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.”

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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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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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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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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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.”

The post The curious case of an endangered wildcat and a disappearing fruit tree appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post The wackiest-looking birds are the most at risk for extinction appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post Macro portraits reveal the glamor and peril of endangered insects appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post What SpaceX’s final Starbase permits could mean for Texas wildlife appeared first on Popular Science.

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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. 

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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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When we think of areas set aside to protect species, they tend to be fixed land expanses: national parks, wilderness reserves, and refuges. But such rigid definitions of protected habitat don’t cut it for many creatures swimming in the open seas, inhabiting zones with more fluid boundaries.

That’s why scientists want provisions for mobile marine protected areas—which can shift boundaries or restrictions depending on the movement of aquatic organisms—to be included in the upcoming revamp of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The convention hasn’t been updated since it was implemented in 1982, and marine ecologists like Sara Maxwell of the University of Washington are keen on using the update to bring ocean conservation into the 21st century.

In meetings on the treaty update, Maxwell says that negotiators are still describing marine protected areas as having fixed boundaries. For the most part, that’s how marine conservation has been done to-date.

There are around 100,000 of these fixed marine parks around the globe, ranging from the size of a baseball field to encompassing hundreds of thousands of square miles. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia was once the largest MPA in the world, at 129 million square miles. But in recent years some massive marine areas have superseded it, including the Ross Sea of Antarctica (600,000 square miles) and the Cook Islands in the South Pacific (772,000 square miles). In these zones, sensitive ecological or cultural resources are protected by restricting human activities, but often some commercial use is still allowed (they’re not quite as prohibitive as designated wilderness in the United States).

The problem is, many marine conservation experts think the UN officials are failing to prepare for a less-predictable future climate by maintaining this traditional view of marine protection. “They’re really thinking about it as boundaries that are going to be static, they’re not thinking about it from the perspective of—first of all—climate change, where everything is moving and everything is shifting in ways that we’re having a very hard time predicting,” says Maxwell. On top of that, “a lot of the species that we’re talking about when we think about the high seas are the ones that are really highly mobile.”

Many sea turtles, whales, and seabirds travel thousands of miles in their migrations. Without dynamic protections that track their movements, these creatures are more vulnerable in their annual journeys. This is especially true of the high seas, the international waters that cover two-thirds of the ocean. Maxwell says that in the high seas, some specific industries—such as the International Maritime Organization, which regulates shipping—have adopted marine protected areas that apply to their activities, but there’s little coordination across interests.

In a paper published Thursday in Science, Maxwell describes her solution: mobile marine protected areas. In this sort of dynamic management, protected areas can shift rapidly to reflect the movement of sensitive species or habitats. For example, if endangered whales appear set to cross a shipping route, those boats could be directed on a detour to avoid collisions with the cetaceans.

The proposal is not as futuristic as it may seem. Right now in Hawaii, NOAA uses a mapping program called TurtleWatch, which projects where loggerhead sea turtles are swimming based on sea surface temperatures. The voluntary program informs the swordfish fishers on where to avoid dropping their lines to keep from reeling in turtles by accident. Off the eastern coast of Australia, officials use data from tagged fish and a computer model to predict where southern bluefin tuna are swimming, reducing the unintended catch of other species (a problem known as bycatch).

The ideal outcome for Maxwell would be for the UN to adopt a guiding role to implementing these mobile protected areas, and rely on a scientists’ input in reviewing them.

“I agree with the concept of mobile MPAs and I certainly think this topic has a place in the discussions on implementing a legally binding instrument to conserve biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction,” says Danielle Smith, a marine policy scientist at the University of Tasmania. She adds that since the approach has been applied in national jurisdictions, it’s theoretically feasible to apply at a global scale. However, it’s also possible to improve the conventional, fixed-boundary MPAs. Smith proposes a network of global MPAs that protect key habitats and migration routes for transient species on the high seas. Also, she says static MPAs need a built-in review process so that boundaries can be adjusted as needed to meet their objectives for protecting species.

“It’s a pretty straightforward argument: habitats in the open-ocean are defined by the characteristics of the water,” says Daniel Dunn, a marine conservation scientist at the University of Queensland. “That water doesn’t stay put, so the border doesn’t stay put.” Ocean biodiversity hotspots can shift by kilometers over days or months, adds Dunn. Still, he thinks mobile protected areas should be implemented carefully to ensure they’re adequately protecting species. “The permanency of MPAs in a specific place conveys many benefits that a mobile MPA would not,” says Dunn. “What would stop certain countries from using MPAs as a rotational harvest mechanism [for fishing] and getting credit for them?” The fixed boundaries of permanent MPAs may not always accurately cover habitats, but their permanent restrictions can provide important protection for sensitive marine life. Dunn worries that replacing fixed MPAs with mobile protected areas might enable accelerated fishing and other rollbacks of environmental protections.

Unsurprisingly, adding regulations to the high seas can be a touchy subject for the industries involved, says Maxwell. But, she adds that such dynamic management policies could benefit all parties involved. For example, if you were interested in protecting blue whales using the old approach, you’d need a large protected area along the entire North American coast. But in a dynamic approach, the protected area would move with the whales, only restricting shipping and fishing when the animals are around. “If you do something that’s more of a dynamic approach, you end up with a lot less area and time that individuals are managed,” Maxwell says.

That’s why in some of the projects she’s worked on, Maxwell’s had fishermen on board with applying her approach. “They know more than anybody does,” she says. “Animals don’t stay in one place and that it’s kind of silly to keep [fishers] out of an area where they could be making a living when there’s not even the reason why.”

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Diego has put in a lot of hard work these past few years. The centenarian made headlines in January after his “raging sex drive” aided the survival of his species: He’s fathered close to 40 percent of the giant tortoises bred at a research station in the Galápagos. Now, researchers will return Diego and his relatives home to their native island of Española.

The so-called horny tortoise was one of three patriarchs at the Fausto Llerena Tortoise Center in Santa Cruz, Ecuador. The program had been running for six decades, but will close its operations now that the critically endangered species has reached a viable number, says Washington Tapia, a tortoise-preservation specialist at Galápagos National Park.

When the program began in 1965, the giant tortoise had just 14 individuals remaining, down from 2,400 adults before humans started hunting them. The species lives longer than most other vertebrates, often exceeding 100-year lifetimes. They can weigh over 500 pounds and measure up to 6 feet.

Diego joined the captive breeding efforts in 1976—and has been a star ever since. But claims about his libido are somewhat inflated, given that his sex life was orchestrated by humans.

Tortoise social behavior is still largely a mystery, so it’s hard to tell why one individual would fornicate more than others. Diego’s purported high sex drive is an “urban legend,” Tapia says: He’s certainly charismatic, but his vibrant personality doesn’t necessarily correlate with the anthropomorphic concepts of lust and desire.

What’s more, Diego wasn’t even the biggest playboy in the program. Another captive male, known simply as E5, fathered about 60 percent of the 2,000 offspring at the center. The third male, E3, apparently made no significant contributions.

In the wild, males compete aggressively for females. Diego’s species frequently squabble over shady cactus trees, which they like to share with their ladies. Longer-necked males have an easier time munching on the branches, so they often win more partners.

Unlike frisky tortoises in the wild, researchers at the Fausto Llerena Tortoise Center ensured that the males contributed to future populations as equally as possible. Such programs aim to avoid genetic skew, which could pass down harmful mutations to offspring.

The staff at Galápagos National Park also brought on conservation geneticist Joshua Miller to act as a tortoise “matchmaker,” advising them on the safest mating combinations. Miller studied a similar restoration effort with another species of giant tortoise from Floreana island. His team used genetic markers to identify which male and female tortoises were most closely related and ultimately paired individuals with the most distant relatives possible. The process was harder on Santa Cruz, he says, given the species’ modest population. He admits that Diego and E5′s dominance in the program isn’t ideal for tortoise conservation efforts: “We’re trying to avoid that skew going forward,” he says.

Still, the program is considered a win for captive breeding efforts. Stephen Blake, an assistant professor in biology at Saint Louis University, has tracked tortoise migration in the Galápagos. He emphasizes the major population boost since the center’s inception.

“We have so much doom and gloom in the world now, in terms of conservation and the environment,” Blake says. “I think it would be important to highlight the spectacular success, at least in the short term, of this Española tortoise program.”

As Diego and his extremely large family return to their native island, they’ll have to grapple with a few changes to the landscape. In the 18th and 19th centuries, humans brought invasive goats and pigs to the Galápagos, which ate tortoise eggs and damaged soils for native cacti. Park officials have recently worked to eradicate the non-native species. The newly reintroduced tortoises will also face the hazards of climate change. Like several other vertebrates, outside temperatures determine a giant tortoise’s sex as it develops in the egg. Higher temperatures could increase the ratio of female individuals and threaten a species’ ability to repopulate.

Despite these uncertainties, the staff at the center is banking on Diego, E5, and their accomplishments. Scientists have determined that it’s best to breed island tortoises in small groups and slowly transition them from captivity to the wild, where the animals can freely fight over cacti and have sex only when they want it.

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On Monday, the Trump Administration announced sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act, a move that conservation advocates say will greatly weaken the historic legislation and push more species toward extinction.

In a press release, officials said that the revisions would improve the act by reducing regulatory burdens and simplifying its application. “The Act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent, and efficient implementation,” said Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, a former fossil fuel lobbyist. “An effectively administered Act ensures more resources can go where they will do the most good: on-the-ground conservation.”

The changes affect three aspects of conservation. One is critical habitat, which is the collective areas considered essential to protect a threatened or endangered species. The administration has identified a list of exceptions to requirements for protecting these key areas. In a document summarizing the changes, officials state that habitat threats that “cannot be addressed by management actions… could create a regulatory burden,” and that examples of this include “threats stemming from glaciers, sea level rise, or reduced snowpack.” So, officials are now exempt from having to protect important habitat for species threatened by climate change. The new ESA rules also make it harder to protect what’s called unoccupied critical habitat, which are areas that are suitable for a listed species, but not currently occupied. But as the climate warms, many species’ ranges will shift. “Climate change is going to force species to move, so it’s that much more important to protect unoccupied habitat,” says Rebecca Riley, the legal director of the Nature Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In addition to the critical habitat changes, new species listed as “threatened” under the act—a step down in urgency from “endangered”—would no longer receive the same protections as endangered species. Now, when a species is considered threatened, officials will outline a specific protocol for it. This could cut back on the protections that would normally automatically extent to threatened plants and animals, Riley says, and could result in delays as officials scramble to make the tailored protocols. “These agencies do not have the time or resources to write … rules for every species,” says Riley. “It’s so ironic, but what they’re really doing is making it far more burdensome.”

There are also changes to consultations around endangered species. When a federal agency is planning an action that might harm a listed organism, they’re required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to avoid this impact. The Administration has now modified this legislation in ways that speed up the consultation process. But, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, these changes “weaken the consultation process designed to prevent harm to endangered animals and their habitats from federal agency activities.”

These revisions come at a time when global extinction rates are accelerating and about one million species are threatened with extinction due to human activities, according to a UN report. In addition, the Ecological Society of America writes that “climate change will increase both species risk and management uncertainty, requiring more intensive and controversial management strategies to prevent species from going extinct,” according to a 2016 report on the state of the Endangered Species Act.

The ESA is credited for helping many iconic American species recover, including the bald eagle, gray wolf, and grizzly bear. The 1973 act has also prevented the extinction of 99 percent of listed species by making it illegal to “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” a threatened or endangered species without a permit.

Conservation groups are gearing up for a fight. Since the Administration proposed the revisions last year, many organizations have been preparing to challenge the rule change for months. Already, California and Massachusetts attorney generals have stated they are planning on a lawsuit, claiming that the changes are “arbitrary and capricious” and their environmental impacts haven’t been considered. In a press release, the Center for Biological Diversity states: “The changes, which could lead to extinction for hundreds of animals and plants, are illegal and will be challenged in court.”

