Research shows ‘danger zones’ for wandering albatrosses

A pair of wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) courting at Bird Island, South Georgia.
Source/Credit: British Antarctic Survey | NERC

Over half of wandering albatrosses breeding on Bird Island, in the sub-Antarctic, encounter fishing vessels when feeding, putting them at risk of being accidentally caught or killed in fishing gear, according to new research led by British Antarctic Survey and Birdlife International. The results will help conservation efforts for a species that is in decline.

In the study funded by the Darwin Plus scheme and published this month (November 2022) in Biological Conservation, researchers tracked the movements of wandering albatrosses using radar-GPS devices to study their interactions with fishing vessels. By cross-referencing the birds’ movements with the locations of fishing vessels, they found that, of the 251 birds that were tracked, 55% went within 30km of a fishing vessel, and 43% within 5km. Birds traveling to the Patagonian Shelf break were particularly at risk of an interaction.

This study is one of the most comprehensive studies of bycatch risk for any seabird species to date, and combines precise locations of fishing vessels from Global Fishing Watch, another collaborator of the study, with those of wandering albatrosses of different ages and breeding stages.

Amphibian Population Decreased Rapidly in the Last Three Years

Lake frogs are among the largest modern amphibians.
Photo Credit: Ilya Safarov

Biologists have recorded severe simultaneous drops in the numbers of three different species of frogs and newts - rare and widespread. The largest population declines occurred among juveniles, but the scientists noted that adults and egg clutches were also affected. The description and results of the study are published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice.

"We believe that a wide range of anthropogenic adverse factors combined with natural fluctuations are responsible for the population decline. Among the causes are global warming, pathogenic infections, habitat loss and exposure to agro-industrial chemicals. But the main reason is drought: reduced precipitation led to a shortage of water in reservoirs and increased water temperature, which ultimately affected the amphibian population," explains Vladimir Vershinin, co-author of the work, Head of the Department of Biodiversity and Bioecology of Ural Federal University, Head of the Laboratory of Functional Ecology of Terrestrial Animals of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of Ural Branch of Russian Academy of Science.

‘Lost’ pigeon found after more than a century

Video Credit: Jason Gregg, American Bird Conservancy

A September expedition to Papua New Guinea confirmed via video the existence of the black-naped pheasant pigeon, a critically endangered species that has not been reported for 140 years.

“For much of the trip, it seemed like we had no chance of finding this bird,” said Jordan Boersma, co-leader of the expedition and a postdoctoral researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “We were just two days away from the end of our time on Fergusson Island in Papua New Guinea when one of our remote cameras recorded the bird walking around and fanning its tail.”

The group captured the first-ever video and still photos of the bird, a large ground-dwelling species with a rust-colored back, a black head and body, and a bobbing pheasant-like tail. It may only exist far inland on Fergusson Island in hot, extremely rugged geothermal terrain laced with twisty rivers and dense with biting insects and leeches.

“After a month of searching, seeing those first photos of the pheasant pigeon felt like finding a unicorn,” said John C. Mittermeier, director of the Search for Lost Birds project at American Bird Conservancy and a core member of the expedition team. “It’s the kind of moment you dream about your entire life as a conservationist and birdwatcher.”

Birds of a feather flock together?

Maria Castaño uses a spectrophotometer to analyze tanager feathers.
Photo Credit: University of Rochester | J. Adam Fenster

A biology PhD student analyzes tanager bird feathers to explore how species evolve over time.

Maria Castaño, a third-year PhD student at the University of Rochester in the lab of Al Uy, a professor of biology, studies populations of birds to understand the processes that lead to the creation of new species.

Castaño collects and analyzes DNA sequences and feathers of tanagers from her native Colombia in South America. Her research focuses on two different subspecies of tanagers, which have different colored feathers on their rump areas: one subspecies lives in the lowlands of Colombia and has yellow rump feathers, while another subspecies lives in the mountains and has red rump feathers.

