month-long migration here alongside a rotating cast of researchers, some of whom hope to solve mysteries that have long flummoxed marine biologists, anatomists, philosophers, and conservationists: What happens when these eels spawn in the wild? And what can be done to help the species recover from the impacts of habitat loss, pollution, overfishing, and hydropower? Scientists say that the answers could improve conservation. But, thus far, eels have kept most of their secrets to themselves.

The idea that eels have sex at all is a fairly modern notion. Ancient Egyptians associated eels with the sun god Atum and believed they sprang to life when the sun warmed the Nile. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle proclaimed that eels spontaneously generated within “the entrails of the earth” and that they didn’t have genitals.

The no-genital theory held for generations. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder asserted that eels rubbed against rocks and their dead skin “scrapings come to life.” Others credited eel provenance to everything from horses’ tails to dew drops on riverbanks. In medieval Europe, this presumed asexuality had real economic consequences and helped make the European eel a culturally important species, according to John Wyatt Greenlee, a medieval cartographic historian who wrote part of his dissertation on the subject. Frequent Christian holidays at the time required followers to adhere to church-sanctioned diets for much of the year. These prohibited adherents from eating “unclean” animals or meat that came from carnal acts, which could incite, as Thomas Aquinas put it, “an incentive to lust.” Fish were the exception, Greenlee says, and eels, given their abundance and “the fact that they just sort of appear and that nobody can find their reproductive organs at all,” appealed to anyone trying to avoid a sexy meal.

Eels could be practically anything to anyone: dinner or dessert; a cure for hangovers, drunkenness, or ear infections; material for wedding bands or magical jackets. They were even used as informal currency. Since yearly rent and taxes in medieval Europe were often due during Lent—the roughly 40-day period preceding Easter—and monasteries owned land people lived on, tenants sometimes paid with dried eels. Entire villages could pay 60,000 eels or more at once.

Eventually, spontaneous generation theories died. But eel genitals landed in the spotlight again after an Italian surgeon found ovaries in an eel from Comacchio, Italy, and the findings were published in the 18th century. The legitimacy of the so-called Comacchio eel remained in question for decades until an anatomist published a description of ovaries from a different Comacchio eel, launching a race to find testicles. Even the granddaddy of psychosexual development theory got involved: near the beginning of his career, in 1876, Sigmund Freud dissected at least 400 eels in search of gonads. It would be about another two decades before someone discovered a mature male eel near Sicily.

It’s no surprise that it took so long to find eel sex organs. There are more than 800 species, about 15 of which are freshwater varieties, and their bodies change so dramatically with age that scientists long thought the larvae were a different species than adult eels. Eels transform from eggs to transparent willow-leaflike larvae, to wormy see-through babies called glass eels, and onward until full size. Like most eel species, American and European eels don’t fully develop gonads until their last life stage, usually between 7 and 25 years in. Around that time, they leave inland fresh and brackish waters, where people can easily observe them, and migrate up to about 6,000 kilometers—roughly the distance from Canada’s easternmost tip to its westernmost—to the Sargasso.

By now, researchers have seen eels mate in lab settings, but they don’t know how this act plays out in the wild. The mechanisms that guide migration also remain somewhat enigmatic, as do the exact social, physical, and chemical conditions under which eels reproduce. Mature eels die after spawning, and larvae move to freshwater habitat, but when that happens and how each species finds its home continent are also unknown.

“We think that the European eel reproduces in the Sargasso Sea because this is the place where we have found the smaller larvae, but we have never found a European eel egg or the eels spawning,” says Estibaliz Díaz, a biologist at AZTI marine research center in Spain, who studies European eel population dynamics and management. “It’s still a theory that has not been proven.” The same applies to the American eel, and yet more questions remain about how many eels survive migration, what makes the Sargasso so singular, and how factors like climate change might affect it.

Both species have dropped in number, but researchers debate which threat is the biggest. Habitat loss is huge—humans have drained wetlands, polluted waters with urban and agricultural runoff, and built hydropower turbines that kill eels and dams that block the animals from migrating in or out of inland waters. Fishing further reduces eel numbers. Commercial fisheries for adult eels exist, but most eels consumed globally come from the aquaculture industry, which pulls young glass eels from the wild and raises them in farms. American and European eels are among the top three most commercially valuable species alongside the Japanese eel, which is also endangered. While it’s legal to fish for all three, regulations on when, where, and how many eels can be sold vary between countries. The European Union requires member nations to close their marine fisheries for three consecutive months around the winter migration season each year—countries themselves determine exact dates—and prohibits trade outside of member countries, but these management efforts are undermined by black-market traders who illegally export more than 90 tonnes of European eels to Asia every year.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists European eels as critically endangered—populations have plummeted more than 90 percent compared with historical levels, and it’s “rather unclear,” as one report notes, whether the decline continues today. By counting glass eels in estuaries and inland waters, researchers found that eel numbers dropped precipitously between the 1980s and 2011, but plateaued afterward without clear cause. American eels are thought to be faring better—they’re considered endangered only by IUCN standards, not by other conservation and research groups—though their numbers have also decreased since the 1970s.

Captive breeding might one day reduce the aquaculture industry’s dependence on wild catches, but isn’t yet viable. Scientists must induce eel gonad development with synthetic hormones. It’s also hard to keep larvae alive. Many researchers believe that, in their natural habitat, larvae eat marine snow—a mélange of decaying organic matter suspended in the water that is impractical to reproduce at commercial scales. Illuminating what happens in the Sargasso could help guide better conservation measures. That’s why Reinhold Hanel heads to sea.

After three years of COVID-19-related delay, in 2023, Hanel will send a research vessel on a 14-day trip from Germany to Bermuda. He’ll fly there and meet up with 11 other eel researchers, then he’ll spend about a month slowly traversing the southern Sargasso, recording ocean conditions, trawling for eel larvae with mesh plankton nets, and sampling for environmental DNA—genetic material shed from skin, mucus, and poop—to track eels by what they leave behind.

Hanel has led voyages like these since 2011. His main goal is to document the abundance of larvae and young eels and, secondarily, to identify possible locations for spawning. By sampling estuaries and inland waters, researchers can identify trends over time to figure out if glass eels in continental waters are increasing or not, but without comparing those trends with similar ones in the Sargasso, it’s impossible to judge whether either American or European eels are bouncing back. Meanwhile, protective regulations aren’t enough, Hanel contends. In 2007, the European Union mandated that member countries develop European eel recovery plans, but several prominent fishery and marine science organizations have criticized the particulars.

In tandem with other measures aimed at reducing eel mortality, provisions like closing fisheries make sense, Hanel says—last year, an international consortium of researchers, of which Hanel is a member, recommended closing fisheries until glass eel stocks recover. But other requirements aren’t rooted in research, including one to ensure 40 percent of adult eels survive to migrate from inland waters to the sea each year. “Scientists cannot say if 40 percent is sufficient to recover the stock,” Hanel says.

That’s why Hanel’s work is so important, says Martin Castonguay, a marine biologist and scientist emeritus at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, who has collaborated with Hanel. Financial obstacles often prevent eel scientists from conducting research outside of inland waters. Research vessels can cost anywhere from CAN $30,000 to $50,000 per day, or just under $1-million for a month-long trip, Castonguay says, requiring scientists to have hefty grants or government support to venture all the way to the Sargasso.

Despite the barriers, scientists keep trying to find answers to how to help eels recover. They have planted hydroacoustic devices in hopes of tracking migrating eels by sound, pored over satellite photos, and injected eels with hormones to induce gonad development before releasing them into the Sargasso to try to study how deep beneath the surface they spawn. Back at home in the lab, they’ve developed algorithms to scan for and spot eels in sonar images of inland waters and built hyperbaric swimming tubes to observe how eels respond to changes in pressure and current strength. They’ve even tried to follow them with satellite transmitters.

In the mid-2010s, Castonguay and four other researchers sewed buoyant trackers to 38 American eels and released them off the coast of Nova Scotia. Every 15 minutes, the trackers recorded the depth at which the eels were swimming, the water temperature, and light levels. The sensors were designed to detach several months later and transmit the data along with the eels’ final location. Unfortunately, they detached before the eels reached any specific spawning locations, though one eel got as close as 100 to 150 kilometers from the spawning region. Still, “it was the first time that an [adult American] eel was documented in the Sargasso,” says Castonguay. Previously, only larvae had been found there. “We were extremely excited.”

If more governments and research institutions were willing to spend the resources, Castonguay adds, these eels wouldn’t be so mysterious. Research on a similar species in Japan offers a case study for how that could work.

On the other side of the globe from the Sargasso, the Japanese eel makes a 3,000-kilometer annual migration from Japan and surrounding countries to the West Mariana Ridge in the western Pacific Ocean. With support from the Japanese government and other scientific institutions, researchers there have identified a spawning location, collected fertilized eggs, and tracked tagged eels swimming to their spawning area—all feats never attained in the Sargasso. They’ve found that Japanese eels spawn over a period of a few days before the new moon, at depths of 150 to 200 meters, and that spawning is triggered in part by temperature shifts that happen as eels move from deep to shallower water. Some eels, they learned, might spawn more than once during a spawning season.

Public outreach efforts have also been important, says University of Tokyo eel biologist Michael Miller. The researcher who led most of the eel work, Katsumi Tsukamoto—a University of Tokyo scientist emeritus known as Unagi Sensei, or Dr. Eel—has worked hard to raise the eels’ public profile. His findings have helped build the case that eels are “something other than just a meal,” Miller says. “It’s something [that’s] part of the Japanese culture and it’s worth conserving,” which has helped boost efforts to protect them.

Hanel is trying to do the same for the eels of the Sargasso and for other species. He speaks to the press and the public as often as he can. He believes, as many others do, that successfully conserving these creatures hinges on whether there’s a unified international effort to do so. But so long as data snapshots come only every few years, answers to questions about spawning and species well-being will stay hidden somewhere in the watery depths, just like the eels themselves.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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On Nov. 8, 2018, faulty electrical equipment in California’s Woolsey Valley sparked a wildfire that enveloped the Santa Monica Mountains. The Woolsey Fire burnt through nearly 100,000 acres of land on the western edge of the greater Los Angeles area, destroying over 1,600 structures and killing three people.

This mountainous landscape is the home territory of LA’s legendary mountain lions, which have held on here despite urbanization and habitat fragmentation. But the fire eliminated half of their remaining habitat, including 88% of the national park land in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. Rachel Blakey, now a professor at Cal Poly Pomona, lived in LA at the time of the fire and began to wonder how the lions were affected. 

“I was a really big fan of the LA mountain lions, as most Angelenos are,” Blakey said. “And I thought, my goodness, what’s happened? How has this wildfire impacted them, when they already have this kind of hemmed-in area?”

The results of Blakey and her co-authors’ research were published in Current Biology on Oct. 20. Using GPS tracking to map the lions’ travels and accelerometer data to record their activity, she and her collaborators compared the animals’ behavior during the 15 months before and after the fire.

 Two lions died in the fire, but many more struggled to survive in the years that followed. Blakey described the charred landscape as a “moonscape” without the vegetation and cover that the cats need to ambush their preferred prey, mule deer.  The lions avoided the burned areas and took greater risks in search of better habitat, crossing busy highways. When they entered the territories of dominant males, interspecies conflict resulted.

Researcher Jeff Sikich, who has studied the Santa Monica population for more than two decades and worked on the research with Blakey, said in an interview that more mountain lions are killed by cars than any other cause. If the fire forced them to cross roads more often, even more deaths were likely.

A young male known as P-61 survived the fire, but in seeking out more suitable habitat afterward he became an indirect victim of it. He was the first collared mountain lion recorded crossing the 405, a major highway with heavy traffic. His initial crossing was successful, but he inadvertently entered the territory of another male, which attacked him and drove him out. Later, he was recorded contemplating a second crossing. But this time his luck ran out, and he was struck and killed by a vehicle.

In the aftermath of the fire, some residents expressed fears that mountain lions would move into more urbanized areas, the researchers reported. But their monitoring showed that the cats only marginally increased their time in such areas. The cats have a “strong tendency to avoid these urban areas,” Sikich said, and that remained true even after the fire. On average, they spent only 5% of their time in urban areas, with even the boldest spending no more than 15% of their time there. When a mountain lion known as P-64 was caught between a burned area and a busy urban space, he chose the smoldering vegetation over the chance of human contact. He was seriously burned, and, unable to hunt, he died.

Winston Vickers, a wildlife veterinarian and researcher with UC Davis, works with a similarly isolated mountain lion population in the Santa Ana Mountains on the eastern side of LA. He has also seen cases where animals would rather risk a fire than encroach on human spaces. “We’re getting more and more (isolated populations), especially in places like coastal California,” Vickers said. He said that the study is important for helping researchers understand how fire can impact isolated populations.

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Wetland conservation is paying off big time according to a new study. The 2022 U.S. State of the Birds Report is a joint research project that was undertaken by 33 science and conservation organizations and wildlife management agencies. It’s the first comprehensive look at the nation’s bird populations since 2019. Researchers looked at long-term population trends of different types of bird species since the 1970s.

Waterbird populations rose 18 percent since 1970 while dabbling and diving duck populations rose 34 percent—the largest increase of any type of bird. In fact, freshwater waterfowl was the lone bright spot in the study, with all other types of birds showing declines. Sea ducks dropped 33 percent. Forest birds in the east and west both declined. Grassland birds dropped 34 percent, and “tipping point,” or threatened, species plummeted by a whopping 67 percent.

“While a majority of bird species are declining, many waterbird populations remain healthy, thanks to decades of collaborative investments from hunters, landowners, state and federal agencies, and corporations,” said Dr. Karen Waldrop, chief conservation officer for Ducks Unlimited. “This is good news not only for birds, but for the thousands of other species that rely on wetlands, and the communities that benefit from groundwater recharge, carbon sequestration, and flood protection.”

“The North American Waterfowl Management Plan, Federal Duck Stamp Program, grants from the North American Wetlands Conservation Act, and regional Joint Ventures partnerships are all part of a framework that has a proven track record with restoring and protecting wetland-dependent species,” added Martha Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). “Now we want to use that precedent to work with our partners to restore bird populations, conserve habitat, and build a foundation for how we respond to the loss of other bird groups.”  Ad

The report emphasizes the need to proactively protect habitats for other types of birds to prevent further declines—and to scale up conservation efforts across the board. The report used five sources of data to track populations, including the United States Geological Survey’s North American Breeding Bird Survey and the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count, which relies on volunteer bird watchers and hunters to tally the birds they see from December 14 through January 5 each year.

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Wearing a navy-blue polo neck emblazoned with the Florida Aquarium logo, Keri O’Neil hugs a white cooler at Miami International Airport. “Coral babieeeeees,” she says, before letting out a short laugh. Relief. The container holds 10 plastic bottles teeming with thousands of tiny peach-colored specks. Shaped like cornflakes and no more than a millimeter in length, they are the larvae of elkhorn coral, an endangered species that is as characteristic to the reefs of the Florida Keys and the Caribbean as polar bears are to the Arctic or giant sequoias to Sierra Nevada.

With the larvae kept at 27 °C inside their insulated cooler nestled in the trunk of her car, O’Neil drives back to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, where she works as senior coral scientist at the aquarium’s Center for Conservation. Once there, the larvae begin their metamorphosis from free-swimming specks into settled polyps, the beginnings of those branching, antler-like shapes that define this species. O’Neil and her colleagues provide everything the coral needs for a strong start in life: warm water with a gentle flow, symbiotic algae that find a home inside the coral’s cells, a soft glow of sunlight, and some ceramic squares “seasoned with algae” that act as landing pads for the larvae.

The transformation of larvae into polyps was the final step in a coral breeding project that began on the shores of Curaçao, an island off the coast of Venezuela, in the summer of 2018 and involved a cadre of conservationists and scientists who each specialize in one specific stage of coral development. From collection of eggs during mass spawning events to the cryopreservation of sperm, and from fertilization to larval growth, every step had to go swimmingly for the project to have any chance of success. “It’s like the most stressful relay on Earth,” says Kristen Marhaver, a coral scientist at the Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity Foundation in Curaçao, who helped start this relay race by collecting eggs during a nighttime dive at a reef that’s a 45-minute drive from her laboratory. As O’Neil was picking up her coral “babies” in Miami, a second team of scientists at Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida, received its own. The pressure on both labs was immense. To fail now would be to drop the baton just before the final straight.

But, if anything, their efforts were too successful; hundreds of larvae settled as translucent and fragile blobs of tissue (each a single polyp) and then started to divide, branching into the clear waters of their shallow, open-top tanks. Elkhorn coral grows an average of five to 10 centimeters per year, a bamboo-like pace for corals in general. To stop them becoming entangled, O’Neil had to cut, separate, and move her colonies to different paddle pool–sized tanks over the course of the next year. “We almost ended up with a six-foot-by-four-foot [1.8-meter-by-1.2-meter] solid piece of elkhorn coral made up of 400 different individuals,” she says. “They were just outgrowing the tanks.”

The rows of coral in O’Neil’s tanks are a window into a former world. The reefs of the Florida Keys were once dominated by elkhorn coral. Visiting these islands that curl southward from Florida like the tip of a bird of prey’s beak, biologist, conservationist, and writer—most notably of Silent Spring, but also of several books on the ocean—Rachel Carson peered into the shallows using a “water glass,” an instrument akin to a glass-bottom bucket. Through this simple portal, she saw great stands of “trees of stone,” a forest of coral. Today, after decades of disease, coastal development, and bleaching, over 95 percent of the state’s elkhorn coral have been lost. And this population isn’t just depleted in number, like a forest that’s been felled, but is also impoverished from within. Some reefs in the Keys descend from a single individual that has reproduced via fragmentation—bits break off the parent coral and start a new colony. This mode of reproduction allows corals to spread, but without the genetic mixing that comes with sex, these clones are more susceptible to disturbances such as disease. The coral larvae raised by O’Neil at the Florida Aquarium are different; they are the product of sperm and egg, a shuffling of genes, and the growth of genetically unique clumps of coral. Reintroducing them could provide a boost to the coral’s genetic diversity—a quick stir to the gene pool—and could save a denuded ecosystem. Their reintroduction could also spell its doom.

Hidden inside the genetic code of the Florida Aquarium’s coral is a map of an atypical origin: the eggs collected from Curaçao were fertilized using sperm from the Caribbean, including Florida. Although the same species (Acropora palmata), these coral populations would never breed in the wild. The distance between the two is hundreds of kilometers and contains the island blockade of the Greater Antilles—an impossible journey for any sperm. The coral housed in the Florida Aquarium are the products of human hands, the latest addition to a recent—and often controversial—trend in conservation known as “assisted gene flow,” shuttling existing genetic diversity to new places.

No hands have offered more assistance to these coral than those of Mary Hagedorn, senior research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who is based at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Hagedorn flew to the Caribbean to guide this project from start to finish. It is her research that made this work possible. Since 2004, she has developed cryopreservation techniques that can freeze coral sperm and—just as importantly—keep them fertile upon thawing. Although cryopreservation has been used for IVF in humans and other mammals for decades, it’s only in the last few years that other coral conservationists have adopted Hagedorn’s techniques for coral sperm. At a time when these methodologies are most needed, Hagedorn’s work has matured into a solid science, says Tom Moore, a coral restoration manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the time of this project and now in the private sector. “I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more of this done in the course of the next few years.”

Without the option to freeze sperm, coral conservationists have been forced to work within the few hours these sex cells remain viable. In Florida, Moore says, scientists from the Lower Keys would drive north to meet colleagues from the Upper Keys and swap sperm samples on the side of the road, fertilizing eggs there and then before the sperm stopped swimming. With the option to freeze sperm using liquid nitrogen, however, samples can be transported long distances—from Florida to Curaçao, for example. Then, when eggs are collected from the reef, the sperm can be thawed and used in concentrations that make fertilization most likely. Hagedorn’s work opens up new possibilities that, just a few years ago, were largely ignored.

Self-funded for many years, Hagedorn’s research was nearly stopped altogether in December 2011. Her savings had run out and funders didn’t seem to see the potential of her work. “I was a month away from closing my lab,” she says. Then she received an unexpected call from the Roddenberry Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up in memory of Gene Roddenberry, the writer of Star Trek. Since Hagedorn’s work fit the criteria for bold and unique science, the foundation wanted to fund her research for five years. Since then, her work has grown to include frozen larvae, frozen coral symbiotic algae, and frozen coral fragments, and it has been adopted by labs around the world. To help her cryopreservation methods spread, Hagedorn runs workshops and shares her techniques freely; the instructions to build her equipment can be downloaded and then manufactured with a 3D printer.

As with IVF in humans, coral fertilization is not a perfect science. In a study published in 2017, Hagedorn and her colleagues showed that fertilization rates from frozen coral sperm are significantly lower than from fresh sperm, roughly 50 percent versus over 90 percent. And these figures were based on coral that lived as neighbors on the same reef. The researchers wanted to increase genetic diversity in the future (through assisted gene flow), but it was still unknown whether populations that had been isolated for thousands of years could produce viable offspring, especially after their sperm had been frozen. The idea to breed elkhorn coral from the Florida Keys with those from Curaçao was the most extreme test yet of Hagedorn’s methods. It was a moonshot for coral conservation, says O’Neil. “We wanted to do something that had never been done before.”

Marhaver thought that they had a five to 10 percent chance of success. To have hundreds of healthy coral now sitting in tanks barely crossed her mind. Conservationists are more attuned to the vibrations of endangerment, extinction, and loss. To have a moonshot succeed is unfamiliar territory. With the impossible now possible, the next hurdle is moving from the lab to the ocean, a leap that not everyone is comfortable with.

As in medical practice, the first rule of restoring ailing ecosystems is primum non nocere, “first, do no harm.” And what concerns Lisa Gregg, program and policy coordinator at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), the organization that decides the fate of the Florida-Curaçao coral, is that they aren’t suited to the local conditions of the Florida Keys, a place that Carson referred to as having an atmosphere that is “strongly and peculiarly [its] own.” These islands are formed from sedimentation, while those of Curaçao and the eastern Caribbean are founded on volcanic activity. Plus, the Florida Keys also have their own unique combination of problems, from infectious disease to coastal development, and from hurricanes to coral bleaching. “We have a lot of problems here,” says O’Neil. “And it is quite likely that the corals that are still alive in Florida after everything that’s happened to them are probably the ones that are best suited to living in Florida and providing offspring that may be capable of surviving in Florida.” If Curaçao genes were introduced, they might lead to lower rates of reproduction, shorter life spans, or lowered resistance to local diseases. Imperceptible at first, such “outbreeding depression” can slowly weaken a population, generation by generation. To introduce genes that haven’t experienced the same history could be a ratchet toward extinction.

The risk of such outbreeding depression is very low, however—a doomsday forecast for Florida’s reefs, many conservationists think. “I’m not so concerned that there’s a huge risk of the Curaçao [genes] causing a major detriment to the native Florida population,” says Iliana Baums, head of marine conservation and restoration at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, who has studied elkhorn coral since 1998. “But that’s based on my knowledge of the literature for other species and modeling and so on. I don’t have any direct evidence for that.” Direct evidence would require reintroduction, a catch-22 of conservation; the very thing that is controversial and potentially dangerous is also the route to understanding.

Gregg was clear with O’Neil, Marhaver, Hagedorn, and their colleagues from the beginning of this project. “They knew right off the bat … that they were not going to be able to out-plant [the coral]. It was never in question.” The FWC has a “nearest neighbor” policy when it comes to conserving Florida’s coral reefs, she says. “With Acropora palmata, I believe the nearest neighbor would be Cuba or Belize. But other acceptable areas to bring corals in from would be Mexico or the Bahamas. If you’ve got corals coming from Curaçao, that’s leaps and bounds away from Florida.”

After nearly 20 years of research and the near closure of her lab, Hagedorn is tired of waiting. She is sympathetic to the FWC’s approach, but also believes that this large population of captive coral should be introduced—in “a restricted and monitored fashion”—given the critical status of A. palmata. “There’s so little coral in Florida now, it’s just a joke,” she says. In addition to tracking their precipitous decline, scientists have tried to find evidence that new, sexually produced elkhorn coral are settling in the area, but they regularly come back empty-handed. Since this species releases sperm and eggs en masse once a year, the lack of natural recruitment is a worrying sign that such mass spawning events are failing. Warmer waters, pollution, a thick covering of algae, and the rarity of mature coral all add up to prevent new baby coral from settling. Whatever the case, successful sexual reproduction—the fertilization of egg and sperm to create a swimming larva—is so low that it no longer supports this population. “Every year, we seem to lose more [coral] without making more, because sexual reproduction isn’t working,” says Baums. “None of us could’ve imagined that these coral populations would die out this fast. I don’t think any one of us could have really wrapped our heads around that, even 10 years ago … I think we’re at the stage that we need to try something new.”

Even with this precipitous decline, there is still time to try a less extreme version of assisted gene flow, O’Neil says. Now that the Florida-Curaçao experiment has been a success, her team can consider crossing coral from Mexico, the Bahamas, or Cuba—just a relative stone’s throw away—with Florida stock. These populations are able to mix naturally: although sperm can’t survive the journey, the planktonic larvae can travel the current from the Bahamas to Florida so are considered part of the same subpopulation. Gregg says that she would support any elkhorn restoration project that conforms to the FWC “nearest neighbor” policy. Until then, such assisted gene flow will remain limited to laboratories and aquariums.

In December 2021, O’Neil said goodbye to the coral she had raised from peach-colored larvae to hand-sized elkhorn recruits. With the project’s end, they were being transported from the Florida Aquarium to the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, where they joined the rest of the coral grown as part of this study. Some are being exposed to warmer temperatures to see if they are better able to survive in the warmer waters predicted for the future. Others will be transported to museums and aquariums around the United States. The rest sit patiently and continue to divide, to grow, polyp by polyp. They may never be introduced into the wild, but their mere existence opens a wide-angle vista for coral conservation. If such disparate populations can be crossed and grown by the hundred, almost anything is possible. The next coral babies that O’Neil collects from the airport will have simply traveled a shorter distance in their cooler.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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The principle to “take only memories, leave only footprints” has been enshrined in America’s National Parks for over a century. The quote is widely attributed to Chief Seattle (or Si’ahl), the leader of Washington State’s Duwamish Tribe, known for his leadership, bravery, and stewardship to the Earth. The phrase is meant to remind humans of their effects on nature and the world around them, but even just the footprints left behind by visitors to National Parks might be affecting animals.

