Up to half of plant and animal species in the world's most naturally rich areas, such as the Amazon and the Galapagos, could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change if carbon emissions continue to rise unchecked.

East Africa elephants [Credit: WWF]

Even if the Paris Climate Agreement 2°C target is met, these places could lose 25% of their species according to a landmark new study by the University of East Anglia (UK), the James Cook University (Australia), and WWF.

Published today in the journal Climatic Change and just ahead of Earth Hour, the world's largest environmental event, researchers examined the impact of climate change on nearly 80,000 plant and animal species in 35 of the world's most diverse and naturally wildlife-rich areas.

It explores a number of different climate change futures - from a no-emissions-cuts case in which global mean temperatures rise by 4.5°C , to a 2°C rise, the upper limit for temperature in the Paris Agreement . Each area was chosen for its uniqueness and the variety of plants and animals found there.

The report finds that the Miombo Woodlands, home to African wild dogs, south-west Australia and the Amazon-Guianas are projected to be some the most affected areas. If there was a 4.5°C global mean temperature rise, the climates in these areas are projected to become unsuitable for many the plants and animals that currently live there meaning:

• - Up to 90% of amphibians, 86% of birds and 80% of mammals could potentially become locally extinct in the Miombo Woodlands, Southern Africa
• - The Amazon could lose 69% of its plant species
• - In south-west Australia 89% of amphibians could become locally extinct
• - 60% of all species are at risk of localised extinction in Madagascar
• - The Fynbos in the Western Cape Region of South Africa, which is experiencing a drought that has led to water shortages in Cape Town, could face localised extinctions of a third of its species, many of which are unique to that region.
• 
  

Verreaux's sifaka in Madagascar [Credit: WWF]

As well as this, increased average temperatures and more erratic rainfall could become be the "new normal" according to the report - with significantly less rainfall in the Mediterranean, Madagascar and the Cerrado-Pantanal in Argentina. Potential effects include;

• - Pressure on the water supplies of African elephants - who need to drink 150-300 litres of water a day
• - 96% of the breeding grounds of Sundarbans tigers could become submerged by sea-level rise
• - Comparatively fewer male marine turtles due to temperature-induced sex assignment of eggs.

If species can move freely to new locations then the risk of local extinction decreases from around 25% to 20% with a 2°C global mean temperature rise. If species cannot they may not be able to survive. Most plants, amphibians and reptiles, such as orchids, frogs and lizards cannot move quickly enough keep up with these climatic changes.

Lead researcher Prof Rachel Warren from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA said: "Our research quantifies the benefits of limiting global warming to 2°C for species in 35 of the world's most wildlife-rich areas. We studied 80,000 species of plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians and found that 50% of species could be lost from these areas without climate policy. However, if global warming is limited to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, this could be reduced to 25%. Limiting warming to within 1.5°C was not explored, but would be expected to protect even more wildlife."

Overall the research shows that the best way to protect against species loss is to keep global temperature rise as low as possible.

The Paris Agreement pledges to reduce the expected level of global warming from 4.5°C to around 3°C, which reduces the impacts, but we see even greater improvements at 2°C; and it is likely that limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C would protect more wildlife.

A giant panda from the Yangtze River area [Credit: WWF]

This is why on 24 March millions of people across the world will come together for Earth Hour, to show their commitment to reducing global emissions and protecting people and wildlife from the impacts of climate change. The event also sends a clear message to business and government that there is a global will to change this trajectory.

Tanya Steele, CEO of WWF commented: "Within our children's lifetime, places like the Amazon and Galapagos Islands could become unrecognisable, with half the species that live there wiped out by human-caused climate change. Around the world, beautiful iconic animals like Amur tigers or Javan rhinos are at risk of disappearing, as well as tens of thousands plants and smaller creatures that are the foundation of all life on earth. That is why this Earth Hour we are asking everyone to make a promise for the planet and make the everyday changes to protect our planet."

The models used in this research come from the Wallace Initiative, a near decade long partnership between the Tyndall Centre at UEA, eResearch at James Cook University, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and WWF.

Dr Jeff Price, coordinator of the Wallace Initiative and also from UEA, said: "This research provides a view on the differing spatial impacts of climate change on biodiversity. It shows the benefits of combining citizen science with the research and resources of highly-ranked universities to assist an NGO with their conservation activities."

Source: University of East Anglia [March 13, 2018]

Poaching and habitat loss have reduced forest elephant populations in Central Africa by 63 percent since 2001. This widespread killing poses dire consequences not only for the species itself but also for the region's forests, a new Duke University study finds.

Populations of forests elephants, which play key roles in maintaining forest habitat, have declined 63 percent in Central Africa since 2001. Without intervention to prevent further losses, 96 percent of the region's forests could undergo major change [Credit: John Poulsen, Duke University]

"Without intervention to stop poaching, as much as 96 percent of Central Africa's forests will undergo major changes in tree-species composition and structure as local populations of elephants are extirpated and surviving populations are crowded into ever-smaller forest remnants," said John Poulsen, assistant professor of tropical ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

These changes will occur because elephants are ecological engineers that help create and maintain forest habitat by dispersing seeds, recycling and spreading nutrients, and clearing understories, Poulsen explained.

"Because they are very large animals, they can eat fruits and disperse seeds too big for other animals to digest. And because they are highly mobile, they help disperse these seeds far and wide through their dung," he said.

In the elephants' absence, scores of tree species may be left without a means of long-distance seed dispersal, which is essential for forest structure and colonization. Trees whose seeds are dispersed by smaller animals could fill the void, dramatically altering forest composition.

Fewer elephants will also mean a more limited distribution of the nutrients contained in their dung.

"Many of Central Africa's forests are nitrogen limited. Elephants help compensate by moving nutrients, especially nitrogen, across the landscape as they defecate. If populations continue to shrink, this nitrogen will be concentrated in smaller and smaller areas, limiting future tree growth elsewhere," Poulsen said.

Understory density will also be affected.

"Elephants have a large effect on forests by eating or trampling slow-growing plants and opening the understory, allowing more light in and reducing competition for water and nutrients," Poulsen said. "These changes alter the recruitment regimes of tree species -- favoring some and not others."

He and his colleagues published their peer-reviewed study in the journal Conservation Biology.

