One of the closest living relatives of the dodo has been spotted multiple times in Samoa — raising hopes that this critically endangered creature can be saved from the brink of extinction.

The Samoa Conservation Society's (SCS) latest field survey, which took place from Oct. 17-Nov. 13, reported five sightings of the manumea (Didunculus strigirostris). Previous surveys only yielded a single sighting, if any. The last photograph of the cryptic species in the wild was taken in 2013.

In the early 1990s, there were around 7,000 of these dodo-like birds, which are only found in Samoa. But habitat destruction, hunting and invasive species decimated the population to an estimated 50 to 150 as of 2024. Before setting out, team members were concerned they wouldn't find the bird alive, potentially signalling its impending extinction.

"That was our worry," said Moeumu Uili, a project coordinator focusing on manumea with SCS. "What happens if we can't find the bird? Does that mean the manumea is no more?"

Despite confirming the manumea's existence, the team found it difficult to photograph due to their distance from the bird, its quick movement and rainy conditions. "All of a sudden, it appears out of nowhere," Uili told Live Science. "When we see it through the binoculars, we can see the bird."

But by the time researchers lower their binoculars to get a camera, the bird is gone, she said.

Last of its kind

The manumea is the only living species of its Didunculus genus, which will end if the bird goes extinct. The chicken-size manumea's scientific name, Didunculus strigirostris, means "little dodo." Both the dodo and manumea are classified as island ground pigeons.

The dodo went extinct due to habitat loss, hunting and predators — the same threats to the manumea's survival. Hunting has been outlawed and subject to fines, so it's imperative to focus on the current main threat — invasive species, particularly feral cats and rats, experts said. Cats hunt living birds and chicks, while rats eat the eggs and chicks.

"The impact on manumea is certainly catastrophic," Joe Wood, the manager of International Conservation Programs at the Toledo Zoo, told Live Science. "It seems very likely that feral cats are a major cause of decline," said Wood, who also co-chairs a group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature that works on manumea conservation efforts. "There has to be some kind of control program."

Saving manumea

In this fall's latest survey, Uili's team focused on the remote coastal rainforest of Uafato, but manumea potentially live in six additional forests in Samoa. A current invasive species management program already exists in one of those forests, Samoa's Malololelei Recreation Reserve, Uili said. If there's funding, SCS wants to expand the invasive species management to areas like Uafato.

If a manumea is secured, the partners working to save it said they can use biobanking to preserve biological samples to establish cultured cell lines for the bird. These cell lines will allow them to study the manumea's genetic material and learn more about it. With more information, they can determine the best measures to take, such as potential captive breeding, to repopulate the species, experts said.

The nonprofit conservation arm of Colossal Biosciences is also supporting some manumea conservation efforts, for instance, by building an app to distinguish the manumea's call from another bird's in hopes of getting a more accurate estimate of the manumea's prevalence.

Colossal has said they have plans to bring dodos back from extinction. It recently made headlines for "de-extincting" dire wolves — essentially gene editing gray wolves to include a handful of traits that make them look more like dire wolves.

But there's a need to be wary of efforts to bring extinct species back into ecosystems that have changed since they were alive, Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory in the Department of Zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told Live Science.

Rawlence also said you must bring back enough species to ensure genetic diversity so they can adapt and survive, which is known as the 500-rule in conservation.

To save the manumea, Rawlence echoed Wood and stressed it's crucial to stop invasive species and other threats to the manumea's survival without many left.

"I think it's still going to come down to the grunt work of predator control, habitat restoration, translocation," he said.

Manumea conservation work in Samoa is supported by SCS, the Samoa Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, BirdLife International, the Colossal Foundation, the Toledo Zoo, and the Waddesdon Foundation through the Zoological Society of London.

Editor's Note: This story was produced in partnership with the Fellowship in Journalism and Health Impact through the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Have you been hearing about the dire wolf lately? Maybe you saw a massive white wolf on the cover of Time magazine or a photo of "Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin holding a puppy named after a character from his books.

The dire wolf, a large, wolflike species that went extinct about 12,000 years ago, has been in the news after biotech company Colossal claimed to have resurrected it using cloning and gene-editing technologies. Colossal calls itself a "de-extinction" company. The very concept of de-extinction is a lightning rod for criticism. There are broad accusations of playing God or messing with nature, as well as more focused objections that contemporary de-extinction tools create poor imitations rather than truly resurrected species.

