Building an Ark for the Anthropocene

We are barreling into the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet. A recent study published in the journal Science concluded that the world’s species are disappearing as much as 1,000 times faster than the rate at which species naturally go extinct. It’s a one-two punch — on top of the ecosystems we’ve broken, extreme weather from a changing climate causes even more damage. By 2100, researchers say, one-third to one-half of all Earth’s species could be wiped out.

As a result, efforts to protect species are ramping up as governments, scientists and nonprofit organizations try to build a modern version of Noah’s Ark. The new ark certainly won’t come in the form of a large boat, or even always a place set aside. Instead it is a patchwork quilt of approaches, including assisted migration, seed banks and new preserves and travel corridors based on where species are likely to migrate as seas rise or food sources die out.

The questions are complex. What species do you save? The ones most at risk? Charismatic animals, such as lions or bears or elephants? The ones most likely to survive? The species that hold the most value for us?

One initiative, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services formed in 2012 by the governments of 121 countries, aims to protect and restore species in wild areas and to protect species like bees that carry out valuable ecosystem service functions in the places people live. Some three-quarters of the world’s food production depends primarily on bees.

“We still know very little about what could or should be included in the ark and where,” said Walter Jetz, an ecologist at Yale involved with the project. Species are being wiped out even before we know what they are.

Another project, the EDGE of Existence, run by the Zoological Society of London, seeks to protect the most unusual wildlife at highest risk. These are species that evolved on their own for so long that they are very different from other species. Among the species the project has helped to preserve are the tiny bumblebee bat and the golden-rumped elephant shrew.

While the traditional approach to protecting species is to buy land, preservation of the right habitat can be a moving target, since it’s not known how species will respond to a changing climate.

To complete the maps of where life lives, scientists have enlisted the crowd. A crowdsourcing effort called the Global Biodiversity Information Facility identifies and curates biodiversity data — such as photos of species taken with a smartphone — to show their distribution and then makes the information available online. That is especially helpful to researchers in developing countries with limited budgets. Another project, Lifemapper, at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, uses the data to understand where a species might move as its world changes.

“We know that species don’t persist long in fragmented areas and so we try and reconnect those fragments,” said Stuart L. Pimm, a professor of conservation at Duke University, and head of a nonprofit organization called SavingSpecies. One of his group’s projects in the Colombian Andes identified a forest that contains a carnivorous mammal that some have described as a cross between a house cat and a teddy bear, called an olinguito, new to science. Using crowd-sourced data, “we worked with local conservation groups and helped them buy land, reforest the land and reconnect pieces,” Dr. Pimm says.

Coastal areas, especially, are getting scrutiny. Biologists in Florida, which faces a daunting sea level rise, are working on a plan to set aside land farther inland as a reserve for everything from the MacGillivray’s seaside sparrow to the tiny Key deer.

To thwart something called “coastal squeeze,” a network of “migratory greenways” is envisioned so that species can move on their own away from rising seas to new habitat. “But some are basically trapped,” said Reed F. Noss, a professor of conservation biology at the University of Central Florida who is involved in the effort, and they will most likely need to be picked up and moved. The program has languished, but Amendment 1, on the ballot this November, would provide funding.

One species at risk is the Florida panther. Once highly endangered, with just 20 individuals left, this charismatic animal has come back — some. But a quarter or more of its habitat is predicted to be under some three feet of water by 2100. Males will move on their own, but females will need help because they won’t cross the Caloosahatchee River. Experts hope to create reserves north of the river, and think at some point they will have to move females to new quarters.

Protecting land between reserves is vital. The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, known as Y2Y, would protect corridors between wild landscapes in the Rockies from Yellowstone National Park to northern Canada, which would allow species to migrate.

RESEARCHERS have also focused on “refugia,” regions around the world that have remained stable during previous swings of the Earth’s climate — and that might be the best bet for the survival of life this time around.

A section of the Driftless Area encompassing northeastern Iowa and southern Minnesota, also known as Little Switzerland, has ice beneath some of its ridges. The underground refrigerator means the land never gets above 50 or so degrees and has kept the Pleistocene snail, long thought extinct, from disappearing there. Other species might find refuge there as things get hot.