To conduct their analysis, they reviewed 158 previous studies on forest elephant behaviors and their cascading ecological impacts. By cross-referencing these impacts with data on local elephant populations, forest tree-species composition and structure, nutrient availability, and understory growth in existing Central African forests -- both protected and unprotected ones alike -- Poulsen and his team determined that up to 96 percent of all forests in the region were susceptible to dramatic changes if elephant populations shrank or disappeared.

"Stopping poaching is an urgently needed first step to mitigating these effects," he said, "but it will not be easy. Long-term conservation will require land-use planning that incorporates elephant habitat into forested landscapes that are being rapidly transformed by industrial agriculture and logging."

Source: Duke University [March 12, 2018]

A major study into an ancient climate change event that affected a significant percentage of Earth's oceans has brought into sharp focus a lesser-known villain in global warming: oxygen depletion.

Credit: wildestanimal/Getty Images

The study, just published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined a past period of global warming around 94 million years ago, when oceans became de-oxygenated.

This famous period in Earth's geological history, known as an Oceanic Anoxic Event (OAE), was more severe and on much longer timescales than the current changes. But it has given the scientists studying this period an extreme case-study to help understand how the oceans are effected by high atmospheric CO2 emissions.

Research Fellow Dr. Matthew Clarkson and Professor Claudine Stirling, of the Chemistry Department at The University of Otago (New Zealand), applied a revolutionary new tool to examine how the oceans responded to climate change in the past.

Professor Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter, developed a model to interpret the new data whilst visiting the University of Otago. The model enabled the team to quantify how much carbon was injected into the atmosphere to trigger each of the two phases of the oceanic anoxic event.

"What this tells us is how vulnerable the Earth system is to large emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – whether from volcanic processes or human activities," Professor Lenton said. "One long-term consequence of warming the climate is to deoxygenate the ocean – with severe consequences for marine life."

The scientists used a novel technique that measures naturally-occurring uranium isotopes from ancient sediments, which could be used to estimate ocean oxygen content, thus identifying an ancient geochemical record of how much of the ocean was deoxygenated these many millions of years ago. They applied this technique to geological sediments that were once deposited in the ocean and are today preserved on land at the white cliffs in the South of England, and also in Italy.

They found that the likely driving mechanism of this anoxic, or deoxygenation, event was nutrient run-off, itself driven by high CO2 emissions and warmer temperatures; and that when CO2 emissions reduced, along with nutrient levels, global oceans recovered for a period.

Professor Stirling says the ability to predict what could happen, thanks to the combination of uranium isotopes and modelling, is a significant breakthrough.

"It helps us understand the missing piece of the puzzle, what happens to oxygen levels in our oceans when they are effected by global warning. CO2 levels in the atmosphere were much higher than they are now, so we won't see this level of change for a long time, but we will see the same sequence of events" she says.

Areas of ocean deoxygenation, known as "dead zones", can be found currently in a number of oceans around the world such in the eastern parts of the tropical Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The "dead zones" occur because it is harder to dissolve oxygen in water when the oceans are warm, and also more oxygen is used up during the breakdown of biological material. In these zones there are high amounts of nutrients, leading to high amounts of organic matter, and hence more oxygen is used up. Some of these nutrients come from run-off in rivers, and some from upwelling of deep ocean water.

Dr. Clarkson explains the importance of the study: "From studies like this scientists can describe the link between increased global temperatures and increased global weathering rates, which drive a high input of nutrients into the ocean.

"This leads to high primary productivity in the oceans and eventually the loss of oxygen as the organic matter degrades by aerobic respiration. This process is similar to eutrophication, which happens in many lakes and rivers due to the input of fertilisers, but in this case it occurred on a global oceanic scale," says Dr. Clarkson.

"Through comparison to other geochemical data, and simulating the event with a new biogeochemical model, we present strong evidence for the nutrient input hypothesis as a driving mechanism for anoxia (deoxygenation)."

The event was most likely caused by increased CO2 emissions from volcanic activity, over hundreds of thousands of years. Marine fauna suffered heavily during this event, although it is not considered one the major mass extinctions of Earth's history.

"Another significance of this study is that we are able to put a new estimate on the area of the seafloor that became anoxic, at around 8-15 percent, compared to only 0.3 percent in the modern ocean.

"Importantly, a number of completely independent studies, with very different methods, are finding consistent results for the Oceanic Anoxic Event. This helps gives scientists much greater confidence when trying to understand the legacy of modern human activity."

This particular Oceanic Anoxic Event was also thought to have lasted for around 1 million years, but the new data also shows for the first time that the global oceans briefly recovered in the middle of the event, before returning to widespread anoxia again.

"This recovery was the result of declining CO2 emissions from volcanic sources, and the removal of carbon from the atmosphere by weathering and the burial of organic matter. These two processes are known to help regulate the global climate, acting as negative feedback mechanisms similar to a thermostat, but they take a very long time."

Source: University of Exeter [March 06, 2018]

For nearly two decades, scientists have noted dramatic changes in arctic tundra habitat. Ankle-high grasses and sedges have given way to a sea of woody shrubs growing to waist- or neck-deep heights. This shrubification of the tundra challenges animals like caribou that are adapted to low-stature arctic vegetation.

Microscopic imaging reveals the pattern of annual rings in shrub stems, which the researchers used to determine that shrub growth is controlled by temperatures in June, the first month of the brief arctic growing season [Credit: Daniel Ackerman]

Pinpointing a cause has been difficult. However, new UMN research published in Environmental Research Letters found that regardless of soil fertility or rainfall amounts, the single variable that was by far the strongest determinant of how much a shrub grew in a given year was the temperature in June. A warmer June means faster shrub growth.

"It was a surprising result," said Daniel Ackerman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences who led the UMN research team that traveled to the tundra in northern Alaska to investigate why the habitat was changing. "Other variables, including temperatures during the rest of the growing season in July and August, barely had an impact on shrub growth."

University of Minnesota researcher Daniel Ackerman wades through neck-deep shrubs in northern Alaska to collect samples [Credit: Meera Subramanian]

Like trees at lower latitudes, shrubs in the tundra form a concentric ring around their stem each growing season. Ackerman's team used these annual rings to their advantage, collecting hundreds of shrub stems across a range of soil conditions. They measured the size of each annual ring in their samples--no easy task given that these shrubs can contain more than 50 rings in a stem with the diameter of a pencil.