While the biological and philosophical debates are interesting, the legal ramifications for endangered species conservation are of paramount importance. As a legal scholar with a Ph.D. in wildlife genetics, my work focuses on how we legally define the term "endangered species." The use of biotechnology for conservation, whether for de-extinction or genetic augmentation of existing species, promises solutions to otherwise intractable problems. But it needs to work in harmony with both the letter and purpose of the laws governing biodiversity conservation.

Of dire wolves and de-extinction

What did Colossal actually do? Scientists extracted and sequenced DNA from Ice Age-era bones to understand the genetic makeup of the dire wolf. They were able to piece together around 90% of a complete dire wolf genome. While the gray wolf and the dire wolf are separated by a few million years of evolution, they share over 99.5% of their genomes.

The scientists scanned the recovered dire wolf sequences for specific genes that they believed were responsible for the physical and ecological differences between dire wolves and other species of canids, including genes related to body size and coat color. CRISPR gene-editing technology allows scientists to make specific changes in the DNA of an organism. The Colossal team used CRISPR to make 20 changes in 14 different genes in a modern gray wolf cell before implanting the embryo into a surrogate mother.

While the technology on display is marvelous, what should we call the resulting animals? Some commentators argue that the animals are just modified gray wolves. They point out that it would take far more than 20 edits to bridge the gap left by millions of years of evolution. For instance, that 0.5% of the genome that doesn't match in the two species represents over 12 million base pair differences.

Related: Colossal's de-extincted 'dire wolf' isn't a dire wolf and it has not been de-extincted, experts say

More philosophically, perhaps, other skeptics argue that a species is more than a collection of genes devoid of environmental, ecological or evolutionary context.

Colossal, on the other hand, maintains that it is in the "functional de-extinction" game. The company acknowledges it isn't making a perfect dire wolf copy. Instead it wants to recreate something that looks and acts like the dire wolf of old. It prefers the "if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck" school of speciation.

Disagreements about taxonomy — the science of naming and categorizing living organisms — are as old as the field itself. Biologists are notorious for failing to adopt a single clear definition of "species," and there are dozens of competing definitions in the biological literature.

Biologists can afford to be flexible and imprecise when the stakes are merely a conversational misunderstanding. Lawyers and policymakers, on the other hand, do not have that luxury.

Deciding what counts as an endangered 'species'

In the United States, the Endangered Species Act is the main tool for protecting biodiversity.

To be protected by the act, an organism must be a member of an endangered or threatened species. Some of the most contentious ESA issues are definitional, such as whether the listed species is a valid "species" and whether individual organisms, especially hybrids, are members of the listed species.

Colossal's functional species concept is anathema to the Endangered Species Act. It shrinks the value of a species down to the way it looks or the way it functions. When passing the act, however, Congress made clear that species were to be valued for their "aesthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people." In my view, the myopic focus on function seems to miss the point.

Despite its insistence otherwise, Colossal's definitional sleight of hand has opened the door to arguments that people should reduce conservation funding or protections for currently imperiled species. Why spend the money to protect a critter and its habitat when, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, you can just "pick your favorite species and call up Colossal"?

Putting biotechnology to work for conservation

Biotechnology can provide real conservation benefits for today's endangered species. I suggest gene editing's real value is not in recreating facsimiles of long-extinct species like dire wolves, but instead using it to recover ones in trouble now.

Projects, by both Colossal and other groups, are underway around the world to help endangered species develop disease resistance or evolve to tolerate a warmer world. Other projects use gene editing to reintroduce genetic variation into populations where genetic diversity has been lost.

For example, Colossal has also announced that it has cloned a red wolf. Unlike the dire wolf, the red wolf is not extinct, though it came extremely close. After decades of conservation efforts, there are about a dozen red wolves in the wild in the reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina, as well as a few hundred red wolves in captivity.

The entire population of red wolves, both wild and captive, descends from merely 14 founders of the captive breeding program. This limited heritage means the species has lost a significant amount of the genetic diversity that would help it continue to evolve and adapt.

In order to reintroduce some of that missing genetic diversity, you'd need to find genetic material from red wolves outside the managed population. Right now that would require stored tissue samples from animals that lived before the captive breeding program was established or rediscovering a "lost" population in the wild.

Recently, researchers discovered that coyotes along the Texas Gulf Coast possess a sizable percentage of red wolf-derived DNA in their genomes. Hybridization between coyotes and red wolves is both a threat to red wolves and a natural part of their evolutionary history, complicating management. The red wolf genes found within these coyotes do present a possible source of genetic material that biotechnology could harness to help the captive breeding population if the legal hurdles can be managed.

