Welcome

Despite large vol­umes of data cur­rently avail­able on mankind, it is sur­pris­ing how lit­tle we know about other species. A paper pub­lished on 19 April in the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences (PNAS) reveals that crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion, such as fer­til­ity and sur­vival rates, is miss­ing from global data for more than 98 per­cent of known species of mam­mals, birds, rep­tiles, and amphibians.

Man­tled guereza mon­keys (Colobus guereza) are among many species of ‘howlers’ assessed as endan­gered by IUCN Red List, often due to defor­esta­tion. Know­ing fun­da­men­tal demo­graph­ics, such as fer­til­ity rates and how many ado­les­cents sur­vive to adult­hood, equips sci­en­tists to assess whether pop­u­la­tions can stave off these threats — and for how long.
Image credit: Species360.

This gap has far-​reaching impli­ca­tions for con­ser­va­tion­ists seek­ing to blunt the impact of mass extinc­tions. IUCN Species Sur­vival Com­mis­sion sci­en­tists, Con­ven­tion on Inter­na­tional Trade in Endan­gered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES), TRAF­FIC, Mon­i­tor, and oth­ers tasked with sav­ing thou­sands of species require com­pre­hen­sive data on which to make informed decisions.

Dalia A. Conde, lead author, Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Cen­ter on Pop­u­la­tion Dynam­ics and Depart­ment of Biol­ogy, Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark, Odense, Den­mark, and Species360 Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ence Alliance director

A mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team led by Conde and researchers from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Den­mark, Oxford, the Max Planck Insti­tute for Demo­graphic Research (Ger­many), Rad­boud Uni­ver­sity (the Nether­lands), San Diego Zoo Global Insti­tute for Con­ser­va­tion Research (USA) and Species360 Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ence Alliance, along­side more than 17 other aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tions, believes we can sub­stan­tially increase what we know by apply­ing robust ana­lyt­ics to data long over­looked. Data from a pre­vi­ously unused source on cap­tive wild ani­mals, orig­i­nat­ing in zoos, aquar­i­ums, sanc­tu­ar­ies, research and edu­ca­tion centres.

Pre­dict­ing when species are at risk, and how best to bol­ster pop­u­la­tions, requires know­ing when females repro­duce, how many infants or hatch­lings will sur­vive to ado­les­cence, and how long adults live. To under­stand what data are cur­rently avail­able, and mea­sure the void, the team devel­oped a Species Knowledge Index (SKI) that clas­si­fies demo­graphic infor­ma­tion for 32,144 tetrapods, or species of mam­mals, birds, rep­tiles and amphibians.

“The index pro­vides sig­nif­i­cant infor­ma­tion that, in con­junc­tion with genetic data, allows esti­ma­tions of events that affect pop­u­la­tion via­bil­ity. Severe pop­u­la­tion declines, some­times called genetic bot­tle­necks, influ­ence the sus­tain­abil­ity of pop­u­la­tions, as we have found in study­ing endan­gered rhi­nos,” said Oliver Ryder, Ph.D., Direc­tor of Con­ser­va­tion Genet­ics, San Diego Zoo Global.

Using go-​to global sources of infor­ma­tion, the index reg­is­ters com­pre­hen­sive birth and death rates for just 1.3 % of these major classes of species. A map, which illus­trates the demo­graphic knowl­edge avail­able for all tetra­pod classes, shows that many remain largely blank.

That changes when Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ence Alliance researchers add a pre­vi­ously untapped source, the Zoo­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment Sys­tem (ZIMS). By invit­ing ZIMS to the party, the Species Knowl­edge Index gains an eight­fold increase for com­pre­hen­sive life table data used to assess populations.

Dalia A. Conde

“Class by class, from mam­mals through amphib­ians, we saw large blank spaces fill with points rep­re­sent­ing usable data,” Conde added. Nonethe­less, the researchers note that cau­tion is required when inter­pret­ing data from cap­tive pop­u­la­tions. Zoo and aquar­ium pop­u­la­tions are inten­sively man­aged, there­fore, likely to dif­fer from wild pop­u­la­tions. This will lead to, espe­cially, dif­fer­ent sur­vival and repro­duc­tion rates. So, care must be taken when using data from cap­tive pop­u­la­tions to model wild populations.

ZIMS is curated by wildlife pro­fes­sion­als work­ing within zoos, aquar­i­ums, refuge, research, and edu­ca­tion cen­tres in 97 coun­tries. It is main­tained by Species360, a non-​profit member-​driven organ­i­sa­tion that facil­i­tates infor­ma­tion shar­ing among its nearly 1,200 insti­tu­tional mem­bers, and is the world’s largest set of wildlife data.

The study, ‘Data gaps and oppor­tu­ni­ties for com­par­a­tive and con­ser­va­tion biol­ogy,’ sug­gests a value far beyond the data itself. As Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ence Alliance and other researchers apply ana­lyt­ics to data aggre­gated across global sources, includ­ing ZIMS, they glean insights that impact out­comes for species in dan­ger of extinc­tion. More­over, this can pro­vide key insights for com­par­a­tive and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy, such as under­stand­ing the evo­lu­tion of ageing.

Demo­graphic Species Knowl­edge Index
A mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team of 33 sci­en­tist includ­ing data ana­lysts, biol­o­gists, and pop­u­la­tion dynam­ics researchers devel­oped the Species Knowl­edge Index to map just how much we know about species world­wide. The first, the Demo­graphic Species Knowl­edge Index, aggre­gates, analy­ses and maps data from 22 data­bases and the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened species™.

Sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the land­scape of demo­graphic knowl­edge for tetrapods. (A) Rep­tilia. (B) Mam­malia. © Aves. (D) Amphibia. Pink shades rep­re­sent high knowl­edge of sur­vival and var­i­ous lev­els of knowl­edge about fer­til­ity. Dark gray shades rep­re­sent low or fair knowl­edge, and the light gray areas indi­cate no demo­graphic knowl­edge. For the entire range of tetrapods, only 1.3% of species have high sur­vival and fer­til­ity infor­ma­tion, less than 0.6% have high sur­vival but lit­tle or no fer­til­ity infor­ma­tion, 43.3% have lim­ited sur­vival and fer­til­ity infor­ma­tion, and 54.8% have no sur­vival or fer­til­ity infor­ma­tion.
Source: Dalia A. Conde et al., 2019. Data gaps and oppor­tu­ni­ties for com­par­a­tive con­ser­va­tion biol­ogy, PNAS.
License: Cre­ative Com­mons License 4.0 (CC BY-​NC-​ND)

(Source: Species360 Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ence Alliance press release, 19.04.2019)

Paleontologists of the Natural history museums in Copenhagen and Helsinki have succeeded in mapping historical biodiversity in unprecedented detail. For the first time, it is now possible to compare the impact of climate on global biodiversity in the distant past - a result that paints a gloomy picture for the preservation of present-day species richness. The study is first published on 25 March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) lying on the rocks near the coastline of Hudson Bay.
Credit Chris Bobkowski, blogger on Earthwatch.org

The diversity of life on Earth is nearly unimaginable. There is such a wealth of organisms that we literally can't count them all. Nevertheless, there is broad consensus that biodiversity is in decline and that Earth is in the midst of a sixth extinction event - most likely due to global warming. The sixth extinction event reflects the loss of plant and animal species that scientists believe we are now facing. It is an event that, with overwhelming probability, is caused by human activity.

Chris­t­ian M. Ø. Ras­mussen, lead author, Nat­ural His­tory Museum of Den­mark, Uni­ver­sity of Copenhagen

Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor Chris­t­ian Mac Ørum Ras­mussen, who led this ground­break­ing study, fur­ther explains, “thus far, it has been a big prob­lem that some of the largest fluc­tu­a­tions in bio­di­ver­sity through geo­log­i­cal time have been excep­tion­ally tough to grasp and accu­rately date. As such, it has been dif­fi­cult to com­pare pos­si­ble envi­ron­men­tal impacts and their effects on bio­di­ver­sity. Among other things, this is because cli­mate change takes place quite abruptly, in a geo­log­i­cal per­spec­tive. As pre­vi­ous cal­cu­la­tions of bio­di­ver­sity change in deep time have been based on a time-​binning par­ti­tion­ing divided into 10 — 11 mil­lion year inter­vals, direct com­par­isons with cli­mate impacts have not been pos­si­ble. Our new bio­di­ver­sity curves pro­vide unprece­dent­edly high tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion, allow­ing us to take a very large step towards the under­stand­ing and coher­ence of climate-​related and envi­ron­men­tal impacts on over­all bio­di­ver­sity — both in rela­tion to species devel­op­ment and extinc­tion event intervals.”

A new method
Researchers at the uni­ver­si­ties of Copen­hagen and Helsinki have devised a new method that can pro­vide unprece­dented accu­racy in the por­trayal of bio­di­ver­sity fluc­tu­a­tions on geo­log­i­cal time scales. This has lead to new insight, both in rela­tion to what spurred the largest marine spe­ci­a­tion inter­val in Earth’s his­tory, as well as to what caused our planet’s second-​largest mass extinc­tion event. This method has deployed, among other things, big data and the pro­cess­ing of large quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion col­lected on fos­sils, cli­mate and his­toric geo­log­i­cal changes. The study cov­ers a pre­his­toric period char­ac­ter­ized by dra­matic changes to Earth’s cli­mate and envi­ron­ment. Among other things, it doc­u­ments increas­ing lev­els of oxy­gen and heavy vol­canic activ­ity as well as impor­tant events that doc­u­ments the rise in the num­ber of mul­ti­cel­lu­lar marine species, such as dur­ing the Cam­brian Explo­sion.

“The stud­ies we have been engaged with for over four years have, for the first time, made it pos­si­ble to com­pare devel­op­ments related to bio­di­ver­sity with cli­mate change, for exam­ple. We are now able to see that pre­cisely when ocean tem­per­a­ture fell to its cur­rent level, there was also a dra­matic increase in bio­di­ver­sity. This sug­gests that a cooler cli­mate — but not too cold — is very impor­tant for con­serv­ing bio­di­ver­sity. Fur­ther­more, we find that the very large extinc­tion event at the end of the Ordovi­cian period (485 — 443 mil­lion years ago), when upwards of 85% of all species dis­ap­peared, was not “a brief ice age” — as pre­vi­ously believed — but rather a sev­eral mil­lion years long cri­sis inter­val with mass extinc­tions. It was most likely prompted by increased vol­canic activ­ity. It took nearly 40 mil­lion years to rec­tify the mess before bio­di­ver­sity was on a par with lev­els prior to this period of vol­canic caused death and destruc­tion,” empha­sizes Chris­t­ian Mac Ørum Rasmussen.

Work­ing meth­ods
Among other things, the researchers have made use of a large data­base known as ‘the Pale­o­bi­ol­ogy Data­base ‘. It con­tains data about fos­sils col­lected from across the planet and from dif­fer­ent peri­ods of Earth’s geo­log­i­cal his­tory. Until now, pulling data to pro­vide an over­all pic­ture and assess­ment of the global sit­u­a­tion with high tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion has not been pos­si­ble due to the ardu­ous nature of the process. The new study has over­come this obsta­cle by first con­struct­ing a glob­ally defined schema of ‘time inter­vals’ that divided a 120 million-​year-​long period into 53 ‘time bins’. They then jux­ta­posed these bins of time with rock for­ma­tions in which fos­sils were found. Then, the researchers analysed their data using a sta­tis­ti­cal method typ­i­cally used by biol­o­gists to cal­cu­late the preva­lence of ani­mal life in a given area. The pale­on­tol­o­gists used the method to cal­cu­late the diver­sity of gen­era per time bin, as well as ‘to pre­dict’ how many gen­era ought to occur in sub­se­quent time bin. Not only did this method­ol­ogy allow for researchers to achieve an unprece­dented high tem­po­ral accu­racy, it also let them account for any lack­ing fos­sil remains over geo­log­i­cal time.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Copen­hagen press release, 04.04.2019)

Pale­on­tol­o­gists at Ohio Uni­ver­sity have dis­cov­ered a new species of meat-​eating mam­mal larger than any big cat stalk­ing the world today. Larger than a polar bear, with a skull as large as that of a rhi­noc­eros and enor­mous pierc­ing canine teeth, this mas­sive car­ni­vore would have been an intim­i­dat­ing part of the east­ern African ecosys­tems occu­pied by early apes and monkeys.

Sim­bakubwa kutokaafrika was a car­ni­vore that lived about 22 mil­lion years ago.
Illus­tra­tion (and recon­struc­tion) by Mauri­cio Anton

In a new study pub­lished online on 17 April in the Jour­nal of Ver­te­brate Pale­on­tol­ogy, the researchers name Sim­bakubwa kutokaafrika, a gigan­tic car­ni­vore known from most of its jaw, por­tions of its skull, and parts of its skele­ton. The 22-​million-​year-​old fos­sils were unearthed in Kenya decades ago as researchers can­vassed the region search­ing for evi­dence of ancient apes. Spec­i­mens were placed in a drawer at the National Muse­ums of Kenya and not given a great deal of atten­tion until Ohio Uni­ver­sity researchers Dr. Nancy Stevens and Dr. Matthew Borths redis­cov­ered them, rec­og­niz­ing their significance.

Dr. Matthew Borths, lead author, Depart­ment of Bio­med­ical Sci­ences, Her­itage Col­lege of Osteo­pathic Med­i­cine, Ohio Cen­ter for Ecol­ogy and Evo­lu­tion­ary stud­ies, Athens, USA

Sim­bakubwa jaw vs lion skull.
Credit: Ohio Uni­ver­sitySim­bakubwa is Swahili for ‘big lion’ because the ani­mal was likely at the top of the food chain in Africa, as lions are in mod­ern African ecosys­tems. Yet Sim­bakubwa was not closely related to big cats or any other mam­malian car­ni­vore alive today. Instead, the crea­ture belonged to an extinct group of mam­mals called hyaenodonts.

Hyaen­odonts were the first mam­malian car­ni­vores in Africa. For about 45 mil­lion years after the extinc­tion of the non-​avian dinosaurs, hyaen­odonts were the apex preda­tors in Africa. Then, after mil­lions of years of near-​isolation, tec­tonic move­ments of the Earth’s plates con­nected Africa with the north­ern con­ti­nents, allow­ing flo­ral and fau­nal exchange between land­masses. Around the time of Sim­bakubwa, the rel­a­tives of cats, hye­nas, and dogs began to arrive in Africa from Eurasia.

As the rel­a­tives of cats and dogs were going south, the rel­a­tives of Sim­bakubwa were going north. “It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing time in bio­log­i­cal his­tory,” Borths says. “Lin­eages that had never encoun­tered each other begin to appear together in the fos­sil record.”

The species name, kutokaafrika, is Swahili for ‘com­ing from Africa’ because Sim­bakubwa is the old­est of the gigan­tic hyaen­odonts, sug­gest­ing this lin­eage of giant car­ni­vores likely orig­i­nated on the African con­ti­nent and moved north­ward to flour­ish for mil­lions of years.

Ulti­mately, hyaen­odonts world­wide went extinct. Global ecosys­tems were chang­ing between 18 and 15 mil­lion years ago as grass­lands replaced forests and new mam­malian lin­eages diver­si­fied. “We don’t know exactly what drove hyaen­odonts to extinc­tion, but ecosys­tems were chang­ing quickly as the global cli­mate became drier. The gigan­tic rel­a­tives of Sim­bakubwa were among the last hyaen­odonts on the planet,” remarks Borths.

“This is a piv­otal fos­sil, demon­strat­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of museum col­lec­tions for under­stand­ing evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory,” notes Stevens, Pro­fes­sor in the Her­itage Col­lege of Osteo­pathic Med­i­cine at Ohio Uni­ver­sity and co-​author of the study. “ Sim­bakubwa is a win­dow into a bygone era. As ecosys­tems shifted, a key preda­tor dis­ap­peared, herald­ing Ceno­zoic fau­nal tran­si­tions that even­tu­ally led to the evo­lu­tion of the mod­ern African fauna.”

“This dis­cov­ery under­scores both the impor­tance of sup­port­ing inno­v­a­tive uses [sic] of fos­sil col­lec­tions, as well as the impor­tance of sup­port­ing the research and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of tal­ented young post­doc­toral sci­en­tists like Dr. Borths,” said Daniel Marenda, a pro­gramme direc­tor at the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, which funded this research. “This work has the poten­tial to help us under­stand how species adapt — or fail to adapt in this case — to a rapidly chang­ing global climate.”

(Source: Ohio Uni­ver­sity media release, 18.04.2019)

Chang­ing cli­mate and ecosys­tems, and zoos, may cause more and dif­fer­ent species to inter­act. This could increase the emer­gence of dis­eases in new host species when dis­eases cross the species bar­rier. When the host species between which the pathogen jumps are evo­lu­tion­ary less related, the dis­ease could be more lethal in the new host accord­ing a recent publication.

Some dis­eases which are fatal in one species can cause only mild dis­com­fort in another — but it’s hard for sci­en­tists to pre­dict how lethal a dis­ease will be if it leaps across species.

How­ever, a new paper pub­lished online on 29 March in the jour­nal PNAS indi­cates that the evo­lu­tion­ary rela­tion­ship between infected hosts can pre­dict the impact of diseases.

Cana­dian researchers used data from the World Organ­i­sa­tion for Ani­mal Health (OIE) to track dis­eases in domes­ti­cated mam­mals, trac­ing their paths and out­comes across the world.

Jonathan Davies, co-​author, Botany, For­est, and Con­ser­va­tion Sci­ences & Bio­di­ver­sity Research Cen­tre, Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia, Canada; African Cen­tre for DNA Bar­cod­ing, Uni­ver­sity of Johan­nes­burg, South Africa

A dis­ease jump­ing from a buf­falo to a cow is mak­ing a short evo­lu­tion­ary jump, and is less likely to be fatal. A dis­ease jump­ing from a buf­falo to a cat involves a larger evo­lu­tion­ary jump and a higher chance of death. Luck­ily, this lethal­ity may cause the dis­ease to spread poorly amongst its new hosts.

Nev­er­the­less, such infec­tions are a con­cern. Many dis­eases are trans­mit­ted between domes­ti­cated ani­mals, wildlife and humans. A dis­ease that is less lethal, but easy to spread, could be even more prob­lem­atic than one with a high mor­tal­ity rate.

“With the world’s ecosys­tems under­go­ing rapid trans­for­ma­tions and cli­mate change alter­ing species’ ranges, dif­fer­ent ani­mals are com­ing in con­tact for the first time. This may pro­mote the emer­gence of dis­eases in new hosts,” says Maxwell Far­rell, the lead author of the study who con­ducted the research while at McGill Uni­ver­sity. “Pre­dict­ing the out­come of these inter­ac­tions will pose a major challenge.”

The biol­o­gists hope to expand their research, look­ing at more species, includ­ing humans, to cre­ate a data­base of infec­tion outcomes.

“We shouldn’t worry about the num­ber of dis­eases we have, we should be wor­ried about how vir­u­lent they are — whether they are in wildlife, domes­ti­cated ani­mals or humans,” con­cludes Davies.

(Source: the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia media release, 28.03.2019)

A mis­sion to trap Tas­man­ian dev­ils in the Tasmania’s remote south-​west coast has found healthy ani­mals with an absence of Devil Facial Tumour Dis­ease (DFTD).

Sci­en­tists from the Save the Tas­man­ian Devil Pro­gram (STDP), The Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney (USYD) and Toledo Zoo spent eight days explor­ing the south west wilder­ness on a quest to find and trap Tas­man­ian dev­ils (Sar­cophilus har­risii) in an area that nobody had trapped before.

One of the disease-​free Tas­man­ian dev­ils found.
Photo cred­its: Toledo Zoo & Aquarium.

STDP Team Leader, and Adjunct Biol­o­gist to Toledo Zoo, Dr Sam Fox said the trip was crit­i­cal to look at the health of dev­ils to see if dis­ease had reached this area.

“The com­bined trap­ping mis­sion across Wreck Bay and Nye Bay saw 14 indi­vid­ual dev­ils trapped,” Dr Fox said. “All were in good con­di­tion and impor­tantly, there were no signs of disease.”

Dr Sam Fox, STDP Team Leader and Adjunct Biol­o­gist to Toledo Zoo

Dr Fox led the Wreck Bay crew and said the results show that the pop­u­la­tion in this area of the south west coast is small and healthy.

“The dev­ils we caught are likely to have a large home range. They are hav­ing to travel long dis­tances along the coast to find food and are mov­ing back­wards and for­wards as they for­age for pro­tein,” Sam says. “We know this because we trapped the same dev­ils two or three times in dif­fer­ent loca­tions between our trap sites that were kilo­me­tres apart.”

“The dev­ils are restricted to the coastal fringes where food is prob­a­bly more abun­dant. There were iso­lated patches of suit­able habi­tat for dev­ils. The major­ity of the coastal ter­rain is but­ton­grass plain which is not ideal for dev­ils to find food. Nat­ural mar­su­pial lawns are fre­quented because they attract brows­ing mam­mals and are also often used as latrines,” Dr Pem­ber­ton said.

“The pre­ferred areas had food sources for the dev­ils such as pademel­ons and they also pro­vided the right habi­tat for den­ning. The dev­ils spend their time mov­ing between these small pock­ets of appro­pri­ate habi­tat. They also scav­enge along the coast­line, look­ing for other pro­tein such as washed-​up fish, or even some­thing big­ger like a whale or seal.”

Scats were also col­lected as part of the trap­ping mis­sion and they will be used to look at the dev­ils micro­biome. Tis­sue was also col­lected from ear biop­sies. The sam­ples are cur­rently being analysed by the Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney and this will shed more light on how genet­i­cally dif­fer­ent these dev­ils are to the rest of the pop­u­la­tion across Tasmania.

“The data we col­lected on this trip can give us a rough pop­u­la­tion esti­mate, based on the cap­ture mark cap­ture process, look­ing at the num­ber of dev­ils cap­tured and how many ani­mals were new or recap­tured,” Dr Fox said.

Toledo Zoo Pres­i­dent and CEO Jeff Sailer says the Zoo is hon­oured to be a part of the STDP, as both an in situ research part­ner and a facil­ity with dev­ils on dis­play — one of only six zoos in the USA that have Tas­man­ian devils.

“The Zoo’s mis­sion is to inspire oth­ers to join us in car­ing for ani­mals and con­serv­ing the nat­ural world. We can’t think of a bet­ter way to exem­plify that mis­sion than to pro­vide all the resources pos­si­ble to help save an iconic species from the brink of extinc­tion,” Dr Sailer said.

“We under­stand the vital role dev­ils play in the Tas­man­ian ecosys­tem and pop­u­lar cul­ture and are com­mit­ted to help­ing the devil pop­u­la­tion thrive for gen­er­a­tions to come.”

The south west trip comes under the exist­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion between STDP and USYD in regards to long-​term genetic man­age­ment of Tas­man­ian devils.

Dr Car­olyn Hogg, Research Man­ager of the Aus­tralasian Wildlife Genomics Group said USYD sourced crowd­fund­ing to help make the trip a real­ity and was sup­ported by 106 donors to the crowd­fund­ing campaign.

“It has been won­der­ful to bring together gov­ern­ment, aca­d­e­mic and indus­try part­ners to ensure we have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what is hap­pen­ing with Tas­man­ian dev­ils in south west Tas­ma­nia in regards to the dis­ease and their genetic value,” Dr Hogg said.

Dr Car­olyn Hogg, Research Man­ager of the Aus­tralasian Wildlife Genomics Group

Dr Hogg said funds were used to sup­port the genetic analy­sis of the ²⁰¹⁵⁄₁₆ scat sam­ples col­lected by vol­un­teers from Wild­care SPRATS and Tas­ma­nia National Parks & Wildlife.

(Source: Tas­man­ian Gov­ern­ment news release, 30.04.2018)

Researchers have helped develop a new way to save endan­gered African wild dogs (Lycaon pic­tus). Dr Damien Paris and PhD stu­dent Dr Femke Van den Berghe from the Gamete and Embry­ol­ogy (GAME) Lab at James Cook Uni­ver­sity, have suc­cess­fully devel­oped a sperm freez­ing tech­nique for the species.

African wild dogs.
Image copy­right James Cook University/​Damien Paris.

Con­ser­va­tion sta­tus
The highly effi­cient pack hunters have dis­ap­peared from most of their orig­i­nal range across sub-​Saharan Africa due to habi­tat destruc­tion, human per­se­cu­tion and canine dis­ease, leav­ing less than 6,600 ani­mals remain­ing in the wild. The African wild dog is clas­si­fied as Endan­gered by the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species.

Dr Paris said pop­u­la­tion man­age­ment and cap­tive breed­ing pro­grammes haven been set up, but there is a prob­lem. “One goal of the breed­ing pro­grammes is to ensure the exchange of genetic diver­sity between packs, which is tra­di­tion­ally achieved by ani­mal translo­ca­tions. But, due to their com­plex pack hier­ar­chy, new ani­mals intro­duced to an exist­ing pack are often attacked, some­times to the point of being killed,” he said.

Sperm freez­ing tech­nique
Dr Paris said the new sperm freez­ing tech­nique could now be com­bined with arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion to intro­duce genetic diver­sity into exist­ing packs of dogs, with­out dis­rupt­ing their social hierarchy.

Work­ing with inter­na­tional canine experts Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor Monique Paris (Insti­tute for Breed­ing Rare and Endan­gered African Mam­mals), Dr Michael Briggs (African Preda­tor Con­ser­va­tion Research Orga­ni­za­tion), and Pro­fes­sor Wenche Farstad (Nor­we­gian Uni­ver­sity of Life Sci­ences), Dr Paris and Dr Van den Berghe col­lected and froze semen from 24 males across 5 dif­fer­ent packs using the new for­mu­la­tion. After thaw­ing sperm to test their sur­vival, the team dis­cov­ered most sperm remained alive, appeared nor­mal and con­tin­ued to swim for up to 8 hours.

“Sperm of this qual­ity could be suit­able for arti­fi­cial insem­i­na­tion of African wild dog females to assist out­breed­ing efforts for the first time,” said Dr Van den Berghe.

Dr Paris said he is deter­mined the find­ings will reach zoo and wildlife man­agers in order to max­imise the uptake of these tech­niques and develop a global sperm bank for the species. As part of these efforts, the team have also pre­sented these results at the Inter­na­tional Con­gress on Ani­mal Repro­duc­tion (France), African Painted Dog Con­fer­ence (USA), and the annual con­fer­ence of the Euro­pean Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoos and Aquaria (Nether­lands, 2017).

The work has been pub­lished online on Decem­ber 2017 as an open access paper in the sci­en­tific jour­nal Cry­obi­ol­ogy.

Sperm bank
The team hopes to expand their work to estab­lish a regional sperm bank for the species in South­ern Africa. They also plan to col­lect and freeze sperm from free-​ranging wild dogs in Botswana that could be used to insem­i­nate females in frag­mented cap­tive and wild pop­u­la­tions, thereby increas­ing genetic diver­sity and fit­ness in offspring.

To sup­port this ini­tia­tive or learn more about this work visit the IBREAM web­site here.

ABC radio inter­view with Damien Paris, Aussie researchers to the res­cue of the African wild dog:

(Source: James Cook Uni­ver­sity media release, 05.04.2018)

Deprived of oxy­gen, naked mole-​rats (Het­e­ro­cephalus glaber) can sur­vive by metab­o­liz­ing fruc­tose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the jour­nal Sci­ence. Under­stand­ing how the ani­mals do this could lead to treat­ments for patients suf­fer­ing crises of oxy­gen depri­va­tion, as in heart attacks and strokes.

“This is just the lat­est remark­able dis­cov­ery about the naked mole-​rat, a cold-​blooded mam­mal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets can­cer, and doesn’t feel many types of pain,” says Thomas Park, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois at Chicago (UIC), who led an inter­na­tional team of researchers from UIC, the Max Del­brück Insti­tute in Berlin and the Uni­ver­sity of Pre­to­ria in South Africa on the study.

In humans, lab­o­ra­tory mice, and all other known mam­mals, when brain cells are starved of oxy­gen they run out of energy and begin to die. But naked mole-​rats have a backup: their brain cells start burn­ing fruc­tose, which pro­duces energy anaer­o­bi­cally through a meta­bolic path­way that is only used by plants — or so sci­en­tists thought.

In the new study pub­lished on 21 April, the researchers exposed naked mole-​rats to low oxy­gen con­di­tions in the lab­o­ra­tory and found that they released large amounts of fruc­tose into the blood­stream. The fruc­tose, the sci­en­tists found, was trans­ported into brain cells by mol­e­c­u­lar fruc­tose pumps that in all other mam­mals are found only on cells of the intestine.

“The naked mole-​rat has sim­ply rearranged some basic building-​blocks of metab­o­lism to make it super-​tolerant to low oxy­gen con­di­tions,” said Park, who has stud­ied the strange species for 18 years.

At oxy­gen lev­els low enough to kill a human within min­utes, naked mole-​rats can sur­vive for at least five hours, Park said. They go into a state of sus­pended ani­ma­tion, reduc­ing their move­ment and dra­mat­i­cally slow­ing their pulse and breath­ing rate to con­serve energy. And they begin using fruc­tose until oxy­gen is avail­able again. The naked mole-​rat is the only known mam­mal to use sus­pended ani­ma­tion to sur­vive oxy­gen deprivation.

The sci­en­tists also showed that naked mole-​rats are pro­tected from another deadly aspect of low oxy­gen — a build-​up of fluid in the lungs called pul­monary edema that afflicts moun­tain climbers at high altitude.