A roughly 250-acre refugia on the Little Cahaba River in Alabama has been called a botanical lost world, because of its wide range of unusual plants, including eight species found nowhere else. Dr. Noss said these kinds of places should be sought out and protected.

Daniel Janzen, a conservation ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is working to protect large tracts in Costa Rica, said that to truly protect biodiversity, a place-based approach must be tailored to the country. A reserve needs to be large, to be resilient against a changing climate, and so needs the support of the people who live with the wild place and will want to protect it. “To survive climate change we need to minimize the other assaults, such as illegal logging and contaminating water,” he said. “Each time you add one of those you make it more sensitive to climate change.”

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, beneath the permafrost on an island in the Arctic Ocean north of mainland Norway, preserves seeds from food crops. Frozen zoos keep the genetic material from extinct and endangered animals. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive in Michigan, meanwhile, founded by a family of shade tree growers, has made exact genetic duplicates of some of the largest trees on the planet and planted them in “living libraries” elsewhere — should something befall the original.

In 2008, Connie Barlow, a biologist and conservationist, helped move an endangered conifer tree in Florida north by planting seedlings in cooler regions. Now she is working in the West. “I just assisted in the migration of the alligator juniper in New Mexico by planting seeds in Colorado,” she said. “We have to. Climate change is happening so fast and trees are the least capable of moving.”
_________________
Robbins, Jim. 2014. “Building an Ark for the Anthropocene”. New York Times. Posted: September 27, 2014. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/sunday-review/building-an-ark-for-the-anthropocene.html

Mammoth resurrection on the way?

The long-extinct woolly mammoth could be resurrected within five years, thanks to recent advances in cloning technology.

Japanese researchers plan to collect mammoth tissue this summer from a carcass that was frozen in the Siberian permafrost and is now in a Russian research laboratory, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The hope is to recover an undamaged nucleus of a mammoth cell from this tissue and insert it into an elephant egg cell from which the nucleus has been removed. This will create an embryo with mammoth genes, according to the news report.

This embryo will be inserted to the elephant's womb in hopes that she'll give birth to a mammoth.

"Preparations to realize this goal have been made," Akira Iritani, a team leader from Kyoto University, told the Yomiuri Shimbun.

New technique

Previous attempts to recover nuclei from frozen tissue failed because the cold temperatures damaged the DNA.

The new technique is based on work by Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, who in 2008 cloned a mouse from the cells of another mouse that were frozen for 16 years.

Iritani says his team has devised a method to extract the nuclei of mammoth cells without damaging them. "Now that the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told London's Daily Telegraph.

Mammoth for display

If the team is successful in creating an embryo, they will discuss how to breed the mammoth — and whether or not to display it to the public — before transplanting to a surrogate elephant, Iritani told the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Even if the embryo is successfully created and implanted, the chances of bringing a cloned mammoth to term (or any cloned animal, for that matter) are slim. When South Korean researchers tried cloning dogs, for example, nearly 1,100 embryos were transplanted to surrogate dogs, but only two live births resulted, and only one of those puppies survived past the 22-day mark.

Nevertheless, Iritani was confident of success. "After the mammoth is born, we'll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors," he said.

Woolly mammoths went extinct at the end of the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether climate change or human hunters were the cause of their demise.

Last December, researchers said another factor could be the fact that the creatures delayed weaning their young due to the long dark winter north of the Arctic Circle.
___________________
References:

Roach, John. 2011. "Mammoth resurrection on the way?". MSNBC. Posted: January 18, 2011. Available online: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/18/5870423-mammoth-resurrection-on-the-way

"Extinct," Pop-Eyed Primate Photographed for First Time

Fewer than a hundred Horton Plains slender lorises thought to survive.
Long thought to be extinct, one of the world's rarest primates has been caught on camera for the first time, scientists announced Monday.

Discovered in 1937 but "missing" for 60 years, Sri Lanka's Horton Plains slender loris was presumed to have died out. In 2002 a fleeting nighttime sighting of something looking like the elusive tree-dweller, however, gave conservationists hope.

Follow-up surveys led by the Zoological Society of London finally confirmed the lorises are alive—if not exactly well—in 2009, when two individuals were photographed and examined.

Initial estimates after the rediscovery put the total world population at fewer than a hundred, said the society's conservation biologist Craig Turner. And in this case, the world is limited to high cloud forests in the Horton Plains area (map) of central Sri Lanka—the animal's only known habitat.

