Category: conservation

More on the “dire wolf”: Adam Rutherford is furious

April 9, 2025 • 10:45 am

Like me, Matthew Cobb, and all straight-thinking scientists, geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford is sick of hearing claims about the return of “de-extincted animals.” The latest one is the Dire Wolf, a tricked-out gray wolf I wrote about yesterday. (See also Rutherford’s strong critique in the Guardian of the woolly mammoth de-extinction project.) The hype about the “de-extintcted Dire Wolf” involves making only 20 DNA base changes in 14 genes of the Gray Wolf (there are probably a bit more than 20,000 genes in wolves), so that only a few superficial characters like body size, jaw structure, and color were changed in the wolf genome. (The “Dire Wolf” came out white, but that was done using edits of wolf genes, not the insertion of color genes from the ancient DNA of Dire Wolves. We don’t know if real Dire Wolves were white.)

All these de-extinction projects involve changing just a few genes among thousands in the genome of living species, making something that only superficially looks like an extinct species. But, as Adam points out in his piece I highlight below, we know nothing about the behavior, gestation, physiology or digestion of these ancient creatures, and so are powerless to even get close to a real Dire Wolf—even if we had the ability to edit thousands of genes or even to insert a Dire Wolf genome into a wolf cell whose nucleus had been removed. (We can’t do that.)

Yet despite this, Colossal Bioscience keeps proclaiming that it’s resurrected an extinct wolf, and will soon be bringing back other extinct creatures like the dodo and thylacine.  This is pure hype, and it’s not gonna happen—not in our lifetime or the lifetimes of our kids.  Yet compliant journalists play along with Colossal, pretending that, yes, the Dire Wolf is back and the woolly mammoth is right around the corner.  To anybody who appreciates accurate science writing, this unholy collusion between the media and Colossal is reprehensible.

And so Adam has gotten more and more pissed off in the past few days, finally writing a short piece on his Substack post that takes the whole de-extinction hype apart. And it’s laden with plenty of expletives and profanity! I don’t blame him, for that same language goes on in my brain, but I lack the courage to put it on paper. But I’ll quote him below.

First, Adam announces his piece with a link.

The resurrection circus keeps clowning, but make no mistake, Dire wolves remain very extinct. An angry, sweary piece by a frustrated geneticist. arutherford.substack.com/p/dire-wolve…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T06:22:55.899Z

The link is above, or you can go to his Substack site and read it (for free, but subscribe if you want to support his writing). Click below:

A few excerpts:

Extinction, with that one shitty exception, is forever. I’ve talked about this incessantly, with increasing humourlessness, for a number of years, once explaining to an Irish priest on live radio about the difficulties in artificial insemination due to the right-angled bend in the vaginal tract of an African elephant. Last year I appeared on the Infinite Monkey Cage and shat on the whole idea from a great height. This was unlinked to any particular press release, just a very popular subject that is worthy of interrogation, and ripe for a few gallows humour gags. Last month, when Colossus Bioscience – the company fuelling the mammoth resurrection gargleballs – released an un-peer-reviewed paper in which they unveiled a genetically modified mouse, its genome edited to include mammoth versions of a couple of genes. The hirsute mouse came out not cold adapted as was intended, but certainly a bit hairy. My write up was in the Guardian, and there’s little more to add to it.

Today, the press is awash with fawning headlines about the successful de-extinction by Colossus Bioscience of the Dire Wolf. Three pups are now alive, and they are cute.

Let me be absolutely clear on this though: no matter how cute they are, this story is absolute bollocks. No amount of fancy pictures, cool legendary names (Romulus, Remus and one from Game of Thrones), or American-brand biotech TED-style glossy hubris can change this. I’m just going to list the ways that this vexes me, and should vex you too.

ONE: The newborn wolves are not Dire Wolves. There isn’t a definition on Earth by which they could be considered Dire Wolves. Romulus, Remus and the one from Game of Thrones are Grey Wolves, an entirely different species, whose genomes have a very small number of edits that make those genes a bit more like Dire Wolf versions of the same genes. They are, by any sensible definition, genetically engineered grey wolves.

There are four ways that Rutherford’s kishkes are roiled by Colossal, but I’ll let you read the list. He does, however, make a good analogy to explain how far Colossal was from creating a genuine Dire Wolf, or even a Dire Wolf-ish canid:

I’m trying to think of an analogy: we often use books and words as metaphors for genetics. There are around 19,000 Grey Wolf genes, and Colossus Bioscience have made TWENTY individual edits of single letters of DNA in 14 genes. Certainly, that is enough to make a noticeable difference to the phenotypes in question, but if you think that renders it a different species, it’s back to Evolution 101 for you.