The sci­en­tists think that the naked mole-​rats’ unusual metab­o­lism is an adap­ta­tion for liv­ing in their oxygen-​poor bur­rows. Unlike other sub­ter­ranean mam­mals, naked mole-​rats live in hyper-​crowded con­di­tions, packed in with hun­dreds of colony mates. With so many ani­mals liv­ing together in unven­ti­lated tun­nels, oxy­gen sup­plies are quickly depleted.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois at Chicago news release, 20.04.2017)

Not even the most intre­pid researcher wants to spend win­ter in Antarc­tica, so how can you learn what pen­guins are doing dur­ing those cold, dark months? Sim­ple: Leave behind some cam­eras. Year-​round stud­ies across the full extent of a species’ range are espe­cially impor­tant in polar areas, where indi­vid­u­als within a sin­gle species may adopt a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent migra­tion strate­gies to get by, and a new study pub­lished on 19 April in The Auk: Ornitho­log­i­cal Advances uses this unique approach to get new insights into Gen­too Pen­guin behaviour.

Gen­too Pen­guins (Pygoscelis papua) are of inter­est to sci­en­tists because they’re increas­ing at the south­ern end of their range in the West­ern Antarc­tic Penin­sula, a region where other pen­guin species are declin­ing. Lit­tle is known about their behav­iour dur­ing the non­breed­ing sea­son, so Caitlin Black and Tom Hart of the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford and Andrea Raya Rey of Argentina’s Con­sejo Nacional de Inves­ti­ga­ciones Cien­tifi­cas y Téc­ni­cas used time-​lapse cam­eras to exam­ine pat­terns in Gen­too Pen­guins’ pres­ence at breed­ing sites across their range dur­ing the off sea­son. They found both tem­po­ral and spa­tial fac­tors dri­ving win­ter atten­dance — for exam­ple, more Gen­too Pen­guins were present at breed­ing sites when there was open water or free-​floating pack ice than when the shore­line was iced in, and more Gen­too Pen­guins were at breed­ing sites ear­lier in non­breed­ing sea­son than later.

Map of 7 study sites, includ­ing (1) Mar­tillo Island, Argentina; (2) Maiviken, South Geor­gia; (3) Cuverville Island; (4) Danco Island; (5) Neko Har­bor; (6) Port Lock­roy: and (7) Peter­mann Island on the West­ern Antarc­tic Penin­sula. Sim­i­lar col­ors indi­cate sites that are not sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent in their counts of non­breed­ing atten­dance when exam­in­ing their orthog­o­nal con­trasts. The dashed box des­ig­nates the region of study sites 3 – 7.
Caitlin Black, Andrea Raya Rey, and Tom Hart (2017) Peek­ing into the bleak mid­win­ter: Inves­ti­gat­ing non­breed­ing strate­gies of Gen­too Pen­guins using a cam­era net­work. The Auk: July 2017, Vol. 134, No. 3, pp. 520 – 529.
Cre­ative Com­mons license (CC-​BY-​NC-​ND)

The researchers deployed the cam­eras at seven sites includ­ing Argentina, Antarc­tica, and sev­eral islands. Each cam­era took eight to four­teen pho­tos per day, and vol­un­teer “cit­i­zen sci­en­tists” were recruited to count the pen­guins in each image via a web­site (pen​guin​watch​.org). Over­all, the seven sites fell into three dis­tinct groups in terms of win­ter atten­dance, each with its own pat­terns of site occu­pa­tion. These find­ings could have impor­tant impli­ca­tions for under­stand­ing how local­ized dis­tur­bances due to cli­mate change and fish­eries activ­ity affect pen­guin pop­u­la­tions dur­ing the non­breed­ing season.

“Work­ing with cam­eras allows us to under­stand half of this species’ life with­out hav­ing to spend the harsh win­ter in Antarc­tica. It has been excit­ing to dis­cover more about why Gen­toos are present year-​round at breed­ing sites with­out hav­ing to han­dle a sin­gle bird,” says Black. “I believe the appli­ca­tions for this tech­nol­ogy are far-​reaching for colo­nial seabirds and mam­mals, and we are only just begin­ning to dis­cover the uses of time-​lapse cam­eras as deployed vir­tual ecol­o­gists in field studies.”

“What most seabirds do away from their nest is often anybody’s guess. For Antarc­tic birds, this is com­pounded by the long peri­ods of dark­ness that pen­guins and oth­ers must face in the win­ter,” adds Mark Hauber, Editor-​in-​Chief of The Auk: Ornitho­log­i­cal Advances and Pro­fes­sor of Ani­mal Behav­iour at Hunter Col­lege and the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter of the City Uni­ver­sity of New York. “This new research in The Auk: Ornitho­log­i­cal Advances on Gen­too Pen­guins colonies reveals crit­i­cal year-​to-​year dif­fer­ences in where the birds are when they are not nest­ing: In some years, only the most tem­per­ate sites are vis­ited, and in other years both southerly and northerly loca­tions are busy with penguins.”

(Source: The Auk Ornitho­log­i­cal Advances press release, 19.04.2017)

Hunt­ing is a major threat to wildlife par­tic­u­larly in trop­i­cal regions, but a sys­tem­atic large-​scale esti­mate of hunting-​induced declines of ani­mal num­bers was lack­ing so far. A study pub­lished on 14 April in the jour­nal Sci­ence fills this gap. A team of ecol­o­gists and envi­ron­men­tal sci­en­tists found that bird pop­u­la­tions declined on aver­age by 58 per­cent and mam­mal pop­u­la­tions by 83 within 7 and 40 km of hunters’ access points, such as roads and settlements.

Addi­tion­ally, the team found that com­mer­cial hunt­ing had a higher impact than hunt­ing for fam­ily food, and that hunt­ing pres­sure was higher in areas with bet­ter acces­si­bil­ity to major towns where wild meat could be traded. The impact of hunt­ing was found to be larger than the team expected. ‘Thanks to this study, we know that only 17 per­cent of the orig­i­nal mam­mal abun­dance and 42 per­cent of the birds remain in hunted areas.’

The researchers syn­the­sised 176 stud­ies to quan­tify hunting-​induced declines of mam­mal and bird pop­u­la­tions across the trop­ics of Cen­tral and South Amer­ica, Africa and Asia. The team, led by Ana Benítez-​López from the Rad­boud Uni­ver­sity in Nijmegen, com­prised researchers from the Nether­lands Envi­ron­men­tal Assess­ment Agency (PBL), the uni­ver­si­ties of Wagenin­gen and Utrecht in the Nether­lands and from the Uni­ver­sity of Sussex.

Info­graphic of the impact of hunt­ing on trop­i­cal mam­mal and bird pop­u­la­tions,
Image credit Rad­boud Uni­ver­sity
Benítez-​López et al., 2017. The impact of hunt­ing on trop­i­cal mam­mal and bird pop­u­la­tions in Science.

Higher hunt­ing pres­sure around vil­lages and roads
’There are sev­eral dri­vers of ani­mal decline in trop­i­cal land­scapes: habi­tat destruc­tion, over­hunt­ing, frag­men­ta­tion etcetera. While defor­esta­tion and habi­tat loss can be mon­i­tored using remote sens­ing, hunt­ing can only be tracked on the ground. We wanted to find a sys­tem­atic and con­sis­tent way to esti­mate the impact of hunt­ing across the trop­ics. As a start­ing point, we used the hypoth­e­sis that humans gather resources in a cir­cle around their vil­lage and in the prox­im­ity of roads. As such, hunt­ing pres­sure is higher in the prox­im­ity of vil­lages and other access points. From there the den­si­ties of species increase up to a dis­tance where no effect of hunt­ing is observed. We called this species deple­tion dis­tances which we quan­ti­fied in our analy­sis. This will allow us to map hunting-​induced declines across the trop­ics for the first time,’ Benítez-​López explains.

Not only the big cud­dly species
The main nov­elty of the cur­rent study is that it com­bined the evi­dence across many local stud­ies, thus for the first time pro­vid­ing an over­ar­ch­ing pic­ture of the mag­ni­tude of the impact across a large num­ber of species. The study takes all ani­mals into account — not only the big cud­dly species, but birds and rodents as well. Benítez-​López explains the dif­fer­ence in impact between birds and mam­mals: ‘Mam­mals are more sought after because they’re big­ger and pro­vide more food. They are worth a longer trip. The big­ger the mam­mal, the fur­ther a hunter would walk to catch it.’

With increas­ing wild meat demand for rural and urban sup­ply, hunters have har­vested the larger species almost to extinc­tion in the prox­im­ity of the vil­lages and they must travel fur­ther dis­tances to hunt. Besides, for com­mer­cially inter­est­ing species such as ele­phants and goril­las, hunt­ing dis­tances are much larger because the returns are higher.

Pro­tected areas are no safe haven
Another inter­est­ing find­ing of this study is that mam­mal pop­u­la­tions have also been reduced by hunt­ing even within pro­tected areas. ‘Strate­gies to sus­tain­ably man­age wild meat hunt­ing in both pro­tected and unpro­tected trop­i­cal ecosys­tems are urgently needed to avoid fur­ther defau­na­tion,’ she says. ‘This includes mon­i­tor­ing hunt­ing activ­i­ties by increas­ing anti-​poaching patrols and con­trol­ling over­ex­ploita­tion via law enforcement’.

(Source: Rad­boud Uni­ver­sity news release, 13.04.2017)

A new PETA video offers a glimpse behind the scenes at Germany’s Hanover Adven­ture Zoo, where employ­ees were caught using whips, bull-​hooks — weapons resem­bling a fire­place poker with a sharp metal hook on one end — and even, in one instance, a fist to force ele­phants to per­form circus-​style tricks to enter­tain vis­i­tors. In response, PETA Ger­many has filed a com­plaint with local law enforce­ment and is call­ing for an end to the facility’s ele­phant exhibit and breed­ing programme.

Buck­ley, who eval­u­ated the footage, explains that the sole pur­pose of this sys­tem­atic abuse — whereby the train­ers inflict pain on adult and baby ele­phants for even the slight­est per­ceived infrac­tion — is to teach them tricks and that it can lead to long-​lasting trauma.

“No zoo can pro­vide ele­phants with the open space, free­dom, and com­pan­ion­ship these highly intel­li­gent liv­ing beings need in order to thrive”, says PETA Direc­tor Elisa Allen.

Hanover Zoo response
After being con­fronted with the footage, the zoo dis­missed the claims of ani­mal abuse . Hanover Zoo insisted that the record­ings do not dis­cernibly show the ani­mals being beaten. Instead, zoo direc­tor Cas­dorff said the zookeep­ers were sim­ply guid­ing the elephants

“You have to repeat the exer­cises often because you have to train the ani­mals so they fol­low [also for med­ical treat­ment], that requires reg­u­lar exer­cises,” said Andreas Cas­dorff, direc­tor of the zoo. “Our zookeep­ers work in a team with their ani­mals. None of them would mali­ciously hurt an animal.”

But col­leagues from other Ger­man zoos are not so sure. The ele­phants at Hanover are trained by the so-​called ‘direct-​contact’ method, which is “now out­dated” accord­ing Pro­fes­sor Man­fred Niekisch, direc­tor of Frank­furt Zoo. Niekisch added that “beat­ings and chains are things from a past where peo­ple thought they had to mas­ter animals”.

EAZA state­ment
Also the Euro­pean Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) does not con­done incor­rect or exces­sive use of the bull-​hook or ankus. EAZA Mem­bers, such as Hanover Zoo, are bound by the Association’s Guide­lines on the use of ani­mals in demon­stra­tions (2014), which set out clearly the role ani­mals can play in edu­ca­tional activ­i­ties, and show clear lim­its within which demon­stra­tions should remain to main­tain the wel­fare and dig­nity of the animals.

More­over, EAZA’s first respon­si­bil­ity lies with the wel­fare of the ani­mals at Hanover Zoo, and EAZA has sought an expla­na­tion of the film’s con­tents from the insti­tu­tion and reas­sur­ances that the ani­mals are being cared for in accor­dance with the hus­bandry guide­lines and our Stan­dards for the Accom­mo­da­tion and Care of Ani­mals at Zoos and Aquar­i­ums (2015). These reas­sur­ances, if and when forth­com­ing, will be exam­ined in detail. There­fore, EAZA is in con­tact with Hanover Zoo and will review all the evi­dence as part of their com­mit­ment to trans­par­ent and solution-​oriented process in the han­dling of the case.

PETA — whose motto reads, in part, that “ani­mals are not ours to use for enter­tain­ment” — notes that ele­phants are highly social ani­mals who thrive in matri­ar­chal herds, pro­tect­ing each other, car­ing for their young, and trav­el­ling many miles a day. In zoos, they’re con­fined to small enclo­sures, caus­ing them to develop arthri­tis and other foot prob­lems — which can be fatal — and to suf­fer from psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress. Many cap­tive ele­phants show signs of zoo­chosis, includ­ing repeat­edly sway­ing back and forth. Their life expectancy is half that of ele­phants in the wild.

(Source: PETA news release, 07.04.2017; THE LOCAL​.de news, 04.04.2017; The Irish Times news, 05.04.2017; EAZA state­ment release, 05.04.2017)

In a wel­come sign of hope for the endan­gered tiger, a new sci­en­tific sur­vey has con­firmed the pres­ence of the world’s sec­ond breed­ing pop­u­la­tion of Indochi­nese tigers and pro­vided the first pho­to­graphic evi­dence of tiger cubs in east­ern Thai­land.

Announced at a press con­fer­ence today, Thailand’s Depart­ment of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Con­ser­va­tion (DNP), Free­land, a front­line counter-​trafficking organ­i­sa­tion, and Pan­thera, the global wild cat con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion, hailed the find­ing as a critically-​timed vic­tory for the future of the Indochi­nese tiger, con­firm­ing the first evi­dence of a breed­ing pop­u­la­tion in East­ern Thai­land in over 15 years.

Con­ducted in part­ner­ship by Free­land and Pan­thera with sup­port from the gov­ern­ment of Thai­land, the cam­era trap sur­vey car­ried out in the for­est com­plex in East­ern Thai­land indi­cated a den­sity of 0.63 tigers per 100km².

A trio of tigers, a mother and her two cubs, inspect a Pan­ther­a­Cam. This cam­era was one of over 156 cam­era traps placed by Thailand’s Depart­ment of National Parks (DNP), Free­land, and Pan­thera to sur­vey a crit­i­cally impor­tant pop­u­la­tion in East­ern Thai­land in 2016.
Image credit: DNP/​Freeland/​Panthera.

While these data sug­gest the region sup­ports an excep­tion­ally mod­est tiger den­sity, on par with some of the most threat­ened tiger habi­tats in the world, the results con­versely demon­strate the species’ remark­able resilience given wildlife poach­ing and ille­gal rose­wood log­ging present in the East­ern Thai­land for­est com­plex — a UNESCO World Her­itage Site.

Breed­ing of tigers rep­re­sents a key mile­stone for this UNESCO World Her­itage Site. These and other results have inspired opti­mism that efforts to train and equip pro­tected area rangers are pay­ing off.

Freeland’s tiger con­ser­va­tion efforts in Thai­land have been sup­ported by Panthera’s Tigers For­ever Pro­gram, David Shep­herd Wildlife Foun­da­tion, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice and Born Free Foun­da­tion.

(Source: Pan­thera press release, 28.03.2017)

The World Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoos and Aquar­i­ums (WAZA) pro­vides the fol­low­ing rea­sons to jus­tify the keep­ing of wild ani­mals in captivity,and why peo­ple need to sup­port and cel­e­brate zoos.

1. Wildlife con­ser­va­tion and Species preser­va­tion
Extinc­tion is a very real prob­lem and schol­ars say we’re in the mid­dle of the 6^th mass extinc­tion. This means we’re deal­ing with the worst loss of species since the extinc­tion of the dinosaurs 65 mil­lion years ago. Zoos and aquar­i­ums pro­tect ani­mals from extinc­tion through reg­u­lated breed­ing pro­grammes. With­out these types of efforts, fewer species would be alive today. What would the future be like with­out the Sea otter, Cal­i­for­nia con­dor, or the Przewalski’s horse? Zoos aren’t sit­ting around to find out.
The world zoo and aquar­ium com­mu­nity has the largest poten­tial con­ser­va­tion net­work in the world. Pre­serv­ing indi­vid­ual species in human care is not enough to pro­tect global bio­di­ver­sity. Con­ser­va­tion of intact ecosys­tems is the only chance for the sur­vival of our planet’s wildlife. A steadily increas­ing num­ber of zoos and aquar­i­ums have rec­og­nized that the real chal­lenge of bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion is sav­ing wild species and habi­tats. To sup­port this com­mit­ment to con­ser­va­tion WAZA devel­oped a Con­ser­va­tion Strat­egy.

2. Edu­cate
Zoos and aquar­i­ums teach the pub­lic about bio­di­ver­sity, cli­mate change and sus­tain­abil­ity. They reach mil­lions of peo­ple all over the world. Most vis­i­tors live in urban areas and have lit­tle or no con­tact with nature. They come to the zoo or aquar­ium because they have an inter­est in ani­mals. The world’s lead­ing zoos and aquar­i­ums employ spe­cial­ists to design their con­ser­va­tion edu­ca­tion pro­grammes. Zookeep­ers also pro­vide vis­i­tors with tips and tricks on how daily actions can sup­port wildlife.

3. Research
The role of the zoo and aquar­ium has evolved to pri­or­i­tize research, edu­ca­tion, and con­ser­va­tion. Through their liv­ing col­lec­tions, zoos and aquar­i­ums are uniquely placed to con­tribute to conservation-​related research. They may under­take research to fur­ther their own as well as other insti­tu­tions’ aims (e.g. by col­lab­o­rat­ing with uni­ver­si­ties). Research cat­e­gories include: behav­iour, genet­ics, dis­eases and repro­duc­tion; field sur­veys; and vis­i­tor learning.

4. Raise Aware­ness
Vis­it­ing a zoo or aquar­ium is a great way for indi­vid­u­als and fam­i­lies to gain emo­tional ties to wildlife and par­tic­i­pate in con­ser­va­tion ini­tia­tives. Con­ser­va­tion mes­sages relayed to vis­i­tors aid in teach­ing them how to con­tribute to the preser­va­tion of wildlife and their related habi­tats. With global cam­paigns such as WAZA’s Bio­di­ver­sity is Us that pro­vides tools for rais­ing aware­ness about bio­di­ver­sity, and WCS’s 96 Ele­phants cam­paign that high­lights the plight of African ele­phants and the ivory trade (96 ele­phants are killed each day in Africa) — the zoo and aquar­ium com­mu­nity plays a part in the global aware­ness rais­ing efforts.

5. Keep live ani­mals
Zoos and aquar­i­ums pro­vide vis­i­tors with an unfor­get­table expe­ri­ence when they inter­act with live ani­mals, and that makes a big impact on vis­i­tors. Many chil­dren and adults who live in cities may never see a wild ani­mal. There is some­thing to be said about com­ing face to face with a moun­tain gorilla or even our local fauna such as the red fox that changes a person’s per­spec­tive. Through such inter­ac­tions, vis­i­tors to zoos and aquar­i­ums learn to have a greater appre­ci­a­tion for wildlife!

6. Pro­vide Recre­ation
’Edu-​tainment’ is a port­man­teau that’s com­monly used in the zoo and aquar­ium com­mu­nity. Zoos not only pro­vide an edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence, but offer a relax­ing envi­ron­ment to spend a won­der­ful day out with your fam­ily. Zoos and aquar­i­ums seam­lessly blend edu­ca­tion with enter­tain­ment. When a vis­i­tor is truly engaged dur­ing a guided tour with a keeper, or if a teacher needs help get­ting the younger stu­dents to focus and learn some­thing new, vis­it­ing the local zoo or aquar­ium could be just what the doc­tor ordered. More­over, most zoos not only serve as hubs for recre­ation, but also play a very impor­tant role in serv­ing as an ‘oasis’ in an oth­er­wise urban environment.

7. Fundraise
The col­lec­tive social, polit­i­cal and finan­cial power of zoos and aquar­i­ums as a com­mu­nity, as well as the poten­tial impact of such vast audi­ences, can be truly potent! There are over 700 mil­lion vis­its to zoos and aquar­i­ums around the world every year. In 2010 it was esti­mated that the world zoo and aquar­ium com­mu­nity report­edly spends about US$ 350 mil­lion on wildlife con­ser­va­tion each year. How­ever this might have already increased. For exam­ple, The National Zoo in Wash­ing­ton D.C. has just raised 60.1 mil­lion and has a goal of 80 mil­lion specif­i­cally des­ig­nated to save species!

8. Care for Ani­mals
Zoos and aquar­i­ums are filled with wildlife experts from con­ser­va­tion sci­en­tists, to vet­eri­nar­i­ans. The staff of a zoo or aquar­ium don’t work in ‘the­ory’ but actu­ally have hands-​on prac­tice and train­ing, and that’s exactly what sets them apart from other insti­tu­tions or organ­i­sa­tions. Zoos and aquar­i­ums read­ily accept the respon­si­bil­ity that comes with main­tain­ing and car­ing for ani­mals. The WAZA devel­oped a World Zoo and Aquar­ium Ani­mal Wel­fare Strat­egy titled “Car­ing for Wildlife” in 2015. The strat­egy pro­vides fur­ther guid­ance to zoos and aquar­i­ums to achieve high stan­dards of ani­mal wel­fare in sup­port of their con­ser­va­tion, edu­ca­tional, research and recre­ational goals.

9. Advo­cate
Zoos and aquar­i­ums take action! The com­mu­nity works on both the national and the inter­na­tional level when it comes to chang­ing pol­icy. Some fan­tas­tic cam­paigns ini­ti­ated by zoos and aquar­i­ums that have made a real impact are:
- Zoos & Aquar­i­ums 350 (reduc­ing cli­mate change impact)
- ‘Don’t Palm Us Off’ (sup­port palm oil labelling)
- ‘You Buy, They Die’ (help stop ille­gal wildlife trade)

(Source: WAZA press release, 22.04.2016)

New research reveals that eat­ing dif­fer­ent foods does not deter­mine how birds of prey’s beaks evolve.

A clas­sic exam­ple of evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selec­tion is the way the beaks of bird species evolved into char­ac­ter­is­tic shapes to eat the dif­fer­ent food in their habi­tat. How­ever, new research from the Uni­ver­si­ties of Bris­tol, Sheffield, Madrid and York, pub­lished online on 28 April in the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, found this does not apply to all species, and that rap­tors in par­tic­u­lar have not enjoyed this evo­lu­tion­ary flexibility.

Lead author of the study, Dr Jen Bright, of the Uni­ver­sity of Sheffield, said: “Our results show that in birds of prey such as eagles and fal­cons, the shapes of the skulls change in a pre­dictable way as species increase or decrease in size. The shape of the beak is linked to the shape of the skull, and these birds can’t change one with­out chang­ing the other.

“We think that being able to break this con­straint — let­ting the beak evolve inde­pen­dently from the brain­case, may have been a key fac­tor in enabling the rapid and explo­sive evo­lu­tion of the thou­sands of species of song­birds such as Darwin’s finches and Hawai­ian honeycreepers”.

The researchers used a method that allowed them to sta­tis­ti­cally quan­tify vari­a­tion in the shape of preda­tory bird skulls and see how this shape vari­a­tion com­pared with size, what the birds ate and how they are related to each other.

“Our research does not cast doubt on Darwin’s ideas, far from it,” said project lead Pro­fes­sor Emily Ray­field, of the Uni­ver­sity of Bris­tol. “Instead it demon­strates how evo­lu­tion has con­strained rap­tor skulls to a par­tic­u­lar range of shapes.”

The research team is now keen to extend and test their ideas in other groups of birds.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Bris­tol press release, 29.04.2016)

by Shreya Das­gupta

Thailand’s Tiger Tem­ple has been mired in controversy.

Ear­lier this year, a National Geo­graphic inves­ti­ga­tion and a report released by Cee4life (Con­ser­va­tion and Envi­ron­men­tal Edu­ca­tion for Life) accused the tiger tem­ple of being involved in ille­gal tiger trade. The reports alleged that the temple’s 147 tigers were abused, kept and bred with­out per­mits, and ille­gally removed from or added to the temple.

The tem­ple author­i­ties have denied these alle­ga­tions and have been try­ing to get a zoo per­mit to gain legal sta­tus of its 147 tigers. Pre­vi­ously, the temple’s appli­ca­tions for a zoo license were rejected.

But last Tues­day, the Depart­ment of National Parks granted the tem­ple a license to oper­ate a zoo, local media reported. This devel­op­ment has angered sev­eral activists and conservationists.

“We at the Wildlife Friends Foun­da­tion Thai­land (WFFT) are shocked and dis­gusted by this lat­est devel­op­ment of an ongo­ing sick­en­ing drama that has con­tin­ued for so many years,” Edwin Wiek, Founder and Direc­tor of Wildlife Friends Foun­da­tion Thai­land, said in a state­ment. “Instead of being taken to court and receiv­ing a well war­ranted penalty for all the crimes com­mit­ted they now are rewarded with a zoo license, so they can fur­ther con­tinue the uncon­trolled breed­ing of more and more tigers. The tem­ple can now obtain lots of more wildlife, through legally trad­ing and pur­chas­ing many more endan­gered species, fur­ther increas­ing the abu­sive prac­tices of this, what seems to us, like an unstop­pable hell hole for animals.”

Wiek added that Thailand’s laws do not allow peo­ple involved in ille­gal wildlife trade to obtain a zoo license.

Last Tues­day, Thailand’s Depart­ment of National Parks granted the con­tro­ver­sial tiger tem­ple a license to oper­ate a zoo, anger­ing sev­eral activists and con­ser­va­tion­ists.
Photo by Michael Janich, CC By-​SA 3.0 Wiki­me­dia Commons.

How­ever, offi­cials from the Depart­ment of National Parks told Bangkok Post that the license was given legally with proper reg­u­la­tions. The zoo will be reg­is­tered and run under a sep­a­rate pri­vate enter­prise called the Tiger Tem­ple Co.

This is mainly to deflect back­lash against the tem­ple, Saiy­ood Peng­boon­choo, a lawyer for the tem­ple, told Khaosod Eng­lish. “The bureau­cracy doesn’t want the tem­ple involved in this because it would look bad.”

The license, which is effec­tive until 18 April 2021, will allow the Tiger Tem­ple Co to run a zoo cov­er­ing 25 rai of land (~10 acres) to be devel­oped with a bud­get of 120 mil­lion Baht (~$3.4 mil­lion). The license will allow the Tiger Tem­ple Co to use wild ani­mals, includ­ing tigers, for show, accord­ing to the Bangkok Post. But the com­pany has to ful­fil cer­tain con­di­tions, which include hir­ing full-​time vet­eri­nar­i­ans and spe­cial­ists, and hav­ing lim­ited num­ber of ani­mals at the zoo.

This year so far, the Depart­ment of National Parks has removed 10 tigers from the tem­ple and relo­cated them to government-​run research cen­tres. The depart­ment report­edly told the media that they will con­tinue to relo­cate tigers from the tem­ple, but the license would allow the tem­ple com­pany to buy its tigers back.

“We still have as our mis­sion to relo­cate them all from the tem­ple,” Adis­orn Noochdam­rong, the department’s Deputy Direc­tor Gen­eral, told Bangkok Post. “If the com­pany wants them back, it could be pos­si­ble to buy them back from the department.”

Saiy­ood, the temple’s lawyer, told Khaosod Eng­lish that the tem­ple com­pany does intend to buy the tigers back from the depart­ment once the tiger cages are ready.

Wiek has called the department’s expla­na­tion for grant­ing a zoo license to the con­tro­ver­sial tem­ple “absurd and unbelievable”.

“The WFFT is seri­ously con­sid­er­ing to demand from the Admin­is­tra­tive Court that the law is to be enforced on this issue, and that the zoo license is revoked imme­di­ately by the courts on grounds of seri­ous legal neglect on the pros­e­cu­tion, dou­ble stan­dards on enforce­ment and that the issue of the zoo license is against pro­ce­dure,” he said in the state­ment. “Last but not least we also would like to ask the Reli­gion Affairs Depart­ment under the Min­istry of Cul­ture if com­mer­cial­iza­tion, the open­ing of uneth­i­cal busi­nesses in tem­ples, will be the new rule from now on instead of prac­tic­ing the teach­ings of Buddha.”

(Source: Mongabay news release, 27.01.2016)

Call for bet­ter data as study reveals just 5 per­cent of datasets meet a ‘gold stan­dard’ needed for effec­tive bio­di­ver­sity conservation.

To pre­vent a new mass extinc­tion of the world’s ani­mal and plant life, we need to under­stand the threats to bio­di­ver­sity, where they occur and how quickly change is hap­pen­ing. For this to hap­pen, we need reli­able and acces­si­ble data. A new study pub­lished on 22 April in Sci­ence reveals those data are largely miss­ing. We are lack­ing key infor­ma­tion on impor­tant threats to bio­di­ver­sity such as inva­sive species, log­ging, bush meat har­vest­ing, and ille­gal wildlife trade.

Over the past two years a con­sor­tium of 18 orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing UNEP-​WCMC, the Inter­na­tional Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature, the Luc Hoff­mann Insti­tute, a research hub at WWF Inter­na­tional, and BirdLife Inter­na­tional, com­piled avail­able global data on bio­di­ver­sity threats. They reviewed almost 300 data sets and marked them on five attrib­utes required for con­ser­va­tion assess­ments. Datasets should be freely avail­able, up to date, repeated, at appro­pri­ate spa­tial res­o­lu­tion, and val­i­dated for accu­racy. Only 5% of the datasets sat­is­fied all attributes.

“We were sur­prised that so few datasets met all of the five attrib­utes we believe are required for ‘gold stan­dard’ of data,” added Lucas Joppa.

“This analy­sis can help pio­neer a new approach to map­ping and mea­sur­ing the threats fac­ing endan­gered species and ecosys­tems,” says Jon Hut­ton, Direc­tor of the Luc Hoff­mann Insti­tute. “This is crit­i­cal if we are to under­stand why some pop­u­la­tions of, for exam­ple, tigers or ele­phants are doing bet­ter than others.”