New critical period of sex determination in sea turtles identified

Sea turtles’ sex is determined based on the environment, which makes them especially vulnerable to climate change. An increase in incubation temperatures could jeopardize the production of both sexes.
 Photo credit: Jay Paredes

Unlike humans, turtles, lizards and other reptiles – such as crocodiles – do not have sex chromosomes. Their sex is determined based on the environment, which makes them especially vulnerable to climate change. An increase in incubation temperatures could jeopardize the production of both sexes.

Gauging primary sex ratios in these species is critical because it assesses their vulnerability under both current and future climate change constraints. While there has been great progress in sex ratio prediction, studies have been hampered due to a lack of accurate and representative regional and population sex ratio estimates. As a result, primary sex ratios calculations could be skewed.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University, in collaboration with the Université Paris-Saclay in France, have demonstrated that the timing of key developmental process driven by temperature is vital when it comes to identifying when sex is determined for sea turtle embryos. They also are the first to compare the output of the most widely used sex ratio prediction methods to actual sex ratios from natural clutches in sea turtles.

They have developed a new way to integrate the effect of thermal fluctuations on embryonic sex determination and predict sex ratios with much better accuracy than prior models. This method measures the strength of masculinization or feminization of temperatures using novel parameters that have uncovered how temperature-sensitive sex determination works.

California Academy of Sciences researchers produce first-ever ‘family tree’ for aquarium-bred corals

Two-year-old corals sampled for this study in the Academy's Coral Spawning Lab.
Photo Credit: California Academy of Sciences

Corals bred in public aquaria provide novel research opportunities and a healthy stock for outplanting into the wild, essential components of a thriving future for coral reef ecosystems, which support around 25% of all life in Earth’s oceans. But the long-term success of such efforts hinges in part on maintaining genetic diversity in aquarium-bred corals which leads to increased resilience to threats like ocean warming and acidification. In a study published today in Frontiers in Marine Science, a diverse team of Steinhart Aquarium biologists and researchers from the California Academy of Sciences' Coral Spawning Lab produce the first-ever pedigree, or ‘family tree’, for corals bred in an aquarium and provide a list of best practices to maintain genetic diversity in aquarium-bred corals.

“Genetic diversity is what enables species to adapt to the myriad threats resulting from climate change,” says Academy Curator Rebecca Albright, PhD, who founded the Coral Spawning Lab, one of only a handful of facilities on Earth capable of successfully breeding corals. Albright’s work is an integral part of the Academy’s Hope for Reefs initiative, which is aimed at halting the decline of coral reefs in this generation. “For facilities like ours at the Coral Spawning Lab, ensuring each generation of corals is diverse allows us to conduct more robust experiments, which is a critical element of better understanding how corals can thrive on our changing planet. For organizations that do outplantings, increased genetic diversity translates to a greater chance of survival in the wild.”

Five times more rangers needed to manage protected areas worldwide by 2030

Ranger in Patagonia National Park, Chile.
Photo Credit: Jan Vincent Kleine, Rewilding Chile

The first study of its kind outlines an urgent need for larger numbers and better-supported protected area staff to ensure the health of life on Earth. In a new scientific paper published in Nature Sustainability, an international team of scientists, including one from University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, argue that there are not enough rangers and other staff to manage the current protected areas around the world. This is the first estimate of the global number of protected area personnel since 1999 and the first to specifically include rangers.

The study comes ahead of the global meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Montréal, Canada, December 7–15, which decides new targets for conservation. The authors urge governments, donors, private landowners and non-governmental organizations to increase the numbers of rangers and other staff five-fold in order to meet global biodiversity conservation goals that have economic, cultural and ecosystem benefits.

“Sufficient staffing is fundamental to the success of conservation initiatives,” said Eleanor Sterling, study co-author and director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). “Protected area personnel have a critical role to play in ensuring implementation of this conservation strategy honors local and national values.”

