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Nature’s Warning: Early Signs in Marine Life Predicting the Next Mass Extinction

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Saturday, June 15, 2024

Researchers have utilized a detailed global dataset of foraminifera fossils to study shifts in marine community structures before mass extinctions, offering an early warning system for future biodiversity losses due to climate change. Led by Anshuman Swain and Adam Woodhouse, the study emphasizes the importance of monitoring ecological changes to predict future extinctions, potentially shaping the field of paleoinformatics.A study using foraminifera fossils suggests that shifts in marine community structures can predict future extinctions, highlighting the role of historical data in forecasting climate change impacts on biodiversity.For hundreds of millions of years, single-celled organisms known as foraminifera, which are microscopic and hard-shelled, have thrived in the oceans. These tiny creatures form the foundation of the food chain. The fossils of these ancient organisms provide insights into potential shifts in global biodiversity linked to our warming climate.Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that are among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that major environmental stress events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as a pre-extinction early warning signal. Planktonic foraminifera fossils. Credit: Tracy Aze / University of LeedsThe results are in Nature, co-led by Anshuman Swain, a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and an affiliate of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. A physicist by training who applies networks to biological and paleontological data, Swain teamed with co-first author Adam Woodhouse at the University of Bristol to probe the global, community structure of ancient marine plankton that could serve as an early warning system for future extinction of ocean life.“Can we leverage the past to understand what might happen in the future, in the context of global change?” said Swain, who previously co-authored a study about the formation of polar ice caps driving changes in marine plankton communities over the last 15 million years. “Our work offers new insight into how biodiversity responds spatially to global changes in climate, especially during intervals of global warmth, which are relevant to future warming projections.”Leveraging Historical Data for Future PredictionsThe researchers used the Triton database, developed by Woodhouse, to ascertain how the composition of foraminifera communities changed over millions of years – orders of magnitude longer time spans than are typically studied at this scale. They focused on the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, the last major period of sustained high global temperatures since the dinosaurs, analogous to worst-case global warming scenarios.They found that, before an extinction pulse of 34 million years ago, marine communities became highly specialized everywhere but southern high latitudes, implying that these micro-plankton migrated en masse to higher latitudes and away from the tropics. This finding indicates that community-scale changes like the ones seen in these migration patterns are evident in fossil records long before actual extinctions and losses in biodiversity occur.The researchers thus think it’s important to place emphasis on monitoring the structure of biological communities to predict future extinctions.According to Swain, the results from the foraminifera studies open avenues of inquiry into other organismal groups, including other marine life, sharks, and insects. Such studies may spark a revolution in an emerging field called paleoinformatics, or use large spatiotemporally resolved databases of fossil records to glean new insights into the future of Earth.Reference: “Biogeographic response of marine plankton to Cenozoic environmental changes” by Anshuman Swain, Adam Woodhouse, William F. Fagan, Andrew J. Fraass and Christopher M. Lowery, 17 April 2024, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07337-9The researchers’ study was made possible by a longstanding National Science Foundation field study aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel, which over the last 55 years has conducted ocean drilling around the world. The project is set to expire this year.

A study using foraminifera fossils suggests that shifts in marine community structures can predict future extinctions, highlighting the role of historical data in forecasting climate...

Ocean Storm Representing Deoxygenation

Researchers have utilized a detailed global dataset of foraminifera fossils to study shifts in marine community structures before mass extinctions, offering an early warning system for future biodiversity losses due to climate change. Led by Anshuman Swain and Adam Woodhouse, the study emphasizes the importance of monitoring ecological changes to predict future extinctions, potentially shaping the field of paleoinformatics.

A study using foraminifera fossils suggests that shifts in marine community structures can predict future extinctions, highlighting the role of historical data in forecasting climate change impacts on biodiversity.

For hundreds of millions of years, single-celled organisms known as foraminifera, which are microscopic and hard-shelled, have thrived in the oceans. These tiny creatures form the foundation of the food chain. The fossils of these ancient organisms provide insights into potential shifts in global biodiversity linked to our warming climate.

