Category: conservation

Cheetah urine may help save the species

February 15, 2019 • 2:30 pm

The song at the beginning of this cheetah video shows what it would sound like if Barry White got involved in saving wildlife. Here’s a cool video from VICE about breeding cheetahs (Acinonyx jubata), and I hope they’re breeding them for release. I still get queasy about saving a species by keeping it permanently in captivity—especially a species in which individuals are evolved to lope and run.

What they do here is determine which male a female likes by exposing her to urine samples from diverse males. That will facilitate pairings that produce cubs.  Note that they collect the urine by putting a cologne—Calvin Klein’s “Obsession” (LOL)—on a urine-catching receptacle. Also note the female’s flehmen response, which you may have seen in your own cat.

The YouTube video:

The global cheetah population has plummeted over the last century. While zoo programs have made captive breeding a focus of their conservation efforts for endangered species, successful mating is a tricky dance. But inventive research has found that it may only take a few sterile gauzes soaked in urine to find that special someone to share the dance floor with.

h/t: Amy

The Crest-tailed mulgara is alive!!

February 10, 2019 • 12:45 pm

Yes, today we have a species long thought to be extinct, that, like Lazarus, has returned from the dead. It’s the Crest-tailed Mulgara (Dasycercus cristicauda), a small carnivorous marsupial that was thought for more than a century to be extinct, and whose existence was based on bone fragments. As Roaring Earth and the University of New South Wales report, recently one female was found in the desert of central Australia. And where there’s one, there’s more:

From the UNSW report:

A crest-tailed mulgara — thought to be extinct for more than 100 years — was recently found burrowing through the sand dunes of New South Wales.

Known previously only through fossilized remnants, the animal is one of two species of mulgara found throughout Central Australia. These marsupials have crested bushy tails, measure up to a foot in length, and boast sandy-blonde fur.

. . . A team from the UNSW Sydney’s Wild Deserts project made the unexpected discovery during recent scientific monitoring.

UNSW scientist and Wild Deserts ecologist Dr Rebecca West says it is particularly exciting to find a Crest-tailed Mulgara alive for the first time in NSW.

“The Crest-tailed Mulgara was once widely distributed across sandy desert environments in inland Australia, but declined due to the effects of rabbits, cats and foxes,” West says.

“The species weighs around 150 grams and has pale blonde fur and a thick tail with a distinctive black crest.”

The discovery comes at a great time, according to UNSW scientist and Wild Deserts project co-ordinator Reece Pedler.

“Next year we are due to begin introduced predator and rabbit eradication from a large area, which will no doubt help the Mulgara,” Pedler says.

From Roaring Earth, which makes a mistake in the first line (they mean “near extinction”):

The mulgaras were originally driven to extinction due to the introduction of invasive species including cats, foxes, and rabbits, all of which have European origins. Their return to existence in this specific area could be indicative of a natural decline in rabbit and invasive predator populations.

The recently spotted mulgara was found by researchers from the Wild Deserts project on a scientific monitoring trip in Sturt National Park, located just north-west of Tibooburra. Researchers identified the animal as a young female before releasing it back into the wild, hopeful for its reproduction.

Wild Deserts aims to reintroduce locally extinct mammal species back into their native habitats, which also involves removing some invasive species like rabbits, feral cats, and foxes. The greater bilby, burrowing betong, Western quoll, and Western barred bandicoot are the project’s primary focus, but they will now keep their eyes peeled for mulgara tracks as well.

Here are some photos of the rediscovered one:

 

Photo: Reece Pedler
Photo: Katherine Moseby

And a video:

Now what confuses me here is that there’s a Wikipedia page on the species, not mentioning its rediscovery, giving a range map, implying that there are a fair number of these things, and showing the picture below. They do say that there are two species in the genus, the other being the brush-tailed mulgara, but this one is clearly identified as the “crest-tailed mulgara”. Nor is the brush-tailed mulgara described as having nearly gone extinct.

Photo credit: Bobby Tamayo, Simpson Desert, QLD.

Perhaps Wikipedia has gone badly wrong here, in which case we have another examples for Greg Mayer’s long-promised “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?” post.