Consider this: My longest book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Lived, has around 120,000 words. The US version has words like colour, flavour and favourite edited to be color, flavor and favorite. There are 79 uses of the word colour, colours or coloured in the UK version. So there are four times more edits in my book than in the wolf genomes. Is it still the same book? OF COURSE IT FUCKING IS.

And of course he points out that dire wolves ran in packs, but “these three Grey Wolves have been brought into the world without their packs, without wolf parents (their surrogate mothers were dogs), as gaudy boutique animals for a greedy, morally suspect company.”  Yep, we can’t resurrect their social life, which we know nothing about, so we’ll never be able to let these things go free in nature, where they’d probably revert to gray wolves quickly. They’re only good for gawking at.  And we have learned almost nothing about the Dire Wolf from this project. It is the media’s distortion of what was done, and its credulous acceptance of this exaggeration, which leads Rutherford, Matthew, and I to a state of peevishness.  For in the end this kind of science reporting simply deludes the public.

Rutherford, like many of us, has great respect for Carl Zimmer’s science reporting, but Adam thinks that Zimmer reverted to “client journalism” in his NYT piece on the Dire Wolf (free access), more or less accepting that Colossal had come “close” to recreating a Dire Wolf.  When one respected science journalist disses another, you know that something has gone wrong. Rutherford says this:

Even Carl Zimmer, a mensch and doyen of American science journalism couldn’t quite manage to debunk their claims in the New York Times’ fawning write up.

On de-extinction…‘Colossal Bioscience appear to have done it, or something close’, he writes. Well, they haven’t done it, and if by ‘close’ he means ‘have done minor edits on a grey wolf so that it could barely be described as a hybrid let alone a resurrected species’ then fair game. And I’m pretty sure Carl knows that.

‘Or something close’. Disappointing client journalism from one of the best science journalists.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T22:00:48.349Z

As the Time magazine cover shows below (with one obvious edit by Rutherford), the press guzzled it like a cat with cream.  Rutherford:

. . . the press have just lapped all this wolfshit up, and regurgitated it, mostly without the slightest questioning of the corporate press release. Barely ANY reports have rebutted the dubious claims by Colossus. Time magazine has it on the cover, the word ‘extinct’ crossed out. That scientifically illiterate megalomaniacal fragile lunch Elon Musk tweeted it to his 218 million twitter followers (I will not call it X), with a picture from Game of Thrones.

Clearly, Time crossed out “extinct,” while the insertion “not’ is from Rutherford:

Many of us were surprised that Beth Shapiro, a a highly-regarded molecular evolutionist at UC Santa Cruz, took three years off to become the chief scientific officer of Colossal. Why? One can guess, but I don’t psychologize. At any rate, Shapiro appears to have bought into the Colossal hype, as Graham Coop (an evolutionary biologist at UC Davis) points out below:

Joking aside, this stuff about species concepts is such transparent BS. [deleted & reposted, as first draft was too annoyed.] http://www.newscientist.com/article/2475…

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T21:50:13.253Z

WHAT?  A morphological species concept in which changing a couple of traits creates a new species? How much does the “de-extincted” Dire Wolf have to look like the real Dire Wolf before we can say “we have it back!!”?  This species concept, which I discuss and dismiss in my book Speciation with Allen Orr, has many flaws, including the fact that many truly reproductively incompatible species nevertheless are hard or impossible to tell apart by looking. (These are often called “sibling species.”) Would Shapiro classify Japenese, the Dutch, and sub-Saharan Africans as belonging to different species?

As Coop notes as he quotes Shapiro, what she says about species concepts is “transparent BS”. (Read chapter 1 and the Appendix of Speciation if you want to learn more.)

Coop gets in one more lick:

Inside me there are two wolves. One of them has a 15 genome edits the other 20 genome edits. Neither of them is a dire wolf.

— Graham Coop (@gcbias.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:56:25.311Z

Another science communicator joins the crowd of people with a beef against this faux “Dire Wolf.”

Scientists love to debate and argue, but if there are 3 things every scientist absolutely agrees on, it's that:1. Climate change is real2. Vaccines work3. Those are NOT dire wolves 😤🧪

— Science Sam (@samanthayammine.com) 2025-04-08T20:36:29.683Z

And somebody couldn’t resist comparing the Colossal wolf to the famous jackalope!

I’ll close with a few final posts from Rutherford, who, though unable to contain the profanity, is correct in what he says below:

Reposting this from last month, cos it’s the same bullshit from the same company that is flooding your media with wolfshit. Reviving the woolly mammoth isn’t just unethical. It’s impossiblewww.theguardian.com/commentisfre…

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T06:16:47.426Z

Amen, brother! No clones, either!

