Richard Conniff's Blog, page 67

Heading Back to Dzanga Bai

Back in May, I wrote about the terrible slaughter of elephants at Dzanga Bai, in the Central African Republic. Now Andrea Turkalo, the biologist who has spent much of her career getting to know the elephants there, is heading back.  She has just released this brief video on the terrible global war against elephants:

http://youtu.be/ze2S2nSm584

How Wildlife Comebacks Happen

In Wales, a red kite stoops to conquer (Photo: Mali Halls)

News about wildlife often comes across as a litany of catastrophic decline. The startling truth, though, is that we generally succeed when we make the effort to fix a problem, or save a species.

Despite all the outrage and political posturing around the Endangered Species Act, for instance, 90 percent of the species it protects are recovering on schedule. You can see the results of that law, and other federal interventions, almost anywhere. Go to Manhattan’s Central Park, for instance, and with a little effort you can now find red-tailed hawks, sharp-shinned hawks and a peregrine falcon doing its 200-mile-an-hour killer dive to pick off a pigeon for dinner. All of these species (except the pigeons) were far less common—and the peregrines were actually endangered—until the federal government passed protective legislation in the 1970s, including a ban on the pesticide DDT. The same laws saved our pelicans, ospreys, herons, cormorants and of course our national bird, the bald eagle.

Now Europe is also struggling with the terrible specter of success at species protection. A report out last week by the Zoological Society of London and other conservation groups describes a broad recovery of iconic bird and mammal species across the continent. Gray wolves …   to read the full article, click here.

Highways as the Last Hope for Some Wildlife

Everywhere in the world people are moving to cities and suburbs, covering the landscape in houses, highways, office developments, and strip malls.  Just in the lifetimes of today’s 20-somethings, urban coverage in the lower 48 states will more than triple–from 2.5 percent to 8.1 percent of the landscape by 2050.  In some Northeastern states, according to the U.S. Forest Service, the land will be more than 60 percent urban by mid-century, up from about 35 percent now.

So where will plants and animals fit in this crowded world?  Nowhere at all, unless planners figure out how to make a place for them.  It may be a mark of desperate times, but many conservationists are now looking to the sides of highways as the only place left for some species to live.

The United States has four million miles of highways, most of them with substantial unpaved medians and margins. Planting grass is the standard treatment, partly because that’s how the guys in the highway department have always done it, and partly because political patronage at the county level drives the investment in machinery and gasoline. But a few states now take a greener approach.

In Iowa, for instance, the wall-to-wall planting of corn means hardly any of the original prairie habitat has survived. So that state has become a leader at … to read the rest of this story, click here.

A Pig for Peptic Ulcers

Readers may remember that there’s been a lot of controversy recently about the bacteria species Helicobacter pylori.  Here’s what I wrote about it, in a feature on the microbiome earlier this year in Smithsonian:

For Blaser, the decline of one “bad” bacterial species represents what’s happening to the entire microbiome.   Helicobacter pylori, which lives in the human stomach, became notorious in the 1980s after University of Western Australia scientists Barry Marshall and Robin Warren demonstrated that it is the essential precondition for almost all gastric ulcers.   The microbe was already on the decline from sanitary improvements and routine antibiotic use, but doctors then began directly targeting H. pylori in adults, incidentally meaning parents were less likely to pass the microbe on to their children. Today, while up to 100 percent of children in developing countries have Helicobacter, fewer than 20 percent of kids in some developed countries do —and the latter is ostensibly a good thing.)

“It’s good and it’s bad,” says Blaser.  A study last year traced the human association with H. pylori back at least 116,000 years into our evolutionary history.  “The idea that an organism that has been with us that long is disappearing in a century is striking,” says Blaser.  “The good news is that it means less ulcers and less gastric cancer.  The bad news is that it means more childhood-onset asthma and more esophageal reflux, both of which have been linked to a lack of Helicobacter.”  In certain circumstances, Blaser argues, H. pylori may have protective effects we don’t yet fully recognize.

The medical community has thus far resisted the rehabilitation of H. pylori …

So now there’s a pig bred to serve as a model for better research on how H. pylori or harms. Here’s the press release:

Researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have developed a new large animal model to study how the immune system interacts with the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori, the leading cause of peptic ulcer disease.