After painstakingly measuring 20,000 individual shrub rings through a microscope, the team created records of historic shrub growth from across northern Alaska. Next, before coming to their findings, the team compared these growth records to climate observations, examining factors like precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation.

"Our new understanding of the link between June temperature and shrub growth means that we can expect shrubification to continue throughout northern Alaska," said Ackerman. "With this study and others like it, we're beginning to understand the causes of shrubification. However, we still have a ways to go in predicting its effects. It seems like larger shrubs will benefit some animals, like moose and ptarmigan, while other animals, like caribou, could be harmed."

Source: University of Minnesota [March 06, 2018]

Evolutionary biologists have now discovered that the Pygmy Marmoset – the world’s smallest monkey – is not one species but two.

Pygmy Marmoset [Credit: University of Salford]

Weighing just 100 grams - roughly the size of a large tomato - the insect-eating primate was first described scientifically in 1823 by German naturalist Johann Spix as Cebuella pygmaea, with a sub-species subsequently found.

Now a team led by the University of Salford, using the latest techniques in genomics and phylogenetics, have established proof of two clades or branches of pygmy marmosets, that have diverged from one another around 2 – 3 million years ago.

The study was restricted to monkeys in the Brazilian Amazon, but there are indications that researchers may discover more species with further research in the forests of the other countries where they live.

Implications for conservation efforts

Findings like this have serious implications for conservation, since population numbers essentially are halved when a species is suddenly split in two in the light of new scientific evidence.  Luckily for the pygmy marmosets, the forests where they are found are amongst the best preserved patches of Amazon, the scientists say.

The study, led by Jean Boubli, professor of tropical ecology and conservation, at Salford University, UK, and the first ever to use genomics to investigate the evolutionary history of a group of New World primates, is published in Molecular Phylogenics and Evolution.

The team, which included scientists from four Brazilian research institutes and US-based Conservation international, found one of the distinct Pygmy Marmoset species is found in Brazil’s Japurá basin, extending west into Colombia, northern Peru and Ecuador, while the other, is found south of the Amazon River, east to the Madeira River in Brazil, and possibly extending into Peru and Bolivia.

They employed genome sequencing (ddRADseq) to study the evolutionary history of Cebuella and found two lineages.

Keep original name?

Professor Boubli said: “There has long been confusion over the taxonomy of these wonderful creatures mostly because Spix did not record in his travel diaries the exact location where he collected the type of Cebuella pygmaea in the early 1800s.  That creates confusion as to which of  the two recently uncovered species should keep the original name; that of the north or of the south of the Amazon.

“The beauty of genomics means that we can now see the pygmy marmoset is a term for two species which have been evolving independently for nearly 3 million years.”

According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Pygmy Marmosets are species of “Least Concern.” But recent disease epidemics resulting have prompted the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Primate Specialist Group to recommend updating that status to Vulnerable.

The team is now collecting more data including faeces from different localities to clarify the taxonomy of Pygmy Marmosets and the geographic ranges of the two species already identified—and possibly even that of new ones.

Source: University of Salford [March 02, 2018]

For the past 40 years, the total number of Adélie Penguins, one of the most common on the Antarctic Peninsula, has been steadily declining -- or so biologists have thought. A new study led by researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, is providing new insights on of this species of penguin. In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown "supercolony" of more than 1,500,000 Adélie Penguins in the Danger Islands, a chain of remote, rocky islands off of the Antarctic Peninsula's northern tip.

The researchers found that the Danger Islands have 751,527 pairs of Adélie penguins--more than the rest of the entire  Antarctic Peninsula region combined. They include the third and fourth largest Adélie penguin colonies in the world  [Credit: Michael Polito, Louisiana State University]

"Until recently, the Danger Islands weren't known to be an important penguin habitat," says co-PI Heather Lynch, Associate Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University. These supercolonies have gone undetected for decades, she notes, partly because of the remoteness of the islands themselves, and partly the treacherous waters that surround them. Even in the austral summer, the nearby ocean is filled with thick sea ice, making it extremely difficult to access.

Yet in 2014, Lynch and colleague Mathew Schwaller from NASA discovered telltale guano stains in existing NASA satellite imagery of the islands, hinting at a mysteriously large number of penguins. To find out for sure, Lynch teamed with Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI, Mike Polito at LSU and Tom Hart at Oxford University to arrange an expedition to the islands with the goal of counting the birds firsthand.

When the group arrived in December 2015, they found hundreds of thousands of birds nesting in the rocky soil, and immediately started to tally up their numbers by hand. The team also used a modified commercial quadcopter drone to take images of the entire island from above.

Earlier reports based on satellite data suggested that the Danger Islands could be home to several penguin "supercolonies."  However, heavy pack ice is common around the Danger Islands, even in austral summer, making difficult to access this area  to conduct a comprehensive survey [Credit: Rachael Herman, Louisiana State University, © Stony Brook University]

"The drone lets you fly in a grid over the island, taking pictures once per second. You can then stitch them together into a huge collage that shows the entire landmass in 2D and 3D," says co-PI Hanumant Singh, Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University, who developed the drone's imaging and navigation system. Once those massive images are available, he says, his team can use neural network software to analyze them, pixel by pixel, searching for penguin nests autonomously.

The accuracy that the drone enabled was key, says Michael Polito, coauthor from Louisiana State University and a guest investigator at WHOI. The number of penguins in the Danger Islands could provide insight not just on penguin population dynamics, but also on the effects of changing temperature and sea ice on the region's ecology.

"Not only do the Danger Islands hold the largest population of Adélie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula, they also appear to have not suffered the population declines found along the western side of Antarctic Peninsula that are associated with recent climate change," says Polito.


Being able to get an accurate count of the birds in this supercolony offers a valuable benchmark for future change, as well, notes Jenouvrier. "The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why. Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know," she says.

It will also lend valuable evidence for supporting proposed Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) near the Antarctic Peninsula, adds Mercedes Santos, from the Instituto Antártico Argentino (who is not affiliated with this study but is one of the authors of the MPA proposal) with the Commission for the Conservation of the Antarctic Marine Living Resources, an international panel that decides on the placement of MPAs. "Given that MPA proposals are based in the best available science, this publication helps to highlight the importance of this area for protection," she says.