Using a high-resolution global dataset of planktonic foraminifera fossils that are among the richest biological archives available to science, researchers have found that major environmental stress events leading to mass extinctions are reliably preceded by subtle changes in how a biological community is composed, acting as a pre-extinction early warning signal.

Planktonic foraminifera

Planktonic foraminifera fossils. Credit: Tracy Aze / University of Leeds

The results are in Nature, co-led by Anshuman Swain, a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, a researcher in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and an affiliate of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. A physicist by training who applies networks to biological and paleontological data, Swain teamed with co-first author Adam Woodhouse at the University of Bristol to probe the global, community structure of ancient marine plankton that could serve as an early warning system for future extinction of ocean life.

“Can we leverage the past to understand what might happen in the future, in the context of global change?” said Swain, who previously co-authored a study about the formation of polar ice caps driving changes in marine plankton communities over the last 15 million years. “Our work offers new insight into how biodiversity responds spatially to global changes in climate, especially during intervals of global warmth, which are relevant to future warming projections.”

Leveraging Historical Data for Future Predictions

The researchers used the Triton database, developed by Woodhouse, to ascertain how the composition of foraminifera communities changed over millions of years – orders of magnitude longer time spans than are typically studied at this scale. They focused on the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum, the last major period of sustained high global temperatures since the dinosaurs, analogous to worst-case global warming scenarios.

They found that, before an extinction pulse of 34 million years ago, marine communities became highly specialized everywhere but southern high latitudes, implying that these micro-plankton migrated en masse to higher latitudes and away from the tropics. This finding indicates that community-scale changes like the ones seen in these migration patterns are evident in fossil records long before actual extinctions and losses in biodiversity occur.

The researchers thus think it’s important to place emphasis on monitoring the structure of biological communities to predict future extinctions.

According to Swain, the results from the foraminifera studies open avenues of inquiry into other organismal groups, including other marine life, sharks, and insects. Such studies may spark a revolution in an emerging field called paleoinformatics, or use large spatiotemporally resolved databases of fossil records to glean new insights into the future of Earth.

Reference: “Biogeographic response of marine plankton to Cenozoic environmental changes” by Anshuman Swain, Adam Woodhouse, William F. Fagan, Andrew J. Fraass and Christopher M. Lowery, 17 April 2024, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07337-9

The researchers’ study was made possible by a longstanding National Science Foundation field study aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel, which over the last 55 years has conducted ocean drilling around the world. The project is set to expire this year.

Read the full story here.
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Rare and Elusive Australian Bird, Once Thought Extinct for 100 Years, Discovered by Indigenous Rangers and Scientists

Using sound recordings, the team identified the largest known population of the night parrot, a secretive species known as the "Holy Grail of birdwatching"

