The 2-year-old female panda Qing Bao will arrive in Washington DC later this year
Roshan Patel, Smithsonian?s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute
Two new pairs of giant pandas will join the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington DC and the San Diego Zoo in California by the end of the year, signalling a shift in “panda diplomacy”.
“It’s official, the pandas are coming back to DC!” said US First Lady Jill Biden in an announcement on social media. This marks the first time in two decades that China has sent giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) to US zoos.…
A scan of a California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) egg has revealed a rarely seen embryonic world. The chick is the 250th condor hatched at a facility helping to bring back the threatened birds from the brink of extinction.
Like each condor egg laid in the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s breeding program, this one was closely monitored by veterinary staff to ensure it was growing normally. As part of these regular check-ups, experts “candle” the developing eggs by placing a light against the shell to check the position of the chick inside.
All eggs have an air pocket inside, but this one was in an unusual position, which suggested the chick was contorted. Such a position can harm its chance of hatching successfully. The team decided to do a computed tomography (CT) scan to peek inside the shell – something they have had to do for previous eggs, too.
“We can see the skeleton and air pockets in the egg,” says Nora Willis at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. “I’m still blown away by it.”
To their relief, the scan revealed that the chick inside was doing just fine. The condor chick even started “pipping” – one of the early stages of breaking through the shell. The team returned the egg to its nest, where its parents helped the young bird hatch on the morning of March 16. The team named the chick Emaay (pronounced “eh-my”), a word for “sky” from the language of the Kumeyaay, an Indigenous people of California.
The hatch of the new chick, whose sex is not yet determined, marks a notable milestone for the species, which narrowly evaded extinction. The chick’s father, Xol-Xol (pronounced “hole-hole”), was one of just 22 condors surviving in the 1980s that was brought into the breeding program. “It’s kind of like a full circle moment,” says Willis.
The northern white rhinoceroses Najin and Fatu live on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya
Ol Pejeta/DPA/TNS/Alamy Live News
There are only two northern white rhinos left on the planet, but the species may be able to recover from the brink of extinction using frozen skin cells from deceased rhinos.
Much of the hope for the future of the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) has rested on the last surviving members of the subspecies: Fatu and Najin, an infertile mother-daughter pair. But because neither can carry a pregnancy, experts are turning to genetic and reproductive innovation.
That led researchers at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance in California to look at skin cells taken from 12 different northern white rhinos that are stored in their Frozen Zoo, a repository of genetic material from more than a thousand different species. Using a computer model, they simulated how the subspecies would fare if these rhinos’ genetic material was used to generate sperm and egg cells, which could then be turned into embryos and carried by females of the closely related southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum).
They found that it would be possible to restore the population of northern white rhinos over multiple generations – no Fatu and Najin needed. “The beauty of having this consistent resource of genomes in the Frozen Zoo is that we can continually pull new individuals out and reintroduce them into the population,” says Aryn Wilder at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Their model revealed that, after 10 generations, the northern white rhinos in these simulations were not inbred – instead, they were a healthy, genetically diverse bunch. That is good news for the subspecies’ future because inbred animals tend to be more susceptible to disease and less likely to survive.
Wilder then compared the genes of those simulated rhinos to genes from the southern white rhino, which bounced back from a population of around 100 individuals in the early 1900s to about 20,000 today. “Compared to the southern white rhino, there’s actually more genetic diversity in the northern white rhino genome,” she says.
But discovering that northern white rhinos are not genetically doomed is only part of the challenge. Researchers would still need to chemically coax these frozen skin cell lines into viable sperm and egg stem cells. There is also no guarantee that southern white rhino surrogates can successfully carry the embryos of the northern white rhinos. Another way forward is cloning: the banked cell lines could be used to create a genetic copy of the deceased animals.
“There is so much more to conserving rhinos than genetic diversity in cell lines,” says Terri Roth at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Ohio. “But good news on any front is still worth celebrating in these tough times.”
The wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) is classed as vulnerable to extinction
imageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG /Alamy
Hundreds of migratory species – from humpback whales to wandering albatrosses – are under threat because of human activity, according to the first United Nations report on the animals. The State of the World’s Migratory Species report, released today, concludes that almost half of the migratory animals on a UN list of vulnerable species are seeing population declines. About a quarter of the listed species are at risk of extinction.
Billions of animals, belonging to more than 2000 species, travel vast distances every year for a variety of reasons, such as to find food or a place to breed. They include some of the world’s most iconic animals, says Amy Fraenkel at the UN’s Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. Elephants, whales, dolphins and turtles are all migratory.
As a result of their wandering nature, though, these animals encounter a range of perils across their migratory routes, says Wolfgang Fiedler at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, who wasn’t involved in the report. “A stork can be endangered in central Europe by an electrocution risk that comes from wrongly built electricity pylons, in the Mediterranean region by environmental poisoning and habitat loss and in North Africa by illegal hunting.”
In 1983, an international UN treaty came into effect that aimed to protect these animals. Under the agreement, known as the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS), 1189 species were identified as being of particular interest, partly because they regularly cross national borders during their migrations.
“These are species that really require international cooperation for their survival and conservation,” says Fraenkel.
To understand how these migratory animals are faring today, Fraenkel and her colleagues conducted a comprehensive analysis of the conservation data for all the species.
Since 1990, 70 CMS-listed species – including the steppe eagle (Aquilanipalensis) and the Egyptian vulture (Neophronpercnopterus) – have seen a rise in their risk of extinction. Significant population declines have hit 44 per cent of CMS-listed species, and 22 per cent are in danger of being wiped out entirely.
Fish have been hit especially hard: 97 per cent of CMS-listed fish, including scalloped hammerhead (Sphyrnalewini) and pelagic thresher (Alopiaspelagicus) sharks, are either endangered or critically endangered.
The team also identified a further 399 migratory animals – including many species of albatross – that are vulnerable to extinction but that are not currently listed under CMS. About half of these are fish species.
Human activity is the biggest factor behind these alarming trends. Overfishing, pollution and habitat loss from deforestation and urbanisation all put species at risk. Climate change is a problem too.
“But there are solutions to these challenges,” says team member Kelly Malsch at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre.
“Tangible things include reducing light pollution or changing fishing gear to help reduce bycatch,” she says. “We also need to continue identifying these really important regions that species need in order to migrate and make them protected areas.”
“Such declines and conservation concerns may not seem unique, given the loss of natural areas and global biodiversity at large, but what is unique is the challenges in conserving migratory species, especially those that migrate long distances or travel across continental, national and cultural boundaries,” says Tong Mu at Princeton University, who wasn’t involved in the report. “To make the conservation of migratory species successful, most, if not all, of these threats need to be addressed at the right times at the right sites, during which large-scale coordination and collaboration is usually the key.”