In some cases, the data needed for effec­tive con­ser­va­tion pol­icy already exists but are not acces­si­ble due to asso­ci­ated costs, com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tions or intel­lec­tual prop­erty arrange­ments. “Agree­ments between con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tions and pri­vate com­pa­nies can help address this,” says Brian O’Connor, Pro­gramme Offi­cer for UNEP-WCMC’s Sci­ence Pro­gramme. “For exam­ple, an agree­ment between UNEP-​WCMC and IHS Com­pany pro­vides detailed and com­pre­hen­sive data on oil and gas activ­ity world­wide for use in bio­di­ver­sity assessments.”

Gov­ern­ments are another valu­able future source of infor­ma­tion. “Open Gov­ern­ment Ini­tia­tives such as those in the UK and US have made more than 200,000 datasets freely avail­able, includ­ing sev­eral that are rel­e­vant to envi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion,” says Piero Vis­conti, Post­doc­toral Sci­en­tist at UNEP-​WCMC. “We encour­age more ini­tia­tives of this kind.”

This work has already started to have an impact on con­ser­va­tion. “We are work­ing with TRAF­FIC and UNEP to analyse legal and ille­gal wildlife trade to address one of the crit­i­cal knowl­edge gaps we iden­ti­fied in this study,” con­cludes Neil Burgess, Head of Sci­ence at UNEP-​WCMC.

The authors of the study stress that fill­ing these data gaps need not start from scratch. Sev­eral exist­ing datasets, such as those deal­ing with inva­sive species on islands around the world, can be scaled up if appro­pri­ately resourced.

(Source: World Wildlife Fund news release via EurekAlert!, 21.04.2016)

You really are what you eat. That’s the taking-​off point for a new polar bear study, con­ducted by U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS) researchers with an assist from the Ore­gon Zoo — and pub­lished online on 18 April in the jour­nal Phys­i­o­log­i­cal and Bio­chem­i­cal Zool­ogy.

As sea ice shifts in the Arc­tic, sci­en­tists have noted a cor­re­spond­ing shift in polar bears’ diets. In West­ern Hud­son Bay, for exam­ple, sea-​ice loss has been asso­ci­ated with declines in the con­sump­tion of benthic-​feeding prey, such as bearded seals. In East Green­land, polar bears have increased con­sump­tion of hooded seals and decreased con­sump­tion of their more typ­i­cal prey, ringed seals.

The degree to which these types of changes are com­mon through­out polar bear pop­u­la­tions, and their impli­ca­tions on bear health, are not well under­stood. To deter­mine whether bears are chang­ing their diet in these remote Arc­tic regions, sci­en­tists are gath­er­ing base­line data from a cou­ple of ani­mals closer to home — Tasul and Con­rad, two res­i­dent polar bears at the Ore­gon Zoo.

“Sci­ence can some­times be a slow process,” said Amy Cut­ting, who over­sees the zoo’s North Amer­ica and marine life areas. “And cli­mate change is hap­pen­ing rapidly. Any­thing we can do to quickly gain infor­ma­tion about how polar bears respond will help man­agers make crit­i­cal deci­sions for pro­tect­ing them in the wild.”

Sta­ble iso­topes
Using a handy chem­i­cal tool called “sta­ble iso­topes” — which include the car­bon and nitro­gen atoms that exist in every liv­ing thing — researchers from the USGS are reveal­ing how polar bears, which cur­rently boast the highest-​fat diets of all the ani­mal king­dom, process dif­fer­ent types of meals.

This is pos­si­ble, Rode says, because when a polar bear eats a meal of seal, whale or wal­rus, it takes on that organism’s iso­tope load as well. These chem­i­cal mark­ers can then be detected in the bears’ own tis­sue sam­ples, such as their blood or hair, which grows at a pre­dictable rate and reveals the bear’s past “dietary sig­na­ture” — or what and where their meals were eaten, she says.

But it’s not quite that sim­ple. “It’s not just that a 50 per­cent salmon diet shows up as 50 per­cent salmon in the body,” Rode said. “Some gets routed toward body fat, some gets stored and some is trans­formed directly to energy. I need to under­stand how the bear body processes food before I can under­stand how dif­fer­ent diets may affect them.”

Ore­gon Zoo research con­tri­bu­tion
Dur­ing data col­lec­tion, the zoo bears par­tic­i­pated in what zoo staff dubbed a “surf and turf” exper­i­ment — switch­ing between marine and ter­res­trial foods. By com­par­ing this new data to USGS archive sam­ples from the Chukchi and South­ern Beau­fort Sea bear pop­u­la­tions over the past 25 years, Rode and her team may reveal the effects of this new meal diver­sity on polar bears.

“We’re hop­ing to study their diets over time to explain poten­tial changes in resource use as a result of climate-​related changes in this sen­si­tive Arc­tic ecosys­tem,” said USGS research biol­o­gist Craig Stricker.

This project, con­ducted by the USGS Polar Bear Team, is part of the USGS’s Chang­ing Arc­tic Ecosys­tems research on the effects of cli­mate change on polar bears.

(Source: USGS news release, 20.04.2016)

A research team led by Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), working in cooperation with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has successfully placed satellite collars on two wolverines as part of a study to see how these elusive predators are faring on Alaska's North Slope.

Brav­ing minus 30 degree tem­per­a­tures, the researchers set high-​tech traps along river and stream that send emails to researchers when sprung. Then, once an ani­mal is col­lared, data is sent back daily, which allows track­ing ani­mals in near real time. This greatly facil­i­tates col­lect­ing scat for diet analy­sis and locat­ing dens. The trap­ping por­tion of the wolver­ine project con­tin­ues through the end of April.

So far researchers have learned that wolver­ines pre­fer to dig incon­spic­u­ous dens in deep snow drifts on the banks of small streams. Wolver­ines dig small incon­spic­u­ous holes for dens, mak­ing find­ing them extremely dif­fi­cult. WCS researchers use track­ing tech­niques on the ground (cov­er­ing over 72 kilo­me­tres of wolver­ine tracks) and from planes to locate dens. This led researchers to dis­cover many active holes, and con­firm one active den so far. They have also obtained what may be the third set of pho­tos ever taken of a mother wolver­ine with kits in the wild.

The wolver­ine
Wolver­ines live in the Arc­tic regions of Eura­sia and North Amer­ica where they pre­fer tun­dra, boreal for­est, and high ele­va­tion moun­tains. Adults typ­i­cally weigh 20 to 50 pounds and have a dark brown coat with a dis­tinct light tan band around their sides. Though rel­a­tively small, wolver­ines have been known to kill adult moose weigh­ing more than 20 times their size.

Habi­tat and threats
Wolver­ines are cur­rently being con­sid­ered for list­ing under the endan­gered species act in the con­tigu­ous United States due to cli­mate change. Pop­u­la­tions in Arc­tic Alaska are rel­a­tively sta­ble, how­ever their reliance on snow drifts for den­ning and caching food may be at risk due to a rapidly chang­ing climate.

“Wolver­ines are an iconic sym­bol of wild north­ern places,” added Robards. Their habi­tat has recently been linked to per­sis­tent spring snow cover, but the exact nature of the rela­tion­ship is uncer­tain. WCS researchers hope to learn whether den­ning and den loca­tion plays a role in this, hypoth­e­siz­ing that the ani­mal may require deep drifts to safely raise young. Though wolver­ines are wide­spread in the Arc­tic, their habi­tat may be threat­ened in the lower 48, and find­ing out their exact habi­tat require­ments is cru­cial to their persistence.

Geo­graphic dis­tri­b­u­tion of the wolver­ine (Gulo gulo).
Image credit Oona Räisä­nen & IUCN (Inter­na­tional Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature)

The wolver­ine (Gulo gulo) is listed as Least Con­cerned in the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™ due to its wide dis­tri­b­u­tion and remain­ing large pop­u­la­tions. There is an over­all con­tin­ued decline of the species due to human per­se­cu­tion and land-​use change, and the Euro­pean wolver­ine is cur­rently Vul­ner­a­ble. How­ever it is esti­mated that some large pop­u­la­tions remain in North Asia and North Amer­ica, which jus­ti­fies the sta­tus of Least Con­cerned on a global scale. A next assess­ment could lead the species to be listed as Vulnerable.

WCS Beringia pro­gram
The research is part of WCS’s Beringia pro­gram — a tri-​national effort to pro­tect one of the most pro­duc­tive marine areas and land­scapes on the planet shared by the U.S., Canada and Russia.

WCS aims to pro­tect Arc­tic wildlife such as polar bear, wal­rus, arc­tic fox, muskoxen, seals, and shore­birds — and wolver­ines — from pres­sures related to a rapidly chang­ing cli­mate and the onset of new indus­trial devel­op­ment. At the same time, WCS works to ensure the region’s indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties can con­tinue to depend on local resources for food, eco­nomic, and cul­tural vital­ity. Imple­ment­ing con­ser­va­tion in such a rapidly chang­ing envi­ron­ment can only be effec­tive through work­ing with sci­en­tists, local experts, and indige­nous communities.

(Source: WCS press release, 22.04.2016; IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™)

Satel­lite analy­sis reveals tiger habi­tats are more intact than expected; area large enough to dou­ble wild tiger pop­u­la­tion remains

Enough forested habi­tat remains to bring the tiger back from the brink of extinc­tion, accord­ing to new analy­sis pub­lished in Sci­ence Advances on 1 April by researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota, RESOLVE, Smith­son­ian Con­ser­va­tion Biol­ogy Insti­tute, Rain­for­est Alliance, Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity and World Resources Insti­tute (WRI). The study found for­est loss was lower than expected in tiger habi­tats, sug­gest­ing there is more than enough habi­tat remain­ing to achieve the inter­na­tional com­mit­ment of dou­bling the wild tiger pop­u­la­tion by 2022 (an ini­tia­tive known as “Tx2”) with addi­tional con­ser­va­tion investment.

Tigers need large areas to sur­vive but pop­u­la­tions can rebound quickly when habi­tat and prey are abun­dant and hunt­ing is con­trolled. For exam­ple, Nepal and India have reported 61 and 31 per­cent increases in their tiger pop­u­la­tions, respec­tively. This is partly thanks to con­ser­va­tion ini­tia­tives like the preser­va­tion of the cross-​boundary Terai Arc Land­scape. Reach­ing the Tx2 goal will require that any sig­nif­i­cant future tiger habi­tat loss is pre­vented, key cor­ri­dors are restored between remain­ing for­est frag­ments, nations imple­ment green infra­struc­ture to pre­vent habi­tat frag­men­ta­tion, and con­ser­va­tion man­agers translo­cate and rein­tro­duce tiger pop­u­la­tions where necessary.

Study results
The study, “Track­ing changes and pre­vent­ing loss in crit­i­cal tiger habi­tat” — uses high and medium-​resolution satel­lite data from Global For­est Watch to exam­ine impact of for­est loss on tiger pop­u­la­tions. It shows that less than 8 per­cent (nearly 79,000 km² or 30,000 mi²) of global forested habi­tat was lost from 2001 – 2014. Though still a loss, this rate of for­est loss is lower than antic­i­pated, given that tiger habi­tats are gen­er­ally dis­trib­uted in fast-​growing rural economies, some with high pop­u­la­tion den­si­ties and fac­ing severe pres­sures from indus­trial agriculture.

“It is not a sign that we are in the clear yet, but it does show us that tigers can poten­tially recover from the edge of extinc­tion if we make the right for­est man­age­ment choices,” added Joshi. “We are see­ing this already in areas like the bor­der between Nepal and India, where for­est cover is recov­er­ing with the help of com­mu­ni­ties and tigers are com­ing back in a big way. ”

Despite lower-​than-​expected lev­els of for­est loss within tiger habi­tat, the study also con­firms the pre­car­i­ous­ness of the species’ sur­vival. The researchers esti­mate that for­est clear­ing since 2001 resulted in the loss of habi­tat that could have sup­ported an esti­mated 400 tigers. This is poten­tially dev­as­tat­ing, con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent global tiger pop­u­la­tion is fewer than 3,500 indi­vid­u­als. Fur­ther­more, the study did not con­sider the dele­te­ri­ous effects of poach­ing and prey loss within these landscapes.

“After decades of work­ing in tiger con­ser­va­tion, it is great to have some encour­ag­ing news for once,” said Eric Din­er­stein, Direc­tor of the Bio­di­ver­sity and Wildlife Solu­tions Pro­gram at RESOLVE and a Senior Fel­low at WRI. “But ille­gal hunt­ing of both tigers and prey can result in ‘empty forests’ with­out enough food or shel­ter to sup­port large preda­tors like tigers. Mea­sur­ing and com­bat­ting this sort of for­est impov­er­ish­ment and its effects will be essen­tial. It com­ple­ments our efforts to iden­tify habi­tat poach­ing in this study.”

Palm oil devel­op­ment biggest threat
The vast major­ity (98 per­cent) of tiger for­est habi­tat loss occurred within just 10 land­scapes, often dri­ven by the con­ver­sion of nat­ural for­est to plan­ta­tions for agri­cul­tural com­modi­ties such as palm oil. The land­scapes with the high­est per­cent­age of for­est clear­ing were in areas of Malaysia and Indone­sia with heavy oil palm devel­op­ment, such as the Bukit Tiga­pu­luh ecosys­tem in Suma­tra, which has lost more than two-​thirds (67 per­cent) of its for­est since 2001, resulted in a loss of habi­tat suf­fi­cient to sup­port an esti­mated 51 tigers. Palm oil devel­op­ment remains an ongo­ing threat— in Indone­sia alone, more than 4,000 km² (1,544 mi²) of for­est habi­tat, an area five times the size of New York City, have been allo­cated for oil palm concessions.

Mon­i­tor­ing tree cover change
This is the first major study to exam­ine tree cover change sys­tem­i­cally across all 76 Tiger Con­ser­va­tion Land­scapes using high and medium res­o­lu­tion satel­lite data. Global For­est Watch and Google Earth Engine, along with analy­sis from the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land, pro­vided the for­est change data for long-​term analy­sis. Global For­est Watch pro­vides monthly and in some cases weekly tree cover loss alerts that can empower park rangers and com­mu­ni­ties to mon­i­tor and pro­tect tiger for­est habi­tat, even at the finest scale of a sin­gle for­est cor­ri­dor used by a dis­pers­ing male tiger.

“The abil­ity to mea­sure for­est change within endan­gered species habi­tat across the globe is a huge step for­ward for con­ser­va­tion and remote sens­ing,” said Crys­tal Davis, Direc­tor of Global For­est Watch at WRI. “Now it is time to use the data to take action. If we can use that infor­ma­tion to respond faster to threats, we can ensure that tigers will sur­vive for future generations.”

A screen­shot of the inter­ac­tive map at the Global For­est Watch website

You can explore the maps of tiger habi­tat and tree cover change online at glob​al​forest​watch​.org here.

(Source: World Resources Insti­tute press release, 01.04.2016)

Mongolia’s Par­lia­ment declares the Tost Moun­tains a State Pro­tected Area. This moun­tain range is home to a sta­ble, breed­ing pop­u­la­tion of snow leop­ards.

The Great Ikh Hural, Mongolia’s par­lia­ment, has approved a pro­posal to turn the Tost Moun­tains, a prime snow leop­ard habi­tat in the country’s South Gobi province, into a Nature Reserve, one of four cat­e­gories of State Pro­tected Areas under Mon­go­lian law. Under this des­ig­na­tion, only tra­di­tional eco­nomic activ­i­ties such as live­stock graz­ing that aren’t harm­ful to nature will be allowed, while min­ing, con­struc­tion, and hunt­ing will be prohibited.

Accord­ing the Snow Leop­ard Trust (SLT) this parliament’s deci­sion in favour of the pro­posal is a major achieve­ment for those who cham­pi­oned the pro­posal for many years — such as the local gov­ern­ment at Gur­vantes, the provin­cial gov­ern­ment of South Gobi and most of all Tost’s local communities.

One of the largest pro­tected habi­tats in the world

“This Nature Reserve will be a bridge between two exist­ing Pro­tected Areas, the Great Gobi and the Gobi Gur­van­saikhan National Park,” added Charu Mishra. “The result­ing land­scape will be one of the world’s largest con­tin­u­ous pro­tected snow leop­ard habitats.”

Under Mon­go­lian law, the gov­ern­ment will now appoint a work­ing group, con­sist­ing of mem­bers of sev­eral rel­e­vant gov­ern­ment agen­cies and pub­lic sec­tor part­ners, to work out the specifics of the new National Park, includ­ing its pre­cise bound­aries. The Gov­ern­ment has 60 days to com­plete this task.

“Within the 8163 km² that are being con­sid­ered for the National Park, there are cur­rently around 12 licenses for min­ing explo­ration, and 2 active min­ing sites, says Bayar­jar­gal Agvantseeren, the leader of Mongolia’s Snow Leop­ard Con­ser­va­tion Foun­da­tion and Direc­tor of SLT’s Mon­go­lia Programme.

A map of Mon­go­lia, show­ing the pro­posed area for Tost Nature Reserve (red) and exist­ing Pro­tected Areas (dark grey).
Image credit Snow Leop­ard Trust.

As min­ing activ­i­ties won’t be per­mit­ted within the park bound­aries, the work­ing group now has to come up with a solu­tion for the land affected by min­ing licenses. The licenses can either be revoked, in which case the com­pa­nies hold­ing them would be com­pen­sated, or the licensed land be kept out of the National Park. To pro­tect the eco­log­i­cal integrity of the area, it would be impor­tant to revoke licenses that fall inside the boundary.

Site of the most com­pre­hen­sive snow leop­ard study to date
Tost is the site of the world’s most com­pre­hen­sive long-​term snow leop­ard research study, being con­ducted by the Snow Leop­ard Con­ser­va­tion Foun­da­tion, Snow Leop­ard Trust, and the Mon­go­lian Acad­emy of Sci­ences since 2008. The con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion Pan­thera was also a part­ner in the study until 2012.

In this study, sci­en­tists have so far tracked 20 snow leop­ards with GPS satel­lite col­lars, gain­ing unprece­dented insights into the behav­iour and ecol­ogy of these cats, and mon­i­tor­ing wild snow leop­ard cubs in their dens for the first time ever.

Remote-​sensor cam­era data col­lected over a span of five years has shown Tost’s snow leop­ard pop­u­la­tion to be sta­ble and repro­duc­ing, with at least 12 adult cats using the area at any given time.

A win that was years in the mak­ing
Given the impor­tance of this ecosys­tem both to the endan­gered snow leop­ard and the local pas­toral com­mu­nity, the Snow Leop­ard Con­ser­va­tion Foun­da­tion and local peo­ple began mak­ing efforts for its pro­tec­tion in 2008. In 2010, the com­mu­nity achieved a major break­through, as both the provin­cial and cen­tral gov­ern­ments agreed to give Tost and Toson­bumba the sta­tus of a Local Pro­tected Area. This offered some level of pro­tec­tion from fur­ther expan­sions of min­ing in the area, but could not guar­an­tee the ecosystem’s long-​term future.

The project team rec­og­nized this early on, and began work­ing with the local com­mu­nity and lead­er­ship toward achiev­ing State Pro­tected Area sta­tus in 2012. Now, 4 years, this col­lec­tive effort has paid off, and Tost should remain a safe haven for snow leopards.

(Source: Snow Leop­ard Trust press release, 14.04.2016)

The fol­low­ing state­ment was released on 15 April con­cern­ing the sta­tus of tigers.

On Sun­day, April 10^th, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Global Tiger Forum (GTF) issued a report stat­ing that the world’s wild tiger pop­u­la­tion was on the rise, and on track for a dou­bling in a decade (see also here). We do not find this report¹ and its impli­ca­tions sci­en­tif­i­cally convincing.

{jb_orangedisc}1.{/jb_orangedisc} Hav­ing devoted years of our lives to try­ing to under­stand and save wild tigers, we believe their con­ser­va­tion should be guided by the best pos­si­ble sci­ence. Using flawed sur­vey method­olo­gies can lead to incor­rect con­clu­sions, an illu­sion of suc­cess, and slack­en­ing of con­ser­va­tion efforts, when in real­ity grave con­cern is called for. Gloss­ing over seri­ous method­olog­i­cal flaws, or weak and incom­plete data to gen­er­ate feel-​good ‘news’ is a dis­ser­vice to con­ser­va­tion, because tigers now occupy only 7% of their his­toric range². A recent World Con­ser­va­tion Union (IUCN) assess­ment³ showed 40% habi­tat loss in the last decade, and a spike in poach­ing pres­sure in many regions. Cam­bo­dia, Viet­nam, Lao PDR and China have vir­tu­ally lost viable tiger pop­u­la­tions in recent years. This is not a time for con­ser­va­tion­ists to take their eyes off the ball and pat each other on the back.

{jb_orangedisc}2.{/jb_orangedisc} There is no doubt that wildlife man­agers in parts of India and even in spe­cific reserves in South East Asia and Rus­sia have made com­mend­able con­ser­va­tion efforts, lead­ing to recov­er­ies in spe­cific tiger pop­u­la­tions. India has invested mas­sively in recov­er­ing sev­eral tiger pop­u­la­tions² over the last four decades. This has been pos­si­ble because of strong polit­i­cal, admin­is­tra­tive and pub­lic sup­port rarely matched any­where else.3.

{jb_orangedisc}3.{/jb_orangedisc} Such spo­radic tiger recov­er­ies should be mon­i­tored using sta­tis­ti­cally robust cam­era trap or DNA sur­veys. Rig­or­ous sci­en­tific stud­ies in India, Thai­land and Rus­sia^{4 – 6} demon­strate this can indeed be done. But these stud­ies also indi­cate that tiger recov­ery rates are slow and not likely to attain lev­els nec­es­sary for the dou­bling of wild tiger num­bers within a decade^{4 – 6}.

{jb_orangedisc}4.{/jb_orangedisc} Esti­mates of tiger num­bers for large land­scapes, regions and coun­tries cur­rently in vogue in the global media for a num­ber of coun­tries are largely derived from weak method­olo­gies^{7 – 9}. They are some­times based on extrap­o­la­tions from tiger spoor (tracks and drop­pings) sur­veys, or spoor sur­veys alone. While spoor sur­veys can be use­ful for know­ing where tigers occur, they are not use­ful for reli­ably count­ing their num­bers. Trans­lat­ing spoor counts to tiger num­bers poses sev­eral sta­tis­ti­cal prob­lems that remain unre­solved⁹, which can lead to fun­da­men­tally flawed claims of changes in tiger num­bers^{7 – 9}.

{jb_orangedisc}5.{/jb_orangedisc} Source pop­u­la­tions of tigers that occur at high den­si­ties and which are likely to pro­duce ‘sur­plus’ ani­mals that can dis­perse and expand pop­u­la­tions now occupy less than 10% of the remain­ing 1.2 mil­lion square kilo­me­tres of tiger habi­tat². Almost 70% of wild tigers sur­vive within these source sites. They are recov­er­ing slowly, only in some reserves^{4 – 6} where pro­tec­tion has improved. Out­side these source sites lie vast ‘sink land­scapes’, which are con­tin­u­ing to lose tigers and habi­tat due to hunt­ing as well as rural and devel­op­men­tal pressures.

{jb_orangedisc}6.{/jb_orangedisc} With the above con­sid­er­a­tions in view, even tak­ing these puta­tive tiger num­bers at face value, sim­ple cal­cu­la­tions show that dou­bling of the world’s tigers in ten years as hoped for in the report¹ is not a real­is­tic propo­si­tion. Assum­ing 70 – 90% of wild tigers are in source pop­u­la­tions with slow growth^{4 – 6}, such an antic­i­pated dou­bling of global tiger num­bers would demand an increase between 364 – 831% in these sink land­scapes. We believe this to be an unlikely scenario.

{jb_orangedisc}7.{/jb_orangedisc} Rather than engag­ing in these tiger num­ber games that dis­tract them from real­ity, con­ser­va­tion­ists must now focus on enhanc­ing and expand­ing recov­ery and mon­i­tor­ing of source pop­u­la­tions, while pro­tect­ing their remain­ing habi­tat and their link­ages, all the while being guided by the best of science.

As stated by:

K. Ullas Karanth, Ph.D
Direc­tor for Sci­ence Asia-​Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Society

Dale Miquelle, Ph.D.
Direc­tor, Rus­sia Program-​Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Society

John Goodrich, Ph.D.
Senior Direc­tor, Tiger Program-​Panthera

Arjun Gopalaswamy, Ph.D.
Research Asso­ciate, Zool­ogy,
Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, UK

Cita­tions

¹ WWF. Global wild tiger pop­u­la­tion increases, but still a long way to go. 2016. Avail­able: http://​wwf​.panda​.org/​w​w​f​_​n​e​w​s​/​?​u​N​e​w​s​I​D​=​2​6​5​1​9​7

² Wal­ston J, Robin­son JG, Ben­nett EL, Bre­it­en­moser U, da Fon­seca GAB, Goodrich J, et al. Bring­ing the tiger back from the brink — the six per­cent solu­tion. PLoS Biol. 2010;8: e1000485.

³ Goodrich J, Lynam A, Miquelle D, Wibisono H, Kawan­ishi K, Pat­tanav­i­bool A, Htun, S., Tempa, T., Karki, J., Jhala, Y., Karanth, K U.. Pan­thera tigris. The IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species 2015: e.T15955A50659951. 2015. Avail­able: http://​dx​.doi​.org/​1​0​.​2​3​0​5​/​I​U​C​N​.​U​K​.​2​0​1​5 – 2.RLTS.T15955A50659951.en

⁴ Karanth KU, Nichols JD, Kumar NS, Hines JE. Assess­ing tiger pop­u­la­tion dynam­ics using pho­to­graphic capture-​recapture sam­pling. Ecol­ogy. 2006;87: 2925 – 2937.

⁵ Duangchantrasiri S, Umpon­jan M, Sim­charoen S, Pat­tanav­i­bool A, Chai­wat­tana S, Maneerat S, et al. Dynam­ics of a low-​density tiger pop­u­la­tion in South­east Asia in the con­text of improved law enforce­ment. Con­serv Biol. 2016; doi:10.1111/cobi.12655

⁶ Miquelle DG, Smirnov EN, Zaumyslova OY, Souty­rina S V, John­son DH. Pop­u­la­tion dynam­ics of Amur tiger (P. t. altaica, Tem­minck 1884) in Sikhote-​Alin Zapoved­nik: 1966 – 2012. Integr Zool. 2015;10: 315 – 328.

⁷ Karanth KU, Nichols JD, Sei­den­sticker J, Din­er­stein E, Smith JLD, McDou­gal C, Johhns­ingh, AJT, Chun­dawat, R, Tha­par, V. Sci­ence defi­ciency in con­ser­va­tion prac­tice: The mon­i­tor­ing of tiger pop­u­la­tions in India. Anim Con­serv. 2003;6: 141 – 146.

⁸ Karanth KU. India’s Tiger Counts: The Long March to Reli­able Sci­ence. Econ Polit Weekly. 2011;XLVI: 22 – 25.

⁹ Gopalaswamy AM, Delam­pady M, Karanth KU, Kumar NS, Mac­don­ald DW. An exam­i­na­tion of index-​calibration exper­i­ments: count­ing tigers at macro­e­co­log­i­cal scales. Yoc­coz N, edi­tor. Meth­ods Ecol Evol. 2015;6: 1055 – 1066. doi:10.1111/2041-210X.12351

{jb_warning}This makes you won­der how impor­tant it is for WWF and GTF to show the world a suc­cess. Espe­cially when the sci­ence where­upon this suc­cess story is based shows flaws and there­fore not backs up the story. Com­ing from these renown tiger researchers and con­ser­va­tion­ists their state­ment should be taken seri­ously I would say [Moos].{/jb_warning}

(Source: WCS press release, 15.04.2016)

Habi­tat map­ping soft­ware and satel­lite imagery can help con­ser­va­tion­ists pre­dict the move­ments of endan­gered species in remote or inac­ces­si­ble regions and pin­point areas where con­ser­va­tion efforts should be pri­or­i­tized, a new Duke University-​led case study shows.

The Duke team used the soft­ware and images to assess recent for­est loss restrict­ing the move­ment of Peru’s crit­i­cally endan­gered San Mar­tin titi mon­key (Cal­lice­bus oenan­the) and iden­tify the 10 per­cent of remain­ing for­est in the species’ range that presents the best oppor­tu­nity for con­ser­va­tion. The find­ings are pub­lished online on 3 March in the jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Conservation.

“Using these tools, we were able to work with a local con­ser­va­tion orga­ni­za­tion to rapidly pin­point areas where refor­esta­tion and con­ser­va­tion have the best chance of suc­cess,” added Dan­ica Schaffer-​Smith.

San Mar­tin titi mon­key
The San Mar­tin titi mon­key inhab­its an area about the size of Con­necti­cut in the low­land forests of north cen­tral Peru. In 2011 the IUCN has upgraded the con­ser­va­tion sta­tus of the species on the Red List from Vul­ner­a­ble to Crit­i­cally Endan­gered. Fur­ther­more, it was in 2012 added to the Inter­na­tional Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature’s list of the 25 most endan­gered pri­mates in the world, stress­ing the need for con­ser­va­tion actions.

Increased farm­ing, log­ging, min­ing and urban­iza­tion have frag­mented forests across much of the monkey’s once-​remote native range and con­tributed to an esti­mated 80 per­cent decrease in its pop­u­la­tion over the last 25 years.

Titi mon­keys travel an aver­age of 663 meters a day, pri­mar­ily mov­ing from branch to branch to search for food, social­ize or escape preda­tors. With­out well-​connected tree canopies, they’re less able to sur­vive local threats and dis­tur­bances, or recol­o­nize in suit­able new habi­tats. The diminu­tive species, which typ­i­cally weighs just two to three pounds at matu­rity, mate for life and pro­duce at most one off­spring a year. Mated pairs are some­times seen inter­twin­ing their long tails when sit­ting next to each other.

