#conservation of biodiversity

[reasonsforhope]

"Once thought to be extinct, black-footed ferrets are the only ferret native to North America, and are making a comeback, thanks to the tireless efforts of conservationists.

Captive breeding, habitat restoration, and wildlife reintegration have all played a major role in bringing populations into the hundreds after near total extinction.

But one other key development has been genetic cloning.

In April [2024], the United States Fish and Wildlife Service announced the cloning of two black-footed ferrets from preserved tissue samples, the second and third ferret clones in history, following the birth of the first clone in December 2020. 

Cloning is a tactic to preserve the health of species, as all living black-footed ferrets come from just seven wild-caught descendants.  This means their genetic diversity is extremely limited and opens them up to greater risks of disease and genetic abnormalities. 

Now, a new breakthrough has been made.

Antonia, a black-footed ferret cloned from the DNA of a ferret that lived in the 1980s has successfully birthed two healthy kits of her own: Sibert and Red Cloud.

These babies mark the first successful live births from a cloned endangered species — and is a milestone for the country’s ferret recovery program.

The kits are now three months old, and mother Antonia is helping to raise them — and expand their gene pool.

In fact, Antonia’s offspring have three times the genetic diversity of any other living ferrets that have come from the original seven ancestors.

Researchers believe that expanded genetic diversity could help grow the ferrets’ population and help prime them to recover from ongoing diseases that have been massively detrimental to the species, including sylvatic plague and canine distemper. 

“The successful breeding and subsequent birth of Antonia's kits marks a major milestone in endangered species conservation,” said Paul Marinari, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. 

“The many partners in the Black-footed Ferret Recovery Program continue their innovative and inspirational efforts to save this species and be a model for other conservation programs across the globe.”

Antonia actually gave birth to three kits, after mating with Urchin, a 3-year-old male ferret. One of the three kits passed away shortly after birth, but one male and one female are in good health and meeting developmental milestones, according to the Smithsonian.

Mom and babies will remain at the facility for further research, with no plans to release them into the wild.

According to the Colorado Sun, another cloned ferret, Noreen, is also a potential mom in the cloning-breeding program. The original cloned ferret, Elizabeth Ann, is doing well at the recovery program in Colorado, but does not have the capabilities to breed. 

Antonia, who was cloned using the DNA of a black-footed ferret named Willa, has now solidified Willa’s place as the eighth founding ancestor of all current living ferrets.

“By doing this, we’ve actually added an eighth founder,” said Tina Jackson, black-footed ferret recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in an interview with the Colorado Sun. 

“And in some ways that may not sound like a lot, but in this genetic world, that is huge.”

Along with the USFWS and Smithsonian, conservation organization Revive & Restore has also enabled the use of biotechnologies in conservation practice. Co-founder and executive director Ryan Phelan is thrilled to welcome these two new kits to the black-footed ferret family.

“For the first time, we can definitively say that cloning contributed meaningful genetic variation back into a breeding population,” he said in a statement.

“As these kits move forward in the breeding program, the impact of this work will multiply, building a more robust and resilient population over time.”"

-via GoodGoodGood, November 4, 2024

[vexwerewolf]

Yo this rules and is genuinely uplifting

[hope-for-the-planet]

Endangered Species Sightings from This Year

This is thought to be the first time in over 20 years that a blue whale was spotted off the Coast of Massachusetts.

I highly recommend watching the video and listening to the reaction of the people on the whale watching boat--the cheers and emotion in some of their voices, especially the woman saying "I'm trying not to" when someone jokingly tells her not to cry.

This is the first time ever that a mother clouded leopard with two cubs has been spotted on a game cam!

"After being considered regionally extinct for over a century, giant anteaters have been spotted roaming once again in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul state. Scientists have concluded these returned natives ventured over from Argentina's Ibera Park, where conservationists have released around 110 rescued and captive-bred anteaters since 2007."

Over 100 years and the anteaters are finally coming home!