A study published yesterday in the journal People and Nature found that even in the more remote and rarely visited national parks, the presence of even just a few humans impacts the activity and behavior of wildlife that live there.

“There’s been increasing recognition of how much just the presence of humans in these places, and our recreating there, can impact wildlife,” senior author Laura Prugh, associate professor in the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, said in a statement. “These results are striking in showing that really any level of human activity can have an effect on wildlife.”

[Related: How to selfie responsibly, and other tips for not damaging wildlife on vacation.]

The study was based in Glacier Bay National Park, a remote coastal area in southeast Alaska that is accessible only by boat or aircraft. Most the park’s visitors arrive on cruise ships, but the boats don’t dock on shore. The park only sees 40,000 people per year, a drop in the bucket compared with the about 3.3 million yearly visitors to Yosemite and 14.1 million to the Great Smoky Mountains. But the number of visitors to Glacier Bay is increasing.

“Glacier Bay is a great park to explore what the lower limits are where humans start to affect wildlife behavior,” Prugh said.

The team worked with park staff to install 40 motion-activated cameras across 10 sites within the park. During the summers of 2017 and 2018, the cameras captured detections of humans and four animal species—wolves, black bears, brown bears and moose. By controlling where and when people could access certain areas of Glacier Bay and then measuring wildlife responses to the differing levels of human activity, the researchers identified two important thresholds. 

If humans were present in an area, fewer than five animals per week were detected across all four species studied. The team believes that the animals avoided the areas where humans were present. In more remote backcountry areas, the wildlife detections dropped to zero each week if there were only 40 visitors to the park per week.

The researchers were surprised by the apparent low tolerance wildlife had for the presence of people nearby.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to visiting national parks.]

“It was eye-opening to see the number of wildlife sightings we are ‘missing’ just by recreating in backcountry areas of Glacier Bay,” lead author Mira Sytsma, who completed this work as a UW graduate student, said in a statement. “I was surprised that for all four species, wildlife detections were always highest when there wasn’t any human activity. So many people visit national parks for the chance to view wildlife, and that desire alone may reduce the chance of it happening.”

All four species showed some change to their activity or behaviors due to humans, but wolves were most likely to disappear from cameras when people were around. Brown bears were the least impacted by human presence and moose were more active during the times of day and locations where people were seen. The team believe that the moose may be using people as a shield from predators, aligning their peak active hours with human visitors to avoid becoming dinner.

In the more visited parks where animals are more accustomed to seeing people, the team suspects that at least some individual animals won’t react as strongly to humans as the ones in Glacier Bay. However, the findings reinforce some other research that shows that as people flock to national parks in record numbers, their presence is impacting the animals who live there.

“Our findings lend support to concentrating human activities in some areas, because if you’re going to go above zero human activity and it’s going to have an impact, you might as well go way above zero in some areas and then have other areas where you have almost no human activity,” Prugh said. “In those areas, then, wildlife can live their natural lives unaffected by people.”

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Populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish decreased by 69 percent on average since 1970, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). The WWF’s biennial Living Planet Report 2022 used the Living Planet Index, a dataset of 32,000 populations of 5,230 vertebrate species, to measure the changes in average population size. This total loss of species is approximately equal to losing the human population of Europe, the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and China.

“Today we face the double, interlinked emergencies of human induced climate change and the loss of biodiversity, threatening the well-being of current and future generations,” the authors write in the report. “As our future is critically dependent on biodiversity and a stable climate, it is essential that we understand how nature’s decline and climate change are connected.”

[Related: We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.]

The drop measured in this two-year report follows a trend of progressively severe declines. By comparison, the decrease in population was a 68 percent loss in 2020 and 60 percent in 2018.

The steepest declines in average population size were seen in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the vital Amazon region. This area saw a 94 percent drop in 48 years. Africa had the second largest fall with 66 percent, followed by Asia and the Pacific at 55 percent, and North America at 20 percent. The least amount of population decrease was seen in Europe and Central Asia, with 18 percent.

“This report tells us that the worst declines are in the Latin America region, home to the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon,” Tanya Steele, the chief executive at WWF-UK said in an interview with The Guardian. “ Deforestation rates there are accelerating, stripping this unique ecosystem not just of trees but of the wildlife that depends on them and of the Amazon’s ability to act as one of our greatest allies in the fight against climate change.”

[Related: Protecting 30 percent of the oceans would benefit the entire planet.]

The freshwater populations monitored in the report saw the greatest loss of any species group, with a decline of 83 percent since 1970. Barriers to annual migration and habitat loss made up half of the threats to freshwater organisms. Freshwater habitats are hotbeds of biodiversity, home to one-third of vertebrate species. They are also essential to food security, industries such as fisheries, and energy production.

The index measures how wildlife populations have changed over time; it’s not a tally of individual animals that disappeared. Still, the implications are grim. “The Living Planet Index highlights how we have cut away the very foundation of life and the situation continues to worsen. Half of the global economy and billions of people are directly reliant on nature,” said Andrew Terry, the director of conservation and policy at ZSL, in a press release. “Preventing further biodiversity loss and restoring vital ecosystems has to be at the top of global agendas to tackle the mounting climate, environmental and public health crises.”

The report acknowledges that conservation efforts are working, but more action is needed. To curb even more loss of life, the 89 authors of this year’s report urge the world leaders attending this December’s UN Convention on Biological Diversity (Biodiversity COP15) to reach an ambitious agreement to protect wildlife. One important move, they say: Carbon emissions must be slashed to limit further global warming.

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There is some good news for Idaho’s wolf population. Early data shows that numbers appear to be holding steady at around 1,250 wolves, even after a 2021 change in regulations that allowed for expanded seasons for killing wolves (including year-round wolf trapping on private property) and methods of eliminating the predator. These methods include trapping and snaring wolves on a single hunting tag, no restriction on hunting hours, using night-vision equipment with a permit, using bait and dogs, and allowing hunting from motor vehicles.

Official numbers will be available in January 2023, as with previous years.

At a session of Idaho’s Natural Resources Interim Committee last week, the state Department of Fish and Game Director Ed Schriever said the preliminary data on human-caused and natural wolf mortality is similar to the rate seen since 2019 before these new regulations were enacted.

[Related: Wisconsin hunters have already killed more gray wolves than allowed]

“I think the best way to describe Idaho’s population right now is that it’s fairly stable, and it’s fluctuating around 1,250,” he told lawmakers, according to reporting from the Associated Press. “Part of the year it’s below that; part of the year it’s above that. But the population is fluctuating around 1,250.”

He used a graph to show lawmakers that the western state’s wolf population from 2019 to 2021 fluctuated with a high of more than 1,600 in May 2019 when wolf pups are born down to a low of about 800 in April 2020 as wolves die through natural mortality, hunting or trapping. He said a pattern with similar numbers could be repeated, but the agency won’t have a good estimate for the this year’s wolf population until January 2023.

In 2021, lawmakers approved the rancher-backed law that greatly expanded wolf killing. Some lawmakers feared it could reduce the wolf population by 90 percent, while the law’s supporters said the expansion would reduce the wolf population and attacks on livestock while boosting the state’s deer and elk herds.

Following the law’s passage, Idaho wildlife officials also announced the state would make $200,000 available to divide between hunters and trappers who kill wolves in the state as an incentive.

Schriever gave a breakdown of 389 wolves killed last year by some 50,000 hunters and trappers. He noted that only 72 hunters and trappers killed more than one wolf, accounting for 236 wolves in all that year.

[Related: These states want you to eat more roadkill]

“Those people are very important in the concept of managing the wolf population,” Schriever said, suggesting the reimbursement program could be a key component to target wolves in specific areas of the state. “The reimbursement program may, in fact, be very important in keeping some of these highly skilled people engaged in this for a longer period of time,” he said.

Despite the support for hunting wolves, there was concern the new rules could overshoot and deplete the wolf population. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service could take over the management from the state is the wolf population falls below 150.

“If you go below that (150), that’s bad news,” Schriever told lawmakers.

These new hunting regulations have not come without pushback by conservation groups, but those efforts have yet to succeed. In August, a US District Court judge rejected a request by these groups to temporarily block Idaho’s expanded wolf trapping and snaring rules. Environmental groups said these regulations violate the Endangered Species Act, since they could lead to the illegal killing of federally protected Canada lynx and grizzly bears. Schriever said that no grizzlies have so far been caught in a wolf trap.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

A black rope had rubbed the whale’s flesh raw and white, making it easier for marine mammal rescuers to see the months-old humpback entangled in fishing gear off Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Using a nine-meter pole tipped with a sharp hook, rescuers from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) cut away the tangled gear—one of several similar rescue operations the team conducts each year.

The vast majority of the team’s rescue attempts are a success. But to Bob Lynch, CCS’s rescue operations manager, their efforts are a band-aid fix. There are many whales they can’t get to, he says. Beyond that, while disentanglement can save a whale, it can’t save the species, says Lynch. “What we’re doing is not a solution to the problem whatsoever.” Preventing whales from getting entangled in the first place will have a larger impact on their protection.

Vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are the leading causes of human-caused mortality for humpbacks and other baleen whales. Over the past several years, scientists and conservation managers around the world have tried all sorts of things to prevent entanglements, including testing ropeless gear, increasing marine litter cleanup efforts, and implementing seasonal closures of areas that whales frequent. But off the Massachusetts coast, research led by Tammy Silva, a marine ecologist at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS), hints at another way to find whales and hopefully prevent their entanglement. Key to the approach is the overlap of habitat use between humpback whales and one kind of seabird—the brown-washed great shearwater.

North of Cape Cod Bay, in the choppy waters off the SBNMS, great shearwaters often gather in the hundreds. Through tracking studies, Silva and her colleagues have shown that a congregation of great shearwaters can signal that a pod of humpback whales is swimming below. Both species are preparing for an offshore feast—the whales ascend from the deep to capture sand lance, a silver eel-like fish. Shearwaters lie in wait to pick from what the whales miss.

While it’s possible to track whales directly using satellite tags, the approach can be expensive, and the tags have a short life span. Catching and tagging seabirds, says Dave Wiley, SBNMS’s research coordinator, is also much easier than tagging a humpback whale.

Tracking shearwaters starts with getting birds in hand, Silva explains. Because great shearwaters spend the bulk of their lives on the open ocean, traveling to land only to breed, researchers have to capture them at sea. So, each year since 2012, the team has choreographed what Silva describes as an alien abduction.

Launching in a small inflatable boat from their mother ship, a 15-meter vessel in the Gulf of Maine, three or four team members set out after a raft of shearwaters. One team member tosses chopped mackerel and squid to lure birds in, while the others use long handheld nets to scoop the birds into the boat. Working quickly to minimize stress on the animals, they place each bird in a cat carrier to relax.

After they’ve caught several birds, they head back to the mother ship. There, the scientists collect samples to gauge each bird’s health and diet, and stitch a small solar-powered satellite tag to the skin between its wings.

Tagging and tracking 58 birds over five years has revealed the significant overlap between where and when great shearwaters and humpback whales meet en masse. Now, Silva and her colleagues hope to use this data to save humpbacks from life-threatening entanglements.

Identifying overlaps in known persistent hotspots, like SBNMS, means that now they can look farther offshore. “Take Georges Bank,” says Wiley, “no one’s going to Georges Bank to look for humpback whales.” But if enough shearwaters show up in the area between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia during a particular time frame, there’s a good chance that humpbacks are in the area, too.

There’s still a lot of work left in developing their real-time bird-based system for predicting the presence of humpback whales. But the team hopes that, in the future, detecting an aggregation of tagged birds could trigger action from marine management teams. Fishermen could be required to move gear, and boaters could be asked to steer clear of the area.

It’s a lot like how a phone or smartwatch can track its owner’s location through a constant update of information. “It’s really an extension of our everyday lives,” says Silva, “taking in real-time data and applying that to conservation.”

Maintaining the long-term data collection from shearwaters is central to both Wiley and Silva’s hopes for the future of the project—as highly mobile species, seabirds are a top indicator of ocean patterns and can help answer key questions about the health of marine life, including whales. To protect humpbacks, we have to change our approach, Silva says. “Ultimately, coexistence is what we’re after.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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Weighing in up to 330,000 pounds and 110 feet long, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is bigger than even the largest dinosaurs, despite subsisting on a tiny organism called krill (in huge quantities). They’re the largest animal on Earth currently, and one of the largest animals to have ever lived on our planet in all of history. Still, the magnificent creatures have been on the endangered species list since 1970. They remain at risk due to vessel strikes, risk of entanglement, and a steep decline in their main food source, krill, which can be linked back to ocean acidification and climate change.

In an effort to protect a unique population of these endangered gentle giants from the threat of vessel strikes, the largest shipping and logistics conglomerate in the world, Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), has rerouted their shipping lanes near the coast of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. The blue whales here aren’t migratory and have distinct vocalizations. The vessels will now travel about 15 nautical miles (roughly 17 miles) to the south of the previous shipping route.

“MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company has taken a major step to help protect blue whales and other cetaceans living and feeding in the waters off the coast of Sri Lanka by modifying navigation guidance in line with the advice of scientists and other key actors in the maritime sector,” MSC said in a statement provided to Insider.

[Related: Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help.]

The move comes in response to a request from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and OceanCare. According to the IFAW, Sri Lankan blue whales are in these waters year round. Current international shipping lanes off Dondra Head bring vessels right through the area with the most whales and whale watching activity.

“By ensuring these small changes, MSC is making a significant difference for these endangered whales. Whales often die as a result of collisions and this population is at risk. Ship strikes are both a conservation and a welfare problem, and even one whale death is one too many,” said Sharon Livermore, Director of Marine Conservation at IFAW, in a press release.

This voluntary rerouting from MSC does not impact other shipping carriers in the area (like Hapag-Lloyd or Maersk), but environmental advocates hope that this could lead to a chain reaction of permanent changes to the official shipping lane that would impact all container ships. According to the IFWA, research shows that adjusting the shipping lane would reduce the risk of a ship striking a whale by 95 percent.

“Re-routeing is the key hope to turn the tide for blue whales off Sri Lanka. It also demonstrates to the Sri Lankan government that now is the time to take appropriate action and move the shipping lane out of blue whale habitat for all merchant vessels,” said Nicolas Entrup, Director International Relations at OceanCare, in a press release.

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

While commercial whaling is banned worldwide, blue whales were on the brink of extinction as recently as the 1960s. The ban on whaling helped the population rebound, but populations are still lower than pre-whaling numbers. It’s estimated that there may have been about 200,000 to 300,000 whales in the Southern Hemisphere before commercial whaling, compared to 2,300 in 1998. Populations are rising at about 7 percent per year.

Vessel strikes are a major issue for a number of whale species, not just blue whales. The critically endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) is especially suffering—NOAA Fisheries has documented four lethal (death and serious injury) right whale vessel strike events in US waters over the past two and a half years.

There are fewer than 350 right whales in the wild and they are not reproducing fast enough to maintain their numbers. In July, NOAA Fisheries announced proposed changes to vessel speed rules to, “further reduce the likelihood of mortalities and serious injuries to endangered right whales from vessel collisions.” The proposed changes would broaden the spatial boundaries and timing of seasonal speed restriction areas along the eastern coast of the United states and expand the mandatory speed restrictions of 10 knots or less to include most vessels 35–65 feet in length.

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It’s lobster season right now in New England, but this year it might be more of an event for endangered whales than for foodies.

The North Atlantic right whale (NARW) has been migrating over 1,000 miles from Florida to calve and Canada to feed for thousands of years. Razor toothed predators like great white sharks or orca attacks haven’t been their biggest threat over all that time. Instead, it’s been human activity from commercial whaling (now banned), vessel strikes, and certain types of fishing. There are currently fewer than 340 NARWs remaining and the population has dwindled by 28 percent over the past 10 years.

In an effort to try and save these whales, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sustainability guide Seafood Watch has placed American lobster caught by pot and gillnet on a “red list” of seafood to avoid due to the threat lobstering poses to this critically endangered cetacean. Some other red listed seafood include European anchovies, wild-caught cod from both the US and abroad, and Atlantic rock crab.

In a press release, Seafood Watch stated that it reviewed all available data on the issue and gathered input from scientific, government, industry, and conservation experts and through a public comment period. “After reviewing all available scientific data, as well as existing legal requirements and regulations, Seafood Watch determined that current Canadian and US management measures do not go far enough to mitigate entanglement risks and promote recovery of the North Atlantic right whale. As a result, Seafood Watch assigned a red rating to those fisheries using pots, traps, and gillnets.

[Related: Post-pandemic seafood could be more sustainable. Here’s how tech is driving the change.]

Seafood Watch also cited a US court decision from June which determined that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) violated the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act by “failing to quickly reduce impacts to the North Atlantic right whale.”

In addition to being struck by ships, entanglement in fishing gear used to catch crab, lobster, and other species is hurting NARW populations. According to NOAA, their migration route is littered with more than 1 million vertical lines from pots and traps, 622,000 of which in US waters. The ropes from fishing gear can become embedded in a whale’s skin, weighing it down and preventing it from swimming or feeding properly. In 2020, there were 53 large whale entanglements confirmed in the US and more than 80 percent of NARWs have been entangled in fishing gear at least once.

The Maine lobster industry is worth an estimated $752 million and this new designation has raised concern from the state and fishing industry. “Seafood Watch is misleading consumers and businesses with this designation,” said Governor Janet Mills in a press release. “Generations of Maine lobstermen have worked hard to protect the sustainability of the lobster fishery, and they have taken unprecedented steps to protect right whales—efforts that the Federal government and now Seafood Watch have failed to recognize. No right whale death has been attributed to Maine gear, and there has not been a right whale entanglement attributed to Maine lobster gear in eighteen years.”

[Related: Whale-monitoring robots are oceanic eavesdroppers with a mission.]

In an interview with the Portland Press Herald, executive director of the Maine Lobsterman’s Association said, “Lobster is one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world due to the effective stewardship practices handed down through generations of lobstermen. These include strict protections for both the lobster resource and right whales.” The association has been involved in protections since the late-1990’s.

Some conservationists and scientists praised the decision. “For every North Atlantic right whale calf that is born, three right whales are estimated to die,” senior scientist and Veterinarian in the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Michael Moore tells PopSci. “Thus, recovery of the species will require not only minimal mortality but also increased reproductive health.”

“The Seafood Watch listing has significant potential benefit,” Moore adds, “even in areas where whale densities are relatively low.”

But this doesn’t mean customers have to give up their lobster-filled favorite foods. “Consumers should seek low risk of entanglement for their trap caught seafood,” he says, “such as areas only open to on-demand fishing (aka Ropeless), where entanglement risk is minimized, while still enabling trap fishing.”

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A new report from The Rainforest Trust and Asociación Armonía (Rainforest Trust’s partner in Bolivia) shows that conservation efforts to protect the habitat of one of the world’s most beloved and endangered birds may be working. Once thought to be extinct, a population of nearly 50 blue-throated macaws was rediscovered in northeastern Bolivia in 1992, and thanks to conservation efforts, there are an estimated 200-300 of them living in the wild today.

As this year’s nesting season for the blue-throated Macaw nesting season comes to an end, the Laney Rickman Reserve reports 16 nesting attempts in the 100 nest boxes monitored by the park’s rangers. The nesting resulting in eight chicks successfully fledging—a significant number nt for conservation of the species, according to the Rainforest Trust. The Laney Rickman Reserve was created in 2018 in the southeast portion of the Beni Savanna as an effort to protect the largest known group of nesting critically endangered Blue-throated Macaws in the world.

As of last year, Asociación Armonía has successfully fledged 105 Blue-throated Macaw chicks since the inception of its nesting box program in 2005.

[Related: Monarch butterflies show hints of a comeback out West, but experts are cautious.]

“Rainforest Trust and our donors care about all endangered birds–indeed all endangered species. But Blue Throated Macaws are special–spectacular, brilliant, social. Our world would be vastly impoverished without them,” Rainforest Trust CEO James Deutsch said in a press release. “That’s why we are so privileged to support Asociación Armonía in their highly professional and successful efforts to pull this species back from the brink.”

The gold and blue parrot is one of the rarest birds in the world (it’s found only in Bolivia’s Beni Davanna) and highly intelligent. Despite these recent successes, they are still critically endangered due to habitat loss and the illegal pet trade.

[Related: “We don’t have a full picture of the planet’s shrinking biodiversity. Here’s why.”]

The reserve is located in the Beni Savanna, in the lowlands of the southwestern Amazon River basin in northern Bolivia. The area is also called the Llanos de Moxos and is one of only two unique Bolivian endemic ecosystems. It’s made up of natural savannas, forest islands with motacú and totai palm trees, dry forest patches, and river edge Amazonian forests. It is home to 146 mammal species, including giant anteater, jaguar, and maned wolf, and hundreds of species of birds.

A 2017 study published in Scientific Reports finds that three macaw species (including the blue-throated macaw) are influential seed dispersers in the ecosystem, primarily for the Motacú palm. The tree is also their preferred nesting tree and preferred food and need seed dispersal in order to thrive. 2017 also saw a record number of macaw sightings (155 individual sightings) at the Barbara Azul Nature Reserve in Bolivia, according to Asociación Armonía.

Despite the success, there are still major hurdles in protecting the world’s critically endangered species. A study published earlier this month in the journal Current Biology, finds that predicted loss of birds species with striking and extreme traits will likely face extinction first, taking with them unique traits in evolutionary history. Some estimate that there has been a 68 percent decline in species population and size over the past 52 years, with climate change threatening even greater biodiversity loss.

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Since they were first recorded by Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1859, scientists have observed how greenhouse gases (GHG) like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide and act like a giant blanket around the Earth. Like a greenhouse does for plants, these gasses trap heat and warm the planet. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory measured the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at an astounding 421 parts per million, a range not seen on Earth in millions of years.

This drastic change to the chemistry in the atmosphere has lead to major consequences to our land and seas and it will only worsen as the climate continues to change. A study published on August 22 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at their current rate, nearly 90 percent of all marine species could face extinction by the end of this century. The most impacted groups would be the ocean’s top predators (particularly tuna and shark, since they are hunted by humans for food), areas with large amounts of biodiversity, and coastal fisheries of low-income nations, according to the study.

The international team of researchers created a new scorecard called the Climate Risk Index for Biodiversity (CRIB). They used it to examine about 25,000 species of marine life, including animals, plants, protozoa, and bacteria.

[Related: Climate change is making the ocean lose its memory. Here’s what that means.]

“We created a ‘climate scorecard’ for each species and ecosystem that tells us which will be winners or losers under climate change,” says Daniel Boyce, the study’s lead author and a research associate at Dalhousie University, in a press release. “It allows us to understand when, where and how they will be affected, as well as how reducing emissions can mitigate climate risk.”

In a blog post for CarbonBrief, Boyce explains that the framework uses data from analyzing how a species’ innate characteristics like body size and temperature tolerance interact with past, present, and future climate conditions. They evaluated climate risk under two different scenarios: one where emissions continue to be high and another where emissions are sharply reduced in accord with the Paris Agreement’s goal to keep warming below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius).

According to the study, under the worst-case emissions scenario, 87 percent of marine species would be under high or critical climate risk, species were at risk across 85 percent of their distribution on average, and climate risk was heightened in coastal ecosystems and closer to the equator, disproportionally threatening tropical biodiversity hotspots and fisheries

However, if GHG emissions are curbed, there is an opportunity to course correct and prevent this mass extinction from happening. Reducing GHG emissions would limit the risk for virtually all species on Earth and help minimize disruption to 98.2 percent of the fisheries and ecosystems in the study.

[Related: These Hawaiian corals could hold the secret to surviving warming waters.]

“The benefits of emission mitigation for reducing climate risk are very clear,” said co-author Boris Worm in a press release. “Mitigation provides the most straightforward path to avoiding the worst climate impacts on oceans and people, setting the stage for global recovery under improved management and conservation.”

On August 16th, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $369 billion to fund energy and climate projects with the goal of reducing carbon emissions by 40 percent in 2030. While climate experts have called a major step in curbing GHG emissions, the legislation also comes soon after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate emissions at power plants. in West Virginia v. EPA.

“The reality is that climate change is already impacting the oceans, and even with effective climate mitigation, they will continue to change,” Boyce and co-author Derek Tittensor wrote in CarbonBrief. “Therefore, adapting to a warming climate is crucial to building resilience for both ocean species and people.”

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The iconic migratory monarch butterfly has had a rough past couple decades. While its numbers can vary year to year, populations east and west of the Rockies have seen an overall long-term decline—to the point where conservation biologists and butterfly lovers are concerned for its survival as a species. Yet despite its dwindling health, the monarch has not been placed under federal protections in the US.

A global leading authority on endangered species conservation disagrees, however. After conducting a two-year assessment, last month the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) designated the monarch butterfly as endangered on the organization’s Red List of Threatened Species. 

“This is an assessment by an international scientific body that looked at all of the data and said monarchs are endangered,” says Karen Oberhauser, an expert on monarch butterfly biology and conservation and the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. “That means they’re in danger of their population going so low that it wouldn’t be able to recover.” 

In other words, monarch butterflies could be at risk of extinction. The destruction of precious milkweed habitat as well as climate change are the primary threats to their survival, researchers report, with the IUCN stating that numbers have sunk between 22 to 72 percent over the last decade. The boldly striped insect lays its eggs and feeds on milkweed in breeding grounds in Canada and the US. After journeying up to 3,000 miles, the Western monarch subspecies overwinters on the California coast, while the Eastern one migrates down to Mexico. The “bellwether” for monarch populations, Oberhauser says, is how many butterflies make it to the overwintering grounds each year.

[Related: A parasite could be killing millions of monarch butterflies as they migrate]

Oberhauser and the IUCN scientists hope that the designation will prompt the public, and even policy makers, to see the urgency of the state of monarchs. However, moving a species onto the IUCN Red List does not initiate federal protective measurements. “This is purely a scientific designation,” says Oberhauser, who helped draft the IUCN assessment. “It doesn’t have any legal requirements.”