The project
Armed with Aster and Land­sat satel­lite images show­ing the pace and extent of recent for­est loss, and Geo­HAT, a down­load­able geospa­tial habi­tat assess­ment toolkit devel­oped at Duke, Schaffer-​Smith worked with Anto­nio Bóveda-​Penalba, pro­gramme coor­di­na­tor at the Peru­vian NGO Proyecto Mono Tocón, to pri­or­i­tize where con­ser­va­tion efforts should be focused.

“The images and soft­ware, com­bined with Proyecto Mono Tocón’s detailed knowl­edge of the titi monkey’s behav­iours and habi­tats, allowed us to assess which patches and cor­ri­dors of the remain­ing for­est were the most crit­i­cal to pro­tect,” said Jen­nifer Swen­son, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of the prac­tice of geospa­tial analy­sis at Duke, who was part of the research team.

The results
The team’s analy­sis revealed that at least 34 per­cent of low­land forests in the monkey’s north­ern range, Peru’s Alto Mayo Val­ley, have been lost. It also showed that nearly 95 per­cent of remain­ing habi­tat frag­ments are likely too small and poorly con­nected to sup­port viable pop­u­la­tions; and less than 8 per­cent of all remain­ing suit­able habi­tats lie within exist­ing con­ser­va­tion areas.

Areas the model showed had the high­est con­nec­tiv­ity com­prise just 10 per­cent of the remain­ing for­est in the north­ern range, along with small patches else­where. These forests present the best oppor­tu­ni­ties for giv­ing the highly mobile titi mon­key the pro­tected paths for move­ment it needs to survive.

Based on this analy­sis, the team iden­ti­fied a 10-​kilometre cor­ri­dor between Peru’s Morro de Calzada and Almen­dra con­ser­va­tion areas as a high pri­or­ity for protection.

“For many rare species threat­ened by active habi­tat loss, the clock is lit­er­ally tick­ing,” Schaffer-​Smith said. “Soft­ware tools like Geo­HAT — or sim­i­lar soft­ware such as Cir­cuitScape — can spell the dif­fer­ence between act­ing in time to save them or wait­ing till it’s too late.”

(Source: Duke Uni­ver­sity, Nicholas School of the Envi­ron­ment news release, 12.04.2016)

The 3^rd Asia Min­is­te­r­ial Con­fer­ence on Tiger Con­ser­va­tion con­cluded today with tiger coun­tries adopt­ing the New Delhi Res­o­lu­tion on Tiger Con­ser­va­tion. The Res­o­lu­tion aligns tiger con­ser­va­tion and eco­nomic devel­op­ment, inspired by the inau­gural speech of the Indian Prime Min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi, who spoke of the need to see tiger land­scapes as “nat­ural capital”.

“Guided by the Hon­ourable Prime Minister’s speech, this res­o­lu­tion is a pos­i­tive game changer for con­ser­va­tion,” said Mr. Ravi Singh, Sec­re­tary Gen­eral and CEO, WWF-​India. “Fram­ing devel­op­ment poli­cies and pro­grammes with a con­ser­va­tion lens can lead to a win-​win sit­u­a­tion for tigers and people.”

The 13 tiger range coun­tries com­mit­ted to:

Accel­er­ate imple­men­ta­tion of the Global and National Tiger Recov­ery Pro­grammes
Align eco­nomic devel­op­ment and tiger con­ser­va­tion
Lever­age global and national fund­ing and tech­ni­cal sup­port
Recog­nise the value of tiger habi­tats for ecosys­tem ser­vices and cli­mate change
Empha­sise recov­ery of tiger pop­u­la­tions in areas with low tiger den­si­ties
Strengthen co-​operation at the high­est lev­els of gov­ern­ment
Increase knowl­edge shar­ing and use of tech­nol­ogy includ­ing smart tools

“I am happy with the com­mit­ment shown by the 13 tiger range coun­tries,” said Dr. Rajesh Gopal, Sec­re­tary Gen­eral, Global Tiger Forum. “We look for­ward to work­ing together in the new par­a­digm to dou­ble wild tiger num­bers with renewed energy and resources.”

The Min­is­ter for Envi­ron­ment, For­est & Cli­mate Change for India, Mr. Prakash Javadekar, presided over the clos­ing cer­e­mony and spoke of the need for sus­tained efforts and mutual coop­er­a­tion amongst tiger range countries.

The Res­o­lu­tion, which sets the path­way for the next six years of the Tx2 goal to dou­ble wild tiger num­bers by 2022, builds on the for­mer com­mit­ments of tiger range coun­tries in Hua Hin, St. Peters­burg, Thim­phu and Dhaka. It also recog­nises the Global Tiger Forum and the Global Tiger Ini­tia­tive Coun­cil as the coor­di­nat­ing bod­ies for the Tx2 goal over the next six years, for­mally tak­ing over from the role pre­vi­ously held by the Global Tiger Initiative.

The Con­fer­ence opened with news that global wild tiger num­bers have increased for the first time from 3,200 in 2010 to 3,890. This updated min­i­mum fig­ure, com­piled from IUCN data and the lat­est national tiger sur­veys, can be attrib­uted to mul­ti­ple fac­tors includ­ing increases in tiger pop­u­la­tions in India, Rus­sia, Nepal and Bhutan, improved sur­veys and enhanced protection.

The National Tiger Con­ser­va­tion Author­ity hosted this con­fer­ence on behalf of the Gov­ern­ment of India, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Global Tiger Forum, WWF and other partners.

(Source: WWF US press release, 14.04.2016)

A Giant Leap for Scimitar-​Horned Oryx Conservation

For the first time, scimitar-​horned oryx are going to be rein­tro­duced to the wild in Chad. Extinct in the wild since the mid-​1980s, the species’ return is the result of the Envi­ron­ment Agency-​Abu Dhabi (EAD) and the gov­ern­ment of Chad’s Scimitar-​horned Oryx Rein­tro­duc­tion Pro­gramme. Researchers from the Smith­son­ian Con­ser­va­tion Biol­ogy Insti­tute (SCBI) will be work­ing as part of the pro­gramme to mon­i­tor the herd remotely after the rein­tro­duc­tion. A team of rangers trained by EAD and the Sahara Con­ser­va­tion Fund (SCF) will mon­i­tor the herd on the ground in Chad.

Mont­fort, who was in Chad when the oryx arrived, added, “Restor­ing oryx to the wild will have a huge and pos­i­tive impact on the con­ser­va­tion and man­age­ment of the entire Sahe­lian grass­lands ecosys­tem. We are thrilled to play a role in this incred­i­ble part­ner­ship designed to restore the species to its right­ful place in the wild.”

Twenty-​five scimitar-​horned oryx arrived in Chad by aero­plane from Abu Dhabi March 16 and were taken to the Ouadi Rimé-​Ouadi Achim Game Reserve. It was the first time in 30 years any oryx had been in the coun­try. The oryx will ini­tially be held in a large fenced area to accli­ma­tise them to their new home at the Reserve. They will be fully released this sum­mer, when the rainy sea­son makes con­di­tions in their native desert habi­tat more favourable.

Scimitar-​horned oryx mak­ing a come­back:

Before the full release of the herd, each oryx will be fit­ted with a GPS-​satellite col­lar and mon­i­tored by sci­en­tists at SCBI and the Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don. The data they col­lect will be used to track and help pro­tect the ani­mals, gather behav­ioural data on the species and study their ecol­ogy. The data will help future rein­tro­duc­tion efforts.

The col­lars were tested on scimitar-​horned oryx herds liv­ing at SCBI in Front Royal, Va., and at Fos­sil Rim Wildlife Cen­ter in Texas in sep­a­rate one-​month tri­als. The tri­als demon­strated that the oryx were not neg­a­tively affected by wear­ing the col­lars. Before the full release this sum­mer, SCBI sci­en­tists will travel to Chad to fit the oryx with col­lars and con­duct final tests of the satel­lite data trans­mis­sion and analy­sis pro­to­cols before the ani­mals are released.

Scimitar-​horned oryx at the Ouadi Rimé-​Ouadi Achim Game Reserve in Chad.
Image credit: Envi­ron­men­tal Agency — Abu Dhabi (EAD)

SCF and EAD have also trained a team of local wildlife experts and rangers to mon­i­tor the oryx after they are rein­tro­duced. To help with their con­tin­ued pro­tec­tion, the team will organ­ise community-​outreach pro­grammes about the oryx. The rein­tro­duc­tion pro­gramme is work­ing to build a self-​sustaining pop­u­la­tion of 500 wild oryx over the next five years. EAD is devel­op­ing a genet­i­cally diverse “world herd” of oryx, includ­ing ani­mals orig­i­nally from the United States, Europe and United Arab Emi­rates. Those ani­mals will be part of future reintroductions.

(Source: Smith­son­ian news release, 13.04.2016)

The num­ber of wild tigers has been revised to 3,890, based on the best avail­able data, said WWF and the Global Tiger Forum (GTF) ahead of a major tiger con­ser­va­tion meet­ing tomor­row in New Delhi to be opened by India’s Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi.

This updated min­i­mum fig­ure, com­piled from IUCN data and the lat­est national tiger sur­veys, indi­cates an increase on the 2010 esti­mate of ‘as few as 3,200′, and can be attrib­uted to mul­ti­ple fac­tors includ­ing increases in tiger pop­u­la­tions in India, Rus­sia, Nepal and Bhutan, improved sur­veys and enhanced protection.

“For the first time after decades of con­stant decline, tiger num­bers are on the rise. This offers us great hope and shows that we can save species and their habi­tats when gov­ern­ments, local com­mu­ni­ties and con­ser­va­tion­ists work together,” said Marco Lam­ber­tini, Direc­tor Gen­eral of WWF International.

Info-​graphic on global tiger sta­tus April 2016; © WWF

The meet­ing of tiger range gov­ern­ments at the 3^rd Asia Min­is­te­r­ial Con­fer­ence on Tiger Con­ser­va­tion this week is the lat­est step in the Global Tiger Ini­tia­tive process that began with the 2010 Tiger Sum­mit in Rus­sia. Gov­ern­ments at that meet­ing agreed to the Tx2 goal to dou­ble wild tiger num­bers by 2022.

“This is a crit­i­cal meet­ing tak­ing place at the halfway point in the Tx2 goal,” said Dr Rajesh Gopal, Sec­re­tary Gen­eral, Global Tiger Forum. “Tiger gov­ern­ments will decide the next steps towards achiev­ing this goal and ensur­ing wild tigers have a place in Asia’s future.”

Over the three day meet­ing, coun­tries will report on their progress toward the Tx2 goal and com­mit to next steps. Prime Min­is­ter Modi will address the con­fer­ence on the essen­tial role tigers play as a sym­bol of a country’s eco­log­i­cal well-​being.

“A strong action plan for the next six years is vital,” added Michael Baltzer. In order for coun­tries to pro­tect their tigers, it is essen­tial that they know their tiger pop­u­la­tions and the threats they face.

In 2014, tiger range gov­ern­ments agreed to announce a new global tiger esti­mate by 2016, based on full, sys­tem­atic national sur­veys. How­ever, not all coun­tries have com­pleted or pub­lished these sur­veys. The new min­i­mum esti­mate of close to 3,900 tigers is based on the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™ account for tigers, updated for coun­tries where national tiger sur­veys have taken place since the IUCN assessment.

First image record of a tiger fam­ily in inland China!:

WWF and the GTF com­mend the tiger range coun­tries that have updated their pop­u­la­tion fig­ures since 2010 and encour­age the remain­ing coun­tries to com­plete and pub­lish their pop­u­la­tion sur­veys as soon as possible.

(Source: WWF global news release, 10.04.2016)

Sci­en­tists in Sal­ford have shed new light on the evo­lu­tion of one of the world’s most diverse pri­mate groups — the titi monkey.

Dr Jean Bou­bli and PhD stu­dent Hazel Byrne, work­ing with zool­o­gists from Brazil and the US, used cutting-​edge mol­e­c­u­lar and com­puter mod­el­ling tech­niques to inves­ti­gate the genus Cal­lice­bus, first described by Old­field Thomas in 1903.

Pub­lished on 1 March in the jour­nal Fron­tiers in Zool­ogy, the research iden­ti­fies much greater diver­sity in the titi which they pro­pose to rede­fine as three dis­tinct gen­era — Cal­lice­bus (Titi), Cher­ace­bus and Plec­tur­o­ce­bus. They have also reclas­si­fied the species Cal­lice­bus dubius as Cal­lice­bus cali­ga­tus, reduc­ing the num­ber of recog­nised species from 34 to 33.

Jean Bou­bli described the find­ings as the “cul­mi­na­tion of his 20 year quest for the ori­gins of titi mon­key diversity”.

Decades of sam­ples
Jean Bou­bli, who spent three years with the Yanomami peo­ples in the north­ern Ama­zon, and Hazel who also spent months in the jun­gle, built the largest array of titi mon­key DNA sequences ever assem­bled, afford­ing a fresh per­spec­tive on the key evo­lu­tion­ary events and when they occurred over time.

They pin­point the split between Plec­tur­o­ce­bus and Cal­lice­bus at approx­i­mately 11 mil­lion years ago and the split of Cal­lice­bus and Cher­ace­bus to 8 mil­lion years.

“His­tor­i­cally tax­on­omy (the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of ani­mals) has been largely based on mor­phol­ogy — colour, shape, size, fea­tures — rather than genetic diver­sity. How­ever, things can be very closely related and look quite dif­fer­ent, or be genet­i­cally dis­tinct and look the same,” explained Hazel Byrne.

Titi mon­keys
Genus Cher­ace­bus	Genus Cal­lice­bus	Genus Plec­tur­o­ce­bus
Illus­tra­tion by Stephen D. Nash ©Con­ser­va­tion Inter­na­tional. Byrne et al., 2016. Phy­lo­ge­netic rela­tion­ships of the New World titi mon­keys (Cal­lice­bus): first appraisal of tax­on­omy based on mol­e­c­u­lar evi­dence. Fron­tiers in Zool­ogy13:10. DOI: 10.1186/s12983-016‑0142-4; Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 4.0 Inter­na­tional License

So does it mat­ter?
“Absolutely”, says Jean Bou­bli who describes tax­on­omy as “the road map of con­ser­va­tion” and ulti­mately, our under­stand­ing of how the evo­lu­tion­ary tree of pri­mates fits together, guides deci­sions about which groups are endan­gered and which need pro­tec­tion. “Each of the three gen­era can now be recog­nised as unique, impor­tant lin­eages, giv­ing gov­ern­ments and NGOs a clearer focus for con­ser­va­tion pro­grammes. “It makes sense that before you say ‘we’re going to ded­i­cate our resources to this, you need to know what ‘this’ is.”

The team are fol­low­ing up the research with a forth­com­ing bio­geo­graph­i­cal analy­sis, inves­ti­gat­ing how these gen­era diver­si­fied over time and space, which could shed light on how the Ama­zon was formed.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Sal­ford — Man­ches­ter news release, 06.04.2016)

Shrink­ing habi­tat, increased con­flict pro­jected in regions crit­i­cal to sur­vival of threat­ened top preda­tors.

A new study con­firms that the global con­ser­va­tion of car­ni­vores is at risk. Pub­lished online on 1 April in Sci­en­tific Reports, the report mod­els future global land con­ver­sion and esti­mates this will lead to sig­nif­i­cant range loss and con­flict with local peo­ple in regions crit­i­cal for the sur­vival of already threat­ened car­ni­vore species.

Orga­nized by researchers from the Uni­ver­sity of Helsinki in col­lab­o­ra­tion with an inter­na­tional team of con­ser­va­tion and land use change sci­en­tists the study con­cludes that imme­di­ate action is needed to pre­vent habi­tat loss and con­flict with humans in pri­or­ity areas for car­ni­vore conservation.

Dr.Enrico Di Minin explained, “We assessed how expected land use change will affect pri­or­ity areas for car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion in the future. The analy­sis revealed that car­ni­vores will suf­fer con­sid­er­able range losses in the future. Wor­ry­ingly, it seems that the most impor­tant areas for car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion are located in areas where human-​carnivore con­flicts are likely to be most severe.”

Di Minin con­tin­ued, “Presently, South Amer­i­can, African, and South East Asian coun­tries, as well as India, were found to con­tribute mostly to car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion. While some of the most charis­matic species, such as the tiger and giant panda were found to be at high risk under future land use change, smaller, less charis­matic species, with small ranges were found to be equally threat­ened by habi­tat loss.”

Per­for­mance curves quan­ti­fy­ing the median pro­por­tion of the orig­i­nal occur­rences of all car­ni­vore species, rep­re­sented at each frac­tion of the ter­res­trial land pro­tected for car­ni­vores.
The dashed ver­ti­cal line in yel­low rep­re­sents the per­cent­age cur­rently pro­tected (~11% of ter­res­trial land). The ver­ti­cal dashed line in black rep­re­sents the 17% tar­get for the opti­mized expan­sion of the pro­tected area net­work. The dashed ver­ti­cal lines in red and blue rep­re­sent the ter­res­trial land tar­gets required to meet a 50% rep­re­sen­ta­tion across all car­ni­vore species under present, and future (2040), land use allo­ca­tion (21 and 24% of ter­res­trial land, respec­tively). The grey dashed lines and rec­tan­gle show the cor­re­spond­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion lev­els for already exist­ing pro­tected areas and the Aichi tar­get 11 for 17% ter­res­trial land pro­tec­tion.
Di Minin, E., Slo­tow, R., Hunter, L., Montesino-​Pouzols, F., Toivo­nen, T., Ver­burg, P., Leader-​Williams, N., Petracca, L., Moila­nen, A. 2016. National pri­or­i­ties for global car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion under land use change. Sci­en­tific Reports 6:23814, doi: 10.1038/srep23814.

Pro­tect­ing car­ni­vores pro­tects also other species
Car­ni­vores include some of the most iconic species that help gen­er­ate fund­ing for bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion and deliver impor­tant ben­e­fits to humans. Pro­tect­ing car­ni­vores will con­serve many other bird, amphib­ian, rep­tile and mam­mal species that live in pri­or­ity areas for car­ni­vore conservation.

Dr.Luke Hunter, Pres­i­dent and Chief Con­ser­va­tion Offi­cer of Pan­thera, the global wild cat con­ser­va­tion organ­i­sa­tion, and a co-​author of the paper shared, “Car­ni­vores like big cats have been squeezed out of their ranges at alarm­ing rates for decades now, and we can now see that habi­tat loss and its shock waves on wildlife are only on the rise. In order to pro­tect our planet’s land­scape guardians, a far greater finan­cial invest­ment from the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity is needed for range-​wide con­ser­va­tion approaches, both within and out­side of pro­tected areas where car­ni­vores roam.”

Pro­fes­sor Rob Slo­tow from the Uni­ver­sity of KwaZulu-​Natal, another co-​author in the paper, in South Africa empha­sizes that reduc­ing con­flict with humans out­side of pro­tected areas is piv­otal. “Most pri­or­i­ties for car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion are in areas in the global south where human pop­u­la­tions are increas­ing in size, agri­cul­ture is inten­si­fy­ing, and human devel­op­ment needs are the high­est. There is need to imple­ment con­ser­va­tion strate­gies that pro­mote tol­er­ance for car­ni­vores out­side pro­tected areas and focus on the ben­e­fits that peo­ple derive from these species.”

Global risk of human-​carnivore con­flict.
The bars rep­re­sent the con­tri­bu­tion in terms of total area size (km2) that each coun­try makes to the 17% pro­tec­tion tar­get for mam­malian car­ni­vores under present (a) and future (2040) land use change. No pri­or­ity means that the coun­try makes no con­tri­bu­tion to the 17% pro­tec­tion tar­get. Full details about how the risk index was cal­cu­lated are avail­able from the Meth­ods sec­tion. Fig­ure cre­ated in ArcGIS 10.2.1 soft­ware (URL http://​desk​top​.arcgis​.com/​e​n​/).
Di Minin, E., Slo­tow, R., Hunter, L., Montesino-​Pouzols, F., Toivo­nen, T., Ver­burg, P., Leader-​Williams, N., Petracca, L., Moila­nen, A. 2016. National pri­or­i­ties for global car­ni­vore con­ser­va­tion under land use change. Sci­en­tific Reports 6:23814, doi: 10.1038/srep23814.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Helsinki press release, 04.04.2016)

A shock­ing new report by the Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety (WCS) and Fauna & Flora Inter­na­tional (FFI) doc­u­ments a cat­a­strophic col­lapse of the world’s largest great ape– the Grauer’s gorilla — due to a com­bi­na­tion of ille­gal hunt­ing around min­ing sites and set­tle­ments, prior civil unrest, and habi­tat loss.

The results of the report point to a 77 per­cent drop in gorilla num­bers, from an esti­mated 17,000 in 1995 to just 3,800 indi­vid­u­als today. Grauer’s goril­las — the world’s largest gorilla sub­species weigh­ing up to 400 pounds — are closely related to the bet­ter known moun­tain gorilla. The sub­species is restricted to east­ern Demo­c­ra­tic Repub­lic of Congo (DRC).

The sur­vey was led by experts from WCS and FFI, with field data gath­ered from across the Grauer’s gorilla range by a group of col­lab­o­rat­ing orga­ni­za­tions. The report, funded by the Arcus Foun­da­tion, analysed data col­lected with sup­port from Crit­i­cal Ecosys­tem Part­ner­ship Fund, KfW (Ger­man Devel­op­ment Bank), The Insti­tut Con­go­lais pour la Con­ser­va­tion de la Nature (ICCN), Newman’s Own Foun­da­tion, Rain­for­est Trust, UNESCO, USAID, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice, and World Bank. Results were pre­sented at a press con­fer­ence in Kinshasa.

Crit­i­cally Endan­gered
The authors of the report say that their find­ings jus­tify rais­ing the threat­ened sta­tus of the Grauer’s gorilla (Gorilla beringei ssp. graueri) from the cur­rent Endan­gered to Crit­i­cally Endan­gered on the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™, high­light­ing the per­ilous posi­tion these great apes are in, and the need to act now to pre­vent a fur­ther decline in num­bers. This would put all four gorilla sub­species in the crit­i­cally endan­gered cat­e­gory, the high­est cat­e­gory ranking.

Civil war in the DRC
The decline in Grauer’s goril­las can be traced back to the Rwan­dan geno­cide in 1994, which forced hun­dreds of thou­sands of refugees to flee to the DRC. This in turn led to the DRC civil war in 1996, which con­tin­ued until 2003 with dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences, includ­ing an esti­mated 5 mil­lion peo­ple killed. But beyond the human tragedy, the war has also taken its toll on the DRC’s wildlife as a result of inse­cu­rity, height­ened ille­gal bush­meat trade and increased deforestation.

The authors of the report sought to assess the impact of the civil war on Grauer’s gorilla num­bers, which were esti­mated at 17,000 before the con­flict. Field teams con­ducted wide­spread sur­veys, the most inten­sive ever for this ape, in regions beset by inse­cu­rity, search­ing for ground nests and other signs of this elu­sive ape. In addi­tion, the authors employed a novel method that allowed them to rig­or­ously assess data col­lected by local com­mu­nity mem­bers and rangers to esti­mate Gorilla abundance.

The sur­vey results con­firmed their worst fears: num­bers had plum­meted to an esti­mated 3,800 indi­vid­u­als — a shock­ing 77 per­cent decline.

DRC pro­tected areas. Image credit WCS, ICCN, FFI. . .

DRC Occu­pancy map for Grauer’s gorilla using sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant cli­mate and phys­i­cal covari­ables, and spa­tial effects accord­ing the iCAR model. Image credit WCS, ICCN, FFI.

Arti­sanal min­ing for coltan
One of the pri­mary causes of the decline in Grauer’s gorilla num­bers has been the expan­sion in arti­sanal min­ing for coltan (a key min­eral used in the man­u­fac­ture of cell phones and other elec­tron­ics) and other min­er­als in the gorilla’s range. Most of these arti­sanal min­ing sites are remote, which means that the min­ers often turn to local wildlife for food. Although pro­tected by law, goril­las are highly prized as bush­meat due to their large size and because they are eas­ily tracked and killed as they move in groups on the ground in their small home ranges.

Turn­ing the tide
The authors say that halt­ing and revers­ing the decline of Grauer’s gorilla will take con­sid­er­able effort and will require more fund­ing than is cur­rently avail­able. Arti­sanal min­ing must be con­trolled and the var­i­ous armed groups that con­trol mines dis­armed. To accom­plish this, it will be nec­es­sary to halt min­ing in pro­tected areas, as it is known that min­ers sub­sist on bush­meat and hunt goril­las around their camps.

Three areas are now par­tic­u­larly cru­cial for the gorilla’s sur­vival: Kahuzi-​Biega National Park, the adja­cent Punia Gorilla Reserve where WCS is sup­port­ing local com­mu­ni­ties to estab­lish the reserve and man­age and pro­tect goril­las, and the remote unpro­tected Usala For­est which has no sup­port cur­rently. The Ito­mbwe Reserve and the Tayna regions also sup­port highly-​important out­ly­ing pop­u­la­tions. It is crit­i­cal to for­mally gazette the Ito­mbwe and Punia Gorilla Reserves, which have com­mu­nity sup­port but whose bound­aries are not yet legally established.

Park guards con­tinue to be at risk. On March 31^st, a guard was killed by armed rebels in an ambush in the for­est of the high­land sec­tor of Kahuzi Biega National Park, the only site where the study found goril­las were increasing.

Plumptre added, “Sig­nif­i­cantly greater efforts must be made for the gov­ern­ment to regain con­trol of this region of DRC. In par­tic­u­lar, the gov­ern­ment needs to quickly estab­lish the Ito­mbwe Nat­ural Reserve, sup­port local-​community man­age­ment of the Punia Gorilla Reserve, rein­force Kahuzi-​Biega National Park efforts, and estab­lish strong coor­di­na­tion between ICCN and the DRC mil­i­tary to tackle armed mili­tias that con­trol ille­gal min­ing camps in Grauer’s gorilla heartland.”

Stu­art Nixon of FFI (now at Chester Zoo where he has con­tin­ued his analy­sis of the sur­vey data), one of the co-​authors involved in the study stated, “Grauer’s gorilla is found only in the east­ern Congo — one of the rich­est areas on our planet for ver­te­brate diver­sity. As one of our clos­est liv­ing rel­a­tives, we have a duty to pro­tect this gorilla from extinc­tion. Unless greater invest­ment and effort is made, we face the very real threat that this incred­i­ble pri­mate will dis­ap­pear from many parts of its range in the next five years. It’s vital that we act fast.”

Aer­ial photo of Kahuzi Biega Park. Image credit WCS.

Radar Nishuli, Chief Park War­den for the Kahuzi Biega National Park and another co-​author, said: “What we have found in the field is extremely wor­ry­ing. We are urg­ing a strong and tar­geted response that addresses the fol­low­ing: Train, sup­port and equip eco­guards to tackle poach­ing more effec­tively; build intel­li­gence net­works, and sup­port the close daily mon­i­tor­ing of gorilla fam­i­lies to ensure their pro­tec­tion; engage cus­tom­ary chiefs who hold tra­di­tional power in the region to edu­cate their com­mu­ni­ties to stop hunt­ing these apes.”

Co-​author Jef­fer­son Hall, staff sci­en­tist at the Smith­son­ian Trop­i­cal Research Insti­tute said, “the bright spot in all this is that we have seen, over and over again, ded­i­cated Con­golese con­ser­va­tion­ists risk their lives to make a dif­fer­ence,” Hall added. “Thanks to these indi­vid­u­als, there is still hope and the oppor­tu­nity to save these ani­mals and the ecosys­tems they represent.”

(Source: WCS press release, 04.04.2016)

Cli­mate change caus­ing habi­tat loss and reduced food is the main prob­lem for polar bears, but plas­tic waste and other pol­lu­tants are grow­ing risks.

Greenland’s polar bears have a thy­roid prob­lem. Their endocrine sys­tems, too, are being dis­rupted. In both cases the cul­prit agency is envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion by a range of long-​lived indus­trial chem­i­cals and pesticides.

Kristin Møller Gabrielsen of the Nor­we­gian Uni­ver­sity of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy in Trond­heim and col­leagues report in the jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Research that they exam­ined the liver, mus­cle and kid­ney tis­sues taken from seven polar bears killed by Inuit hunters in East Green­land in 2011 and analysed the effect of more than 50 con­t­a­m­i­nants in plasma sam­ples from these polar bears (Ursus mar­itimus), to see what effect organohalo­gen com­pounds could have on the bears’ thy­roid systems.

All mam­mals have thy­roid sys­tems, and these are phys­i­o­log­i­cally essen­tial for growth, devel­op­ment, repro­duc­tion, stress response, tis­sue repair, metab­o­lism and ther­moreg­u­la­tion (an animal’s abil­ity to keep its body tem­per­a­ture within lim­its): dis­rup­tion at any stage of life can be dam­ag­ing, but thy­roid reg­u­la­tion is vital in the ear­lier stages of life.

But the researchers found high con­cen­tra­tions of plas­tic pol­lu­tion and pes­ti­cide con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in the crea­tures’ tis­sues, many of which could affect the hor­monal systems.