Apropos of nothing:THERE WILL NEVER EVER EVER BE A CLONED MAMMOTH. <Message ends>

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-03-04T16:56:07.751Z

Dire-ish wolf

April 8, 2025 • 11:30 am

Readers and correspondents are asking me what i think about the just-revealed “de-extinction” of the dire wolf by Colossal Biosciences, and the firm’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth, too.  I don’t want to write much about this now because I’ve put up a few posts about the mammoth before, and Matthew has expressed similar sentiments in his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age.  Further, I am writing my take for another venue, so I will just say this about the genetics of the de-extinction efforts so far:

My general sentiments are these: attempts to bring back extinct species as outlined so far are not only scientifically misguided, but are journalistically mis-reported by the press.  That is, the press is, by and large, distorting what has been done scientifically, pretending that an animal with only a few cosmetic gene edits is actually identical to an extinct species. Further, Colossal seems happy enough to let this misconception be widely reported (to be fair, there are some decent articles about the science of de-extinction, and I’ll link to a few below).

The main problem, as I said, is the pretense that changing a living species by editing just a handful of genes (20 max so far) to get something that looks like the extinct “dire wolf” is not the same thing as re-creating a dire wolf.  That species undoubtedly had hundreds or thousands of genetic differences from the gray wolf, including genes affecting metabolism and behavior—genes that we do not know.  Further, control regions of genes, which are outside protein-coding regions, undoubtedly are involved in differences between extinct species and their relatives. But we don’t know where these regions are and so cannot use them for genetic editing.

All of this means that, in my view, de-extincting species is a cosmetic rather than a serious genetic project, designed to produce gee-whiz animals to entertain rich people and to wow children.  Such animals, especially the highly touted de-extincted mammoth, which mammoth expert Tori Herridge calls “an elephant in a fur coat”, would certainly not survive in their original habitat.  Further, proponents’ claims that de-extinction would be a fantastic conservation effort , and could even mitigate global warming. are totally unsupported speculations.

There are two such efforts that have received all the press: the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth and of the dire wolf; the latter effort has produced some pups, but they are not dire wolves. We will never see woolly mammoths, though Colossal promises that they’ll be stomping about in three years!

Mammoth (see my website posts above) There are many reasons why this project is a non-starter.  The evidence that it is feasible rests solely on the production of “woolly mice,” which are mice that have had 8 edits in only 7 genes (remember, mice are easier to work with than elephants!).  Only two of the genes that were changed were edited in a way to conform to known mammoth genes. The rest are simply using mouse mutants known to affect hair texture, color, and waviness in lab mice.  Thus we have a woolly mouse—not anything close to a woolly elephant. Yes, it’s cool to make multiple changes in multiple genes at once, but this is not a new technology. The novelty will be to edit an elephant egg cell in a way that the edited cell can be implanted in an Asian elephant and develop into a woolly mammoth. If you really want something popping out of an Asian elephant that is close to a woolly mammoth, you will never get it. In fact, the whole project seems impossible to me. And the conservation results touted by Colossal–that the re-exincted mammoths, released on the tundra, will keep carbon in the permafrost and not in the atmosphere–are purely speculative.

Dire wolf:  Scientists edited a gray wolf stem cell, changing 20 genes. Fifteen of the edited genes were designed from from the sequenced dire-wolf genome (again, sequencing an extinct organism is a feat, but not one developed by Colossal), while five others were taken from known genes that change dogs or wolves (the articles aren’t clear on which genes were used, as Colossal is keeping that secret).  The edited cell, as an egg, was placed into a “large dog” to be the surrogate mom, and then extracted via caesarian section (did the dogs survive this procedure?) They get a whitish wolf with some dog or gray-wolf genes, not dire wolf genes. All of the changes are said to affect things like fur color, body size, and tooth and jaw configuration–traits that differentiated the dire wolf from the gray wolf.  As I noted, we wind up with a gray wolf (and remember, domestic dogs are descended from gray wolves, and can even be considered gray wolves, as they mate with each other and can produce fertile hybrids); we get a gray wolf with a couple of changed traits to make it look like what we think the dire wolf looked like. (We are not sure, for example, that the dire wolf had white fur.)

Neither the mammoth nor the dire wolf results are published in a peer-reviewed journals, though the woolly mouse experiment has been languishing on bioRΧiv for a while but hasn’t been published.

Here are some links, most but not all of them pointing out problems with de-extinction projects:

Colossal’s explanation of  the mammoth project. (Note that they also want to de-extinct the dodo and the thylacine, or marsupial wolf.)