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The native bees of Fiji don’t bear much resemblance to their black-and-yellow cousins in the West. Instead, these southwest Pacific insects are colorful and metallic, adorned in brassy tones of green, blue, black, and bronze. They’re also much more biodiverse than scientists originally thought.

Researchers recently identified nine previously unknown species of these opalescent bugs, showcased in detailed macrophotography by biologist James Dorey (the photographs and their findings were described this week in the journal Zootaxa). In addition to the nine new species, Dorey and his colleagues also redescribed four known species of native bees, locating new specimens and updating their descriptions with a more current sense of their geographic diversity.

All of these new and recently updated bees belong to the same genus, Homalictus. Altogether, this brings the total number of Homalictus on the Fijian archipelago up to 13, still a relatively small genus.

As is the case with most scientific discoveries, there’s good news as well as bad. The good news is that for many years, the Fijian archipelago was thought to be lacking in bee diversity. Prior to this current research, scientists hadn’t checked in on the taxonomic status of this genus in Fiji in over 40 years.

Currently, researchers are undertaking a more purposeful investigation of native insect populations, catching and cataloguing species throughout the islands. This new finding only serves to deepen their understanding of the underappreciated biodiversity common in these topographically diverse islands.

Now for the bad stuff: Almost as quickly as they were discovered, these tiny, brassy bees are now facing possible extinction. Of the 13 native Homalictus species, 11 of them live at least 800 meters above sea level. This elevation, which comprises only 2 percent of the land area of Fiji, is often restricted to the tops of mountains and heavily affected by climate change.

This situation, study co-author Mark Stevens states in a press release, “highlights the vulnerability of highland-restricted species to a warming climate.”

Other unique geographic factors further compound this risk. Fiji’s highland habitat is becoming more crowded as animals move to higher elevations to escape rising tides and changing temperatures. The bees also have to contend with noxious weeds and human impacts (mountain peaks are very popular tourist destinations). To drive this point home, researchers bestowed an intentionally portentous name on one of the newly discovered species: Homalictus terminalis. The name is meant to highlight the precarious position of this species, and the genus as a whole.

“Homalictus terminalis…like many Fijian bees, it is nearing its limit and is at risk of climate-related extinction,” says Dorey. So far, H. terminalis, along with several other Homalitus species, have only been found to live on a single mountain top. Loss of these pollinators could pose a significant threat to Fiji’s isolated island ecosystem.

“This raises real concerns about the extinction of many highland species in Fiji,” says co-author Mark Schwartz, “and across all of the tropics.”

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Rhinos are massive, gorgeous, creatures with very few natural predators. Despite this, these beauties are critically endangered and are tough to find outside of wildlife parks and reserves. This is mostly due to an increase in poaching. But according to a recent study, protection could come from an unlikely source: The small but mighty oxpecker.

Rhinos are nearly blind as a bat and tend to fly solo, which makes detecting an unfriendly hunter or defending themselves from one a tricky task. But a winged, vampire-like frenemy could be the difference between a rhino roaming scot-free and being surrounded by danger.

The relationship between rhinos and oxpeckers goes way back. In fact, the Swahili word for the bird is quite literally “the rhino’s guard.” In a seemingly mutualistic relationship, the oxpeckers ride around on the backs of rhinos, picking ticks off their backs and giving out a warning hiss when predators including humans ventured too close.

But the benefits of this relationship had never been demonstrated scientifically, until this past week. A new study in Current Biology shows that when a rhino has an oxpecker riding around on its rump, the animal has a much better chance of avoiding people altogether.

The authors of the study spent over a year in South Africa following around the massive beasts. They initially tagged around a dozen rhinos to keep track of their location. Then they went back out to find whatever rhinos they could. Of the rhinos they found in their second search, the ones that were already tagged, and they were able to find their location ahead of time and essentially “stalk them”, had a 56 percent chance of roaming around with a bodyguard on board.Further, the ones that were untagged (meaning they hadn’t found them before and tagged them) were much less likely to have an oxpecker on their backs.

‘‘There’s a whole heap of [untagged rhinos] avoiding us because they have oxpeckers on their back,” said South Africa-native Roan Plotz, an author of the study and an environmental science lecturer at Victoria University in Australia.

Next, they practiced sneaking up exclusively on the tagged rhinos that they could more easily hunt down and recorded whether or not they had a bird riding along or not.

Rhinos with no oxpecker looking after them only noticed their human stalkers about a quarter of the time, at a distance of around 23 meters (about 75 feet). With an oxpecker guard, however, the animals detected a human creeper 100 percent of the time at a much larger 61-meter (200 feet) range. The birds provided a clear advantage to keeping away from potential hunters.

However, the relationship between bird and beast is more complicated than it seems. Plotz also found that the birds, who rely on the rhinos for sustenance, were more likely to target open bleeding lesions on the rhinos for a meal than tick-heavy spots, meaning the birds prefer to pick and snack on a rhino’s painful scabs than it’s bothersome ticks. That’s about as lovely for the rhinos as it sounds.

“Feeding on lesions or blood is a parasitic behavior,” says Plotz.

And it’s not just rhino sores that sound delectable to an oxpecker. Other African wildlife, like African buffalo, get lesions but roll around or shake their horns to shoo away the parasitic birds every time one comes near them. Rhinos, on the other hand, tolerate the icky behavior.

“There has been a widespread belief that the mammal-oxpecker interaction is a mutualism, i.e., that both species receive benefits from it,” says Judith Bronstein, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona University not involved in the study. “The authors know better, which I really like.”

But for the rhinos, the benefit of having a bodyguard outweighs the fact that the bodyguard is low key eating their flesh. After all, relationships always come with some kind of cost-benefit analysis, whether it’s between a hungry bird or an annoying roommate. As long as the benefit is in our favor, sometimes it’s worth it to put up with a little bit of bad behavior, Plotz says.

“In any relationship, I suppose we all do that.”

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In 2011, wildlife researchers in Southern California were overjoyed to find that a new male mountain lion had wandered into the Santa Ana Mountains, joining a small and isolated population of the big cats there. By the time his radio collar stopped working in December 2013, M86 had fathered at least 11 kittens—a huge flux of genetic diversity for the inbred population of less than 20 cougars. He was the only new cat to successfully join and reproduce with that group in 15 years.

But then, in 2015, his near-decomposed body was found along one of the roadways framing his habitat, presumably hit and killed by a car.

This is a common fate among Southern California wildcats. The Santa Ana population, located southeast of Los Angeles, is particularly is at risk of death by car collision. And the nearby Santa Monica mountains’ population is not doing much better. Now, a new study shows that these groups’ isolation—largely a result of roads, homes, and other development divvying up their once-contiguous habitat—puts them at risk of extinction by 2050, especially if inbreeding begins to degrade their health.

“We can’t just sit on this issue—we’ve known about the potential issues for a long time,” says T. Winston Vickers, one of the study’s authors and a veterinarian at the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis. “The moral of the story is more animals need to get across the road.”

Without the ability to roam into new territory, the cats in these small groups inevitably breed with close relatives. Scientists are worried about inbreeding depression, in which genetic defects from inbreeding impact survival. It happened to Florida panthers: in the 1990s, they numbered fewer than 30, and were in such poor health from inbreeding that biologists had to bring in cougars from Texas to mate with them and help the population recover.

Inbreeding adds to the many threats the SoCal mountain lions already face—collisions on roadways, getting shot by landowners after the cats have hunted livestock (although there’s been some progress here), and growing wildfires. Their small numbers put them especially at risk of extinction should a big fire or virulent illness strike.

To figure out how imminent that extinction might be, biologists used data collected on the cats from the 1990s to 2016. There was DNA information drawn from blood and tissue samples, plus estimates of the number, ages, and sexes of the mountain lions. They then fed that information into a model that considered how factors like immigration (cats moving in from outside populations) and inbreeding affected their odds of survival.

Even without accounting for inbreeding depression, the study concludes that the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountain cats have a 16 to 29 percent chance of extinction by 2050. The odds decreased with more immigration, but then the scientists added in the potential effect of inbreeding. By their estimates, the median time to extinction with inbreeding depression would be about 15 years from now.

Should they disappear, we’d lose more than striking, iconic carnivores. They provide benefits to the ecosystems they inhabit. Like any top predator, they keep prey populations—in this case, mostly mule deer—in check, which in turn protects vegetation from being overly grazed.

The news is especially worrisome because some mountain lions are already showing signs of inbreeding defects, says Vickers. “We have detected or captured two lions with kinked tails, and they were the two most inbred animals in the population,” says Vickers. The Florida panthers also had these kinked tails at the same time that they were having other inbreeding-related issues, such as greater mortality and smaller litter size. “It does worry us that maybe we’re starting to see the first signs of inbreeding-related physical abnormalities.”

The Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountain lions are not the only isolated population in California. There’s about six groups on the coast that are essentially “islands” or “semi-islands,” says Vickers. The results of the study are “clearly a warning that the current paths are going to result in all likelihood in multiple populations that have these same issues.”

For Vickers, it’s a demonstration of just how impacted these areas have become by highways, shopping malls, and homes. “Here’s a type of animal that’s incredibly mobile, basically leaps tall buildings in a single bound, they’re really super skilled animals, and yet humans have found a way to divide them up,” he says. “I think it tells us how powerful humans are at altering the landscape.”

The news is gloomy, but it also shows a clear way to help the cats survive: bringing new individuals into these populations. “The nice thing is that the model shows that with just slightly higher levels of immigration we can actually see these populations maintain their genetic diversity and the extinction probability goes way down,” says John Benson, the study’s lead author and vertebrate ecologist at the University of Nebraska.

The key is habitat connectivity. There are two main strategies for this: protecting the habitat corridors the cats already use from development, and building bridges to re-connect currently isolated areas. In the short term, even transporting cats around between different mountain ranges could bring a boost to their health and chances of surviving. “For decades, literally, it’s been known that there needs to be better connectivity for wildlife,” says Vickers. “I think it’s time we start putting protocols in place for moving animals.”

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Last Thursday, the Trump administration announced a proposal to cut provisions in the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—the law that for almost half a century, has protected plants and animals at risk of extinction. The law has broad and bipartisan support across the country, with around 80 percent of Americans expressing their support for the law.

Announced jointly by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—the two agencies that govern the ESA—the proposed changes aim to “improve collaboration, efficiency, and effectiveness,” but those opposing the proposal argue that it may leave some plants and animals more vulnerable.

For conservationists, one of the most concerning changes is striking out language that previously prevented economics from factoring in on decisions to protect species. As the act stands now, how to best preserve a vulnerable habitat is based purely on scientific data, not cost. Some worry that removing this rule could give businesses the go-ahead to develop near protected habitats. In addition, the new proposal means threatened species would no longer be extended the same protections as endangered ones—threatened species would be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

“Species are literally of infinite value, they’re priceless. It shouldn’t be a question of cost,” says Bob Dreher, senior vice president for conservation programs for the nonprofit organization Defenders of Wildlife, regarding the allowance of economic consideration into the fate of a vulnerable plant or animal.

“Although a number of these regulatory changes may be fairly minor and may make sense, there’s virtually nothing we see in this package that actually enhances protection of endangered species,” he says. “And there are a number of provisions that may leave species exposed to threats. It really isn’t a package of regulations an administration that really cared about endangered species would be putting out.”

Right now, the ESA protects more than 1,600 plants and animals at risk of extinction, or at risk of becoming endangered. The act has been criticized in the past for delisting animals who still may be in need of protection, but the act has also helped more than 50 endangered or threatened species recover by protecting and restoring habitats, monitoring at-risk species, creating captive breeding programs, and reintroducing animals into the wild.

Here are 10 plants and animals the ESA has helped pull back from the brink.