Readers are welcome to clarify this conundrum.

h/t: Kiera

A new paper confirms six subspecies of tigers, promoting conservation of the species (with some curmudgeonly comments on conservation genetics by Professor Ceiling Cat)

October 29, 2018 • 10:30 am

It’s a sad situation that the tiger (Panthera tigris), the world’s largest and arguably most magnificent wild cat, is heading towards extinction in nature. Fewer than 4,000 of them remain in the wild, and there are more in captivity than are roaming free in nature. Their current range is only 7% of the territory they occupied before humans killed them and destroyed their territory. Here, from Wikipedia, is a map of their present versus historical ranges. Sad, isn’t it?

One strategy for saving the tiger is to recognize subspecies, which are populations of the species that are recognizably different, either genetically (usually through inspection of DNA sequences) or through morphology (morphological differences, of course, often reflect genetic differences). Subspecies used to be called “races,” and still are by some people, but the term “race” is now in bad odor because of its past misapplication to our own species.

The designating-subspecies strategy here is two-pronged, with one prong scientific and the other political. The scientific rationale is that because populations differ genetically, saving different populations that are genetically diverse is a way to conserve overall genetic diversity in that species. Why? It’s sometimes not clear, but reasons given are to enable the species to recover if populations go extinct from inbreeding (a loss of genetic diversity), to conserve populations that look different and thus could be considered to have diverse appeal, and to save rare alleles that might prove adaptive under environmental change. I consider this strategy ill-conceived for reasons I’ll mention below.

The political reason is simply because some conservation laws, like the U.S.’s Endangered Species Act of 1973, allow a population to be listed as threatened or endangered if it’s not an entire species but simply a subspecies: a genetically different population. If you want to save a species, then, one way is to help save its constituent subspecies, regardless of the genetic rationale above. All that’s required is that a population be designated a subspecies because it is genetically different from other populations, and then that subspecies cannot be touched. Exactly how different a population must be to be regarded as a subspecies is not clear, and is subject to discussion and argument by biologists.

The use of the “subspecies” category thus gives conservationists a way to save species by saving their populations, even if the genetic rationale supporting it is weak. But because most conservationists and many biologists, including me, see saving species as an intrinsic good, regardless of genetic differentiation, we can use the “genetic differences” regulations as a way to do what we really want to do: save species as wholes regardless of how genetically different their populations are. And that surely holds for the vanishing tiger.

In other words, it’s in the interests of species-loving biologists to designate as many subspecies as possible as a way to save species, regardless of whether we agree with the “saving genetic diversity” argument. (As I said, I don’t really buy into that argument.) Thus you can use even tiny genetic differences, perhaps as little as a single gene causing change in, say, color—or even a diagnostic difference in DNA sequence of unknown function—as a way to designate subspecies and thus save species.

Now some biologists do think that we need to conserve genetic diversity within a species, and sometimes they might be right. But more often I think it’s a tactic to enable them to do what they feel impelled to do: stave off the destruction of threatened species by any means possible.

I hasten to add, though, that investigating population differences is of interest in its own right. For instance, we can get an idea whether those populations might be reproductively isolated (no gene exchange because of biological differences), and thus true species rather than subspecies. Or the genetic differences might give us some idea of the history of the species and the evolutionary relationships among populations. Or you might be able to identify illegal wildlife traffickers by looking at the DNA of material they’re selling.

An increase in tiger subspecies—or rather, a genetic confirmation of traditional subspecies— comes from a new genetic survey of the world’s tigers by by Yue-Chen Liu et al., just published in Current Biology (paper here, pdf here; reference below; ask if you can’t get it). There’s also a summary of the study in this week’s New York Times (click on screenshot below).

The upshot of the paper:

  • Tigers are genetically depauperate, probably because of a reduction in species size to around 50,000 during Pleistocene glaciation.
  • Nevertheless, sequencing of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of tigers shows clear genetic differentiation among populations, and the well-demarcated populations (genetically, not morphologically) correspond to the six subspecies already recognized: the Bengal tiger, the Amur tiger, the South China tiger (only one specimen used), the Sumatran tiger, the Indochinese tiger, and the Malayan tiger.

Here’s a phylogeny of the tigers based on 11,600,055 autosomal variants, showing that they fall into six neat groups (consult the paper for caption and methodology) corresponding to the different subspecies already recognized (colors). Mitonchondrial and X-chromosomal analyses give similar phylogenies, and the numbers at the branches show that these are significantly demarcated using bootstrapping methods:

 

Below is a cluster analysis of tiger genomes using the “ADMIXTURE” program. The data are based on nearly two million variants on the autosomes. The different colors recognize units that the program can distinguish under assumptions of different numbers of clusters, with the number of clusters to look for set from 4 to 6. As you see, under the assumption of 5 clusters you get five subspecies, and with 6 clusters you get six subspecies. (This is not a trick, but a way to recognize hierarchically differentiated populations.)