Colossal’s account on the dire wolf result.

Nature paper by Ewen Calloway on why the woolly mouse isn’t a credible step towards a woolly mammoth.

Nature paper by Tori Herridge explaining why she turned down a position as advisor to Colossal on the mammoth

Article in Ars Technica by Nitin Sekar, WWF authority on conserving the Asian elephant, explaining why “Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation.”

Guardian paper by Adam Rutherford explaining why trying to de-extinct the Woolly Mammoth is not only unethical, but impossible.

NYT article by Carl Zimmer on the dire wolf, a good summary and not nearly as critical as his Bluesky post below.

New Yorker article by D. T. Max on the dire wolf, somewhat windy and credulous (archived here).

Article in the MIT Technology Review by Antonio Regalado: “Game of clones: Colossal’s new wolves are cute, but are they dire?”

Tweets and posts:

Tori Herridge’s posts on both Twitter and Bluesky are an informative and hilarious critique of the woolly mouse/mammoth projects. Get started with this one if you’d like (it’s a thread):

[though as an aside, honestly Colossal missed a trick not going for the Fgfr1/2 double mutant — I mean, have you seen a more mammothy-mouse?!]*MAMMOUSE KLAXON*www.nature.com/articles/s41…

— Tori Herridge (@toriherridge.bsky.social) 2025-03-05T00:20:55.808Z

Journalist Asher Elbein and a commenter on the misleading Dire Wolf.

Here Carl Zimmer points out that Colossal’s dire wolf is not a dire wolf. This is a bit more frank than his NYT article!

It's not a dire wolf. It's a gray wolf clone with 20 dire-wolf gene edits, and with some dire wolf traits. And here's my story! Gift link: http://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/s&#8230;

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-04-07T16:38:15.772Z

Adam Rutherford (read his Guardian article on mammoths above) is particularly critical of the Dire Wolf project. I love the first tweet asserting that journalists who don’t do due diligence are making people stupider. That’s true, and it also makes people misunderstand (and possibly eventually mistrust) science:

Public service announcement. They are not Dire Wolves. They have 20 single letter changes in their entire genomes. I’ve done shits with more mutations. Every time journalists write up a Colossus press release, They are making people stupider. Client journalism by a ridiculous company.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-07T20:02:25.283Z

GODDAMIT. IT’S NOT A RESURRECTED DIRE WOLF. 20 edits in 19,000 genes. IT’S NOT GOING TO AID CONSERVATION. EVERY WRITE UP THAT SWALLOWS AND REGURGITATES THIS GUFFERY WOLFSHIT IS DOING PR FOR A FUNDING ROUND.

— Adam Rutherford (@adamrutherford.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T12:05:49.778Z

Caveat emptor!

Oh, and for fun, here’s the Secretary of the Interior tweeting about how we shouldn’t worry so much about endangered species and pay more attention to “de-extincting” species.  But of course “de-extincting” isn’t going to do squat to keep existing species from waning. Burgum is off the rails here, entranced by the dire gray wolf.

ZeFrank on the waning of fireflies

April 4, 2025 • 12:30 pm

Here’s a short ZeFrank video on the apparent waning of fireflies, which are luminescent species of beetles in the family Lampyridae. Wikipedia notes as well that fireflies seem to be disappearing worldwide, and there are many reasons why this should be so:

Firefly populations are thought to be declining worldwide. While monitoring data for many regions are scarce, a growing number of anecdotal reports, coupled with several published studies from Europe and Asia, suggest that fireflies are endangered. Recent IUCN Red List assessments for North American fireflies have identified species with heightened extinction risk in the US, with 18 taxa categorized as threatened with extinction.

Fireflies face threats including habitat loss and degradation, light pollution, pesticide use, poor water quality, invasive species, over-collection, and climate change. Firefly tourism, a quickly growing sector of the travel and tourism industry, has also been identified as a potential threat to fireflies and their habitats when not managed appropriately. Like many other organisms, fireflies are directly affected by land-use change (e.g., loss of habitat area and connectivity), which is identified as the main driver of biodiversity changes in terrestrial ecosystems. Pesticides, including insecticides and herbicides, have also been indicated as a likely cause of firefly decline. These chemicals can not only harm fireflies directly but also potentially reduce prey populations and degrade habitat. Light pollution is an especially concerning threat to fireflies. Since the majority of firefly species use bioluminescent courtship signals, they are also sensitive to environmental levels of light and consequently to light pollution.A growing number of studies investigating the effects of artificial light at night on fireflies has shown that light pollution can disrupt fireflies’ courtship signals and even interfere with larval dispersal. Researchers agree that protecting and enhancing firefly habitat is necessary to conserve their populations. Recommendations include reducing or limiting artificial light at night, restoring habitats where threatened species occur, and eliminating unnecessary pesticide use, among many others.