An illustration of night parrots by Elizabeth Gould, completed in 1890. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons The night parrot—a brilliantly colored, nocturnal bird—once thrived in Australia’s outback. The arrival of colonists and feral predators, however, brought about an almost catastrophic decline in the species’ population in the late 19th century. In fact, the vibrant, green parrots were believed to be extinct for roughly a century, until one of them was found in western Queensland in 1990. While that was heartening for scientists, there was one problem: The specimen was dead. Then, another dead night parrot was identified 16 years later. It wasn’t until 2013 that a naturalist found a small, living population in southwestern Queensland. Since then, the species’ known population has been in the tens of birds, and the night parrot remains one of the most elusive—and most endangered—birds on Earth. Now, however, a team of Indigenous rangers and scientists has discovered as many as 50 night parrots on land managed by the Ngururrpa people in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. The new results from their project, which is supported with funding from Australia’s National Environmental Science Program’s Resilient Landscapes Hub, were published in the journal Wildlife Research on Monday. “We the Ngururrpa Rangers have been looking for night parrots since 2019. First, we thought they were only living in one area, on our neighbor’s country, but then we started checking in our area and ended up finding evidence that they are here,” Clifford Sunfly, a Ngururrpa ranger and co-author of the study, says in a statement. “We are still looking for them, to make sure they are safe, and we are still finding them.” Night parrots, once thought to be extinct for roughly 100 years, are among Australia's rarest and most elusive birds. Nicholas Leseberg Night parrots are generally difficult to detect—a fact that has been long recorded in Indigenous culture. The elusive species creates tunnels and nests in dense spinifex bushes and emerges at night to forage for seeds. Spotting such a creature has been called the “Holy Grail of birdwatching.” During their work, the rangers found physical evidence of night parrots, including feathers and nests with eggs, and they “knew it was a good sign,” Rudi Maxwell writes for NITV. A few years ago, they even captured a rare photograph of a night parrot—only the fourth image of the bird on record. This encounter put the team among the special group of fewer than 30 people who had seen a live night parrot in the last 100 years. The new breakthrough, though, came from sound data. Rangers used their knowledge of the environment to narrow down the parrot’s vast habitat to 31 potential roosting areas, where the team then placed sound recorders to listen for its distinctive calls, which include “whistles, croaks and bell-like sounds,” the team writes for the Conversation. “The acoustic data we gathered was then analyzed to extract any bird calls in the night parrot’s frequency range. Potential detections were verified using a reference library of known night parrot calls,” the scientists add in the Conversation. They successfully identified night parrot calls in 17 of the 31 sites they had chosen, ten of which were determined to be roost sites, since the calls sounded shortly after sunset and before sunrise. Four of the authors of the new night parrot paper—Angela Reid, Clifford Sunfly, Rachel Paltridge and Nicholas Leseberg—at the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area Ngururrpa Rangers One of the night parrot’s diverse array of calls sounded like “didly dip, didly dip,” like a telephone, as study co-author Nick Leseberg, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, tells the Guardian’s Petra Stock. Another sounded like “dink dink,” resembling a bell. The team hypothesized the distribution of night parrots and the birds’ general population size by counting the number of different calls, because individuals are thought to have unique vocalizations. Researchers also took into account the volume of the call, which helps determine the location it came from. They then extrapolated these results across 58 potential habitats in the area and estimated up to 20 roosting sites may be active there, hosting a predicted total of between 40 and 50 birds. This makes the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area population the largest known congregation of night parrots, since the known population in Queensland contains no more than 20 birds, per the Guardian. Having identified the night parrots by sound, the team moved on to studying threats to the endangered species using camera traps. They found that dingoes were the most present predators in the area—but the large, wild dogs were busy eating feral cats, which the team suspects are the real key predators of night parrots. So dingoes, they suggest, are actually protecting the night parrot population. A night parrot appears in a photograph captured by a camera trap. Ngururrpa Rangers Satellite imagery helped determine that lightning-caused bushfires pose a great threat to the parrots in the Great Sandy Desert. The rangers already conduct strategic land burning to manage that risk, but the new data could help them tailor their plan to protect roosting sites. Night parrots also benefit from a lack of human development in their environment, so the team argues remote habitats should be kept unindustrialized. In fact, the Great Sandy Desert “is probably one of the world’s most uninfluenced ecosystems when it comes to industrial-level footprints,” James Watson, a biogeographer at the University of Queensland who was not involved in the study, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Peter de Kruijff. “It’s these large, intact places that allow species to adapt to a changing climate, because they’ve got big, healthy populations that can move through the landscape,” he adds. Urgent action is needed to protect the newly discovered night parrot population, the scientists write in the Conversation, and to “ensure the night parrot doesn’t go missing a second time, perhaps for good.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Extinction
Indigenous
Culture

Did humans drive Cyprus dwarf hippos and elephants extinct?

A new study shows that now-extinct dwarf hippos and elephants on the island of Cyprus were likely driven to extinction by humans about 14,000 years ago. The post Did humans drive Cyprus dwarf hippos and elephants extinct? first appeared on EarthSky.