  • Gene flow among populations was extant but low, reflecting the fact that they’re geographically isolated and have been so for some time. They aren’t considered different species because there is some gene flow and because hybrids, at least in captivity, are readily formed and are fertile.
  • These differences aren’t so readily discerned using morphology, since tiger subspecies generally lack diagnostic physical traits, though there are some average differences in size, shape and color (see here for a summary). That is, you can’t unambiguously put a single tiger into one of the six subspecies using morphology alone, but you can do it using just a few genes.
  • These findings, while confirming traditional classification, go against the suggestion of some biologists that there are only two subspecies of tigers. Those biologists say that having only two subspecies is better than having more, because the recognition of some very small subspecies, like the South China tiger, would make them “face extinction”. (This baffles me unless those researchers don’t think we should make an effort to save this population.)
  • Some of the DNA data give evidence that population differences arose by natural selection (this comes from the pattern of the variation associated with these regions). As the paper notes, “We identified multiple genomic regions that are candidates for identifying the adaptive divergence of subspecies. The body-size-related gene ADH7 appears to have been strongly selected in the Sumatran tiger, perhaps in association with adaptation to the tropical Sunda Islands.”

But genetics does confirm the populations previously recognized by average trait differences. That’s not a novel finding, but the genetically diagnostic differences, say the authors, will help us conserve the species. As they say in the paper (my emphasis):

Because many of the conservation policies and measurements regarding the tiger, including coordinated captive breeding programs and legislations in several tiger range countries, are based on “subspecies taxonomy,” an appropriate description of subspecies is vitally important.

Considering the subspecies concepts presented above, the genome-wide signatures of phylogeographic partitioning and evidence for long-term restriction of gene flow and adaptive divergence jointly allow us to elucidate tiger evolution and corroborate six phylogeographic units. These findings provide the strongest genetic evidence for subspecies delineation in tigers to date, evidence stronger than that used to define subspecies in nearly any felid reported thus far. These population units correspond precisely with the geographic subspecies named much earlier. . .

Understanding the tiger’s natural history from a genomic perspective provides a data-driven foundation for subspecies recognition, conservation strategic planning, and management actions. Our general goals are to reverse the species’ decline by maximizing the efforts to preserve the genetic diversity, evolutionary uniqueness, and potential of the species Panthera tigris.

The New York Times article echoes the conservation importance emphasized by the study’s authors.  But, as I implied above, recognizing six subspecies rather than two is important mainly because it gives biologists a legal handle to save tigers in general. The genetic differences between populations, as diagnostic as they are, are in my view not sufficient reason by themselves to save all populations. Sufficient reason to save the populations, though it won’t fly with governments and laws, is simply because we need to save as many tiger populations as we can, because they add to our world, because they were here before us, and because we have no right to wipe out a dwindling species for our own selfish needs. Despite their fierceness, tigers can’t fight human development. Most nature-loving biologists simply want any way to save tigers, and genetics (again, this is my opinion) gives them an excuse—but not a good population-genetic reason. Any one population of tigers surely contains enough genetic variation to replenish all the other populations, whether that variation be common or rare. And, of course, new mutations occur.

Here’s what one of the authors say in the NYT piece:

A system recently proposed by some scientists that would classify the world’s tigers into two subspecies would harm the world’s remaining tigers rather than benefit them, said Shu-Jin Luo, a geneticist at Peking University who led the study. Preserving what is left of tigers’ genetic diversity will require ensuring that all remaining subspecies are taken into account, she and her co-authors argue.

“If you think that all tigers are genetically homogeneous, you might say if you lose the Amur tiger, you still have the Bengal tiger — and that’s O.K. because they’re very similar,” Dr. Luo said. “But that’s not O.K., because now we know that tigers are not all alike.”