Retreat­ing ice
Polar bears face an uncer­tain future: the Arctic’s most iconic preda­tor depends on sea ice for access to the most nour­ish­ing prey — seals − but thanks to global warm­ing dri­ven by green­house gases dis­charged by humankind since the start of the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, the ice is in retreat. This is a threat, espe­cially, in the spring when polar bears gain most of their annual fat reserves by con­sum­ing seal pups before com­ing ashore for the sum­mer. The bears can and do for­age on land for small prey, eggs, berries and so on. Research con­ducted at Spits­ber­gen showed such type of for­ag­ing devel­op­ment in polar bears. This video shows suc­ces­sive vis­its by polar bears to a bar­na­cle goose colony, west coast of Spits­ber­gen, Sval­bard. Bears walk from nest to nest to eat the eggs, leav­ing behind the upset nest own­ers. Other bird species that are pre­dated on this video are eider and glau­cous gull. The video sum­marises 20 hours of polar bears feed­ing in the colony through­out the 2012 breed­ing season:

But new research sug­gests that this is unlikely to help them much.

“The health of the Arc­tic polar bear is being attacked from all fronts, but among many other fac­tors is the expo­sure to envi­ron­men­tal con­t­a­m­i­nants,” said Maria Jesus Obre­gon, of the Bio­med­ical Research Insti­tute in Madrid, one of the authors.

“A wide vari­ety of organochlo­rine com­pounds and pes­ti­cides have an effect on the thy­roid hor­mones in plasma, tis­sues and deio­d­i­nase enzymes, which are in charge of sta­bil­is­ing the thy­roid hor­mones in tissues.”

The biggest prob­lem that con­fronts the polar bear is still cli­mate change, loss of habi­tat and a more pre­car­i­ous food sup­ply. But as a marine mam­mal, the bear is exposed to a huge range of pol­lu­tants deliv­ered by mod­ern indus­try, trans­port and commerce.

Con­ser­va­tion guide­lines
Researchers in Feb­ru­ary cal­cu­lated that in 2010, around eight mil­lion tons of plas­tic waste ended up in the world’s oceans.

A sec­ond team of researchers has framed guide­lines for the con­ser­va­tion of the polar bear, and pro­posed 15 mea­sures that could deter­mine the fac­tors impor­tant in sav­ing the crea­ture from ulti­mate extinction.

They report in the jour­nal Sci­ence of the Total Envi­ron­ment that they ques­tioned 13 spe­cial­ists from four nations to pro­pose ways of mea­sur­ing polar bear health. Not sur­pris­ingly, cli­mate change topped the list of threats, but the list also included nutri­tional stress, chronic phys­i­o­log­i­cal stress, dis­eases and par­a­sites, and increas­ing expo­sure to com­peti­tors. Expo­sure to con­t­a­m­i­nants was the third largest threat.

“We still don’t know to what extent envi­ron­men­tal changes will affect polar bear health and there­fore its con­ser­va­tion,” say the authors.

(Source: Cli­mate News Net­work arti­cle by Tim Brad­ford, 17.04.2015)

Demand for nat­ural rub­ber fuelled by the tyre indus­try is threat­en­ing pro­tected parts of South­east Asia — accord­ing to research from the Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia (UEA).

A new study pub­lished first online on 17 April in sci­en­tific jour­nal Con­ser­va­tion Let­ters pre­dicts that up to 8.5 mil­lion hectares of addi­tional rub­ber plan­ta­tions will be required to meet demand by 2024. But expan­sion on this scale will have ‘cat­a­strophic’ bio­di­ver­sity impacts, with glob­ally threat­ened unique species and ecosys­tems all put under threat.

Researchers say that the extent of the prob­lem is com­pa­ra­ble to oil palm and that it is closely linked to the grow­ing tyre mar­ket. They urge man­u­fac­tur­ers such as Goodyear and Miche­lin to sup­port and strengthen sus­tain­abil­ity ini­tia­tives and drive change in the industry.

“We pre­dict that between 4.3 and 8.5 mil­lion hectares of new plan­ta­tions will be required to meet pro­jected demand by 2024. This will threaten sig­nif­i­cant areas of Asian for­est, includ­ing many pro­tected areas,” said Warren-​Thomas. “There has been grow­ing con­cern that switch­ing land use to rub­ber cul­ti­va­tion can neg­a­tively impact the soil, water avail­abil­ity, bio­di­ver­sity, and even people’s liveli­hoods. But this is the first review of the effects on bio­di­ver­sity and endan­gered species, and to esti­mate the future scale of the prob­lem in terms of land area.”

The study focuses on four bio­di­ver­sity hotspots in which rub­ber plan­ta­tions are expand­ing — Sun­da­land (Malay Penin­sula, Bor­neo, Suma­tra, Java, and Bali), Indo-​Burma (Laos, Cam­bo­dia, Viet­nam, most of Myan­mar and Thai­land, and parts of South­west China, includ­ing Xishuang­banna and Hainan Island), Wal­lacea (Indone­sian islands east of Bali and Bor­neo but west of New Guinea, plus Timor Leste) and the Philippines.

Rub­ber extent in all rub­ber pro­duc­ing coun­tries, exclud­ing Bolivia for which data were unavail­able. (Warren-​Thomas, E., Dol­man, P. M. and Edwards, D. P. (2015), Increas­ing Demand for Nat­ural Rub­ber Neces­si­tates a Robust Sus­tain­abil­ity Ini­tia­tive to Mit­i­gate Impacts on Trop­i­cal Bio­di­ver­sity. Con­ser­va­tion Let­ters. doi:10.1111/conl.12170)

“Rub­ber can thrive across a wide range of cli­mate and soil con­di­tions across South­east Asia, and could replace a whole range of for­est types con­tain­ing large num­bers of glob­ally threat­ened and unique species. Pro­tected areas have already been lost to rub­ber plan­ta­tions. For exam­ple, more than 70 per cent of the 75,000 hectare Snoul Wildlife Sanc­tu­ary in Cam­bo­dia was cleared for rub­ber between 2009 and 2013. In Cam­bo­dia, for­est areas ear­marked for fur­ther rub­ber plan­ta­tions con­tain crit­i­cally endan­gered water birds like the White Shoul­dered Ibis, glob­ally threat­ened mam­mals like Eld’s deer and Ban­teng, and many impor­tant pri­mates and car­ni­vores. Macaques and gib­bons are known to dis­ap­pear com­pletely from forests which have been con­verted to rub­ber, and our review shows that num­bers of bird, bat and bee­tle species can decline by up to 75 per cent.”

Species which could be affected (L-​R): Gib­bons (c. Rushen), Macaques (c. Tam­bako The Jaguar), Ban­teng (c. Michelle Ben­der) and the White Shoul­dered Ibis (c. David Cook)

“Con­ver­sion to rub­ber mono­cul­ture also has a knock on effect for fresh­wa­ter species because fer­tilis­ers and pes­ti­cides run off into rivers and streams. In Laos, local peo­ple have reported dra­matic declines in fish, crabs, shrimps, shell­fish, tur­tles and stream bank veg­e­ta­tion. In Xishuang­banna, China, well water was found to be contaminated.”

{jb_warning}“These find­ings show that rub­ber expan­sion could sub­stan­tially exac­er­bate the extinc­tion cri­sis in South­east Asia.”{/jb_warning}

“There has been huge pres­sure on com­pa­nies to clean up their act when it comes to oil palm — with cer­ti­fi­ca­tion schemes and com­mit­ments from major play­ers like Unilever to source sus­tain­ably grown prod­ucts. But right now, there is almost no atten­tion at the con­sumer level to the neg­a­tive impacts rub­ber plan­ta­tions can have. Rub­ber grown on defor­ested land is not treated any dif­fer­ently in the mar­ket to rub­ber grown in a more sus­tain­able way. This is mis­lead­ing, espe­cially when some prod­ucts made from nat­ural rub­ber are labelled as an ‘eco-​friendly’ alter­na­tive to petrochemicals.”

“We also found that because oil palm grow­ers can­not get sus­tain­abil­ity cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and access to major mar­kets if they plant on defor­ested land, they are replac­ing rub­ber plan­ta­tions with oil palm, dis­plac­ing the rub­ber else­where, and adding to the total demand for land.”

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of East Anglia press release, 17.04.2015)

Researchers were in for a sur­prise when they viewed footage from a remote and little-​explored area of south­east­ern Tibet. Within the more than 700 pho­tos cap­tured by their cam­era traps, they spot­ted sev­eral macaques with phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics that hadn’t been doc­u­mented before; namely, gen­i­tals that were shaped and coloured dif­fer­ently than those of other known macaques in the region. These dif­fer­ences may make these macaques a new species, the sci­en­tists write in their study first pub­lished online 25 March in the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Primatology.

Pho­tos of the newly described macaque, named the white-​cheeked macaque (Macaca leucogenys) by the authors of the study, were cap­tured in Modog county (some­times spelled “Medog”) in south­east­ern Tibet. Modog lies within the east­ern fringes of the Himalayan moun­tain range, bor­dered by India’s Arun­chal Pradesh state to the south. The region boasts a wide array of habi­tats, from trop­i­cal for­est to grass­land to bar­ren moun­tain­tops, and is regarded as a bio­di­ver­sity hotspot, but has not been exten­sively sur­veyed by scientists.

“It is an area where there’s been very lit­tle sci­en­tific explo­ration, partly because of polit­i­cal con­flicts,” Paul Gar­ber, exec­u­tive edi­tor of the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Pri­ma­tol­ogy, told New Sci­en­tist.

To help shed a lit­tle light on what lives within Modog’s forests, researchers from insti­tu­tions in China set up 31 cam­era traps in var­i­ous places through­out the county that col­lected images for about six months in 2013 and 2014. They also recorded the calls of macaques. They then com­pared the images and calls to known records, find­ing some sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences in sev­eral monkeys.

One of the most strik­ing dif­fer­ence was the shape and colour of the white-​lipped macaque’s penis and scro­tal sac. Unlike the four other macaque species in the area that have teardrop-​shaped penis tips, the tip of the white-​lipped macaque’s penis is rounded. Also, its scro­tum is dark where those of other macaque species are light. The white-​lipped macaque also has thicker, longer hair around its neck than the other species.

“Our pho­tos clearly showed some mor­pho­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences between the new species and other known species,” co-​author Peng-​Fei Fan, from Dali Uni­ver­sity, told New Sci­en­tist. Genetic analy­sis has yet to be done [to con­firm whether this is a new species or not — Moos].

For now, the entire known range of the white-​lipped macaque exists within a pro­tected area. How­ever, the authors sus­pect it may be found else­where in the region. They also cau­tion that local bush­meat hunt­ing and the pro­posed devel­op­ment of hydropower sta­tions in the area and sub­se­quent human pop­u­la­tion influx may threaten its habitat.

“More­over, the gov­ern­ment of China is plan­ning to con­struct cas­cade hydropower sta­tions in Modog includ­ing the locale where we pho­tographed… M. leucogenys,” the authors write. “Con­struc­tion of hydropower sta­tions would result in destroy­ing and flood­ing exten­sive areas of for­est along the rivers, the poten­tial habi­tat for white-​cheeked macaques. The immi­gra­tion of a large num­ber of peo­ple into the area to con­struct the hydropower sta­tions also will result in an increase in the bush­meat trade, defor­esta­tion, new roads, and the con­struc­tion of hous­ing for work­ers, all of which will have a neg­a­tive impact on white-​cheeked macaque conservation.”

“Dis­cov­ery of white-​cheeked macaques fur­ther high­lights the imme­di­ate need for bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion in this area along with more inten­sive sur­veys and stud­ies to pro­tect, man­age, and con­serve this impor­tant ecosys­tem,” the authors write.

(Source: Mongabay Report­ing Net­work news release, 10.04.2015)

Humanity’s use of land for agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion has come at a cost, accord­ing to a major col­lab­o­ra­tive research project.

A global net­work of con­trib­u­tors has sub­mit­ted data from every con­ti­nent, pro­vid­ing the most com­plete pic­ture yet of the effects of land-​use by humans. The team of sci­en­tists assessed changes in bio­di­ver­sity from year 1500 until the present day. Over 280 pub­li­ca­tions have been con­sulted, with 26,593 species con­sid­ered by researchers.

The study, pub­lished this week on 2 April in the sci­en­tific jour­nal Nature, revealed that by 2005 land-​use change had caused a decrease of 14 per cent in the aver­age num­ber of species found in local ecosys­tems, com­pared to the pre-​industrial era. Most of the loss has come in the last 100 years.

The team con­cluded that, if human impacts con­tinue to grow as they have been, future losses in bio­di­ver­sity will be con­cen­trated in bio­di­verse but eco­nom­i­cally poor countries.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-​Secretary-​General and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the UN Envi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UNEP) said:
“As our under­stand­ing of the human impact on ecosys­tems and the esca­lat­ing loss of species grows so must our will­ing­ness to change course. The adop­tion of robust pol­icy frame­works that sup­port the emer­gence of effec­tive car­bon mar­kets and land-​use prac­tices for the preser­va­tion of nat­ural habi­tats are but one exam­ple of the oppor­tu­ni­ties we must seize.”

Lead author of the study, Tim New­bold of UNEP’s World Con­ser­va­tion Mon­i­tor­ing Cen­tre, said:
“The worst-​case sce­nario we have mapped would have a severe impact upon most regions of the planet. Our mod­els pre­dict that rapid agri­cul­tural expan­sion, par­tic­u­larly in poorer coun­tries, will cause rapid fur­ther losses of bio­di­ver­sity. How­ever, other sce­nar­ios give a much more pos­i­tive out­come for bio­di­ver­sity, espe­cially for poorer countries.”

Lead sci­en­tist, Andy Purvis of London’s Nat­ural His­tory Museum, said:
“These find­ings are a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone in under­stand­ing our impact on the planet. They show that what hap­pens next is com­pletely down to us. If we carry on as we are, num­bers of species will fall by nearly 3.5 per cent on aver­age by 2100. But if soci­ety takes con­certed action, and reduces cli­mate change by valu­ing forests prop­erly, then by the end of the cen­tury we can undo the last 50 years of dam­age to bio­di­ver­sity on land.”

The pub­li­ca­tion in Nature is the first global analy­sis pro­duced within the project PRE­DICTS. This project of Pro­ject­ing Responses of Eco­log­i­cal Diver­sity In Chang­ing Ter­res­trial Sys­tems is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort aim­ing to use a meta-​analytic approach to inves­ti­gate how local bio­di­ver­sity typ­i­cally responds to human pres­sures such as land-​use change, pol­lu­tion, inva­sive species and infra­struc­ture, and ulti­mately improve our abil­ity to pre­dict future bio­di­ver­sity changes.

(Source: Nat­ural His­tory Museum press release, 01.04.2015; PRE­DICTS website)

Zoos and aquar­i­ums around the world have a cru­cial role to play in help­ing peo­ple under­stand how they can pro­tect ani­mals and their nat­ural habi­tats, new research from the Uni­ver­sity of War­wick, the World Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoos and Aquar­i­ums (WAZA) and Chester Zoo has found.

Dr Eric Jensen, from Warwick’s Depart­ment of Soci­ol­ogy, says it is the most com­pelling evi­dence to date of the influ­ence of such attrac­tions, which attract more than 700 mil­lion vis­its across the globe every year.

The find­ings of the study, which is the biggest of its kind ever con­ducted, involv­ing 5,661 respon­dents at 26 zoos and aquar­i­ums, in 19 dif­fer­ent coun­tries, have been pub­lished on 14 March in the jour­nal Con­ser­va­tion Biol­ogy(first pub­lished online on 22 August 2014).

Dr Jensen, who is an inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised expert on pub­lic engage­ment with wildlife, explained: “Zoos and aquar­i­ums are in a unique posi­tion to con­tribute to the goal of rais­ing under­stand­ing of bio­di­ver­sity con­ser­va­tion. Indeed the major­ity have an insti­tu­tional and, in some cases, legal com­mit­ment to pub­lic edu­ca­tion. But because these estab­lish­ments tend to be viewed as providers of enter­tain­ment by the pub­lic, it has been unclear to what extent zoos’ edu­ca­tional mes­sages are effec­tive and, as there has been no pre­vi­ous global eval­u­a­tion of their impact, it has been impos­si­ble to assess their impor­tance on this scale — until now.”

“For the first time, there is strong evi­dence that many peo­ple leave these attrac­tions not just with greater aware­ness but also a bet­ter under­stand­ing of bio­di­ver­sity and con­ser­va­tion,” added Dr Jensen.

“But the chal­lenge for zoos and aquar­i­ums now is how to use these find­ings to directly improve the con­ser­va­tion of bio­di­ver­sity, because it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that an increase in knowl­edge does not nec­es­sar­ily lead to a change in behav­iour. The next equally impor­tant step should be to build on this knowl­edge to pro­mote pro-​conservation behav­iour and social change.”

What Zoos Do:

Dr Markus Gus­set, WAZA’s Chief Con­ser­va­tion Offi­cer, con­cluded: “The United Nations has a tar­get that every­one should be aware of the val­ues of bio­di­ver­sity and the steps they can take to con­serve and use it sus­tain­ably by 2020 at the lat­est. Our find­ings high­light that zoos and aquar­i­ums have an extremely impor­tant role to play if this goal is to be reached and if we are to even­tu­ally reverse the loss of bio­di­ver­sity on the planet.”

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of War­wick press release (EN, ES), 16.03.2015; WAZA press release, 19.03.2015)

A team of sci­en­tists led by the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS) found that polar bears, increas­ingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, may be eat­ing ter­res­trial foods includ­ing berries, birds and eggs, but any nutri­tional gains are lim­ited to a few indi­vid­u­als and likely can­not com­pen­sate for lost oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­sume their tra­di­tional, lipid-​rich prey — ice seals.

“Although some polar bears may eat ter­res­trial foods, there is no evi­dence the behav­iour is wide­spread,” said Dr. Karyn Rode, lead author of the study. “In the regions where ter­res­trial feed­ing by polar bears has been doc­u­mented, polar bear body con­di­tion and sur­vival rates have declined.”

The authors detail their find­ings in a review arti­cle pub­lished in the April issue of the jour­nal Fron­tiers in Ecol­ogy and the Envi­ron­ment. The sci­en­tists noted that over much of the polar bear’s range, ter­res­trial habi­tats are already occu­pied by griz­zly bears. Those griz­zly bears occur at low den­si­ties and are some of the small­est of their species due to low food qual­ity and avail­abil­ity. Fur­ther, they are a poten­tial com­peti­tor as polar bears dis­placed from their sea ice habi­tats increas­ingly use the same land habi­tats as griz­zly bears.

Rode con­tin­ues by point­ing out that “Griz­zly bears and polar bears are likely to increas­ingly inter­act and poten­tially com­pete for ter­res­trial resources.”

The study found that fewer than 30 indi­vid­ual polar bears have been observed con­sum­ing bird eggs from any one pop­u­la­tion, which typ­i­cally range from 900 to 2000 indi­vid­u­als. “There has been a fair bit of pub­lic­ity about polar bears con­sum­ing bird eggs. How­ever, this behav­iour is not yet com­mon, and is unlikely to have population-​level impacts on trends in body con­di­tion and sur­vival,” said Rode.

Few foods are as ener­get­i­cally dense as marine prey. Stud­ies sug­gest that polar bears con­sume the high­est lipid diet of any species, which pro­vides all essen­tial nutri­ents and is ideal for max­i­miz­ing fat depo­si­tion and min­i­miz­ing ener­getic require­ments. Poten­tial foods found in the ter­res­trial envi­ron­ment are dom­i­nated by high-​protein, low-​fat ani­mals and veg­e­ta­tion. Polar bears are not phys­i­o­log­i­cally suited to digest plants, and it would be dif­fi­cult for them to ingest the vol­umes that would be required to sup­port their large body size.

“The reports of ter­res­trial feed­ing by polar bears pro­vide impor­tant insights into the ecol­ogy of bears on land,” said Rode. “In this paper, we tried to put those obser­va­tions into a broader con­text. Focused research will help us deter­mine whether ter­res­trial foods could con­tribute to polar bear nutri­tion despite the phys­i­o­log­i­cal and nutri­tional lim­i­ta­tions and the low avail­abil­ity of most ter­res­trial food resources. How­ever, the evi­dence thus far sug­gests that increased con­sump­tion of ter­res­trial foods by polar bears is unlikely to off­set declines in body con­di­tion and sur­vival result­ing from sea ice loss.”

The USGS is lead­ing stud­ies of polar bear response to sea ice loss through its Chang­ing Arc­tic Ecosys­tems Ini­tia­tive. Cur­rent stud­ies include exam­i­na­tion of polar bear nutri­tional and behavioural ecol­ogy, linked to population-​level con­se­quences. For fur­ther infor­ma­tion, visit the USGS Polar Bear Pro­gram.

(Source: USGS news release, 01.04.2015)

Pro­tect­ing wildlife while feed­ing a world pop­u­la­tion pre­dicted to reach 9 bil­lion by 2050 will require a holis­tic approach to con­ser­va­tion that con­sid­ers human-​altered land­scapes such as farm­land, accord­ing to researchers from Stan­ford University.

Wildlife and the nat­ural habi­tat that sup­ports it might be an increas­ingly scarce com­mod­ity in a world where at least three-​quarters of the land sur­face is directly affected by humans and the rest is vul­ner­a­ble to human-​caused impacts such as cli­mate change. But what if altered agri­cul­tural land­scapes could play vital roles in nur­tur­ing wildlife pop­u­la­tions while also feed­ing an ever-​growing human population?

A new study, pub­lished on 16 April in the jour­nal Nature and co-​authored by three Stan­ford sci­en­tists, finds that a long-​accepted the­ory used to esti­mate extinc­tion rates, pre­dict eco­log­i­cal risk and make con­ser­va­tion pol­icy rec­om­men­da­tions is overly pes­simistic. The researchers point to an alter­na­tive frame­work that promises a more effec­tive way of account­ing for human-​altered land­scapes and assess­ing eco­log­i­cal risks.

Cur­rent pro­jec­tions fore­cast that about half of Earth’s plants and ani­mals will go extinct over the next cen­tury because of human activ­i­ties, mostly due to our agri­cul­tural meth­ods. “The extinc­tion under way threat­ens to weaken and even destroy key parts of Earth’s life-​support sys­tems, upon which eco­nomic pros­per­ity and all other aspects of human well-​being depend,” said co-​author Gretchen Daily, the Bing Pro­fes­sor in Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence at Stan­ford and senior fel­low at the Stan­ford Woods Insti­tute for the Environment

But that grim future isn’t a fore­gone con­clu­sion. “Until the next aster­oid slams into Earth, the future of all known life hinges on peo­ple, more than on any other force,” Daily said.

Nature is not an island
Con­ser­va­tion­ists have long assumed that once nat­ural land­scapes are frac­tured by human devel­op­ment or agri­cul­ture, migra­tion cor­ri­dors for wildlife are bro­ken, block­ing access to food, shel­ter and breed­ing grounds. A schol­arly the­ory was devel­oped to esti­mate the num­ber of species in such frac­tured land­scapes, where patches of for­est sur­rounded by farms resem­ble islands of nat­ural habitat.

The “equi­lib­rium the­ory of island bio­geog­ra­phy” is a pil­lar of bio­log­i­cal research — its ele­gant equa­tion to esti­mate the num­ber of species in a habi­tat has almost reached the sta­tus of a sci­en­tific law, accord­ing to Menden­hall. The the­ory dri­ves the default strat­egy of con­serv­ing bio­di­ver­sity by des­ig­nat­ing nature reserves. This strat­egy sees reserves as “islands in an inhos­pitable sea of human-​modified habi­tats” and doesn’t ade­quately account for bio­di­ver­sity pat­terns in many human-​dominated land­scapes, accord­ing to the Stan­ford study.

“This paper shows that farm­land and for­est rem­nants can be more valu­able for bio­di­ver­sity than pre­vi­ously assumed,” said Daniel Karp, who earned his PhD in biol­ogy at Stan­ford in 2013 and is cur­rently a NatureNet post­doc­toral fel­low at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berkeley.

To test the island the­ory against a more holis­tic the­ory of agri­cul­tural or coun­try­side bio­geog­ra­phy, the researchers turned to bats — a species acutely sen­si­tive to defor­esta­tion. The study focused on bat pop­u­la­tions within a mosaic of for­est frag­ments and farm­land in Costa Rica and on islands in a large lake in Panama. The researchers also did a meta-​analysis of 29 stud­ies of more than 700 bat species to bol­ster and gen­er­alise their find­ings globally.

Island bio­geo­graphic the­ory accu­rately pre­dicted bats’ responses to for­est loss on the Pana­man­ian islands sys­tem, but didn’t come close to accu­rately fore­cast­ing sim­i­lar responses in the Costa Rican coun­try­side land­scape. For exam­ple, the island the­ory pre­dicted that the Costa Rican cof­fee plan­ta­tions would have inad­e­quate habi­tat to sus­tain a sin­gle species of bat. In real­ity, plan­ta­tions in the coun­try­side typ­i­cally sup­ported 18 bat species, com­pared to the 23 to 28 sup­ported by trop­i­cal for­est frag­ments and nature reserves.

“Con­ser­va­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties for trop­i­cal wildlife are tightly linked to ade­quate man­age­ment of these human-​modified habi­tats,” said co-​author Christoph Meyer, a researcher at the Uni­ver­sity of Lisbon’s Cen­ter for Envi­ron­men­tal Biology.

Over­all, as for­est cover dis­ap­peared, the rate of species loss was “sub­stan­tially and sig­nif­i­cantly higher” in the island ecosys­tem, and species abun­dances were “increas­ingly uneven” com­pared to the coun­try­side ecosys­tem, the study found.

The rea­son for the dis­crep­an­cies, accord­ing to the study’s authors, is that island bio­geo­graphic the­ory was orig­i­nally based on actual islands sur­rounded by water, and does not account for fac­tors such as a coun­try­side landscape’s abil­ity to sup­port more species and slow extinc­tion rates com­pared to true island ecosys­tems. Espe­cially in the trop­ics, island bio­geo­graphic theory’s appli­ca­tion is “dis­tort­ing our under­stand­ing and con­ser­va­tion strate­gies in agri­cul­ture, the enter­prise on which the future of bio­di­ver­sity most crit­i­cally hinges,” the study’s authors wrote.

“Not only do more species per­sist across the ‘sea of farm­land’ than expected by island bio­geo­graphic the­ory, novel yet native species actu­ally thrive there,” said co-​author Eliz­a­beth Hadly, Pro­fes­sor in Envi­ron­men­tal Biol­ogy at Stan­ford and senior fel­low at the Stan­ford Woods Insti­tute for the Envi­ron­ment. “This indi­cates that human-​altered land­scapes can fos­ter more bio­log­i­cal diver­sity than we anticipated.”

A new approach
The fate of much of the world’s wildlife is play­ing out in human-​altered land­scapes that are increas­ingly threat­ened by chem­i­cal inputs such as her­bi­cides and pes­ti­cides. Bio­di­ver­sity is not the only loser. Peo­ple are los­ing many of nature’s ben­e­fits, called ecosys­tem ser­vices, such as water purifi­ca­tion pro­vided by forests and wet­lands and pest con­trol pro­vided by birds and bats.

The study’s find­ings point to the need for new approaches that inte­grate con­ser­va­tion and food pro­duc­tion, to make agri­cul­tural lands more hos­pitable to wildlife by reduc­ing chem­i­cal inputs, pre­serv­ing frag­ments of for­est and other nat­ural habi­tats and reward­ing farm­ers and ranch­ers for the ben­e­fits that result.

“A the­ory of coun­try­side bio­geog­ra­phy is piv­otal to con­ser­va­tion strat­egy in the agri­cul­tural ecosys­tems that com­prise roughly half of the global land sur­face and are likely to increase even fur­ther in the future,” the researchers wrote. A new approach that could inspire con­ser­va­tion­ists, researchers and pol­i­cy­mak­ers to adopt new think­ing to ensure a long-​term sus­tain­able agri­cul­tural food pro­duc­tion. Which is nec­es­sary, because the pro­jec­tions made in 2009, by UNEP/​GRID-​Arendal, of expected changes in agri­cul­tural out­puts in 2080 due to cli­mate change were not very pos­i­tive. While recently, sci­en­tists have reported (UN-​IPCC) that crop yields are expected to decline faster due to cli­mate change than thought before (MIT news, 31.03.2014).

(Source: Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity news release, 16.04.2014)

Wildlife fences are con­structed for a vari­ety of rea­sons includ­ing to pre­vent the spread of dis­eases, pro­tect wildlife from poach­ers, and to help man­age small pop­u­la­tions of threat­ened species. Human-​wildlife con­flict is another com­mon rea­son for build­ing fences: Wildlife can dam­age valu­able live­stock, crops, or infra­struc­ture, some species carry dis­eases of agri­cul­tural con­cern, and a few threaten human lives. At the same time, peo­ple kill wild ani­mals for food, trade, or to defend lives or prop­erty, and human activ­i­ties degrade wildlife habitat.

So, sep­a­rat­ing peo­ple and wildlife by fenc­ing can appear to be a mutu­ally benefi­cial way to avoid such detri­men­tal effects. But in a paper in the jour­nal Sci­ence, pub­lished on 4 April, sci­en­tists review the ‘pros and cons’ of large scale fenc­ing and argue that fenc­ing should often be a last resort.

Cost of fenc­ing
Although fenc­ing can have con­ser­va­tion ben­e­fits, it also has costs. When areas of con­tigu­ous wildlife habi­tat are con­verted into islands, the result­ing small and iso­lated pop­u­la­tions are prone to extinc­tion, and the result­ing loss of preda­tors and other larger-​bodied species can affect inter­ac­tions between species in ways that cause fur­ther local extinc­tions, a process which has been termed “eco­log­i­cal meltdown”.

In addi­tion to their ecosystem-​wide impact, fences do not always achieve their spe­cific aims. Con­struc­tion of fences to reduce human-​wildlife con­flict has been suc­cess­ful in some places but the chal­lenges of appro­pri­ate fence design, loca­tion, con­struc­tion, and main­te­nance mean that fences often fail to deliver the antic­i­pated ben­e­fits. Iron­i­cally, in some places, fences also pro­vide poach­ers with a ready sup­ply of wire for mak­ing snares.