The unique migratory lifestyle of monarchs presents a tricky conservation conundrum. Canada, Mexico, and the US each have separate wildlife agencies and processes that determine whether a species should be federally protected. While certain areas and states like California have monarch-specific legislation, protection is “piecemeal” and imperfect, says Oberhauser. Mexico does federally protect the butterflies and the bioreserve where they overwinter. In Canada, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife has deemed the species endangered, but still does not protect it under the Species at Risk Act. Similarly, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which establishes recovery efforts and reviews candidate plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act, has not listed the monarch as endangered. 

While the IUCN Red List is scientifically reviewed, it is separate from threatened and endangered species lists regulated by individual countries. This might cause some confusion among the public, says Delbert André Green II, who studies the genetics and evolution of migrating monarchs at the University of Michigan.  

“It might even cause a bit of a panic in that, now, people might think that it’s a listing of ‘endangered’ under the Endangered Species Act, which is not true,” says Green. “The IUCN recognizes many more species as endangered compared to the Endangered Species Act, so monarchs are not the only one that are in this situation.”

Currently, more than 1,300 species are listed as endangered or threatened in the US, compared to the more than 147,500 species on the IUCN Red List. The USFWS has been made aware of the IUCN’s decision, an agency spokesperson told Popular Science in an email, further stating that “this action does not constitute a US Fish and Wildlife Service Endangered Species Act (ESA) listing decision.”

That decision was on the table just a few years ago. After the species’ southern migration in 2013, the World Wildlife Fund-Mexico (WWF-Mexico) reported that overwintering sites in Mexico saw Eastern monarch butterflies squeezed down to an alarming 2.94 acres of forest area—a 59 percent decrease from the previous season and the lowest area covered in 20 years. “Alarm bells went off in that year,” says Green. “It was dramatically low, below what was predicted.” The public submitted petitions to the USFWS, prompting agency biologists to kick off a six-year assessment to determine if monarchs should be listed. 

In December 2020, federal officials determined that the monarch was “warranted but precluded” by other higher priority species that faced greater risk, and placed it on the backburner as a candidate for endangered species listing. “They said they are threatened, but there are so many species worse off than monarchs,” says Oberhauser. “I think the initial thought was that it seemed like a prudent decision, although there were some groups who could have wanted the full-on designation as threatened.”

In the US, the Endangered Species Act is one of the strongest measures for not only recovering at-risk animals and plants, but creating protective actions to preserve the environment, says Oberhauser. “Once a species is listed, it means that its habitat has to be protected,” she says. “In my opinion, the act is one of the most important pieces of environmental legislation.”

[Related: To save monarch butterflies, we need more milkweed]

As a candidate species, USFWS biologists will monitor the status of migratory monarchs annually. The agency’s spokesperson states that USFWS “intends to propose listing the monarch in fiscal year 2024,” if legal protection is still warranted at the time of reassessment. While the IUCN Red List might not have any legal clout, Green thinks that it could still have an impact on the US government’s next steps. 

Official protections, however, could make it illegal to remove or interfere with monarchs or their habitat in the wild, explains Green. This, he adds, has the potential to ripple out to grassroots education and restoration programs, which have played a big role in monarch conservation efforts. Special permit applications might be needed for research groups and the public to physically interact with monarchs. Green cautions that it could have a “complete chilling effect” on some current campaigns.

“The additional exposure for monarchs [from the IUCN Red List] is great, but we want to make sure that we don’t inadvertently lose them as this important model for promoting conservation,” he says. “It’s certainly going to be a balance that we’ll have to strike.”  

While it’s unclear exactly how the US government will find this balance, countries that already protect the species can provide a picture. “In Mexico, nobody can take monarchs for anything without special permission from the federal government,” says Eduardo Rendón-Salinas, a monarch expert with WWF-Mexico who leads surveys on overwintering grounds. “We are very concerned here in Mexico on all levels about the monarch migration and the monarch overwintering. It’s a really, really special topic that we must protect here.” 

It’s also crucial to learn how climate, habitat availability, and other environmental factors come together to affect the stability of monarch butterfly populations, which do see year-to-year fluctuation. Green says that determining the exact causes for sporadic swings is tricky. “There have been some surprises that we’ve seen in the past few years. For instance, there was a bounce back of the California population recently,” he says. While the bump in the Western subspecies doesn’t nearly bring numbers close to historic counts, it’s still notable and unexpected. Similarly, this past overwintering season in Mexico also saw a 35 percent increase of Eastern monarchs, according to the most recent survey led by WWF-Mexico—a sign that the population is recovering. However, experts remain cautious, given that numbers are still trending downward.

“Especially in the past five years or so, we’ve been trying to understand much more deeply what exactly is contributing to these trends,” Green says. 

Since the 1990s, loss of milkweed from agricultural herbicides and deforestation in overwintering habitats have been the main contributors to monarch population decline, says Oberhauser. (Rendón-Salinas points out that there have been improvements in canopy cover following the Mexican government’s actions to crack down on illegal logging and protect monarchs.) In recent years, however, climate change has added another pressure on both populations. In a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, Oberhauser, Rendón-Salinas, and a team of scientists in the US and Mexico reported that between 2004 and 2018, breeding season weather in the US was nearly seven times more important than other factors in determining the numbers of overwintering monarchs.  

The same can be true on both ends of the migration. A single snowstorm in the overwintering grounds in Mexico, for instance, can wipe out 70 to 80 percent of Eastern populations in a season, while hot and dry conditions during the spring and summer in the southern and northeastern US can also spell bad news. Rendón-Salinas says similar trends have been seen in both monarch butterfly subspecies in the East and West.  

“This new IUCN category of the migratory monarch in North America is an opportunity to reinforce our efforts in the conservation of the species,” he notes. “To do that, we need support from the governments, from the NGOs, from the private institutions—but the most important thing is that we need help from all kinds of people involved in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.” 

Oberhauser, Rendón-Salinas, and Green all note that the public can play a big role in the future of monarch butterflies: planting flowering plants, growing milkweed, and participating in monarch monitoring. USFWS for its part agrees. “Monarch populations benefit from widespread, ongoing conservation measures that are helping reduce threats,” the agency’s representative said in a statement. “We strongly encourage continued efforts to improve the status of monarchs.”

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How do you keep a fish alive without water? 

This contradictory question is the reality that Thomas Archdeacon, a fish biologist with the New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office, is having to ask himself more often each summer. The Rio Grande river typically runs low between monsoon rains, and for decades, dams have left stretches of the river in southeastern New Mexico dry during the summer irrigation season. But this year, the river dried up completely where it runs through Albuquerque, New Mexico, for the first time since the 1980s. The development doesn’t bode well for the subject of his research, the Rio Grande silvery minnow.

“This is the new normal, the new floor,” says Archdeacon.

The endangered fish, an unmarked strip of silver small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, used to have a range that tracked the river through Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Now, the species is only found on short stretches north and south of where it flows through Albuquerque, thanks to habitat loss, warmer water temperatures, and disruptions to historic flow patterns as dams were constructed and channels narrowed for irrigation. Before this summer, carefully managed releases from upstream reservoirs meant that that the northern length of river could usually be counted on to have running water at most times.

But that wasn’t the case this year, due to what that Archdeacon calls a “perfect storm” of disruptions to the river’s flow. Besides the pulse from the reservoirs arriving too early, repairs to the El Vado Dam upstream meant that the water usually held throughout the summer to tide the system over during dry spells wasn’t available. A disputed water agreement between the governments of New Mexico and Texas is putting even more strain on the limited supply. 

At the end of July, technicians from the New Mexico Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office were running nets through the small, shallow pools left in the river bed. They were trying to scoop up the silvery minnows stranded in the standing water to relocate them upstream, where there was still enough moisture to tide them over until the next rain. “It’s not a long-term solution,” says Archdeacon, whose research has found that the rescued fish have a very low survival rate even once they’ve been moved to somewhere with more water. “You can’t get the fish to live because they are really stressed out before the pools begin to form. They’re crowded and too warm.”

The total loss of their habitat for days between summer monsoon rains isn’t the only threat to the minnow’s persistence. To reproduce, they depend on a surge of water in the spring when the snowpack melts, which triggers the females to release their eggs. The males release sperm into the high water at the same time, fertilizing the eggs.

But for decades, rising average temperatures from climate change have been melting the snowpack progressively earlier in the year, so the springtime surge rushes down the Rio Grande before the minnows are ready to release their eggs. State officials responsible for stewarding the species can create an artificial one with the dams used to regulate the river’s flow to prompt the fish to spawn. This year, though, their efforts yielded only a single egg, nowhere near the 10,000-egg minimum needed to make the effort worthwhile. 

As a backup, hatcheries run by state and federal conservation agencies collect eggs from the river in the spring, raise them, and then release the minnows into the river in the fall or winter when it’s flowing consistently. “If this happens again, if this happens next year, it’d be a big problem,” says Archdeacon. The hatchery has enough eggs and fish to weather a bad year or two, but if they aren’t able to collect any next year, they’ll be hard-pressed to boost the silvery minnow population with genetically diverse, captive adults.

The main thing the fish need to survive is more water, a seemingly simple proposition that becomes incredibly complicated with Western water politics. The Southwest is undeniably growing more arid, but the periods of intermittent drying imperiling the silvery minnow are due to decisions to release reservoirs on a schedule that prioritizes the needs of farmers and other human users. 

Tricia Snyder, the interim Wild Rivers Program Director for the conservation nonprofit WildEarth Guardians, says that it’s time for a “reckoning in the West” over water use. “We have an over-allocated system here on the Rio Grande, with every drop and then some promised to somebody.” 

[Related: America thrived by choking its rivers with dams. Now it’s time to undo the damage.]

Last year, WildEarth Guardians published an intent to sue local and federal officials with a role in managing the Rio Grande, saying water governance planning didn’t adequately take endangered species into account. They haven’t had to file an actual lawsuit yet, as the announcement brought the necessary leaders to the table for conversation. 

“We’re really hopeful that we can find some workable solutions,” says Snyder. “The intent here is that we create a water management system that accounts for all water uses, including plant and wildlife communities. When we make the ecosystem better for endangered species, we make it better for everyone.”

In the meantime, scientists like Archdeacon will have to keep scooping minnows out of the parched river, trying to keep a Rio Grande fish alive without the Rio Grande.

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Biologists have successfully engineered animals that produce the sperm of a different species, which brings labs one step closer to animal reproduction that uses nothing but the animal’s DNA. And while there’s potential to rebuild endangered species populations, or even bring extinct species back to life, don’t worry—Jurassic Park will probably stay fiction.  

The new research published today in Stem Cell Reports has demonstrated that it is possible to produce rat sperm in sterile hybrid mice. While the technique still needs to be fine-tuned, the study authors say that their approach of adding engineered stem cells from one species to embryos of another species, called blastocyst complementation, has the potential to boost endangered species. If at-risk species aren’t able to maintain healthy numbers, generating their eggs and sperm in a lab could be used as a new tool to build populations up.  

The team’s process used stem cells, specifically pluripotent stem cells. Stem cells are the raw materials that make all kinds of cells, but the pluripotent stem cells can produce the greatest number of different cell types. These stem cells naturally develop only in embryos, but it’s also possible for other types of cells, such as those from a regular tissue sample, to be transformed into pluripotent stem cells. So this gives scientists a more readily available source to brew these stem cells in the lab. Adding them to the sterile embryos of a different living animal ultimately converts these stem cells into germ cells, such as sperm or eggs. 

Previous research had already shown that rat sperm could be made in mice using pluripotent stem cells, says Ori Bar-Nur, a biologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich and a coauthor of the study. The process involves creating a chimera, which is an artificial genetic hybrid of multiple animals—in this case, mice and rats. But past experiments with rat-mice chimera produced mouse sperm in addition to rat, resulting in a mix that was difficult to distinguish, isolate, and use. Unlike these past experiments, Bar-Nur and his team used mice that were genetically sterile. By adding the pluripotent stem cells of a rat to a sterile mouse embryo at a particular stage in its development (in this case the blastocyst stage) only the rat’s sperm formed in the resulting rat-mouse chimera.

“It’s removed a hurdle, especially if the process can work with other species,” says Kevin Gonzales, a postdoctoral stem cell biology researcher at the Rockefeller University who was not involved with the study. 

This new system wasn’t a perfect success, though. The sperm produced by the chimeras could fertilize rat eggs, but at a relatively low rate, and the resulting embryos didn’t develop into live offspring. Bar-Nur and his team aren’t sure why this is, but they suggest that it could be because the cells had been frozen and thawed, which is known to reduce viability. “It’s something we still need to pursue and are working on,” Bar-Nur says. 

Still, Gonzales says that the team’s ability to engineer a chimera that exclusively produced the sperm of a different species shows promising progress for the future of stem cell propagation in conservation efforts. Continuing down this line of research has the potential to repopulate endangered (or even extinct) species with dwindling numbers. Small populations lead to a dangerous lack of genetic diversity, which increases the risk of extinction. “If you think about critically endangered species, you probably won’t have access to spermatozoa,” explains Bar-Nur. “But you might have tissue samples, and if we could transform that into pluripotent stem cells and find an evolutionarily close species, we could potentially, eventually, repopulate the species.” 

[Related: Airborne animal DNA could help biologists track endangered species]

There are a number of steps left before this technology can be put to practical use. First, biologists have yet to actually develop a living creature with sperm made from this particular type of stem cell propagation, blastocyst complementation. Additionally, no one has been able to produce female eggs with this method. However, both Bar-Nur and Gonzales say there’s every reason to think it’s possible. 

Gonzales points out that future use of the application will depend on having or making pluripotent stem cells. Samples of endangered species’ tissue are being collected and preserved, so labs could gain access, he says. However, the specific set of genetic keys needed to transform cells into pluripotent stem cells varies from species to species. The DNA sequences  of lab mice, for instance, are relatively well known, but those of a rare tiger might not be.

The reproductive systems of mammal species present another barrier: they will need hosts to carry any viable embryos, says Gonzales. Even if sperm and eggs are successfully created and combined, it’s unknown whether the embryo could healthily develop in the uterus of a different species, even one that is closely related.

So as Jurassic Park-esque as it sounds to use cell samples to bring an extinct species back to life—or even a nearly-extinct species back from the brink—researchers still have a few hurdles to overcome before the technology can be put into practice. 

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To anyone with an interest in the fate of the world’s wildlife, it’s a familiar story: Bringing back predators like wolves and wildcats is crucial to re-wilding ecosystems. The most famous example might be the return of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, and its ripple effect on other species, including plants. The wolves’ presence after 70 years forced elk herds in certain areas to start moving again, which then gave the willow and aspen they had over-browsed a chance to regrow. That, in turn, provided beavers with enough sticks and logs to make a comeback of their own—from eight colonies in 1953 to 100 colonies today.

It’s a tidy story of nature’s resilience. But as biologists are now learning, reintroducing top predators to ecosystems where they’ve been absent for generations can affect other species in unexpected, and perhaps unwelcome ways.

Take the Iberian pear, a small, heat- and cold-resistant tree found only in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco—a hotspot of plant biodiversity. The species grows up to 32 feet high and sports round, marble-sized fruit that are so hard when unripe, shepherds used them as slingshot projectiles. The tree is considered stable but in decline with a “severely fragmented” population due to agricultural development, according to the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened and Endangered Species.

[Related: The fight to save America’s most endangered mammal]

Another species endemic to the Iberian Peninsula, the Iberian lynx, was reintroduced to several areas in Spain and Portugal in recent years. Inspired by the Yellowstone wolf findings, Tamara Burgos, a researcher in ecology at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, was curious to find out how the presence of lynx may be affecting the pear on the Spanish side of the border. From a 2009 study by colleagues, she knew that the trees depend on small mammals like foxes and badgers to spread their seeds. The animals consume the ripe fruit and later excrete the seeds, often some distance away, spreading the pear to new sites. Burgos and her co-investigators set up camera traps in Sierra de Andújar Natural Park, one of the largest remaining refuges for Iberian lynx. They placed some cameras in the wildcat’s territory and some outside it to see if the lynx’s presence might be influencing where, when, and how red foxes, Eurasian badgers, and stone martens forage for Iberian pear fruit in the area.

The team placed Iberian pears beneath fruiting trees and, using the images from the cameras, kept an eye on the sites to see how often these important seed-spreaders visited them, how much fruit they ate, and how long they spent foraging. They found that within lynx territory, the red fox visited the sites less often, ate less fruit, and foraged less efficiently. The stone martens didn’t turn up at the sites at all, while badgers seemed unperturbed. The pear sites outside lynx territory, on the other hand, were far more popular: Across the entire study area, 70 percent of fox visits and 100 percent of stone marten visits to pear trees occurred beyond the lynx’s range.

Burgos and her collaborators concluded that the lynx has kept these frugivorous carnivores on the move and is likely affecting how they disperse pear seeds.

“We got really interesting results,” Burgos says. “We don’t think carnivores have any impact on plants because they prey on animals. But in many ecosystems, like this one, they are super important for plants.” The next step is to figure out exactly how the presence of lynx is affecting pear distribution—a dynamic that could have implications for Iberian pear recovery efforts.

While the study sites were in a lynx stronghold where the predator didn’t need to be reintroduced, Burgos says the seed-spreaders’ behaviors suggest that there could be a similar effect in areas where the wildcats have returned.

Lynx habitat on the Iberian peninsula mainly overlaps with private lands, so Burgos had to use some unusual tactics to gain access to her study sites. “We had to reach a deal with them, because they had to allow us to work inside their properties,” she says of the farmers and other landowners in the area. “That was the hardest part for this project. There were many dinners, many meetings in bars. It took one year of work, building these relationships.”

Bill Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, calls the work enabled by those deals an “innovative” study and encourages more experts in the field to explore these kinds of effects. Still, as the co-author of a 2012 study on the “passive restoration” of Yellowstone ecosystems after the reintroduction of gray wolves, he cautions that other factors may have also influenced foraging behavior in lynx territory, such as human activity or the presence of wolves, which also live in the park.

“This has really piqued my interest,” he says. “But at the same time, I want to emphasize that nature can be complex. We know so little; we have to be humble.”

[Related: Great white shark sightings are up in the US, thanks to decades-old protections]

In the past, ecologists and biologists have primarily focused on how the return of predators affects prey numbers. Now they’re beginning to realize that their influence on behavior merits just as much attention, Ripple adds. “The behavioral impact needs to be considered as much or even more so than the mortality effects [on prey]. And this study is definitely looking at the ‘landscape of fear’ and those effects.”

Burgos says she plans to continue studying how the comeback of the lynx is affecting the pear, stone martens, and other species. And she hopes the fruit of her research will inspire other ecologists to explore the complicated and sometimes unexpected effects of returning long-absent predators to their native habitats. Understanding how bringing back one species can influence others can also help wildlife managers improve reintroduction programs, she explains.

“The lynx is a super charismatic species,” she says, “but we need to think about the rest of the species in the ecosystem.”

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Many of the world’s rarest birds are also oddballs. There are frigatebirds, with inflatable necks; hornbills, with faces shaped like a pair of bananas; and glossy kingfishers with cartoonishly large heads.

That means that avian eccentricity itself may be in danger. Across the world, so many species have disappeared or are disappearing that ecologists agree we are entering a sixth extinction event, on par with the dinosaur die-off. In an analysis published Thursday by British biologists in the journal Current Biology, the birds at the greatest risk of extinction are also disproportionately diverse. If the extinction crisis continues apace, the world will be left not only with fewer species of birds, but the ones that are left will look—and often act—like one another.

[Related: The UN’s devastating extinction report, explained in 5 charts]

“It’s quite stark, actually,” says Emma Hughes, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield and the paper’s lead author. The “horrific” pattern showed up in every type of landscape, from grasslands, to forests and swamps, and in half of the world’s ecoregions. “We’re seeing not only species loss happening, but we’re losing diversity of morphology at a really high rate,” she explains.

The project began with a catalog of thousands of bird bodies housed in the collection of the UK’s Natural History Museum. For years, Hughes helped create 3D models of bird beaks—a famously adaptable feature of bird anatomy that shaped Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

That library of bird bodies allowed the researchers to develop a global picture of bird diversity. The average bird, morphologically speaking, looks a lot like a crow. The major variation is size—a bald eagle is about 1,000 times the weight of an Anna’s hummingbird. But there are also shapes: the sweeping wings of acrobatic swifts, the stilt-like legs of cranes, the scoop bills of brown pelicans, and the chisel bill of pileated woodpeckers.

Birds at risk of extinction, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, an international collaboration that maintains a “red list” of endangered species, carry a disproportionate amount of that bodily weirdness. The IUCN lists 111 bird species as critically endangered. Pull them from the global pool, and physical diversity plummets. When the researchers did the same with endangered—though not critically so—birds, diversity also crashed. But when they removed just the not-threatened birds, they saw no impact.

“The biggest thing [about this paper] is the huge scale of data they investigated,” says Allison Shultz, who studies bird evolutionary biology at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Almost everywhere on Earth was affected, but certain regions and ecosystems lost more diversity. Islands jumped out, although perhaps not as much as expected given that they tend to act as biodiversity hotspots. Hughes suspects that’s because many unusual island species, like the North Atlantic’s penguin-sized great auks, or Madagascar’s elephant birds, are already gone. “I think we’ve already lost a lot of diversity on islands,” she says.

But the research also uncovered overlooked threats to diversity. Hughes’ analysis found that the high plateaus around the Himalayan Mountains were at extremely high risk of homogenizing. “It turns out these areas have got quite a number of critically endangered vulture species,” Hughes says. And vultures are physical outliers, huge bodies with a long, hooked beak that helps them dig into carcasses.

There’s a reason why unique physiques are vulnerable. Animals with especially strange forms have often adapted to some specific part of their environment, like hummingbirds that drink the nectar of a single type of flower. That leaves them more susceptible when the environment changes, whether because of habitat destruction or climate change.

By contrast, less specialized species can thrive in the wake of human disturbance. “Species that are more generalist in nature take opportunities with new food resources, like your crows and your sparrows,” Hughes says.

[Related: Australian cockatoos are teaching each other to open trash cans]

Size appeared to be a key driver of risk. “Previous research has shown that birds that are larger tend to be more vulnerable to extinction,” says Huges, “They take longer to reproduce, they take longer to reach maturity, and they’re more vulnerable to hunting.”

If anything, the findings capture only part of the world’s threatened diversity. Although the physical measurements appear to have captured trends in how species evolved, they don’t pick up some of the most iconic features of different species: “There’s color, patterns, songs, how birds interact socially with each other,” Shultz says. The study authors  “did not see a lot of morphological diversity in the tropics. And that’s actually where most of the color diversity lies. So there could be other signals that come across when you look at other aspects of bird biology.”

There’s nothing wrong with the average crow or sparrow—generalist species are amazing exactly because they’ve been able to carve out homes among humans. But animals with offbeat traits often play special roles as pollinators, seed dispersers, or scavengers; if they’re mission, it could unravel the web of relationships that tie an ecosystem together.

That’s playing out right now among the vultures around the Himalayas. Over the last 40 years, vulture populations across the Indian subcontinent have declined about 95 percent, largely because of the proliferation of a veterinary antibiotic that’s toxic to birds. “Losing these species can have quite dire consequences for humans,” Hughes says. As carcasses go uneaten, rats and feral dogs have taken over as scavengers. “Those mammalian predators spread things we’re quite vulnerable to as humans—rabies, bubonic plague—so that’s a direct consequence of losing vultures.”

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The Lord Howe Island stick insect might look more lobster than bug. Nicknamed the “land lobster,” this critter can grow up to seven inches long and gleams like polished obsidian among tree trunks and twigs, blending into the forest environment. For decades, Lord Howe Island, a small volcanic isle just northeast of Sydney, Australia, was the only known home of the species, Dryococelus australis. But in 1918, a shipwreck introduced predatory black rats that decimated the stick bug and many other native animals. Locals and biologists thought the insect was extinct until 2001, when a tiny population was discovered on a small nearby spired island, Ball’s Pyramid. Zoo and museum scientists are breeding the insects to restore this once-lost species and soon return it back to the wild—their original home on Lord Howe Island. 

The Lord Howe Island stick insect represents one of 40 species brought to life in a new macrophotography exhibit, Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril, by photographer Levon Biss at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The large format photos not only reveal the insects’ diverse textures and minute hairs in vivid detail—they also shed light on these often overlooked creatures whose existence is threatened by human-induced climate change and other ongoing pressures. 

“Right now, we’re just in the process of trying to quantify how much insects are in trouble,” says David Grimaldi, the museum’s invertebrate zoologist who curated the exhibit, in a video. “We have to rely on entomologists and other biologists to go out into the field and monitor insects, but we shouldn’t wait for the counts. We should start protecting natural areas.”

[Related: Do we still need to save the bees?]

Insects make up 80 percent of animal life on Earth, shaping a significant slice of our ecosystem from pollinating crops to decomposing waste. In 2017, a study in PLOS One revealed that more than 75 percent of the total biomass of flying insects in protected nature reserves in Germany had been lost over 27 years—scratching just the surface of an alarming trend of species diversity loss and insect population decline.

“Without hyperbole we’re in a very serious conundrum,” says Jessica Ware, entomologist and associate curator in invertebrate zoology at the museum, in AMNH’s press video. “Insects have undergone mass extinctions in the past, but right now the mass extinction that we’re seeing, that we’re witnessing, seems to be the largest that’s ever been recorded.”

With the power of macrophotography, Biss hopes that the insect portraits of Extinct and Endangered: Insects in Peril will be an eye-opening look at insects that showcases both their beauty and their value. These tiny creatures, Biss says in the video, go underappreciated despite being so important to humans and the planet.

“We need to understand that they’re important and we can’t just ignore them because they’re hard to see,” Biss says. “Hopefully people will walk away with an appreciation of them and they’ll marvel in them, and realize that they’re too beautiful to be lost, they’re too important to be lost.”

Images and specimen captions from Endangered: Insects in Peril are provided by AMNH.

The sabertooth longhorn beetle, Macrodontia cervicornis, lives in the Amazon River basin and is among the longest beetles in the world. Habitat loss has contributed to its vulnerable status. The practice of collecting and selling these beetles—a single specimen can go for thousands of dollars—is another cause of their decline.