"Potentially this is the rarest primate we're aware of today," Turner said.

Lonely Lorises

About 8 inches (20 centimeters) long and weighing just 11 ounces (310 grams), the slow-moving loris has been doomed as forests have been felled for firewood and to make way for tea plantations and other farms, Turner said.

"There's no means for these lorises to move between the [remaining] forest patches," Turner said. "In terms of breeding and finding mates, it is very difficult for them." (See a satellite picture of Horton Plains' forests.)

"The real focus now has to be on the remaining forest areas and looking at how we can enhance and protect them, and also reconnect them to one another," he added.

"New" Loris Also New Species?

The Horton Plains slender loris is generally classified as a subspecies of Sri Lanka's red slender loris. But, thanks in part to the first ever pictures, researchers now believe the "extinct" loris could be a whole new species.

"It's clearly very different physically," Turner said. Compared to lowland lorises, the Horton Plains loris is "stockier, shorter limbed—and it's got a much longer fur coat."

Ongoing tests on DNA samples taken from the few individuals recorded to date, he added, should help to settle the issue.
__________________
References:

Owen, James. 2010. ""Extinct," Pop-Eyed Primate Photographed for First Time". National Geographic News. Posted: July 19, 2010. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/100719-horton-plains-slender-loris-pictures-first-time-science/

New clues to the Falklands wolf mystery

Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting in the November 3rd issue of Current Biology who have compared DNA from four of the world's dozen or so known Falklands wolf museum specimens to that of living canids offer new insight into the evolutionary ancestry of these enigmatic carnivores.

"One of the big draws for an evolutionary biologist is that this species had a big influence on Darwin's ideas about how species evolve," said Graham Slater of the University of California, Los Angeles, noting that Darwin recognized differences between the East Falkland and West Falkland wolves as evidence that species are not fixed entities. But the wolves' circumstances were also just downright puzzling.

"It's really strange that the only native mammal on an island would be a large canid," Slater explained. "There are no other native terrestrial mammals—not even a mouse. It's even stranger when you consider that the Falklands are some 480 kilometers from the South American mainland. The question is, how did they get there?"

Possible explanations for the wolves' presence on the islands, which have never been connected to the South American mainland, range from dispersal by ice or logs to domestication and subsequent transport by Native Americans. Ultimately, the Falklands wolf died out because it was perceived as a threat to settlers and their sheep, although fur traders took out a lot of the population as well.

Biologists have also puzzled over the Falklands wolf's ancestry. It had been suggested that they were related to domestic dogs, North American coyotes, or South American foxes. Slater said the wolves were the size of a coyote, but much stockier, with fur the color of a red fox. They had short muzzles, just like gray wolves, and thick, wooly fur.

Slater's team now reports that the Falklands wolf's closest living relative is actually the maned wolf—an unusually long-legged, fox-like South American canid. The researchers also found that the four Falklands wolf samples that they examined shared a common ancestor at least 70,000 years ago, which suggests that they arrived on the islands before the end of the last ice age and before humans ever made it into the New World. That rules out the prevailing theory that Native Americans had anything to do with their presence on the islands.

"The biggest surprise was that the divergence of the Falklands wolf from its closest living relative, the maned wolf, occurred over 6 million years ago," Slater said. "Canids don't show up in the South American fossil record until 2.5 million years ago, which means these lineages must have evolved in North America. The problem is that there are no good fossils that can be assigned to the Falklands wolf lineage in North America."

Given that maned and Falklands wolves split so long ago, there should be fossils of their close relatives in South America, Slater said. And in fact, the researchers may have a candidate: a species from Patagonia called Dusicyon avus, which went extinct 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. Slater says that's a possibility that study coauthor Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide in Australia is further investigating now.
_____________________
References:

Genova, Cathleen. 2009. "New clues to the Falklands wolf mystery". EurekAlert!. Posted: November 2, 2009. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-11/cp-nct102809.php

Back from Extinction: The Taino People of the Caribbean

The Taino people were the gentle Native folk who encountered Christopher Columbus upon his arrival over 500 years ago. They shared the Caribbean islands with the more aggressive, warlike Caribs. Lynne Guitar in her article for the Kacike Journal argues the transcultural miscommunication and understanding that was created between accounts by the Europeans and the reality of their situation in the Caribbean.