Endangered Devils Hole pupfish is one of the most inbred animals known

A curious, captive-raised Devils Hole pupfish at the Ash Meadows Fish Conservation Facility in Nevada. The facility maintains a refuge population of pupfish as a backup to the wild population, which fluctuates over decades and once dipped to a mere 35 individuals.
Resized Image using AI by SFLORG
Photo Credit: Olin Feuerbacher/USFWS

As its name implies, the Devil’s Hole pupfish lives in a truly hellish environment.

Confined to a single deep limestone cave in Nevada’s Mojave Desert, 263 of them live in water that hovers around 93 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, with food resources so scarce that they are always on the edge of starvation, and with oxygen levels so low that most other fish would die immediately. The pupfish, Cyprinodon diabolis, lives in the smallest habitat of any known vertebrate.

New research now documents the extreme effect that these harsh and isolated conditions have had on this fish’s genetic diversity.

In a paper published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, University of California, Berkeley, biologists report the first complete genome sequences of eight pupfish species from the American Southwest — 30 individuals in all, including eight Devils Hole pupfish. Astoundingly, the Devils Hole pupfish is so inbred that 58% of the genomes of these eight individuals are identical, on average.

“High levels of inbreeding are associated with a higher risk of extinction, and the inbreeding in the Devils Hole pupfish is equal to or more severe than levels reported so far in other isolated natural populations, such as the Isle Royale wolves in Michigan, mountain gorillas in Africa and Indian tigers,” said lead researcher Christopher Martin, UC Berkeley associate professor of integrative biology and curator of ichthyology in the campus’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “Although we were not able to directly measure fitness, the increased inbreeding in these pupfish likely results in a substantial reduction in fitness.”

Platypus Populations Impacted by Large River Dams Are More Vulnerable to Threats

Photo Credit: David Clode

The platypus is possibly the most irreplaceable mammal existing today. They have a unique combination of characteristics, including egg-laying despite being mammals, venomous spurs in males, electroreception for locating prey, biofluorescent fur, multiple sex chromosomes, and the longest evolutionary history in mammals.

Platypuses are a threatened species in some Australian states and their conservation is of concern more broadly, due to known decline in their populations.

A new study published in Communications Biology examined the genetic makeup of platypuses in free-flowing and nearby rivers with large dams in New South Wales. These included the free-flowing Ovens River, along with the dammed Mitta Mitta River, and the free-flowing Tenterfield Creek, along with the nearby Severn River regulated by a large dam.

The study found that large dams are significant barriers to platypus movements. This was reflected in greater genetic differentiation between platypuses above and below large dams compared to rivers without dams. Importantly, this genetic differentiation increased over time since the dam was built, reflecting the long-term impacts of the dam.

How much microplastic do whales eat? Up to 10 million pieces per day

Humpback whales lunge feed in Monterey Bay. New research shows whales are ingesting plastic in larger quantities than previously thought, and nearly all comes from their prey, not from the enormous volumes of seawater the whales gulp when feeding.
Photo Credit: shadowfaxone

Analysis of ocean plastic pollution and whale foraging behavior tracked with noninvasive tags shows whales are ingesting tiny specks of plastic in far bigger quantities than previously thought, and nearly all of it comes from the animals they eat – not the water they gulp.

The largest animals ever known to have lived on Earth ingest the tiniest specks of plastic in colossal amounts, Stanford University scientists have found.

Published in Nature Communications, the study focuses on blue, fin, and humpback whales and their consumption of plastic fragments no bigger than a few grains of sand, which are commonly called microplastics. The authors combined measures of microplastic concentrations up and down the water column off the coast of California with detailed logs of where hundreds of whales carrying tracking devices foraged for food between 2010 and 2019.

They found the whales predominantly feed 50 to 250 meters below the surface, a depth that coincides with the highest concentrations of microplastic in the open ocean. The planet’s biggest creature – the blue whale – ingests the most plastic, at an estimated 10 million pieces per day as it feeds almost exclusively on shrimplike animals called krill.