Pygmy hippopotamus at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy. The now-extinct dwarf hippo in Cyprus would have looked much like this species. But a new study indicates that only a few thousand humans made the Cyprus dwarf hippos and elephants go extinct. Image via Chuckupd / Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Dwarf hippos and elephants once lived on Cyprus but went extinct around 14,000 years ago, likely due to hunting by humans. A small population of 3,000-7,000 Stone Age humans could have hunted these animals to extinction within 1,000 years. Researchers used fossil data and computer models to reconstruct likely scenarios about the animal populations and hunting pressure, and concluded that human hunting caused the extinctions. Dwarf hippos and elephants once roamed the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. They disappeared some 14,000 years ago, not long after humans arrived on the island at the end of the last Ice Age. Did that human population – a group perhaps numbering only 3,000 to 7,000 individuals – cause the animals’ extinction? Controversy has surrounded this question. But now, a new study suggests that these Stone Age humans were indeed responsible. Scientists published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on September 18, 2024. Did a few thousand people hunt the hippos and elephants to extinction? There’s been controversy over whether humans were responsible for the extinction of the dwarf hippos and elephants on Cyprus. Changing environmental conditions and inbreeding have been considered as possible reasons. Some researchers thought that the animals disappeared before the arrival of humans. Others felt there simply weren’t enough early humans in Cyprus to kill off the animals. Scientists believe that humans arrived in Cyprus about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. And they think that the population grew to several thousand within just a few hundred years after arrival on the island. Fossil remains – teeth and bones – from dwarf elephants on display at the Akamas Geology and Paleontology Information Center in Cyprus. Image via Corey Bradshaw/ Flinders University. Used with permission. Fertility, longevity and population size So, did humans hunt these creatures to extinction? To answer that question, the scientists examined likely scenarios, using computer models. They used data on fossils of the dwarf hippos and elephants, and archaeological evidence of early human presence in Cyprus, for the analysis. First, dwarf hippo and elephant fossils were used to figure out how much these animals would have weighed. That allowed the researchers to estimate population sizes, fertility, and longevity. They also estimated the animals’ growth rate by comparing then to closely related species alive today, the pygmy hippo and African elephant. With this information, they then created computer models of scenarios resulting from the arrival of human hunters. The scientists estimated hunting and harvesting efficiency, and how much energy the hunters would have needed from their prey for survival on the island. Theodora Moutsiou of Cyprus University, a paper co-author, said in a statement: Cyprus is the perfect location to test our models because the island offers an ideal set of conditions to examine whether the arrival of populations of humans ultimately led to the extinction of its megafauna species. This is because Cyprus is an insular environment and can provide a window back in time through our data. Evidence points to human cause for extinctions The results showed that a population numbering between 3,000 and 7,000 people could have easily caused the extinction of the dwarf hippos, followed by the dwarf elephants. This progression of the disappearance of these animals is supported in the fossil record. Moreover, the models predicted that these extinctions could have occurred in less than 1,000 years. Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University is the lead author of the paper. He said: Our results provide strong evidence that paleolithic peoples in Cyprus were at least partially responsible for megafauna extinctions during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene. The main determinant of extinction risk for both species was the proportion of edible meat they provided to the first people on the island. Our research lays the foundation for an improved understanding on the impact small human populations can have in terms of disrupting native ecosystems and causing major extinctions even during a period of low technological capacity. A view of the limestone caves in Cyprus where many of the dwarf hippo and elephant fossils were found. Image via Corey Bradshaw/ Flinders University. Used with permission. Meet the Cyprus dwarf hippos and elephants Cyprus isn’t the only Mediterranean island that once had dwarf hippos and elephants. Other islands in the area, like Malta and Sardinia, did too. On Cyprus, the diminutive elephants and hippos were the largest animals on the island when humans arrived. The animals had no natural predators on the island. Why were they so small? A phenomenon called insular dwarfism resulted in smaller versions of these otherwise large creatures found on the mainland. These animals evolved a reduced body size due to fewer food resources on the island. The Cypriot pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minor), according to fossil evidence, measured a bit over 2 feet (.6 meter) tall and 4 feet (1.2 meters) long. It likely weighed just 290 pounds (230 kg). That’s about the size of the pygmy hippopotamus found today in western Africa. In comparison, Phanourios’s closest living relative, the common hippopotamus, is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, ranges in length from 9 to 16 feet (about 3 to 5 meters), and can weigh over 3,000 pounds (1,300 kg). Display at the Akamas Geology and Paleontology Information Center in Cyprus showing bones from a dwarf hippo and an artist’s reconstruction of the animal. Image via Corey Bradshaw/ Flinders University. Used with permission. Also on the island was the Cypriot dwarf elephant (Palaeoloxodon cypriotes). These elephants weighed about 1,100 pounds (500 kg). and may have measured just over 3 feet (1 meter) tall. Palaeoloxodon descended from the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant that lived in mainland Europe and Western Asia during the middle and late Pleistocene (770,000 to 11,700 years ago). The males were about 13 feet (4 meters) tall and weighed 29,000 pounds (13,000 kg), while females measured 10 feet (3 meters) tall and weighed over 12,000 pounds (5,400 kg). Bottom line: A new study shows that dwarf hippopotamus and elephants that once lived on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus were likely driven to extinction by humans about 14,000 years ago. Source: Small populations of Palaeolithic humans in Cyprus hunted endemic megafauna to extinction Via Flinders University Via The Conversation Read more: Ice Age humans: Did they affect the extinction of large mammals?The post Did humans drive Cyprus dwarf hippos and elephants extinct? first appeared on EarthSky.