If you were to read Columbus' journals about the first encounter with the Tainos, you would read about their nakedness and lack of shame. Guitar writes;

Think about the term “naked.” It’s a Eurocentric term that means not to be “dressed,” not to be covered with cloth. After describing the Taínos’ nakedness, the Spanish chroniclers went on to describe the Taínos’ elaborate arm and leg bands, tattoos and painted adornments, headdresses, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets, the caciques’ (chiefs’) elaborate belts, masks, and feathered capes, and the naguas--finely woven cotton “skirts”--that some of the
Taíno women wore. That’s a lot of clothing and accoutrements for a supposedly naked people! (The women’s naguas, by the way, were more loincloths than skirts, for they did not hide the
women’s buttocks and were not meant to hide their pubic areas, either. Like today’s
Western women wear wedding bands, the naguas indicated that the women who wore them were married, and the nobler a woman was, the longer was the nagua that she wore.) (p.3).

The miscommunication is applied by Guitar to all aspects of reporting, including reports of their extinction.

Today we know that most of the Taínos were not killed by abuses endured under the
because they had no immunities to them, and after 1519, of smallpox. In tropical areas like Hispaniola, between 80 and 90% of the Native Indians died of plagues that often preceded the actual arrival of the Spaniards, for the germs and viruses were carried by messengers bearing
news from plague-ridden areas. An 80-90% loss is a significant and horrifying loss. It is so horrifying that it obscures the fact that 10 to 20% of the Taínos survived.

A re-examination of the documents of the era reveals the origins of the myth of Taíno extinction:

When the chroniclers wrote that all of the Indians of Hispaniola were gone, they were, in fact, following the lead of Las Casas, who exaggerated the Taíno population decline in order to convince the emperor to abolish the encomienda system (see note 1) and, instead,
establish missionary villages for the Indians’ conversion.

The chroniclers also wrote about the Taínos in comparison to the denser populations of Native Indians later discovered on the Mainland; this is especially true about Oviedo, who
spent his early years in today’s Panama.

The chroniclers were also repeating what was written in letter after letter to the Royal Court by encomenderos on Hispaniola who exaggerated their losses in order to gain sympathy and
royal permission to import more African slaves, who were believed to be “stronger” than the Taínos because they did not fall prey to the diseases that decimated the Indians.

The legacy of the miscommunication was that the Taínos became extinct. However, Dr. Guitar does show that they were not extinct, but rather surviving in severely reduced numbers elsewhere on the islands.

This article provided a very interesting read into the interpretation of ethnological reports. Be sure to read the whole article here.
_____________________________________
Note 1: Encomienda (ānkōmyān`dä) [Span. encomendar=to entrust], system of tributory labor established in Spanish America. Developed as a means of securing an adequate and cheap labor supply, the encomienda was first used over the conquered Moors of Spain. Transplanted to the New World, it gave the conquistador control over the native populations by requiring them to pay tribute from their lands, which were "granted" to deserving subjects of the Spanish crown. The natives often rendered personal services as well. In return the grantee was theoretically obligated to protect his wards, to instruct them in the Christian faith, and to defend their right to use the land for their own subsistence. When first applied in the West Indies, this labor system wrought such hardship that the population was soon decimated. This resulted in efforts by the Spanish king and the Dominican order to suppress encomiendas, but the need of the conquerors to reward their supporters led to de facto recognition of the practice. The crown prevented the encomienda from becoming hereditary, and with the New Laws (1542) promulgated by Las Casas, the system gradually died out, to be replaced by the repartimiento and finally debt peonage. Similar systems of land and labor apportionment were adopted by other colonial powers, notably the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the French. Source

References:

Anonymous. 2007. "Ecomienda System definition of the Ecomienda system in the Free Online Encyclopedia". The Free Dictionary.Columbia University Press. Available online http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Encomienda+system Taken from: L. B. Simpson, 1966.The Encomienda in New Spain (rev. ed. 1966); J. F. Bannon, Indian Labor in the Spanish Indies.

Guitar, Lynne. 2002."Documenting the Myth of Taíno Extinction".Kacike:Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology. Available online: http://www.kacike.org/GuitarEnglish.pdf