Source: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [March 02, 2018]

In a study spanning twelve years, researchers from Kyoto University, and with Ryukoku University have developed a method to calculate the fluctuating stability of a natural ecological community in Maizuru Bay.

Kyoto researchers spend a decade tracking changes in fish communities [Credit: Kyoto University/Reiji Masuda]

Their findings, published in Nature, provide insight into and new methodologies for ecological and population research.

How biological communities are maintained is a big question in ecology. While current studies suggest community stability can be influenced by species diversity and interactions, these ideas have almost never been tested in natural ecosystems.

"Previous research focused on issues such as the birth-death process, like when a predator eats prey, and inside a somewhat controlled environment," explains lead author Masayuki Ushio. "Even then, it is challenging to measure the rapidly changing interactions of multiple species in nature."

A key reason for this is that natural ecosystems do not typically exhibit equilibrium dynamics, and so the most viable way to measure changes is to keep constant records of organisms in a particular location.

Fortunately, Reiji Masuda of the Field Science Education and Research Center has been doing just that in Maizuru Bay. For twelve years, he has been diving into the waters every two weeks, recording the populations of all the fish and jellyfish he encountered.

"I initially started these observations in 2002 to see what organisms lived in the area and how they change over time," Masuda describes. "When I showed my work to Masayuki Ushio and Michio Kondoh at Ryukoku University, they suggested we work together and build a model to chart the interactions between the organisms."

The model was constructed by applying a time series analysis tool -- empirical dynamic modeling, or EDM -- to the Maizuru Bay data set. EDM is designed to analyze the fluctuating dynamics of a natural ecosystem, without setting any defined equations. This was then further developed to analyze the ecosystem's dynamic stability.

What they found was a complex web of interactions, where organisms have positive or negative effects on each other, and more importantly, showed that short-term changes in the network influences overall community dynamics.

"We could even see that things such as diversity, species interactions, and stability itself fluctuate throughout time," says Ushio. "This suggests that these properties are key to understanding the mechanisms underlying the functioning of natural ecosystems."

The team's methods can be readily applied to other fields, from neuroscience, microbiology, to economics.

"This is by far one of the most comprehensive looks at how much an ecosystem can change in the natural world," concludes team leader Michio Kondoh. "I was surprised to see that community stability, which is often assumed to be constant, is in fact changing over time. The robustness of ecological communities depends on timing and seasons."

Source: Kyoto University [March 02, 2018]

A new study has confirmed that the world's last breeding population of leopards in Cambodia is at immediate risk of extinction, having declined an astonishing 72% during a five-year period. The population represents the last remaining leopards in all of eastern Indochina -- a region incorporating Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

One of Cambodia's last leopards [Credit: Susan Weller, Panthera]

The report was published this month in the Royal Society Open Science journal by Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), Panthera -- the global wild cat conservation organization, WWF-Cambodia, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Forestry Administration of the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries of Cambodia.

Carried out in Cambodia's Eastern Plains Landscape, the study revealed one of the lowest concentrations of leopards ever reported in Asia, with a density of one individual per 100 square kilometers. Increased poaching, especially indiscriminate snaring for the illegal wildlife trade and bushmeat, is to blame for the dramatic decline.

Panthera Southeast Asia Leopard Program Coordinator and study coauthor, Dr. Jan Kamler, stated, "This population represents the last glimmer of hope for leopards in all of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam -- a subspecies on the verge of blinking out. No longer can we, as an international community, overlook conservation of this unique wild cat."

Kamler continued, "As the world gathers to celebrate World Wildlife Day this Saturday, we must band together in action, not just in words, to curb the epidemic of poaching facing this gorgeous big cat and others around the globe."

Professor David Macdonald, Director of the WildCRU and also a co-author, added "Leopards are a monument to opportunism, adapting to habitats from desert to urban jungle, but their adaptability risks a deadly complacency: people think -- "oh, leopards will be fine." They won't! Almost everywhere they are doing worse than people thought, and our findings show that in SE Asia they are heading for catastrophe."

In addition to these somber results, scientists were shocked to discover that the primary prey of leopards was banteng -- a wild species of cattle weighing up to 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds). In particular, male leopards targeted this large ungulate, making this the only known leopard population in the world whose main prey weighed greater than 500 kg (1,100 pounds), more than five times the leopard's mass.

Scientists believe the Indochinese leopards' new choice of prey was triggered by the extirpation of tigers from the region in 2009, which created a predatory void for the opportunistic and highly adaptable species.

Prompted by the study's findings, Panthera and WildCRU are working with local and national collaborators to increase effective law enforcement and monitoring of this region, which will include the use of Panthera PoacherCams, and strengthen environmental laws to develop strictly protected conservation zones and increased fines for poachers.

Historically found throughout all of Southeast Asia, the Indochinese leopard has lost 95% of its range and is likely to be classified as Critically Endangered by IUCN later this year. A separate study recently authored by WildCRU, Panthera and partners estimates just over 1,000 breeding adult Indochinese leopards remain in all of Southeast Asia. However, just 20-30 reproductive individuals remain in eastern Cambodia, representing the last hope for the leopard's future in eastern Indochina.

Poaching for bushmeat and the illegal wildlife trade, habitat loss, prey decline due to bushmeat poaching, and conflict with people are to blame, creating a deadly cocktail of threats facing leopards in Asia, and around the globe.

WildCRU scientist and lead author, Susana Rostro-Garcia, stated, "Much of the snaring in Cambodia, and across Southeast Asia, is driven by the rising demand for bushmeat. Wild landscapes are covered with thousands of snares set to catch wild pig and deer to supply bushmeat markets. Unfortunately, these snares also negatively impact many other species, with leopards and other wildlife often caught as by catch, and their valuable parts removed and sold to illegal wildlife traders."

In particular, as tiger numbers plummet due to poaching pressure, leopard skins and other body parts are increasingly coveted for use as status symbols and in traditional Asian medicines sold through the illegal wildlife trade.