Bald eagle

These wide-winged birds of prey were plentiful in 1782 when the U.S. first adopted the animal as our national symbol. But the bald eagle population plummeted after World War II when the highly toxic DDT pesticide was introduced. Birds were inadvertently ingesting DDT, weakening adults and causing them to produce feeble eggs. By 1963, only 417 breeding pairs were left in the lower 48 states.

The bald eagle was one of the first species protected under the Endangered Species Preservation Act (a precursor to today’s ESA). In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned DDT. The ESA was officially in place the following year, and the federal regulations protected nesting sites and helped repopulate the species through captive breeding programs. Bald eagles were taken off the list of threatened and endangered species in 2007. There are now almost 10,000 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states today.

Grizzy bear

It’s hard to imagine a predator at the top of the food chain threatened by anything. But in 1975, grizzly bears living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—spanning parts of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho—were listed as a threatened species.

Decades of logging, mining, and land development destroyed bears’ habitats, and the great creatures were often hunted for sport or killed when spotted on human land. By 1975, there were less than 200 bears left. Conservation efforts have brought the grizzly population in Yellowstone National Park back up to 700. After 42 years on the threatened species list, the bears were officially deemed recovered and delisted in 2017. But with no protections outside national parks, critics of the delisting have argued bears will be susceptible to all the same dangers that cut down their population in the first place.

Gray wolf

Like grizzly bears, gray wolves struggle to coexist with humans. At one time, wolves were as common as domestic dogs are today—sadly, these pack animals were always considered villains, not man’s best friend.

Although wolf attacks on humans were rare, the yellow-eyed canines would pick off unsuspecting livestock during the night, infuriating ranchers. Wolves were trapped, poisoned, or shot, hunted almost to extinction. By 1920, there were less than 40 left, and only a few packs persisted in Minnesota and on Isle Royale in Michigan. The species didn’t receive protection until the ESA was enacted in 1973.

By the ‘90s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had brought wolves in from Canada to begin reintroduction. Wolves were delisted in 2008, but a surge of wolf shootings in the Rocky Mountains just two months later resulted in a federal lawsuit to put wolves back under the act’s protection. The courts ruled in favor of the wolves, and by fall of 2008, they were back on the list of endangered and threatened species. In 2017, the wolf population was considered recovered, and delisted for the second time.

Humpback whale

Known for their melodic whale songs and beautiful breaches, the openness of these colossal creatures may have led to their demise. Because of their massive size and tendency to lounge near the surface of the water, humpback whales were easy prey.

The commercial whaling business almost wiped out these sea creatures completely, leaving only a few thousand alive worldwide. In 1966, hunting humpback whales was banned, and a few years later, the species was listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Conservation Act, another law that preceded the ESA. Humpback whales were delisted in 2016, and around 20,000 are singing under the sea today.

Eggert’s sunflower

When we think of endangered species, it’s easy to focus on all the beloved animals that roam the earth. But there are many wild plants at risk, too. In 1997, Helianthus eggertii—a bright, yellow flowering plant indigenous to Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina—was listed as a threatened species.

What jeopardized this tall flower’s survival is also a threat to human habitat: wildfire. Because these plants grow in such barren environments, they rely on wildfires to propagate. But of course, raging outbursts of flame are no good for humans, and fire suppression efforts made it difficult for these already rare plants to persevere. Put under the ESA’s protection in 1997, the species was able to recover through restorative burns in secured areas. Now 287 populations of the rare sunflower exist, and the plant was listed as recovered in 2005.

American alligator

Toothy

Alligators managed to survive and thrive for millions of years—until humans came along. Like wolves and whales, alligators were almost hunted to extinction. Found in the swampy, southern states, the alligator population was almost decimated due to unregulated hunting. In 1967, alligators were listed as an endangered species, and alligator hunting was prohibited under the newly formed ESA in 1973.

Twenty years later, the alligator recovered, making one of the act’s quickest comebacks. Now a species of least concern (there are around five million gators in the U.S. today), alligator hunting has been made legal again.

Tennessee purple coneflower

This striking daisy-like flower was the second plant (following the evening primrose) to be put on the endangered species list in 1979. It only existed in one place in the world: a 14-mile stretch of limestone cedar glade (also an endangered ecosystem) near Nashville, TN. Ripe with aromatic red cedar trees growing atop a bed of limestone, this otherworldly area is full of fissures where the purple coneflower grows. As Nashville developed, the species and its habitat became threatened. A conservation plan was implemented, and through protections of the ESA, the plant was recovered in 2011. This plant is now plentiful, and you can even buy seeds and try growing it yourself.

Peregrine falcon

The story of the fastest bird in the world parallels the one of the bald eagle. Falcon numbers were already on the decline due to loss of habitat, hunting, and egg collecting, but it was the pesticide DDT that really did in these kings of the air. By the ’60s, no peregrine falcons existed in the eastern U.S., and in 1970, the species was listed as endangered.

Protected under the ESA, the birds were successfully bred in captivity and reintroduced into the wild. The peregrine falcon was delisted in 1999, and there are around 3,000 breeding pairs in North America today.

Red kangaroo

Australia Red Kangaroo Large

It’s not just animals on American soil the ESA has helped recover. Found in Australia, the red kangaroo is sought after for its meat and hide. Now, the mammoth marsupials are so plentiful that kangaroo hunting in Australia is considered sustainable. But in 1974, excessive hunting put the them on the endangered species list. Shortly after, the ESA aided conservationists overseas by putting a ban on all imports of kangaroos or kangaroo-derived products. The species moved from threatened to recovered, and was delisted in 1995.

Virginia flying squirrel

It seems like squirrels are always just a stone’s (or perhaps peanut) throw away, but those that fly through the air at night are rare. There once was no shortage of coniferous tree tops in the Appalachian Mountains to glide between, but deforestation quickly pushed the squirrel species to near extinction.

Put on the endangered list in 1985, the flying squirrels were thought to have recovered in 2008, but were put back under protection in 2011. In the months after its reinstatement, conservation efforts made to regenerate forests led to a restoration of the species, and by 2013, the flying squirrel was officially declared recovered.

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Today, lions joined tigers, a few species of bears, and a host of other endangered species under the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

Subspecies Panthera leo leo, which has a range covering parts of India and western and central Africa, will be listed as endangered. Another subspecies that lives mostly in eastern and southern Africa, Panthera leo melanochaita will be listed as threatened.

“The lion is one of the planet’s most beloved species and an irreplaceable part of our shared global heritage,” Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said in a statement. “If we want to ensure that healthy lion populations continue to roam the African savannas and forests of India, it’s up to all of us – not just the people of Africa and India – to take action.”

The New York Times reported that one impetus for the addition was the killing of Cecil, a famous and much-beloved lion in July. Cecil was killed for sport by an American dentist on a hunting trip to Africa. Since then, there has been a huge public backlash against trophy hunting. But the petition to include lions under the protection of the Endangered Species Act dates back to 2011, when the Fish and Wildlife Service began considering whether to list Panthera leo leo as endangered. A study by the Fish and Wildlife Service in October found enough evidence to list them as threatened, not endangered, but in the year since, the Service changed their mind.

One of the reasons was a shift in taxonomic thinking. The African lion used to be thought of as a distinct subspecies, separate from the Asiatic lions living in India. Now, genetic testing shows that they are essentially the same. That group, Panthera leo leo has only 1,400 individuals remaining in India and parts of Africa. Panthera leo melanochaita is doing marginally better with about 18,000 individuals.

The protection means that it will soon become much harder to bring lions into the United States, dead or alive. Bringing Panthera leo leo trophies will become next to impossible in the United States, and while trophy hunting of Panthera leo melanochaita may still be allowed, the any hunters wishing to bring trophies back to the United States will have to go through a new, extensive permitting process.

A statement released by the Fish and Wildlife Service said “The process will ensure that imported specimens are legally obtained in range countries as part of a scientifically sound management program that benefits the subspecies in the wild,”

Lions aren’t listed as endangered everywhere. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List lists lions as a vulnerable population, one step above the endangered classification. But it notes that lion populations are declining, with an estimated 43 percent decline between 1993 and 2014.

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The only remaining evidence of the Scioto madtom’s existence floats in jars of ethanol tucked in the bowels of a squat warehouse in Ohio. Extracted from its jar, a madtom carcass, with its pale flesh and dull bluish eyes, looks more like a pinky-sized ghost than a venomous, bottom-feeding catfish.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature, which organizes the international species lists, declared the Scioto madtom extinct in 2013. It had last been seen alive in 1957. But the United States still classifies the catfish as endangered, despite the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—the federal organization in charge of the endangered species list—agreeing that the fish is gone. Without clear incentive to delist the Scioto madtom, yet also without proof that there are any left to save, the catfish has drifted into extinction purgatory.

It might seem simple to determine when a species has gone extinct, but declaring it is trickier than expected. Researchers can’t prove that an animal no longer exists by simply not finding it when they go out looking for it. Often biologists rely on models of population trends based on extensive surveys—which are done as funding permits, not as needed—but a recent paper in the journal BioScience supports longstanding concerns that these surveys don’t always match real population trends. Biologists believe dozens of species should be declared extinct, yet remain on the endangered list. Concerns about protecting habitat and troubles determining whether these species are really, truly extinct keep these critters in a kind of limbo.

“It’s tricky because there are two competing things that are going on with keeping on [them] on the endangered species list,” says Easton White, a population biologist at the University of Vermont. “On one hand, you don’t want to make the mistake of delisting a species that is still in existence; but on the other, if you don’t declassify species that are extinct, and leave them on the endangered species list, it dramatically inflates how you’re doing, because it keeps the extinction rate low.”

Some scientists and regulators argue that it’s time to accept that the Scioto madtom and other vanished species are gone forever, and shift focus onto species that can still be saved. “People are very uncomfortable declaring a species extinct,” says Eben Paxton, a Hawaii rare bird ecologist with the United States Geological Survey. He says species like the Kaua’i ‘akialoa, a yellow-breasted bird with a long, curved beak, the greater ‘akialoa, and the po’o-uli, are among twelve Hawaiian birds that biologists agree are extinct, but remain on the endangered list. Allowing the list to remain inflated by animals that are actually extinct, Paxton argues, “could dilute the attention from the species that really need it.”

But the stakes of delisting are high. Besides preventing people from collecting, threatening, or harming an at-risk animal or plant, a species’ presence on the endangered list also protects its habitat. Once a species is officially declared extinct, those protections can be dropped. This happened in the Burma grasslands, where the supposedly extinct Myanmar Jerdon’s babbler lived. The bird’s rediscovery in 2015, 74 years after it was last seen, spurred renewed attempts to protect the grasslands. More of the birds have since been discovered and the Wildlife Conservation Society is working with the local farmers in the Ayeyarwady Delta to implement sustainable rice farming to help the birds cohabitate with the local community, says Rob Tizard, a technical advisor for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Myanmar. These kinds of habitat protections, along with species recovery efforts like breeding and reintroduction attempts, do more than just help individual species like bald eagles, black-footed ferrets, and the Topeka shiner fish—they revitalize entire ecosystems.

There’s a credibility issue, too, according to Angela Boyer of the Ohio branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is important, she says, “to make sure that we’re not protecting something that no longer exists.”

But not all researchers are persuaded by that argument.

Though dramatic rediscoveries like that of the Myanmar Jerdon’s babbler are admittedly rare, some activists worry that animals like the Scioto madtom could be clinging to survival somewhere, too. The extremely rare purple catspaw mussel, thought to be extinct in 1984, was spotted in Kilbuck’s Creek in Ohio ten years after biologists had given up hope. “I’m a hell of a lot more worried about being wrong about the extinction of the madtom than some kind of political credibility,” says Kierán Suckling, the executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, an Arizona-based environmental group active in endangered-species issues. Suckling has identified 86 species on the endangered species list that are in a similar situation to the Scioto madtom, about five percent of the 1,704 species listed. Of these species, 62 of them were likely extinct before they were even added to the list.