No, tigers are not all alike; they differ on average in appearance, and in DNA sequence, some of those differences probably being the result of geographically varying natural selection. But what do we gain by saving subspecies because they have genetic differences. What, indeed, are the genetic differences we’re trying to conserve? Genes for morphology? Those differences are inherent within in any one subspecies, so you could constitute any extinct population simply by either selecting variants within another subpopulation, or transplanting members of extant populations to areas of extinction, where selection will act eventually to create a new subspecies (it may be different from the old one). Are we trying to save variants that might be adaptive in the whole species, enabling it to respond to new selective pressures? If so, those variants are probably latent in several populations, so you don’t need to conserve them all. Are we trying to prevent inbreeding? Well, there’s no evidence that extinction is caused by inbreeding in this species, and to save them that way requires crossing members of different subspecies, which wipes out the differences we’re trying to conserve in the first place.

What I’m not saying here is that because the rationale for conserving genetic variation in tigers is weak, we shouldn’t try to save every subspecies. No, what I’m saying is that the genetic-variation excuse is a way that some biologists, chafing under legal restrictions, try to save every member of a species, no matter how many subspecies there are. Having six rather than two subspecies of tigers makes it easier to save them all, but what if the genetic variation analysis had shown just two, or four, distinct subspecies? Would it be less pressing to save tiger populations? I doubt that even conservationists would agree. And that shows that we’re using political rather than sound genetic rationales to save endangered species.

My message here is just this: we should save all the tigers because tigers are an inherent good. If we have to do that by recognizing subspecies, well, that’s the way we have to do it. But we shouldn’t pretend that we need to save subspecies to “conserve genetic variation in tigers”. That rationale is very weak, and makes conservation dependent on subjective criteria like the frequency of DNA variants that may not even play a role in adaptation—now or in the future. I think it’s time for conservation geneticists to tell us exactly what kind of genetic variation they want to save, and why. (There’s very little written about this.) And it’s time for biologists to admit that for many of us, our interest is not in conserving genetic variation, but in saving every tiger possible. The subspecies ploy is one way to do that, but it’s still a ploy.

We should save all tigers because of they are dwindling but magnificent; because of this:

(From the NYT): Tigers in a park in Hailin, northeast China. A century ago, about 100,000 tigers roamed Asia’s habitats. There remain only about 4,000 in the wild worldwide.CreditVisual China Group/Getty Images

The way to save tigers is not to designate subspecies and then use various schemes to conserve genetic variation, but to save the habitat in which tigers live and to keep people from poaching them.

____________

Liu, Y.-C., X. Sun, C. Driscoll, D. G. Miquelle, X. Xu, P. Martelli, O. Uphyrkina, J. L. D. Smith, S. J. O’Brien, and S.-J. Luo. Genome-wide evolutionary analysis of natural history and adaptation in the world’s tigers. Current Biology, online. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.09.019

What was the animal that inspired Dr. Seuss’s lorax? Biologists suggest a hypothesis

July 25, 2018 • 10:45 am

The New York Times from two days ago has an article about one of Dr. Seuss’s most famous books, The Lorax (you can see a preview of the book’s contents at the Amazon site). Here’s the article:

And the book at issue:

The book’s plot involves a man called the Once-ler visiting a beautiful forest of Truffula trees inhabited by the Lorax and many other species. Sensing a mercantile opportunity, the Once-ler cuts down the trees to manufacture “Thneed”, apparently a fabric used to make beautiful clothes. The Thneed factory expands, polluting the air and water, and eventually they cut down all the Truffula trees, putting themselves out of business. According to Wikipedia, the story ends like this (I haven’t read it):

Without raw materials, the factory shuts down and the Once-ler’s relatives leave. The Lorax says nothing but with one sad backward glance lifts himself into the air “by the seat of his pants” and disappears behind the smoggy clouds. Where he last stood is a small monument engraved with a single word: “UNLESS”. The Once-ler ponders the message for years, in solitude and self-imposed exile.

In the present, his buildings falling apart around him, the Once-ler at last realizes out loud what the Lorax meant: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” He then gives the boy the last Truffula seed and urges him to grow a forest from it, saying that, if the trees can be protected from logging, then the Lorax and all of his friends may come back.

The Lorax was published in 1971, when the U.S. environmental movement was getting underway, with the National Environmental Policy Act passed in January, the first Earth Day celebrated in April, and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in December. It was also the year that Joni Mitchell released her musical equivalent of The Lorax, the environmentalist song “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Dr. Seuss, too, was peeved as, according to the New York Times article, he was upset that a development project in San Diego proposed to cut down the eucalyptus trees around his home.