The discovery in the October edition of the journal Infection and Immunity may inform changes in the ways doctors treat patients. An estimated 4 million Americans have sores in the stomach lining known as peptic ulcers, according to the American Gastroenterological Association.

Although the bacterium is found in more than half the world’s population, most people do not develop diseases. However, some experience chronic inflammation of the stomach, or gastritis, which can lead to the development of ulcers or cancer.

In addition to its role as a pathogen, the bacteria have beneficial effects, preventing certain chronic inflammatory and metabolic diseases, including Type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

When bacteria reside within host cells, the immune system typically recruits a type of white blood cell called T cells — in this case, CD8+ cytotoxic T cells — to destroy the infected cells.

However, the researchers found that these cells may contribute to tissue damage.

In patients with H. pylori-associated gastritis, higher numbers of cytotoxic T cells are present, indicating that these cells may contribute to the development of gastric lesions.

To study immune responses in H. pylori-mediated disease, researchers at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute’s Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory developed a pig model that closely mimics the human gastric environment. When pigs were infected with H. pylori, the researchers observed an increase in another type of immune cells called pro-inflammatory CD4+ T helper cells, followed by an increase in CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, according to the study.

Scientists did not observe an increase in CD8+ T cells in mouse and gerbil models of H. pylori infection. However, the rise of the cells in pigs mirrors the recent findings in human clinical studies.

“Pigs have greater anatomic, physiologic and immunologic similarities to humans than mice, the main animal model used in biomedical research,” said Raquel Hontecillas, co-director of the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory and the Center for Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens. “The results from our new pig model closely mimic what has been reported in clinical settings, which will allow us to comprehensively and systematically investigate human immune responses to H. pylori.”

The discovery will help scientists better understand the complex interactions of H. pylori and its host.

Researchers within the Center for Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens are using results from the pig model and other experimental data to develop a computational model of H. pylori infection. Such modeling efforts aim to develop faster, more efficient ways to predict initiation, progression and outcomes of infection.

The Center for Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. HHSN272201000056C. PI: Josep Bassaganya-Riera

The Disturbing Things We Do For Silk

Silkworm cocoons ready to be processed into silk (Photo: John Javellana/ Reuters)

The latest research on silkworms is wonderful news on the fashion front, opening up the possibility for new textiles and more efficient manufacturing methods. But for the silkworms, it also sounds kind of creepy in a science fiction nightmare way.

First, a little background. Humans have had a long and rewarding relationship with the Chinese mulberry silkworm Bombyx mori, ever since someone figured out 6,000 years ago how to unravel the threads from the caterpillars’ cocoons and weave them into gorgeous textiles for China’s emperors. The Chinese managed to keep the process secret for centuries, until it became the object of history’s first known instance of commercial espionage. In the sixth century A.D., according to legend, the European emperor Justinian dispatched two monks to China. They returned with both the silkworm eggs and seeds for the mulberry trees on which they feed, smuggled home inside bamboo walking sticks.

The result today is a global industry. China is once again leading the world, producing 58,000 tons of silk annually. (And that is a lot of caterpillars.) The United States also had a thriving silk industry, until the introduction of nylon in World War II. My family was among the many that benefited from it: My grandfather was a warper at silk mills in Manchester, Connecticut, and Paterson, New Jersey. So without silkworm wages—not to put too fine a point on it—there would be no me.

Now back to the new research, just out in the journal Biomacromolecules. British researchers have devised a means to continuously milk silk from living silkworms. This is a big deal because of an unfortunate fact behind the loveliness of silk: Up to now, the only way to unravel silk was to boil the cocoons, killing the silkworms inside. Mohandas Gandhi criticized the process, as have modern animal rights activists. But when researchers tried to extract the silk more directly, the caterpillars resisted, clamping onto the line and snapping it. The record for reeling a strand of silk out of a living caterpillar was just six meters.

The researchers in the new study noticed that silkworms employ a “play dead” behavior, lingering in a state of self-induced paralysis when injured. Otherwise, the caterpillar’s way of moving—picture the classic inchworm—would cause hydrostatic pressure and further tear the wound. Alex Wood, a physician and entomologist, identified the chemical the caterpillars rely on. By injecting it into caterpillars, researchers at Oxford University were able to induce a state of semi-paralysis.