This coyote population was Colossal's source for its cloned "ghost" red wolf. Even this announcement is marred by definitional confusion. Due to its hybrid nature, the animal Colossal cloned is likely not legally considered a red wolf at all.

Under the Endangered Species Act, hybrid organisms are typically not protected. So by cloning one of these animals, Colossal likely sidestepped the need for ESA permits. It will almost certainly run into resistance if it attempts to breed these "ghost wolves" into the current red wolf captive breeding program that has spent decades trying to minimize hybridization. How much to value genetic "purity" versus genetic diversity in managed species still proves an extraordinarily difficult question, even without the legal uncertainty.

Biotechnology could never solve every conservation problem — especially habitat destruction. The ability to make "functional" copies of a species certainly does not lessen the urgency to respond to biodiversity loss, nor does it reduce human beings' moral culpability. But to adequately respond to the ever-worsening biodiversity crisis, conservationists will need all available tools.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Exploring anywhere on Earth, look closely and you'll find insects. Check your backyard and you may see ants, beetles, crickets, wasps, mosquitoes and more. There are more kinds of insects than there are mammals, birds and plants combined. This fact has fascinated scientists for centuries.

One of the things biologists like me do is classify all living things into categories. Insects belong to a phylum called Arthropoda — animals with hard exoskeletons and jointed feet.

All insects are arthropods, but not all arthropods are insects. For instance, spiders, lobsters and millipedes are arthropods, but they're not insects.

Instead, insects are a subgroup within Arthropoda, a class called "Insecta," that is characterized by six legs, two antennae and three body segments — head, abdomen and the thorax, which is the part of the body between the head and abdomen.

Most insects also have wings, although a few, like fleas, don't. All have compound eyes, which means insects see very differently from the way people see. Instead of one lens per eye, they have many: a fly has 5,000 lenses; a dragonfly has 30,000. These types of eyes, though not great for clarity, are excellent at detecting movement.

What is a species?

All insects descend from a common ancestor that lived about about 480 million years ago. For context, that's about 100 million years before any of our vertebrate ancestors — animals with a backbone — ever walked on land.

A species is the most basic unit that biologists use to classify living things. When people use words like "ant" or "fly" or "butterfly" they are referring not to species, but to categories that may contain hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of species. For example, about 18,000 species of butterfly exist — think monarch, zebra swallowtail or cabbage white.

Basically, species are a group that can interbreed with each other, but not with other groups. One obvious example: bees can't interbreed with ants.

But brown-belted bumblebees and red-belted bumblebees can't interbreed either, so they are different species of bumblebee.

Each species has a unique scientific name — like Bombus griseocollis for the brown-belted bumblebee — so scientists can be sure which species they're talking about.

Related: What is a species?

Quadrillions of ants

Counting the exact number of insect species is probably impossible. Every year, some species go extinct, while some evolve anew. Even if we could magically freeze time and survey the entire Earth all at once, experts would disagree on the distinctiveness or identity of some species. So instead of counting, researchers use statistical analysis to make an estimate.

One scientist did just that. He published his answer in a 2018 research paper. His calculations showed there are approximately 5.5 million insect species, with the correct number almost certainly between 2.6 and 7.2 million.

Beetles alone account for almost one-third of the number, about 1.5 million species. By comparison, there are "only" an estimated 22,000 species of ants. This and other studies have also estimated about 3,500 species of mosquitoes, 120,000 species of flies and 30,000 species of grasshoppers and crickets.

The estimate of 5.5 million species of insects is interesting. What's even more remarkable is that because scientists have found only about 1 million species, that means more than 4.5 million species are still waiting for someone to discover them. In other words, over 80% of the Earth's insect biodiversity is still unknown.

Add up the total population and biomass of the insects, and the numbers are even more staggering. The 22,000 species of ants comprise about 20,000,000,000,000,000 individuals — that's 20 quadrillion ants. And if a typical ant weighs about 0.0001 ounces (3 milligrams) — or one ten-thousandth of an ounce — that means all the ants on Earth together weigh more than 132 billion pounds (about 60 billion kilograms).

That's the equivalent of about 7 million school buses, 600 aircraft carriers or about 20% of the weight of all humans on Earth combined.