Source: Panthera [March 01, 2018]

An international team of researchers has produced one of the most comprehensive evolutionary pictures to date by looking at one of the world's most iconic animal families - namely elephants, and their relatives mammoths and mastodons-spanning millions of years.

Crushed dentine from a Woolly Mammoth for DNA extraction [Credit: JD Howell, McMaster University]

The team of scientists-which included researchers from McMaster, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Harvard Medical School, Uppsala University, and the University of Potsdam-meticulously sequenced 14 genomes from several species: both living and extinct species from Asia and Africa, two American mastodons, a 120,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant, and a Columbian mammoth.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, sheds light on what scientists call a very complicated history, characterized by widespread interbreeding. They caution, however, the behaviour has virtually stopped among living elephants, adding to growing fears about the future of the few species that remain on earth.

"Interbreeding may help explain why mammoths were so successful over such diverse environments and for such a long time, importantly this genomic data also tells us that biology is messy and that evolution doesn't happen in an organized, linear fashion," says evolutionary geneticist Hendrik Poinar, one of the senior authors on the paper and Director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and principal investigator at the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Research.

"The combined analysis of genome-wide data from all these ancient elephants and mastodons has raised the curtain on elephant population history, revealing complexity that we were simply not aware of before," he says.

Graduate student Emil Karpinski holds a tibial cross section from a Siberian Woolly Mammoth. This permafrost preserved sample still contains fat entombed marrow [Credit: JD Howell, McMaster University]

A detailed DNA analysis of the ancient straight-tusked elephant, for example, showed that it was a hybrid with portions of its genetic makeup stemming from an ancient African elephant, the woolly mammoth and present-day forest elephants.

"This is one of the oldest high-quality genomes that currently exists for any species," said Michael Hofreiter at the University of Potsdam in Germany, a co-senior author who led the work on the straight-tusked elephant.

Researchers also found further evidence of interbreeding among the Columbian and woolly mammoths, which was first reported by Poinar and his team in 2011. Despite their vastly different habitats and sizes, researchers believe the woolly mammoths, encountered Columbians mammoths at the boundary of glacial and in the more temperate ecotones of North America.

Strikingly, scientists found no genetic evidence of interbreeding among two of the world's three remaining species, the forest and savanna elephants, suggesting they have lived in near-complete isolation for the past 500,000 years, despite living in neighbouring habitats.

These are African savanna elephants in the San Diego Zoo. In the middle is Swazi, the female elephant from which the reference genome was sequenced [Credit: San Diego Zoo Global]

"There's been a simmering debate in the conservation communities about whether African savannah and forest elephants are two different species," said David Reich, another co-senior author at the Broad Institute who is also a professor at the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. "Our data show that these two species have been isolated for long periods of time - making each worthy of independent conservation status."

Interbreeding among closely related mammals is fairly common, say researchers, who point to examples of brown and polar bears, Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, and the Eurasian gold jackal and grey wolves. A species can be defined as a group of similar animals that can successfully breed and produce fertile offspring.

"This paper, the product of a grand initiative we started more than a decade ago, is far more than just the formal report of the elephant genome. It will be a reference point for understanding how diverse elephants are related to each other and it will be a model for how similar studies can be done in other species groups," said co-senior author Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, a senior associate member of the Broad Institute and Director of the Science for Life Laboratory at Uppsala University in Sweden.

"The findings were extremely surprising to us," says Eleftheria Palkopoulou, a post-doctoral scientist in at HMS. "The elephant population relationships could not be explained by simple splits, providing clues for understanding the evolution of these iconic species."

Researchers suggest that future work should explore whether the introduction of new genetic lineages into elephant populations-both living and ancient-played an important role in their evolution, allowing them to adapt to new habitats and fluctuating climates.

Source: McMaster University [February 26, 2018]

More than 70 percent of the global King penguin population, currently forming colonies in Crozet, Kerguelen and Marion sub-Antarctic islands, may be nothing more than a memory in a matter of decades, as global warming will soon force the birds to move south, or disappear. This is the conclusion of a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change and performed by an international team of researchers.

More than 70 percent of the global King penguin population may be nothing more than a memory in a matter of decades,  as global warming will soon force the birds to move south, or disappear [Credit: Robin Cristofari]

"The main issue is that there is only a handful of islands in the Southern Ocean and not all of them are suitable to sustain large breeding colonies" says Robin Cristofari, first author of the study, from the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC/CNRS/University of Strasbourg) and the Centre Scientifique de Monaco (CSM).

King penguins are in fact picky animals: in order to form a colony where they can mate, lay eggs and rear chicks over a year, they need tolerable temperature all year round, no winter sea ice around the island, and smooth beach of sand or pebbles. But, above all, they need an abundant and reliable source of food close by to feed their chicks. For millennia, this seabird has relied on the Antarctic Polar Front, an upwelling front in the Southern Ocean concentrating enormous amounts of fish on a relatively small area.

Yet, due to climate change, this area is drifting south, away from the islands where most King penguins currently live. Parents are then forced to swim farther to find food, while their progeny is waiting, fasting longer and longer on the shore. This study predicts that, for most colonies, the length of the parents' trips to get food will soon exceed the resistance to starvation of their offspring, leading to massive King penguin crashes in population size, or, hopefully, relocation.

King penguins are picky animals [Credit: Celine LeBohec]

Using the information hidden away in the penguin's genome, the research team has reconstructed the changes in the worldwide King penguin population throughout the last 50,000 years, and discovered that past climatic changes, causing shifts in marine currents, sea-ice distribution and Antarctic Polar Front location, have always been linked to critical episodes for the King penguins. However, hope is not lost yet: King penguins have already survived such crises several times (the last time was 20 thousand years ago), and they may be particularly good at it.

"Extremely low values in indices of genetic differentiation told us that all colonies are connected by a continuous exchange of individuals," says Emiliano Trucchi formerly at the University of Vienna and now at the University of Ferrara, one of the coordinator of the study. "In other words, King penguins seem to be able to move around quite a lot to find the safest breeding locations when things turn grim."

But there is a major difference this time: for the first time in the history of penguins, human activities are leading to rapid and/or irreversible changes in the Earth system, and remote areas are no exception. In addition to the strongest impact of climate change in Polar Regions, Southern Ocean is now subject to industrial fishing, and penguins may soon have a very hard time fighting for their food.