Dragonflies may be the most acrobatic fliers in the insect world, and stygian shadowdragons are no exception. Late in the twilight, they soar high above dark waters, swooping down to capture mosquitoes and other insect prey. Living near lakes and rivers in the eastern US and Canada, stygian shadowdragons, Neurocordulia yamaskanensis, start out life in the water. Females lay their eggs and larvae develop there, breathing through internal gills.

[Related: Inflatable tentacles and silk hats: See how caterpillars trick predators to survive]

For now, their numbers appear stable in some parts of their range, but in other areas they have completely disappeared. In coming years, climate change could have many detrimental effects on remaining populations. Much remains to be learned about how dragonfly larvae manage in northeastern rivers and lakes, and if those waters warm dramatically, the larvae may not be able to survive. Depending on how the waters are affected by heat, drought and other factors such as water pollution, researchers have estimated that more than 50 percent of this dragonfly species’ preferred river habitat could be lost as the climate shifts.

The raspa silkmoth, Sphingicampa raspa, lives in hot, arid areas of Arizona, West Texas, and in Mexico, and depends on the “monsoon” season as part of its life cycle. If these reliable yearly rainstorms are affected by climate change, it could imperil these and other southwestern moths and butterflies.

This colorful tiger beetle may look flashy, but in the pink sand dunes of its Utah habitat, its cream and green hues actually help the animal blend in. The cream forewings also help these beetles handle desert heat, by reflecting rather than absorbing sunlight. In the dunes, these tiger beetles are predators—note the insect’s curving mandibles, used to capture ants, flies, and other small prey.

The beetles’ tiny range lies on public lands, and researchers and wildlife officials there have closely monitored them for years. In low-rainfall years they have found the beetle population falls—a decline that may only become steeper with climate change. A different type of risk comes from people driving off-road vehicles over the dunes. To prevent the larvae in their burrows from being crushed, officials have set aside some conservation areas where the vehicles are now prohibited.

Every 17 years when the weather warms, millions of periodical cicadas (Magicicada septendecim) have a mass emergence, digging themselves out of the soil where they’ve been growing, climbing up trees, and splitting out of their skins into winged adults. But land clearing and development may destroy the underground nymphs before they can emerge and reproduce. And pesticides applied to lawns, golf courses, and parks seep into the ground where the nymphs feed.

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Update (June 13, 2022): Today the Federal Aviation Administration announced that to move forward with the Starship launch, SpaceX will have to make more than 75 changes to its proposed plan to further reduce environmental disruptions in Boca Chica, Texas. Some of those requirements involve closer collaboration with biologists and other experts from federal agencies. Approval of the launch license is contingent on these changes, though on Twitter, SpaceX hinted that it was still on schedule for the first launch test.

After years of development, the SpaceX Starship is rumbling to life for its first big launch. But before the 164-foot-tall rocket can lift off into space, the company, headed by Elon Musk, has to make it through some final regulatory hurdles.

The launch is set to take place at Boca Chica, located at the southernmost tip of Texas and surrounded by state parks and wildlife refuge. The nature of its operations has raised concerns about potential harm to wildlife species, especially to threatened shorebirds, in the region. SpaceX has also bought out dozens of people’s homes to make them relocate, and caused other residents to evacuate during tests.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently completing a final environmental assessment of the site and was expected to reach a decision on May 31. However, the agency pushed back the deadline for a sixth time and is now expected to finalize the review on June 13. It said SpaceX had made multiple changes to its application that required additional FAA analysis.

Last month, the FAA released 17,000 comments, some of which raise concerns about the SpaceX project’s impact on endangered species and the nearby Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The company filed permits to develop an additional 17.6 acres of wetlands next to its existing Starbase facility—the size of the entire affected area will likely be much larger. Boca Chica is one of the most important shorebird sites along the entire Gulf Coast, says David Newstead, director of the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program’s (CBBEP) Coastal Bird Program in South Texas. It also serves as a critical site on the Central Flyway, connecting migratory birds between North and South America.

“There’s been repeated explosions [at the testing site], many of which have spread debris into the surrounding wildlife refuge and state park habitat,” Newstead says. “And the SpaceX properties are immediately adjacent to occupied, heavily used, important shorebird habitat.”

[Related: Project Icarus is creating a living map of Earth’s animals]

The CBBEP’s monitoring efforts show that in Boca Chica, piping plovers—a federally threatened shorebird species—declined from an estimated population of 327 in 2018 to 214 in 2020. But the population recorded a slight uptick to 276 in 2021. These changes correlate with the start and stop of launch testing at the site, Newstead says. SpaceX first started manufacturing and locally testing its Starship rocket systems in 2018.

“There was a small increase [in piping plovers] this past winter, but not recovered to the extent that they were previously,” Newstead adds. “Notably, from August 2021 until April 2022, there’s been no more launch testing.”

Besides tracking piping plover populations, the CBBEP also monitors nesting snowy plovers and Wilson’s plovers at Boca Chica. These birds have mostly disappeared from the area and seem to avoid nesting in sites close to the launch site, Newstead says. 

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has also determined that SpaceX’s continued activity in Boca Chica will impact animals protected under the Endangered Species Act. Among those of the greatest concern are red knot shorebirds and the jaguarundi and ocelot wild cats. Marine life is also in danger, including the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, which nests on the beaches of Boca Chica and is the world’s most critically endangered sea turtle.

The SpaceX launch site could threaten wildlife populations by causing direct injury or death through explosions and tests. USFWS and other entities have also noted that heat, pressure, and debris from launch testing that began in 2018 could harm species or drive them away from critical habitat. But the judgment on SpaceX’s environmental impact is ultimately in the hands of the FAA. 

“I am optimistic that we will get approval [from the FAA],” Musk said this February, as reported by Spaceflight News. “Objectively, I think this is not something that will be harmful to the environment. We’ve obviously flown the [Starship spacecraft] several times … We’ve fired the engines a lot. I think the reality is that it would not have a significant impact.”

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

SpaceX is shooting for a 2023 launch of its Starship spacecraft, which is designed for voyages to the moon and Mars. If the FAA decides to require a new environmental impact statement from the company, it would cause a setback of six to eight months, Musk said earlier this year. In that case, SpaceX plans to shift its Starship launch operation to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the company has already received the environmental approval it needs.

Newstead says although it is not uncommon for regulatory agencies to delay their decisions, the number of FAA postponements around the SpaceX project does stand out.

“I would assume that the extent of the delays is a testimony to the number of stumbling blocks the agency is facing in authorizing this type of activity,” he says. “If it was benign, [SpaceX] would have had their permit a long time ago.”

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Shrouded in darkness on a south Florida beach, I crouched about 20 feet behind a loggerhead sea turtle, waiting. I watched in silence, eyes straining in the weak red light of my headlamp, as she deposited one soft, ping-pong-ball-sized egg after another onto a quickly growing pile. I was witnessing the perilous propagation of an endangered species—a rare and spectacular sight.

And perilous might be an understatement: once hatchlings emerge from the sand, only 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 will actually make it to the Gulf Stream where they feast on algae, seaweed, and jellyfish as they grow into adults. Of the millions of eggs laid each year along Florida coasts, only several hundred turtles are likely to make it to sexual maturity.

That’s because the hatchlings that make it to the water without getting picked off by sea birds or led astray by distracting lights on the beach may succumb to boating or fishing accidents or trash and pollution in waterways. Given all those risks, it’s important to offer sea turtles the best chance of survival from the get-go, and you can start by protecting nests and hatchlings on North America’s beaches this summer.

When is sea turtle nesting season?

The time of year that sea turtles nest, lay eggs, and hatch depends on the species and where in North America you are. Loggerheads and green sea turtle nests are abundant in Florida, but loggerheads also crawl ashore from Alabama to North Carolina. Similarly, green turtles will lay eggs in Hawaii, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Kemp’s ridley sea turtle—a critically endangered species—is more likely to be found in Texas and Mexico. Leatherbacks primarily nest in Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean, while hawksbill sea turtles mainly reproduce in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

For most species, April to October are active times for nesting and hatching—almost perfectly coinciding with prime beach-going season. Take the loggerhead, for example: When a female is ready to nest, she slowly heaves her 300-pound body up the beach until she feels dry sand under her chin, sometimes going far beyond the high tide line. She then digs a 2-foot deep hole with her back flippers, lays an average of 120 eggs, refills the hole with sand, and heads back to the water. The whole process might take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours, depending on the species, and female turtles will do it every two weeks, for an average total of four to six nests.

But if a turtle spots you on her way up the beach or while digging, she may stop and retreat to the ocean. That’s a problem, because if she tries and fails more than a couple of times to build a nest, she’ll give up and deposit her clutch of eggs in the ocean where they won’t hatch. And because sea turtle species are endangered, some critically, every nest is crucial for their recovery, says Mary Kay Skoruppa, US Fish and Wildlife Service sea turtle coordinator for the Texas coast, speaking specifically of the Kemp’s ridley.

Turn your lights off

While most adult sea turtles avoid bright light instinctually, hatchlings are attracted to artificial light, explains Amber Kuehn, a marine biologist in charge of South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island Sea Turtle Patrol. When baby turtles emerge, they know to look for the moon reflecting off the ocean, lighting their way to the water. But if there’s a bright porch light or lantern nearby, they’ll scurry toward it instead, resulting in almost certain death.

At a beachfront property, turn the outside lights off at night and use dark-sky-approved fixtures that are downward-facing and shielded on the beach side of the house, fitted with warm-colored bulbs. Interior light shouldn’t be pouring onto the beach, either, explains Kuehn, so consider tinting your windows or using light-blocking curtains or blinds. In many places, including Hilton Head, there are even municipal codes detailing turtle-protection directives.

Sandcastles and holes, for example, can trap turtles or block their paths to and from the water. It only takes a hole a few inches deep to ensnare a hatchling, likely killing it. So whether you’re building or digging, make sure to level the sand before you leave.

It should go without saying, but don’t leave any trash on the beach, either, no matter how small. Plastic straws are notorious for the risks they pose to sea turtles, but plastic bags, fishing line, candy wrappers, and really any type of garbage can endanger them as a tangling or choking hazard.

If your pup is accompanying you to the beach, keep it on a leash, especially at night. Dogs can easily injure sea turtles or scare them away from a nesting area.

In Texas, the Kemp’s ridley nests during the day, but that doesn’t mean they’re easier to see: after a female fills in her nest, her back will be covered with camouflaging sand.

What to do if you spot a turtle nesting

If you happen to be nearby when a sea turtle is making her way up the beach, it’s important not to give her a reason to abandon her mission. So keep your distance—50 feet is a good rule of thumb for pedestrians; 100 feet for motorized vehicles, according to Skoruppa. You should also lower your voice, and absolutely do not block her path whether she’s headed out of or into the water.

“Enjoy the moment and consider yourself blessed,” Skoruppa says. “It’s a magnificent thing to witness.”

Once the turtle is gone, mark the nest site by laying pieces of driftwood or other beach debris in a large circle around the area so biologists can find the nest during patrol. Just don’t disturb the nest itself once the animal has departed. Not only could you hurt the eggs inside, but it’s a federal offense.

Finally, call a local agency to alert them to the nest’s location. Most beaches will have signs with contact information, but if not, a good bet is to ring your state’s wildlife agency or the federal Fish and Wildlife Service.

We hope you have a safe, enjoyable visit to the beach this season, but make sure the species who rely on it do, too.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

A dead seal washes ashore in Northern California. Ravens and turkey vultures peck at its eyes and tail end, but they’re not strong enough to break into the blubbery carcass. For that they’d need the help of the Western Hemisphere’s largest land-based bird: the condor. With feathers as long as your femur and the body weight of a human preschooler, a condor can hold down a big carcass and rip into it with the torque of its meat hook-shaped beak. It may seem macabre from a Western perspective, but condors clean up with an efficiency other animals—including humans—cannot match. It’s one reason the Yurok Tribe has spent over a decade working to bring them home. 

To the Yurok people, the California condor, whose Yurok name is preygoneesh, embodies the spirit of renewal. It heads the scavenger sanitation crew: When preygoneesh eats, so does everybody. But preygoneesh has been absent from this beach for over a century. The ravens and vultures have to look elsewhere for a meal. The seal carcass bloats in the sun, wasted.

Preygoneesh’s decline accompanied Americans’ push Westward in the mid-1800s, a manifest casualty of the usual suspects: habitat destruction, novelty hunting by collectors and killings out of misplaced fear. Preygoneesh once ranged from what’s now called Mexico to British Columbia, from the Pacific to New York. The birds can travel 100-200 miles per day on 9.5-foot wingspans that can take them to 15,000 feet (2.8 miles), even higher than eagles. But by the 1980s, only 22 were left, their range diminished like a reservation to a sliver of skies over central and Southern California. Because they declined so early, Western scientists were never able to study healthy condor populations in the wild. What their thriving looks like is a mystery.

Except to Indigenous communities like the Yurok. 

On an unusually wintry day in late March, snowflakes piled on redwood boughs, fluffy and silent one hour, slushy and dumpy the next. But Yurok Wildlife Department Director Tiana Williams was confident the tribe’s four adolescent condors could handle the weather. They’d just arrived from the Ventana Wildlife Society in Monterey, which held them while the tribe finished constructing its own condor pen.

Tribal Chair Joseph L. James spoke to the press while snare hits of slush plopped on the overhead canopy. “It is a historical moment in the Yurok Tribe, as we introduce our condors back home to fly back above the sky, providing that balance for us,” he said. Vice Chair Frankie Myers followed, saying it took generations of work, and fulfills the dream of Yurok grandparents. “This is how government is supposed to represent its people,” Myers said.

Standing alongside tribal leadership were Redwood National Park Superintendent Steven Mietz and Victor Bjelajac, superintendent of California State Parks’ North Coast Redwoods District, representatives of the tribe’s original condor restoration partners. Numerous other agencies joined later, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which sent staff out to help build the tribe’s condor facility.

The historic day arrived with the help of some unlikely partners, too. PG&E, the power company whose equipment started the Dixie Fire last summer, donated $200,000 to the Yurok condor restoration program. Pacific Power, whose parent company owns the Klamath River dams the Yurok have been fighting to remove, is also involved. Then there are local dairy farmers who donate stillborn calves to feed the fledglings. The tribe even approached timber companies, although, according to Mietz, logging and other industries have damaged two-thirds of Redwood National and State Parks, part of the Yurok’s ancestral homelands.

“As we heal this landscape and we bring back the condors, and we start to restore the previous majestic glory of the redwood forest, we’re also healing the relationship with each other, and repairing our relationship with the original Indigenous people,” said Mietz. “We’re following their lead in how to manage the park, to restore this very damaged landscape.”

The tribe and its partners built the holding pen from shipping containers, in part because they’re fireproof. (In 2020, a California wildfire killed 12 condors.) The facility is tucked away in a discreet location and surrounded by electrified fencing. This protects preygoneesh not just from roaming predators, but from a well-meaning public, said biologist Chris West, the tribe’s lead condor program manager, flashing a still-red finger wound where a feisty fledgling took a chunk just days before.

A mentor bird—an 8-year-old adult condor, distinguishable by its bald red head—mingled with the adolescents. “If you just threw a bunch of teenagers into an area and expected them to behave themselves, at some point you might want to throw an elder in there to straighten them out a little bit,” West explained. “That’s kind of what’s going on with our mentor bird.”

Condors are social animals, with a literal pecking order that includes other, smaller scavengers. In the wild, a condor’s parents follow it around to teach it; here, the mentor plays that role. Bait outside the pen attracts turkey vultures and ravens, allowing the condors to get used to the animals they’ll dine with in the wild.

The adolescents, a female and three males, are 2 to 3 years old. Some hatched at the Oregon Zoo, others at the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise. And after their stay in Monterey, they needed to acclimate to Yurok country and socialize for a few weeks before release. There was no rush, said West. “We’re on condor time.”

Adult condors reproduce slowly, laying just one egg every two years. And they face one extremely lethal adversary. Lead poisoning from ammunition, which contributed to preygoneesh’s decline, remains their number-one killer, accounting for half of all known wild condor mortalities. A piece of lead the size of a pinhead can paralyze pregoneesh’s powerful gastrointestinal system, causing an agonizing death. “There’s some indication that if we were able to get rid of the lead problem,” Williams said, “that we could potentially stop managing condors.”

California banned lead ammo in 2019. Nevertheless, 13 condors died in the wild last year from lead poisoning. The tribe reached out to hunters with information about alternatives, like copper ammunition. “Anywhere from 85%-95% of hunters we talked to came to our events, saying, ‘I had no idea, and of course I’ll make the switch to non-lead,’” Williams said. “I’m not surprised by that, being a hunter myself, coming from a hunting family.”

Hunters, like dairy farmers, utility operators, loggers, and park superintendents, all seem to want preygoneesh to succeed. Yet it’s the Yurok’s leadership that has brought these unexpected allies together in the name of renewal.

According to Williams, the Yurok people’s fundamental reason for being is to keep the world renewed and in balance. She said preygoneesh is a critical part of the Yurok’s 10-day Jump Dance, a world-renewal ceremony that uses preygoneesh feathers and songs. Every other year, before the ninth full moon, participants fast and pray, dance and sweat. “We pray for our river, we pray for our streams, we pray for our salmon,” Chair James told HCN. “We pray for our condor to come home.”

On a morning in early May, the Yurok’s livestream showed two of the fledglings hopping to the edge of the release door and taking wing past a bait carcass. They’ll build their mental map around this location as a key place to return to for food and socializing.

The tribe won’t stop with these four birds: A new cohort arrives later this year, and West hopes to release four to six birds every year for the next 20 years, 80 to 120 birds from this site altogether.

“Our prayers are answered. They’re coming home now,” James said with a smile. “It’d be icing on the cake, being able to dance and have a condor fly over us. It’ll happen.”   

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Biodiversity makes the world go round—from tiny freshwater creatures to giant trees, the living things on planet earth are what makes it flourish. But in recent years, humans haven’t been all too good at preserving biodiversity—research has shown that nature is declining in unprecedented ways. As of 2019, one in four species on earth are at risk of extinction, and rates of extinction now compared to the times before human activity are about a thousand times higher (with higher rates predicted in the future). Humans are directly impacted by biodiversity loss when it comes to things like water availability and agriculture, which can become stressed as species die out or suffer.

This isn’t only devastating purely due to loss of the nature that makes our world special—it’s also a climate change crisis. Not only does climate change power biodiversity loss, but the weakening of natural ecosystems makes it harder to combat growing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, as climate change disasters like droughts and wildfires hit the Amazon rainforest, the trees and wildlife have a harder time bouncing back to normal—hindering their ability to store carbon.  Just last month, the most recent IPCC report stressed the importance of preserving nature—14 percent of all species face a “high rate of extinction” even at the most optimistic warming outcomes. 

[Related: Want to better understand the biodiversity of a forest? Ask the locals.]

“Loss of biodiversity, stresses on agricultural productivity, human health risks—the themes highlighted by WGII are not new,” Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said in a release last month. “We’ve been tracking most of them for years now. What is emerging is the indisputable evidence for how climate change is acting to compound and conjoin these challenges at a rate humankind is currently struggling to keep pace with, and how these impacts often hit the most vulnerable first.”

Still, even knowing how drastic the effects of biodiversity loss can be, getting information on what species are suffering, and where, can be tricky. Traditionally, maps may focus on the large-scale range of a species, and largely focus on vertebrate animals. A new study out last week in Ecological Applications, however, zooms in on the most likely suitable habitat for thousands of species—ranging from the Santa Cruz Island Cypress to the Twisted Dwarf Crayfish to Cockerell’s Bumble Bee, across the US. 

What they found is that in the lower 48 states, there are nearly 300 species of at-risk creatures and plants that fall completely out of currently-protected wildlife zones. These protected areas make up a mere 13 percent of the continental US, or around 316 million acres (though the Biden administration has a lofty goal of getting that number up to 30 percent by 2030). 

“When we think of biodiversity, we may reflect on tropical rainforests or coral reefs, where the richness of life is indeed staggering,” author Healy Hamilton, chief scientist at nonprofit NatureServe said in a release, “but our own country harbors globally significant biodiversity. The findings from the Map of Biodiversity Importance show us areas critical for preventing extinction across the nation.”

The most at-risk regions for imperiled species, the map shows, are across the California coast and the Southeast. At-risk freshwater invertebrates are most likely found in the Southeast, including two vulnerable mussel species that are only found in the Escambia River in Florida, and imperiled pollinators appear largely clumped on California’s coast and in the rust belt. 

[Related: Conservation and ecology research tackles global issues without global input.]

Additionally, out of the over 800 species investigated on federal lands, around 85 percent aren’t protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, 326 of which occur primarily on federal multiple-use lands. Around 66 percent of areas of unprotected biodiversity importance were found primarily on private land, and according to the new findings, around 90 percent of Americans live “within 30 miles of an area of high importance to biodiversity conservation,” said Sean T. O’Brien, President and CEO of NatureServe in the release. 

“Most people are not aware that we have so many imperiled species in America, much less that almost all of us live close to a conservation hotspot for biodiversity,” O’Brien says.

But there are ways to protect biodiversity no matter where you are located: supporting local farms, planting native plants and bee-friendly flowers in your yard, reducing water use, and supporting local and responsible farmers are all a good way to start. And if you have the spare time, searching for ways to volunteer in local conservation efforts can also help rebuild and protect the land that houses our rarest and most at-risk flora and fauna. 

The post Here’s where biodiversity is disappearing the quickest in the US appeared first on Popular Science.

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In Wisconsin, poaching that targets gray wolves may be exacerbated by wintry weather and hunting seasons for other animals, a new analysis suggests. 

Researchers examined three decades of wolf tracking data and found that poaching in the state increased during snowy periods when wolf tracks are easier to detect. When these conditions coincided with hunting seasons for deer and other large mammals, the rate of poaching increased more than six times. The findings emphasize the need for stronger protections for wolves, the study authors wrote on February 2 in Scientific Reports.

“The odds are that a wolf in Wisconsin is more likely to die of poaching than any other cause,” says Francisco J. Santiago-Ávila, the Big River connectivity science and conservation manager for Project Coyote, a nonprofit based in Larkspur, California, and a coauthor of the paper. Yet poaching is often underestimated when states develop the population estimates used to determine protections and hunting quotas. “It’s critical for state agencies to focus on these periods of time when these [hunting] activities increase, because we’re seeing that poaching increases during those times,” he says.

Gray wolves once ranged across much of North America. However, they were hunted nearly to extinction in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries before receiving protection under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s. 

[Related: Wisconsin’s gray wolves are in serious trouble]

In October 2020, the Trump administration announced that it was removing gray wolves from the list of endangered species in the lower 48 states. This led to a surge in hunting in Wisconsin that Santiago-Ávila and his collaborators estimated dented the population by an alarming 27 to 33 percent. Six Native American tribes in northern Wisconsin and environmental groups filed lawsuits to block a second hunt that was planned to start in November. In October, a judge ordered a halt on the hunt while the state’s Department of Natural Resources comes up with a new wolf management plan, which is expected to be finalized by June.

Previous studies have indicated that poaching is the main cause of death for most wolf populations in the US, Santiago-Ávila says, and that illegal killing increases after protections are loosened. People poach wolves for a variety of reasons, including concern for livestock and general animosity towards the animal and other predators. Some deer and bear hunters also view wolves as competition, or a threat to their hounds. 

For the new research, the team investigated poaching during the years when gray wolves were still listed as endangered species. They used data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, which tracked 495 radio-collared wolves between 1979 and 2012.

To identify which times of year were most dangerous for wolves, the researchers analyzed how the rate of poaching changed in response to weather and human activities. These included the hunting seasons for other animals such as deer and bears, and periods when hunting hounds were trained. The team examined the number of reported poaching deaths, in which a carcass is recovered, as well as cases where wolves vanished when their transmitters stopped working—which is nearly always a result of poachers destroying the collar, says Adrian Treves, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and another coauthor of the new findings.

He and his colleagues found that the poaching slowed during the period from mid-April to the beginning of July, when the snow had melted and hunting and hounding weren’t allowed. “Adult wolves get a breather during that time,” Santiago-Ávila says. “They’re not as easy to detect and there’s no people around.”

By comparison, the rate of poaching more than doubled during late winter to early spring, when there was still snow on the ground but hunting and hounding had ceased. But when snow and hunting periods overlapped from late fall to early winter, the rate of poaching rose by more than 650 percent.

Wolf disappearances also increased by more than 50 percent during the snowy period after hunting ended, and by smaller amounts from July through early January. The researchers suspect that poachers are more willing to take the time to tamper with the collars of the wolves they’ve killed when there are fewer people about to notice and report them, Treves says.

The new findings indicate that, even when wolves are supposed to be protected, snow cover and hunting allow poaching to flourish. There are several possible explanations for why poaching seems to shoot up when these two factors coincide. 

More potential poachers might be roaming during this season, either because they’re legally hunting other prey or because they’re willing to use the commotion of the hunts as cover. 

However, “the chances of being caught increase when there are hundreds or even thousands of hunters in the field,” Treves says. This might cause poachers to change their behavior during hunting seasons, such as leaving the collars behind after killing a wolf in fear of getting caught if they stick around after the act. “There’s a lot of poaching that goes on that is detected because the collars aren’t damaged.”

Delisting wolves as an endangered species and instating wolf hunts in Wisconsin could indicate to the public that wolves aren’t valued and population numbers are not at risk, further emboldening poachers, Santiago-Ávila says.

Aside from restricting hunting, the state could provide additional protection by implementing patrols throughout the forests to deter poachers, Treves says. He and his colleagues have previously observed that poaching diminished when Wisconsin sent people out to monitor wolf populations in the late 1990s.

There’s already strong existing evidence that poaching and other human activities are a major cause of death for large predators, Andrés Ordiz, a conservation biologist at the University of León in Spain who wasn’t involved in the research, wrote in an email. “That is a well-known fact, but [this] study is important because it quantifies poaching in a specific study area and taking into account different factors, such as seasonality, and including a large dataset,” said Ordiz, who studies interactions between brown bears and wolves in Scandinavia. “It seems to me that the results should be taken into account by conservation and management agencies in that area, and the study is interesting elsewhere as well.”

