The New Yorker: The Strange and Gruesome Story of the Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth

Sometimes you hear about a story that you can't forget. Over two years ago I happened to meet a biologist who casually mentioned a colleague studying Greenland sharks, and how they had used the same technology that detectives used to solve a murder and discovered the animals had seemingly supernatural longevity. It took me since then to track the people and details. Read the story at newyorker.com 

"Greenland sharks are among nature’s least elegant inventions. Lumpish, with stunted pectoral fins that they use for ponderously slow swimming in cold and dark Arctic waters, they have blunt snouts and gaping mouths that give them an unfortunate, dull-witted appearance. Many live with worm-like parasites that dangle repulsively from their corneas. They belong, appropriately enough, to the family Squalidae, and appear as willing to gorge on fresh halibut as on rotting polar-bear carcasses. Once widely hunted for their liver oil, today they are considered bycatch. For some fishermen, a biologist recently told me, netting a Greenland shark is about as welcome as stepping in dog poop.

And yet the species has an undeniable magnetism. It is among the world’s largest predatory sharks, growing up to eighteen feet in length, but also among its most elusive. Its life history is a black box, one that researchers have spent decades trying in vain to peer inside..."

The New Yorker: A Compass in a Haystack

Birds, turtles, dragonflies, sharks and elephants. So many animals travel long distances, in many cases thousands of miles, year after year. How do they find their way? I went to London to attend the tri-annual conference on animal navigation held by the Royal Institute of Navigation in April. Here's the story about the search for the animal compass and the scientists racing to prove two very different theories about how many animals navigate with such awesome precision across the planet.

Read the rest at newyorker.com

The New Yorker: No Country for Panthers

Earlier this year, a motorist driving near Picayune Strand State Forest, in southwestern Florida, spotted a dead panther on the side of the road. Although the entire population of Florida panthers numbers fewer than a hundred and eighty, this was not a particularly unusual sight. In 2014 alone, twenty-two panthers were killed by automobiles. This animal, it turned out, had not been hit by a car. When wildlife officials conducted a necropsy, they found that it had died from a gunshot wound. It was the second such attack in six months. The previous October, a different driver on the same road had spotted a two-year-old male panther behaving strangely. When the animal was captured, officials discovered that he had been blinded by buckshot. Because Florida panthers are endangered, intentionally killing one is a federal offense, punishable by up to a year in jail and a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. Nevertheless, at least five panthers have died this way since 2008. In the couple of cases that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has solved, the perpetrators were hunters—people who didn’t like the cats competing for the same prey. Florida has a panther problem. Read the rest at newyorker.com

Nautilus: Big Bird Data

There are many things in the world that we cannot see with our eyes, including the hundreds of millions of birds that migrate in the spring and fall under cover of darkness. I wrote about radar ornithology, a field of study that uses weather surveillance radar to track birds at night, and a group of scientists who are using artificial intelligence to try and interpret the data and glean the relationships between ecology, climate and migration for the goal of conservation. The piece is here at Nautilus magazine's issue on "Dark Matter." 

Cecil, Trophy Hunting, and Ethical Relativism

The emotion and outrage at Cecil the lion's killing by an American hunter in Zimbabwe has ebbed in the last week. So I thought I would take an opportunity to add my two cents to the debate that has emerged over trophy hunting. 

Everything that has been reported about Cecil's killing indicates it was not only illegal, but also ill conceived and poorly-executed, starting with the guides who lured the lion out of its preserve to the hunter who initially wounded the lion instead of achieving a fast and humane kill. Despite this, I find that I can’t join in the widespread condemnation of trophy hunting. The reason is I strongly suspect that most trophy hunters place great value on animals and the conservation of nature, perhaps even more than many "animal lovers" (myself included) who don't hunt. In fact, trophy hunting is arguably a component of effective conservation policy for some species and in many places around the world.

Here's a basic question: what is the value of animal or species? It's been the subject of much philosophizing since the early 1970s. As countries began extending legal protections to threatened animals and species, environmental ethicists tasked themselves with articulating and debating their source of moral value: Is it their rarity? Scientific interest?  Aesthetic beauty? Ecological significance? Cuteness? Because they just….exist?