Extinction
Animals
Food

Europe saved its predators from the brink of extinction. So why is it killing thousands of bears, wolves and lynx?

With Sweden issuing permits to kill a fifth of its bears, and Romanian MPs voting to double its quota, and the debate over hunting season has become a political issueThe forest was unnaturally still when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first picked up the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the hills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists biking and foraging for mushrooms. Fellow hunters who had come face to face with bears had told Supeková the fear had been so great they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with her father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed a few bears, she found herself in a similar state of dread – she was out on that trip expecting to kill deer, and did not want to come on a bear unexpectedly.“Fear permeated me … the smell penetrated to the tip of my bones,” says Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear never appeared. The next morning, the daughter-and-father hunting duo saw its droppings. “We breathed a sigh of relief only in the car.” Continue reading...

The forest was unnaturally still when Soňa Chovanová Supeková first picked up the bear’s scent. It was roe deer rutting season in southern Slovakia, and the hills below the Carpathian mountains were busy with tourists biking and foraging for mushrooms. Fellow hunters who had come face to face with bears had told Supeková the fear had been so great they could not lift their rifles. Sitting with her father, a hunter in his 80s who had killed a few bears, she found herself in a similar state of dread – she was out on that trip expecting to kill deer, and did not want to come on a bear unexpectedly.“Fear permeated me … the smell penetrated to the tip of my bones,” says Supeková, the founder of the Club of Slovak Lady Hunters. But the bear never appeared. The next morning, the daughter-and-father hunting duo saw its droppings. “We breathed a sigh of relief only in the car.”A 124kg male bear was one of 19 shot during the first day of hunting in Ljusdal, central Sweden, on 21 August 2020. Photograph: Adam Ihse/TT News Agency/AlamyEurope’s brown bears are a protected species. But they – alongside wolves and lynxes – are increasingly crossing paths with farmers, forestry officials and hunters such as Supeková. The appetite for killing big carnivores has shot up as wolf and bear populations have grown, several bear attacks have made headlines, and politicians have taken aim at laws that brought back them back from the brink of extinction.Sweden has issued permits to kill 486 of its brown bears, about 20%, this hunting season, which runs until mid-October. In 2023, the country conducted record-breaking culls of lynxes and wolves. Romania’s MPs voted in July to double its hunting quota from 220 brown bears to 481. In Slovakia, where a bear was recently filmed rampaging through a village, lawmakers voted in June to allow hunting near villages under certain conditions. In July, the European court of justice ruled that recent wolf culls in Austria and Spain were unlawful. Earlier in the year, Switzerland also faced legal challenges for its proposal to kill 70% of its wolf population.The wolf is no longer an animal with two ears, four legs and one tail; it is a political subjectThe debate around shooting protected species has provoked such fury among farmers, hunters and conservationists that it has bubbled up to the highest levels of bureaucrats in Brussels. The European Commission, whose president, Ursula von der Leyen, had a pony killed by a wolf two years ago, is seeking to downgrade the animal’s protection status.“The wolf is no longer an animal with two ears, four legs and one tail; it is a political subject,” says Luigi Boitani, a zoologist at the Sapienza University of Rome and chairman of the Large Carnivore Initiative for Europe, a conservation group. “There’s a lot of polarisation. When you speak about wolves and bears, the world is not a variety of greys, it’s black or white.”Wolves were killed off across much of Europe in the 19th and 20th century, but began to bounce back in the 1970s as people moved from villages to cities, and governments later protected the animals and their habitats. A similar shift happened with brown bears and lynxes, with conservationists resettling them in regions from which they had been wiped out.Wolves shot in a hunt on 1 January 2020, as filmed in the Guardian documentary The Wolf Dividing Norway. Photograph: Kyrre Lien/The GuardianThe continent is now home to six species of large carnivore, and the EU bans killing them, with some exceptions – for example if they pose a