Many insect species are going extinct

All of this has potentially huge implications for our own human species. Insects affect us in countless ways. People depend on them for crop pollination, industrial products and medicine. Other insects can harm us by transmitting disease or eating our crops.

Most insects have little to no direct impact on people, but they are integral parts of their ecosystems. This is why entomologists — bug scientists — say we should leave insects alone as much as possible. Most of them are harmless to people, and they are critical to the environment.

It is sobering to note that although millions of undiscovered insect species may be out there, many will go extinct before people have a chance to discover them. Largely due to human activity, a significant proportion of Earth's biodiversity — including insects — may ultimately be forever lost.

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rats thrive around humans, for good reason: They feed off crops and garbage and readily adapt to many settings, from farms to the world's largest cities. To control them, people often resort to poisons. But chemicals that kill rats can also harm other animals.

The most commonly used poisons are called anticoagulant rodenticides. They work by interfering with blood clotting in animals that consume them. These enticingly flavored bait blocks are placed outside of buildings, in small black boxes that only rats and mice can enter. But the poison remains in the rodents' bodies, threatening larger animals that prey on them.

My colleagues and I recently reviewed studies from around the world that sought to document wild mammal carnivores' exposure to anticoagulant rodenticides. Many animals tested in these studies were already dead; others were alive and a part of other studies.

Researchers detected rodenticides in about one-third of the animals in these analyses, including bobcats, foxes and weasels. They directly linked the poisons to the deaths of one-third of the deceased animals — typically, by finding the chemicals in the animals' liver tissues.

RELATED: Rat poison harms famous California cougar

Most poisons that these studies detected were so-called second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides, developed since 1970. These products are used exclusively in residential and urban areas and can kill a rat or mouse after just one night's feeding. First-generation rodenticides, which typically are used only on farms, require several doses to kill.

These poisons are widely available, and their use is largely unregulated in most countries. Using rodenticides is projected to increase and may be contributing to declines in many carnivore species around the world.

Rising through food chains

When wild animals consume rat poison — typically, by eating a poisoned rat — the effects may include internal bleeding and lesions, lethargy and a reduced immune response, which can make them more susceptible to other diseases. In many cases the animal will die. Sometimes these deaths occur at scales large enough to reduce local predator populations.

We began our review by compiling a list of 34 species known to be exposed to rat poisons. They included members of the weasel and dog families, such as stoats, western polecats and red foxes, along with wild cats and other carnivores.

Some of these predators, such as mountain lions and gray wolves, don't usually hunt rodents. Rodenticides have even been detected in semiaquatic predators such as river otters, which normally eat crustaceans and fish.

It's likely that large carnivores such as wolves are consuming rat poison by eating other poisoned carnivores, such as raccoons and bobcats.

This movement of poisons up the food chain is called bioaccumulation. In the best-known example, bald eagles and other birds of prey were exposed to the pesticide DDT in fish they consumed before the U.S. banned DDT in 1972. Many affected species, including bald eagles, ospreys and peregrine falcons, were drastically reduced for years due to the effects of DDT on their populations.

RELATED: Massive DDT dumping ground found off the Los Angeles coast is bigger than anyone thought

Carnivores at risk

We found dozens of previous studies that attempted to quantify exposure risk, usually by examining animals' habitats. Some studies found an elevated risk of consuming rat poison in urban and agricultural areas, but many also found a high correlation with natural spaces.

For example, a 2012 study found rodenticides in fishers and martens that spent time near illegal cannabis growing sites in Humboldt County, California, where growers were protecting their fields with rat poisons.

Other potential contributors to exposure included the animal's sex and age. All in all, understanding which animals are at risk requires more study.

Most research on this topic is being conducted in North America and Europe. Only a handful of studies to date have focused on South Africa, New Zealand or Australia, although over half of all carnivore species of global concern are found in Asia, Africa or South America.

In Africa, for example, anticoagulant rat poisons could threaten species such as the black-footed cat, which is classified as vulnerable. These poisons are also widely used across Asia, particularly at palm oil plantations. Many wild species live in this type of forested agricultural area, including carnivores that hunt rodents, such as common palm civets and leopard cats.

Our study found that 19% of carnivore species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List of threatened species have ranges that overlap entirely or partially with countries where rat poison exposure has been documented in wildlife. However, only 2% of Red List species list rodenticides as a recognized threat, and none are included in the 19% that our review indicates may be threatened by rodenticide exposure. This suggests that wildlife researchers and conservationists are not fully aware of the reach of these poisons.