Penguins form colonies in Crozet, Kerguelen and Marion sub-Antarctic islands [Credit: Celine LeBohec]

"There are still some islands further south where King penguins may retreat," notes Celine Le Bohec (IPHC/CNRS/University of Strasbourg and CSM), leader of the programme 137 of the French Polar Institut Paul-Emile Victor within which the study was initiated, "but the competition for breeding sites and for food will be harsh, especially with the other penguin species like the Chinstrap, Gentoo or Adelie penguins, even without the fisheries. It is difficult to predict the outcome, but there will surely be losses on the way. If we want to save anything, proactive and efficient conservation efforts but, above all, coordinated global action against global warming should start now."

Source: University of Vienna [February 26, 2018]

Caecilians are serpent-like creatures, but they're not snakes or giant worms. The limbless amphibians, related to frogs and salamanders, favor tropical climates of Africa, Asia and the Americas. Most live in burrows of their own making; some are aquatic.

A limbless amphibian, known as Caecilian, Siphonops annulatus, widely distributed in Brazil. Scientists from Utah State University in the United States and Brazil’s Butantan Institute report skin gland concentrations adapted to different evolutionary pressures in the head and posterior regions of the amphibian [Credit: Carlos Jared, Butantan Institute]

With colleagues from Brazil, Utah State University ecologist Edmund "Butch" Brodie, Jr. reports caecilians feature greatly enlarged poison glands at each end of their bodies, which appear to have evolved from different selective pressures - the ability to tunnel into the ground and to defend oneself from predators.

Brodie, along with Carlos Jared, Pedro Luiz Mailho-Fontana, Rafael Marques-Porto, Juliana Mozer Sciani, Daniel Carvalho Pimenta, and Marta Maria Antoniazzi of São Paulo's Butantan Institute, published the findings in Scientific Reports.

The team's research, supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, focuses on Siphonops annulatus, a caecilian species found throughout Brazil.

"My Brazilian colleagues noticed the burrows made by this species were lined with a shiny, slick substance," says Brodie, professor in USU's Department of Biology and the USU Ecology Center. "We didn't think it was a secretion from the poison glands, so we decided to investigate."

The Brazilian caecilian, grayish in color and measuring about 18 inches in length, is a surprisingly rapid burrower, he says.

Magnified image of connective tissue matrix forming honeycomb structure surrounding glands on the head of Caecilian, Siphonops annulatus. Scientists from Utah State University in the United States and Brazil’s Butantan Institute report skin gland concentrations adapted to different evolutionary pressures in the head and posterior regions of the amphibian [Credit: Carlos Jared, Butantan Institute]

"When caecilians burrow, they force their snouts into the ground and essentially dive into the soil," Brodie says.

As suspected, the team discovered all the skin glands in the serpentine creatures' head region were greatly enlarged, tightly packed mucous glands - not poison ones. The slippery lubrication enables the caecilians' rapid, subterranean escape from predators, especially coral snakes.

"We know of no other amphibian with this high concentration of mucous glands," Brodie says. "In other terrestrial amphibians, mucous is mainly related to the uptake of oxygen. Here, in caecilians, it's obviously used in locomotion."

Examination of the caecilians revealed further information. The mucous glands extend throughout the amphibians' body, in gradually reduced concentration, and give way to poison glands concentrated in the tail.

"The poison glands, resulting from a different selective pressure, provide another defense from predators," Brodie says. "In addition to chemical defense, the tail acts as a 'plug,' blocking the tunnel and further deterring predators."

The eccentric amphibian, Brodie and colleagues write, is "really a box of surprises."

Author: Mary-Ann Muffoletto | Source: Utah State University [February 23, 2018]

There are no such things as "wild" horses anymore. Research published in Science overturns a long-held assumption that Przewalski's horses, native to the Eurasian steppes, are the last wild horse species on Earth. Instead, phylogenetic analysis shows Przewalski's horses are feral, descended from the earliest-known instance of horse domestication by the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago.

Thought to be the world's last-remaining 'wild' horse, Przewalski's horses actually descend from horses domesticated by the Botai people about 5,500 years ago [Credit: Lee Boyd]

Further, the new paper finds that modern domesticated horses didn't descend from the Botai horses, an assumption previously held by many scientists.

"This was a big surprise," said co-author Sandra Olsen, curator-in-charge of the archaeology division of the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas, who led archaeological work at known Botai villages. "I was confident soon after we started excavating Botai sites in 1993 that we had found the earliest domesticated horses. We went about trying to prove it, but based on DNA results Botai horses didn't give rise to today's modern domesticated horses -- they gave rise to the Przewalski's horse."

The findings signify there are no longer true "wild" horses left, only feral horses that descend from horses once domesticated by humans, including Przewalski's horses and mustangs that descend from horses brought to North America by the Spanish.

"This means there are no living wild horses on Earth -- that's the sad part," said Olsen. "There are a lot of equine biologists who have been studying Przewalskis, and this will be a big shock to them. They thought they were studying the last wild horses. It's not a real loss of biodiversity -- but in our minds, it is. We thought there was one last wild species, and we're only just now aware that all wild horses went extinct."

Some of the Botai horses were found to carry genetic variants causing white and leopard coat spotting patterns [Credit: Ludovic Orlando, reworked by Sean Goddard and Alan Outram]

Many of the horse bones and teeth Olsen excavated at two Botai sites in Kazakhstan, called Botai and Krasnyi Yar, were used in the phylogenetic analysis. The international team of researchers behind the paper sequenced the genomes of 20 horses from the Botai and 22 horses from across Eurasia that spanned the last 5,500 years. They compared these ancient horse genomes with already published genomes of 18 ancient and 28 modern horses.

"Phylogenetic reconstruction confirmed that domestic horses do not form a single monophyletic group as expected if descending from Botai," the authors wrote. "Earliest herded horses were the ancestors of feral Przewalski's horses but not of modern domesticates."

Olsen said the findings give rise to a new scientific quest: locating the real origins of today's domesticated horses.

"What's interesting is that we have two different domestication events from slightly different species, or separate sub-species," she said. (The Przewalski's horse's taxonomic position is still debated.) "It's thought that modern-day domesticated horses came from Equus ferus, the extinct European wild horse. The problem is they were thought to have existed until the early 1900s. But, the remains of two individuals in St. Petersburg, Russia, are probably feral, too, or at least probably had some domesticated genes."