The video describes various ways of monitoring their abundance as well as reprising the causes of decline describe above. When I was a kid, fireflies were abundant during the summer, and we would catch them and put them in jars to make lanterns (we’d let them go afterwards).  Now I can’t remember when I last saw one of these amazing insects. It’s very sad.

I could go on about how they emit light, and the amazing species that flash synchronously, but I’ll leave that ZeFrank in a future video. But if you want to donate, just go to this page of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and cough up a few bucks.

 

h/t Matthew Cobb

NBC News gets the woolly mammoth story badly wrong

March 19, 2025 • 10:30 am

I’ve posted quite a bit on the futility of attempts to bring back the woolly mammoth via genetic engineering. In my view, it’s close to a scam that deludes the public about what the geneticists really intend to produce, which, as Dr Tori Herridge at the University of Sheffield calls it, is simply “an elephant in a fur coat”. For my posts on this debacle, inspired by conversations with Matthew Cobb, go here. But there are two other useful references that Matthew provided, with links:

An extract from his book As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

and

The geneticists also want to resurrect the dodo and the thylacine, equally futile endeavors. But despite all the problems that scientists have noted, for some reason many science journalists are still selling the “mammoth resurrection” tale as told by Colossal Biosciences, a company with $10.2 billion dollars in funds.

As I watched NBC News last night, I was upset to see that NBC had also bought the story, selling it as the program’s final “There’s good news tonight” upbeat story. You can watch it below, but do it today as they replace the news each day. Click on the screenshot below and start the segment at 18:29 (turn up the sound using the icon at the left bottom of the screen):

First, Colossal’s CEO Ben Lamm says that the company aims, besides producing mammoths, to  “return balance to ailing ecosystems.” That is ridiculous. Is the tundra ailing because of the absence of mammoths, and, if so, will a couple of elephants in fur coats, not adapted to that ecosystem, cure it? Which ecosystem will the dodos “cure”?

He adds, misleadingly, “We actually took the genes that made a mammoth a mammoth, mapped them to mice, and then in only one month we produced living, healthy mice.”  He doesn’t mention the huge mortality in this experiment, nor that they didn’t REALLY use mammoth genes, but mice genes that had a few DNA bases changed to the mammoth version (As I recall, they changed I think only three bases in seven mouse genes.) There was no attempt to insert full mammoth genes into mice, and they really couldn’t because they’d have to insert the control regions, too.

Lamm’s statement is flat wrong, and misleads the listener into thinking that they put mammoth hair genes into mice, making the mice “woolly.” In fact, as I pointed out before, the wooliest of all the mice had no mammoth-informed DNA in it. There is not the slightest indication that the lipid-related gene they put in the mice will increase their ability to withstand cold.

Lamm also neglects to mention the difficulty of getting entire mammoth chromosomes into the egg of an Asiatic elephant, nor the impossibility of constructing the Volkswagen-sized artificial elephant uteruses that would be needed to grow up the “mammothy” embryos to birth.

Finally, in view of the futility of this project, another Colossal officer says that their endeavors have inspired children to love science, and perhaps to save the environment. That’s the Hail Mary call of a dying project.  Note that they project the production of the first mammoth (again, just an “elephant in a fur coat”  for 2028. Only three more years! Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to put a giant fur coat onto an Asiatic elephant and then usher several of these garbed pachyderms to the tundra?

There are many changes–probably millions–necessary to convert an Asiatic elephant to a woolly mammoth, including those affecting behavior and metabolism. They will not accomplish such a conversion. Nor will they accomplish it with the dodo nor the thylacine. But Colossal talks a good game, as you see, and they’ve pulled the wool (pardon the pun) over the eyes of the public and of many credulous journalists. Shame on NBC News for not doing due diligence.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 28, 2025 • 8:15 am

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior contributes another text-and-photo essay to the site, this time showing how a thorough knowledge of ecology is required to save a declining species. His ID’s and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The butterfly, the plant, and the ant

All news is bad news, it seems, especially about the environment. Melting glaciers, oceans choked with plastic, relentless deforestation, extinctions. In the face of such a depressing deluge, we could do with a feel-good tale. And as inspiring tales go, it’s hard to beat the Large Blue Story.