[platypu]

[lovecraftian-frog]

During my internship, I saw another strange fellow. If you like the neck flexibility of the European wryneck you sure gonna love the Little bittern (Ixobrychus minutus). This bird is in the heron family (Ardeidae) but loves to shrink itself. But be warned ! They know where your eyes are and can launch their neck and beak real fast ! One tried to attack me while I was checking its ring and I was lucky to be just 10 cm too far. Despite this vicious attack I love this funny bird and he was quite easy to untangle and to ring. With colleagues, we nicknamed it the "Accordion of death"

[amnhnyc]

🦇Museum Curator of Mammalogy Angelo Soto-Centeno shares updates from his recent expedition to Puerto Rico, where he and a team of local and international researchers led a paleontological excavation and bat diversity inventory. The aim of this work was to explore new locations to examine the present, or living, and past, or fossil, communities of bats and identify species that have become extinct in recent times.

They found three species of extinct bats that were lost in the last 4,000 to 1,600 years—including insectivore and nectarivore bats!

[witchboxco]

[rebeccathenaturalist]

This is a pretty big deal. When I was a kid in the 1980s, this was one of the most endangered species in the world. It had been declared extinct in 1979, but two years later a small population was discovered in Wyoming. These became the basis for a breeding and reintroduction program, and today there are a few hundred in the wild with more in captive breeding programs.

The challenge with working with such a small captive population is that you only have so many adult female ferrets that can be having kits at any given time. While cloning is more resource-intensive than simply raising a ferret born in captivity, it adds another individual to the breeding pool. If cloning can be streamlined, it could help increase the number of breeding adult ferrets more quickly than through natural means alone.

In this case, one of the first cloned black-footed ferrets has not only made it to adulthood but has successfully given birth to two kits which wouldn't have existed otherwise. Because she was cloned from the cells of a ferret that died in the 1980s, she was able to reintroduce genetic diversity in a species that has suffered a severe population bottleneck. While it remains to be seen whether the kits survive to adulthood--a challenge any young ferret faces--this is a very promising sign.

We can't rely on cloning alone to save this species, though. The systematic destruction of prairie habitats for agriculture and other development, the subsequent loss of prey populations, the introduction of canine distemper from domestic dogs, and secondary poisoning from poisoned prairie dogs and other prey, all have contributed to the precipitous decline of this charismatic little mustelid. By preserving and restoring prairie habitats and their biodiversity, preventing the poisoning of prey, and controlling canine distemper vectors, we can give both birthed and cloned black-footed ferrets a better chance of reestablishing their species in their historic range.

[headspace-hotel]

Native Plant Info Masterlist...2!

This will be a USA centric post sadly, mostly focused on the East, since I am unfamiliar with resources outside of my area.

iNaturalist lets you upload pictures of any organisms and get them identified by the community, but if you don't want to upload, you can still lurk and look through all the photos being posted in your area to develop familiarity with the plants

Wildflower Search lets you toggle between photos of leaves, flowers, fruits etc. of each plant, gives loads of links to other sites that provide info, lets you search by flower color, plant type, time of year, and about a dozen other search criteria- very cool site

Wildflower.org is another very good site- has a search function where you can search plants by various traits and qualities

Find native plants by the number of butterflies that use them

Butterfly host plant list

Keystone species for every USA ecoregion for butterflies and bees

UNC Chapel Hill's 2022 Flora of the Southeastern United States. The ultimate EXHAUSTIVE compendium of plants. You can download it but beware it is over 2,000 pages long

Illinois Wildflowers is an excellent resource for plants found throughout the southeast and Midwest

Virginia Wildflowers

Northern Forest Atlas Awesome high quality photos of trees and leaves, buds, etc.

Name That Plant is a great resource focused on the Carolinas and Georgia

Maryland Biodiversity has much information on plants and many other creatures

Sarracenia.com is all about carnivorous plants

Native Beeology is focused on native bees of New York State

Also try looking up "[your state] native plant society" as many states have one! It could be a great way to find opportunities to get involved.

[mindblowingscience]

Conservation efforts directed towards just 0.7% of the world's land mass could help protect one third of the world's threatened and unique tetrapod (four-limbed vertebrate) species, new research by Imperial College London, On the Edge, and ZSL has shown. The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London and published this week in Nature Communications, finds that large gains in conservation are possible by focusing on areas home to exceptional biodiversity and species with high levels of evolutionary distinctiveness and global endangerment.