Olsen led excavation of Botai sites associated with the earliest-known domestication of horses [Credit: Sandra Olsen]

Olsen began excavating Botai village sites in Kazakhstan in 1993 after the fall of the Soviet Union made the region accessible to western scientists. Some of the horse remains collected by Olsen were tested as part of the new study showing their ancestry of modern-day Przewalskis.

The Botai's ancestors were nomadic hunters until they became the first-known culture to domesticate horses around 5,500 years ago, using horses for meat, milk, work and likely transportation.

"Once they domesticated horses they became sedentary, with large villages of up to 150 or more houses," said Olsen, who specializes in zooarchaeology, or the study of animal remains from ancient human occupation sites. "They lived primarily on horse meat, and they had no agriculture. We had several lines of evidence that supported domestication. The fact the Botai were sedentary must have meant they had domesticated animals, or plants, which they didn't have. More than 95 percent of the bones from the Botai sites were from horses -- they were in a sense mono-cropping one species with an incredible focus. If they were hunting horses on foot, they would have quickly depleted bands of horses in the vicinity of the villages and would have had to go farther afield to hunt -- it wouldn't have been feasible or supported that large human population."

The KU researcher also cited bone artifacts from Botai sites used to make rawhide thongs that might have been fashioned into bridles, lassos, whips, riding crops and hobbles, as further evidence of horse domestication. Moreover, the Botai village sites include horse corrals.

The Botai buried horses with their snouts pointing southeast toward the rising sun [Credit: Sandra Olsen]

"We found a corral that contained high levels of nitrogen and sodium from manure and urine," said Olsen. "It was very concentrated within that corral. The final smoking gun was finding residues of mares' milk in the pottery. It's commonplace today in Mongolia and Kazakhstan to milk horses -- when it's fermented it has considerable nutritional value and is very high in vitamins."

Interestingly, Olsen found that after slaughtering horses, the Botai buried some horse skulls and necks in pits with their snouts facing the southeast, toward where the sun rose in the morning in autumn. Mongols and Kazakhs slaughter most of their horses at that time of year because that is when they retain the most amount of nutritious fat in their bodies.

"It's interesting because throughout the Indo-European diaspora there's a strong connection between the sun god and the horse," she said. "It may be that Botai people spoke an early proto-Indo-European language, and they also connected the horse to the sun god. Later in time, and this idea is in the historical record for the Indo-European diaspora, it was believed the sun god was born in the east and rode across the sky in a chariot, pulled by white horses. According to the belief, he would then die in the west and be reborn every day."

The team behind the paper believe Przewalski's horses likely escaped from domestic Botai herds in eastern Kazakhstan or western Mongolia.

Excavation at the Botai site, Northern Kazakhstan, 2017 [Credit: Alan Outram/University of Exeter]

"They started developing a semi-wild lifestyle like our mustangs, but they still have a wild appearance," Olsen said. "This is partly why biologists assumed they were genuinely wild animals. They have an upright mane, something associated with wild equids. They also have a dun coat, like the ones you see in the Ice Age cave paintings in France and Spain made when horses were wild. Their size, however, is very similar to what you see at Botai and other sites."

By 1969, Przewalski's horses were declared extinct in the wild, and all living today originated from just 15 individuals captured around 1900. Today, there are approximately 2,000 Przewalski's horses, all descended from those captured horses, and they have been reintroduced on the Eurasian steppes. In a sense, the horses have fared better than the peoples who once domesticated them.

"The Botai people seem to have vanished from their homeland in northern Kazakhstan," said Olsen. "Perhaps they migrated eastward to Mongolia since the later Bronze Age people there shared the practice of ritually burying the horse's head and neck pointing toward the rising sun in the autumn, the time of year they were slaughtered. That's a very specific shared trait."

Source: University of Kansas [February 22, 2018]

Researchers from the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria have CT scanned all 13 known Tasmanian tiger joey specimens to create 3D digital models, allowing them to study their skeletons and internal organs, and reconstruct their growth and development.

Internal structures of Thylacine joeys [Credit: University of Melbourne]

This has revealed important new information about how this unique extinct marsupial evolved to look so similar to the dingo, despite being very distantly related.

The digital scans show that when first born the Tasmanian tiger or thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) looked like any other marsupial. But three months later, when they left the pouch, they had taken on the appearance of a puppy and continued to grow with a dog-like appearance.

The research, led by the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria and in conjunction with an international team of scientists, is published in Royal Society Open Science.

The Tasmanian tiger was a marsupial, which raised its young in a pouch. Its resemblance to the dingo is one of the best examples of convergent evolution in mammals. This is where two species, despite not being closely related, evolve to look very similar. The Tasmanian tiger would have last shared a common ancestor with the canids (dogs and wolves) around 160 million years ago.

The specimens cover ages from two to 12 weeks. The white scalebar is 10mm [Credit: University of Melbourne]

Dr Christy Hipsley, Research Associate at the University of Melbourne and Museums Victoria, said after sequencing the Tasmanian tiger genome in 2017, this research fills one more piece of the puzzle on why they have evolved to look so similar to dogs. 

"This is the first digital development series of the Tasmanian tiger, Australia’s most iconic extinct marsupial predator.

"Using CT technology we have been able to garner new information on the biology of this iconic species, and its growth and development."

These scans show in incredible detail how the Tasmanian tiger started its journey in life as a joey that looked very much like any other marsupial, with robust forearms so that it could climb into its mothers pouch. But by the time it left the pouch around 12 weeks to start independent life, it looked more like a dog or wolf, with longer hind limbs than forelimbs.


Once ranging throughout Australian and New Guinea, the Tasmanian tiger disappeared from the mainland around 3000 years ago, likely due to competition with humans and dingos.

The remaining Tasmanian tiger population, isolated on Tasmania, was hunted to extinction in the early 20th century, with the last known individual dying at Hobart Zoo in 1936.

Axel Newton, PhD student and Lead Author on the paper notes, until now there have only been limited details on its growth and development. For the very first time we have been able to look inside these remarkably rare and precious specimens.