“They’re lower on the food chain than you might expect by their massive size, which puts them closer to where the plastic is in the water. There’s only one link: The krill eats the plastic, and then the whale eats the krill,” said study co-author Matthew Savoca, a postdoctoral scholar at Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford’s marine laboratory on the Monterey Peninsula.

Wildfires drive L.A.’s mountain lions to take deadly risks

  A National Park Service researcher displays the scorched paws of the adult male mountain lion known as P-64. While an NPS tracking collar showed that P-64 survived the Woolsey Fire, he died several weeks later of starvation.
Credit: Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

When the Woolsey Fire roared through the Santa Monica Mountains in fall 2018, it torched half of the available habitat for the area’s mountain lions — a population already hemmed in by freeways and an ocean.

Most survived the blaze, but in a study published today in Current Biology, scientists from UCLA and the National Park Service found that the animals, no longer able to utilize burned areas, engaged in risky behaviors that increased the likelihood of dangerous encounters with human-built infrastructure and rival mountain lions.

Conflicts with other cougars, particularly males, can be deadly, said lead study author Rachel Blakey, a researcher with UCLA’s La Kretz Center for California Conservation Biology. So can crossing busy roads and freeways, something the researchers found occurred with greater frequency in the 15 months after the fire, jumping from about three crossings a month to five.

“The mountain lions we live alongside in L.A. are already taking their chances with roads and other mountain lions,” Blakey said. “The Woolsey Fire, by further limiting the space they have, really intensified those risks.”

Reliably estimating proportion of vaccinated populations in wildlife

Japanese Wild Boar
Credit: KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons

Researchers develop a ground-breaking model to estimate bait vaccination effectiveness in wild animals based on the proportion of immunized animals in a population and the number of vaccine applications.

Wild animals are host to pathogens that cause a wide variety of infectious diseases, including zoonotic diseases such as rabies, influenza and tuberculosis. The control of these diseases in wild animals is an important issue in the fields of public health, livestock health, and conservation biology. One of the most widely used methods of control is vaccination of wildlife via bait containing oral vaccines (bait vaccination). However, assessing the effectiveness of these vaccines has been difficult.

A team of scientists led by Associate Professor Ryosuke Omori at the International Institute for Zoonoses Control, Hokkaido University, has developed a ground-breaking model to estimate the effectiveness of bait vaccination in wild animals. Their model and findings were published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Virologists close gap on unknown viruses affecting amphibians and reptiles

It took three years to identify the virus that all but wiped out the Bellinger River turtle in 2015. It is hoped that amassing new viral data affecting herptiles will allow quicker conservation responses.
Credit: Pelagic, CC BY-SA 4.0

New knowledge about amphibian and reptile viruses will help us act faster to conserve threatened species.

A study of viruses that affect amphibians and reptiles has closed the gap on the knowledge of viruses affecting animals which until now has largely focused on humans and other mammals.

Third year PhD student Emma Harding, who led the study published today in ISME Communications, used the UNSW supercomputer Katana to comb through petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of publicly available amphibian and reptile RNA data in search of new viruses affecting these classes of animals.

“We know a lot about viruses that infect us and livestock, however not many people have investigated viruses that infect amphibians and reptiles, even though there are over 18,000 species globally,” Ms. Harding, lead author on the paper, says.

“We looked through more than 200 RNA datasets from amphibians and reptiles for evidence of new viruses that could lead to disease. We found 26 new viruses from a range of different families and now have a better understanding of what viruses can infect these animals.”

Endangered fruit-eating animals play an outsized role in a tropical forest

A view of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state.
Credit: Adriano Gambarini/The Nature Conservancy

A new study by researchers at the University of Washington shows that losing a particular group of endangered animals — those that eat fruit and help disperse the seeds of trees and other plants — could severely disrupt seed-dispersal networks in the Atlantic Forest, a shrinking stretch of tropical forest and critical biodiversity hotspot on the coast of Brazil.