For most of the world this debate isn’t nearly so abstract. The value of an animal or species is utilitarian and related to survival: an animal that assists in survival is valuable; one that hurts survival or is simply inconsequential is less so. In these terms, if a lion kills the livestock of a farmer in Africa, it is not only a physical threat but threatens the livelihood (and safety) of their family and community. If the protection of a bird keeps local villagers out of the forest, it prevents them from extracting natural resources like timber, food, and medicine.

Consider the case of an extremely rare species of Tanzanian frog that became extinct in the wild due to a hydroelectric dam. The value of a Kihansi spray toad changes depending on whether you are an amphibian-lover halfway round the world, or a mother whose children will benefit from electricity generated by a new dam. Many complicated cases of endangered species today have this sort of ethical knot at their core. You could even say that the mass extinction we are currently facing had been driven by the individual humans’ prerogative for survival. 

These moral scales shift, however, when a species has value for many people, even if the source of that value is different. For instance, mountain gorillas. Tourists spend millions of dollars in Rwanda for the experience of seeing these endangered animals in their natural habitat, which has in turn increased the species’ value for many local communities who have reaped the benefits of new schools, roads, and health centers as a result. The tourist values the gorilla for its awesomeness; the local Rwandan values it for the resources it brings. 

The price that trophy hunters will pay to kill an animal can counter intuitively raise the value of a species and even achieve conservation goals. For example, as reported in Conservation Magazine, when white rhinoceros hunting was legalized in South Africa, the country’s population increased from around one hundred to more than 11,000. Hunting became an incentive for the species' preservation on private land. No one would argue that a similar policy would work for northern white rhinos, of which there are only five left today. But there is much evidence that in some cases, regulated, controlled hunting can be a tool in helping multiple stakeholders achieves goals whether those be survival, conservation, or sport.

When my own grandfather killed a polar bear with a bow and arrow in the Arctic, he paid tens of thousands of dollars for what he considered a great privilege. Much of the money he paid went to the Inuit community that had an annual quota to hunt the bears for subsistence. And when he went to Africa to hunt the Big Five, he shot a rhino with a tranquilizer that allowed a veterinarian to conduct an exam of the animal’s health. These are small examples of how trophy hunting, again, when legal and controlled, can support both local communities and conservation. These hunts are also some of my grandfather’s most-cherished memories because he deeply values animals and wilderness, and has sought direct experiences of them since he was a boy. 

Even as we condemn the circumstances and illegality of Cecil’s killing in Zimbabwe, we might take this opportunity to ask some questions about our ethical convictions. What is the source of the moral value we extend to animals and species? Can we challenge ourselves to make room for other perspectives and a diversity of values in a complicated world? And can we find commonalities with one another in order to achieve a vision of broad, effective conservation for species all over?

The Atlantic: Making Rhino Horns Out of Stem Cells

Last spring I was reporting on the last Northern white rhinos in Africa and I had an interesting conversation with a bush pilot on the veranda of my host's home on the outskirt of Nairobi. I had been explaining how in the future, stem cell technology might be used to recreate Northern white rhinos in surrogate rhinos, when he asked me, "Why don't they just use stem cells to recreate rhino horns and sell them to stop poaching?" I went home and set out to find anyone else who had the same idea and sure enough, I found the bioengineer and entrepreneur Garrett Vygantas. My piece in The Atlantic focuses on how Vygantas is launching a company to produce and sell artificial rhino horns to Asian markets, and the ethics of this endeavor. 

How Fast Can Evolution Go?

I recently returned from a reporting trip to the banks of this tiny creek on a U.S. Air Force base in White Sands, New Mexico. Called the Lost River and at times no more than a foot wide, the slow-moving water creeps for about a mile until it disappears into the gypsum dunes of the White Sands National Monument. I went to see Cyprinodon tularosa, a desert fish that has survived in the Tularosa basin since the Pleistocene era, when the basin floor was covered by a body of salt water called Lake Otero. As the climate warmed, the lake dried up and the pupfish were isolated to a handful of remaining springs and drainages. In modern times, these habitats shrank to just two: Malpais Spring and Salt Creek, and the fish were listed as threatened by the state of New Mexico. The geologist C.L. Herrick, who went to New Mexico in 1898 to try and cure his tuberculosis, was the first person to take note of the silver fish, no more than two inches long, flitting in the waters of Malpais Spring. A few years later, another geologists noted the same fish in Salt Creek. Later genetic testing shoed that a volcanic lava flow separated these two populations from each other at least 5,000 years ago. 