danger to the public. Perched at the top of their food chain, the animals help ecosystems thrive by regulating prey populations. There is also some evidence they can limit the spread of disease.But the scale and speed of their return – there are thought to be more than 20,000 wolves and 17,000 bears in Europe – has increasingly led to conflicts with humans. Farmer and hunting lobbies have pushed to reduce the number of hurdles needed to kill them as the animals have expanded their territory and attacked people and livestock.A week after Supeková found the bear’s tracks in the forest, she says: “A farmer’s son met a bear on a forest road when he was mushroom picking in a place only about 2km away. Luckily, the bear ran away.”Footage of a bear barrelling down the streets of a small Slovakian town captured international attention in March, with five injured in the attack. So too did the death of a Belarusian hiker who died when fleeing from a bear the day before. The attacks prompted a change in law to let Slovak security services shoot brown bears that come within half a kilometre of a human settlement. A few months later in Romania, the death of a 19-year-old hiker at the hands of a bear led to the prime minister calling lawmakers back from their summer break for an emergency session in which they voted to cull more bears.A bear ran amok in the Slovakian town of Liptovský Mikuláš in March this year, leading to a change in the law on shooting bears. Photograph: undefined/Courtesy of Trnkova BizubovaPeople from villages and the countryside want to reduce the numbers of bears because attacks are increasing, says Supeková. “What’s very tragic is that one bear in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš injured five people, running across the town where children were outside playing games.”The issue has become fodder for populist parties courting rural votes, with politicians blasting Brussels for putting their children at risk and abandoning villages out of elitist environmental concerns.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionCritics say the deaths are tragic but have been blown out of proportion. In Romania, which is home to the most brown bears in Europe, the animals killed 26 people and injured 276 over 20 years, according to the environment ministry. Data from Eurostat shows that motorised vehicles killed 45,000 people in the country in that time.Cultural associations are a problem for the wolf, which has long been portrayed as the villain of fairytales. Helmut Dammann-Tamke, president of the German hunting association and politician with the centre-right Christian Democrats, says the threat of wolf attacks on sheep is “like something on a serving platter” for the far right because it reaches people on an emotional level. “This issue is an incendiary force in the hands of populists.”A 2022 study of German municipalities found that wolf attacks on livestock predict far-right support. After controlling for factors such as immigration and jobs, the researchers found wolf attacks were associated with far-right gains in municipal elections of between one and two percentage points. “The evidence points to wolf attacks as one potential driver of electoral radicalisation,” the authors wrote.Environmental activists question whether blanket policies to cull animals will do much to avoid conflicts with humans and have called for measures to promote peaceful coexistence that range from fences and guard dogs to awareness campaigns for visitors.Scientists are not yet troubled by the wolf’s population across the continent, but have warned that killing wolves in countries with small populations could prove catastrophic. Large-scale culls could put populations of these predators below local survival levels, they warn. Culls can even increase predation of livestock, as packs are disrupted, sending lone, vulnerable wolves venturing on to farms to hunt. The same “backfire” effect has also been documented with cougars and coyotes.Spanish farmers protest against the protection of wolves and bears in Madrid in 2021, ahead of the country’s ban on wolf hunting later that year. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty ImagesCiprian Gal from the Romanian branch of Greenpeace said the Europe-wide trend of weakening protection for big carnivores was “a step backwards” that echoed times when humans felt a strong sense of competition with wildlife.“European governments, influenced by dominant populist rhetoric and powerful hunting and agricultural lobbies, seem to be choosing solutions based on fear and rapid economic return,” he says. “In a way, this is a backlash against the ambitious green policies of recent years and a valve for those still struggling to cope with the climate reality we’re facing.”