The resulting production technique could make buying silk acceptable again, for people who have balked because of that business about boiling. Even so, the new technique doesn’t make a pretty picture: The caterpillar is attached to a stick and suspended in mid-air, like one of the unconscious organ donors in the science fiction movie Coma. One end of the silk that the worm is producing becomes attached to a reel, which slowly winds it up, keeping time with the caterpillar. In its semi-conscious state, the caterpillar may realize what’s happening. And it may not like it. But paralysis means that it is too weak to snap the wonderfully strong silk that it is producing. So far, the researchers have been able to extract silk from a single caterpillar for up to six hours, and a record of 500 meters.

The press release for the new study touts the discovery as the key to manufacturing a variety of new silk products, including medical implants (as in Coma). It also highlights “the exciting potential for genetically modifying silkworms to induce paralysis ‘on-demand,’ a particularly useful feature for mass-rearing.”

But to be honest, I think I’m going to have bad dreams tonight. You know the kind—lying there paralyzed while strangers move around in the shadows.

I suppose, though, that it is at least a step up from being boiled alive.

Eagle Schools Deer on Dinosaur Ancestry

An eagle takes down a deer (Photo: WCS)

This is one of the better camera trap images ever.  Here are the details from the folks at the Wildlife Conservation Society:

A camera trap set out for endangered Siberian (Amur) tigers in the Russian Far East photographed something far more rare: a golden eagle capturing a young sika deer.

The three images only cover a two-second period, but show an adult golden eagle clinging to the deer’s back. Its carcass was found two weeks later, just a few yards from the camera, initially puzzling researchers.

The paper and images appear in the September issue of the Journal of Raptor Research.  Authors include Linda Kerley of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

“I saw the deer carcass first as I approached the trap on a routine check to switch out memory cards and change batteries, but something felt wrong about it. There were no large carnivore tracks in the snow, and it looked like the deer had been running and then just stopped and died.” said lead author Dr. Linda Kerley of ZSL, who runs the camera trap project. “It was only after we got back to camp that I checked the images from the camera and pieced everything together. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

Co-author Dr. Jonathan Slaght of WCS noted that golden eagles have a long history of eyebrow-raising predation attempts. “The scientific literature is full of references to golden eagle attacks on different animals from around the world, from things as small as rabbits—their regular prey—to coyote and deer, and even one record in 2004 of an eagle taking a brown bear cub.”

Researchers from ZSL have been using camera traps for six years to monitor Amur tigers in the Lazovskii State Nature Reserve in Primorye in the southern Russian Far East. The images from these traps usually record common prey species, and occasionally a resident or transient tiger—information important to understanding tiger population structure.

The scientists underscore that golden eagles do not regularly attack deer, and there is no evidence that such attacks have any impact on deer populations.

Dr. Kerley said, “I’ve been assessing deer causes of death in Russia for 18 years—this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this.”

Dr. Slaght added, “In this case I think Linda just got really lucky and was able to document a very rare, opportunistic predation event.”

ZSL and WCS have been partnering on monitoring tigers and their prey in the Russian Far East since 2007, and are collaborating across the landscape to improve efficiency of anti-poaching teams. Both organizations have been working on Amur tiger conservation for approximately two decades (since 1995 and 1993, respectively).

Here are the other two images in the series, just before:

And just after, heading out of frame:

Pin-Striped Tit-Babblers in a Public Bath House

OK, I have to admit that when I read that title, it conjured up the image of lecherous Wall Street plutocrats playing peeping tom, and volubly comparing notes, outside the women’s bathing area.

But, in fact, it is a totally legit natural history description. Let’s go to the video

Also check out this version from the Bird Ecology Study Group, which adds some helpful commentary: http://www.besgroup.org/2013/09/23/pin-striped-tit-babblers-in-a-public-bath-house/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+besg+%28Bird+Ecology+Study+Group%29

 

Fathers and Sons

Regular readers may recall that a few months ago, after my father’s death, I posted an article he had written. ”Manchild Coming of Age,” about his youngest son Mark.