In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote that "We see nothing in these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages." 150 years later, Darwin's belief that natural selection and evolution are slow processes that take place over eons, has been upturned by the White Sands pupfish. Biologists now believe that the fish have one of the fastest rates of evolution for a known vertebrate. This phenomenon, called “rapid” or “contemporary” evolution, has significant implications for how we think about and mitigate extinction crises. Anthropogenic disruptions like climate change don’t just reduce biodiversity and abundance, they alter the evolution of organisms and can do so over mere decades. This also means that conservation efforts themselves—moving populations of animals, captive breeding, and assisted reproduction—is not really preserving animals at all. It’s actually setting them on new evolutionary trajectories that are not “wild” in the way we typically understand that word to mean free of human interference. This is evolution directed by us.   

Biologists might never have discovered this remarkable trait of the obscure pupfish if not for a retired engineer by the name of Ralph Charles. 40 years ago, Charles' fascination with pupfish led him to do something bizarre: he stole 30 of them from Salt Creek and brought them to Lost River, where he released them into the tail end of the creek as it meets the white gypsum sand dunes. Charles was a former employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, a water management agency under the U.S. Department of Interior. For years he had requested to visit the native populations of pupfish at Salt Creek and Malpais Spring. Unfortunately for him, the fish had been under the protection of the U.S. Department of Defense since around 1945. That was when the military created a missile range and weapons testing ground on 3,200 square miles in the Tularosa Basin (still operative today) that enveloped both native pupfish habitats. Charles finally appealed to a U.S. Senator, who granted him a one day security clearance to get onto the missile range. In the late 1990s, when ecologist John Pittenger was trying to understand how exactly pupfish got to Lost River, he came across the papers of William Jacob Koster, one of the first ichthyologists to focus on New Mexico’s fish, at the Museum of Southwestern Biology in Albuquerque. Among the papers was a letter from Charles inquiring as to how the pupfish he had brought from Salt Creek to Lost River were faring. Until Pittenger found this note, no one knew whether the Lost River population had always been there or was introduced. 

Charles' motives for taking the fish have been lost to time, but translocating fish around the springs and drainages of southern New Mexico was not necessarily unheard of. An anonymous rancher had done the same thing in the 1960s, bringing pupfish from Salt Creek TK to a freshwater environment called Mound Spring further north in the basin, probably as a form of mosquito control. Both of these translocated fish survived. Pupfish, in fact, appear to be an extraordinarily adaptive species, capable of reproducing in waters that range from brackish to highly saline. At Lost River, for instance, the water can vary from 25 to 80 percent salt concentration. At the high end of this spectrum, the salt content of Lost River is double that of the Dead Sea.  “I like to say they are evolutionarily labile,” said Michael Collyer. “They are capable of evolving in multiple directions. They can be saline fish, freshwater fish. These changes would normally cause extinctions in most fishes but they tend to persevere.” Fresh and salt water, however, have different densities that result in different kinds of fish. Saline habitats produce fish with more slender bodies and hence less drag, whereas freshwater fish have a deep-bodied shape.

By the time Collyer, a graduate student at the North Dakota State University began studying the species in the late 1990s, he began to notice something strange about the two introduced populations of fish at Lost River and Mound Spring. "You spend enough time looking at the fish and start thinking, you know, they look different to me," he told me. "It's a lot like parents of twins, they see differences in their kids other people can't see." This single observation became the main thrust of Collyer's research. He developed a methodology for establishing morphological differences between the populations and what he found was that the Mound Spring population had evolved a deep body shape since their relocation, while the Lost River population maintained their streamlined morphology. This was not just the result of what biologists call phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism to change its appearance and physiology in response to changes in the environment. The differences in the Mound Spring population were genetically based. "This was contemporary evolution," said Collyer. "This population of fish was now different from its source. That was fascinating. We're talking about a couple of decades, when we're used to to seeing changes over thousands of generations." 