In the case of these species, Suckling argues retaining them on the Endangered Species List is the better option. “It costs very little money to keep potentially extinct species on the ESA list (because no conservation is done for them other than an occasional survey) and may mean the difference between saving them from extinction or not if they are later discovered,” he wrote in an email. “There is little harm and great conservation benefit to doing so.”

The only Scioto madtom ever caught are the eighteen saved in the collection of the Museum of Biological Diversity at Ohio State University. Between 1943 and 1957, renowned biologist Milton Trautman caught them in a single location on Big Darby Creek where the water bounced over large stones on a sandy creek bed, making it possible for him to spot the elusive, nocturnal swimmers. Trautman never discovered the nesting habitat of the madtom, and speculated that the fish lived elsewhere during the rest of the year.

Since so little is known about the Scioto madtom, local scientists are left to speculate about its disappearance by studying its environment. “One of the reasons that the Scioto madtom disappeared, along with competition with other species, was extreme modifications to the burrows and banks of Big Darby creeks where the madtoms like to hide,” says Marc Kibbey, Associate Curator of Fish Collection of the Ohio State Museum of Biological Diversity. Development along the river had increased the area’s predilection to flash flooding and undercutting of the banks.

The area the Scioto madtom was originally discovered is the least protected part of Big Darby Creek, as most of those banks are private property, says Brian Zimmerman, a research associate in the Stream and River Lab at Ohio State University. The middle section of the river is tightly protected because of other endangered species, like the seven endangered mussels found there and in the nearby Scioto River. Zimmerman spends significant time surveying the populations of fish in the area and says the habitat protections for all these species have drastically increased the water quality, making the Scioto River the most biologically diverse river in the state of Ohio. He points out that when Troutman discovered the madtom, Big Darby Creek was at its very worst, full of field runoff and untreated sewage. “A lot of the species in the river that made it through that time are really thriving,” Zimmerman says. “Everything else has pretty well recovered so if it was still there we would find it. And a lot of people have looked.” Despite regular surveying for the past 60 years, no one has seen a Scioto madtom since Trautman’s original sighting.

One possibility is that biologists aren’t surveying enough, though it’s hard to know what is the right amount. In order to figure out if there was a minimum amount of time needed to determine how a species’ population is changing, White took the best datasets he could find across 822 species that had at least 35 years of continuous monitoring and figured out the minimum number of years you’d need to survey them on average in order to accurately predict the actual population changes that occurred. “On average, you get about 16 years is required,” White says, “but there is huge variability in that, so it really sheds doubt in using a simple rule of thumb.”

That’s about in line with the 10-year or three generations rule that the IUCN currently uses to model changes. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily sufficient. “It’s not really about the species, or generation time of a species, but how variable a species is from year to year,” White says. “For example, if you have a small mouse species that varies a lot per year, you could sample for a short amount of time and draw the wrong conclusion.” Based on his results, Whites says that each species really has to be modeled individually, using empirical results, or even similar species to create population models. And even with that level of evidence, extinction is still a difficult case.

“It comes down to a judgment decision, because you can’t prove extinction,” says Hawaii’s Paxton, “you can’t prove an absence.” Even for less enigmatic animals than the Scioto madtom, finding a species on the verge of extinction poses a problem: How can you tell how many of the creature are left? Paxton and others have developed mathematical models that estimate whether standard surveys miss endangered birds in an attempt to determine how many might be hiding in the Hawaiian jungle. These models incorporate estimates of population density, analyses of how well the bird hides in its environment, and information on where surveys occurred and for how long. They’re thorough, but they’re also incredibly time-consuming. The IUCN is working to incorporate this method into its own judgments of whether species are really extinct, but so far it’s not widely used.

For now, we still rely on a long, bureaucratic process for determining which species should make the endangered list. The process generally involves researchers gathering information every five years to assess a species’ status and make recommendations for conservation. These reviews aren’t necessarily new surveys. They’re more about collecting the latest information and recording any changes since the last status update.

If an animal is determined to be extinct, it goes into the delisting work plan, which is where the Scioto madtom currently resides. The last government search specifically for the Scioto madtom was in 1985, and between that and local biologists’ efforts looking for it the fish was recommended for delisting in 2009. At that point, the madtom should have gotten a specific date within a three year period by which the government would gather all the possible information available on the species, potentially including an official survey, to determine its extinction status once and for all.

Eleven years later, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has still not been delisted. The fish is scheduled to be evaluated by September 2019, says Georgia Parham, a spokesperson for the U.S. FWS, and if it’s determined to be extinct at that point there will be a proposed rule to delist it. That will be followed by a public comment period and an official ruling a year later, which could schedule it to be officially declared extinct in the fall of 2020, 11 years after it was originally recommended. “People are very reluctant to give up hope,” explains Parham.

Even if it is removed from the list, Parham says, there is an emergency re-listing process should the madtom be rediscovered, so “we forestall any kind of catastrophic event.”

But Suckling at the Center for Biological Diversity worries that once a species is delisted, even an emergency re-listing would not occur fast enough to save it. Almost half of the species that have gone extinct did so while waiting to get on the endangered species list, he says, citing a Center report examining 108 U.S. extinctions from 1973-1994. And although eight species since 1995 have gotten onto the list within a year of their emergency petitions, no species has ever returned to the list after being removed. For an animal as historically elusive as the madtom, Suckling argues, agencies should be especially conservative about delisting. “For my mind, all of the stakes point toward giving the species the benefit of the doubt until it can be properly established that it’s extinct.”

But even researchers who know the Scioto madtom best say the point of no return passed long ago. “As far as we know, this one is gone, unfortunately,” says Zimmerman. Even without government requests for official surveys, Zimmerman has continued looking for the madtom during his collecting trips over the last five years. Species like the madtom that can only survive in highly specific habitats are always vulnerable, but he says it’s disappearance is nonetheless surprising because it was last found in what is now one of the most protected streams in Ohio.

“As far as the Scioto madtom, the general agreement is that it’s gone,” says Kibbey. He starts thinking out loud, reviewing the return of water quality to Big Darby Creek, the fact that he hasn’t been there himself for several years, or that he hasn’t specifically searched for the madtom. He laughs, having talked himself back around again. “Well, who knows it might be time to look again!”

As rare as rediscoveries are, they keep scientists like Kibbey and Suckling from losing track of species and from giving up hope. But Paxton, the Hawaiian ecologist, thinks that extinction declarations can have an important public impact, too. Extinction can draw attention to broad threats species are facing due to global concerns like climate change and the spread of tropical illnesses. “Often in conservation we are looking for positive stories,” Paxton says, and although extinction is not a happy topic, “I think highlighting it could be used to be sort of a rallying point.”

That moment may come for the Scioto madtom, but it’s not officially dead yet. For now, it remains a specter floating in ethanol, waiting for its final bell to toll.

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A massive survey of hundreds of coral reefs along the coasts of nearly 60 nations found that overfishing has significantly diminished the numbers of sharks that live within these tropical habitats. Scientists did not see any sharks on nearly 20 percent of the reefs they examined, and saw only half as many sharks as they predicted in 35 nations.

However, the biologists found that sharks were thriving in a few countries. Those nations used sanctuaries and other conservation strategies, which the researchers think may be playing a significant role in restoring shark populations elsewhere that have taken a hit, the researchers reported on July 22 in the journal Nature.

“There are certain places where the shark population seems to be in reasonably good shape but…that’s probably not an accident,” says Michael Berumen, a professor of marine science at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and coauthor of the new findings. “Almost all of them are places that have made the investment—the time and energy and resources—to have effective protections in those coral reef systems.”

Marine biologists have long known that in the open seas, decades of overfishing have devastated shark populations in many regions. Shark populations in coastal areas are less well understood, however.

“We really didn’t know a lot about how they were doing at a global scale,” says Mike Heithaus, a marine ecologist and dean of the college of arts, sciences, and education at Florida International University in Miami. To find out, Heithaus, Berumen, and their colleagues—a team of more than 100 scientists from around the world—placed cameras baited with ground-up fish in 371 coral reefs from 58 nations between 2015 and 2018.

The researchers, along with hundreds of volunteers, then combed through more than 15,000 hours of video footage. They counted very few sharks from reefs in a number of nations, including the Dominican Republic, Qatar, and Vietnam. On the other hand, sharks were generally plentiful in Australia, the Bahamas, French Polynesia, and several other countries.

Countries where sharks were abundant tended to employ a number of tactics like creating shark sanctuaries, areas where commercial shark fishing and trade in shark products is banned, setting limits on the number of sharks that can be caught, or restricting the use of gillnets and longlines. “They catch fairly indiscriminately,” Heithaus says. “Getting rid of those [fishing] gears is one of the biggest things that can be done to help rebuild coastal shark populations.”

Key to protecting sharks is figuring out which approach will work best in a particular region. In French Polynesia, where shark fishing has never been a huge part of the economy, the establishment of a sanctuary has led to an “incredible” abundance of sharks, Heithaus says.

In other places, people rely on shark fishing for their livelihood. Banning particularly destructive tools like gillnets may make more sense in these regions. Transitioning from fishing to ecotourism may also be effective in areas with particularly clear water. “You have to make sure that the benefits go to the people who would be losing out from not fishing anymore,” Heithaus says.

In Saudi Arabia, longlines aren’t often used to catch sharks so banning them would not have a very large impact, Berumen says. Establishing catch limits or a shark sanctuary in the Red Sea may be more effective.

Overall, the researchers observed 59 shark species in reefs around the world, from nurse sharks in Florida to grey reef and lemon sharks in French Polynesia. The roles that sharks play in these ecosystems are still somewhat mysterious. One possibility, though, is that sharks keep smaller predators in check that would otherwise gobble up fish further down the food chain that graze on algae.

Without these herbivorous fish, algae may be able to run rampant, especially after hurricanes, bleaching events, or other disturbances destroy coral populations. “When corals die the first thing that starts to take over the empty space left over by the corals are algae, and that algae can grow fast and they can prevent new corals from becoming established,” Berumen says. “If you don’t have sharks, the rest of the reef population might at first look to be okay, but if a disturbance comes that reef ecosystem may be poorly prepared to bounce back.”

Coral reefs help buffer coastlines from storms, shelter fish and other animals that people depend on for sustenance and income from fishing or tourism. “When you are talking about the immense value of coral reefs that are already under stress from changing temperatures, ocean acidification, and other human effects, you don’t want to be picking out other pieces that could be important to the health of the ecosystem,” Heithaus says.

However, he and his team are optimistic that shark populations can be rebuilt on many reefs where they are currently struggling.

“These [conservation] methods are not groundbreaking, earth-shattering new ideas,” Berumen says. “They’re pretty straightforward management methods that probably just need to be implemented in more places.”

At the same time, he warns, we cannot become complacent in areas where sharks appear to be plentiful.

“Just because a place has a good number of sharks right now, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have to worry about those places; it doesn’t mean that we can stop the actions that have maintained those populations,” he says.

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For the Pacific bluefin tuna, sitting at the popular kids’ table sure isn’t paying off. The stock of the fish is at historically low levels and is being dangerously overfished, a new report shows.

Fisheries scientists from the International Scientific Committee to Study the Tuna and Tuna-Like Species of the North Pacific Ocean estimate that the Pacific bluefin population has declined from its unfished level by more than 96 percent. The report warns that stock levels likely won’t improve by extending the current fishing levels. All the world’s scrombrids — a family that includes tunas and mackerels — are on the endangered list.

One problem is the majority of bluefin fishermen are snagging fish are under a year old, further hindering the species’ chance to procreate. But the extreme lack of supply isn’t deterring many buyers. If anything, low supplies of the fish have caused it to become a premium commodity, worth buying at extreme prices. Last week, a Pacific bluefin sold for $1.78 million at an auction in Tokyo.

Amanda Nickerson, the director of the Pew Environment Group has said that “the most responsible course of action is to immediately suspend the fishery until significant steps are taken to reverse this decline.” She called on the main countries responsible for Pacific bluefin fishing — Japan, Mexico, South Korea and the U.S. — to take conservational action.