Giraffe at a fence in South Africa:

Alter­na­tive meth­ods
Co-​author Simon Hedges of WCS said: “A vari­ety of alter­na­tive approaches — includ­ing bet­ter ani­mal hus­bandry, community-​based crop-​guarding, insur­ance schemes, and wildlife-​sensitive land-​use plan­ning — can be used to mit­i­gate conflicts between peo­ple and wildlife with­out the need for fenc­ing. WCS projects work­ing with local peo­ple and gov­ern­ment agen­cies have shown that human-​elephant con­flict can be dra­mat­i­cally reduced with­out using fences in coun­tries as dif­fer­ent as Indone­sia and Tanzania.”

Co-​author Sarah Durant of ZSL’s said, “An increased aware­ness of the dam­age caused by fenc­ing is lead­ing to move­ments to remove fences instead of build­ing more. Increas­ingly, fenc­ing is seen as back­wards step in conservation.”

Dis­eases
The desire to sep­a­rate live­stock from wildlife in order to cre­ate zones free from dis­eases such as foot-​and-​mouth has resulted in exten­sive fenc­ing sys­tems, par­tic­u­larly in south­ern Africa. Some of these fences have had dev­as­tat­ing envi­ron­men­tal effects. For­tu­nately, it is increas­ingly recog­nised that a com­bi­na­tion of improved test­ing, vac­ci­na­tion, and stan­dard­ised approaches to meat prepa­ra­tion can pre­vent spread of dis­eases with­out the need to sep­a­rate cat­tle from wildlife by fencing.

The authors con­clude that as cli­mate change increases the impor­tance of facil­i­tat­ing wildlife mobil­ity and main­tain­ing land­scape con­nec­tiv­ity, fence removal may become an impor­tant form of cli­mate change pre­pared­ness, and so fenc­ing of wildlife should be avoided when­ever possible.

How­ever, there are other opin­ions about using fences to sep­a­rate wildlife from humans as a con­ser­va­tion mea­sure. Just over a year ago a report was pub­lished that con­cluded that nearly half of Africa’s wild lion pop­u­la­tions may decline to near extinc­tion over the next 20 – 40 years with­out urgent con­ser­va­tion mea­sures. The plight of many lion pop­u­la­tions is so bleak, the report con­cluded that fenc­ing them in — and fenc­ing humans out — may be the lions’ only hope for survival.

(Source: WCS press release, 03.04.2014; Pan­thera press release, 05.03.2013)

Global cli­mate change and rapidly dis­ap­pear­ing habi­tat are crit­i­cal to the sur­vival of count­less endan­gered species. There­fore, there is a height­ened sense of urgency to con­firm the exis­tence of these endan­gered species, as well as the return of ani­mals thought to be extinct, or to con­firm the pres­ence of newly dis­cov­ered species. Tra­di­tion­ally field biol­o­gists col­lect spec­i­mens to dis­tin­guish the ani­mals or to con­firm that they do indeed exist in the wild.

Researchers at Ply­mouth Uni­ver­sity and Ari­zona State Uni­ver­sity (ASU) want to change the way biol­o­gists think about this “gold stan­dard” of col­lect­ing a ‘voucher’ spec­i­men for species iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. They sug­gest that cur­rent spec­i­men col­lec­tion prac­tices may actu­ally pose a risk to vul­ner­a­ble ani­mal pop­u­la­tions already on the brink of extinction.

“We are draw­ing atten­tion to this issue as an impor­tant ques­tion bear­ing on the eth­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties of field biol­o­gists. It con­cerns not only an increased extinc­tion threat to re-​discovered species, but also the col­lec­tion of spec­i­mens from small pop­u­la­tions more gen­er­ally,” said Ben Minteer. “Com­bine the under­stand­able impulse to con­firm some­thing really impor­tant — such as that a species is not, in fact extinct — with the sen­si­tiv­ity of a pop­u­la­tion to col­lec­tion and you’ve got a poten­tially sig­nif­i­cant con­ser­va­tion issue,” added Minteer added, who is also the Ari­zona Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety Chair.

The researchers raise the issue in an arti­cle pub­lished on 18 April in the jour­nal Sci­ence. In the arti­cle, Minteer and his col­leagues cite exam­ples of the decline or loss of a range of ani­mal species due to the impact of field col­lec­tions by both pro­fes­sional sci­en­tists and ama­teur nat­u­ral­ists. There are cases of now-​extinct birds, as well as the loss and redis­cov­ery of amphib­ians in Costa Rica.

Chang­ing the “gold stan­dard”
The researchers sug­gest using a com­bi­na­tion of mod­ern, non-​lethal tech­niques to con­firm a species’ exis­tence includ­ing high-​resolution pho­tog­ra­phy and audio record­ings of sounds or mat­ing calls. Also, using DNA sam­pling by tak­ing swabs of the mouth or skin offer mol­e­c­u­lar tech­niques that could iden­tify an ani­mal with­out tak­ing a spec­i­men from the field.
The sci­en­tists say using new tech­nolo­gies can be just as effec­tive in iden­ti­fy­ing an organ­ism and will also avoid increas­ing the extinc­tion risk for small populations.

“The thrill of (re)discovering a species must be one of the most excit­ing events in a biologist’s life, how­ever it is easy to for­get it comes with sig­nif­i­cant respon­si­bil­i­ties. What impact are we caus­ing to the species even in this first encounter? The tech­nol­ogy is there to gather cru­cial evi­dence to sub­stan­ti­ate our find­ing with­out harm­ing the ani­mals, there is no need to col­lect by default, ” said Robert Puschen­dorf, a con­ser­va­tion biol­o­gist who focuses his work on the impacts of dis­ease and cli­mate change on wildlife at the School of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences, Ply­mouth University.

Biol­ogy and ethics: bal­anc­ing eco­log­i­cal impact against value of research
The dis­cus­sion about replac­ing lethal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­niques and field col­lec­tion prac­tices with less-​invasive ones is part of a more com­plex issue. Weigh­ing the ben­e­fits of improved sci­en­tific under­stand­ing of threat­ened species for con­ser­va­tion, against the research impacts on endan­gered ani­mals is com­pli­cated.
“Study­ing small pop­u­la­tions is a spe­cial chal­lenge, espe­cially in cases such as amphib­ians where species are declin­ing glob­ally, at times to extinc­tion. Our goal is to high­light this chal­lenge while offer­ing options for doc­u­ment­ing excit­ing, inter­est­ing, and impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies. We are draw­ing atten­tion to the need for inves­ti­ga­tors to reflect on the wider eth­i­cal and social impli­ca­tions of their work before or as they con­duct the research and not just after the fact,” said James P. Collins, an evo­lu­tion­ary ecol­o­gist and Vir­ginia M. Ull­man Pro­fes­sor of Nat­ural His­tory and the Envi­ron­ment in ASU’s School of Life Sciences.

(Source: Ply­mouth Uni­ver­sity news release, 17.04.2014)

Increas­ing tigers’ genetic diver­sity — via inter­breed­ing and other meth­ods — and not just their pop­u­la­tion num­bers may be the best solu­tion to sav­ing this endan­gered species, accord­ing to Stan­ford research.

In other words, increas­ing genetic diver­sity among the 3,200 or so tigers (Pan­thera tigris) left on the planet is the key to their sur­vival as a species.

Iconic sym­bols of power and beauty, wild tigers may roam only in sto­ries some­day soon. Their his­tor­i­cal range has been reduced by more than 90 per­cent. But con­ser­va­tion plans that focus only on increas­ing num­bers and pre­serv­ing dis­tinct sub­species ignore genetic diver­sity, accord­ing to the study. In fact, under that approach, the tiger could van­ish entirely.

The research, pub­lished on 17 April in the Jour­nal of Hered­ity, shows that the more gene flow there is among tiger pop­u­la­tions, the more genetic diver­sity is main­tained and the higher the chances of species sur­vival become. In fact, it might be pos­si­ble to main­tain tiger pop­u­la­tions that pre­serve about 90 per­cent of genetic diversity.

Rachael Bay, a grad­u­ate stu­dent in biol­ogy at Stanford’s Hop­kins Marine Sta­tion and the lead author of the study, said, “Genetic diver­sity is the basis for adap­ta­tion,” which reflects Darwin’s and Wallace’s orig­i­nal idea of nat­ural selection.

Loss of diver­sity
The research focused on the Indian sub­con­ti­nent, home to about 65 per­cent of the world’s wild tigers. The sci­en­tists found that as pop­u­la­tions become more frag­mented and the pools of each tiger sub­species shrink, so does genetic diver­sity. This loss of diver­sity can lead to lower repro­duc­tion rates, faster spread of dis­ease and more car­diac defects, among other problems.

The researchers used a novel frame­work, based on a method pre­vi­ously employed to analyse ancient DNA sam­ples, to pre­dict what pop­u­la­tion size would be nec­es­sary to main­tain cur­rent genetic diver­sity of tigers into the future. The authors believe this new approach could help in man­ag­ing pop­u­la­tions of other threat­ened species.

The results showed that for tiger pop­u­la­tions to main­tain their cur­rent genetic diver­sity 150 years from now, the tiger pop­u­la­tion would have to expand to about 98,000 indi­vid­u­als if gene flow across species were delayed 25 years. By com­par­i­son, the pop­u­la­tion would need to grow to about 60,000 if gene flowwere achieved immediately.

Nei­ther of these num­bers is real­is­tic, con­sid­er­ing the lim­ited size of pro­tected tiger habi­tat and avail­abil­ity of prey, among other fac­tors, accord­ing to the researchers. But “num­bers don’t tell the entire story,” said Eliz­a­beth Hadly.

Lim­ited habi­tat
“Since genetic vari­abil­ity is the raw mate­r­ial for future evo­lu­tion, our results sug­gest that with­out inter­breed­ing sub­pop­u­la­tions of tigers, the genetic future for tigers is not viable,” said co-​author Uma Ramakr­ish­nan, a for­mer Stan­ford post­doc­toral scholar in biol­ogy and cur­rent researcher at the National Cen­tre for Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences in Ban­ga­lore, India.

Because migra­tion and inter­breed­ing among sub­species appear to be “much more impor­tant” for main­tain­ing genetic diver­sity than increas­ing pop­u­la­tion num­bers, the researchers rec­om­mend focus­ing con­ser­va­tion efforts on cre­at­ing ways for tigers to travel longer dis­tances, such as wildlife cor­ri­dors, and poten­tially cross­breed­ing wild and cap­tive tiger subspecies.

Under­stand­ing these fac­tors can help decision-​makers bet­ter address how devel­op­ment affects pop­u­la­tions of tigers and other ani­mals, the study noted.

Con­ser­va­tion efforts for other top preda­tors have shown the impor­tance of con­sid­er­ing genetic diver­sity and con­nec­tiv­ity among pop­u­la­tions, accord­ing to the report. One exam­ple is Florida pan­thers: since indi­vid­u­als from a closely related pan­ther sub­species were intro­duced to the pop­u­la­tion, Florida pan­thers have seen a mod­est rise in num­bers and fewer cases of genetic dis­or­ders and poor fitness.

The out­come of the research could be vital infor­ma­tion to save the tiger from going extinct, and could help to make the Global Tiger Recov­ery Pro­gram a suc­cess, and dou­ble wild tigers by the next ‘Year of the Tiger’ in 2022:

(Source: Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity news release, 15.04.2014; Global Tiger Ini­tia­tive; World Wildlife Fund YouTube channel)

Part II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 5^th assess­ment report, pub­lished at the end of March, reported that cli­mate change is alter­ing species’ dis­tri­b­u­tions and pop­u­la­tions with high con­fi­dence. How­ever, what is less clear is how and why. Now researchers funded by the Cam­bridge Con­ser­va­tion Initiative’s Col­lab­o­ra­tive Fund for Con­ser­va­tion have pub­lished find­ings from a lit­er­a­ture review and meta-​analysis, which show that the main dri­ver of change might actu­ally occur through altered inter­ac­tions between species, rather than direct responses to climate.

The lit­er­a­ture review paper, pub­lished on 28 March in the jour­nal Global Change Biol­ogy, was pro­duced as one of the out­puts from the Cam­bridge Con­ser­va­tion Ini­tia­tive (CCI) project ‘Mech­a­nisms under­pin­ning the impact of cli­mate change on nat­ural pop­u­la­tions’.

Each species shares an ecosys­tem with other species, some of which it might eat, and oth­ers that might eat or com­pete with it. The col­lab­o­ra­tion of researchers from CCI part­ners, led by sci­en­tists from the British Trust for Ornithol­ogy (BTO), found it was the effects of cli­matic changes upon the pop­u­la­tions or activ­ity of these other species which were respon­si­ble for many of the impacts observed, as they cas­cade through the food chain. For exam­ple, Arc­tic fox pop­u­la­tions have been affected by declin­ing lem­ming pop­u­la­tions linked to changes in snow cover, and also by expand­ing red fox pop­u­la­tions. In the UK upland birds such as the golden plover are affected by increas­ing sum­mer tem­per­a­tures, which causes prob­lems for their crane fly prey. These dis­rup­tions par­tic­u­larly affect preda­tory species, and appear to have wors­ened with cli­mate change.

Dr James Pearce-​Higgins of the BTO said, “Although it might be assumed that most species are respond­ing directly to cli­matic changes, either as indi­vid­u­als move to keep within their favoured cli­mate zone, or through sur­vival and repro­duc­tive rates linked closely to these cli­matic vari­ables, this does not account for the major­ity of impacts. Instead, the main impacts of cli­mate change occur through altered inter­ac­tions between species within an ecosystem.”

Impor­tantly, as much con­ser­va­tion action is already about man­ag­ing species’ pop­u­la­tions, such as con­trol­ling inva­sive species or reduc­ing pre­da­tion risk, we already have the con­ser­va­tion tools in place to reduce the impacts of cli­mate change on species. This under­stand­ing there­fore pro­vides hope that we can help the most vul­ner­a­ble species adapt to cli­mate change, pro­vid­ing the mag­ni­tude of cli­mate change is not too great, and that con­ser­va­tion activ­ity is suf­fi­ciently funded. For exam­ple, in the UK uplands, we can restore degraded peat­land habi­tats to boost inver­te­brate crane fly pop­u­la­tions, and increase their resilience to cli­mate change. Whilst this work also helps iden­tify the types of species’ most vul­ner­a­ble to future cli­mate change impacts, there remains a lack of infor­ma­tion from the trop­ics, where most species occur, and where increased mon­i­tor­ing and research is essential.

“This study high­lights a need to con­sider the often com­plex eco­log­i­cal rela­tion­ships between species when assess­ing the impacts of cli­mate change on wildlife.” says Jamie Carr of the IUCN. “Most research to date has focused on the direct impacts of chang­ing con­di­tions, which may mean that impor­tant emerg­ing threats are being overlooked.”

(Source: Cam­bridge Con­ser­va­tion Ini­tia­tive News, 14.04.2014)

Sup­port for nat­ural his­tory — the study of organ­isms, how and where they live and how they inter­act with their envi­ron­ment — appears to be in steep decline in devel­oped coun­tries, accord­ing to Joshua Tewks­bury, a Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton (UW) pro­fes­sor and WWF Inter­na­tional sci­en­tist. “Yet nat­ural his­tory pro­vides essen­tial knowl­edge for fields as var­ied as human health, food secu­rity, con­ser­va­tion, land man­age­ment and recre­ation,” he said.

Tewks­bury and 16 other sci­en­tists from across North Amer­ica out­line the impor­tance to soci­ety and call for a revi­tal­i­sa­tion of the prac­tice of nat­ural his­tory in an arti­cle first pub­lished online on 26 March in the jour­nal BioScience.

Nat­ural his­tory is gen­er­ally more con­cerned with obser­va­tions and col­lec­tions than with exper­i­men­ta­tion. It’s thought nar­rowly as the purview of sci­en­tists bot­tling up spec­i­mens or press­ing plants meant for muse­ums. But nat­ural his­tory is really about look­ing at organ­isms so closely that one learns their habits and how they fit with what’s around them. The approach works for under­stand­ing ani­mals, plants and other organ­isms out­doors as well as at the micro­bial level in, for exam­ple, our bodies.

Among exam­ples in the paper, the co-​authors point out that effec­tive fish­eries man­age­ment relies on nat­ural his­tory and that dis­as­ters such as the col­lapse of the Bering Sea wall­eye pol­lock fish­ery might have been avoided had nat­ural his­tory been used sooner. Many infec­tious dis­eases of humans — includ­ing avian influenza, Lyme dis­ease, cholera and rabies — are linked at some point in their life cycles to other ani­mals. Indeed 75 per­cent of emerg­ing infec­tious dis­eases of humans are asso­ci­ated with ani­mals, called zoonoses. Con­trol strate­gies rely on know­ing these hosts’ nat­ural history.

Increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated bio­log­i­cal mod­els still need obser­va­tions from the real world, the authors point out.

(Source: The Nat­ural His­to­ries Project — Vimeo channel)

“Despite the impor­tance of detailed nat­ural his­tory infor­ma­tion to many sec­tors of soci­ety, expo­sure and train­ing in tra­di­tional forms of nat­ural his­tory have not kept pace with growth in the nat­ural sci­ences over the past 50 years,” accord­ing to the authors.

Whereas uni­ver­si­ties in the 1950s, exam­ined as part of the Bio­Science paper, required nat­ural his­tory courses for a biol­ogy degree, today the major­ity of U.S. schools have no such require­ment, a trend that has coin­cided with the rise of mol­e­c­u­lar, exper­i­men­tal and other forms of biol­ogy. The rate of nat­ural his­tory pub­li­ca­tions in some dis­ci­plines has seen a par­al­lel decline.

In the paper the co-​authors offer rec­om­men­da­tions for indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions inter­ested in revi­tal­is­ing nat­ural his­tory.

“There’s hope, both within and out­side of tra­di­tional nat­ural his­tory col­lec­tions, in the rise of Inter­net– and smartphone-​based tech­nolo­gies that allow the growth of broad part­ner­ships, includ­ing citizen-​science ini­tia­tives,” Tewks­bury said. An exam­ple is eBird, a web-​based pro­gram devel­oped by the Cor­nell Lab of Ornithol­ogy that has cap­i­talised on the wide­spread inter­est in and appeal of birds. The pro­gram has wit­nessed a rapid, global increase in data con­trib­u­tors and users, which has enabled both researchers and the gen­eral pub­lic to ben­e­fit from tech­nolo­gies for the col­lec­tion, organ­i­sa­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion of vast num­bers of bird observations.

Such pro­grammes are emerg­ing but will need estab­lished pro­fes­sion­als to self-​identify as nat­ural his­to­ri­ans to pro­vide the lead­er­ship for nat­ural his­tory to reclaim its nec­es­sary role, the authors assert.

Besides the paper, a web­site and other mate­ri­als emerged fol­low­ing a series of four work­shops funded by the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the UW Col­lege of the Environment.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton news release, 26.03.2014)

A new INTER­POL report has under­lined the need for greater oper­a­tional and inves­tiga­tive responses to the highly lucra­tive illicit tiger trade if the species is to avoid extinction.

With both small-​scale oppor­tunis­tic crim­i­nals and organ­ised crime net­works using con­stantly chang­ing tac­tics and more inno­v­a­tive and sophis­ti­cated meth­ods to avoid detec­tion, the report by INTERPOL’s Envi­ron­men­tal Secu­rity unit says law enforce­ment efforts need to keep pace with the evolv­ing nature of wildlife crime.

The ‘Assess­ment of Enforce­ment Responses to Tiger Crime’ report also high­lights the need for a net­work of intel­li­gence ana­lysts from tiger range coun­tries to develop a plan for con­sis­tent, trans­par­ent and effec­tive infor­ma­tion man­age­ment in rela­tion to inter­na­tional wildlife trafficking.

To this end, a four-​day meet­ing with ana­lysts from tiger range coun­tries and other inter­na­tional spe­cial­ists will be held at the Gen­eral Sec­re­tariat head­quar­ters in Lyon in May. In addi­tion to shar­ing infor­ma­tion on Asian big cat crime, the meet­ing is also aimed at iden­ti­fy­ing areas where INTER­POL can sup­port coun­tries in strength­en­ing intel­li­gence man­age­ment to develop a cohe­sive global strat­egy to more effec­tively tackle the crim­i­nal net­works behind tiger crimes.

“Tools and ser­vices, such as INTERPOL’s data­bases and notices, are in place to help iden­tify and arrest crim­i­nals, but they need to be used to their full extent if they are to be effec­tive in com­bat­ing this and all types of wildlife crime,” said Mr Higgins.

The report was drafted as part of INTERPOL’s Project Preda­tor. Funded pri­mar­ily by the US Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment (USAID), the project was cre­ated in 2011 to develop a global pic­ture of the crim­i­nal activ­ity under­min­ing ongo­ing con­ser­va­tion efforts in rela­tion to tigers and other big cats.

Watch and lis­ten to what David Hig­gins of INTERPOL’s Envi­ron­men­tal Secu­rity unit said about tiger crime and wildlife trade in ‘View­point’ on ASEAN TV, 15 March 2012:

(Source: cheep­a­jorn­loke YouTube channel)

“We are united in our efforts to stop the killing and ille­gal trade of wild tigers. This report works to this end and informs the United States’ efforts in imple­ment­ing our new National Strat­egy to com­bat wildlife traf­fick­ing,” said Mary Mel­nyk, USAID’s Senior Advi­sor, Nat­ural Resources Man­age­ment for Asia and the Mid­dle East.

The report high­lighted the impor­tant role of global and regional organ­i­sa­tions in encour­ag­ing coop­er­a­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between tiger range coun­tries, as well as the need to raise pub­lic aware­ness to reduce con­sumer demand and sup­port tiger conservation.

The report’s find­ings were pre­vi­ously shared with other key part­ners at a meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton DC, which brought together agen­cies and organ­i­sa­tions includ­ing USAID, the US Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice, US Depart­ment of State’s Bureau of Inter­na­tional Nar­cotics and Law Enforce­ment Affairs (INL), the World Bank Global Tiger Ini­tia­tive, Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion, IFAW and WWF.

(Source: INTER­POL news release, 03.04.2014)

Every autumn, in the Arc­tic arch­i­pel­ago of Sval­bard, polar bears build dens to give birth and nurse their young through the first days of life. Know­ing how many cubs are born — and where their dens are located — is crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the sta­tus of the bears as they face a future of rapidly decreas­ing ice.

When the polar bears of Sval­bard ven­ture from their dens this year, a joint expe­di­tion of WWF-​Canon and the Nor­we­gian Polar Insti­tute (NPI) will be there to observe how the bears are adapt­ing to chang­ing sea ice con­di­tions. The WWF-​Canon expe­di­tion arrived only weeks after the max­i­mum extent of Arc­tic sea ice was found to be at its fifth low­est level in the satel­lite record. A recently pub­lished paper also sug­gests that the Sval­bard expe­di­tion area will be ice-​free in sum­mer by 2050.

The fol­low­ing video shows one model of how the sum­mer Arc­tic ice cap may van­ish over the years through 2049, cour­tesy of Uni­ver­sity Cor­po­ra­tion for Atmos­pheric Research:

There is some evi­dence that the Sval­bard pop­u­la­tion is mov­ing away from tra­di­tional den­ning sites on the Nor­we­gian islands. The bears need to be close to sea ice to hunt when they emerge from their dens. One pos­si­bil­ity is that they are mov­ing fur­ther east where the ice sur­vives longer.

“For WWF, this is impor­tant work to under­stand how many cubs were born last win­ter and where they were born,” said Gert Polet, an Arc­tic expert with WWF-​Netherlands. “We want to see how polar bears use an area that is encoun­ter­ing such rapid change because of melt­ing and shift­ing sea ice.”

NPI researchers will place satel­lite col­lars on female bears so that they can track their travel over the next year. Com­par­ing the posi­tion of the bears to satel­lite infor­ma­tion about the sea ice will help explain how polar bears are respond­ing to ice con­di­tions and how they might adapt to future changes.

Four of the bears col­lared dur­ing the expe­di­tion can be fol­lowed on WWF’s polar bear tracker as soon as the satel­lite col­lars are acti­vated. The NPI and WWF-​Canon expe­di­tion runs from April 11 through April 21 and can be fol­lowed at http://​panda​.org/​s​v​a​l​b​a​r​d

The expe­di­tion is spon­sored by Canon Europe, Con­ser­va­tion Imag­ing Part­ner of WWF Inter­na­tional. Canon has a long­stand­ing part­ner­ship with WWF that goes back over six­teen years, using imag­ing exper­tise to help WWF record and pro­mote aware­ness of the state of the envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change. Canon is sup­ply­ing pho­to­graphic equip­ment for this project and spon­sor­ing a lead­ing Swedish wildlife pho­tog­ra­pher and Canon Ambas­sador, Bru­tus Östling, to cap­ture images of the wildlife encoun­tered along the way.

(Source: WWF Global news, 10.04.2014)

A team of inter­na­tional sci­en­tists, includ­ing a trio from Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity (SFU), has pub­lished the world’s first rank­ing of evo­lu­tion­ary dis­tinct birds under threat of extinc­tion. These include a cave-​dwelling bird that is so oily it can be used as a lamp and a bird that has claws on its wings and a stom­ach like a cow.

The research, pub­lished on 10 April in Cur­rent Biol­ogy, shows that Indone­sia, Aus­tralia and New Zealand all score high on respon­si­bil­ity for pre­serv­ing irre­place­able species. The researchers exam­ined nearly 10,000 bird species and iden­ti­fied more than 100 areas where addi­tional pro­tec­tion efforts would help safe­guard avian biodiversity.

“We used genetic data to iden­tify the bird species that have the fewest rel­a­tives on the ‘Tree of Life’, that is, which species score high­est on the ‘evo­lu­tion­ary dis­tinct­ness’ index,” explains Arne Moo­ers, one of the six authors of a study that was seven years in the making.

The index was cre­ated by for­mer SFU PhD stu­dent Dave Red­ding, another one of the SFU trio, and was applied to an updated ver­sion of the first global tree of birds, pub­lished in 2012 by the group in Nature.

The researchers, led by Moo­ers and Wal­ter Jetz at Yale Uni­ver­sity, com­bined the index with data on extinc­tion risk and maps of where every bird in the world lives. The result is a snap­shot of how the entire Tree of Life of birds is dis­trib­uted on the planet, and where on earth the tree is most at risk of being lost. “Given that we can­not save all species from extinc­tion, these dis­tinct species are of spe­cial con­ser­va­tion con­cern, since they are truly irre­place­able — they have no close rel­a­tives that share their DNA,” Moo­ers says.

Jeff Joy, another SFU team mem­ber, adds: “Many of these dis­tinct species are also incred­i­bly cool — the number-​one bird lives in caves and is so oily you can use it as a lamp, the num­ber three-​bird has claws on its wings and a stom­ach like a cow, while still another, the Abbott’s Booby, breeds only on Christ­mas Island.”

Doc­u­men­tary on con­ser­va­tion efforts in Ari­zona to bring back the Cal­i­for­nia Con­dors, no 3 on the EDGE list, from the brink of extinc­tion to the brink of recov­ery:

(Source: Ari­zona Game­And­Fish YouTube channel)

Map­ping where dis­tinct species are on the planet also gives insight into which areas and coun­tries stew­ard dis­pro­por­tion­ate amounts of bird evo­lu­tion. The data also offer some insight into large-​scale processes affect­ing bio­di­ver­sity, Moo­ers says.

“We also found that if we pri­ori­tise threat­ened birds by their dis­tinct­ness, we actu­ally pre­serve very close to the max­i­mum pos­si­ble amount of evo­lu­tion,” says Moo­ers. “This means our method can iden­tify those species we can­not afford to lose and it can be used to pre­serve the infor­ma­tion con­tent rep­re­sented by all species into the future. Both are major goals for con­ser­va­tion biology.”

The new rank­ings will be used in a major con­ser­va­tion ini­tia­tive called the Edge of Exis­tence pro­gramme of the Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don (ZSL), which was launched in Jan­u­ary 2007. ZSL has already iden­ti­fied sev­eral species like the huge monkey-​eating Philip­pine eagle that are at once dis­tinct, endan­gered, and suf­fer from lack of attention.

(Source: Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity media release, 10.04.2014)

“Suci”, one of the world’s rare endan­gered Suma­tran rhi­nos, passed away late on Sun­day, March 30. Sur­rounded by the keep­ers and vet­eri­nary staff who cared for her daily, she died at her home at the Cincin­nati Zoo & Botan­i­cal Garden.

The female Suma­tran rhino, born at the Cincin­nati Zoo in 2004, was one of three Suma­tran rhino calves born to mother “Emi” and father “Ipuh.” Suci’s keep­ers first became con­cerned about her when they noticed her los­ing weight sev­eral months ago. After care­ful research and hours of ded­i­cated mon­i­tor­ing, staff began treat­ing her for hemochro­mato­sis, oth­er­wise known as iron stor­age dis­ease. Although hemochro­mato­sis is extremely dif­fi­cult to diag­nose in a Suma­tran rhino, Suci’s mother died from the dis­ease in 2009. In humans it is a her­i­ta­ble dis­ease and many of Suci’s symp­toms were sim­i­lar to those of her mother’s. A necropsy will be per­formed on Suci early Mon­day, but it will be sev­eral weeks before the zoo will have the final results.

“Today the Cincin­nati Zoo has lost one of its most beloved and charis­matic ani­mals. Suci was a sym­bol of hope for her entire species, one that is quickly los­ing ground in the wild, and her absence will leave a great hole in our hearts,” said Dr. Roth.

For sev­eral months, sci­en­tists, keep­ers, and vet­eri­nar­i­ans at the Cincin­nati Zoo have been treat­ing Suci for the com­plex dis­ease, while hop­ing for a com­plete recov­ery. Ther­a­peu­tic phle­botomies, the treat­ment used on humans and in African black rhi­nos, were per­formed by Zoo staff and the early results were promising.