Sounds of 'alalā

The story of the extinction of crows indigenous to the Hawai'ian forests is not well-known outside of the islands. I came upon it through writing about The Frozen Ark in San Diego, where some tissues from Corvus hawaiiensis are preserved in liquid nitrogen. In 2002, the last two ‘alalā, as they are called in Hawai'i, disappeared from the wild and there are around 110 individuals in captivity today.  Hawai'ian crows, like other corvid species, are extraordinarily intelligent and emotional; they have been observed using twigs as tools to get food and are monogamous, and forming lasting bonds. Bird couples usually build nests together in early spring and raising a brood of one or two chicks each year. Because the crows' vocalizations are so distinctive--ranging from howling to growling to muttering, I was eager to hear what they sounded like and found this gem, a recording of some of the last ‘alalā living in the wild, taken on McCandless Ranch, a privately-owned tract of land in the Kona District of Hawai’i island. Early hunters disliked the crows because the curious birds would follow them through the woods, and their squawks alerted other animals to their presence. But it was easy enough to imitate the birds’ own calls to draw them close enough to shoot them. In the late 1800s, the archeologists Henry W. Henshaw wrote that, “It would be difficult to imagine a bird differing more in disposition from the common American crow than the Hawaiian ‘alalā. The bird, instead of being wary and shy, seems to have not the slightest fear of man, and when it espies an intruder in the woods is more likely than not to fly to meet him and greet his presence with a few loud caws. He will even follow the stranger’s steps through the woods, taking short flights from tree to tree, the better to observe him and gain an idea of his character and purpose.” 

The word "‘alalā" has a multitude of meanings and connotations within Hawaiian culture, where the bird has a potent spiritual and symbolic place. Some say the word comes from from ala (to rise up) and lā (the sun), a reference to the garullus bird’s habit of filling the forest with its voice in the morning, while others say the word refers to the sound a child makes. During the court of Kamehameha in the 18th century, the ‘alalā were a group of gifted orators used by the king to deliver news in poetic form or songs, or during wartime communicate commands to warriors. 

The question of whether ‘alalās have maintained the behaviors of forest-dwelling birds is central to the effort to conserve them. Unlike some bird species, ‘alalās are not hardwired from birth for particular behaviors. Instead, they learn how to be a crow, so to speak, from their parents in the year after hatching and when the juvenile birds join the larger flock, which can contain multiple generations of the young bird’s family. For over two decades, the eggs of captive ‘alalās have been pulled from the parent’ nest and hatched in incubators to insure their survival. Until 2014, when a few birds were allowed to hatch their own eggs, all ‘alalās in existence have been raised by humans rather than other birds. There is evidence that the birds’ culture has already changed in substantial ways as a result, as behaviors particular to the ‘alalā, once passed from generation to generation, have disappeared. The birds’ repertoire of vocalizations has diminished. When an release of captive bred ‘alalā was attempted in the 1990s, the crows appeared to no longer know how to avoid the ‘io, the Hawaiian hawks they once banded together against. The crows are habituated to humans and no longer forage for food for daily survival; all  behaviors that might be important for their ability to survive back in the wild one day. In his book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction, anthropologist and philosopher Thom van Dooren spoke with local Hawaiians about the ‘alalā, including Cynnie Salley, who fought so bitterly to keep the last wild ‘alalā on her land. Salley told Dooren she believes the captive breeding program has changed the crows profoundly, so much so that they represent a different species. 

"They were kind of like the kings and queens of the forest. They chased the hawks and the hawks had a healthy respect for them. As a matter of fact, it took four or five years of releasing young birds before the hawks realized that these were different than the ones that used to chase them around and that they had fair game… All of those birds that were originally wild are now gone. All of the birds there [at KBCC] have been raised by puppets. So I truly feel that whatever happens in the forest now with these birds, it’s a different species…. Whatever they release now is really starting at evolutionary ground zero. They’re going to have to relearn everything—including calls… So, from their language on up they’re going to have a huge learning curve. So it’s going to be a different bird."

One of Seven (Now Five)

I travelled to Nanyuki, Kenya recently to sleep at Ol Pejeta Conservancy and visit Suni, one of seven Northern White rhinos alive today. There are three other NWR's at Ol Pejeta but Suni is the youngest and represents one of the best chances that the animals will mate and prolong the survival of the subspecies. Suni is in a large area with two female Southern White rhinos at the moment, which game keepers hope will pique his interest. 

Wildlife According to Children

I came across these pie charts today and think they are delightful, not least because they look like something Alexander Calder might have painted. The charts are direct comparisons of children's imaginations to scientific data. Researchers asked children in England to draw their ideal rainforest and then the number of different species was quantified. The chart on the left is the biomass of diversity in tropical rain forests as represented in their art work; the middle and right side charts are actual scientific measurements.