The large blue butterfly (Phengaris arion) has always been rare in Britain, but its numbers were found to be alarmingly low by 1972 and falling steadily thereafter. In 1979, it became extinct in the British Isles. At first, collectors were blamed for the large blue’s demise, which was a reasonable explanation considering the rarity and the appeal of such a beautiful butterfly. But soon attention was directed to another possibility: the depletion of wild thyme (Thymus praecox), the main food for the butterfly’s early larval instars (developmental stages). It turned out that food losses contributed to the large blue extinction, but the plot was considerably thicker.

The large blue butterfly, Phengaris arion. The species’ taxonomy is a matter of dispute, so it is also known as Maculinea arion © PJC&Co, Wikimedia Commons:

The large blue and about 75% of the 6,000 or so related species (family Lycaenidae) are myrmecophilous, that is, they are associated with ants. These butterfly-ant relationships vary in form and intensity, but in the case of the large blue, red ants (Myrmica spp.) mean food: without them, the butterfly cannot survive.

A female large blue lays her eggs on the flower buds of wild thyme – wild marjoram (Origanum vulgare) would do, but it usually flowers too late in the season for the butterfly. The emerging caterpillars eat the wild thyme flower heads and seeds for the first few weeks of their lives, like any ordinary butterfly. Siblings are also fair game: if two eggs hatch on the same flower, one baby caterpillar will eat the other. Then the surviving one goes full Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The grown caterpillar drops to the ground and starts releasing substances that attract worker ants, including pheromones that mimic the aroma of red ant larvae. When an ant bumps into it, the caterpillar stretches and twists to assume the shape of an ant larva. So instead of attacking the juicy, soft and nutritious caterpillar, the chemically mesmerised ants take their ‘stray young’ back to their nest. There the caterpillar is cared for just like the ants’ own brood.

Once inside an ant nest, some lycaenid species adopt a cuckoo lifestyle; they induce the ants to nurse and feed them through regurgitation. Not the large blue (and some related species): they feed on ant larvae, all the while secreting sugary substances to keep the ant workers happy.

A greater large blue (P. arionides) caterpillar feeding on M. kotokui larvae © Ueda et al., 2016:

The caterpillar carries on eating ant grubs until it pupates the following spring. The emerging adult crawls to the surface and seeks refuge in the nearby vegetation, where it expands its wings and flies away in search of a mate.

A gravid female butterfly (1) is attracted to wild marjoram (2) and lays her eggs on suitable flower buds (3). A fourth-instar caterpillar drops to the ground and is ‘adopted’ by ants (4). The caterpillar spends 11 months inside the ants’ nest, feeding on their brood (5) © Casacci et al., 2019:

The above was a summary of the complex biology and ecology of the large blue: UK butterflies has the full story.

The large blue’s reliance on wild thyme and red ants has been known for a long time, but none of the conservation efforts prevented its extinction in 1979. Things started to change when a PhD student – today Professor Jeremy Thomas, OBE, made a crucial discovery. Not just any red ant would do for the large blue. It needs one specific species: M. sabuleti (M. scabrinodis is an alternative host, but butterfly survival is poor with this ant).

Myrmica sabuleti, the crucial host for the large blue © B. Schoenmakers, Wikimedia Commons.

Thomas’ findings opened a whole new perspective for large blue conservation. If M. sabuleti populations are not doing well, the butterfly cannot do well either, regardless of the quantity and condition of the host plant.

It turns out that the survival and abundance of this ant depend largely on one factor: sunshine, which warms their nests. If grasses that grow alongside wild thyme are too tall, the ant nests will become shaded, cold and wet: the colonies will fail or be too small to sustain large blue populations. One caterpillar may require 200 ant larvae to reach adulthood, and about 350 ant workers may be needed to rear a single caterpillar. The conclusion from these findings was that fencing, thought to help the butterfly by keeping thyme-munchers at bay, is actually bad for the ants.

Wild thyme in full sunshine maintains healthy M. sabuleti colonies © GT1976, Wikimedia Commons:

Armed with this information, Nature Conservancy (now Natural England) and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology launched a reintroduction programme, and its linchpin was the creation and management of adequate conditions for both the butterfly and the ant. Conservation organisations, land managers and volunteers set out to monitor large blue and M. sabuleti populations, manage grazing to keep the grass short, clear scrub and plant wild thyme. When a pilot site was considered in favourable condition in 1983, large blue specimens were brought in from Sweden. More releases followed at several suitable sites during subsequent years. Today, large blue colonies are more abundant and larger than they were in the 1950s.