Seuss (real name: Theodore Geisel) wanted to write a children’s book about environmentalism, but got writer’s block, so his wife suggested they chill out at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, a fancy resort with plenty of animals and forest around. That lifted the block, and Seuss wrote most of The Lorax, a perennially popular book (over a million copies sold in 15 languages) in just one afternoon.

Now the book has been impugned for making The Lorax into a domineering and obnoxious sort of environmentalist (“ecopolice”), the argument being that he was the master of the forest and could decree its fate. But a new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution (reference at bottom, free link here, free pdf here) suggests this interpretation is wrong: the Lorax was really based on two species that are part of Kenya’s ecosystem, and The Lorax simply an animal activist calling for the preservation of entire ecosystems, whose parts are interdependent. (This “reinterpetation” of the book seems to me largely a distinction without a difference, and thus not that exciting, as well as virtually untestable.)

What’s more interesting, as detailed in the paper, is that the Lorax and the Truffula trees might have been inspired by real animals and plants that Seuss saw in Kenya. The authors’ hypothesis is that the Truffula tree is the whistling thorn acacia (Acacia drepanolobium), a tree on which lives the patas monkey (Erythrocebus patas). The monkey gets over 80% of its diet from the gum and leaves of the tree, and the monkey’s depredations don’t hurt the tree. This is then an example of a commensalism: a relationship between two species in which one benefits and the other isn’t harmed. If you wipe out the tree, the monkey goes with it. (As I mention below, this is in fact happening.)

The Truffula trees do look, to the authors, like the spindly whistling thorn acacia. You can see a Truffula above, and here’s the acacia:

Here’s a photo of various parts of the story, including E. patas in the acacia, from the Nature paper:

(From the paper): a, Location of the Mount Kenya Safari Club together with data on the patchy distribution of patas monkeys (E. patas) in Kenya. A comparison of historical records (pre-1996) and surveys between 1996 and 2004 indicates that the range of E. patas has declined by 46% in Kenya24. b, The Lorax in the crown of a silk-tufted Truffula tree. c, Spindly tree that resembles the whistling thorn acacia (A. drepanolobium). d, Male patas monkey; the subspecies in Kenya (E. patas pyrrhonotus) is distinguished by its black facial skin and white nose25. e, Female patas monkey feeding on A. drepanolobium.

 

But what is the lorax? The authors further suggest that the lorax was modeled on E. patas, and test this by using fancy “eigenvalue decomposition methods” to compare the Lorax’s face to that of three primates (see photo below) as well as another Seuss character that looks similar: a “control” creature in The Foot Book. They find that the Lorax clusters with two cercopithecine monkeys: the patas monkey and the blue monkey (C. mitis). The comparison:

(From the paper’s Figure 3): We used a characterized camera19 to photograph every forward-facing image of two Seussian creatures, the Lorax (n = 13) and the bipedal creature in The Foot Book (n = 13). We calculated the mean face of each creature19 and projected it into a space containing the faces of every cercopithecine monkey in Kenya: the patas monkey; the tantalus monkey (Chlorocebus tantalus); the red-tailed monkey (Cercopithecus ascanius); the blue monkey (Cercopithecus mitis); and the De Brazza’s monkey (Cercopithecus neglectus). We used eigenface decomposition methods to calculate facial similarities19 and we generated the plot with t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE)26, an iterative algorithm that down-projects multidimensional information into two dimensions for visualization.

The authors have other “evidence:”

Dates, physical similarities and probable encounters underlie our proposal that patas monkeys inspired the Lorax. His physical appearance postdates Geisel’s trip to Kenya, evolving into a short, “sort of man” with a signature moustache; his mossy pelage was blue before it was orange (Fig. 2). Many of these final traits are shared with patas monkeys and it is probable that Geisel encountered them at the Mount Kenya Safari Club (Fig. 1a). Even the voice of the Lorax (a “sawdusty sneeze”) resembles the ‘whoo-wherr’ vocalization of patas monkeys; the ‘whoo’ is a loud, wheezing expiration of air. It appears to be an alarm call issued in response to predators and human observers.