The findings, published Oct. 12 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, indicate that a high number of plant species in today’s Atlantic Forest rely on endangered frugivores — the scientific term for animals that eat primarily fruit — to help disperse their seeds throughout the forest. As a result, losing those endangered frugivores would leave a high proportion of plants without an effective means to disperse and regenerate — endangering these plants, reducing diversity in the Atlantic Forest and crippling critical portions of this ecosystem.

“Tropical forests contain this incredible diversity of trees,” said lead author Therese Lamperty, a UW postdoctoral researcher in biology. “One of the main processes forests use to maintain this diversity is dispersal. If you’re not dispersed, you’re in a crowd of trees that are just like you – all competing for resources. And there are a lot of plant enemies already in the area or that can be easily recruited, like harmful animals or plant diseases. Your chance of survival is higher when you get transported away from your mother tree to an area without trees like you.”

Taking a biochemical snapshot of sea turtle health

Green Sea Turtle 
Photo credit: Randall Ruiz

New Griffith research is using biochemical profiles from the blood of sea turtles as a tool to monitor the health of populations in the wild.

Published in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, the researchers used metabolomics, which measures the by-products of physiological processes, to determine if environmental conditions or the way in which they were captured can affect their health.

“As iconic but threatened species, there is considerable interest in adapting cutting-edge analytical techniques to evaluate the health of wild populations of sea turtles,” said Dr Steve Melvin a Research Fellow at the Australian Rivers Institute.

“Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a powerful technique that can provide a metabolic fingerprint of the physiological processes taking place in an animal. It gives a direct indication of an organism’s health and how external conditions influence an animal’s physiological response.

“Being non-lethal, metabolomics provides an attractive method for comparing populations of threatened species like sea turtles, and to understand how the environment they are living in impacts their health. However, few studies have used this method to evaluate wild populations of sea turtles.”

Gut Microbiomes Help Bears with Very Different Diets Reach the Same Size

Photo credit: National Park Service.

A recent study of the gut microbiome of Alaskan brown bears (Ursus arctos) shows that the microbial life in bears’ guts allows them to achieve comparable size and fat stores while eating widely different diets. The work sheds light on the role of the gut microbiome in supporting health in wild omnivores.

“We think of bears as having simple digestive tracts, so it’s easy to slip into thinking that they therefore have simple gut microbiomes,” says Erin McKenney, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. “But this study shows there can be tremendous diversity in the gut microbiomes between individual bears, and that this variation can be very important to the physical condition of these animals.”

“For example, the amount of fat that bears are able to store is absolutely critical to the health of wild populations,” says Grant Hilderbrand, co-author of the study and associate regional director for resources for the National Park Service in Alaska. “If female bears are able to reach levels where 19-20% of their body mass in the autumn is fat, they’ll reproduce. And knowing that they can take different dietary paths to reach those fat levels is a valuable insight.”

For this study, researchers collected fecal samples from 51 adult brown bears in three national parks: Katmai National Park and Preserve, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve.

No evidence that dehorning black rhinos negatively impacts the species’ reproduction or survival

A sedated black rhino in the process of being dehorned, with a cap over its eye to protect it from the dust
Credit: Piet Beytell, Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism

There are no statistically significant differences in key factors of population growth - breeding, birth, survival, life span and death - between dehorned or horned black rhinos new research, conducted by the University of Bristol Vet School, Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism, and Save the Rhino Trust has found.

The black rhino is critically endangered, with poaching one of several threats to the species’ survival. Many reserves across a number of African countries, including Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, now dehorn their rhinos in an attempt to reduce poaching but few studies have looked at the impacts of dehorning, particularly in black rhinos.

The study aimed to build on existing knowledge of population productivity between dehorned and horned individuals in four sub-populations of black rhino (of the sub-species Diceros bicornis bicornis) in Namibia.