So far, there’s been one minor step forward: In June 2012, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission set a quota for the tuna catch in the eastern Pacific for the first time ever. Some of the other actions the Pew Environment Group suggested were preventing fishing on bluefin spawning grounds in the northern pacific and creating size limits to reduce the number of juvenile bluefin caught.

NYTimes

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It’s official: polar bears are in trouble. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne has announced that he is accepting the recommendation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act. That means the bear is just one step from becoming “endangered,” a category reserved for species on the brink of extinction.

Kempthorne’s decision to list the bear is based on studies that show a severe decline in Arctic sea ice over the last decade, along with computer models that predict continued melting. Polar bears travel across sea ice to hunt for seals and other prey, and are likely to starve if these frozen hunting grounds disappear.

Today’s announcement is an acknowledgement by the Bush Administration that climate change is putting wildlife in peril. However, the issuance of the listing does nothing to stop the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Nor does it guarantee the survival of the polar bear.

Kempthorne said that although he is compelled by law to list the polar bear as threatened, he is taking administrative and regulatory action to limit the scope of his decision so that the Endangered Species Act “isn’t abused to make global warming policies.” Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate made another unsuccessful attempt yesterday to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

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The front room features a bounty of exotic and decidedly illegal animal products—stuffed baboons, monkey skulls, miniature crocodiles dressed in straw hats. A mannequin dons a coat made of cheetah fur. A taxidermied giraffe cranes its neck over the scene. The National Wildlife Property Repository in Denver boasts another 22,000 square feet of storage space, all of it populated by the macabre remains of endangered species. “This repository is the only one of its kind in the world,” said Colleen Schaefer who runs the warehouse.

Schaefer previously worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Los Angeles, using specially trained dogs to scan incoming ships for illegal goods. Now, she leads a small group of officers, processing the crates of illegally traded products that are mailed to the warehouse, regularly adding powder made from rhino horns, purses made from giant sea turtles, and other curiosities to the collection of more than one million animal specimens.

The fight to curb the black market wildlife trade is largely hidden from view. The warehouse is a testament to the work of officers like Schaefer, who are vital to protecting endangered species. Around the world, people are buying rare animals they wrongly believe can be used as medicine. Traders in South Africa tout lion bones as an aphrodisiac. Some in Australia claim that bathing inside dead whales can cure rheumatism, while others in China and Vietnam say that powder made from rhino horns can be used to treat fever, gout, and other illnesses. In some places, demand for rhino horns is driving the species to the brink of extinction.

Laws against poaching are helping to curb the trade of endangered animals. But, by cracking down on poachers, governments have made hunting endangered animals a more risky endeavor, which has driven up the price of of each catch, making the trade more lucrative. Once the work of small, disconnected regional operations, animal trafficking is now a far-reaching $23 billion industry.

“Wildlife trafficking used to be a crime of opportunity,” Schaefer said. “But it’s really become a global, well-organized crime syndicate that trades in various components of wildlife in order to make money for whatever else they want to use it for.”

Species are disappearing at an alarming clip, and poaching isn’t the only reason for the decline of wildlife. Human ingenuity has also taken a toll on the natural world. Cars, trucks, factories, and power plants are pumping out heat-trapping carbon pollution, which is fueling drought, floods and extreme heat, imperiling countless species. Some, like the Pacific green sea turtle, are threatened by both wildlife traffickers and climate change. The sex of these creatures is influenced by the temperature of their nest. Warmer weather is turning large numbers of sea turtles female, putting the survival of the species at risk.

Schaefer is doing her part by working to protect sea turtles from poaching, helping to give them a fighting chance. As part of that work, she and her colleagues are educating the public about wildlife trafficking, leading tours of the warehouse and lending confiscated goods to classrooms, among other measures. “So many times when I give tours or interviews, the most common thing I hear is, ‘I had no idea,’” Schaefer said. “Hopefully we can do more good.”

Bart Vandever writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, politics, art and culture.

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On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of the Interior decided not to give the greater sage-grouse protection under the Endangered Species Act as a result of “unprecedented landscape-scale conservation effort.”

Sage-grouse used to number in the millions, but in recent years, their population dropped to as few as 100,000 birds. That’s why the Fish and Wildlife Service first considered them for ESA protection in 2010.

Since then, FWS reports that conservation efforts–which Think Progress notes included cutting down on fires, invasive grasses, and habitat fragmentation–have reduced the risk to the species by as much as 90 percent. Although their numbers aren’t nearly as high as the 16 million-strong population of about 100 years ago, the 2015 estimate of 424,645 is an improvement.

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior said in a statement that, “This is truly a historic effort–one that represents extraordinary collaboration across the American West. It demonstrates that the Endangered Species Act [ESA] is an effective and flexible tool and a critical catalyst for conservation.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determines which species are classified as Endangered or Threatened under the Endangered Species Act based on these factors:

There was some concern, as the Washington Post wrote, that the listing of the sage-grouse and the subsequent protection under the ESA would be harmful to development in the region, comparing it to the listing of the northern spotted owl, which effectively shut down logging operations in its Pacific Northwest habitat. Since the grouse’s range is much larger (it’s distributed across 173 million acres in 11 states in the West), it could have an even larger impact on local industries.

Though oil companies and local governments were strongly opposed to listing the sage-grouse as endangered, the decision not to was a reportedly biological one, not political. In August, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies released a report that notes “Scientists make population estimates based on the number of male birds counted on traditional mating areas, or leks. The number of males counted on leks has increased 63% since 2013.” The FWS claims that “despite long-term population declines, sage-grouse remain relatively abundant.”

But despite the government’s rosy view on it, not all groups are sure this ruling is a good one. WildEarth Guardians, for example, was reportedly pushing for the sage-grouse’s listing.

Beyond having a particularly impressive mating dance, the sage-grouse is an important species for the sagebrush ecosystem. As Audubon reports, it’s an indicator species, which means the health of the sage-grouse can signal problems or successes in the overall ecosystem.

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The bears are back in town.

Last week, the Department of the Interior announced that the bears that had inspired the teddy bears are finally coming off the Federal Lists of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife.

The Louisiana black bear was propelled to fame in the early 1900s as the inspiration for the beloved stuffed toy, after one of their number had an (ultimately) unfortunate encounter with Theodore Roosevelt. But in the years afterward, the numbers of Louisiana black bears shrank even as the number of stuffed toys grew. By 1992, the population had shrunk to just 150 bears. Now there are around 500 to 750.

“President Theodore Roosevelt would have really enjoyed why we are gathered here today,” Secretary Jewell said. “Working together across private and public lands with so many partners embodies the conservation ethic he stood for when he established the National Wildlife Refuge System as part of the solution to address troubling trends for the nation’s wildlife. As I said last spring when the delisting proposal was announced, the Louisiana black bear is another success story for the Endangered Species Act.”

To get to this point of recovery, many farmers and private landowners across Louisiana helped restore or protect bear habitats, eventually expanding the bears’ habitat from small fractured forests near rivers to 750,000 acres of habitat.

Habitat Restoration

Teddy bears owe their origins to Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, who went on a hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902. He refused to shoot a Louisiana black bear that had been caught by part of the hunting group (though it was later killed). His decision was considered sportsmanlike, and cartoons of the encounter appeared, eventually inspiring one shop owner to create the first teddy bear toy.

Teddy bear cartoon

Louisiana black bears are a subspecies of black bear. They are omnivores that live in the forest near rivers, and some can grow to be over 600 pounds. Even though they are being removed from the rolls of endangered species, it is still illegal to hunt them under Louisiana law.

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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.

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Everyone agrees that the Pacific walrus is stressed. The large, tusked pinnipeds depend on floating sea ice to rest and give birth in the spring and summers, when the Goldilocks-sized not-too-thin, not-too-thick ice floes they require are becoming increasingly rare. But coming to a consensus on how the large marine mammals will react to that stress is less straightforward.

“While the Pacific walrus will experience a future reduction in availability of sea ice … we are unable to reliably predict the magnitude of the effect,” read the official Fish and Wildlife service finding in October 2017, explaining the decision not to list the species under the Endangered Species Act despite the service’s own 2011 assessment that it was threatened by climate change. The text continued: “We do not have reliable information showing that the magnitude of this change could be sufficient to put the subspecies in danger of extinction now or in the foreseeable future.”

The “foreseeable future” is a term that defies easy description. It appears in the text of the Endangered Species Act as part of the standard to determine whether a species is “threatened”—that is, if it is at risk of becoming endangered or extinct in the foreseeable future. If so, under the 1973 law, it must be protected. But exactly how much of the future can be reasonably foreseen has so far been left to discretion of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the two administering bodies of the landmark environmental law.

Until last week. Among a series of proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act was one provision that would define the “foreseeable future” as the time period extending “only as far as they can reasonably determine that both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats are probable.”

As definitions go, it’s not exactly definitive—the rest of the document avoids setting any threshold for the foreseeable future, or suggesting standards by which to assess it. “Each species will be assessed on its own merits and what is probable for one will be different from another,” explains Gavin Shire, chief public affairs officer for the Fish and Wildlife Service. Shire also says that the changes are meant to make the service’s decisions more transparent: “This proposed change is to codify in regulation what has been established practice for about a decade now.”

Indeed, the decision not to list walruses as threatened was made months before these proposed changes were announced, and used an argument that hinged on the difficulties of foreseeing the future.

“Whenever you’re talking about the future, there’s uncertainty,” says Noah Greenwald, the director for endangered species at the Center for Biological Diversity. “And the problem with uncertainty is you can just make anything up about the future. You can say, ‘maybe walruses will adapt to areas without sea ice, we just don’t know.’ If you use uncertainty in that way to create unlikely scenarios and then use those scenarios, you’re moving out of a land of science and moving into fairy land.”

Then again, the land of science is not the native home of many Trump administration officials, many of them former lobbyists and oil industry executives, including deputy Interior secretary David Bernhardt, who organized the proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act. Bernhardt told the New York Times that the changes will “enhance the conservation of the species” while lifting “some of the unnecessary burden, conflict and uncertainty that is within our current regulatory structure.”

Environmental groups and scientists, by contrast, see the changes as an attempt to limit the protections extended to new species. “It is difficult to place any trust whatsoever in an administration that so openly disdains data, logic, information, reason, and the critical role of science in informed decision making,” says Rod Sayler, a conservation biologist at Washington State University. “By opening the door to interpreting what “foreseeable future” means, people may discount potential longer-term threats (such as those from climate change) and argue for shorter-term perspectives and more immediate benefits of development activities.”

The Center for Biological Diversity first brought the petition to list the walrus to the U.S. government in 2008, following an established path: that year, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the polar bear as threatened due to climate change projections of sea ice loss, and the Arctic bearded and ringed seals followed in 2012. Industry groups including the American Petroleum Institute and the Alaska Oil and Gas Association challenged that designation, but the decision was ultimately upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018. Among the arguments were projections that showed the Arctic sea might experience ice-free summers as early as 2030. Already, limited sea ice has forced walruses to crowd onto land, sometimes resulting in them smothering young or stampeding each other when spooked.

The current administration has shown little indication that it intends to continue along that path. In fact, “climate change” does not appear in the text of the ESA proposed changes, nor in very many other places within the administration. Instead, the new text mentions only “environmental variability” as a potential source of uncertainty, and makes the point that “the foreseeable future for a particular status determination extends only so far as predictions about the future are reliable.”

But turning the “foreseeable” future into a matter of what is “reliable” and “probable” may invite challenges to future endangered species listings, says Dan Rohlf, an environmental law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. He says both the tone of the proposed definition and the wording act as subtle limits on the law’s power.

“It certainly could allow the services to say, ‘Probable means more likely than not, and we’re not 51 percent sure that all the ice is going to disappear by the end of the century, so we can’t make that assumption’,” Rohlf explains. “The bottom line is, either through agency implementation or through some sort of judicial action, it becomes more likely that there will be fewer species listed as the services look at ‘foreseeable future’ more narrowly.”