Kiawah bobcats

I am doing my dissertation research on South Carolina's Kiawah Island, where biologists have detected anticoagulant rodenticides in bobcats. The island's bobcats have been GPS-collared and monitored since the early 2000s in one of the longest multigenerational studies of a carnivore in the world.

In late 2019 and early 2020, three bobcats were found dead due to rodenticide poisoning, including two females that died while giving birth. The bobcat population dropped from an estimated 30 to as few as 10 individual cats. These deaths attracted media attention, spurred efforts to curtail use of poisons on the island and kick-started research to understand how rat poisons were affecting bobcats.

Kiawah is a popular resort destination, but these bobcats have persisted through decades of housing development. Part of my work seeks to tease apart how rodenticides and urbanization are affecting the cats.

In 2020, Kiawah residents volunteered to stop using rodenticides on the island, and the town government carried out public education campaigns explaining the threat to wildlife. Today there are about 20 bobcats on the island, and work continues to end use of rodenticides.

These poisons have contributed to the deaths of other charismatic animals, including urban mountain lions in Southern California and Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from New York City's Central Park Zoo and lived for months in the park. In Europe, rodenticides have been found in the carcasses of Italian wolves.

Rats damage property, contaminate food and spread diseases, so controlling them is a human health concern. However, my research adds to evidence that better control methods are needed to reduce the need for anticoagulant rodenticides.

Community-level efforts like those on Kiawah Island can help. So can cleaning up trash in cities. But better regulation and tracking of rat poison use is likely to be needed in many places around the world.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Feral cats were killing and eating baby crocodiles in Cuba, new evidence suggests.

That's troubling because the Cuban crocodile (Crocodylus rhombifer) is a critically endangered species that lives only in Cuba's Zapata and Lanier swamps. 

Several characteristics distinguish the Cuban crocodile from other New World crocodile species, including bony ridges behind the eyes; an unusually curious, aggressive temperament; and the ability to leap high out of the water, according to George Amato, director emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History's Institute for Comparative Genomics and an expert on Cuban crocodiles.

The Cuban crocodile represents "a very old evolutionary lineage" and plays an important role in its native ecosystem, Amato told Live Science. He has been working with the species since the 1990s.

Related: How are alligators and crocodiles different?

Only around 3,000 Cuban crocodiles are estimated to remain in the wild, so humans are trying to increase the population. Every year, the Zapata Swamp Crocodile Breeding Farm, the world's largest Cuban crocodile breeding operation, releases some 500 Cuban crocs into the swamp, in the hopes that they'll flourish and reproduce, Etiam Pérez-Fleitas, a biologist who's affiliated with the farm, told Live Science in an email.  

From October to November 2022, the farm, which Pérez-Fleitas said manages around 4,500 Cuban crocodiles today, suffered a series of predatory attacks that killed 145 4-month-old crocs, according to an article published online April 19 in the journal Herpetology Notes. In the article, co-authors Pérez-Fleitas and Gustavo Sosa-Rodriguez described evidence that feral cats were responsible for the attacks. 

"I would say this is the first time that I'm aware of that there is a suggestion that feral cats might be a problem for crocodilians," said Amato, who was not involved with the new research.

The clues that cats were responsible include suspicious markings and fur recovered in the vicinity. Camera traps also recorded at least one cat entering the crocodile pens. And on one occasion, farm staff witnessed several cats feeding on something nearby. When they went to investigate, they found "fragments of crocodiles," according to the article. What's more, the attacks stopped a month after seven feral cats were captured and removed from the area.

“We did not get evidence of other predators present in these enclosures,” Pérez-Fleitas said. 

Both Amato and Pérez-Fleitas told Live Science they do not believe feral cats represent an existential threat to the Cuban crocodile, with Amato citing the artificial conditions under which the attacks occurred. After all, he pointed out, young crocodiles are not penned in large numbers in enclosed areas in the wild as they are on the farm. 

Instead, Amato said, the findings underscore that free-roaming cats can wreak havoc on environments into which they are introduced. 

"Feral cats clearly have a significant impact on wild populations — more so than I think people thought," Amato said. "And it's not even just feral cats. It's pet cats that, you know, also are outside."

Ranked No. 38 on a list of 100 of the "world's worst invasive alien species," free-roaming cats are estimated to kill billions of birds and mammals in the United States annually and have been implicated in a number of extinctions worldwide. In response to the resulting damage to native ecosystems, some organizations and governments have adopted controversial mitigation measures, including trapping, shooting and poisoning.