Yesterday, going through my Dad’s papers, I came across a poem he wrote in March 1951 about his eldest son Greg.  At the time, the writer was 30 years old and had just become the father of his fifth child, me.  Greg was 6.  It’s about blocked communication and miscommunication between father and son:

DAD RECALLS

Greg is a boy

And full of boy things:

Laughter, mischief,

Yearning wings.

Dad was a boy once

He recalls

Life in the itch

Of overalls.

Dad is a boy still –

Greg mustn’t know

Though Dad’s heart yearn

To Tell him so.

By the way, that second to last line is not a typo.  It’s not “Dad’s heart yearns.”  My father was extremely careful about his grammar, to the point that it sometimes became another form of blocked communication.  In this case, he’s using the subjunctive mood, to express a sort of future conditional.  To quote wikipedia, things in the subjunctive do “not refer directly to what is necessarily real.” That is, Dad’s heart might yearn. But he’s not saying so out loud.

So it’s a lovely, touching poem, but–how to express this correctly?–also fucked up.

Catching Poachers Before They Kill

A critically endangered Sarahan cheetah caught by a camera trap: (Photo: Farid Belbachir/ Reuters)

It seemed at first like a familiar story.  In 2011 at Orang National Park in Assam, India, poachers killed one of the park’s 70 rhinos, hacked off its precious horn, and made their escape.  But a few days later, park rangers were flipping through the latest batch of images from a nearby camera trap set to monitor wildlife.  To their surprise, the camera had caught a perfect image of three poachers entering the park before the killing, armed with .303 rifles.  After “wanted” posters appeared in nearby villages, two of the poachers soon surrendered and the third fled the area.

There was only one problem: The rhino was already dead.

Could camera traps actually stop poachers before they kill?

Since they first became widely available a decade or so ago, camera traps have revolutionized conservation biology. In the past, research relied entirely on what people could see or hear by spending time in the field.  But while human researchers tended to work by day, says Tim O’Brien, a camera trap specialist in Kenya for the Wildlife Conservation Society, “half the species out there are nocturnal, and the other half are doing everything they can to avoid humans.” By being on the scene around the clock and without human disturbance, other than occasional visits to change batteries and download photos, camera traps solved both problems, often with spectacular results  ….  to read the rest of the story, click here.

The Perils of Pangolins

(Photo: Tikki Hywood Trust, Zimbabwe)

My latest, published today at Yale Environment 360.

Early this year, a Chinese fishing vessel ran aground in Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Philippines. The 12 crewmen were already in trouble for damaging the protected coral reef. But then the Philippine Coast Guard crew working to re-float the vessel got a look at the cargo: 400 boxes of what may be the world’s most heavily trafficked wild mammal contraband — pangolins, carefully butchered and frozen to be served up as a status symbol on the dinner plates of the nouveaux riches in China and Vietnam.

If you have never even heard of pangolins, much less pangolin poaching, you are not alone. Even conservationists tend not to know much about these armor-plated animals, commonly known as scaly anteaters, perhaps because they are small, uncharismatic, and nocturnal. The headlines tend to focus on bigger and seemingly more immediate problems, notably the slaughter last year of 35,000 elephants for their ivory and 810 rhinos for their horns. But almost unnoticed, the illegal trade in pangolins has raged out of control, to meet demand in East Asia for both their meat and their scales, which are roasted and used, like rhino horn, in traditional medicines.

Within the last year alone:

French officials seized 110 pounds of pangolin scales, said to be worth $100,000, being transshipped via Charles De Gaulle Airport from Cameroon to Vietnam.
 Customs officials in Vietnam discovered a cargo of 6.2 tons of frozen pangolins being smuggled in from Indonesia.
Police in India stopped a shipment of scales taken from 300 pangolins.
Police in Thailand stopped a pickup truck carrying 102 pangolins.

Annual seizures run to about 10,000 pangolins, according to Dan Challender, co-chair of the pangolin specialist group for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). But that number is almost certainly a small fraction of what gets through to the marketplace. Notebooks seized in 2009 from one trafficking syndicate, for instance, revealed that 22,000 pangolins had been killed over 21 months just in the northern Borneo state of Sabah.

All eight pangolin species are in dramatic decline and Challender says the specialist group is currently reviewing their conservation status on the IUCN red list. Two of the four species in Asia are now listed as endangered, and in Africa, two are near threatened. Until now, the African species have mainly been hunted for bush meat. But demand from China and Vietnam has recently pushed prices there as high as $7,000 for a single animal, according to Darren Pietersen, who tracks radio-tagged pangolins for his doctoral research at the University of Pretoria.