Extinction
Forests
Mountains

Endangered skates saved from extinction by hatching in captivity

The Maugean skate (Zearaja maugeana) is only found in one habitat in Australia, which is under threat from human activity. Now the species has been saved from extinction by hatching in captivity

Newly hatched Maugean skatesJayson Semmens/University of Tasmania One of the world’s most endangered species of marine fish has been saved from extinction, thanks to researchers who captured wild specimens and helped them reproduce in captivity. The Maugean skate (Zearaja maugeana) is only found in Macquarie harbour on the extremely isolated and rugged south-west coast of Tasmania, Australia. The area is already a naturally low-oxygen environment, making it difficult for fish to thrive, but human impacts, especially salmon farming and river flow changes as a result of hydroelectric dams, have made the situation worse. Jayson Semmens at the University of Tasmania says while no-one knows the exact population of these skates, a collapse between 2014 and 2021 saw it halve. There may now be just over 1000 individuals, he says, and of greatest concern is that they are now predominantly adults, meaning that juveniles aren’t reaching maturity. As a marine heatwave tightened its grip last year in this region, off south-eastern Australia, Semmens and his colleagues decided to undertake a radical intervention to try to safeguard the skates from extinction. In December 2023, the team collected 50 eggs and saw over half of them successfully hatch in captivity. They also collected four adults, two of which died within a fortnight. The two survivors were kept separate, so the team was shocked when the remaining female laid eggs. Semmens says this is because the skates are able to store sperm, to fertilise eggs later. “She’s been laying on average every four days, two eggs every time,” he says. “We have over a hundred eggs from her now and the vast majority of them are looking like they’re going to be viable.” In order to maximise the genetic variability of the captive-reared juveniles, the team is considering capturing other females that have already been inseminated, obtaining eggs and then releasing the females back to the wild. But team member David Moreno, also at the University of Tasmania, says captive breeding isn’t the full solution, so the researchers are also working to reverse environmental issues in Macquarie harbour, including a trial of pumping oxygen into the water. There is no quick fix and even if the captive -reared individuals are able to be released immediately, it would be four to five years before they reached maturity and could start contributing to the population. The stakes are high if the recovery effort fails. “This would be the first extinction of a ray or shark species in modern history,” says Moreno. “So it is a really big line in the sand.”