“Suci’s behav­iour and appetite had improved and we remained hope­ful,” said Dr. Roth. “How­ever, on Sun­day her con­di­tion quickly dete­ri­o­rated. Keep­ers and vets worked together tire­lessly to make Suci com­fort­able but ulti­mately there was lit­tle that could be done.”

Cincin­nati Zoo rhino breed­ing effort
The three Suma­tran rhino calves born at the Cincin­nati Zoo were the direct result of years of break­through research by sci­en­tists at CREW. The Cincin­nati Zoo was the first place to suc­cess­fully breed this crit­i­cally endan­gered species in cap­tiv­ity in over 112 years. To date, only one other calf has been born out­side of Cincin­nati, at the Suma­tran Rhino Sanc­tu­ary in Indone­sia, where Indone­sian vet­eri­nar­i­ans employed the breed­ing pro­to­col devel­oped by CREW sci­en­tists. That calf, named “Andatu” was sired by the first calf pro­duced at the Cincin­nati Zoo “Andalas.” The Los Ange­les Zoo sent Andalas to Suma­tra in 2007 to help bol­ster the Indone­sian pro­gramme. Now, the only Suma­tran rhino liv­ing in North Amer­ica is Suci’s brother “Hara­pan” who also resides at the Cincin­nati Zoo. Hara­pan moved to the White Oak Con­ser­va­tion Cen­ter in Yulee, Florida in 2008, and later moved to the Los Ange­les Zoo, before return­ing to Cincin­nati in July of 2013. At Cincin­nati Zoo plans were devel­oped to allow inbreed­ing as a last resort to avoid extinc­tion of this rare rhino species. But even breed­ing brother and sister

“The Cincin­nati Zoo has been com­mit­ted to sav­ing the Suma­tran rhino for 25 years, and we plan to keep work­ing to ensure this species will still be around a cen­tury from today,” said Thane May­nard, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Cincin­nati Zoo.

Keep­ing Suma­tran Rhi­nos at Cincin­nati Zoo:

The Cincin­nati Zoo works closely with the Indone­sian Min­istry of Forestry, the Indone­sian Rhino Foun­da­tion, the IUCN Asian Rhino Spe­cial­ist Group and the Inter­na­tional Rhino Foun­da­tion, to pro­tect this species in the wild, and also prop­a­gate Suma­tran rhi­nos in cap­tiv­ity. Both approaches will be nec­es­sary to secure the future of this crit­i­cally endan­gered species for future generations.

“Although we remain proud of the many con­tri­bu­tions the Cincin­nati Zoo has made to Suma­tran rhino con­ser­va­tion, espe­cially to the cap­tive breed­ing effort, the loss of Suci is a dev­as­tat­ing blow to the pro­gram,” said Dr. Roth. “The best way we can remem­ber and hon­our her is to work even harder to save this incred­i­ble species — if we let them dis­ap­pear, the respon­si­bil­ity will rest heav­ily on all of our shoulders.”

(Source: Cincin­nati Zoo media release, 31.03.2014)

The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety (WCS) has digi­tised a col­lec­tion of scrap­books kept by William T. Hor­na­day, the first direc­tor of WCS’s Bronx Zoo. Ten of the scrap­books from The Hor­na­day Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Scrap­book Col­lec­tion are avail­able for pub­lic viewing.

The Hor­na­day Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Scrap­book Col­lec­tion is a dig­i­tal project of the Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety Archives which doc­u­ments and pre­serves WCS’s sto­ried his­tory of sav­ing wildlife and wild places since its incep­tion in 1895 as the New York Zoo­log­i­cal Society.

This web­site makes avail­able ten of the four­teen scrap­books that com­pose William T. Hornaday’s self-​titled Scrap­book Col­lec­tion on the His­tory of the Wild Life Pro­tec­tion and Exter­mi­na­tion. The remain­ing four scrap­books have not been made avail­able in dig­i­tal for­mat because they con­tain sig­nif­i­cant amounts of copy­righted mate­r­ial. Like many scrap­books of this age, these books are very frag­ile and show signs of dete­ri­o­ra­tion. Digi­tis­ing does not pre­serve them, but it does allow for access to items with con­di­tion issues related to age. The web­site also pro­vides a biog­ra­phy on Hor­na­day, as well as infor­ma­tion about the col­lec­tion and about the project to digi­tise the scrapbooks.

The pages appear online as they were found at the project’s start in 2012. Every effort was made to pro­tect their con­di­tion dur­ing the digi­ti­sa­tion process.
William T. Hor­na­day (1854−1937) was a pre­mière con­ser­va­tion­ist and pas­sion­ate defender of wildlife. Hor­na­day was a pio­neer in the early wildlife con­ser­va­tion move­ment in the United States. He was well known dur­ing his life­time for his sub­stan­tial roles in the worlds of zoos, nat­ural his­tory muse­ums, and wildlife con­ser­va­tion. He chose the site for and worked on the design of the New York Zoo­log­i­cal Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, and served as its first direc­tor from the open­ing in 1899 until his retire­ment in 1929.

(Source: WCS press release, 07.04.2014)

Australian citizens can become more involved in planning their cities with wildlife in mind thanks to a new tool developed by researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED). The research findings have been published in the November issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

"When it comes to urban planning, protecting wildlife is often overlooked - but the loss of natural ecosystems in cities poses risks to public health and the quality of life of urban citizens," says Dr Sarah Bekessy, of CEED and RMIT University. "Over half of Australia's threatened species and ecosystems occur within the urban fringe and accelerating urbanisation is now a key threat to their survival."

"Our team has developed a way to rank sites for development according to various priorities such as biodiversity loss, flood risk and transport planning. Decision-makers can use this tool to balance different objectives and explore the impact of trade-offs between competing priorities.

"You can then have a democratic process in which citizens are involved in helping to decide the right weight to give to the various planning priorities. The public can - and should - be drawn into the process of ranking development priorities so that important decisions such as protecting wildlife are made by citizens rather than planners," Bekessy says.

Fur­ther impor­tant research by CEED also indi­cates that cities can be planned in a way that both encour­ages and pro­tects native wildlife.

Jes­sica Sushin­sky, Pro­fes­sor Hugh Poss­ing­ham and Dr Richard Fuller of CEED and the Uni­ver­sity of Queens­land recently pub­lished a study in the jour­nal Global Change Biol­ogy which found that birds were much more plen­ti­ful in cities that mixed areas of inten­sive devel­op­ment with open green spaces.

“In a city like Bris­bane where there are large green parks with a mix of veg­e­ta­tion we still find a rel­a­tively healthy diver­sity of birds such as Lewin’s hon­eyeater, grey shrike-​thrush, the red-​backed fairy-​wren and the stri­ated pardalote, which rely on more com­plex habi­tats than are usu­ally found in pri­vate, man­i­cured backyards.

“Where com­pact hous­ing devel­op­ment leaves these impor­tant green spaces intact we see fewer local extinc­tions, even in Bris­bane which has under­gone sub­stan­tial growth in recent years. Urban sprawl on the other hand not only results in the dis­ap­pear­ance of many urban-​sensitive birds but also leads to an increase in feral birds such as the com­mon myna or the spot­ted tur­tle dove, both inva­sive species in Australia.

“While our find­ings sug­gest that future cities should be built ‘up’ rather than ‘out’, any reduc­tion in the size of pri­vate back­yards would also mean it is impor­tant to retain large pub­lic green spaces lead­ing to cities that pro­vide a bet­ter qual­ity of life for both peo­ple and wildlife.”

“CEED’s research is about how we make deci­sions to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment,” says Prof Hugh Poss­ing­ham, Cen­tre Direc­tor at CEED. “These two stud­ies are an excel­lent exam­ple of the co-​ordinated research being under­taken through the Cen­tre. “Under­stand­ing how dif­fer­ent types of urban devel­op­ment impact on birds means that the tool devel­oped by Dr Bekessy and her col­leagues can be used to bal­ance the need for urban growth with impor­tant con­ser­va­tion pri­or­i­ties. Some pri­or­i­ties may even be decided by pop­u­lar vote.”

(Source: CEED media release, 29.04.2013)

Cli­mate change dis­rupts songbird’s tim­ing with­out impact­ing pop­u­la­tion size (yet).

Song­bird pop­u­la­tions can han­dle far more dis­rupt­ing cli­mate change than expected. Density-​dependent processes are buy­ing them time for their bat­tle. But with­out (slow) evo­lu­tion­ary res­cue it will not save them in the end, says an inter­na­tional team of sci­en­tists led by the Nether­lands Insti­tute of Ecol­ogy (NIOO-​KNAW) in Sci­ence this week — pub­lished on 26 April.

Yes, spring started late this year in North-​western Europe. But the gen­eral trend of the four last decades is still a rapidly advanc­ing spring. The sea­sonal tim­ing of trees and insects advance too, but song­birds like the great tit (Parus major), lag behind. Yet with­out an accom­pa­ny­ing decline in pop­u­la­tion num­bers, it seems, as the inter­na­tional research team shows for the great tit pop­u­la­tion in the Dutch National Park the Hoge Veluwe.

Para­dox

“It’s a real para­dox,” explain Dr Tom Reed and Prof Mar­cel Visser of the Nether­lands Insti­tute of Ecol­ogy. “Due to the chang­ing cli­mate of the past decades the egg lay­ing dates of the great tit have become increas­ingly mis­matched with the tim­ing of the main food source for its chicks: cater­pil­lars. The sea­sonal tim­ing of the food peak has advanced over twice as fast as that of the birds and the repro­duc­tive out­put is reduced. Still, the pop­u­la­tion num­bers do not go down.” On the short term, that is, as Reed, Visser and col­leagues from Nor­way, the USA, and France have now cal­cu­lated using almost 40 years of data from this songbird.

Relaxed com­pe­ti­tion

The solu­tion to the para­dox is that although fewer off­spring now fledge due to food short­age, each of these chicks has a higher chance of sur­vival until the next breed­ing sea­son. “We call this relaxed com­pe­ti­tion, as there are fewer fledg­lings to com­pete with,” first author Reed points out. Out of 10 eggs laid, 9 chicks are born, 7 fledge and on aver­age only one chick sur­vives win­ter. That last num­ber increases with less com­peti­tors around.

This is the first time that den­sity depen­dence — a wide­spread phe­nom­e­non in nature — and eco­log­i­cal mis­match are linked, and it is a real eye-​opener. Reed: “It all seems so obvi­ous once you’ve cal­cu­lated this, but peo­ple were almost sure that mist­im­ing would lead to a direct pop­u­la­tion decline.”

Lim­ited flexibility

The great tits that lay eggs ear­lier in spring are more suc­cess­ful nowa­days than late birds, which pro­duce rel­a­tively few sur­viv­ing off­spring. This leads to increas­ing selec­tion for birds to repro­duce early. But the total num­ber of birds in the new gen­er­a­tion stays the same. “That is the sec­ond para­dox,” the researchers state. “Why are pop­u­la­tion num­bers hardly affected, despite the stronger selec­tion on tim­ing caused by the mis­match? The answer is that for selec­tion it mat­ters which birds sur­vive, while for pop­u­la­tion size it only mat­ters how many sur­vive. Visser: “The mor­tal­ity in one group can be com­pen­sated for by the suc­cess in another. But this stretch­ing, this flex­i­bil­ity, is not unlimited.”

The mis­match between egg lay­ing period and cater­pil­lar peak in the woods will keep grow­ing, and so will the impact fol­low­ing the tem­po­rary res­cue, as long as spring tem­per­a­tures con­tinue to increase. “The den­sity depen­dence is only buy­ing the birds time, hope­fully for evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tion to dig in before pop­u­la­tion num­bers are sub­stan­tially affected,” accord­ing to Visser. The new find­ings can help to pre­dict the impact of future envi­ron­men­tal change on other wild pop­u­la­tions and to iden­tify rel­e­vant mea­sures to take. Even rub­ber bands stretch only so far before they break.

(Source: Nether­lands Insti­tute of Ecol­ogy press release, 25.04.2013)

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety (WCS) have received alarm­ing reports from their field oper­a­tions that ele­phants are being slaugh­tered in the violence-​ridden Cen­tral African Repub­lic (CAR), where new pow­ers in place strug­gle to gain con­trol over the sit­u­a­tion. The con­ser­va­tion organ­i­sa­tions are issu­ing today a joint call for imme­di­ate action.

Due to the vio­lence and chaos in the area, the exact num­ber of ele­phants slaugh­tered is not known, how­ever ini­tial reports indi­cate it may be exten­sive. WWF has con­firmed infor­ma­tion that for­est ele­phants are being poached near the Dzanga-​Sangha pro­tected areas, a World Her­itage Site. Ele­phant meat is report­edly being openly sold in local mar­kets and avail­able in nearby vil­lages. The secu­rity sit­u­a­tion is pre­vent­ing park staff from search­ing the dense for­est for ele­phant carcasses.

The two organ­i­sa­tions, WWF and WCS that have worked in CAR since the 1980s, are call­ing on the Cen­tral African Repub­lic and its neigh­bours to imme­di­ately increase secu­rity in the region to pro­tect the area’s peo­ple and ele­phants. Gov­ern­ments are meet­ing next week at an extra­or­di­nary meet­ing to dis­cuss ways to stop the poach­ing that has plagued the region. Up to 30,000 ele­phants are killed in Africa each year for their ivory tusks, which are in demand in Asia.

The fol­low­ing state­ments have been issued by WWF and WCS:

Jim Leape, WWF Direc­tor Gen­eral said:

Cris­t­ian Sam­per, WCS Pres­i­dent and CEO said:

WWF has worked in Dzanga-​Sangha for 30 years and sup­ports pro­tected area man­age­ment, gorilla research, law enforce­ment and tourism devel­op­ment. WCS has been in the area for than 20 years, in charge of mon­i­tor­ing and research of the ele­phants of Dzanga Bai, a for­est clear­ing con­tain­ing a mineral-​rich water­ing hole. In addi­tion, WCS works imme­di­ately across the bor­der in the Repub­lic of Congo to pro­tect the same pop­u­la­tion of ele­phants there where the gov­ern­ment is work­ing to ensure their addi­tional secu­rity on that side of the border.

Take action and donate:
WWF <> WCS

(Source: WWF Global news, 25.04.2013)

The redis­cov­ery of a mys­tery ani­mal in a museum’s under­ground store­room proves that a non-​native ‘big cat’ prowled the British coun­try­side at the turn of the last century.

The animal’s skele­ton and mounted skin was analysed by a multi-​disciplinary team of sci­en­tists and researchers at Southamp­ton, Durham, Bris­tol, and Aberys­t­wyth uni­ver­si­ties and found to be a Cana­dian lynx — a car­niv­o­rous preda­tor more than twice the size of a domes­tic cat.

The research, pub­lished on 23 April in the aca­d­e­mic jour­nal His­tor­i­cal Biol­ogy, estab­lishes the ani­mal as the ear­li­est exam­ple of an “alien big cat” at large in the British countryside.

The research team say this pro­vides fur­ther evi­dence for debunk­ing a pop­u­lar hypoth­e­sis that wild cats entered the British coun­try­side fol­low­ing the intro­duc­tion of the 1976 Wild Ani­mals Act. The Act was intro­duced to deal with an increas­ing fash­ion for exotic — and poten­tially dan­ger­ous — pets. The aca­d­e­mics believe such feral “British big cats” as they are known, may have lived in the wild much ear­lier, through escapes and even delib­er­ate release. There is no evi­dence that such ani­mals have been able to breed in the wild.

Co-​author of the paper Dr Dar­ren Naish, from the Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton, says:

The study of the Cana­dian lynx, redis­cov­ered by research team mem­ber Max Blake among hun­dreds of thou­sands of spec­i­mens at Bris­tol Museum and Art Gallery, details records unearthed at the museum which showed the ani­mal had orig­i­nally been mis­la­belled by Edwar­dian cura­tors in 1903 as a Eurasian lynx — a close rel­a­tive of the Cana­dian lynx. The records also showed that the lynx was shot by a landowner in the Devon coun­try­side in the early 1900s, after it killed two dogs.

The researchers point out in their paper that Eurasian lynxes existed in the wild in Britain many hun­dreds of years ago, but had almost cer­tainly become extinct by the 7^th cen­tury. Lab­o­ra­tory analy­sis of the Bris­tol specimen’s bones and teeth estab­lished it had been kept in cap­tiv­ity long enough to develop severe tooth loss and plaque before it either escaped or was delib­er­ately released into the wild. Ancient DNA analy­sis of hair from the lynx proved incon­clu­sive, pos­si­bly due to chem­i­cals applied to the pelt dur­ing taxidermy.

Dr Greger Lar­son, a mem­ber of the research team from Durham Uni­ver­sity and an expert in the migra­tion of ani­mals, adds: “Every few years there is another claim that big cats are liv­ing wild in Britain, but none of these claims have been sub­stan­ti­ated. It seems that big cats are to Eng­land what the Loch Ness Mon­ster is to Scotland.

“By apply­ing a robust sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy, this study con­clu­sively demon­strates that at least one big cat did roam Britain as early as the Edwar­dian era, and sug­gests that addi­tional claims need to be sub­jected to this level of scrutiny.”

The lynx is now on pub­lic dis­play at Bris­tol museum.

(Source: Uni­ver­sity of Southamp­ton press release, 25.04.2013)

Finally on April 5, Nor­dens Ark in Swe­den could show a glimpse of their three wolver­ine pups that were born on Feb­ru­ary 21. After six weeks in the den with their mother they emerged and are now allowed to start explor­ing the world.

Wolver­ines (Gulo gulo) are dif­fi­cult to breed in cap­tiv­ity, which is asso­ci­ated with high infant mor­tal­ity. But at Nor­dens Ark, we have nice large nat­ural enclo­sures and we are try­ing to dis­rupt the life of a wolver­ine as lit­tle as pos­si­ble, says Elin Eriksson-​Byröd, vet­eri­nary assis­tant at Nor­dens Ark.

Wolver­ine Honan choose where in the enclo­sure she wanted to have her pup­pies, and was allowed to move them between dens, just as in the wild. The first month of their life wolver­ine pups are com­pletely depen­dent on their mother. They are expected to become more inde­pen­dent and explore the out­door enclo­sure on their own in early sum­mer. But with a lit­tle luck you can see the female wolver­ine move the pups between dens when you visit the zoo this period.

It is the female’s sec­ond lit­ter and she proved to be an excel­lent mother. For the male wolver­ine, com­ing from Boras zoo, how­ever, it’s the first time. A year ago, Nor­dens Ark and Boras Zoo exchanged their male wolver­ines, which turned out very suc­cess­fully as both males became father of three this year.

Usu­ally born in Feb­ru­ary or March and weaned around mid-​May wolver­ine pups will stay with their mother for about 4 – 5 months. At first, they are all white and blind. The eyes are, as in other mam­mals, light blue and turn light brown when they grow up. The coat colour will also change and gets the char­ac­ter­is­tic dark brown color with lots of light brown mark­ings dur­ing adulthood.

This year’s pups are part of the Euro­pean Endan­gered species Pro­gramme (EEP) and will move to other zoos when they get older. To which zoo will be deter­mined by the Nor­dens Ark zool­o­gist who is coor­di­na­tor of the wolver­ine EEP. The coordinator’s role is to pair breed­ing spec­i­mens with suit­able genetic background.

The species is pro­tected in Swe­den since 1969, but ille­gal hunt­ing still occurs.

(Source: Nor­dens Ark press release, 05.04.2013, Wikipedia)

As the planet warms, Earth’s cli­mate zones are shift­ing at an accel­er­at­ing pace, says a new study led by a sci­en­tist at the Coop­er­a­tive Insti­tute for Research in Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences, a joint ven­ture between the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado Boul­der and the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Administration.

In the first pub­lished results of more than three years of track­ing pumas (or moun­tain lions) in the Santa Cruz Moun­tains, researchers of Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Santa Cruz (UCSC) doc­u­ment how human devel­op­ment affects the preda­tors’ habits.

In their find­ings pub­lished on 17 April in the open access jour­nal PLOS ONE, UCSC asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of envi­ron­men­tal stud­ies Chris Wilmers and col­leagues with the UC Santa Cruz Puma Project describe track­ing 20 pumas (Puma con­color) over 17,000 square kilo­me­tres for three years. Researchers are try­ing to under­stand how habi­tat frag­men­ta­tion influ­ences the phys­i­ol­ogy, behav­iour, ecol­ogy, and con­ser­va­tion of pumas in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The study’s con­ser­va­tion goals are meant to help pumas sur­vive in the midst of rapidly grow­ing human devel­op­ment by build­ing aware­ness of pumas’ behav­iour and pro­vid­ing safe tran­sit oppor­tu­ni­ties under or over major highways.

(Source: UCSC press release, 17.04.2013)

Zoo staff of Sedg­wick County Zoo watched this unequal bat­tle unfold­ing itself between a bold goose and majes­tic gorilla:

The zookeeper that has been train­ing the goose awaits a grand career as a coach in mar­tial arts .

A provoca­tive new paper writ­ten by cur­rent and recent Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety (WCS) sci­en­tists takes the inter­na­tional wildlife con­ser­va­tion com­mu­nity to task for ignor­ing abun­dant wildlife and their impor­tance to ecosys­tems and humans world­wide.

The paper, “Abun­dance as a Con­ser­va­tion Value,” writ­ten by long­time WCS sci­en­tist Kent Red­ford, now head of Arch­i­pel­ago Con­sult­ing; WCS Senior Sci­en­tist Joel Berger, John J. Craig­head Chair of Wildlife Biol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Mon­tana; and WCS Coor­di­na­tor of Bird Con­ser­va­tion, Steve Zack, appears in the April issue of the inter­na­tional jour­nal of con­ser­va­tion, Oryx.

“The saiga ante­lope in cen­tral Asia has plum­meted from more than a mil­lion ani­mals to only tens of thou­sands in recent years,” says Berger of one of the many ungu­lates he has stud­ied through­out his con­ser­va­tion career. “If the con­ser­va­tion com­mu­nity had com­mit­ted to main­tain this species abun­dance rather than belat­edly act­ing on avert­ing its extinc­tion, then this Asian icon would be con­served, and at much less cost.”

“Abun­dance is the dra­matic fea­ture of Arc­tic wildlife, par­tic­u­larly true in the world­wide aggre­ga­tion of migra­tory birds that breed in coastal plain wet­lands dur­ing the short sum­mer,” says Zack of his recent stud­ies and con­ser­va­tion efforts in Arc­tic Alaska. “Just focus­ing on the con­ser­va­tion of the cur­rently few species war­rant­ing sta­tus as endan­gered would result in miss­ing the essence and nature of this dra­matic place”.

The authors note that it is encour­ag­ing that the Inter­na­tional Union for Con­ser­va­tion of Nature (IUCN) is now devel­op­ing a “Green List” for species, a process that empha­sises recov­ery and per­haps empha­sis on return­ing species to abun­dance, and thus mov­ing away from the sole empha­sis on Red Lists of species that fix­ate on rar­ity and extinc­tion.


(Source: WCS press release, 19.04.2013)

The world’s bio­di­ver­sity is cur­rently in rapid decline, with human-​mediated global change being a prin­ci­pal cause. Europe is no excep­tion, and the Natura 2000 net­work pro­vides an impor­tant con­ser­va­tion tool for bio­di­ver­sity on a Euro­pean level. It forms a net­work of nat­ural and semi-​natural sites within the region with high her­itage val­ues due to the excep­tional flora and fauna they con­tain. The goal of the Natura 2000 net­work is to main­tain the bio­log­i­cal diver­sity of envi­ron­ments, while tak­ing into account eco­nomic, social, cul­tural and regional logic of sus­tain­able devel­op­ment. A new study pub­lished on 18 April in the open access jour­nal Nature Con­ser­va­tion pro­vides an eval­u­a­tion of the effec­tive­ness of Natura 2000 and sets objec­tives and rec­om­men­da­tions for the future.

The analy­sis in the paper is based on a cov­er­age ratio between the Natura 2000 sites and dis­tri­b­u­tion maps of 300 threat­ened IUCN red listed Euro­pean species. The study shows that the dis­tri­b­u­tions of a large pro­por­tion of threat­ened species of mam­mals, birds and rep­tiles are highly cov­ered (above 90%), demon­strat­ing the effec­tive­ness of the Natura 2000 net­work. How­ever, results also con­firm that a large pro­por­tion of threat­ened species, espe­cially fishes, are cur­rently still poorly cov­ered. Of the 124 fish species con­sid­ered, 22 species had a range cov­er­age of less than 10 %. The cov­er­age of species also seems to be highly related to national demo­graphic fac­tors, as the pro­por­tion of the national urban pop­u­la­tion. Fur­ther analy­sis sug­gests that the des­ig­na­tion of sites depends too strongly on gov­ern­men­tal pol­i­tics, eco­nomic and cul­tural cri­te­ria, and inter­ac­tions between soci­ety and the envi­ron­ment.

In order to improve the man­age­ment of sites, a com­mon and stan­dard­ised man­age­ment of the Natura 2000 sites with a uni­form frame­work among mem­ber states needs to be estab­lished. The study sug­gests that sites should be under con­tin­u­ous obser­va­tion and eval­u­a­tion, to deter­mine their impor­tance for the con­ser­va­tion of bio­di­ver­sity in a bio­geo­graph­i­cal region. Such an approach would improve effi­ciency and deter­mine high pri­or­ity Natura 2000 sites, as well as pro­vide a basis on which to deter­mine appro­pri­ate resource allo­ca­tion. These approaches will help with the selec­tion process, and may decrease the impact of the polit­i­cal agenda, as cur­rent observed.

A new study on extinc­tion risk based on exten­sive data from 7 tax­o­nomic groups and 22 Euro­pean coun­tries has shown that pro­por­tions of plant and ani­mal species being clas­si­fied as threat­ened on national Red Lists are more closely related to socio-​economic pres­sure lev­els from the begin­ning than from the end of the 20^th cen­tury. This new find­ing by Ste­fan Dullinger of the Uni­ver­sity of Vienna and Franz Essl from the Aus­trian Envi­ron­ment Agency together with an inter­na­tional group of researchers is pub­lished on 15 April in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences of the United States of Amer­ica.

It is well under­stood that the sur­vival of a sub­stan­tial and increas­ing num­ber of species is put at risk by human activ­ity via for instance habi­tat destruc­tion, envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion or intro­duc­tion of alien species. Accord­ingly, the most recent global IUCN Red List (www​.iuc​nredlist​.org) clas­si­fies 31% of the 65,518 plant and ani­mal species assessed as endan­gered. How­ever, the tem­po­ral scale of cause-​effect rela­tion­ships is lit­tle explored. If extended time lags between human pres­sure and pop­u­la­tion decline are com­mon, then the full impact of cur­rent high lev­els of anthro­pogenic pres­sures on bio­di­ver­sity will only be realised decades into the future.

His­tor­i­cal legacy of species’ pop­u­la­tion losses
Tak­ing an his­tor­i­cal approach, the new study pro­vides cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence that such time-​lags are indeed sub­stan­tial. The researchers demon­strate that pro­por­tions of vas­cu­lar plants, bryophytes, mam­mals, rep­tiles, drag­on­flies and grasshop­pers fac­ing medium to high extinc­tion risks are more closely matched to country-​specific indi­ca­tors of socio-​economic pres­sures (i.e. human pop­u­la­tion den­sity, per capita GDP, land use inten­sity) from the early or mid rather than the late 20^th cen­tury. Accord­ingly, their results sug­gest a con­sid­er­able his­tor­i­cal legacy of species’ pop­u­la­tion losses. In a related analy­sis they also show that cur­rent spend­ing on envi­ron­men­tal con­ser­va­tion only has a weak mit­i­gat­ing effect. This find­ing implies that cur­rent con­ser­va­tion actions are effec­tive, but inad­e­quate in scale, to halt species losses.

The forests of the Russ­ian Far East are being pushed to the brink of destruc­tion due to per­va­sive, large-​scale ille­gal log­ging, largely to sup­ply Chi­nese fur­ni­ture and floor­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers, accord­ing to a new report by WWF-​Russia.

This wide­spread tim­ber theft is threat­en­ing the long-​term sur­vival of the endan­gered Amur tiger, while pro­vid­ing a con­duit for ille­gal tim­ber to find its way into the United States, Europe and Japan.

In the report, Ille­gal Log­ging in the Russ­ian Far East: Global Demand and Taiga Destruc­tion, WWF-​Russia syn­the­sises more than 10 years of on-​the-​ground field obser­va­tions and high­lights a sober­ing real­ity: Russia’s for­est sec­tor has become deeply crim­i­nalised, with poor law enforce­ment, allow­ing ille­gal log­gers to plun­der valu­able tim­ber stocks of oak, ash, elm and lin­den with impunity.

“With min­i­mal resources in place to detect and pros­e­cute ille­gal log­ging through­out the region, the sheer scale of vio­la­tions has reached epi­demic pro­por­tions.”

WWF analy­sis of Russ­ian cus­toms data revealed that in 2010, the vol­ume of Mon­go­lian oak logged for export was twice the amount legally autho­rised for har­vest from the region — mean­ing that at least half of the oak shipped across the bor­der to China was stolen. Fur­ther analy­sis of export data showed that 2010 was a mild year: in 2007 and 2008 the oak har­vest was four times as large.

The report also finds that, although there are a few pos­i­tive exam­ples of suc­cess­ful Russ­ian for­est law enforce­ment actions, the pro­por­tion of reg­is­tered ille­gal log­ging vio­la­tions brought to trial is extremely low. In 2011, only 16 per­cent of the 691 reg­is­tered cases of ille­gal log­ging in Pri­morsky Province were brought to trial — the low­est fig­ure in the past 10 years.