The rescue of the large blue butterfly is a textbook case of species conservation, known and celebrated around the world. It inspires and shows us that science, hard work and goodwill go a long way to restore and protect our natural world.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 20, 2024 • 8:15 am

Today we have photos from Rosemary Alles, a reader who runs an animal conservation organization in South Africa, and is also helping me organize my August trip to Kruger. She originally comes from Sri Lanka but now splits her time between South Africa and the U.S. But I’ll let her narrate herself (her text is indented), and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them. Oh, and there’s a link should you wish to donate to the organization.

Sri-Lanka lies in the shadow of her giant neighbor India; a teardrop on the vast slate of the Indian Ocean. My family emigrated from our island nation many moons ago, leaving a jeweled landscape ravaged by corruption, ethnic violence, and terrorism.  My first home in the West was in Canada, and then, on the Big Island of Hawaii. These days, I travel between South Africa and Hawaii, centering my work on the protection of iconic megafauna, the Global March for Elephants and Rhinos (GMFER). These images were captured in Kruger National Park during a 3-day journey into Africa’s wild world. We work with wildlife rangers (the Black Mambas and Transfrontier Africa), their extended families, and their children to bring the wonders of South Africa’s wilderness to those who rarely—or never—experience it. Our work with the children in rural communities of Africa helps disrupt poaching and wildlife trafficking and heals the wounds inflicted by apartheid and history. Currently we are seeking donations to buy 4 large canvas tents to accommodate more children and young adults in our monthly programs designed to disrupt the distance between rural South Africans and their wild heritage; our target goal is 1500.00 USD. You can help us here.   [JAC:  dig down, please, readers. I don’t ask for anything for me, but these are other species of African mammals who are asking.]

African Bush Elephant (also called “Savannah Elephant,” Loxodonta africana) – male, aka, “Purple Haze”:

Saddle-billed Stork (Ephippiorhynchus senegalensis), female:

 

Grey Heron (Ardea cineria):

Young African Elephant bulls – jostling for dominance at water tank:

Woodland Kingfisher (Halcyon senegalensis):

African Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis), searching the horizon:

Young African Bull Elephant  – drinking at water tank:

African Red-eyed Bulbul (Pycnonotus nigricans):

Elephant Dreams. Mature bull in thicket:

African buffalo (Syncerus caffer); “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse”:

European Roller (Coracias garrulus, migratory):

The iconic Olifants River in Kruger:

Our children and young adults:

Our children and young adults at Koru camp:

Below: images of Nkateko Mzimba, a Black Mamba/Transfrontier Africa Anti-Poaching Ranger at CITES CoP19 (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora – CoP19). Our group -GMFER- sponsored her trip and  accompanied her to Panama City in Panama for CoP19; this so she could advocate on behalf of Africa’s iconic wildlife.  CITES determines, via representative nation votes, the quotas of wild, endangered species and/or their body parts each country can exploit and export; it also regulates—and not well—quotas of trophy hunts. CITES’ representative body in the United States is the USFWS and operates under the Department of the Interior. By and large, and much like many international agencies, CITES is largely ineffective and vaguely corrupt. Still, it is the “best thing” we have to monitor and regulate the trade of endangered species. While in Panama, we collaborated with local schools for a celebration of wildlife on the opening day of CITES’ CoP19. During CoP19, Nkateko’s powerful testimony against Trophy Hunting was delivered prior to a victorious vote on a temporary moratorium on the live capture and trade of wild African elephants.“After a long and complex debate, Africa’s elephants were finally given some respite when the Convention in International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) voted in favor of a temporary moratorium on further exports of live wild elephants at its Conference of the Parties in Panama.” – Born Free. 

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Nkateko describes how her life changed after she became a ranger – at CITES’ CoP19:

Nkateko testified on agenda Item: 66.4 at CITES’ CoP19 – moratorium on the live capture and trade of wild African elephants:

JAC: If only 300 readers donated $5 each, GMFER would reach its goal of providing shelter for local residents who are learning about wildlife in an effort to save them.  Think about making a small (or large) donation here. Money goes a long way in South Africa, so don’t feel shy about donating even $1 or just a couple of bucks. Thanks!

The first photos of Atelopus coynei tadpoles

August 3, 2023 • 9:20 am

As I’ve described before, I collected the first specimen of Atelopus coynei, a small tropical frog that now has its own Wikipedia page. I collected it in the late 1970s on a field trip to Ecuador with my grad-school bestie, the late Ken Miyata, a man who’s sorely missed (he died in a fishing accident in 1983). As I had loaned Ken $500 to help him pay for rent and food, he did me the honor of naming the frog after me.

As it was rare, and first found in coastal Ecuadorian wet forests, which have largely disappeared, I eventually assumed that my frog was extinct, a metaphor for my own life. But, mirabile dictu, it was rediscovered by the great naturalist and photographer Andreas Kay on February 7, 2012 at Chinambi, Carchi, Ecuador. This was far from the sea, in the rain forest of the Andes foothills near the Colombian border, and the frog was still listed as “critically endangered.”