From this the author’s conclude that “Geisel drew inspiration from a ceropithecine monkey and its ecology” when writing The Lorax in Kenya. That’s possible, although the Lorax is most facially similar to the blue monkey, which is neither blue nor commensal with the acacia, but has a wider diet. If that’s the case, then the similarity between the Truffula tree and the whistling thorn acacia falls apart. The hypothesis is semi-interesting, but there’s no way to test it given the lack of verification from Seuss, and I’m not convinced by the author’s arguments that the lorax is really based on the patas monkey.

I’m even less convinced by the authors’ rewriting of the book’s interpretation, which is almost postmodern:

If this natural commensalism [between acacia and patas monkey] informs The Lorax, it challenges traditional interpretations of the Lorax as an ecopoliceman asserting his authority. If the Lorax is based on the patas monkey, he can be seen as a sustainable consumer dispossessed of his commensal partner and an equal victim of environmental degradation.

Well, yes, all this is as possible as anything else. And the authors do point out that this commensalism is endangered, as the acacia is being heavily browsed by giraffes, rhinos and elephants, and that, combined with its use as charcoal, is bringing the tree toward extinction. Likewise, the range of the patas monkey is said to have “collapsed” recently, so Seuss’s lesson, even if not drawn from this system, still applies: stop destroying ecosystems by removing an important element.

Granted, this short (three-page) paper is in the “books and arts” section of the journal, and it’s a semi-fun read, but to me doesn’t make a convincing case. And I’m not sure why Joanna Klein wrote a longish piece about the paper for The New York Times. The source of the lorax remains, at least to me, a mystery. Whether an eco-policeman or part of an endangered ecosystem, the Lorax has brought joy to children for fifty years.

h/t: Bruce Lyon

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N. J. Dominey, S. Winters, D. Pease, and J. P. Higham. 2018. Dr. Seuss and the real Lorax. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2:1196-1198, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0628-x

Bat rescue: Kali the flying fox

March 31, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Make sure you enlarge and turn the sound up on this video, which I purloined from Facebook. It’s the story of how an endangered fruit bat (“flying fox”) named Kali was rescued by keepers at the Oregon Zoo. As the video notes, Kali is a Rodrigues flying fox (Pteropus rodricensis), endemic to the 108 km² island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean.  It was critically endangered (and is still listed as such) because of habitat loss, hunting and bad weather, so in 1976 25 bats were collected for breeding. They’re now increasing in captivity and on the island, which has a population of 3,000—up from fewer than a hundred. It’s looking like a success story, but there’s a way to go.

It’s frugivorous, of course, and social, living in large colonies, like the one you see here in captivity.

For more information on this species, see the entry at ARKive.

This is a gorgeous animal, as all bats are. They’re so interesting and, except for the rabies issue, harmless to humans, so I don’t know why so many people shun them.

Should we bring wolves back to Scotland? A video and a questionnaire

March 29, 2018 • 10:30 am

by Matthew Cobb

It used to be standard practice for final year science students to do a lab-based research project. At the University of Manchester we have broadened the choice of final-year projects so that biology students can also choose to do a Science Media Project. This involves creating a portfolio of writing and other work around a scientific topic. Last year we featured films made by two of my students, and the comments from readers were invaluable.

I’d like to for you help again, by watching this 20-minute video by my student, Kirsty Wells, on the topic of ‘rewilding’. As she explains:

I have produced a short documentary exploring the possibility of wolves being reintroduced into the Scottish Highlands. Having extensively reviewed the literature surrounding the impacts of re-established wolf populations in other parts of the world (Western Europe and Yellowstone National Park), I decided to investigate how these impacts may apply in the context of Scotland. I ventured up North to meet with a few people to discuss what wolf reintroduction would mean to them, and what it could mean for the people of Scotland and Britain more broadly.

Please have a look at her video, and then fill out the quick questionnaire – no personal data are collected! Your comments below would also be greatly appreciated.

New panda movie opens in April

March 9, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Yes, I’m a sucker for cute animals, and everyone—save my friend Melissa Chen, who hates pandas and thinks they should be allowed to go extinct—thinks the panda is among the Top Five Cutest Animals.  On April 6, Warner Brothers will release the IMAX movie “Pandas”, which follows the life of  Qian Qian, a panda born in captivity but released in the wild to swell the shrinking population.

It’s narrated by Kristen Bell, and here’s the trailer:

I didn’t steer you wrong about Kedi, did I? (And if you haven’t seen it, you’re a reprobate.)

Oh, and here’s the Latin name of the giant panda: Ailuropoda melanoleuca, which means “black and white cat-foot”. There will be a quiz.