The new study highlights the importance of considering the impact of poaching when estimating wolf populations, Lisette Waits, a conservation biologist at the University of Idaho who has studied gray wolves in Idaho and red wolves in North Carolina, wrote in an email. 

“These results are very interesting and valuable for documenting the increased mortality and poaching risks for protected wolves associated with legal hunting seasons,” Waits said. “This study provides insight about the importance of developing policies and procedures such as increased law enforcement during active hunting seasons to minimize risk to endangered carnivores like wolves.”

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When you leave a zoo, you physically carry traces of the animals home with you.

A pair of new studies, published together in the journal Current Biology, found that by simply filtering air around zoos, researchers could recover genetic material from surrounding animals. They didn’t just detect the captive animals, though—the teams captured environmental DNA‚ or eDNA, from chicken and fish fed to those animals, and from wild and domestic creatures living nearby.

The technique has the potential to revolutionize environmental monitoring. Traditionally, biologists resort to direct observation: standing around looking for animals, or waiting for them to step in front of wildlife cameras. Particularly in thick tropical forest, “it’s actually very difficult to see vertebrates,” says Christina Lynggaard, a postdoctoral researcher who studies evolution and genomics at the University of Copenhagen, and the lead author on the second paper. “You hear them, and you see insects all over.” But getting a picture of the full complement of birds, monkeys, and reptiles can be impossible, she adds. That’s a problem for understanding pressing conservation questions, like the disappearance of rare species from fragmented forests.

“I think that they have demonstrated in a really quick pair of papers here that we need to be thinking much bigger about the potential of airborne eDNA for biodiversity detection,” says Matthew Barnes, an ecologist who studies the movement of eDNA at Texas Tech University, and was not involved in the two studies.

[Related: Scientists are tracking down deep sea creatures with free-floating DNA]

The two teams began the research independently, but by coincidence were asking almost an identical question. They saw each other’s results before publication, and decided to join forces to get the papers published side-by-side. “We think these papers should appear together because they are a perfect scientific replication,” says Elizabeth Clare, an ecologist at York University in Canada, and the lead author on one of the papers. (She conducted the research while at Queen Mary University of London.) “And that’s ultimately what you should do in science.”

As the price of genomic sequencing has fallen, eDNA research has exploded in popularity as a tool for understanding ecosystems. Researchers have harvested blood from leeches to find genetic material from animals they’ve bitten. A graduate student in Barnes’ lab at Texas Tech University has found that plants release plumes of DNA into the air around them. But no one had taken the step toward figuring out whether microscopic traces of animal could be recovered from the air directly.

“None of us knew if it would work, especially outside,” says Clare.

The scientists turned to zoos—one in the UK, one in Denmark—because, as Clare puts it, “the zoo is this remarkable collection of non-native species.” This allowed the researchers to prove that they found DNA from the location they were studying. If they were to monitor the air on a farm, for instance, it would be impossible to know if they were detecting DNA from cows nearby, or miles away. “The problem I faced with the cows cannot happen with a tiger,” Clare says. “There is no other source of tiger DNA except the one in front of me. We know precisely what we should detect.”

Both teams set up air filters around animal enclosures, from outdoor barns to indoor tropical rainforest exhibits. Once the filters had sucked up enough zoo air, they soaked them, making a broth of all the debris that had been in the air. Then, they hunted for sequences of vertebrate DNA.

“You sort of play a game, a bit like Go Fish,” says Clare. “I have my unknown, and I compare it to my database of known things, and I look for a really good match.”

The teams had lists of zoo animals to compare against, but they were also able to pick up and identify DNA from unexpected sources. Clare’s group found evidence that zookeepers were tracking DNA from one enclosure to another. In the rainforest building, Lynggaard’s crew spotted DNA from the guppies in the ponds. “It’s one thing if you have a rhino that is scratching, or a bird that is flying around,” says Lynggaard. “But the guppies don’t leave the water. How often do they have contact with the air?”

The researchers also found DNA from chicken, fish, and other meat fed to the zoo animals. But they also began to find samples that didn’t match anything at the zoo. Lynggaard’s team found DNA from songbirds and crows, while Clare’s found duck, squirrel, and the endangered Eurasian hedgehog.

It’s not clear exactly what exactly is floating around in the air, carrying the DNA. The teams suggest it’s likely a combination of dead skin, fur, saliva, and feces (“my life has changed,” Lynggaard says of this realization). Figuring that out will help researchers understand how airborne DNA moves through the environment. 

But while eDNA can provide ample clues, it can’t tell a complete story. The genetic material degrades over time, so researchers will need to learn how to figure out when the “footprint” was left. Initial applications of this technique are likely to be most useful in finding either endangered or non-native species.

“The hedgehog was particularly exciting because it’s a critically endangered species in the UK,” says Clare. “The fact that we detect a rare and endangered species is kind of the ultimate goal of this.”

[Related: Citizen scientists are great invasive species detectives]

Pinpointing locations of endangered and non-native species can assist in conservation and early warning efforts, she adds. But the findings also suggest that living things are constantly leaving traces of themselves on the surrounding world. 

“Anyone that suffers pet allergies knows that animal dander in your home can stir up into the air,” says Barnes. “But both these studies are demonstrating that all sorts of plants, all sorts of animals, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians are potentially releasing eDNA that’s collectible.”

As the technology develops, it’s possible that it will let researchers track the movements of migratory animals, or even understand how common they are. “I do think differently about the environment, having worked with eDNA like this,” says Clare. “I know that … if I swim in a lake, I’m swimming through eDNA. There’s these new sources of information that we’re only beginning to learn how to use. I go back to thinking about all my fieldwork in tropical places, and all the animals that leave traces of themselves behind.”

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A group of enigmatic little skunks have a characteristic move: Seconds before they spray, the animals flip into a handstand, and spew their noxious chemical compounds while upside down. Known as spotted skunks, these animals have always been a bit of an enigma to researchers, and now a team of scientists has identified three new species that belong to this distinctive group of skunks. 

Scientists analyzed the DNA of spotted skunks collected from across North America, and found that several populations previously considered subspecies were in fact distinct enough to deserve a promotion. The findings have implications for efforts to conserve the rarer members of the group, the researchers reported on September 1 in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

“There are a lot of places where spotted skunks are not doing particularly well at all,” says Samantha Wisely, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who was not involved in the research. “They’re these incredibly cryptic and very shy species, and so we just don’t know a lot about them and that makes them really hard to conserve.” Now, she says, this new paper provides evidence that there are far more distinct species of this animal than we realized.  

Spotted skunks are smaller than the striped skunks that many people are more familiar with, and covered in white patches that are actually broken-up stripes, says Adam Ferguson, a collection manager of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago and coauthor of the paper. “They are everybody’s favorite; they are adorable,” he says. “I call them the acrobats of the skunk world because they’re really good climbers [and] they can do the handstand.”

Scientists have debated just how many spotted skunk species roam the continent for over a century, with estimates ranging from two to 14. In recent years, four species have been recognized: respectively, the western, eastern, southern, and pygmy spotted skunk. They differ in appearance primarily by size and the pattern of their white markings, Ferguson says. 

He and his colleagues thought that a more thorough look at the genetics of spotted skunks might reveal some additional members hiding within the four known species. Gathering enough skunks to analyze proved to be a challenge, though. This was partly because the agile skunks can be difficult to find and catch, and partly because of their protective stench. 

“Collecting and saving them from roadkill is not what everyone likes to do,” Ferguson acknowledges. “When we found them [dead] on the road, we actually had to bag them and then hang [the bags] out the trunk…because if you put it in your car, your car is going to smell like that for the rest of the time you own the car.”

Ultimately he and his team compiled 203 tissue samples from both recently collected skunks and older museum specimens, along with samples from several other kinds of skunks for the sake of comparison. 

The researchers next examined the skunks’ DNA. First, they looked at the nucleus, the part of the cell containing the majority of genetic material. They also analyzed the mitochondria, which are the energy-producing cellular structures that contain their own circular DNA. Analyzing both types of DNA allowed the researchers to build a more complete picture of the skunks’ evolutionary history, Ferguson says.

He and his colleagues found that there were actually seven different species of spotted skunks. They determined that the pygmy spotted skunk split off from the common ancestor of the rest of the group about five million years ago. 

[Related: The five smells Americans hate most (and how to get rid of them)]

Then, around 1.5 million years ago, this ancestor split into western and eastern populations, which each eventually gave rise to three different species. These splits were likely driven by the expansion and retreat of glaciers—whose icy bulk acted as a barrier to isolate spotted skunk populations from each other—during the Pleistocene Ice Age.

The western group became the Rocky Mountain and desert spotted skunks (both known in previous family trees as the western spotted skunk), as well as the southern spotted skunk. The eastern group splintered into the prairie and Allegheny spotted skunks (formerly both called the eastern spotted skunk), as well as the Yucatán spotted skunk. 

The prairie spotted skunk has declined significantly across the Great Plains in recent years. Recognizing this population as a full species could help it gain protections under the Endangered Species Act. “This is a much older, more distinct evolutionary lineage, which implies that it warrants conservation,” Ferguson says.

The findings may also shed light on a phenomena seen in some spotted skunk populations known as delayed implantation, which allows the animals to mate in fall and then wait to give birth until the spring. 

“They can hold onto a very, very early stage embryo and delay the implantation of it [in the uterus] to really delay pregnancy until it’s a much better time to actually have a baby and raise it,” Wisely says. Understanding how and why spotted skunks diverged into new species can “help us understand what are some of the evolutionary triggers to facilitate this…process.”

There may still be more spotted skunk species waiting to be identified, Ferguson says. In the future, he and his colleagues hope to get their hands on more skunks from the southwestern United States, Mexico’s Gulf Coast, and across Central America. He’s particularly interested in the tropical forests of the southern Yucatán Peninsula.

Skunks can be found across North America, Ferguson says, but “we still don’t know everything there is to know about them…it’s worth continuing to dig deeper in our own backyards as well as other places to figure those things out.”

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Ed Stoddard is a Johannesburg-based journalist with a focus on resource industries, wildlife, economics, and the environment in Africa. A Reuters correspondent for 24 years, he is now a regular contributor to the South African news site The Daily Maverick.

This story originally featured on Undark.

Three hours outside Johannesburg, the gravel road to John Hume’s home slices through grasslands tinged a parched amber hue as the winter dry season fades. The former hotel mogul owns the world’s largest privately held rhino population: 2,000 southern white rhinoceroses, roaming 21,000 acres of former crop and cattle lands. A 60-mile long electrified fence rings the property. Its two-fold role is to keep the pachyderms in and poachers out.

Hume has not lost a rhino to poachers in almost five years, thanks to formidable security. Over the past decade though, state-run parks have been overwhelmed by poachers, who can sell a single rhino horn for six-figure sums. As those wild populations decline, research suggests nearly half of South Africa’s estimated 12,300 white rhinos are now in private hands. With the trend of private breeding growing rapidly, some experts say this number may even have already surpassed 50 percent.

But the fate of Hume’s rhinos—and South Africa’s unusual game privatization experiment—hang in the balance. In December 2020, a government panel recommended phasing out intensive and captive rhino breeding in the country, as part of a broader set of policies for wildlife conservation. According to the panel and a subsequent government policy paper, captive breeding operations like the one owned by Hume are potentially harming the species’ future.

In an email to Undark, the panel’s chair, Pamela Yako, expressed two concerns about intensive breeding and management: “that this, firstly, compromises the genetics of the population and secondly compromises their ability to independently survive in the wild.”

While Yako and her colleagues acknowledge the role of private reserves in helping to build up rhino populations, they conclude it’s time to move the more intensively managed private populations back into wilder habitats.

The panel’s report has been accepted by the South African cabinet, signaling top-level political support. After a public comment period, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment will refine the policy, then draft a white paper to send to Parliament.

But the prospect of losing their herds has alarmed many private rhino owners and conservationists, who say the policy will make southern white rhinos more vulnerable to poaching. “We have rhino in well-protected zones,” says Pelham Jones, chairman of the Private Rhino Owners Association, or PROA. Now, he adds, “the government is recommending that these captive breeding operations, which have proven to be highly, highly successful, and are achieving the best breeding outcome one could hope for, are to be shut down.” The group is considering all options, including a legal challenge that would potentially ensnare the process in years of legal wrangling.

At stake here are questions about how best to preserve a threatened species. The politics are fraught as well, and charged by South Africa’s racial tensions: Proponents of the new policy point out that the country’s Black majority has often been excluded from the benefits of rebounding game populations. By PROA’s own estimates, there are between 150 and 180 private rhino owners in South Africa; nearly all of them are White.

None of them has an operation as large as Hume’s, whose herd may account for up to 13 percent of the global population of white rhinos. His ranch also appears to be a prime target of the new legislation. In her email, Yako expressed concerns about “a single operation that has a large number of rhino under intensive management and breeding”—seemingly a reference to Hume, although Eleanor Momberg, a spokesperson for the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, wrote in an email to Undark that Yako and other panelists were no longer available for further comment because their contracts had expired.

The new policy could eventually undermine the legal basis for Hume’s breeding project, leaving the herd in limbo. It’s unclear who would take over Hume’s herd—and how a South African state balancing intense fiscal pressures with massive social needs would pay for a mass rhino relocation.

Sitting in his modest home office, which is adorned with rhino pictures and carvings, Hume maintains he is adding to an endangered species’ numbers. “Surely that’s what we all want,” he tells Undark. “Show me the good grazing, and assure me that you can keep the bullets away, and I will show you my rhinos thriving.”

Africa is home to two of the five surviving rhinoceros species: the larger white rhino, a grass grazer, and the smaller black rhino, which browses on trees and bushes. In the late 19th century, European settlers killed thousands of the animals. Every southern white rhino today is descended from a single population in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. In the 1890s, the animals reached their low point, numbering just a few dozen.

From this bastion—now called the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park—the population rebounded. By the 1960s, flush with rhinos, a government organization called the Natal Parks Board began selling and donating animals to other African reserves, and to zoos around the world. In 1986, Natal Parks Board started selling to private operations, too. Five years later, the South African government passed the Game Theft Act, which allows people to own rhinos and other game on their property, provided it has been enclosed with fencing.

The law has critics. In a 2015 dissertation, scholar Dhoya Snijders described the act as “one of the largest and most unnoticed transfers of common goods to private landowners in the country’s history.”

Thanks to the new legislation, game ranchers began to rapidly accumulate rhinos to breed and trade for profit, to draw ecotourists, and to stage expensive hunts. Nowadays, most owners also slice off the animals’ horns and store them, in the event that a now 44-year-old global moratorium on the rhino horn trade is lifted. These owners argue that trading rhino horn may help regulate its illicit traffic and would provide substantial revenue to cover the large costs associated with managing and conservation of the species, said Jones. Comprised of keratin—the substance in human fingernails—rhino horn can grow back after it is trimmed, an operation that entails tranquilizing the animal. De-horning is also aimed at thwarting poachers by removing their ultimate target.

By 2010, there were 18,800 white rhinos in South Africa, according to estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, of which at least 5,500 were privately owned.

But as demand for rhino horn grew in newly affluent Asian economies such as Vietnam—where consumers prize its alleged medicinal properties—poaching surged. A record 1,215 rhinos were poached in South Africa in 2014.

Although numbers have dropped since then, poachers still take hundreds of animals per year. The activity has centered on Kruger National Park, South Africa’s flagship wildlife reserve. The park is vast—roughly the size of New Jersey—making it difficult for the cash-strapped government to police. And entrenched poverty in neighboring communities has pushed some people toward poaching.

Today, as state losses mount, poachers are increasingly targeting private reserves. Government data shows 15 percent of rhinos poached in 2019 were on private land. In the first six months of 2021, that spiked to 30 percent. Owners who can afford it invest heavily in security. Meanwhile, many small-scale rhino ranchers have sold out because of costs.

At least so far, the scale of Hume’s operation—and his deep pockets—have fended off poachers. At Hume’s “Ops Center,” 10 TV screens line one wall. Radars and thermal cameras monitor the property, covering the rhinos’ range and the public roads that cut past the ranch. The flat, grassy terrain is ideal for the motion-detecting radars, which cannot penetrate solid objects such trees or buildings. If an intruder gets over the electrified fence, concealed speakers blare warnings while a team rushes to intercept.

“We are always ready, and we can fly a chopper to the scene quickly if we need to,” says Brandon Jones, a helicopter pilot and Hume’s head of security, with a handgun holstered to his hip. The team’s arsenal includes assault rifles; the poachers are also heavily armed. Hume, who refers to the team as his “private army,” said security costs him $2 million per year.

The investment seems to be working. While poachers killed 32 of Hume’s rhinos between 2007 and 2017, he says he has not lost an animal since. More of his rhinos have been killed by lighting strikes.

According to Hume, the operation has accumulated nearly 9 tons of rhino horn, worth a nine-figure sum on the black market. But, he said, his passion for rhinos was driven by the species’ plight in the cross-hairs of poachers, not potential profits. “I always liked breeding,” he says. “I became aware in the early ‘90s of the slaughter of rhino elsewhere in Africa. They were being slaughtered to extinction.” Around that time, he purchased his first 10 animals.

Today, driving around the property, it’s possible to see clumps of rhinos amid the windswept landscape of long wild grass, punctuated by the occasional tree. Other times, there are no signs of the big critters at all, beyond their telltale scat in the soil.

Inside this gated fortress, the number of rhinos on Hume’s ranch has swelled: Between 2008, when he started breeding at his current ranch, and September 2021, Hume’s rhinos had given birth to some 1,690 calves. But whether that growth is an unmitigated good for rhino conservation, or a liability for the future of the species, remains contested.

Yako and other critics of captive breeding have raised concerns that the closely managed life on the ranch could give rise to domestication, a fate that historically has not occurred in any large African mammal, or render the rhino unsuitable for rewilding.

Hume’s rhinos are divided into breeding areas surrounded by electric fencing averaging 1,200 acres. The animals roam, graze, and mate freely in their allotted spaces. But they are intensely monitored, and each enclosure or camp has a ranger who does a daily headcount, often on horseback. Still, Michelle Otto, Hume’s resident and full-time veterinarian, said the animals are far from domesticated. “We are only on our second generation now,” she said, as she prepared medicine for an old cow rhino with hip problems. “I’ve been chased into a tree by a white rhino here because I went in on foot, and one didn’t take a liking to me, and she stormed me.”

Otto said the animals can be habituated to certain vehicles—but, she noted, even wild Kruger rhinos are now accustomed to cars. The ranch does supplemental feeding, mostly in the dry winter months, which Otto said was at most 40 percent of the rhinos’ daily intake. “The rest they take off the veld,” she said.

Some of Hume’s rhinos have already been successfully reintroduced into the wild. Hume sold his last 16 black rhinos—famed for their ornery temperament—to the small kingdom of Eswatini, which borders South Africa. “This group of rhinos has been suitable for introduction, save for one young male which was hand-raised,” wrote Mick Reilly, conservation and security executive with Eswatini’s parks, in an email.

“Hume’s white rhinos as a whole would be suitable for re-introduction into the wild,” added Reilly, who has visited the ranch.

Yako and others have also expressed concerns about the genetic diversity of rhinos in captive breeding populations. Even in the wild, rhino genetics pose serious issues: A century ago, when population numbers were so low, the bottleneck reduced the genetic variability of the species. According to Petra Kretzschmar, a biologist and rhino expert at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany, this state of affairs made the species vulnerable to disease and fertility problems.

Compounding the issue, rhinos tend to mate with their relatives. “Inbreeding is unfortunately a big threat to the white rhino population,” Kretzschmar wrote in an email. “It is therefore very important to prevent rhinos from inbreeding.”

In a 2020 study of rhino breeding patterns on a large private ranch in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province, Kretzschmar and several colleagues found that white rhinos are not choosy about mating with kin. The study, published in the journal Evolutionary Applications, found “no sign of inbreeding avoidance: Females tended to mate more frequently with closely related males.”

The researchers recommended rotating breeding bulls every six years—the time it takes a female to reach sexual maturity—between reserves.

Kretzschmar, who has visited Hume’s ranch, says policies there do effectively address the issue. Otto keeps detailed records in a stud book to prevent inbreeding. Compared to the private reserve where her study was conducted, Kretzschmar says in a phone interview, Otto “has the benefit that the rhinos can be monitored much better,” as they are put into a smaller spaces that can be more readily observed.

“So her records are much more accurate, which results in the fact that she knows exactly who has fathered whom and can immediately move an animal to a different camp to prevent inbreeding,” says Kretzschmar.

In the paper, Kretzschmar—who also does paid consulting for a private game ranch—and her co-authors said South Africa’s private reserves may be the last refuge for the species.

Still, Hume’s approach has critics.

“In John Hume’s case, there is control over the breeding,” says Dave Balfour, an ecologist and member of the IUCN African Rhino Specialist Group who contributed to the government report arguing for reimagining rhino conservation in the region. He says these breeding strategies “are not anywhere near the gold standard.”

“A natural rhino population has 50/50 male/female” Balfour says, adding that Hume’s project had somewhere between 50 cows to three or four bulls. “That is not a natural mating selection system.” (In a WhatsApp message, Otto defended the ranch’s arrangement. “We are a breeding operation, therefore we are skewed towards having higher female densities in a set location than in the wild,” she wrote, adding that females are permitted to choose among two or three bulls.)

Other critics have concerns about the stockpiling of rhino horn, detecting a profit motive beneath a facade of conservation. “Are you trying to mask an economic incentive behind a conservation philosophy?” asks Neil Greenwood, the Southern African director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an NGO. “I don’t think that the captive breeding is necessarily the most effective way to protect those animals.”

At issue are larger questions about the future of wildlife in South Africa, where populations of large, charismatic animals have rebounded. Many are in private hands: Today, according to the government report, there are 9,000 private game ranches in South Africa, comprising around 50 million acres.

The growth of private game reserves has raised some concerns about equity. South Africa is the most unequal society in the world, according to the World Bank, and land ownership patterns remain skewed in favor of the White minority.

According to the government policy paper, many communities with historical ties to wildlife lands have been walled out of the present conservation arrangement. “The forceful removal of people from the land led to the current South African ‘Wildlife Model,’ the report says, “where the largest percentage of wildlife land is owned by the White minority and by the state, with few wildlife resources on community lands.”

Critics note that these conservation disputes are unfolding amid persistent government failures to enact land reforms. “The disparities in ownership in the wildlife industry somewhat reflects what we see in other sub-sectors of agriculture, where participation of Black farmers remains marginal,” says Wandile Sihlobo, the chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa and author of a recent book on land reform in the country.

As part of its vision, the government panel calls for the removal of fences separating many conservation areas. The report envisions “an authentic wild sense of place” with “larger contiguous areas containing vibrant self-sustaining populations” of elephants, buffalos, lions, leopards, rhinos, and other species.

That’s far from the present reality: In South Africa all megafauna except leopards are contained in fenced areas of some kind. And the government panel’s broader vision of wildness has elicited some skepticism from conservationists—and private rhino owners. In a written submission raising objections to the new policy, PROA argues that “human beings in South Africa and across the world simply do not have the luxury of a utopian concept of wild animals roaming across millions of hectares of unfenced, uninhabited, and human-free plains.”

In an email, Momberg wrote that Barbara Creecy, minister of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, preferred not to comment, explaining that officials are still reviewing public responses to the proposal.

For now, Hume’s rhino breeding operation is continuing to grow. On a recent morning, Otto and other Hume employees prepared to dehorn 19 bulls—a brisk, clinical undertaking.

While the rhinos may live carefully managed lives on a ranch, they remain dangerous. Aiming a rifle-like tranquillizer gun out the window of her Toyota Landcruiser, Otto shot a dart into each rhino, generally from around 50 yards. As the rhino wobbled, a member of the up to 15-person crew pulled a blindfold over its eyes, while several men ran in to keep the animal upright. Once the rhino was lying on its chest, one of the ranch’s managers used a hand-held electric saw to do the trimming.

“We are cutting above the growth plate,” Otto said as the saw sliced through the horn of a 2-ton bull. “The section they are trimming is excess horn that contains no blood vessels or nerves.”

When the trimming was complete, Otto injected the rhino with an antidote to the tranquilizer.

“You don’t want to be next to him when he wakes up,” she cautioned. The situation was unnatural, but a rhino is a rhino.

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When conservationist and White Lion Foundation director Brett Barlow took in a blind black rhinoceros that had been found wandering through the South African bush in 2019, he did so knowing that the animal would need heavy protection. Black rhinos are a heavily poached species due to their horns, which can be sold for more than $65,000 per kilogram as a supposed medicinal ingredient or carving material on black markets. What’s more, the animal’s blindness rendered him unable to defend himself in the harsh, dry savanna. So Barlow had the rhino, now known as Munu, move into the South African eco-lodge where he lived, then went looking for a high-tech security system to protect the new resident.

Barlow, collaborated with FLIR Systems, a producer of thermal-camera technology, based in Wilsonville, Oregon, to set up a security system in the area around Munu’s enclosure to help protect him from poachers. Black rhinos have faced staggering losses in South Africa: The population fell from about 65,000 adults in the 1970s to fewer than 6,000 in 2018. Munu’s subspecies, the south-western black rhino, is currently classified as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature—and in general his species is considered critically endangered. In the last decade, however, conservation efforts have ramped up with relocation of black rhino communities to new areas to encourage their productivity and reproduction and increased law enforcement around the animals.

So far, 2020 is looking up for black rhinos in South Africa, with poaching activity logging lower than usual due to a national COVID-19 lockdown. But Barlow, who’s been working with black rhinos for more than 30 years, believes the economic fallout of the pandemic may cause an increase in poaching activity later when people need to find new means to support their families. Munu’s case is particularly dangerous, too, as he faces threats from more than just poachers—larger white rhinos will sometimes approach his pen, and when they do, security personnel need to be able to step in to prevent harm. The FLIR thermal cameras, Barlow says, could be an invaluable tool for protecting Munu and the other animals in his care.

“We have to do everything in our power to look after him,” he says. “That’s why we’ve always said that FLIR is, in essence, his eyes.”