Continue Reading.

[reasonsforhope]

"England is celebrating the first pair of beaver kits born in the country since they were reintroduced back into the country’s north last year.

Landscape managers in England are beside themselves with surprise over the changes brought about by a single year of beaver residency at the Wallington Estate in Northumberland—with dams, mudflats, and ponds just appearing out of nowhere across the landscape.

Released into a 25-acre habitat on the estate last year, the four beavers at Wallington are part of a series of beaver returns that took place across the UK starting in 2021 in Dorset. Last year, GNN reported that Hasel and Chompy were released into the 925-acre Ewhurst Estate in Hampshire in January 2023, and the beavers that have now reproduced established their home in Wallington in July.

“Beavers are changing the landscape all the time, you don’t really know what is coming next and that probably freaks some people out,” said Paul Hewitt, the countryside manager for the trust at Wallington. “They are basically river anarchists.”

“This time last year I don’t think I fully knew what beavers did. Now I understand a lot more and it is a massive lightbulb moment. It is such a magical animal in terms of what it does.”

It’s believed that the only animal which alters the natural environment to the same extent as humans is the beaver. Their constant felling of trees to construct dams causes creeks to build up into pools that spill out during rainfall across the land, cutting numerous other small channels into the soil that distribute water in multiple directions.

Hewitt says that in Wallington this has translated to a frantic return of glorious wildlife like kingfishers, herons, and bats.

Recently the mature pair of beavers mated and produced a kit, though its sex is not yet known because beavers don’t have external genitalia.

These beaver reintroductions have led to a raft of beaver sightings around the country. Those at the National Trust working to rewild the beaver back into Great Britain hope the recovery of the landscape will convince authorities to permit further reintroductions to bigger areas."

-via Good News Network, July 16, 2024

[typhlonectes]

How Non-Native Plants Are Contributing to a Global Insect Decline

The impact of introduced plants on native biodiversity has emerged as a hot-button issue in ecology. But recent research provides new evidence that the displacement of native plant communities is a key cause of a collapse in insect populations and is affecting birds as well...

[jenfoundabug]

In the survey I posted last week, about half of you were correct that this beautiful creature can sting. This is a sweat bee. These solitary bees are rather tiny and sometimes like to drink sweat off of animals (including humans), hence their name. Many species don't have the stereotypical black and yellow bee coloration, which makes them tricky to identify. You can still tell they're bees though because of the long segmented antennae, narrow "waist," four wings, and mouth parts (large mandibles + "tongue"). Augochlora pura, a species of sweat bee, Northern Pennsylvania

[hope-for-the-planet]

Only four months after dams blocking migration were removed, the first Chinook salmon traveled 230 miles to return to the Klamath River Basin. This was the first fish to come home to their ancestral migration routes since 1912.

Over 100 years shut out and it only took them four months to return home once they had the chance.

From the article:

“The return of our relatives the c’iyaal’s is overwhelming for our tribe. This is what our members worked for and believed in for so many decades,” said Roberta Frost, Klamath Tribes Secretary. “I want to honor that work and thank them for their persistence in the face of what felt like an unmovable obstacle. The salmon are just like our tribal people, and they know where home is and returned as soon as they were able[.]"

[probablyasocialecologist]

We tend to think of human induced species extinction in terms of large-scale changes in land use: forests being transformed into crop land, animal farms and plantations; grasslands transformed into pastures; mines and quarries ripping apart dense jungles. But there is a more insidious process at work, which is perhaps even more powerful: the bit‑by‑bit fragmentation of ecosystems that accompanies growth in our demand for nature’s goods and services. Fragmentation leads to disproportionately greater losses in biodiversity. Persistent, incremental encroachment into nature is also insidious because each move seems near harmless: a new bus lane cutting through an ancient orchard here, a mangrove forest sliced to make way for a luxury hotel there, a bat habitat, destroyed to make way for additional housing in an urban sprawl elsewhere. The orchard will not return, the mangrove forest won’t have space to recover its previous glory, and the bat population will die because it has nowhere to go.

Partha Dasgupta