Unable to study the living species, the team had to look to the 13 Tasmanian tiger joey specimens that exist in museum collections worldwide, including three from the collection of Museums Victoria. These joey specimens, representing five stages of postnatal development, were scanned using non-invasive X-ray micro-CT scanning technology to create high resolution 3D digital models, in which all their internal structures such as skeleton and organs could be studied.


Associate Professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne explains this was an incredibly effective technique to study the skeletal anatomy of the specimens without causing any damage to them.

"This research clearly demonstrates the power of CT technology. It has allowed us to scan all the known Thylacine joey specimens in the world, and study their internal structures in high resolution without having to dissect or cause damage to the specimen. By examining their bone development, we’ve been able to illustrate how the Tasmanian tiger matured and identify when they took on the appearance of a dog."

The study has also revealed the incorrect classification of two specimens held in the collection of the Tasmanian Museums and Art Gallery (TMAG). Instead, they are most likely to be quolls or Tasmanian devils, based on the number of vertebrate and presence of large epipubic bones (specialised bones that support the pouch in modern marsupials).

Tasmanian tiger [Credit: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania]

Senior Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at TMAG, Ms Kathryn Medlock, said that the museum had received many requests to dissect its pouch young over the years but requests were always refused.

"One of the major advantages of this new technology is that it has enabled us to do research and answer many questions without destruction of the sample specimens. This is a significant advancement that also has an additional benefit of helping us to learn more about the identity of these specimens that have been in the TMAG collection for many years."

An exciting outcome of the research is that the 3D digital Tasmanian tiger models are to be made publicly available as a resource for current and future researchers.

Source: The University of Melbourne [February 21, 2018]

New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of "extinction cascades," where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions.

Credit: Andreas Haselböck/Senckenberg

The researchers, from the University of Exeter, showed there is a higher risk of extinction cascades when other species are not present to fill the "gap" created by the loss of a species.

Even if the loss of one species does not directly cause knock-on extinctions, the study shows that this leads to simpler ecological communities that are at greater risk of "run-away extinction cascades" with the potential loss of many species.

With extinction rates at their highest levels ever and numerous species under threat due to human activity, the findings are a further warning about the consequences of eroding biodiversity.

"Interactions between species are important for ecosystem (a community of interacting species) stability," said Dr Dirk Sanders, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall. "And because species are interconnected through multiple interactions, an impact on one species can affect others as well.

"It has been predicted that more complex food webs will be less vulnerable to extinction cascades because there is a greater chance that other species can step in and buffer against the effects of species loss.

"In our experiment, we used communities of plants and insects to test this prediction."

The researchers removed one species of wasp and found that it led to secondary extinctions of other, indirectly linked, species at the same level of the food web.

This effect was much stronger in simple communities than for the same species within a more complex food web.

Dr Sanders added: "Our results demonstrate that biodiversity loss can increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to secondary extinctions which, when they occur, can then lead to further simplification causing run-away extinction cascades."

The study, supported by France's Sorbonne Université, is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How extinction cascades work

The loss of a predator can initiate a cascade, such as in the case of wolves, where their extinction on one mountain can cause a large rise in the number of deer. This larger number of deer then eats more plant material than they would have before. This reduction in vegetation can cause extinctions in any species that also relies on the plants, but are potentially less competitive, such as rabbits or insects.

Source: University of Exeter [February 19, 2018]

Over a 16-year period, about half of the orangutans living on the island of Borneo were lost as a result of changes in land cover. That's according to estimates reported in Current Biology showing that more than 100,000 of the island's orangutans disappeared between 1999 and 2015.

A Bornean orangutan [Credit: Marc Ancrenaz]

Many of those losses were apparently driven by the demand for logging, oil palm, mining, paper, and associated deforestation. However, many orangutans have also disappeared from more intact, forested areas, the researchers say. Those findings suggest that hunting and other direct conflicts between orangutans and people remain a major threat to the species.

"The decline in population density was most severe in areas that were deforested or transformed for industrial agriculture, as orangutans struggle to live outside forest areas," says Maria Voigt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "Worryingly, however, the largest number of orangutans were lost from areas that remained forested during the study period. This implies a large role of killing."

To estimate changes in the size of the orangutan population over time, Voigt, along with Serge Wich from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and their colleagues representing 38 international institutions, compiled field surveys conducted from 1999 to 2015. They extrapolated the overall size of the island's population from the number of orangutan nests observed throughout the species' range in Borneo.

This photograph shows where Bornean forest was cleared for road development  [Credit: Marc Ancrenaz]

All told, the team observed 36,555 nests. They estimated a loss of 148,500 Bornean orangutans between 1999 and 2015.The data also suggest that only 38 of the 64 identified spatially separated groups of orangutans (known as metapopulations) now include more than 100 individuals, which is the accepted lower limit to be considered viable.

In order to identify the likely causes of those losses, the researchers relied on maps of estimated land-cover change over the same period that have been made possible by advances in remote sensing technology. The comparison of orangutan and habitat losses suggests that land clearance caused the most dramatic rates of decline. However, a much larger number of orangutans were lost in selectively logged and primary forests. That's because while the rates of decline were less precipitous in those areas, that's also where far more orangutans are found, the researchers explain.

By 2015, they report, about half of the orangutans estimated to live on Borneo in 1999 were found in areas in which resource use has since caused significant changes to the environment. Based on predicted future losses of forest cover and the assumption that orangutans ultimately cannot survive outside forest areas, the researchers predict that over 45,000 more orangutans will be lost over the next 35 years.

This photograph shows where Bornean forest was cleared for a factory  [Credit: Marc Ancrenaz]

They say that effective partnerships with logging companies and other industries are now essential to the Bornean orangutan's survival. Public education and awareness will also be key.

"Orangutans are flexible and can survive to some extent in a mosaic of forests, plantations, and logged forest, but only when they are not killed," Wich says. "So, in addition to protection of forests, we need to focus on addressing the underlying causes of orangutan killing. The latter requires public awareness and education, more effective law enforcement, and also more studies as to why people kill orangutans in the first place."

They note that Indonesia and Malaysia are both currently developing long-term action plans for orangutan conservation. By taking into account past failures, the hope is that new strategies to protect orangutans can be developed and implemented.

Source: Cell Press [February 15, 2018]