The name “pangolin” comes from the Malayan dialect word “pengguling,” meaning “something that rolls up.” It’s an apt description of the pangolin’s primary means of self-defense. When threatened, a pangolin will tuck its head under its tail and ball itself up in the shelter of its armor plating – it looks a bit like a basketball crossed with an artichoke. In this posture, it’s “too big for a lion or hyena to get its mouth around and get a grip,” says Pietersen, and the scales are too tough to penetrate. “Most often a lion just chews on them for a few hours and gives up.”

The pangolin’s way of life has also generally provided it with protection against predators and hunters. A pangolin is usually active for only about four to eight hours a night, when it heads out to raid ant nests and termite mounds. Its long, pencil-thin tongue can extend up to 16 inches for probing into a nest, and it is coated with a sticky substance like flypaper to catch and retrieve insects. The ants defend themselves by spraying formic acid, says Pietersen, but a pangolin generally feeds and moves away from a nest in a minute or two, before the noxious spray can have much effect. Otherwise, arboreal pangolins spend most of their time in nest holes high up in tree trunks, and ground-dwelling species hide out in burrows as much as 11 feet beneath the surface.

But hunters now use dogs to locate arboreal pangolins or they spotlight the animals as they forage. Then they take down the nest tree or set snares outside burrows. The basketball-like defensive posture that lions can’t handle turns out to be perfectly suited to human poachers, who can pick up a pangolin and bag it without even a struggle.

That makes pangolins “the new rhinos,” says Lisa Hywood, who manages the Tikki Hywood Trust, an animal rescue and conservation facility in Zimbabwe. But she says the hazard for pangolin species is more urgent than for bigger, better known species: Zoos at least know how to breed elephants and rhinos in captivity. So even if every last one were to be hunted out, it would still be possible to save those species and reintroduce them to the wild.

But so far, she says, captive breeding of any of the eight pangolin species has proven extraordinarily difficult. Moreover, captive breeding wouldn’t solve the problem: Pangolins in the wild produce only one offspring per year, not nearly enough to replace the population being lost to poachers. (In a horrific twist, presenting a pangolin fetus for dinner is regarded as a particularly impressive status symbol in China.) The bottom line is that if a pangolin species goes extinct in the wild, it will be gone forever.

In July, the IUCN sponsored a meeting in Singapore of 40 conservationists from 14 countries to develop a global plan for pangolin conservation. Laws banning the trade are already in place in many countries, and it is also forbidden under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But enforcement is minimal, often with only token punishment for poachers. When they seize a pangolin shipment, some countries simply auction it off again, moving it back into the illegal market at a profit.

What’s needed, says Jonathan Baillie of the Zoological Society of London, are programs to “reduce demand for pangolin parts in East Asia” and also to create “pangolin strongholds where we can ensure the viability of populations in the wild.” One likely initiative is a social marketing campaign, with celebrity support, to make dead pangolins a symbol of shame rather than status in East Asia. The campaign would also inform people that pangolin scales, which are made of keratin, like fingernails, have no medicinal value whatsoever.

Raising public awareness also means introducing pangolins to the public as living creatures rather than simply as meat on a plate. Despite their obscurity, says Lisa Hywood, pangolins do in fact have their charismatic qualities. Her facility in Harare rehabilitates rescued pangolins for return to the wild. Part of the routine is a daily walk, she says, with the pangolins doing “what an animal does, digging, rolling in the dirt, investigating.” They aren’t on a leash. The handler walks a few steps behind, she says, and the pangolins don’t ball themselves up or run away because “they are very intelligent animals, and they can tell the difference between a person who is trying to kill and eat them, and one who is caring for them.”

Hywood has one pangolin she has been rearing for the past 18 months named Chaminuka. She says he recognizes her when she comes home, makes a soft chuffing noise, and stands up to hold her hand and greet her.

It can of course be deeply moving to work with elephants, she adds, speaking from experience. But she has discovered that working with pangolins can be even more powerfully emotional, especially as these curious creatures rapidly vanish from the face of the Earth.