Because most poachers go out at night, park rangers and wildlife keepers often have difficulty identifying them. The FLIR cameras used in and around Munu’s boma, or pen, consist of a combination of thermal, vision, and thermal-vision hybrid units that can provide a complete picture of the animal in pitch darkness or full daylight. They’re also a good stand-in for CCTV camera feeds during rainy or misty weather conditions.

“Our eyes see a fairly narrow band of wavelengths of energy on the electromagnetic spectrum, and the thermal cameras see a longer wavelength that is essentially heat,” says Shawn Jepson, a global solutions architect and program manager at FLIR Systems. “What you gain from that is it doesn’t matter what the light levels are, if you have artificial lighting, if there’s inclement weather—the camera can still create an image.”

In total, there are 24 solar-powered cameras set up around Munu’s boma. That includes a 360-degree, 2.1 megapixel camera unit placed inside the enclosure itself and six optical cameras with 1080p video resolution that will eventually record a livestream for the public. FLIR also built a special camera unit that combines thermal sensors and optical lenses and can trigger an alarm if someone is found approaching the enclosure. The company is also testing six small thermal cameras on the property that use an algorithm to distinguish human and vehicle motion from other types of movement in video clips.

Overall, the new security system keeps Munu safe with fewer armed security guards. Other conservationists in Barlow’s area may need to have 30 to 40 security guards on staff to make sure that the animals are constantly protected. But Barlow employs far fewer guards, thanks to the thermal tools at his disposal, and still believes Munu and the other animals are just as well protected—if not better.

The use of thermal camera networks to deter poachers isn’t necessarily new. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has been testing and deploying the technology with international conservation projects since 2015. Last year, the organization partnered with the Kenyan government to install FLIR cameras in 11 national parks, encompassing 80 percent of the country’s black rhino population, says Colby Loucks, head of the WWF’s Wildlife Crime Technology Project. The extra layer of security has helped drive down poaching rates: This year, Loucks says no rhinos have been hunted by humans in Kenya.

With the rhino-conservation initiative in east Africa, the thermal technology assists rangers in three ways. The first is a set of thermal binoculars, which rangers can bring with them on patrols to scan for people approaching animals in the parks. Thermal cameras can also be attached to vehicles, so that as rangers go out on their patrols, they’re able to easily identify and pursue poachers. And the final way is similar to how the cameras are used in and around Munu’s boma in South Africa.

The cameras could also help curb the loss of human life. Between 2012 and 2018, 269 rangers in African countries have been killed on the job, mostly by poachers, including 12 in the Democratic Republic of Congo this past April. “What became apparent quite quickly is that this technology also protects rangers,” Loucks says. The technology allows park staff to see where the poachers are and what weapons they’re carrying and decide how to respond safely and strategically.

More surprisingly, the technology can protect the lives of poachers as well by preventing them from engaging in illegal exploits, Loucks says. Between 2010 and 2015, an estimated 150 to 200 poachers were arrested or killed in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Word gets around when rangers have this technology, and Loucks and Barlow believe that when poachers know that the rhinos in an area are heavily protected, they stay away.

Thermal camera technology has other conservation purposes, too. In North America, FLIR’s gadgets are helping to count black-footed ferrets, an endangered, nocturnal species that’s been notoriously difficult to quantify. The cameras can also be used to document the behavior of nocturnal carnivores without disturbing them with beams of light.

In the midst of a global pandemic that’s made conservation efforts far more difficult, thermal camera technology has helped protect animals who may not have been able to survive on their own. This, Barlow says, is the most important piece of his mission.

“The only way to save a species,” he says ,”is to begin by saving individuals like Munu.”

Correction: While WWF did start working with thermal cameras in Kenyan national parks in 2015, they only started testing the FLIR’s technology more widely last year. The story has been updated to reflect that.

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This story originally featured on Field & Stream.

It’s not uncommon to find little critters taking shelter and looking for food in your garage, but most people find unwanted pests like rats and mice. A man in Colorado, however, stumbled upon a particularly rare animal on Monday, November 8, in his home’s garage. He encountered a black-footed ferret and coaxed it into a box before calling Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW).

The black-footed ferret is often considered the rarest mammal in North America and according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), is “one of the most endangered mammals in the United States.” In fact, black-footed ferrets were declared extinct in 1979 before a remnant population was discovered in 1981 in northwest Wyoming. That remnant population was used to form the “seed stock” for a captive-breeding recovery program that has spanned decades and recently, even involved a genetic cloning effort.

The ferret found in a man’s garage in Colorado was part of a CPW reintroduction program in tandem with the USFWS’s greater black-footed ferret recovery initiative. The ferret was found in Pueblo West, which is near a tract of land called Walker Ranch, where more than 120 black-footed ferrets have been released since 2013. Reintroduction efforts were put on hold in 2020 due to COVID-19 but were recently restarted, and two weeks ago, CPW released nine ferrets near a 1,600-acre prairie dog colony. Before being released, the black-footed ferrets have a passive integrated transponder microchip inserted between their shoulders. A scanning device showed the garage-invading ferret was one of the nine ferrets most recently released on Walker Ranch.

“We don’t know exactly why this black-footed ferret left the colony,” said Ed Schmal, CPW conservation biologist, in a press release. “We put them into prairie dog burrows, but they may not stay. Sometimes they scramble around the colony to find the right home. This one might have gotten pushed out by other ferrets, and it went looking for a new home. We really don’t know.”

The ferret did not appear to have any signs of injury and was again released back into the wild. Through its recovery effort, CPW has never received any similar reports of a black-footed ferret entering a garage or similar human-made structure.

“This is extremely rare,” Schmal said. “Black-footed ferrets are nocturnal and extremely shy. For some reason, this one left the colony and was seeking shelter. We’re just glad it appeared healthy, not starving or sick, and we were able to capture it and return it to the colony.”

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Last year, fish consumption reached a global annual average of 37.5 pounds per person. Meanwhile, cod and bluefin-tuna populations have collapsed, and animals ranging from whales to turtles have been added to the Endangered Species Act. Our voracious appetite isn’t the only problem. Fishermen catch a lot of things unintentionally, in what Tim Werner, director of the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Engineering program, calls the “collateral damage” of commercial fishing: bycatch.

Compared with the more intractable problem of overfishing, technological solutions to bycatch abound.Bycatch ensnares coral, sponges, starfish, sharks, whales, turtles and even birds. It is “one of the more immediate threats that marine diversity faces,” Werner says. It has led to the assumed extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin, has nearly wiped out the Gulf of California’s vaquita porpoise (fewer than 200 remain), and threatens the survival of the North American right whale (400 remain) and the short-tailed albatross. A United Nations report estimates bycatch at 7.5 million tons a year, or 5 percent of the total commercial-fishing haul. Because most available data is self-reported, Werner says that the U.N.’s numbers “woefully underestimate” the problem. A more representative statistic, he says, comes from Gulf of Mexico shrimp fisheries, some of which dredge up to five pounds of bycatch for every pound of shrimp.

The good news is that compared with the more intractable problem of overfishing, technological solutions to reduce bycatch abound. Shrimp companies, for example, have begun using “turtle-excluding devices,” metal grates at the front of a trawl net that let the shrimp in and keep the turtles out. Fishermen who use long subsurface “gillnets” have begun to deter porpoises by equipping these nets with battery-powered acoustic “pingers.” In the best cases, pingers have reduced casualties from 25 porpoises per net to one. At Florida Atlantic University, associate professor Stephen Kajiura is trying to protect sharks by affixing rare-earth elements to the lines that fishermen use to catch tuna. The metals react with seawater to create an electromagnetic field that repels sharks (as well as skates and rays).

Turtle Filter

The most effective solutions will be those that are cheap and easy to implement. Jeffry Fasick, an assistant professor at Kean University, is studying the vision of the North Atlantic right whale in an effort to develop brightly colored ropes that the animals can see and avoid. The quintessential cheap-and-easy fix, however, may be the “weak hook,” thinner hooks that bend under the weight of animals (bluefins, sharks, whales) larger than the yellowfin tuna they’re designed to catch. In a field test, NOAA found that weak hooks reduced bycatch of endangered bluefin tuna by 56 percent—results significant enough that the agency may soon mandate weak hooks in bluefin-tuna territory.

Click here to see more ways to save our seas.

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It’s a good day for whales. This afternoon, NOAA Fisheries took nine of 14 populations of humpback whales off the list of species protected by the Endangered Species Act. It’s a place that humpback whales have occupied since the Endangered Species Act was signed in 1973.

“Today’s news is a true ecological success story,” said Eileen Sobeck, assistant NOAA administrator for fisheries. “Whales, including the humpback, serve an important role in our marine environment. Separately managing humpback whale populations that are largely independent of each other allows us to tailor conservation approaches for each population.”

Four populations are still considered “endangered” and one is considered “threatened.” All five of these populations continue to enjoy the protections of the Endangered Species Act. For some of these five, they are still experiencing threats like fishing gear entanglements, energy exploration, disease, whaling, and vessel collisions.

The delisting of the nine populations won’t mean major changes for humpbacks. The Marine Mammal Protection Act still applies to all humpback whale populations, and the whales will continue to be protected from hunting and other activities. New regulations will also limit the distance at which vessels can approach humpback whales in Alaska and Hawaii, where whales are frequently spotted. But federal agencies will no longer be required to consult with the NOAA every time they engage in an activity that might affect non-endangered humpback whale populations.

The delisting of the humpback whale populations follows news over the weekend from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that reclassified the giant panda populations as “vulnerable” instead of “endangered”. Gorillas, on the other hand, went the other way, and are now listed as “critically endangered”.

Humpback Whale Populations

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Thomas Hildebrandt first saw the inside of an elephant in 1990. With the mammoth carcass laid across his lab bench at the ­Leibniz Institute in Berlin, where the German veterinary student was working that summer, he pondered his thesis on using human-fertility techniques to save endangered wildlife. Hildebrandt, then 27, was taken aback by the mammal’s bizarre reproductive tract. The passage was 10 feet long and concealed by a folded vaginal opening as narrow as a sunflower seed. The task of artificially inseminating an elephant, he learned in that moment, would mean getting shoulder-deep in many a cavernous nether region. “I’ve always loved to solve problems other people cannot,” recalls Hildebrandt, now 54, of his 26-year career as an animal-­fertility expert and pioneer of endangered-species insemination. The procedures he’s developed take hours and demand a steady hand. Today, as the lead reproduction specialist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, he has more practice than anyone. He’s helped conceive more than 50 elephant calves, performed CPR on rhinos sedated for surgery by jumping on rib cages, and patented a slew of techniques and devices for making babies in these behemoths. This year, he’ll attempt his greatest feat yet: the first ever successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) of a rhino. Despite superficial similarities to its trunked cousins, the beast’s anatomy poses a new, high-stakes biological puzzle. If he can crack it, however, Hildebrandt could pull the northern white back from the brink. Colonial-era hunting, poaching, and habitat loss have put all rhino species at risk. Though people have used the creature’s horn in ­traditional medicine for thousands of years, a recent surge in demand in Asia sent populations crashing. South Africa lost 13 individuals out of some 15,000 to poaching in 2007; in 2014, the number hit 1,215. Three of the world’s five rhino species are now critically endangered, a designation marking them as at an extremely high risk of extinction. But the northern white rhino occupies a uniquely precarious position.

Only two—both females incapable of carrying calves— remain at the Ol ­Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya. Najin, age 28, has Achilles tendons that could rupture under the weight of a pregnancy. Fatu is younger but barren, thanks to a uterine infection. The world’s last male, Sudan, died in March at the age of 45.

But the beloved bull could still sire a calf. Sperm from Sudan (and four other males) is on ice, and Hildebrandt hopes to harvest Fatu and Najin’s eggs. The vet and his international partners will fertilize the ova in an Italian lab, and return the embryo to Ol Pejeta, where the kid-carrying will fall to a family friend.

With their robust population of 20,000 living individuals, Hildebrandt believes that the southern white rhino—technically the same species as its endangered northern cousin but so distinct from years of separation that many experts argue otherwise— can stand to spare a few females to serve as surrogates.

Steady Hands

The notion to make test-tube offspring of at-risk wildlife came to Hilde­brandt through serendipity. While studying to become a livestock vet in the late ’80s, he visited his future wife. She was working as a birthing assistant at Charité Hospital in East Berlin, which just so happened to produce the first human IVF birth in the region. The facility inspired him to redirect his focus and tackle a thesis on using the technique to revive endangered species. “At the time, no one—not even the so-called elephant experts—knew how to use artificial insemination to help these ­animals reproduce,” Hildebrandt recalls.

That’s because decades of successes in ­human IVF—seeding an egg in a laboratory before implanting it in a mother or surrogate—don’t directly apply to other animals. Since its introduction in 1978, the U.S. alone has seen some 1 million babies born with the help of the method. But, somewhat unsurprisingly, there are nearly as many variations on the mechanics of reproduction as there are species. Pandas, for instance, can conceive only a few days out of each year. Whiptail lizards make embryos without male intervention. Fruit flies have enormous sperm (the insect is about ⅛ inch; its swimmers, more than 2 inches).

There are even disparities among close ­relatives, like species of rhino, so ­Hildebrandt must develop or refine unique tools and procedures for each new mammalian patient. Extracting eggs is the most delicate part of the endeavor. Though he’s already patented a handheld needle capable of reaching the ­ovaries through the rectum of the black rhino, collecting whites’ eggs demands a new twist on the tool. The custom probe still slips through the rectum but must span 6 feet long to allow the vet to snake it just past a major blood vessel that, if punctured, would cause the female to bleed out. Such risk ­demands extreme caution from the team; after all, there are only two northern white rhinos remaining.

“When it comes to using new techniques on ­endangered species, we don’t have the luxury of trial and error,” ­Hildebrandt says. “Precision is essential.” That’s why he has been using southern whites as guinea pigs for the harvesting procedure. He and his team of nine have spent two years refining the operation. They’ve successfully harvested eggs from 14 southern white females in European zoos, and none has experienced health issues as a result.

Hildebrandt says he might move on to making a northern white embryo by the end of the year. Then, 16 to 18 months later, the world’s first test-tube rhino calf could arrive.

Even if Hildebrandt succeeds in creating multiple calves, they could fail to propagate into a viable population. Two living rhinos and five deceased sperm donors don’t provide the gene pool with a lot of diversity (especially since Najin is Sudan’s daughter, and Fatu his granddaughter). Varied genes keep unfortunate mutations from quickly spreading and weakening the population. Contemporaneous work by a team at the San Diego Zoo could help with that problem. The facility holds frozen adult cells from 12 northern whites. Stem-cell biologists are working to reprogram them into sperm and eggs. But while Hildebrandt is hopeful that a future collaboration could bolster his efforts, for now the groups are working independently.

All these factors and more make saving the species “tenuous,” concedes Ol Pejeta CEO Richard Vigne. And whether future generations could safely return to their native Central African habitat is not his immediate priority. “We’re focused on getting more northern whites on the ground,” he says. He believes the team’s efforts support all species of rhino by showing their plight to the world, and could even spark similar efforts for other imperiled animals.

Hildebrandt himself is confident that a baby rhino will soon be stumbling around Ol Pejeta, and has no qualms about how much scientists must meddle to make it happen. “We must save this magnificent creature, since barbaric human actions caused its extinction,” he says. But he warns that efforts will collapse without funding. For now, the various entities working to save the subspecies are financing their own pieces of the puzzle, and costs are considerable. Establishing a wild population of northern whites could take more than $6 million, and Hilde­brandt’s department has less than $25,000 per year allocated to the project.

But Hildebrandt fiercely defends the potential ­expense. “I think about what people spend on cultural treasures—say, a da Vinci painting—and how many ­species that money could save,” he says. “Losing species means losing the books of evolution before we have the chance to read them.”

Millie Kerr is a journalist, wildlife conservationist, and former lawyer.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science.

This text has been updated to clarify the work of the San Diego Zoo.

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The pangolin may look like a giant artichoke (or tiny dragon) that’s humbly asking you for a favor, but its cuteness and strangeness belie its perilous situation: The pangolin is one of the most heavily trafficked mammals in the world. But international cooperation may change that, as all eight species of pangolins have been uplifted to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora–CITES for short.

Armored but endangered

The pangolin had previously been listed under Appendix II, which allowed for limited trade. But with booming demand for the animals’ scales, which have long been used in Chinese medicine, the illegal trade has continued to thrive. Poachers exploited this Appendix II loophole, struggling to keep up with increasing demand that drove the price of scales up 250 percent over the last five years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But today, at the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Johannesburg, South Africa, all four Asian pangolin species were protected before lunch, Mary Dixon, senior vice president of communications for the Wildlife Conservation Society, tells Popular Science. Then, after lunch, the convention reconvened to move all four African species up as well. “Global leaders were electrified,” says Dixon.

Nope, that’s not a pine cone

Madhu Rao, senior advisor to the Wildlife Conservation Society of Asia, is pleased, too. “There is a huge coalition of NGOs and governments,” she said. “There’s a large momentum of support.” She adds that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service co-sponsored all the proposals at the conference, helping the measures pass.

And while this is a positive move for the endangered animal, greater legal protection does not necessarily put a stop to poaching. Just look to the continued trade in elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns. But Rao says this status change is just a first step that will empower and educate law enforcement officials to take action to stop the illegal trade. “What needs to happen is a strengthening of national laws for protection of these species,” she says. The pangolin’s uplifting to Appendix I will allow this to happen.

So even though illegal trade may still continue after this status change, Rao points out that poachers will no longer be able to exploit the Appendix II loopholes that allowed them to slip by. “With Appendix I, there can be no legal trade,” she says. “All trade is prohibited.”

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On the most westerly point of Australia lies Shark Bay, a remote island where sienna-streaked cliffs meet the sea and ancient, bulbous stromatolites speckle the coastline. Not only is this ecological wonderland a UNESCO world heritage site, but it also turns out to be one of the last habitats for the elusive Gould’s mouse—an Australian rodent thought to have gone extinct more than 150 years ago.  

But according to a study published this month in PNAS, the mouse has been around this whole time, living it up on several islands in Western Australia. The study, which was conducted by researchers at the Australian National University, used 184-year-old museum specimens to sequence the genomes of eight extinct Australian rodent species and then looked at 42 of their living relatives. 

“We compared the DNA of Gould’s mouse, thought to be extinct, to all living species of native rodents. What we found was that it was genetically indistinguishable from another living species, the Shark Bay mouse,” said Emily Roycroft, lead author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University. 

“Originally, we thought the Gould’s mouse only lived in New South Wales and Victoria, but after the results of our study, it’s clear that it once roamed across most of the Australian mainland.” 

Mapping out mice genomes

Australia has the highest recorded rate of mammalian extinction in the world. 

Since European colonization began in 1788, 34 land-roving mammal species have disappeared from the landscape. Of those, rodents have been disproportionately affected—they’ve comprised 41 percent of mammal extinctions since settlers arrived. 

“When we started the study, we set out to examine the relationships between extinct Australian rodents and living species, to determine the level of genetic diversity present before they became extinct,” Roycroft said. 

To do this, the evolutionary biologists extracted DNA from 87 museum specimens and mapped out the gnawing mammalians’ genomes. Understanding the genetic diversity of a population could help ecologists determine to what extent the arrival of Europeans contributed to their extinction, said Roycroft. 

One hypothesis for the mass disappearance of Australian rodents is they were already experiencing a decline due to loss of genetic diversity. Ecologists observed this when sequencing the genomes of two other Aussie animals: the endangered Tasmanian devil, which is now extinct on mainland Australia, and the fully-extinct Thylacine, a larger carnivorous marsupial also called the Tasmanian wolf or Tasmanian tiger. 

[Related: The endangered species list is full of ghosts]

Prior to colonization, these two species were experiencing a rapid reduction in genetic diversity, which indicates their numbers were already declining, leaving them more vulnerable to the threat of invaders. In other words, Europeans didn’t cause their extinction, only accelerated it. 

However the study found this was not the case for rodent extinction. In fact, there was no evidence for reduced genetic diversity in the extinct species prior to the late 18th century, which indicates that their populations were large and thriving at the time. Their rapid decline following the arrival of Europeans suggests genetic diversity doesn’t necessarily protect species from rapid, catastrophic extinction. 

“This shows how severe the impacts of European colonization have been, including introduced predators and land clearing, resulting in species that were relatively common becoming extinct in less than 200 years,” Roycroft said. 

Rodents’ role in the Australian ecosystem 

The rapid disappearance of Australia’s furry critters doesn’t just mean less scampers and squeaks—it could also have a devastating impact on almost all of the country’s ecosystems. Their presence is found in ecological niches ranging from arid deserts to the moist corners of the coastline. 

“Native rodents are important ecosystem engineers and play an integral role in Australian environments as consumers of plants, fungi, and invertebrates, and as a prey source for other native species,” Roycroft said. “The ongoing loss of native rodents from the Australian landscape has the potential to lead to broader ecosystem collapse.” 

[Related: Humans have become the biggest selection force in evolution]

Roycroft believes understanding the genome of extinct species can help inform conservation efforts for surviving species. 

“Our study shows just how much we can learn about species we’ve otherwise lost to extinction using data from museum specimens,” she said. “If we can generate this type of data from across all of Australia’s native species, not just rodents, we can learn more about the broader pattern and pace of extinctions.” 

Although it’s unlikely, future genome sequencing projects may uncover other living species once thought to have vanished from the face of the planet. But for now, we at least know the Gould’s mouse is still scuttling around the already-protected Shark Bay.

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Lurking in the waters off the coasts of East Africa and Indonesia is the coelacanth—an ancient species of fish that can reach up to 6.5 feet in length. They reside in the ocean’s “twilight zone,” the dimly lit depths 500 to 800 feet below the surface. Little is known about these slow-moving giants. In fact, scientists previously thought they went extinct about 65 million years ago along with the dinosaurs. It wasn’t until the first live specimen was caught in 1938 that scientists realized the marine mammoths were swimming in the deep today.

Scientists have observed very few coelacanths partially due to their mysterious behavior—they spend most of the day clustered together in volcanic caves. The creatures are classified as critically endangered, which means fishing them is prohibited, so very few ever make it up to the surface. However, a study published this month in Current Biology has begun to unravel some of these scaly critters’ secrets. 

The latest study, which was unfunded, found coelacanths live five times longer than once predicted. Prior to this discovery, marine ecologists believed the behemoths lived to the age of 20, which would have classified them as one of the fastest-growing aquatic species. Now, ecologists believe they could reach the ripe old age of 100, a relatively rare feat.

To scientists who know the bizarre creatures, a long lifespan actually isn’t a huge surprise. Characteristics like a slow metabolism, low oxygen extraction capacity, producing small batches of eggs, and ovoviviparity, or when a mother carries eggs within their body until they are ready to hatch all hint at a slow-growing, long-lasting life.

[Related: Animal Crossing’s most elusive fish has a bizarre real-life backstory.]

“That extremely fast growth rate once believed was extremely strange compared to other characteristics [of coelacanths],” Bruno Ernande, a marine ecologist at the French Marine Institute and co-author of the study says. “It was not fitting the picture. So this is why we decided to reinvestigate the age range of coelacanths.”  

Uncovering secret growth rings 

To determine the age of a fish, scientists count growth rings on their scales, much like tallying the rings of a tree trunk. Each ring corresponds to one year of life. 

Past studies observed these growth rings with reflected light, like that found in a flashlight. However, Ernande and his colleagues utilized a more modern technology called polarized light which increases the contrast between the rings. 

In total, the researchers examined 27 preserved specimens across varying ages and sex. The youngest were embryos and the oldest was 84-years-old.

“What we found when we used this different technique is that there were nearly imperceptible rings that originally went unnoticed,” Ernande says. For each bigger, thicker ring, he and his team found five faint ones. “So this is basically how we came to the conclusion that the age of coelacanths was underestimated by a factor of five.” 

Thus, coelacanths may be able to live to the ripe old age of 100, and they don’t reach sexual maturity until their forties to sixties. And the animals don’t just live long lives—the aquatic giants have a gestation period of 5 years, which is possibly the longest of any marine fish and a decent chunk longer than most mammals. 

[Related: ‘Living Fossil’ Fish Has Lungs.]

Ernande says his team is uncertain why every coelacanth specimens deposit bold bands every fifth year. They know it’s not due to environmental factors since the ribbons weren’t uniform across species, but it may have something to do with the five-year cycles of reproduction. However, this is entirely speculative, he says.  

Why age isn’t just a number 

Fishing, channel dredging, submarine blasting, and deep-water port construction, all threaten coelacanths, classifying the creatures as endangered and threatening their 360-million-year run on the planet.  

Plus, species with a slow reproductive rate, such as coelacanths and the great ape, are particularly vulnerable to environmental or man-made changes. While some fish can carry over a million eggs per gestation, Ernande says, coelacanths only carry around 20 on top of being slow to mature and gestate.

“Any accidental or human-caused death takes a very long-time to replace,” Ernande says. 

Understanding the true life span of these living fossils is essential for assessing the demography of the species, which, in turn, can inform conservation policy. 

“There’s a lot more to be discovered about this species,” Ernande says. 

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Pygmy blue whales are some of the largest animals on Earth. Rippling their 80-foot-long bodies through the deep ocean, they are only 20 feet shorter than their relative the Antarctic blue whale. They’re also the loudest creature on the planet—their low-frequency bellows can outroar jet engines. 

Yet, despite being the heftiest and noisiest being on the planet, blue whales are difficult to spot, due partly to their reclusive nature, but mostly to the detrimental effects of human activity.

Commercial whaling in the twentieth century brought these gentle giants to the precipice of extinction. Researchers estimate that less than one percent of the global population of blue whales, including Antarctic and pygmy, survived worldwide, and less than 0.15 percent in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Shockingly, researchers at the University of New South Wales have detected a new population of pygmy blue whales swimming around in the Indian ocean. The study, published this month in Nature, analyzed almost 20 years of audio recordings from underwater bomb detectors to distinguish and locate the pod. Previously, scientists believed only five populations of blue whales inhabited these waters: one Antarctic and four pygmy.  

Tuning in via deep sea microphones

Little is known about why whales sing. So far, it appears only males belt out a warble. Therefore, researchers hypothesize singing is a way for them to attract a mate and produce offspring. Regardless of the purpose of their soulful howls, whale songs are a cost-effective way to study cetaceans. 