Biologist argues that we don’t need to save endangered species because extinction is “natural”

December 1, 2017 • 11:30 am

UPDATE: Apparently Pyron has rethought his position, saying that he “failed to make his views sufficiently clear and coherent” and “succumbed to a temptation to sensationalize parts of my argument.” He also faults himself for not running the piece by his George Washington University colleagues, which is pretty much inexcusable given its message. His mea culpa, “Biodiversity conservation is urgent and important,  now and in the future“, appears on his GWU lab page, and pretty much takes back what he said in the Post—well, sorta. In the end, he claims that he was misunderstood, that the title and subtitle weren’t chosen by him (that’s surely true), and that his intentions should now “be judged by pointing to his scientific research”, which is “steeped in biodiversity discovery and analysis, with many publications on direct conservation topics and many more to come on the global threats affecting reptiles and amphibians.” Well, we didn’t have his c.v. in hand when we read his piece.

The thing is, the title and subtitle accurately mirror the content of Pyron’s original article, whose point is pretty damn clear. To say that he didn’t accurately express what he thought is either disingenuous or bespeaks a totally disordered viewpoint. I suspect that he just got so much flak from his colleagues at GWU and everywhere else that he decided he’d better back down. But then why did the Post publish this misguided piece in the first place, forcing me, and I suspect hundreds of others, to rebut it?

(Thanks to Grania and others for alerting me to Pyron’s walk-back.)

_____________________

The Washington Post “perspective” article below, by associate professor of biology R. Alexander Pyron at George Washington University (click on screenshot to read), has everyone’s knickers in a twist—as well it should. (There are now 3790 comments after the article, though I haven’t read any; the reaction I’ve seen has been on other online sites.)

Pyron’s argument is simple: extinction has been going on ever since the beginning of life, 99% or more of species that ever existed have gone extinct without leaving descendants, and even more have evolved into something very different; there have been lots of “natural” extinctions due to changes in earth’s climate, snowpack, and continental drift; the Earth always recovers from extinctions to produce a new crop of species; it will likewise recover from the latest anthropogenic “Sixth Extinction”; and even if the endangered species—or other species—go extinct, we’ll get some nifty new ones. The only species worth caring about, says Pyron, are those whose welfare impacts our own, like trees, food fish, and so on. And this is from a biologist.  I’ll give just a few quotes to show the tenor of his argument:

But the impulse to conserve for conservation’s sake has taken on an unthinking, unsupported, unnecessary urgency. Extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit. There is no such thing as an “endangered species,” except for all species. The only reason we should conserve biodiversity is for ourselves, to create a stable future for human beings. Yes, we have altered the environment and, in doing so, hurt other species. This seems artificial because we, unlike other life forms, use sentience and agriculture and industry. But we are a part of the biosphere just like every other creature, and our actions are just as volitional, their consequences just as natural. Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.

. . . Our concern, in other words, should not be protecting the animal kingdom, which will be just fine. Within a few million years of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the post-apocalyptic void had been filled by an explosion of diversity — modern mammals, birds and amphibians of all shapes and sizes.

This is how evolution proceeds: through extinction. The inevitability of death is the only constant in life, and 99.9 percent of all species that have ever lived, as many as 50 billion, have already gone extinct. In 50 million years, Europe will collide with Africa and form a new supercontinent, destroying species (think of birds, fish and anything vulnerable to invasive life forms from another landmass) by irrevocably altering their habitats. Extinctions of individual species, entire lineages and even complete ecosystems are common occurrences in the history of life. The world is no better or worse for the absence of saber-toothed tigers and dodo birds and our Neanderthal cousins, who died off as Homo sapiens evolved. (According to some studies, it’s not even clear that biodiversity is suffering. The authors of another recent National Academy of Sciences paper point out that species richness has shown no net decline among plants over 100 years across 16,000 sites examined around the world.)

Pyron has a remarkably anthropocentric view, but justifies it by saying that “we are a part of the biosphere”, and thus our actions are natural and therefore not to be criticized:

There is no return to a pre-human Eden; the goals of species conservation have to be aligned with the acceptance that large numbers of animals will go extinct. Thirty to 40 percent of species may be threatenedwith extinction in the near future, and their loss may be inevitable. But both the planet and humanity can probably survive or even thrive in a world with fewer species. We don’t depend on polar bears for our survival, and even if their eradication has a domino effect that eventually affects us, we will find a way to adapt. The species that we rely on for food and shelter are a tiny proportion of total biodiversity, and most humans live in — and rely on — areas of only moderate biodiversity, not the Amazon or the Congo Basin.