Ille­gal log­ging degrades vital habi­tat for Amur tigers and their prey. Sci­en­tists esti­mate around 450 Amur tigers remain in the wild. Over har­vest­ing lim­its the sup­ply of pine nuts and acorns — a main food source for their prey. As tim­ber sup­plies dwin­dle, eco­log­i­cally sen­si­tive forests like wildlife reserves are increas­ingly threat­ened.

While WWF is work­ing in Rus­sia to sug­gest mea­sures the gov­ern­ment can take to end ille­gal log­ging from the sup­ply side, import­ing nations must take action as well. In par­tic­u­lar, the report high­lights the need for strength­ened col­lab­o­ra­tion between Rus­sia and China to ensure bet­ter tim­ber track­ing between the two coun­tries. In addi­tion, the United States, Euro­pean Union and other coun­tries with tim­ber legal­ity leg­is­la­tion must ensure that those laws are ade­quately enforced. Com­pa­nies in import­ing com­pa­nies must be sure of the for­est ori­gin, legal­ity and trace­abil­ity of their wood products.

The above news item is reprinted from mate­ri­als avail­able at WWF­global. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and length.

(Source: WWF global news, 16.04.2013)

Ocean research reveals rapid evo­lu­tion­ary adap­ta­tions to a chang­ing cli­mate. Genetic vari­a­tion is the key to this abil­ity to deal with higher acid­ity.

Stan­ford sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that some pur­ple sea urchins liv­ing along the coast of Cal­i­for­nia and Ore­gon have the sur­pris­ing abil­ity to rapidly evolve in acidic ocean water — a capac­ity that may come in handy as cli­mate change increases ocean acid­ity. This capac­ity depends on high lev­els of genetic vari­a­tion that allow urchins’ healthy growth in water with high car­bon diox­ide lev­els.

The study, co-​authored by Stephen Palumbi, a senior fel­low at the Stan­ford Woods Insti­tute for the Envi­ron­ment and direc­tor of Stanford’s Hop­kins Marine Sta­tion, revealspre­vi­ously unknown adap­tive vari­a­tions that could help some marine species sur­vive in future acid­i­fied seas.

Sci­en­tists have known for decades that high car­bon diox­ide emis­sions from fos­sil fuels are increas­ing the lev­els of car­bonic acid in the world’s oceans, lead­ing to increased acid­ity. Hun­dreds of stud­ies have shown that acid­i­fi­ca­tion at lev­els expected by the year 2100 can harm ocean life. But lit­tle is known about marine species’ capac­ity to adapt evo­lu­tion­ar­ily to this con­di­tion. The del­i­cate embryos of marine species are espe­cially sus­cep­ti­ble. The West Coast oys­ter farm indus­try nearly col­lapsed in 2007 because of oys­ter lar­vae sen­si­tiv­ity to increased acid­i­fi­ca­tion of coastal waters.

The study exam­ined how pur­ple sea urchins — crea­tures with the most well-​studied genome of any marine species — react to the acid­i­fi­ca­tion lev­els pre­dicted for 2100.

Why are sea urchin babies like ham­burg­ers?:

A new study by sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­sity of York and the Royal Soci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of Birds (RSPB) shows that bird species which have colonised the UK in recent decades breed ini­tially almost exclu­sively in nature reserves and other areas spe­cially pro­tected for wildlife. First author, Jonathan Hiley, a PhD stu­dent in the Depart­ment of Biol­ogy at York, said: “Nature reserves pro­vide eco­log­i­cal wel­come mats for new arrivals.”

Pub­lished online on 10 April in the journal Pro­ceed­ings of the Royal Soci­ety B. , the study shows that, of the 20 wet­land bird species that bred for the first time in the UK since 1960, 18 bred first in these pro­tected areas. Pro­tected areas were cru­cial as the pop­u­la­tion estab­lished and grew. Once estab­lished in reserves, the birds began to spread out into other loca­tions as they expanded their ranges across the coun­try.

For some warmth-​loving south­ern species, such as Lit­tle Egrets and Cetti’s War­blers, these arrivals appear to be in response to a chang­ing cli­mate. For oth­ers, such as Com­mon Cranes, they are a response to other fac­tors, such as recov­ery from his­tor­i­cal loss of habi­tat or per­se­cu­tion.

Spatial measurements of population density could reveal when threatened natural populations are in danger of crashing.

Many factors — including climate change, overfishing or loss of food supply — can push a wild animal population to the brink of collapse. Ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of such a collapse, which could help wildlife and fishery managers take steps to protect endangered populations.

Last year, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicists demonstrated that they could measure a population's risk of collapse by monitoring how fast it recovers from small disturbances, such as a food shortage or overcrowding. However, this strategy would likely require many years of data collection — by which time it could be too late to save the population.

In a paper pub­lished online in the April 10 edi­tion of Nature, the same research team describes a new way to pre­dict the risk of col­lapse, based on vari­a­tions in pop­u­la­tion den­sity in neigh­bour­ing regions. Such infor­ma­tion is eas­ier to obtain than data on pop­u­la­tion fluc­tu­a­tions over time, mak­ing it poten­tially more use­ful, accord­ing to the researchers.

Rare spec­i­men of new bat genus dis­cov­ered by researchers from Buck­nell Uni­ver­sity and Fauna & Flora Inter­na­tional (FFI) while con­duct­ing field research with wildlife author­i­ties in South Sudan.

Researchers have iden­ti­fied a new genus of bat after dis­cov­er­ing a rare spec­i­men in South Sudan. With wildlife per­son­nel under the South Sudanese Min­istry of Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion and Tourism, Buck­nell Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Biol­ogy DeeAnn Reeder and FFI Pro­gramme Offi­cer Adrian Gar­side were lead­ing a team con­duct­ing field research and pur­su­ing con­ser­va­tion efforts when Reeder spot­ted the ani­mal in Ban­gan­gai Game Reserve.

The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety (WCS) con­grat­u­lates the Gov­ern­ment of Sarawak for pro­tect­ing a glob­ally sig­nif­i­cant pop­u­la­tion of up to 200 of the world’s rarest Bornean orang­utans recently found by a team of con­ser­va­tion­ists in Sarawak, Malaysian Bor­neo.

The sub-​species Pongo pyg­maeus pyg­maeus is listed as the most severely threat­ened orang­utan world­wide, and Endan­gered accord­ing the IUCN Red List of Threat­ened Species™, with a total of between 3,000 – 4,500 ani­mals, of which 2,000 live in Sarawak in Batang Ai National Park and Lanjak-​Entimau Wildlife Sanc­tu­ary.

The orang­utans were found in an area of about 14,000 hectares (140 sq km) in Ulu Sun­gai Menyang, close to Batang Ai National Park. Local Iban com­mu­ni­ties had been aware of the exis­tence of orang­utans in this area, but until recently no major research had been con­ducted in Ulu Sun­gai Menyang.

This is what I call a tip­ping point!

(Source: GIF­BIN, 03.04.2013)

Envi­ron­men­tal change can drive hard-​wired evo­lu­tion­ary changes in ani­mal species in a mat­ter of gen­er­a­tions.

A Uni­ver­sity of Leeds-​led study, pub­lished online on 8 April in the jour­nal Ecol­ogy Let­ters, over­turns the com­mon assump­tion that evo­lu­tion only occurs grad­u­ally over hun­dreds or thou­sands of years.

Instead, researchers found sig­nif­i­cant genet­i­cally trans­mit­ted changes in lab­o­ra­tory pop­u­la­tions of soil mites in just 15 gen­er­a­tions, lead­ing to a dou­bling of the age at which the mites reached adult­hood and large changes in pop­u­la­tion size. The results have impor­tant impli­ca­tions in areas such as dis­ease and pest con­trol, con­ser­va­tion and fish­eries man­age­ment because they demon­strate that evo­lu­tion can be a game-​changer even in the short-​term.

Pro­fes­sor Tim Ben­ton, of the Uni­ver­sity of Leeds’ Fac­ulty of Bio­log­i­cal Sci­ences, said:

On Jan­u­ary 28 Mo was born, the first North Amer­i­can river otter pup to be born at Ore­gon Zoo. Very spe­cial to the Zoo of course, but many otter pups are born in cap­tiv­ity glob­ally. Nev­er­the­less, this pup deserves some spe­cial atten­tion because his name is Mo, and not because this is short for Molalla the river in the State of Ore­gon.

River otters are very depen­dent on their moth­ers when they’re born. It’s usu­ally three to five weeks before young otters open their eyes, and about five weeks before they first walk. Mo’s first vet­eri­nary checkup can be seen here:

An Indian rhino calf that lost its mother to poach­ers is cling­ing to life with the help of con­ser­va­tion­ists, accord­ing to WWF staff assist­ing with its care. The two week old male is in crit­i­cal con­di­tion after its mother was gunned down by poach­ers Tues­day April 2 and her horn chopped off.

The shock­ing inci­dent is the lat­est in a surge of poach­ing plagu­ing India’s Assam province where 16 greater one-​horned rhi­nos have been killed already this year.

A team of front­line staff from WWF, the gov­ern­ment and part­ner organ­i­sa­tions joined com­mu­nity mem­bers to search Manas National Park for the orphan after the car­cass of its mother was dis­cov­ered ear­lier this week. The group was deter­mined to pre­vent the calf’s death immi­nent from star­va­tion, which would surely occur with­out the nour­ish­ment of its mother’s milk. The dehy­drated and trau­ma­tised calf was located, cap­tured and brought to a safe loca­tion for urgent vet­eri­nary care. Images of the con­fused new­born show it cow­er­ing in the cor­ner of a store room where it is being held temporarily.

(Source: WWF News, 05.04.2013)

A struc­tural biol­o­gist at the Florida State Uni­ver­sity Col­lege of Med­i­cine has made dis­cov­er­ies that could lead sci­en­tists a step closer to under­stand­ing how life first emerged on Earth bil­lions of years ago.

Pro­fes­sor Michael Blaber and his team pro­duced data sup­port­ing the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 bil­lion years ago were capa­ble of form­ing fold­able pro­teins in a high-​salt (halophile) envi­ron­ment. Such pro­teins would have been capa­ble of pro­vid­ing meta­bolic activ­ity for the first liv­ing organ­isms to emerge on the planet between 3.5 and 3.9 bil­lion years ago.

The results of Blaber’s three-​year study, which was built around inves­tiga­tive tech­niques that took more than 17 years to develop, are pub­lished in the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences.

The first liv­ing organ­isms would have been micro­scopic, cell-​like orga­ni­za­tions capa­ble of repli­cat­ing and adapt­ing to envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions — a hum­ble begin­ning to life on Earth.

“The cur­rent par­a­digm on the emer­gence of life is that RNA came first and in a high-​temperature envi­ron­ment,” Blaber said. “The data we are gen­er­at­ing are much more in favour of a protein-​first view in a halophile envi­ron­ment.”

The widely accepted view among sci­en­tists is that RNA, found in all liv­ing cells, would have likely rep­re­sented the first mol­e­cules of life, hypoth­e­sis­ing an “RNA-​first” view of the ori­gin of liv­ing sys­tems from non-​living mol­e­cules. Blaber’s results indi­cate that the set of amino acids pro­duced by sim­ple chem­i­cal processes con­tains the req­ui­site infor­ma­tion to pro­duce com­plex folded pro­teins, which sup­ports an oppos­ing “protein-​first” view.

Another pre­vail­ing view holds that a high-​temperature (ther­mophile) envi­ron­ment, such as deep-​ocean ther­mal vents, may have been the breed­ing ground for the ori­gin of life.

“Rather than a curi­ous niche that life evolved into, the halophile envi­ron­ment now may take cen­ter stage as the likely loca­tion for key aspects of abio­gen­e­sis,” he said. “Like­wise, the role of the for­ma­tion of pro­teins takes on addi­tional impor­tance in the ear­li­est steps in the begin­nings of life on Earth.”


The above news item is reprinted from mate­ri­als avail­able at Florida State Uni­ver­sity. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and length.
(Source: Florida State Uni­ver­sity news, 05.04.2013)

Researchers at the Uni­ver­sity of Leeds may have solved a key puz­zle about how objects from space could have kin­dled life on Earth.

While it is gen­er­ally accepted that some impor­tant ingre­di­ents for life came from mete­orites bom­bard­ing the early Earth, sci­en­tists have not been able to explain how that inan­i­mate rock trans­formed into the build­ing blocks of life.

This new study shows how a chem­i­cal, sim­i­lar to one now found in all liv­ing cells and vital for gen­er­at­ing the energy that makes some­thing alive, could have been cre­ated when mete­orites con­tain­ing phos­pho­rus min­er­als landed in hot, acidic pools of liq­uids around vol­ca­noes, which were likely to have been com­mon across the early Earth. The paper was pub­lished online by the jour­nal Geochim­ica et Cos­mochim­ica Acta on 15^th March 2013.

Trade and global con­sump­tion of Brazil­ian beef and soy­beans is increas­ingly dri­ving Brazil­ian defor­esta­tion.

A new study pub­lished on April 4 in the jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters finds that con­se­quently, cur­rent inter­na­tional efforts to pro­tect rain­forests (e.g., REDD) may be under­mined by the increased trade and con­sump­tion.

By esti­mat­ing CO2 emis­sions from defor­esta­tion in the Brazil­ian Ama­zon from 1990 to 2010, and con­nect­ing the emis­sions to the most impor­tant direct dri­vers of Brazil­ian defor­esta­tion, i.e. cul­ti­va­tion of soy­beans and graz­ing of cat­tle, the study allo­cates the emis­sions to coun­tries based on domes­tic con­sump­tion and inter­na­tional trade of Brazil­ian soy­beans and beef.

First-​of-​its-​kind study led by the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota pro­vides impor­tant infor­ma­tion on the impact of envi­ron­men­tal change

Adélie pen­guins (Pygoscelis adeliae) may actu­ally ben­e­fit from warmer global tem­per­a­tures, the oppo­site of other polar species, accord­ing to a break­through study by an inter­na­tional team led by Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota Polar Geospa­tial Cen­ter researchers. The study pro­vides key infor­ma­tion affirm­ing hypo­thet­i­cal pro­jec­tions about the con­tin­u­ing impact of envi­ron­men­tal change.

Researchers from the United States and New Zealand used a mix of old and new tech­nol­ogy study­ing a com­bi­na­tion of aer­ial pho­tog­ra­phy begin­ning in 1958 and mod­ern satel­lite imagery from the 2000s. They found that the pop­u­la­tion size of an Adélie pen­guin colony on Antarctica’s Beau­fort Island near the south­ern Ross Sea increased 84 per­cent (from 35,000 breed­ing pairs to 64,000 breed­ing pairs) as the ice fields retreated between 1958 – 2010, with the biggest change in the last three decades. The aver­age sum­mer tem­per­a­ture in that area increased about a half a degree Cel­sius per decade since the mid-​1980s.

footage :

On March 12, 2013, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice received word that a female polar bear had been taken near Point Lay, Alaska. An Inuit hunter shot and killed the polar bear, and when he realised it was a female, he searched for the den and found the cub. The hunter recov­ered the cub after it was trans­ferred first to the com­mu­nity of Point Lay, and then to the North Slope Borough’s Depart­ment of Wildlife Man­age­ment (DWM). Sub­se­quent to a health eval­u­a­tion by the DWM it was deter­mined that the orphaned cub is a young male weigh­ing nearly 8.5 kg and 3 – 4 months of age. The Alaska Zoo was requested to arrange the trans­porta­tion from Bar­row and to pro­vide for pre­lim­i­nary care and man­age­ment of the cub. The cub is cur­rently being held for obser­va­tion at the Alaska Zoo, and appears to be respond­ing well.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice recog­nises and appre­ci­ates the many part­ners, includ­ing the peo­ple of Point Lay (who would like the cub to be named “Kali,” pro­nounced cully, which is the Inu­piat name for Point Lay), the North Slope Bor­ough, Alaska Air­lines, the North Slope Bor­ough Police Depart­ment, and the Alaska Zoo for their efforts in recov­er­ing, trans­port­ing, and car­ing for this young ani­mal.

“Kali” the polar bear cub will be avail­able for pub­lic view­ing in his out­door pen from 11am to noon and 3pm-​4pm daily, start­ing Sat­ur­day March 23. He will still have access to his indoor den dur­ing these times.

Kali will not be a per­ma­nent res­i­dent at the Alaska Zoo, since the Zoo already has two adult polar bears. The final des­ti­na­tion of the cub will be deter­mined by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice after con­sid­er­a­tion of all options, Buf­falo Zoo in New York is can­di­date.

Footage of another orphaned polar bear cub that has been taken care of at Alaska Zoo:

• Strives for bear friendly exhibits with enrich­ment activ­i­ties to stim­u­late the bears to be active and content
• Pro­vides lead­er­ship for car­bon emis­sion reduc­tion in their communities
• Sup­ports PBI research projects to help con­serve wild polar bears
• Plays a key role in the PBI Sus­tain­abil­ity Alliance, a front-​line team help­ing to save polar bears in a rapidly warm­ing Arctic
  
  

A part­ner with PBI since 2005, the Alaska Zoo has sent men­tor­ship stu­dents, keep­ers and edu­ca­tors to PBI Lead­er­ship Camp in Churchill, Man­i­toba, Canada each year. Click here to learn about their cur­rent polar bear action projects!


(Source: the Alaska Zoo press release, 18.03.2013 updated 23.03.2013; Zooborns, 02.04.2013)

A new the­ory about what trig­gered the loss of a num­ber of large car­ni­vores around two mil­lion years ago in East Africa has been launched recently at a sym­po­sium on human evo­lu­tion and cli­mate change.

Koalas will be listed as an endangered species in some areas in Australia from Monday 30^th April 2012. The decision not to list the animal as an endangered species across the whole country is because the government is putting mining interests before protecting the marsupial, according some environmental groups.

Size really does matter — just ask a whale. A new Canadian study indicates their remarkable bulk is a big reason whales attract fervent conservation efforts. Being cute and cuddly works, too,

The first-known camera trap photos of an Amur leopard in China have recently been taken by protected area staff in Hunchun Amur Tiger National Nature Reserve in Jilin Province according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In cel­e­bra­tion of this year’s Earth Day on April 22, NASA’s Webby Award-​winning Global Cli­mate Change web­site, http://​cli​mate​.nasa​.gov , has unveiled a new ver­sion of its pop­u­lar image gallery, “State of Flux.”

A study appearing in the current issue of the journal “Science” reveals that polar bears evolved as early as some 600,000 years ago. An international team of scientists

A new national park in the Russian Far East will protect critically endangered Amur (or Siberian) tigers and the world's rarest big cat: the Amur (or Far East­ern) leopard. Land of the Leop­ard National Park safe­guards 1,011 square miles of leop­ard and tiger habitat.

The feed­ing habits of mam­mals haven’t always been what they are today, par­tic­u­larly for omni­vores. Some groups of mam­mals almost exclu­sively eat meat, take lions and tigers and other big cats as exam­ples. Other mam­mals such as deer, cows and ante­lope are pre­dom­i­nantly plant-​eaters,

Carnivory is behind the evolutionary success of humankind. When early humans started to eat meat and eventually hunt, their new, higher-quality diet meant that women could wean their children earlier.

Conservationists today rescued an adult male orangutan from a pocket of forest in Tripa, an area of deep peat that is at the center of battle over Indonesia's commitment to reducing deforestation.

A team of inter­na­tional sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered the unique Tas­man­ian Tiger or thy­lacine had lim­ited genetic diver­sity prior to its extinc­tion. The results pub­lished today in the inter­na­tional jour­nal PLoS One,

Recently, the release of three young cap­tive born-​and-​bred Iber­ian lynx (Lynx par­di­nus) spec­i­mens was another high­light of the suc­cess­ful res­cue plan of Life Lince, a Span­ish project sup­ported by the Euro­pean Union’s Life programme.

Meat con­sump­tion in the devel­oped world needs to be cut by 50 per­cent per per­son by 2050, and emis­sions in all sec­tors — indus­trial and agri­cul­tural — need to be reduced by 50 per­cent if we are to meet the most aggres­sive strat­egy, set out by the Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change (IPCC), to reduce the most potent of green­house gases, nitrous oxide (N₂O).

The find­ings are results of a study by Dr. Eric David­son and were pub­lished recently in IOP Publishing’s Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters. Dr. David­son, who is Pres­i­dent and a Senior Sci­en­tist at the Woods Hold Research Cen­ter in Mass­a­chu­setts, demon­strates the mag­ni­tude of changes needed to sta­bi­lize N₂O con­cen­tra­tions in the atmosphere.

N₂O is the third high­est con­trib­u­tor to cli­mate change behind car­bon diox­ide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄); how­ever, it poses a greater chal­lenge for mit­i­ga­tion since nitro­gen is an essen­tial ele­ment for food pro­duc­tion. It is also the most potent of these three green­house gases, as it is a much bet­ter absorber of infrared radi­a­tion. But total anthro­pogenic emis­sions are about 6 mil­lion met­ric tons of nitro­gen as N₂O, com­pared to 10 bil­lion met­ric tons of car­bon as CO₂.

The main sources of N₂O in the atmos­phere are due to the spread­ing of syn­thetic nitro­gen fer­til­iz­ers onto agri­cul­tural soils and the use and stor­age of live­stock manure. The nitro­gen con­tained in fer­til­iz­ers and manure is bro­ken down by microbes that live in the soil and released into the atmos­phere as N₂O. In order to reduce emis­sions, it will be nec­es­sary to apply cer­tain changes to the food pro­duc­tion process.

Dr. David­son believes that this can be achieved through improved man­age­ment of fer­til­izer and manure sources, as well as through reduc­tion of the devel­oped world’s per capita meat con­sump­tion that will relieve pres­sure on fer­til­izer demand and reduce growth in the amount of manure being pro­duced. Tech­nolo­gies exist to achieve such improved effi­cien­cies, but over­com­ing social, eco­nomic, and polit­i­cal imped­i­ments for their adop­tion and for changes in dietary habits will present large challenges.

In a draft of the IPCC’s Fifth Assess­ment Report, four sce­nar­ios, known as rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­cen­tra­tion path­ways (RCPs), have been adopted, and these rep­re­sent pos­si­ble means of reduc­tions for a num­ber of green­house gases. Dr. David­son eval­u­ated the scale of changes needed to meet the pre­dicted N₂O path­ways. Three of the IPCC’s less aggres­sive sce­nar­ios could be met by reduc­ing meat con­sump­tion, improv­ing agri­cul­tural prac­tices, or reduc­ing emis­sions from indus­try. The most aggres­sive sce­nario, where atmos­pheric N₂O con­cen­tra­tions sta­bi­lize by 2050, can only be met if a 50 per­cent reduc­tion, or improve­ment, is achieved for each of the above.

To make these cal­cu­la­tions, Dr. David­son relied on data pro­vided by the Food and Agri­cul­tural Orga­ni­za­tion, which assume that the global pop­u­la­tion will increase to 8.9 bil­lion by 2050 and the daily calorific intake per capita will increase to 3130 kcal. They also assume that the aver­age meat con­sump­tion of each per­son in the devel­oped world will rise from 78 kg per year in 2002 to 89 kg per year in 2030 and from 28 kg per year in 2002 to 37 kg per year for each per­son in the devel­op­ing world.

Assess­ing the like­li­hood of reduc­ing meat con­sump­tion in the devel­oped world by 50 per­cent, David­son said:

Are such changes pos­si­ble for diet? “That will depend,” says David­son, “not only on edu­ca­tion about diet, but also on prices of meat. Some agri­cul­tural econ­o­mists think that the price of meat is going to go way up, so that per capita con­sump­tion will go down, but those are highly uncer­tain projections.”

The above news item is reprinted from mate­ri­als avail­able at Woods Hole Research Cen­tre. Orig­i­nal text may be edited for con­tent and length.

(Sources: WHRC, 12.04.2012; News­Wise, 12.04.2012; Envi­ron­men­tal Research Let­ters, 12.04.2012)

The global envi­ron­ment faces a bleak future unless world lead­ers change the way energy and water are con­sumed, accord­ing the Envi­ron­men­tal Out­look to 2050, a joint pro­duc­tion of the Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment (OECD) and Nether­lands Envi­ron­men­tal Assess­ment Agency.

A sur­vey on the loss in the North­ern Hemi­sphere of large preda­tors, par­tic­u­larly wolves, con­cludes that cur­rent pop­u­la­tions of moose, deer, and other large her­bi­vores far exceed their his­toric lev­els and are con­tribut­ing to dis­rupted ecosystems.

An inter­na­tional team of sci­en­tists has dis­cov­ered that the female ances­tor of all liv­ing polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicin­ity of present-​day Britain and Ire­land just prior to the peak of the last ice age — 20,000 to 50,000 years ago.

As global tem­per­a­tures rise, the most threat­ened ecosys­tems are those that depend on a sea­son of snow and ice, sci­en­tists from the United States’ Long Term Eco­log­i­cal Research (LTER) Net­work say. “The vul­ner­a­bil­ity of cool, wet areas to cli­mate change is strik­ing,” says

Colch­ester Zoo’s group of aard­varks cel­e­brated another birth of a healthy off­spring on the 20^th March 2012! Female aard­vark, Oq, gave birth to her 7^th baby at around 11.30am on the 20^th March, with the baby a good healthy size and con­tin­u­ing to develop well along­side the care of mum and its keepers!

Envi­ron­men­tal­ists were handed a set back in a dis­pute over a palm oil plan­ta­tion granted in a pro­tected peat swamp that is home to a pop­u­la­tion of crit­i­cally endan­gered orang­utans, reports the Aceh Globe and the Syd­ney Morn­ing Herald.

A three-​year study of giant pan­das pub­lished 4 April 2012 in Biol­ogy of Reproduction’s Papers-​in-​Press reveals that repro­duc­tive sea­son­al­ity exists not only in female pan­das, but in male pan­das as well.

Today the U.S. National Research Coun­cil released a syn­the­sis of reports from thou­sands of sci­en­tists in 60 coun­tries who took part in the Inter­na­tional Polar Year (IPY) 2007-​08, the first in over 50 years to offer a bench­mark for envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions and new dis­cov­er­ies in the polar regions.

The recent three-​week National Rhino Cen­sus in Nepal reveals that the pop­u­la­tion of the greater one horned rhi­noc­eros (Rhi­noc­eros Uni­cor­nis) has increased by 99, from 435 in 2008 to 534 in 2011. The num­ber has risen above 500 for the first time since the civil war, which had a dev­as­tat­ing effect on the pop­u­la­tion of these endan­gered ani­mals due to poach­ing. The focus of the increase was recorded in Chit­wan National Park,

Three suc­cess­ful major ivory seizures this April by law enforcers in Thai­land, Viet­nam and China pro­vide fur­ther insight into the mar­kets being tar­geted by orga­nized crime syn­di­cates smug­gling ele­phant ivory from Africa to Asia. In Thai­land 247 ivory tusks con­cealed in a con­sign­ment of frozen fish from Kenya were seized by Cus­toms on 1^st April. A few days ago, on 19^th April, media in Viet­nam reported that police had seized 122 tusks found in a ware­house in Mong Cai, at the bor­der with China.

The Indian government’s lat­est fig­ures, that were released to mark the open­ing of the Inter­na­tional Tiger Con­ser­va­tion Con­fer­ence in Delhi, show that wild tiger num­bers across the coun­try are now cal­cu­lated to be 1,706 (i.e. rang­ing between a min­i­mum of 1,571 to a max­i­mum of 1,875), an increase of almost 300 the last tiger cen­sus in 2007. The ques­tion is if this fig­ure should give us hope for the future of Indian tigers, and what is more,

The elu­sive tigers of Cor­bett Tiger Reserve are set to get more breath­ing space with the tiger pop­u­la­tion ris­ing from 164 to 214 in the last four years. After Kazi­ranga, Cor­bett wit­nessed max­i­mum increase in tiger pop­u­la­tion. The Min­istry of Envi­ron­ment & Forests released Rs 65 crore (about 10 mil­lion Euros) for relo­cat­ing 1,000 homes in Sund­herkhal village.

It is a well-​known fact that the brown bear and the polar bear are closely related. Repro­duc­tion in cap­tiv­ity has been recorded. And from analy­ses of mito­chon­dr­ial DNA it is undis­puted that polar bears con­sti­tute a lin­eage within the genetic diver­sity of brown bears. But, due to an extremely poor fos­sil record not much was known about the polar bear’s evo­lu­tion and the moment of their diver­gence. In a recent pub­li­ca­tion in Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, researchers show that the polar bear branched off the brown bear lin­eage prob­a­bly just 150,000 years ago.

The pos­si­bil­ity that preda­tors choose prey selec­tively based on age or con­di­tion has been sug­gested but rarely tested. Researchers from Col­orado and Utah State Uni­ver­si­ties exam­ined whether moun­tain lions (Puma con­color) selec­tively prey upon mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) infected with chronic wast­ing dis­ease, a prion dis­ease. They com­pared dis­ease preva­lence among lion-​killed adult (≥2 years old) deer with preva­lence among deer taken by hunters in the vicin­ity of the moun­tain lion kill sites. The sur­vey sug­gest that moun­tain lions in this area actively selected prion-​infected indi­vid­u­als when tar­get­ing adult mule deer as prey items.

(Source: Biol­ogy let­ters, 23 April 2010, pub­lished online before print)

Genetic diver­sity con­tributes to the exis­tence of pop­u­la­tions in the long term. The most impor­tant strat­egy for the con­ser­va­tion of genetic diver­sity in a pop­u­la­tion is to min­i­mize genetic rela­tion­ships. In the wild this can­not be con­trolled for species that are threat­ened to extinc­tion. In a reg­u­lated envi­ron­ment though, like in cap­tiv­ity in zoos, well defined breed­ing pro­grammes could and should be able to main­tain genetic diversity.