“Acoustics are the easiest way to study whale populations because visual observations are super costly,” Emannuelle Leroy, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales and lead author of the study says. To see a whale, you need a ship, she says. But to hear a tune, you only need to listen.

Leroy and her team obtained the deep sea audiotapes from the International Data Centre of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The organization, which was established in 1997, places undersea microphones in offshore waters to monitor for nuclear testing. 

[Related: Sperm whales have a surprisingly deep—and useful—culture.]

These hydrophones are not only sensitive enough to pick up exploding bombs, but also the intricacies of ocean life like seismic activity and whale sounds, which are made accessible to scientists. 

The particular hydrophones studied by Leroy and her colleagues were placed at six different locations in the Indian Ocean in 2001. She ran the 20 years of recordings through an automatic detector to pick up each instance of the suspected population’s chorus, coined by the team as the “Chagos song”. 

Each whale species, from the humpback to the ultra-rare Omura, has a signature sound. For example, humpbacks whistle a mellifluous call, like the type you would hear on a relaxing playlist, Leroy says. 

“Humpback whales also change their song. They have a new hit every year to attract females, but the blue whale songs are super simple compared to that,” Leroy says. “They have this single song or vocalization that is composed in two to four parts, so it’s forming a pattern that is quite simple. And that is repeated again and again and again with a regular interval during hours.” 

Even for whales of the same species, different crews have different tunes. Leroy had to determine whether Chagos was unique enough from other pygmy blue whale songs in the area to constitute a new herd. 

After comparing the Chagos tune to other pygmy blue whale recordings and other whale species, Leroy says she firmly believes the signature melody belongs to a new population of pygmy blue whales. 

The Chagos song was picked up at five of the six hydrophone locations between 2002 and 2018. These pings provided enough information that the authors determined the pygmy pod migrates clockwise, moving East to West between June and January. Their habitat ranges from the central Indian Ocean near Sri Lanka to the Northeastern corner by Western Australia. 

Understanding the undersea composers 

While the study of bioacoustics can pinpoint and discover a new population of blue whales, there are some drawbacks. For example, microphones can’t count the number of whales in a herd. That’s because hydrophones can distinguish two or three unique songs, but anything more starts to become indiscernible. 

“If there are like four, five, or six whales singing at the same time, you can’t see anything. It starts to be like whale soup,” Leroy says. “However, we know there are a very large number of songs so we can say it’s a whole group. Yet, we have no idea if it’s 10 whales or a hundred.” 

[Related: Carcasses are the best clues we have for these mysterious whales.]

The next steps to discovering these hidden whales would be to set sail and try to observe the new population in real life. But, Leroy says there’s no future plans yet due to the high cost. 

Regardless, the discovery of a new population is exciting—it doesn’t matter if there are a dozen whales or hundreds, this finding still means whale numbers are growing. Yet, oil spills, garbage, noise pollution, boats, and overfishing all threaten these shy whales, keeping the colossal crooners classified as endangered. 

“Finding a new population of blue whales means we will be able to protect them,” Leroy says. “We will know in this area we have to be careful about the noise we make and the human activities done.” 

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Recent work is shedding new light on the distinctions between what were once considered homogeneous groups of Brazilian screech owls. Just last month, an international team of researchers published a study in the journal Zootaxa differentiating and naming two new species of screech owls, one in the southeastern Amazon rainforest and one in the northern Atlantic forest.

Megascops, the screech owl genus, is the most diverse owl genus on the Western side of the Atlantic. But new species are difficult to distinguish because of similarities in coloring and plumage between owls. Differences in the bodily structures of these birds, called morphologies by biologists, are equally difficult to evaluate.

Because of this, screech owls across the Amazonian and Atlantic rainforests have long been lumped together in the Megascops watsonii–M. atricapilla complex, a group of species so similar in appearance that the boundaries between them are unclear. But two researchers in Brazil, unconvinced and armed with genetic and vocal analysis tools, argue there are actually six species, including two previously unnamed groups, in this complex. 

[Related: The Amazon stores tons of carbon. Climate change-fueled wildfires could ruin that.]

Way back in 2006, Sidnei de Melo Dantas and his advisor in zoological studies at the Federal University of Pará, Alexandre Aleixo, began to suspect that there was more variation in the screech owls in the forests of Brazil than had been previously documented. The pair set out to collect data specifically dedicated to parsing out these differences, a project that eventually became the basis for Dantas’ Ph.D, according to Aleixo.

“We needed someone to be really dedicated to this question so it could be answered,” Aleixo says. “Sidnei was really enthusiastic, and it was a project really well suited to him because he’s a field person. He began to collect data in a systematic way for this project.”

Dantas defended his thesis in 2013, and, in 2016, published the first account of the years of fieldwork and analysis he had begun nearly a decade earlier. This first paper outlined the high probability of greater species differentiation within the loosely defined Megascops watsonii–M. atricapilla complex. While there was still plenty of analysis to tackle and publish in detail, other commitments prevented Dantas and Aleixo from digging deep into the samples they had gathered. That is, until the pandemic hit.

The standstill induced by the COVID-19 pandemic gave the researchers the time to take a long, close look at the analysis they had conducted on the samples they had spent years collecting. 

“What we accomplished over this past year, during the pandemic year, was because we had the time to really go deep into the data,” says Aleixo, who is now a curator at the Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki, Finland. “It was easier to tell this story and really convince people that we were dealing with not only one, but six different species of screech owls.”

Gathering screech owl sounds and specimens

In order to circumvent the challenges of similar outward appearance, the recent Zootaxa study made use of extensive genetic analysis and the owls’ distinctive screeches to distinguish six species spread across Brazil and the surrounding areas.

The researchers obtained DNA samples from 49 screech owl specimens, a combination of museum specimens from several countries, including Brazil and the United States, and new specimens collected during the fieldwork conducted by Dantas and his colleagues. 

Over the course of many months, the researchers sought out new owl specimens in Brazil, heading out at night and using pre-recorded screeches to call out the owls and prompt them to defend their territory. Once the owls got close enough, the researchers shot them down, with permission from the Brazilian government, to collect and preserve the necessary tissue samples.

After collecting all the necessary skin and muscle tissues from the rainforests, genetic analysis was carried out at the Field Museum in Chicago. The researchers homed in on three mitochondrial genes and three nuclear genes, which code for distinct functional structures in the cells of the owl. If these codes become too dissimilar between two populations of owls, it no longer makes sense to mate, so the populations diverge and two distinct species evolve over time.

To complement the genetic analysis, the study authors compiled and compared vocal recordings of the owls’ distinctive screeches. In total, 83 recordings from 65 individual owls were analyzed for vocal variation. These recordings were taken from previous studies, open-source archives, and the authors’ own field work.

John Bates, an experienced ornithologist at the Field Museum and one of the study’s authors, says vocal sampling is key for studying nocturnal birds whose morphology is trickier to map. “You can’t see them as well, but you can hear them,” he says. “Vocalizations have started playing a more important role in birds in terms of looking at these differences across geography.”

Dantas, Aleixo, and colleagues mapped the number of notes per second for each sample, and the pitch variation and vocal pacing in each clip. They found that the closer two potentially distinct populations were to one another geographically, the less similar their vocalizations, providing support for their differentiation as species. 

According to Aleixo, the evolutionary divergence of vocal patterns provides an external wedge, reflecting the internal genetic divergence, that makes it disadvantageous for individuals from these two populations to produce offspring together. If the groups can’t communicate, then they can’t mate.

“Their gene pools are so different from each other, that it’s no longer advantageous for them to mix,” Aleixo says. “Evolution creates mechanisms whereby they avoid each other.”

In the end, the researchers outlined six distinct species of screech owls, combining analysis of genetic mutations and vocal variations to make the case for each distinct group. “This study is really neat, because it shows very clearly how when you get sampling from across Amazonia, what looks like one species of owl with some maybe some minor patterns of geographic variation across Amazonia turns out to be multiple genetically distinct units, which also happen to sing differently,” Bates says.

New species—and new threats

Within this group of six, two previously unnamed species were identified by the authors. The first of the new species was named Megascops stangiae, with the common name Xingu screech owl, in honor of Sister Dorothy Mae Stang. Stang was a Catholic nun who worked to protect poor farmers and the environment from deforestation efforts in Brazilian Amazonia. She was an active community leader beginning in the 1960s until she was murdered by ranchers in 2005. The common name refers to the region in which this owl is found, between the Tapajós and Xingu rivers in southeastern Amazonia, where Stang was active.

The second of the new species was named Megascops alagoensis, the Alagoas screech owl, after the Brazilian state of Alagoas, where its song was recorded for the first time in 2001 by another researcher. This species is found in the northern region of the Atlantic forest on Brazil’s easternmost coast.

In addition to the brand-new names, a third species’ name is little used, but clearly defined by the study authors: the Belém screech owl (Megascops ater), first distinguished in 1982. This group is found just to the northeast of the new Xingu screech owl, closer to the coast. Although this species’ distinctive qualities were well-documented nearly four decades ago, it has continued to be lumped into the complex this study is hoping to break apart.

Rounding out the group of six are the Tawny-bellied screech owl (Megascops watsonii), first delineated in 1848 and found in northern Amazonia; the Variable screech owl (Megascops usta), delineated in 1858, which is spread across the western and southern Amazonia; and the Black-capped screech owl (Megascops atricapilla), delineated in 1822 and distributed along the Brazilian coast in the southern regions of the Atlantic forest.

While the recognition of two new species is important, so too is the clear recognition of six species where there once were two. Where it was once believed there were only a few, broadly distributed screech owls in Amazonia and the surrounding areas, studies like this one show rapidly increasing diversity of species and narrowing of their distributions. 

In fact, the two new species detailed by Dantas and his collaborators are already considered endangered, and the other four could be well on their way to endangerment, too. The Xingu screech owl is endemic to the areas most severely burned by the 2019 Amazon fires. Habitat fragmentation by human activity has critically endangered the Alagoas screech owl in the very small area of the Atlantic forest it occupies.

[Related: The Amazon rainforest is burning, and humans are to blame]

With this in mind, Bates says simply protecting one region of the forest won’t protect other groups in other areas. “What these studies show is that there are these unique populations living in the southeast where the most deforestation has happened, where the forest is most threatened and most fragmented,” he says. “Amazonia is not this single homogenous forest from the perspective of the evolutionary history of these organisms, and that’s something that is really important to appreciate for conservation.”

Dantas hopes that his study is followed by many others documenting the biodiversity in the Amazon and Atlantic forests, before it’s too late. “We need urgently to protect and invest more in science here because we are losing our biodiversity, without knowing it really well.”

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Each March, greater sage-grouse gather together at lek sites on their breeding grounds across the Great Basin. In groups of up to 50, the males strut their stuff in an ancient ritual display of stamina. Their tail feathers spike and fan out as they gulp in air, puffing up their white chest plumage and filling two yolk-like air sacs that rise with the inhale before their bodies drop and heads thrust forward with the exhale. The air sacs create a wup sound that can be heard two miles away, attracting females that spend up to three weeks selecting the male that shows it has what it takes.

But this ancient mating dance so familiar to hunters and outdoor enthusiasts may not last.

A new report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) shows that this once-abundant game bird has declined 80 percent in the last six decades and nearly 40 percent since 2002. Climate change and human-caused habitat loss are the main driving factors behind the population decline. If trends aren’t reversed, scientists predict, up to 50 percent of sage-grouse leks could be gone in two decades. And in 56 years, 78 percent of leks could be functionally extinct with less than two breeding males at each lek.

Greater sage-grouse are an indicator species representing the health of the sagebrush ecosystem: As one declines, so will the other.

“The fact that we even considered listing sage-grouse under the Endangered Species Act should be a concern to every sportsman and the entire public,” says Ed Arnett, Chief Scientist for Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, who is familiar with the report. “It means ecosystems are in trouble.” 

This 326-page report is the most comprehensive collaborative study on greater sage-grouse populations ever done between state agencies and the federal government. The unprecedented level of collaboration between USGS scientists and colleagues created a framework to estimate population trends in the 11 western states of California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. 

The report sets up a solution-based framework for state and federal land managers to look at range-wide trends and decide which tools to use to reverse trends. Resource managers can use this framework to evaluate site-specific conservation efforts and examine what’s behind disappearing habitats. 

“It’s important they consider intact habitat and population health not only for greater sage-grouse, but other species dependent on sagebrush, like mule deer, elk, pronghorn, and the over 350 species sharing that habitat,” says John Gale, Conservation Director of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

The report’s findings indicate greater sage-grouse populations are declining more rapidly in the western part of the Great Basin because of drought, fire, invasive species like cheatgrass, and development. While the decline has recently been less severe in eastern areas, range-wide population numbers indicate sage-grouse populations are less than a quarter of what they were 50 years ago. Western Wyoming was the only area remaining relatively stable. 

The collaborative study included USGS, Colorado State University researchers, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, individual state wildlife agencies, and the Bureau of Land Management. These agencies compiled 60 years of data to create a range-wide database for greater sage-grouse breeding grounds to study population trends in different parts of the species’ range. Through this study, scientists learned sage-grouse populations fluctuate between highs and lows every 9.4 years because of precipitation patterns.

Researchers also developed a “Targeted Annual Warning System” to alert land managers when local populations begin to decline, with the goal of spurring action sooner rather than later. 

“The Targeted Annual Warning System provides a tool for biologists and managers to respond more nimbly,” says Peter Coates, USGS scientist and lead author of the report. “It will help determine where conservation action may yield desired results for sage-grouse conservation.”

Procuring robust federal funding to implement restoration takes time, but action is needed immediately to improve habitat. The new warning system described in the report helps states and feds to decide what conservation actions—like habitat restoration or limiting hunting permits—need to be done, where, when, and how long. 

“Our concern is not physical access, but the alarming fact that sage-grouse populations continue on a downward trend despite the conservation plans released in 2015,” Gale says. “Restoring habitat is urgent.”

Hopefully, through collaborative effort, it won’t be the last chance in our lifetimes to witness what’s been referred to as the most incredible mating ritual in all of North America.

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Wisconsin’s controversial wolf season might look a lot different next year. The recent weeklong February hunt closed after just three days as hunters and trappers exceeded the harvest quota by 82 percent, prompting outrage from far beyond the state’s borders and creating national news headlines. An op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post titled, “Wisconsin’s Brutal Wolf Hunt Shows Hunters Have Too Much Sway Over Conservation Policy,” for example, didn’t pull any punches. The result has been a black eye for the Wisconsin DNR and hunters alike.

With the Biden administration reviewing the gray wolf’s delisting under the Endangered Species Act and a lawsuit filed by EarthJustice on behalf of several environmental groups, the future of the hunt, particularly in its current form, is far from assured. There are calls to ban traps and the use of hounds (which was particularly effective in the recent hunt’s snowy conditions). There are even calls to revisit or repeal Wisconsin’s Act 169, which requires a wolf hunt to be held in any year gray wolves aren’t protected under the endangered species act.

For its part, the Wisconsin DNR is accepting applications this month for membership in a new Wolf Management Committee to make recommendations for a scientifically and socially supported management plan.

The current plan hasn’t been updated since 2007, and it sets a population target of 350 wolves, which is less than a third of the current population estimate. Members of Wisconsin-based hunting, wolf advocacy, and agricultural groups will each be allowed up to six seats on a committee that will also include representatives from the DNR and other state agencies as well as the Ojibwe tribes of northern Wisconsin, who consider wolves to be sacred. Although the new Management Committee hasn’t been chosen yet, much less met, it’s unlikely that any new season it may recommend will resemble the rushed 2020 February season.

Wisconsin held its last wolf hunt in 2014. The Obama administration had delisted the gray wolf, only to have a federal judge put it back on the endangered species list until it was delisted again in October, 2020. Following the delisting, the DNR planned for a November 2021 season in order to develop a new quota and to work with the public and with the Ojibwe. However, a lawsuit by the Kansas-based hunter’s-rights group Hunter Nation forced the weeklong February season. Since the actual delisting took effect on January 4, 2021, the suit argued that the season should commence immediately. “There is a substantial possibility that Wisconsinite’s time to hunt wolves is limited,” the lawsuit stated, pointing to the Biden administration’s executive order on climate change, which includes a review of existing regulations and policies. After a judge ruled for Hunter Nation, the season was set for the last week of February.

Aided by snow that made wolves more vulnerable, hunters, especially those using hounds, enjoyed high success rates. The DNR not only admits failing to keep on top of the harvest, it was also hamstrung by a state law requiring 24 hour notice of any season closing. As a result, hunters far exceeded the harvest quota, and the hunt attracted national attention.

Unless the new administration relists the gray wolf or Wisconsin repeals Act 169, there will be another hunt in Wisconsin next year, and the only thing we know for sure is that no matter which of the committee’s recommendations the DNR accepts, they won’t make everyone happy.

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Dedicated captive breeding and reintroduction efforts have brought black-footed ferrets, America’s most endangered mammal, back from the brink. A recent successful cloning of a ferret named Elizabeth Ann even offers the hope of restoring genetic diversity to these mammals.

But despite it all, these animals—agile, elongated mustelids with black masks—may still die out. Because in order to save a species, you can’t just save individuals—you have to save its habitat.

Without sufficient protected habitat, the black-footed ferret is destined to spend the rest of its existence in zoos and captive breeding centers unless it can return to its native grasslands, which have been widely plowed, paved, or subjected to poison to control creatures deemed pests. That’s why many scientists and conservation advocates believe the battle for the future of Wyoming’s Thunder Basin National Grassland is the battle for this emblematic species itself.

“They’re beautiful, elegant–but beyond that, they represent an ecosystem [grasslands] that is dying in North America,” says Michael Lockhart, the former black-footed ferret recovery recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

The Thunder Basin grassland covers more than half a million acres of land in northeastern Wyoming, representing a large portion of the just under four million acres of national grasslands in the United States (in comparison, the Forest Service oversees more than 188 million acres of national forest in the country). At high elevation and cold, the prairie is not welcoming to most crops, but more than 800 native plants take root there as well as a diverse web of grassland animals including black-tailed prairie dogs, mountain plover, burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks, and swift foxes.

Ferret habitat historically covered about 100 million acres of grasslands from Canada to Mexico and the nocturnal creatures lived in prairie dog towns, making their homes in the rodents’ burrows. Ferrets particularly favored black-tailed prairie dog colonies, like the ones that currently cover Thunder Basin. The site is among all the major ones Lockhart had identified as promising for ferret recovery during his tenure as the official recovery coordinator. It’s a rare gem for reintroduction—a large, protected expanse of grassy habitat with abundant prairie dogs, ferrets’ favorite food.

We only need to protect 500,000 acres of prairie dog lands in order to recover ferrets, says Kristy Bly, a senior conservation biologist with the World Wildlife Fund. “We’re dealing with two percent of the former abundance and distribution of prairie dogs in North America,” she says. “It should be a no-brainer.” But the conflict between officials, conservationists, and ranchers at Thunder Basin has been anything but simple. Here, more than a million acres of private and state lands intermingle with the public lands, and this close relationship has brought out sharp contrasts in beliefs about how the grassland—and public lands in general—should be managed.

This conflict has a long history.

Starting in the late 1800s, settlers of the Great Basin poisoned prairie dogs to leave more grass for their cattle. Grasslands, with their deep, rich soil, were also widely converted to farms. A disease brought to States in the early 1900s—sylvatic plague—has also decimated prairie dog populations, since the rodents have no immunity to the introduced pathogen. Ferrets prey exclusively on prairie dogs, so the demise of the burrowing rodent took down the slender mustelids too.

This was especially devastating because ferrets, despite their diminutive size, are territorial and require large expanses of prairie dog colonies. Wildlife officials estimate that more than 15,000 acres of prairie dog colonies are needed to provide for a self-sustaining ferret population with 100 breeding adults. Although prairie dogs continued to scrape by despite extermination efforts, black-footed ferrets tanked. The federal government deemed them endangered in 1967 (in legislation that predated the Endangered Species Act of 1973), and presumed the ferrets to be extinct in 1979.

Then, in 1981 on a ranch near Meeteetse, Wyoming, a dog named Shep brought home a dead ferret. Wildlife officials rushed to capture the surviving mustelids nearby. All ferrets living today are descendents of 15 individuals from this last haven of black-footed ferrets.

Later in 1981, a Forest Service ranger reported a ferret sighting at Thunder Basin after one scampered across the road in front of the ranger’s truck. Illuminated in the beam of the headlights, the ferret and the ranger stared at each other for one and a half minutes, before it padded away into the night. After that, officials never again spotted any ferrets in the area.

Around 2008, after decades of captive breeding and reintroduction efforts, the weasel-like animals seemed to have a fighting chance of gaining a foothold back in their native grasslands. There were over 1,000 alive in the wild, and wild-borne ferrets had the potential to seed new populations (ideal because captive-borne individuals have a harder time surviving on the prairie). “We were going to be able to meet the downlisting goal just in a few more years,” says Lockhart, the former FWS official.

[Related: Why these towns are trying to save an ‘agricultural pest’]

But rapid prairie dog proliferation in the past decade has raised controversy. Between 2015 and 2017, the rodents rippled across more than 75,000 acres of the prairie. “You could step out of your vehicle and it looked like the ground was rolling, there were so many prairie dogs” says Dave Pellatz, executive director of the Thunder Basin Prairie Ecosystem Association, a nonprofit whose members include ranchers and conservationists based in northeastern Wyoming.

It was a time of drought, which increased tensions on the rangeland. Prairie dog colonies expand in dry years. Ranchers claim that their livestock went hungry as the prairie dogs grazed across a larger area. “We had a situation where the combination of all the grazers [livestock and prairie dogs] were eating far more than the land could produce,” says Pellatz. “That’s certainly an immediate economic impact [for ranchers].”

Under a previous agreement, the Forest Service’s objective was to protect 33,000 acres for prairie dogs. But, under pressure to do something about the ballooning numbers, officials proposed a new plan that capped prairie dog habitat to 10,000 acres, and to 7,500 in drought years. This plan, which went into effect in December, also allows people to shoot prairie dogs recreationally and expands the use of poison to prevent the rodents from encroaching onto ranching properties.

Wildlife experts involved in the planning meetings for the change say that the amendment is largely the result of pressure from a handful of nearby landowners, who received support from state lawmakers including the governor. Ana Davidson, an ecologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who attended the meetings, says that she observed a “heavy bias” against prairie dog conservation, and reports that she was cut off from speaking at times. “There are also really strong statements by some of the ranchers that just spoke towards a different, strong attitude about how they see the use of the public lands, and that they need to be surrounding livestock production,” she says.

Forest Service lands are “multi-use,” meaning the agency is supposed to balance the needs of plants, wildlife, and people in places like the Thunder Basin. While that provision often does permit livestock grazing, it also means that the agency has some responsibility to protect wild residents too. Lobbying from individuals representing less than 10 ranches apparently swayed the Forest Service. To Davidson, it begs the question: “what is public land for?”

In a letter in response to the draft environmental impact statement for the decision, Lockhart made his opinion on the matter clear. The plan change would “largely foreclose” the potential to recover the ferrets on a “critically important parcel of Public Land,” he wrote (emphasis his). “Given the enormous resources and work put into ferret recovery over the past three decades by State and Federal wildlife agencies, zoos, conservation organizations and international partners it is unforgivable to take off the table potentially one of the best future ferret reintroduction sites in N. America.”

Officials from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the main agency enforcing the Endangered Species Act, also appear to believe Thunder Basin to be of immense value for ferret recovery. “The [Thunder Basin National Grassland] is one of the few large grassland properties in federal ownership with extensive black-tailed prairie dog populations,” Noreen Walsh, the regional director for the mountain-prairie FWS region, wrote to the regional forester for the Forest Service in 2017 (the letter was obtained in a public records request by staff at the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife). “While there are no immediate plans to reintroduce the ferret at TBNG, it may well be the best existing site across the species’ range in 12 western states, Mexico, and Canada.”

In the 2013 FWS plan for ferret recovery, the authors wrote: “We believe the single, most feasible action that would benefit black-footed ferret recovery is to improve prairie dog conservation.” Prairie dogs have the strange position of being the keystone to rebuilding ferret populations—and really, North American grasslands in general—while also being officially described as an “agricultural pest.” (Popular Science contacted the FWS multiple times, but the agency was not able to arrange an interview prior to the publication of this story).

Now, experts say that it’s unlikely the Thunder Basin prairie can house a self-sustaining population—especially with the continued threat of plague. In order for the mammals to escape their endangered status, one major criteria is that they need 10 populations of at least 100 breeding adults. Right now, there are zero sites that meet this requirement (a couple reintroduction sites have met this goal in the past, but the numbers went down after plague outbreaks), and only about 340 ferrets total are scattered about in the wild currently. In the previous iteration of the Thunder Basin plan, officials had protected enough prairie dog acreage to support a population of 100 ferrets and a portion of the range was officially called “Black-Footed Ferret Reintroduction Habitat.”

Pellatz says there are other grasslands in which to reintroduce ferrets—that Thunder Basin isn’t the end-all for the masked mammals. But biologists familiar with the matter contend that Thunder Basin is a critical site. “Conata Basin [in South Dakota] and Thunder Basin are it,” says Lockhart. “In terms of their history and potential, they are head and tails above anything else.”

Some ecologists believe there could be a sustainable balance between setting the stage for ferrets and maintaining cattle. Studies of bison have, for example, shown that the buffalo prefer to graze on prairie dog colonies, and even gain more weight when they do so. That’s because prairie dog grazing can encourage the growth of diverse grasses rich in nutrients. After all, bison—which once numbered in the tens of millions in North America—seemed to find enough to eat for the thousands of years they lived alongside prairie dogs and ferrets in the plains.

Though some research has found cattle also prefer to graze alongside prairie dogs, the rodent-ungulate relationship is fickle in ways that aren’t fully understood. One major variable is rain, says Kristy Bly, senior conservation biologist with the World Wildlife Fund. When rainfall is plentiful, there’s more likely to be enough forage for all grass-eaters. But when the range gets dry, as Thunder Basin did in the 2010s, that once-beneficial (or at least neutral) relationship can turn sour.