He makes other arguments as well: introduced species sometimes do reduce “native diversity”, but “productivity—the cycling of nutrients through the ecosystem—frequently increases”.  About 140 new reptile species have been introduced in Florida, but they haven’t driven any old species extinct.  He even argues that we don’t try to conserve the “biodiversity” that includes Ebola virus, and yellow fever, so we’re being hypocritical!

Well, as I always say, we can’t simply dismiss people like this by simply saying they’re wrong. We have to muster counterarguments. I will muster a few, since I haven’t paid much attention (on purpose) to the arguments of others.  Here’s my view of why Pyron is misguided:

1.) There is no guarantee that the Earth will recover from this new anthropogenic extinction in a way that guarantees the return of biodiversity. As we chop down the rain forests and convert forests and diverse ecosystems into farms and pastures, the resulting monocultures may be productive, but they’ll be boring. Why is productivity (and I don’t mean just food productivity) privileged over diversity (see below)? Further, destroying natural ecosystems, if you take Pyron’s anthropocentric view (it’s not my view), can drive to extinction animals and plants that are of potential aid to humans: plants that provide medical cures, clues about animals that can help us live longer and healthier lives, and so on.

2.) With the present destruction of natural habitat, and the possibilities of nuclear war and a big change in Earth’s climate due to global warming, we are making it much less likely that Earth will recover its previous biodiversity. Yes, we’re a species, but we’re the only species on the planet with the capacity to not just destroy every other species, but denude the entire planet itself.

3.) Biodiversity should be valued for two reasons other than human welfare: its intrinsic interest and beauty, and its scientific value exclusive of how it could help H. sapiens.  There’s simply something more enthralling and moving about a pristine rain forest than there is in a logged-over pasture. Which would you rather look at: a field of corn growing away, or a sea full of interesting creatures and a forest full of insects, plants, birds, and monkeys? Which would you rather look at: a blank canvas, or an all-black canvas, or a Leonardo?  Further, driving species extinct is like going through a library, destroying half the books and saying, “Yes, but new books will be written to replace them.” That is, each species is an evolutionary palimpsest of its past, telling us something about ecology and evolution, and buttressing our sense of wonder and our knowledge. That knowledge is good in and of itself, for we are a species of curiosity and wonder. And each time a species goes extinct, we lose a chance to learn about it, its ecology, and its evolutionary past. We may be able to recover its ancestry if we save its DNA, but we’ll still irrevocably lose a lot of other stuff. At least right now, we couldn’t suss out the remarkable courtship behavior of the birds of paradise simply from their DNA sequence.

4.) Our actions that drive species extinct often cause suffering of animals; why is human suffering so privileged that we can injure other species with complete impunity? Yes, some species may go extinct simply because they can’t find a mate, and the population becomes so small it dies out from demographic fluctuations. That kind of extinction doesn’t cause much suffering. But other extinctions cause pain and suffering as animals’ homes are destroyed, they are killed by humans (fires, bullets, etc.), or the climate becomes intolerable.

Yes, mass extinctions have happened before, and extinction often causes pain, regardless of whether it’s caused by our own species or physical forces. But if we abet it, we’re increasing the amount of suffering among sentient beings, and that is a net bad. How much increase in human well being does it take to offset, say, the death of hundreds of giraffes, gorillas, and elephants shot by hunters? What is the calculus here? According to Pyron, animals have no value re suffering, and humans have infinite value in comparison.

I think Pyron fails to realize that the depredations of humans aren’t equivalent to the ice sheets that once covered the world. Ice sheets go away; we won’t—unless we manage to drive ourselves extinct first.

In the end, the whole planet will be burnt to a crisp when the Sun expands in about five billion years. But until then, and assuming we’re here for a while, we should do our best to preserve those features of the world that give us not just joy but knowledge that is an intrinsic good. In one way, destroying species is like burning every work of art in the world.  Yes, there will be new art—there always is—but isn’t it nice to go see an exhibit of van Gogh or Rembrandt?

I’m sure readers can come up with other counterarguments (or support of Pyron, if that’s the way you feel).