Extinction
Water

A Record-Breaking 17 California Condor Chicks Hatched at the L.A. Zoo This Year

The successful breeding season offers more hope for the endangered species, which has come back from the brink of extinction due to captive breeding efforts

A California condor chick rests in a clear container lined with paper at the L.A. Zoo. L.A. Zoo via Instagram Weighing 17 to 25 pounds and possessing a wingspan of up to 9.5 feet, California condors are the largest flying birds in North America. But in 1982, only 22 individuals were left in the world. Flash forward to the present, and the Los Angeles Zoo has just reported the hatching of its 17th chick of the year, thanks to a new breeding technique. The zoo announced the happy news, which breaks its 1997 record of 15 condor chicks in one breeding season, in a statement on Friday. “This is a historic moment for the California Condor Recovery Program and the Los Angeles Zoo’s animal care team,” Rose Legato, curator of birds at the L.A. Zoo, says in the statement. “Our condor team has raised the bar once again in the collaborative effort to save America’s largest flying bird from extinction. What we are seeing now are the benefits of new breeding and rearing techniques developed and implemented by our team.” The L.A. Zoo, along with other California Condor Recovery Program (CCRP) facilities in the United States and Mexico, breeds endangered California condors for release into the wild. The breeding birds in L.A. reside in structures the staff calls “condor-miniums,” as zoo spokesperson Carl Myers tells the Los Angeles Times’ Corinne Purtill. Once a pair successfully fertilizes an egg, the animal caretakers put it in an incubator. Then, right before eggs are due to hatch, they place each egg with an adoptive condor parent. In their natural habitats, California condors usually raise one chick at a time—so for a long time, if there were more eggs than condor parents available, the leftover chicks would be raised by humans. Oh, Baby! Meet California Condor Chick LA124! The human surrogate parents tried their best to give the hatchlings a natural experience—even using bird puppets and stuffed animals to prevent them from associating people with food. But in the words of the Verge’s Justine Calma, “condor moms still make much better parents than humans trying to step in.” Young condors raised by condors have a higher chance of survival in the wild. So in 2017, the L.A. Zoo animal care staff tried giving two eggs to a single adoptive condor parent. The technique, which had never been attempted by any other zoo or CCRP partner at that point, was successful. “The result is more condor chicks in the program and ultimately more condors in the wild,” Legato adds in the statement. This year, the zoo team was inspired to try three chicks per single condor. The birds were receptive to this, too, and ultimately the condor surrogate parents raised six chicks in triple broods, eight chicks in double broods and three chicks in single broods. All hatchlings will remain at the zoo for about a year and a half before being evaluated for release into the wild. “Condors are social animals, and we are learning more every year about their social dynamics. So, I’m not surprised that these chick-rearing techniques are paying off,” Jonathan C. Hall, a wildlife ecologist at Eastern Michigan University, tells the Los Angeles Times. “I would expect chicks raised this way to do well in the wild.” Condor keeper Mike Clark gently handles California condor eggs in a green bucket. L.A. Zoo via Instagram California condors used to be a common species across North America, but their numbers began to decline with the arrival of settlers in the 19th century, who killed them and destroyed their nests. In 1967, the federal government declared the California condor an endangered species, but the giant birds’ numbers continued to dwindle because of pesticides like DDT, microtrash, habitat loss and—most crucially—lead poisoning from bullet fragments left in animal carcasses that they scavenge. “California condors are part of nature’s cleanup crew,” Ashleigh Blackford, the California Condor Recovery Program coordinator, tells the Guardian’s Coral Murphy Marcos. “Although it’s not an appealing job, it’s an essential job.” But due to environmental pollutants, this role put the birds at risk. Then, in 1979, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the CCRP. The program is now a multi-entity mission that collaborates with the L.A. Zoo as well as private and public agencies, NGOs and Indigenous tribes. Recovery efforts have been highly successful—as of the end of 2023, there are 561 living California condors, of which 344 are in the wild. The trouble isn’t over yet, however, as California condors are now facing the risk of avian influenza. In response to this threat, CCRP partners have been vaccinating the birds before releasing them. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Extinction
Animals
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