Bly says that continued research into this relationship can help inform solutions. Some of that research is already in the works.

[Related: The endangered species list is full of ghosts]

Davidson is part of a team funded by the USDA that’s trying to illuminate the impacts of prairie dog densities and colony size on cattle weight gains at Thunder Basin. To do so, the scientists are teaming up with local ranchers. Half of the ranchers are helping with the project design and gathering data, including by weighing their cows, while the rest are not directly involved. Beyond quantifying how many prairie dogs it takes before cows start to lose weight, Davidson says the big picture objective is seeing how the collaborative effort affects trust. “Right now, we’re in a landscape where science is not well-trusted,” she says. “Is this a way to get people to start to trust science and scientists?”

Demonstrating how conservation and grazing can coexist is key, says Pellatz. To increase acceptance of prairie dogs and thus the chances of returning ferrets to the land, he says, “we have to convince landowners they won’t have their livelihoods destroyed.”

But there may never be agreement if this is a matter of a fundamental difference in how the parties see the function of public lands, which, in theory, are as much the domain of the Wyoming ranchers as they are an apartment dweller in NYC. Protecting endangered species is very popular with the American public—four out of five Americans support the Endangered Species Act. While this majority would likely favor restoring ferrets, a relative few were able to influence decisions on the ground at Thunder Basin.

According to some advocates, continued compromises with the little land left that could house ferrets are part of the problem. They allege that the compromises have yielded more and more to ranchers, at the expense of the prairie ecosystem. “The collaborations yielded this environmental disaster,” says Erik Molvar, the executive director of the conservation group Western Watersheds Project. “There’s no trust left here. We just need to enforce the federal law and be done with it.” To that end, his organization is planning to sue the Forest Service, accusing them of having violated their legal obligation to do its part to restore endangered species. (The Forest Service declined an interview request with Popular Science, stating their staff are not allowed to comment on decisions being litigated).

“Being able to tolerate wildlife should be part of doing business,” says Lauren McCain, a senior federal lands policy analyst with the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife. “If there are more cows than can be supported on the [public] land, whether it’s inhabited by prairie dogs or not, there should be adjustments in cattle stocking.”

On other public and tribal lands, ferrets have had better luck. In Conata Basin, South Dakota, ferrets were reintroduced in 1996 and have since become the most successful wild population. Like Thunder Basin, the area also neighbors private lands. Bly of the World Wildlife Fund says the reason the reintroduction has been successful is because Forest Service officials there have worked hard to control prairie dogs on the borders of the national grassland, which eased the grumbling of landowners over the rodents.

Balancing dichotomous opinions on prairie dogs and public land is a taxing job for federal officials, one that requires dedication. “When Conata Basin took off and was doing really really well, it was because there was a Forest Service ranger who was absolutely devoted to [ferret recovery],” says Lockhart. In the case of Thunder Basin, he believes the Forest Service caved to political pressure.

Another problem is that continued management of ferret lands is expensive and has no dedicated line item in the federal budget, says Bly. Controlling plague alone costs $40,000 annually for a 1,500-acre ferret reintroduction area. While she’s happy about the successes of captive breeding and cloning, Bly says that there hasn’t been a commensurate amount of money made available for reintroduction and management of wild ferrets.

Whether the solution is officials taking a stronger stand for the endangered ferrets, a collaborative effort between ecologists and ranchers, or some combination thereof, the fact that a handful of individuals were able to sway management on a federal grassland perhaps reveals the vulnerability of the prairie. A 2004 report published by the US Geological Survey on the state of the Great Plains used surprisingly firm language on the matter: “We offer that North America’s Great Plains have suffered from an abundance of fiscal greed and a shortfall of ecological common sense.” The plight of the black-footed ferret might be a warning.

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This post originally featured on Outdoor Life.

Wolf hunters in Wisconsin exceeded the state’s harvest quota just three days into their first wolf hunt since 2014. The hunt was supposed to last a week, but it was called early because of the fast and furious harvest. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said non-native hunters had checked in 182 wolves as of 3 p.m. Wednesday when the state closed the season. The quota for non-native hunters was 119 wolves; native Ojibwe Tribes were also allocated 81 tags, in accordance with treaty rights ceded to the United States in the 1800s. The total number of harvested wolves stood at 216 (in non-native zones) as of noon on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Gray wolves were removed from Endangered Species Act protections in January, and the Wisconsin DNR estimated in April 2020 that the state had about 1,195 wolves. Its management goal is 350 wolves on non-tribal reservation land. Proponents of the hunt and state management say the high population of wolves — more than triple the management goal — is a clear sign of recovery, and they also point to declines in game animals due to wolf predation.

Despite the healthy wolf population in the state, the harvest goal of 200 wolves is not supposed to be met if the tribal hunters do not meet their harvest quota. There are no requirements to fill a tag. Native hunters have expressed disdain for the late-winter hunt, citing it as “especially wasteful and disrespectful,” the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission said in a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal.

DNR spokeswoman Sarah Hoye told the State Journal that the quota was set with a goal of keeping the population stable.

“The wolf population in Wisconsin is healthy, capable of sustaining harvest, and remains well connected to neighboring wolf populations in Michigan and Minnesota,” she said.

Tribal officials said the hunting and trapping season was rushed. A Kansas-based hunting group sued the Wisconsin DNR for failing to follow state law—Wisconsin state law mandates that the DNR hold a wolf hunt between November and February if there are no federal protections on wolves. As with many twists and turns in the Great Lakes wolf saga, the decision ended in court with a judge ruling in favor of the hunt.

More than 27,000 people applied for licenses, and 1,486 tags were issued, including 21 to non-resident hunters.

Predictably, animal rights activists weighed in, with Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, calling the hunt “cruel and unjustifiable.” Pacelle is a long-time opponent of wolf hunting and formerly lead the Humane Society of the United States until his resignation in February 2018. (He was accused by former HSUS employees of sexual assault and harassment.)

Pacelle dipped into his well-worn playbook of frightening prose to describe the hunt: “Is there anything as diabolical as unleashing thousands of trophy hunters and commercial trappers to kill endangered wolves during their breeding season, armed with night-vision equipment, lights, packs of dogs, and steel-jawed leghold traps?”

The decision to remove wolves from federal endangered species protections is being challenged in court. And while other Great Lakes states like Minnesota and Michigan mull over potential wolf hunts during fall 2021, the Biden administration has ordered a review of the USFWS’ decision to delist gray wolves.

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Over the past half-century, oceanic sharks and rays have diminished around the globe, an international team of scientists reported on January 27 in the journal Nature. The researchers analyzed records dating back to the 1970s to track 18 species that dwell on the high seas, and found that their populations had dropped by 71.1 percent overall. Additionally, the team analyzed the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’ extinction risk assessments (which evaluates the risk of extinction for different species) for 31 oceanic sharks and rays and found that about 77 percent of those 31 species are now threatened with extinction.

“What we observed was that the global abundance of sharks and rays has declined by nearly three quarters over the last 50 years and it’s primarily due to overfishing,” says Nathan Pacoureau, a marine biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia and coauthor of the new findings. “The opportunity for saving these iconic creatures is rapidly closing.”

In some cases, sharks and rays are caught for their meat or liver oil. In other instances, though, they are accidentally snared along with commercially valuable species like tuna and swordfish. These animals’ populations are particularly vulnerable to overfishing because they cannot quickly repopulate. “Oceanic sharks have a very slow pace of life, so they take generally a decade, or even several, before they can mature,” Pacoureau says.

Researchers have been observing serious declines in oceanic and coastal shark populations around the Atlantic Ocean and in the waters off of South Africa and Australia for decades. To investigate how sharks have been doing around the globe, Pacoureau and his colleagues pored over scientific papers, government reports, and other records and examined how the populations of different shark and ray species have changed over time.

They found that every species had decreased in abundance since 1970, with the exception of the smooth hammerhead shark. In the Indian Ocean in particular, shark and ray populations had dropped by 84.7 percent over the past 50 years. After an initial steep drop, sharks in the Pacific Ocean have declined at a slower rate since 1990. Meanwhile, shark populations eventually began to stabilize in the Atlantic Ocean after 2000. A few species have even begun to rebuild their numbers since the turn of the century, including the great white and porbeagle sharks.

When the researchers consulted the listings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species for 31 species, they found that the risk of extinction has increased since 1980—a time when only nine species were considered under threat. Now, 24 species are threatened with extinction. Three have become critically endangered, including the oceanic whitetip, scalloped hammerhead, and great hammerhead sharks. An additional four species are categorized as endangered.

For all 31 species, the Red List indicated that overfishing was the biggest threat (although several species face additional risks such as ship strikes). Since 1970, catch rates have tripled for sharks and rays. Additionally, more sharks and rays are kept after being captured to meet the growing demand for their fins. Pacoureau and his team estimate that, since 1970, sharks and rays have faced an 18-fold increase in relative fishing pressure, which measures changes in catch rates relative to the number of fish remaining.

It’s likely that shark and ray populations have been waning even before the period the researchers tracked. “Our analysis starts in the ’70s, but we know that fishing fleets have been expanding globally since even before the ’50s,” Pacoureau says.

Sharks and rays play an important role as predators in marine ecosystems, as well as being a vital source of sustenance for many people. The overexploitation of these species “risks the food security for some of the world’s poorest countries…and can also squander ecotourism opportunities,” Pacoureau says. However, relatively few countries impose catch limits on oceanic sharks, he and his colleagues note in the study.

“Over the last few decades, we have seen a steady positive shift in the public’s perception of sharks. That concern has helped drive significant conservation policy advances, particularly through global wildlife treaties,” Sonja Fordham, president of the nonprofit Shark Advocates International and another coauthor of the research, said in an email. “In most countries, however, concrete restrictions on the main threat—fishing—have not kept pace.”

To protect sharks, the researchers concluded, it’s important to enact rules such as catch limits and minimize accidental captures and deaths with steps such as avoiding known shark hotspots. The good news is that these actions have already begun to replenish some shark populations. In the waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States, fishermen have been prohibited from keeping great white sharks since the 1990s. Meanwhile, catch limits have been placed on hammerhead sharks.

“It’s important to note that these measures have not been perfectly implemented nor have they eliminated all incidental mortality, and yet we’re seeing the tide turning,” Fordham said. “The key point is to start with a concrete fishing limit based on scientific advice and the precautionary approach and build on it over time.”

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Amidst the towering saguaro and pronged organ pipe cacti of southern Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, a 30-foot-tall fence snakes through the vegetation, shadowed by a barren strip of land that’s been carved into the mountainsides. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a flurry of activity in these borderlands, particularly in the area’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. In the last months of the Trump administration, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) construction crew has been dynamiting and drilling their way through nature refuges and cultural relics to make room for the new border wall. A 30-mile-long spine of steel poles filled with concrete now chokes the monument’s southern edge. Mixing the raw materials for this structure requires a lot of water—some 84,000 gallons a day, by CBP’s own estimates—a dwindling resource that’s being siphoned from the already arid landscape.

The 450 miles of border wall in sections of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have already required more than 971,000 tons of concrete, according to CBP. (About 10 percent of that called for new construction; the rest replaced existing structures.) The demand for water, alongside historic droughts in the West, has had a colossal impact on the surrounding ecology of largely public and tribal lands across the Southwest, which scientists and Indigenous communities fear may take years, if not decades, to reverse.

Near Quitobaquito Springs, located in Organ Pipe, only 600 feet from the border, locals have documented CBP diverting water from the same aquifer that feeds the springs. “Contractors have pumped tens of millions of gallons from a deep aquifer that has what hydrologists call ‘fossil water,’” explains Randy Serraglio, who monitors endangered species and their habitats for the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation nonprofit. “It’s water that was laid down thousands of years ago. The aquifer is not easily replenished by the scant rainfall we get now, so the damage is essentially permanent.” Once around 2 feet deep and covering up to half an acre, hydrologists and ecologists estimate the pond at Quitobaquito dropped 15 inches during the summer of 2020, and the spring’s flow reached an historic low of 5.5 gallons per minute this past July.

The ecological impacts may be severe. The Quitobaquito pupfish and Sonoyta mud turtle, both classified as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), reside in the spring and nowhere else in the country.

Almost 300 miles away at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, in the Sky Islands region of southern Arizona, the boggy marshes, tumbling waterfalls, and tree-lined riverbanks of the lush 2,369-acre wetland provide a green oasis within the dry Chihuahuan Desert, thanks to the Río Yaqui watershed.

“A big part of the wall cuts through the heart of the region, which is home to jaguar, ocelot, black bears, mountain lions, and more” says Louise Misztal, executive director of the Sky Island Alliance, a science nonprofit that works to preserve the forested mountains in the borderlands.

Because animals migrate to areas that historically provide them with a water resource, such as the San Bernardino Refuge’s natural ponds, nearby CBP drilling is of particular concern to Misztal, who’s worked as a biologist in the state for more than a decade.

With new wells 8 miles from the spring, which pumps water to ground level, necessary water pressure has dropped during construction. USFWS officials have resorted to manmade pumps to help the pressure return to normal.

Water in several ponds at the refuge—home to endangered fish and rare butterflies, hummingbirds, and bats—dropped to an extremely low level, then disappeared completely, according to USFWS documents leaked to the Center for Biological Diversity in summer of 2020. Citing data gathered between November 2019 and June 2020, USFWS employees warned of the impact of drilling groundwater from wells within a 5-mile radius of the refuge, but the warnings went unheeded.

CBP contractors drew millions of gallons of groundwater from a well just 1.5 miles from the site. As soon as CBP began removing huge amounts of groundwater from the aquifer, the pressure in the system began to fail, “exactly as predicted by scientists,” Serraglio says. “Some ponds dried up and endangered fish and plants, such as the Yaqui catfish and Yaqui beautiful shiner, were killed.”

The threat extends to rivers, too. A segment of the wall has been constructed through the San Pedro River in Arizona, changing the waterway’s hydrology. “There’s not a lot of surface river,” Misztal explains. “Up until now it was a free-flowing river, but they’ve put in a bridge and infrastructure.” The extent of the impact on fish species—such as the endangered Gila chub, the speckled dace, and the Sonora sucker—is not yet entirely clear, Misztal adds, but it will without a doubt change migration and spawning habits. In addition, wildlife that depend on the river as a resource may find their water source has dried up. Monsoons typically recharge low-flowing sections during the summer, but the water may no longer fill up as it once did.

What’s more, the wall construction extends through a region that’s facing its worst drought for 1,200 years due to climate change. Arizona, specifically, has seen record-low rainfalls and snowmelt, and experienced more triple-digit temperatures than in any other year. “Springs and streams are already critically stressed in many places, so the massive pumping is even more damaging,” Serraglio says.

A spokesperson for CBP says that the agency “regularly consults” with tribal governments and wildlife departments to minimize impacts to natural and cultural resources. “Regarding water resources, CBP continues to coordinate with federal land-managing agencies to monitor and evaluate potential groundwater impacts potentially associated with border-wall-system construction,” they added.

However, the Real ID Act of 2005 allows the Department of Homeland Security to supersede existing laws, including the Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and an executive order which requires consultation of tribal governments.

At Quitobaquito Springs, for instance, wall engineers pulled a noticeable amount of water from the O’odham Nation’s sacred pond and also blew up Monument Hill, a site containing some 10,000-year-old artifacts of Apache warriors.

“Construction unearthed pieces of body remains of our ancestors, which now have to be reburied,” says Christina Bell Andrews, district chairwoman of Hia-Ced, a subset of the O’odham Nation.

Serraglio contends that we don’t yet know the full damage of tapping natural wells and drilling new ones. “The situations at San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge in far Southeast Arizona and the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Southwest Arizona are probably the most egregious, but there are others,” he adds.

Both Serraglio and Misztal agree the incoming Biden administration needs to take immediate action to survey the damage that’s been done, and prioritize restoration to reverse the damage caused by wall construction. Andrews is co-authoring a letter requesting immediate action. “Joe Biden can stop the construction on Day One, and he must do that,” Serraglio says. “Every day that he waits, this tragedy will continue to unfold in the borderland.”

Biden told reporters last August he would not build “another foot” of border wall, but has yet to address the damage already done. Whatever his plans, Andrews emphasizes the importance of consulting with the O’odham people in how to remedy the destruction. The Trump administration has already secured more wall contracts, largely in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, complicating Biden’s plan to stop construction.

One way to bring back the ecological and hydrological balance of the borderlands would be to restore the San Pedro River to its original free-flowing state, Misztal says. But in terms of replenishing the springs, she doesn’t know if there’s an easy fix. “Some resources will be changed forever,” she says. “At Quitobaquito, the groundwater is extremely old, and the next 10 years of rain aren’t going to be enough to restore it.” And, although she adds that nature is resilient, the future of the desert’s water sources is less certain.

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Last week, the Trump administration announced its plan to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list after it’s “successful” recovery. In a press release, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt stated that “the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery.”

But biologists argue that the decision is premature, and would likely reverse progress for the charismatic and controversial canids.

Once widespread across the United States, gray wolves were nearly erased from the contiguous states by the early 20th century due to massive overhunting. In 1974, they became one of the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act, which had been enacted just a year before.

After nearly being decimated, the wolves were finally protected from harm, and efforts to reinstate them commenced. In 1995, gray wolves from Canada were released into Yellowstone National Park and Idaho, and soon established a Northern Rockies population. Meanwhile, the Upper Midwest population—which had been one of the last places the carnivores resisted eradication—rebounded.

However, a series of federal decisions and court cases starting in the early 2000s complicated their recovery. Between 2003 and 2012, the wolf underwent five changes in protections under the Endangered Species Act (here is a timeline of all those events). During this time, some states were granted the ability to develop their own management plans.

Now, wolves in the US are protected under a variable patchwork of regulations. In some states, shooting a wolf still brings severe legal penalties. But in others, including Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, hunters can apply for permits to take down wolves, and they can also be killed for the purpose of defending livestock. More than 500 wolves were killed in Idaho in the year between July 2019 and July 2020, says Joanna Lambert, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and scientific advisor for the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. That isn’t great news for a population estimated to be around 1,700. Hunting also increased in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan after wolves in those states were federally delisted, adds Adrian Treves, an ecologist who leads the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

While officials claim that the wolf has met recovery criteria under the ESA, their actual status is up for debate. Officials base these decisions on a number of measures intended to gauge not just a snapshot of current population numbers and range, but whether the species will continue to be stable after delisting. “Where it gets tricky is thinking about whether the species meet those criteria,” says Lambert. “That can be sort of subject to interpretation.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service prepared an extensive report making its case, but Treves, who was part of an independent scientific review of the report, says that the determination largely hinges on the wolves having reestablished across a significant portion of their historic range. But the area the canids currently cover is only about 15 percent of what they once did. Treves says that, ideally, gray wolves should return to 51 percent of their range before they are safe to delist.

Additionally, there’s the issue of whether, once delisted, the wolves will be able to persist. And the evidence is not in their favor. “We’re very confident in predicting that lots of wolves will be killed [if they are delisted], because that’s what happened in the past,” says Treves. “That’s what’s happening in Idaho now.” And he notes that an increase in legal wolf killings tends to prompt an increase in illegal killing as well.

In states that have allowed wolf hunting, it’s often been done with the stated purpose of protecting livestock. However, research has found that after farmers target wolves with lethal management, the canids increasingly prey on their neighbors’ livestock. Other, non-lethal methods have been found to be successful in deterring wolves, including fences with dangling red flags called “fladry” and guard dogs.

Many experts have challenged the interpretation of federal wildlife officials. In fact, all of the researchers who took part in the independent review of the delisting report found shortcomings in the data used to support the decision. And yet, the wolf is still being stripped of its protection.

The new rule will go into effect on January 4, 2021, but a number of advocacy groups have already pledged court battles. Given the shaky evidence on which the decision was made, it’s possible a judge could overturn it.

If the wolf is crossed off the list permanently, much of its fate rests in the hands of state-level governments. That makes state policies like Colorado’s recently-passed bill mandating wolf reintroduction all the more important (though as a note, as of publication time the vote was still too close to call). It also raises the question of whether gray wolves ever be restored across their historic range. Gray wolves once occupied most of what is now the contiguous United States—basically everywhere except the Southeast (which was red wolf territory). Right now, they are only confirmed to be living and breeding in nine states, says Treves.

It’s a historic year for many reasons, and—if you haven’t already—you can add the gray wolf to that list. 2020 marks 25 years since they were reintroduced to Yellowstone, the success of the first voter-led initiative to reintroduce them in Colorado, and perhaps the last year they enjoyed federal protection. “It’s been kind of the year of the wolf,” says Lambert. “And I hope it can continue to be the year of the wolf and the future decades of the wolf.”

Note: This story has been updated to reflect the passing of Colorado’s wolf reintroduction legislation.

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Excerpted from Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C. Slaght. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2020 by Jonathan C. Slaght. All rights reserved.

The fall traps did not pan out. Either the resident fish owls were not interested in the frozen marine fish we offered as lures or the birds were unwilling to walk under the suspicious netted domes to investigate them. At about two o’clock one morning, a few days after the blizzard ended, Sergey and I sped three kilometers on the snowmobile in response to a beeping trap transmitter, only to discover a false alarm: ice had caused the net to sag and this tugged on the string that activated the beacon. Sergey, tired and frustrated and cold, kicked at the frame, breaking it, then threw the remains into the forest. Thus concluded the fall trap experiment.

The capture learning curve was steep. There were multiple nuances specific to each trap and to each capture site. Since late February, we’d had a few very near misses. When we started out the season, we thought that four owl captures seemed like a reasonable target, but I was ready to backtrack on that goal with the realization that simply learning how to safely and efficiently catch these birds would be success enough for me for this year. If we had one or two captures to show for it at the end of the season, after all these failures, I would be satisfied. We were well past the midway point of the field season; if the weather held, we’d have three, possibly four, weeks left before the capture window closed. After that, spring would bring unstable ice, rising waters, and unsuitable conditions to trap fish owls.

The pattern of no owls, poor sleep, second-guessing, and general stagnation continued on for more than a week. I felt trapped, more so knowing that we really were trapped. Even if we wanted to throw up our hands, leave, and start fresh as we had when we left Serebryanka, we could not: our truck was still stuck in the snow a kilometer and a half away. I tried changing my outlook. We’d still made some progress this year, even if we hadn’t caught any owls. It had been arrogant of me to think we could stroll up to some of the least-studied birds in Northeast Asia and assume they’d hand us their secrets.

It was right around this time, when I’d come to terms with our failures, that we caught our first owl. Anatoliy slapped me on the shoulder and told me he knew it all along—all I had needed to do was change my attitude. But in reality, we’d improved our trap. Up until this capture, we’d placed our noose carpets along the riverbank in areas we hoped the owls would land, which was inefficient. Our modification, something novel enough that we were able to later publish a description of it in a scientific journal, coaxed the owls to land where we wanted them to. We created a prey enclosure: an open-top mesh box about a meter long and thirteen centimeters tall, constructed from material left over from our noose carpets. We placed the box in shallow water no more than ten centimeters deep, sprinkled the bottom with pebbles so that from above it looked like any other stretch of river, and then filled it with as many fish as we could catch—usually fifteen or twenty salmon smolt. Then we set a single noose carpet on the closest part of the riverbank. The owl would see the fish, approach for a closer look, and get caught.

Masu salmon, the species most common in these rivers at this time of year, are among the smallest of all salmon. Full-sized individuals reach about half a meter in length and weigh about two kilograms, or more than half the weight of an adult fish owl. The masu have the most constricted range of any Pacific salmon, largely confined to the Sea of Japan, around the island of Sakhalin, and in western Kamchatka. Like many salmon, juvenile masu spend several years in freshwater systems before migrating to the sea, and the coastal rivers of Primorye are full of these pencil-length fish. As a result, this abundant species is a critical resource for fish owls in winter. Masu are also an important food source for local villagers, who can catch scores of them in a leisurely day of ice fishing. There is a misconception among locals that the small masu found in winter—which they call pestrushka— are a different species entirely from the larger fish—called sima— that come in summer to spawn. This complicates management of this species, as the same person who recognizes the commercial and ecological importance of sima may view the pestrushka as a common species that can be exploited.

The second night after we arranged this trap configuration, the male fish owl of the Faata River pair approached the enclosure and ate half the salmon inside before stumbling onto the noose carpet on the bank and engaging the trap transmitter. We were eating dinner by kerosene lantern light, as the hydroelectric plant no longer generated electricity, when it sounded. Despite nothing but false alarms so far, we treated every trigger with dead seriousness. Sergey and I stared for a second at the receiver and its regular, confident beeps, then locked eyes and flew out the door in a tumult of down jackets, hip waders, and uninhibited urgency.

We approached the trap, a few hundred meters away, on skis. Up ahead I saw Sergey’s spotlight reveal a fish owl sitting on the bank, watching us. Like one of Jim Henson’s darker creations, this was a goblin bird with mottled brown feathers puffed out, back hunched, and ear tufts erect and menacing. I’d seen other owl species adopt this posture in order to look bigger and more threatening to an aggressor, and it was working: this was a creature braced for battle. I was taken aback, as I still am every time I see one of these birds, by how enormous it was. The beast stood immobile, glaring at us with yellow eyes in the winter dark and illuminated unevenly by Sergey’s light as our pace quickened. Everything was silent except for the rhythmic friction of skis on snow and our gasps of exhaustion. The urgency to reach the owl before it freed itself was palpable.

My heart stopped as the fish owl pivoted and took to the air in retreat, but the weight of the noose carpet held and drew the bird softly back to ground. The huge owl moved away from us with awkward bounds along the broad, snowy bank, dragging the noose carpet with it, until finally, when we were only meters away, the raptor spun onto its back on the river’s edge. It lay there facing us, talons extended and agape, ready to shred any flesh within striking distance.

In the off-season, I’d trained in raptor handling at The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota and had learned that hesitation with a defensive raptor doesn’t do anyone any good. I swooped my arm in a fluid motion the moment I was within reach, scooping the bird up by its extended legs. Upside down and confused, the owl relaxed its wings, and I used my free arm to tuck them first against its body and then the body against me as though holding a swaddled newborn child. The owl was ours.

The post The quest to snare—and save—the world’s largest owl appeared first on Popular Science.

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