Then, in 2017, I got an email from naturalist Lou Jost, who reads and contributes to this site, telling me that A. coynei had been found on land close to the EcoMinga Foundation’s Dracula Reserve (Lou co-directs the foundation).

. . . . in December 2017, Javier and our herpetologist and reserve manager Juan Pablo Reyes organized an expedition to explore land we hoped to buy to expand the Dracula Reserve. The expedition included Mario Yanez, a well-known herpetologist from Ecuador’s National Institute of Biodiversity. They were thrilled to discover a good population of Atelopus coynei on one of the properties we were considering!!!! They also discovered another species that had been lost in Ecuador, Rhaebo colomai, though that species was known from a population in nearby Colombia. To top it off they discovered a dramatic completely unknown frog species, yellow with blue eyes!!! This is an amazing area and saving it has become a high priority for us. We are being helped by the Orchid Conservation Alliance, the University of Basel Botanical Garden, and the Rainforest Trust.

The three species mentioned above:

Atelopus coynei, photo by Juan Pablo Reyes and Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga. Isn’t it a beaut?

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Rhaebo colomai (photo by Mario Yanez):

The new yellow species with blue eyes (photos by Juan Pablo Reyes and Jordy Salazar/EcoMinga). I don’t know if it’s been described in the literature yet:

But now the story of A. coynei has been supplemented, as workers at the Dracula Reserve have made the first sighting of its tadpoles! As Lou wrote me on July 28:

We have a monitoring program for Atelopus coynei, and during that monitoring, our sharp-eyed reserve guards found the world’s first-ever A. coynei tadpoles! This is really nice to see, as an indicator of breeding and also as a new piece of the species’ biology. I’ll send pictures to you as soon as I receive them (I haven’t seen them yet). Yippee!
Of course I begged for photos, and yesterday Lou sent some of an adult and several tadpoles along with this note:

Here are the adorable tadpoles and an adult, taken in our Dracula reserve. We are carefully monitoring the population and it looks very healthy. We’ve managed to significantly expand the Dracula Reserve, thanks to grassroots campaigns by the Orchid Conservation Alliance, Reserva: Youth Land Trust, and Rainforest Trust. The photographers of the tadpoles, Milton Canticuz and Luis Micanquer, are local residents who were hired by us as reserve wardens and have become passionate conservationists. I hope you can come and visit them some day!

I surely will. This name is forever, as the scientific names of animals cannot be changed PLUS I’ve never done anything that would make me be canceled.  Here is the gorgeous A. coynei and its tadpoles sent by Lou and photographed by Canticuz and Micanquer:

My beautiful, beautiful frog:

And the first photos of its tadpoles:

Note the developing legs:

Of course I asked if Lou was 100% sure that these were A. coynei tadpoles, and he replied:

No, I’m not 100% sure; it is their deduction based on their knowledge of the patterns of local frogs, and our herpetologist experts (who know the local fauna well) concur.

Here’s some info on my frog taken from Wikipedia:

Atelopus coynei, the Rio Faisanes stubfoot toad, is a species of toad in the family Bufonidae endemic to Ecuador. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests, subtropical or tropical moist montane forests, and rivers. It is threatened by habitat loss.

Description

Atelopus coynei can be differentiated from other similar species by its ventral patterning, thick fleshy finger webbing that covers its first finger, and from its long hind limbs that cause its heels to overlap when the legs are positioned perpendicular to the body (Miyata 1980). 

Range and habitat

Atelopus coynei formerly ranged across the northwestern Andes foothills in Carchi, Imbabura, Pichincha and Santo Domingo provinces of Ecuador, where it lives along stream banks in primary and secondary montane forest between 500 and 2,000 meters elevation.

It currently found in only four disjunct areas in Carchi Province, including two locations in Dracula Reserve and Río Chinambi.

Adults are diurnal, active on rainy days on the rocky banks of river and streams. They rest at night on the leaves of streamside vegetation. They lay eggs on rocks in flowing streams. Tadpoles are typical of Atelopus, remaining attached to rocks. [See photos above for tadpoles on rocks.]

Conservation

The conservation status of Atelopus coynei is assessed as critically endangered. It has a very small population which is continually declining from loss and degradation of its habitat, chiefly from agricultural activities. The population is estimated at fewer than 250 mature individuals.

Stay alive, my frog, and please outlive me! I know that Lou, his colleagues, and the EcoMinga Foundation are doing their best.