“What’s being proposed for the Endangered Species Act is taking the teeth out of it, both in terms of language and in terms of how it will be implemented,” says Susan Clark, a conservation and policy expert at the Yale School of Forestry. By defining the future as a “probable” outcome, Clark believes the administration is giving itself a way to avoid the responsibilities enshrined in the Act. “All biological phenomena are probabilistic things,” she says. “Nothing is certain except death.”

It’s all part of a greater strategy to roll back all environmental protections in favor of industry, she says. “And language is being inserted everywhere to that end.” Efforts to undo the protections of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts have followed a similar path, with wording that promises efficient and streamlined rules while deriding uncertainty and complication.

“This is really clearly an attack on the ESA,” says Greenwald. “Especially if you look at it in combination with their other efforts to weaken protections: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the whole gestalt. I think what’s at stake is the quality of our environment: our climate future, the survival of wildlife, the survival of species.”

One of the places where these stakes are highest is the Arctic. Last year, the Republican-majority Congress passed a tax bill that included a call for sale of drilling permits in 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Trump administration has sought to undo an Obama-era ban on offshore drilling in the Arctic, and this month granted the first drilling permit in the region since Shell’s failed 2015 attempt.

It goes to show, Greenwald say, that “you lose a fight for nature once, but you have to win it over and over and over again.”

The Chukchi Sea is part of the contested offshore drilling ban—it’s also the habitat for the Pacific walrus, which continues to feel the effects of climate change: bigger distances to cross between feeding grounds and resting places, less time spent at rest, and a food source, clams and mussels, threatened by ocean acidification. It’s true that their future, like that of many Arctic species, is uncertain—there’s no reliable evidence of what might happen next because the current rate and scale of environmental change on Earth has never happened before. All we have are the scientific probabilities and statistics and models that help us try to see into an unforeseeable future.

“Most people, I think, think that one thing leads to the next leads to the next, like a causal chain of certainty,” says Susan Clark. “Psychologically, most people need certainty–to think that tomorrow’s going to be like today, only better.” But whether we’re willing to accept it or not, she says, life is more like a weather forecast than a story of cause and effect. “There are no causal chains. Everything is probability.”

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Researchers use a range of digital technologies in the field to study animal populations. GPS collars and tags track range and migration; motion-sensitive cameras snap candid photos; pre-recorded calls and songs attract individuals so the scientists can get a closer look. Now a new tool has been added to the field arsenal for University of Montana biologists studying wolves in Idaho: the Howlbox.

The Howlbox takes the concept of attracting animals with recorded calls a few steps further. Programmed to “wake” and “sleep” with the animals, it broadcasts an audible wolf call when the wolves are active and then records their replies. Later, the researchers use audio software to identify the frequencies of each wolf’s call on the recordings, allowing them to count individuals in a population.

The study comes at a critical time for the wolf populations of the West. They are scheduled to be delisted from the Federal Endangered Species Act later this month, which means funding for more involved aerial surveillance and collared tracking will be ending as well.

Via NY Times

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Hara Woltz’s clients don’t say much — mostly just ribbit. A landscape architect and biologist at Columbia University, Woltz has undertaken the daunting task of creating road-crossing tunnels for amphibians and reptiles, based on different animals’ preferences for different tunnel attributes. Building herpetological crosswalks might seem absurd, but the stakes are high: nearly one-third of the world’s amphibian species and many of its reptiles are spiraling toward extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation from human development.

It’s one thing to build a tunnel under a road, but it’s another to build a tunnel that animals will actually use, according to Woltz. “We couldn’t obviously ask them questions,” she says, “but we could determine what they liked through behavioral studies.”

Woltz and a team of scientists from New York universities set up a series of PVC pipe tunnels of differing diameters and lengths, and lined with various materials such as soil, gravel, and cement. Every amphibian or reptile had fifteen minutes to negotiate each tunnel — if they stalled beyond that, the attempt was counted as a “balk.” The researchers used common species collected near the study site in Baldwinsville, New York — snapping turtles, painted turtles, green frogs, and leopard frogs.

Among the study’s pocket-sized participants, tunnels greater than 1.5 feet wide and lined with soil or gravel were the most popular substrate choices, because they held the moisture the animals needed to keep their skin from drying out. The researchers also found that short fences alongside the road worked well to funnel the small travelers toward the tunnels and keep them off the roads. The study was funded by the New York Department of Transportation.

“Almost everyone has had an experience with hitting an animal or seeing an animal dead on the road. It’s something that’s part of the public conscience,” says Woltz.

Volunteers of the New Jersey amphibian crossing survey have seen firsthand the toll that car traffic can have on local amphibian populations. The team hits the road the first warm, rainy nights of spring — when frogs and salamanders start moving toward breeding pools — to aid seasonal migrants across busy thoroughfares, and even, where possible, shutting down roads at migration hotspots.

As few as 26 cars per hour can cause 50 to 90 percent mortality at peak migration times, according to Mike Anderson, a coordinator of the survey and a member of the New Jersey Audubon Society. At one site in northern New Jersey, road traffic is believed to have wiped out a population of locally endangered blue-spotted salamanders. The volunteers were no match for the more than 200 cars an hour that passed through the site at rush hour. “In the end, we were only seeing a couple [salamanders] a year, so we finally just gave up,” says Anderson.

Amphibian and reptile crossing tunnels can be costly to build — the New York Department of Transportation estimates that retrofitting an existing culvert into a crossing tunnel with a guide fence on a two-lane road could cost 9,000 dollars. Woltz and the DOT want to make sure the tunnels will actually lead to lives saved. This involves building tunnels that amphibians and reptiles are not afraid to enter, as well as strategically placing those tunnels at migration hot-spots. Volunteer projects such as the New Jersey survey are crucial in identifying important sites where crossing structures could be implemented.

Wildlife tunnels have previously been implemented in Florida, Colorado, Arizona, Arkansas, and parts of Europe, with varying degrees of success. According to Woltz, those that were unsuccessful failed to take into account the unique behavioral and physiological traits of the species they were targeting. She says that understanding the needs of individual species is crucial to the success of tunnels as tools for conservation.

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If you’re tired of fretting about swine flu, here’s something else to think about: dislodged “ear rocks” — loose crystals made of calcium carbonate that can cause dizziness. These little guys are usually valuable, helping us stay balanced, until an injury or virus triggers a “rock slide.”

Also in today’s links: a levitating air conditioner, horse surgery, and more.

• A Florida woman thought she was buying a Nintendo DS for her son, but the gift turned out to be only marginally more appealing than a lump of coal.
• Scientists have gone to some extreme lengths to rescue endangered species — from dressing up like ancient priests with puppet hands, to performing a reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski’s horse.
• This is something to sneeze at: researchers have collected cosmic dust that’s more than 4.5 billion years old, which had been well preserved in comets. With mind-boggling precision, the scientists have found that two of those specks seem to have come from the huge gas cloud that incubated the sun.
• A levitating air conditioner (well, an A/C with a levitating drive shaft, anyway) is one of the first features to be unveiled as part of a worldwide push for American embassies to go green.

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Late in the evening, a government-owned catamaran departs from Galveston, Texas nearly every week of the summer. It travels through the night, a hundred miles down the Gulf of Mexico, to reach a series of reefs that rise up from the seafloor. The boat parks beside the coral for several days, abutting the edge of the continental shelf. There, biologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can plumb the water’s depths to survey its creatures.

The reefs lie within Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, home to boulders of corals, barracudas, whale sharks, and sea turtles. The sanctuary also harbors scores of young giant manta rays—the first nursery habitat proposed in the world, according to research published earlier this month.

The largest mantas glide through the water with a 23-foot wingspan, longer than a pickup truck. “They’re like gigantic flying saucers,” says marine biologist Joshua Stewart, lead author of the paper. “You’re absolutely dwarfed by these creatures.” But at Flower Garden Banks, the mantas are much smaller, a mere seven feet across on average.

Stewart, a PhD candidate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, first ventured to Flower Garden Banks in 2016, aboard a research vessel named the Manta. He was hoping to gather tissue samples from resident giant oceanic manta rays, to learn whether the group in the sanctuary was related to other populations in the Gulf. But when he spotted the fish on his first dive, he couldn’t get over its size.

“He was so excited. He was giddy talking about how small that manta was,” says Michelle Johnston, a NOAA marine biologist and Stewart’s diving partner for the trip.

“It wasn’t something that struck us as strange,” Johnston explains. She and her colleagues do most of their fieldwork in the sanctuary and didn’t think twice about the mantas’ dimensions. But Stewart, a ray expert, knew the group flapping through this patch of ocean was unique.

Stewart had seen a few young manta rays before, he says, “but it’s super rare.” In the sanctuary, the equation is reversed: mantas of many sizes, but hardly any adults. “It goes all the way from newborn pups up to right before they become mature,” Stewart says. “Some of these guys are staying there for multiple years.”

He sorted through 25 years’ worth of dive logbooks and photographs to figure out if mantas have always been hanging around Flower Garden Banks, staying until they’re big enough to journey from the reef’s protection.

Mantas have unique markings on their bellies, like a fingerprint, so Stewart could identify individuals across the records. The males’ reproductive organs, called claspers, are also visible from photographs, so he could tell whether the pictured mantas were sexually mature.

Identifying where the kiddos hang out is important because so little is known about their basic biology. “They are a group of species that have tons of knowledge gaps, despite being this popular creature that divers love to see,” Stewart says. Like many open ocean species of sharks and rays, no one has ever seen mantas give birth in the wild and next to nothing is known about their early life.

Finding important habitats for mantas also makes it easier to protect them. This year, the government listed the giant manta ray as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The move comes after recent population declines, likely due to pressure from fisheries and warming waters, which may affect the abundance of the tiny plankton mantas love to eat.

It may be a long journey out to see them, but mantas are a pretty magical fish to protect.

“It’s amazing to have a gigantic creature coming over and doing these passes over your head, just wanting to find out more about you,” says Stewart. “They are one of the coolest animals that I’ve ever spent time with in the water.”

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Scarface is dead. Not the ruthless drug kingpin of pop culture fame, but the beloved grizzly of Yellowstone, who was a favorite among parkgoers. The aged bruin—he was 25 years old—was illegally shot by a poacher just outside the park boundary near Gardiner, Montana late last year. Grizzly bears are protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and are off limits to hunting.

Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks confirmed recently in a release that the dead bear was indeed Bear No. 211, as he was known by researchers and park officials. No. 211 was famous among tourists and photographers, who gave him his nickname because of the gnarly scars and floppy right ear he had accrued over his decades of scraps with other male grizzlies over mates and elk carcasses.

His life was also heavily documented by park officials who captured and collared him repeatedly 17 times throughout the years. At his peak, he tipped the scale at a hulking 600 pounds, but had slimmed to about half that in recent times, weighing 338 pounds in 2015. The Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department attributes this to his advanced age, noting that only 5 percent of male bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem survive to age 25.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials have already started an investigation to find out who Scarface’s killer is. Grizzly bears are listed as “threatened” under the ESA. The punishment for killing a threatened species is stiff—up to a $25,000 fine and six months in prison. Killing an animal listed as “endangered” is even worse,, with perpetrators facing a $50,000 fine and a year in prison.

An outpouring of grief has already flooded the web. Scarface’s death is sure to fan the flames of an already contentious debate over whether grizzlies should be removed from the Endangered Species List. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed the species be removed this year. In 1976, when the bears were placed on the list, their population numbered 136. There are now over 700 bears in the park. Removing grizzlies from the list could open them up to hunting, a major fear among those who wish to keep them protected.

The proposal is currently still open for public comment.

Correction: this story originally incorrectly characterized the person who shot the grizzly in this case as a “hunter,” when in fact, they were a poacher. We’ve since updated the story and regret the error.