Three of the populations had undergone some level of dehorning at least once while one of the populations had never been dehorned. The measures investigated included: age of females at the birth of their first calf (age at first reproduction or AFR); average time between the birth of calves for each female (inter-calving interval); birth sex ratios, calf survival, life span and cause of death

Endangered Mouse Study Shares No-Contact Sampling Method

A salt marsh harvest mouse walks across the bulrush at Grizzly Island Wildlife Area in San Francisco.
 Credit: Cody Aylward/UC Davis

From species of marmots to moles, shrews and mice, many of the world’s endangered mammals are small. Genetic sampling is important for understanding how to conserve and protect their populations. But finding efficient, noninvasive ways to collect genetic samples from small animals can be challenging.

A study from the University of California, Davis, describes a new, noninvasive genetic survey technique for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse, which lives solely within the tidal marshes of the San Francisco Bay Estuary.

In larger mammals, scientists often collect samples from scat, but the poop of small animals can be so small that it is difficult to detect in the wild.

The new technique, published in the Journal of Mammalogy, uses a combination of bait stations and genetics to sample and identify salt marsh harvest mice, or “salties” as researchers affectionately call them. The species has lost more than 90% of its habitat to development and is also threatened by rising sea levels. That’s why it is imperative that the remaining populations are identified accurately and efficiently, the authors note.

More than 1.1 million sea turtles poached over last three decades

A new ASU study shows during a 30-year period, 95% of poached sea turtles came from two species — green and hawksbill turtles — both of which are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Also, Southeast Asia and Madagascar emerged as major hot spots for illegal sea turtle take and trade, particularly for critically endangered hawksbills, which are prized in the illicit wildlife trade for their beautiful shells. The East Pacific hawksbill turtle is among the most endangered sea turtle populations.
 Photo Credit: Lindsay Lauckner Gundlock

One of the most serious threats to wildlife biodiversity, in addition to the climate crisis, is the illegal killing and trafficking of animals and plants. Despite many laws against the black-market wildlife trade, it is considered to be one of the most lucrative illicit industries in the world.

Animals, especially endangered and threatened species, are often exploited and sold for their pelts or used as medicine, aphrodisiacs, curios, food and spiritual artifacts.

In a new study published in “Global Change Biology,” Arizona State University researchers estimate that more than 1.1 million sea turtles have been illegally killed and, in some cases, trafficked between 1990 and 2020. Even with existing laws prohibiting their capture and use, as many as 44,000 sea turtles were exploited each year over the past decade in 65 countries or territories and in 44 of the world’s 58 major sea turtle populations.

Despite the seemingly large number of poached turtles, the study shows that the reported illegal exploitation of sea turtles declined by approximately 28% over the last decade — something that surprised the researchers. They initially expected to see an overall increase in reported poaching.

Endangered Amargosa Voles Begin to Repopulate Desert Habitat

This landscape shows the Amargosa Valley at sunset. Amargosa voles are endemic to unique Mojave Desert marshes fed by natural springs and the Amargosa River.
Credit: University of California, Davis

Seven years of carefully planned habitat restoration on private land in the Mojave Desert have yielded hope for the persistence of the endangered Amargosa vole. In early August, a photograph from a wildlife camera placed by researchers from the University of California, Davis, and dated July 3 revealed the presence of one, possibly two, vole pups born from parents that were reintroduced to restored marsh habitat on private land in Shoshone Village, Inyo County.

The Amargosa vole was first discovered in the marshes of Shoshone in the late 1800s but had disappeared by the early 1900s because of habitat conversion to agriculture and other uses that destroyed the marshes. The only other place in the world where the voles persist in the wild is near the town of Tecopa, about 8 miles south of Shoshone.

Restoration of the Shoshone Spring marsh started in 2015 as a joint effort of Shoshone Village, the Amargosa Conservancy, UC Davis and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). The restoration was funded by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) Section 6 and Partners in Fish and Wildlife grants.