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Overfishing made the grey nurse shark endangered, but it’s the animal’s bizarre, cannibalistic embryos that are making it difficult for the species to rebound. The gestating shark pups need a “time out,” says Nick Otway, a fisheries biologist at Port Stephens Fisheries Institute in Australia. As a last-ditch effort to keep the species from eating itself into extinction, he built an artificial uterus, a souped-up fish tank that will give each unborn baby its own womb.

Female grey nurse sharks have two uteruses, in which embryos play “king of the uterus”: competing for nutrients, with the strong gobbling up weaker kin. The last shark standing in each womb devours any unfertilized eggs during a yearlong gestation, after which the mother gives birth to the two pups. The shark’s long pregnancy and low birth rate—along with people killing it because they mistakenly assumed it is a maneater—have knocked its numbers down to just a few thousand worldwide. And caretakers have had trouble keeping pups born in captivity alive, producing only nine sharks in 20 years.

Nick Otway Monitors an Artificial Uterus

Last September, Otway conducted the first trial of the acrylic uterus with 10-month-old embryos from a pregnant wobbegong shark, a non-cannibalizing, plentiful species whose young develop on the same schedule as the grey nurse’s. He replicated a shark’s uterus by bathing the embryos in 68˚F seawater. After 17 days, the fake womb “gave birth” to six healthy pups. The team plans to experiment with younger wobbegongs and adjust the mixture in the tank to a watery solution rich in urea, sodium and potassium to match the early stages of a wobbegong pregnancy.

Sharks in a Box

Before Otway rears grey nurse sharks, his crew will study and duplicate the intrauterine solution found in the mothers. Then he’ll build separate wombs for each embryo. If all goes well with the 10-year project, he could increase a mother’s brood to 20. Otway says he could adapt the device for biologically similar species, but he has no plans to make artificial human uteresus. “That might be possible, but I don’t want to get into it because of the ethical issues,” he says. “I’ll stick with sharks.”

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With its shiny golden yellow head and oversized bubblegum pink bill tipped in blue the color of the sky, the Short-tailed albatross is a bird straight out of a kid’s coloring book. But with long, slender wings stretching seven-and-a-half feet across and adapted for soaring long distances while skimming the ocean’s waves, these birds also embody the romance of the sea. Short-tailed albatross are the most endangered of the three North Pacific albatross species, and most of the world’s population of 4,200 nest on islands off Japan. However, on November 29, 2017, one was spotted incubating an egg at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, 1,200 miles northwest of Honolulu. In the bird world, that was news in and of itself. Only three Short-tailed chicks have hatched in the United States in recorded history. “Everybody was very excited when they appeared to be incubating an egg,” says Beth Flint, biologist with U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. “But we were a little suspicious because it was a late [in the season] for inception of a Short-tailed nest. Also, the egg seemed a little smaller.” Things got decidedly more interesting on January 24, 2018, when the egg cracked open and revealed a healthy and hungry chick—but not a Short-tailed albatross.

It took a week of patient waiting by biologists before the incubating parent stood up long enough for them to get a good look. The chick’s shorter bill and coloration confirmed suspicions: it was a Black-footed albatross. Measuring three-feet long and weighing 16 pounds, Short-tailed albatross are the largest seabirds in the North Pacific. Their smaller cousins, the Black-footed albatross come in at two-and-a-half feet and nine pounds. However, egg sizes of the two species can overlap, so no one was quite sure what to expect until the chick finally emerged.

Even though the little critter doesn’t represent the rare birth scientists had hoped for, there’s still reason to celebrate. The Black-footed babe could still do its part to help boost the Short-tailed population.

“Albatrosses are extremely long-lived animals, and they don’t necessarily get all their reproductive ducks in a row on the first try,” Flint says. The Short-tailed pair are first-time parents, and their experience with adoption will help them get it right the next time around. “It’s good, because even if it isn’t their egg, they’re getting practice. They’re learning how to do it.”

This isn’t the first time birds have crossed the species line to raise a chick. Last year, a pair of Bald eagles in British Columbia welcomed a Red-tailed hawklet into their nest and raised it alongside their own eaglets that, surprising some biologists, didn’t kill the hawklet in an act of siblicide. Because albatross only lay one egg a season, their chicks don’t need to fear death by a fellow nestling. On Midway, noted for being the largest albatross colony in the world, Black-footed albatross have also raised chicks of the third species nesting there—Laysan. This can happen when a storm jostles nests around, as they did in 2011 with a series of big wave events that included a tsunami triggered from the Tohoku earthquake off Japan.

In this case, no one knows exactly why the Short-tailed pair co-opted the Black-footed egg, whether they took over incubating duties after it was abandoned or if they pushed a Black-footed parent off its nest. What is known is that the pair themselves hatched on uninhabited Torishima, which translates to Bird Island, located south of Tokyo. Most albatross return to their place of hatch when it comes time to breed, a characteristic called natal philopatry; however, a few pioneers venture elsewhere.

Once, Short-tailed albatross were considered the most common albatross species in the North Pacific. But feather collectors around the turn of the 20th century, looking to supply the hat industry, clubbed the species nearly to extinction. Some reports estimate the loss of five million individual birds. With the population decimated, the only remaining breeding site was Torishima, an active volcano. What birds the feather collectors didn’t get, it was thought, a volcanic eruption did—and in 1949 scientists considered the species extinct worldwide. But in 1951, a few Short-tailed albatross returned from sea to breed. The Midway pair are likely descendants of those survivors.

The older and larger of the nesting pair at Midway, who scientists banded in 2003, sports his species’ striking adult plumage. He first dropped his webbed feet on U.S. soil in 2006. Albatrosses are known for having strong nest site fidelity. Once they select a nesting spot, they return to the same place year after year, just as this male did. He’s been nicknamed, “Lonesome George,” after the last surviving Pinta tortoise in the Galapagos, which died while conservationists searched for a female of his species with no success. Finding the perfect mate was a challenge for George the Albatross, too. A million-and-a-half albatrosses meet up at Midway every November to breed, but few looked and danced like George. Eventually, after years of standing out and standing alone, he got lucky. George’s chosen one was unofficially dubbed “Geraldine.”

“Everybody was delighted when he was first seen with another Short-tail, because for years he made attempts to dance with Laysan and Black-foots, but they were not interested,” Flint says.

Ornithologists use bands—typically placed around a bird’s ankle—to identify specific individuals that are part of scientific studies. The unique IDs are like a social security number for birds, and both George and Geraldine are banded. Because biologists haven’t been able to read the entirety of the band encircling Geraldine’s leg, they aren’t 100 percent sure who George’s selected partner is. But a partial read of the number is consistent with a Short-tailed albatross that showed up last season and was spotted performing the species’ ritualized courtship dance with George. If so, Geraldine hatched in 2008 and still displays the much-less-dramatic plumage of a juvenile.

The hawklet that was raised by eagles reportedly grew up to display some eagle-like behaviors. The news of Short-tailed albatross raising a Black-footed chick presents similar questions. Both albatross species forage in similar places and favor similar foods, so much of the adopted bird’s upbringing will be unchanged. But when it comes time to breed, will the chick try to mate with a Short-tailed albatross, or another Black-footed albatross?

“The answer is never simple,” Flint says. “The [Black-footed albatross] chick that hatched out and saw a big white breast of a Short-tail may or may not be confused when it grows up.”

That confusion wouldn’t necessarily doom the Black-footed bird to a life of solitude. Albatross species have cross-bred on occasion. A handful of hybrids exist at Midway, most of them the result of partnerships between Black-footed males and Laysan ladies.

“But there will be other clues for it in terms of the dance,” Flint says. Each species has its own specific dance moves, which are innate instead of learned behaviors. “It’s thought that courtship dances of albatross are important in species recognition as well as mate selection.” So when George and Geraldine’s young ward steps out onto the dance floor to find its own mate, genes may win out.

Meanwhile, the adopted Black-footed albatross chick is turning out to be the biggest of the season, because its parents are feeding it Short-tailed-size portions of squid and fish. Soon, it will be banded and is expected to fledge come June, taking its first flight to sea where it will stay for a few years learning the best foraging spots in the North Pacific before returning to land in search of that elusive mate—Black-footed or Short-tailed.

For now, the only thing to do is watch what happens. But it may be a long wait. On average, Short-tailed albatross don’t start breeding until six years of age. And with so few available choices at Midway, George held off until he was 15. The more imminent question to be answered, however, will come this November when George and Geraldine return for the next breeding season: Will they raise a chick of their own? Flint is hopeful they will—that this is the start of a long and fruitful relationship that will produce numerous Short-tailed albatross in the future. But one thing’s for sure. “It will be super interesting to learn what happens,” she says.

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National Geographic reports:

There’s almost no market for rhino horns in South Africa, according to the article, so legalizing domestic trade could cause smugglers to sneak the horns into countries that want them. Horns can cost as much as $300,000 in Vietnam, where they’re ground up and snorted as a cancer or hangover cure, according to the Atlantic. You still can’t legally get rhino horn powder in Vietnam with the new ruling, though; international horn trade has been banned since 1977 thanks to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES). That hasn’t stopped poachers from stealing the horns, which grow back, or from killing rhinos.

The South African government banned any horn trade at all in 2009 to prevent poaching, leaving rhino farmers like John Hume with stockpiles of horns and nothing to do with them. He and safari operator Johan Krueger sued the government to overturn the ban. A report released by Minister of Environmental Affairs Bomo Edna Molewa in 2015 revealed that poachers were still killing record numbers of rhinos.

Still, supporters of the rhino horn trade feel that horn money could help fund rhino conservation, according to Reuters. While the southern white rhino is listed as nearly threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, the northern white rhino and black rhino are both critically endangered.

You yourself probably shouldn’t snort horn powder, even if you can get your hands on it. Rhino horn is made from the same stuff your fingernails are made out of, keratin, and snorting fingernails doesn’t cure cancer or hangovers.

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40 tiger cubs, a bear, various horns, intestines, and other animal parts were discovered during a raid of Thailand’s “Tiger Temple” early this morning.

The Buddhist monks of the temple claim that the contents were saved in a kitchen freezer as evidence that they were not trafficked. The tiger cubs were all one or two days old when they died, and the cause of death is unclear at this time.

Wildlife officials will file new charges against the temple curators, the BBC reported. The charges, which are crimes against endangered species, carry a sentence of four years in prison and a fine of over $1,100.

The “Tiger Temple,” founded in 1994, claims it is a spiritual sanctuary for protecting animals. Visitors can choose different packages to experience time with the tigers and other animals, and can end up spending hundreds of dollars to interact with the animals and take pictures. National Geographic estimates that the temple makes more than $3 million a year. This follows April allegations from a former veterinarian at the temple, who accused the temple owners of trading multiple tigers to a tiger farm in Laos.

The temple refutes the trafficking allegations and claims that tiger cub mortality is high naturally, even within the temple. Tiger cubs have been saved in the freezer since 2010, when a former veterinarian decided to stop cremation and save the bodies, said the group in a Facebook post.

Tiger and other animal parts found in “Tiger Temple” freezer

This find adds to a list of allegations against Tiger Temple from government officials and nonprofit organizations, including illegal breeding of endangered species, animal exploitation, and trafficking wildlife.

The trade and care of tigers and their parts are regulated under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Tiger bones and other body parts are a huge money maker on the black market, where they are bought for traditional medicines.

Earlier this week, the Thailand Wildlife Conservation Office and the police began removing tigers from the temple, Wat Pa Luangta Bua Yannasampanno, west of Bangkok near the Burmese border. Eighty-five tigers remain at the temple, while fifty-two were removed.

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From the spammily named BestCollegesOnline comes a pretty excellent interactive tool to check out the 100 most endangered species in the world–before they’re gone. The list includes plants and fungi as well as animals, and you can sort the list by location, type, or habitat, in case you were particularly curious about creatures that live in the air above Oceania.

84: Greater Bamboo Lemur

The most endangered species in the world may come as a surprise: it’s nothing famous, like the giant panda or Amur leopard, but instead the forest coconut, native to Madagascar. It’s estimated that there are fewer than ten adult forest coconut trees left, so, um, yeah, sounds pretty endangered.

Check out the rest of the interactive list here.

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A kitten is cute. A tiger cub is cuter. Three tiger cubs playing together is basically the pinnacle of cuteness.

This week, three tiger cubs, born March 16, made their debut at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio.

The cubs, Metis, Callisto, and Elara, seemed to enjoy their new home, playing in the mud with each other and their mom, Irisa.

The cubs are Amur tigers (also known as Siberian tigers), an endangered species. There are only about 450 tigers left in the wild.

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An Asiatic lion in the Indian state Gujarat has been sentenced to life in prison after forensic evidence suggested he had killed and consumed three people.

The government had put the big cat, a member of an endangered subspecies of lion, on trial along with 16 other lions of the same pride after the sixth lion-caused death this year near the Gir Forest.

The lions, captured over the last two months and kept in separate cages, had their paw prints taken, behavior assessed, and scat examined by experts. One male lion was condemned after human material, mostly hair, was found in his scat.

Two female lions also had human material present in their scat and are being assessed as to whether they can be released. The remaining 14 cats will be released back into the forest.

Anirudh Pratap Sigh, chief conservator of forests at the Jungagadh Wildlife Circle, told the New York Times that the cats were getting a “fair trial” under observation. The male lion will live out his life sentence in a zoo.

Gujarat state is known for India’s only population of wild Asiatic lions. Killings are an anomaly that are on a small increase this year, according to the BBC.

The Gir Forest, near where all of the killings have occurred this year, has a lion population of 523, though the carrying capacity for the region had been estimated at 270 lions. In April 2013, the India Supreme Court ordered that some of the lions should be moved to a sanctuary in a neighboring state, but none have been moved since then. Gujarat authorities do not trust other states to protect the lions, the Associated Press reported.

Experts suspect that the small rise in lion attacks and killings may have to do with the high heat currently in the area, causing many people to sleep outdoors. Lions, which predominantly hunt at night, may be mistaking people for buffalo calves or other animals.

Others believe that by taking out parts of the pride piecemeal before the trial may have caused upheaval in the lion pride that could have caused more aggression toward humans.

Experts do note that there is no shortage of prey in the area, though habitat fragmentation and human population expansion are known pressures on this endangered subspecies.

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An endangered, blind catfish, originally thought to only live in Mexico, has been found for the first time in a cave in southern Texas.

The species, called the Mexican Blindcat, is a relative of the widespread Channel Catfish and other species in North America, though its coloration and lack of eyes are common with species that have evolved to live in dark and deep ecosystems.

The species, only around three inches in length, lives in limestone caves connected to the Edwards-Trinity Aquifer, which is below the Rio Grande basin.

Until now, sightings of the species were only rumors north of the Rio Grande. The Blindcat was believed to only live in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, but apparently the fish are also subterranean border crossers.

Originally discovered in 1954, the species is listed as a foreign endangered species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Zara Environmental LLC, and Texas Parks and Wildlife found the fish in the Amistad National Recreation Area near Del Rio, Texas and have relocated a pair to the San Antonio Zoo.

The researchers believe that protecting this species and its ecosystem is not only important for the survival of the Mexican Blindcat, but also for the human populations around the Rio Grande.

“Aquifer systems like the one that supports this rare fish are the lifeblood of human populations and face threats from contamination and over-pumping of groundwater,” Jack Johnson, the National Park Service resource manager at Amistad who first spotted the Texas fish said in a press release.

“The health of rare and endangered species like this fish at Amistad can help indicate the overall health of the aquifer and water resources upon which many people depend.”

The Mexican Blindcat is the third blind catfish species to be found in the United States, all of which are only found in Texas in the Edwards-Trinity Aquifer.

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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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The endangered black-footed ferret is already getting some hi-tech help from scientists. But in case vaccine-laden snacks shot from drones aren’t enough to bolster the population, the Fish and Wildlife Service has another plan: reintroduce DNA from dead specimens.

Black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes) have rallied after the population dropped to 18 animals in 1987, but the several hundred ferrets alive today are all descended from just seven of those 18 individuals. So they have hardly any genetic diversity to speak of, making the population especially vulnerable to diseases and other threats.

Long-lost DNA from frozen specimens in zoos or museums could be restored to the ferrets via clones genetically near-identical to the frozen specimens that would breed with the existing population, writes David Biello at Scientific American. With gene editing, the clones could also carry and pass along resilience against disease. Geneticists plan to begin gene-editing cell cultures this year in partnership with the Zoological Society of San Diego.

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Wild canines in North America have had a complicated, controversial history, and a new study published yesterday in Science Advances adds to the current controversy of the endangered status of American wolves.

The study, the most comprehensive to date, examined the DNA of the three American wolf species recognized by the U.S. government, with American coyotes and international specimens.

The researchers found that two species in critical condition, the eastern wolf and the red wolf, are hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes, and do not have a separate ancestry. Eastern wolves were on average a gray wolf-coyote split, but red wolves were up to three-quarters coyote.

Though other studies have had different results (there have been some previous studies that completely disagree with these findings), the researchers see this as pointing to a large gap in current legislation. The Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law in 1973, makes no mention of hybrid, or admixture species.

“Our findings demonstrate how a strict designation of a species under the ESA that does not consider genetic admixture can threaten the protection of endangered species,” Bridgett vonHoldt, lead author of the study and evolutionary biologist at Princeton said in a press release.

“We argue for a more balanced approach that focuses on the ecological context of genetic admixture and allows for evolutionary processes to potentially restore historical patterns of genetic variation.”

Not so different after all

Some say that this hybrid classification could be bad news for red wolf populations, which have been vulnerable for decades.

Native to the southeast United States, red wolves found their niche after gray wolf populations were decimated by new-coming settlers. The smaller species was able to grab a foothold concentrating on smaller prey, like their coyote ancestors. Today there are an estimated 50 red wolves living in the wild.

As there is no classification for a hybrid species, there is a possibility that the former red wolf could lose its protected status with its species designation.

And there is also the possibility that the red wolf would be classified as a hybrid with mostly coyote blood, which are not protected under current legislation. Or, it could just be protected with gray and eastern wolves. All we have is speculation without any formal hybrid precedents or law.

But others say that a hybrid classification for the other species, eastern wolves, could beneficial to wolf species as a whole. Eastern wolves, recognized by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2013, have a precipitously low population. The separating of the species made room for the FWS recommendation to de-list the gray wolf, as its populations are higher due to conservation efforts in the western United States.

By saying that gray wolves, eastern wolves, and red wolves are all one species, this could keep them listed as an endangered species because of the hybrids’ low numbers. But if the gray wolf numbers continue to rise, this could complicate the issue for the other two.

Overall, it still calls into question how a hybrid species should be protected, if at all.

Precipitous decline

The study also shows that wolves and coyotes share a much more recent common ancestor than believed, which lived about 50,000 years ago somewhere in Eurasia. While hybridization isn’t uncommon in the animal kingdom, this relatively common ancestor shows the closeness between the species.

“What we’re finding with today’s high-resolution genetic tools is that hybrids are everywhere,” Roland Kays, biodiversity researcher of the Raleigh-based North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences told New Scientist. “To say it’s a hybrid, so it’s not worth protecting, just doesn’t work anymore.”

Researchers are continuing work on the DNA of wolves, coyotes and even man’s best friend through the Canine Ancestry Project. This study will definitely not solve the issue, especially as some outside researchers disagree with some of the sample selections, saying they are not representative due to increased hybridization in certain populations at times. But with more research, we may someday solve the hybrid question.

“We put things in baskets, but it doesn’t work that way in nature,” Robert Wayne, study coauthor and evolutionary biologist at the University of California Los Angeles told The New York Times.

“We need to have a hybrid policy.”

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Clinging To A Precipice

In remote northwest China, the cliffs of the Tian Shan mountains provide the last holdout for the Ili pika, a tiny rabbit relative with a shrinking habitat.

The Ili pika was always a rare and elusive creature, and it’s becoming rarer. Last summer it was photographed for the first time in 20 years, and the adorable photos were published this month in National Geographic‘s China edition.

Conservationist Li Weidong, the photographer, discovered the species in 1983. Since then, he’s documented the Ili pika’s decline. Analyzing tracks and droppings, Li and another scientist estimate that the Ili pika’s numbers dropped from 2,900 in the 1990s to 2,000 in 2005. There may be only 1,000 Ili pika left today.

“I discovered the species, and I watched as it became endangered,” Li told CNN. “If it becomes extinct in front of me, I’ll feel so guilty.”

Climate change is believed to be the culprit behind the Ili pika’s demise. As mountaintop glaciers melt, the animals have to climb to higher and higher elevations to find a permanently snowy habitat. Soon they may have nowhere else to go.

Though the IUCN lists the Ili pika as endangered, CNN notes that the animal is not included on China’s List of Wildlife under Special State Protection.

Nĭ Hăo, Ili Pika

[National Geographic, CNN]

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Here’s something you probably don’t hear very often: A nuclear power plant that lights up thousands of homes in Florida has become a major refuge for a once-endangered species. Canals designed to divert power plant water provide a safe haven for crocodiles, a supremely cold-sensitive species that once numbered fewer than 300 in this country. The closed-loop cooling system channels warmed water into the canals, heating the crocs’ once-disappearing habitat.

“It’s wound up being a win-win situation for the animals,” said Bianca Martinez Cruz, spokeswoman for Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point nuclear power plant.

Crocodiles’ only habitat in this country is in south Florida (where they coexist with the more common alligator; it’s the only place in the world that boasts both species), but that habitat was slowly eroded by development throughout the mid-20th century, as this AP feature story says. By the 1970s, there were fewer than 300 crocs in the state, and the federal government classified them as endangered.

But in 1977, Turkey Point employees happened upon a crocodile nest in one of the then-new plant’s cooling canals. The company set up a monitoring program to ensure they didn’t hurt the animals (none has been found with any radiation), and this program has helped track their rebound, according to the AP. Crocodile monitoring entails capturing the beasts, microchipping them and weighing them. A video below shows what this work looks like. Florida Power has a team of biologists who keep tabs on the crocs — not exactly the type of job you would expect to find at a nuclear plant.

Now there are something like 1,500 crocs in south Florida, hundreds of which live at Turkey Point. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service credits the power company for the population increase.

AP

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The California Condor is the quintessential underdog success story. In the late 1980s, habitat loss and poisoning reduced the population to just 22 individuals, all of whom lived in captivity. But thanks to a robust conservation effort, there are now more than 400 worldwide, both in the wild and in captivity.

But just because they’ve recovered quickly doesn’t mean the population is no longer vulnerable. Now that many California Condors have been reintroduced to the wild, they are facing some severe dietary challenges.

In a paper published today in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers found that one of the California Condor’s favorite food sources, the dead carcasses of marine mammals, might actually be hurting them.

“Even though marine mammals are a potentially abundant food source for condors, they might not be that safe to eat,” said Carolyn Kurle, lead author of the study.

Marine mammals like seals, sea lions, and others are often at or near the top of their food chain. That means chemicals like mercury, pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (formerly used in electrical equipment), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (used as a flame retardant) can build up in the bodies of marine mammals as they consume other food contaminated by those substances.

When condors then consume the dead marine mammals, they ingest all those pollutants, and even a metabolized form of DDT called DDE that remains in the environment decades after being banned as a pesticide. DDT can cause eggshells of birds like the condor to thin, leaving them vulnerable and likely to perish. These contaminants are a “potential threat to the ongoing recovery of California condors,” said Kurle.

The research reveals a potential stumbling block for the relatively recently released condors. It’s unclear what, if anything can be done to ensure the safety of a condor’s diet, but knowing that there is a problem is the first step towards addressing it.

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