Related: Feral cats in Australia sentenced to death by sausage

In light of the attacks, Pérez-Fleitas said he and his colleagues are "monitoring areas where Cuban crocodile populations exist to estimate the size of the feral cat population, if they exist in those locations." 

If the populations are small enough, sterilizing the male cats may be sufficient to protect the crocodiles, Pérez-Fleitas said. 

However, "In places where populations were abundant," he added, "unfortunately our recommendation will be to use lethal methods to reduce their effective size and then sterilize."

Endangered smalltooth sawfish in Florida are erratically "spinning and whirling" in shallow waters, causing them to strand themselves and die. The "abnormal fish behavior event" currently defies explanation, scientists say.

"There have been over a hundred unique reports of affected sawfish and now over 30 confirmed mortalities," Adam Brame, the sawfish recovery coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries, told Live Science in an email.

The ongoing mortality event began in October 2023 along the coast of the Florida Keys, and so far 32 smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata) have died, although NOAA officials believe that this is an undercount, according to a statement. Deaths have resulted from sawfish "essentially stranding themselves" on beaches, Brame said.

Footage posted to Facebook on April 1 shows a smalltooth sawfish spinning near the shore.

Water samples didn't reveal any irregularities in water quality or levels of inorganic or organic chemicals. However, tests identified elevated concentrations of dinoflagellates from the genus Gambierdiscus, according to Bonefish & Tarpon Trust.

Related: Largest recorded smalltooth sawfish washes up dead in Florida

Dinoflagellates are microscopic, single-celled algae that can sometimes appear in large concentrations in the water — known as algal blooms. Some algal blooms are harmless, but some algae, including Gambierdiscus species, produce neurotoxins that can be harmful to people and animals in the area.

The behavior is possibly "a neurological response to some kind of an agent," Michael Crosby, president and CEO of the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, who is collaborating in the emergency response, told CBS news.

Water and tissue samples continue to be tested to discover the cause. The affected sawfish are large juveniles and adults, ranging between 7 and 14 feet (2.1 and 4.2 meters) long.

Historically, smalltooth sawfish lived along the coast of the Americas from the U.S to Brazil, but now they are mainly found in southwestern Florida. The species is critically endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species — mainly due to overfishing and habitat destruction.

In October 2023, odd swimming behaviors were first reported in small boned fish species in the region. Locals described fish "showing abnormal swimming behaviors in which they erratically swim in circles or swim upside down," Brame said. "We didn't get a report of a sawfish that was seemingly affected until late January 2024."

Researchers have examined the dead sawfish but found no signs of contagious disease or bacterial infection that could be responsible, according to a statement from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), which is leading the investigation.

The smalltooth sawfish "plays a crucial role in the overall ecology of the environment in which they live," Brame said. "We don't definitively know what could happen if sawfish are pushed to extinction but it could have much larger implications for the south Florida ecosystem as a whole," he added.

For affected sawfish, "NOAA and partners have developed a rescue and rehabilitation strategy that will involve attempting to rescue affected sawfish and move them to quarantine facilities to receive around the clock care," Brame said. "The hope is that we can rehabilitate affected sawfish and then release them back to the wild once healthy."

Name: American burying beetle or giant carrion beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) 

Where it lives: U.S. and Canada

What it eats: Dead animals

Why it's awesome: The American burying beetle exhibits a rare behavior for its kind — parental care. And to take it a step further, both the male and female are involved in this duty. 

Upon emerging from hibernation in late spring, the males and females search for mates — and importantly, a dead vertebrate. It's a bit of a Goldilocks mission to find just the right size carcass — between 2.8 and 7.1 ounces (80 and 200 grams) — for what's ahead. Once beetles find a suitable carcass and mate, and any potential competitors shooed off, the male and female get to work. Not mating just yet, but working together to bury the carcass underground. 

Once this step is complete, they can finally mate and create a brood chamber. The duo strips the dead animal of its fur (or feathers) and then rolls it into a ball, before coating it with a mix of anal and oral secretions that reduce decay.

Related: Tortoise beetle larvae use their telescopic anuses to build shields from shed skin and poop

They lay the eggs in the soil next to the carcass, and once hatched, the parents feed the larvae regurgitated food before the young progress to feeding directly on the carcass.

Generally a female with a larger carcass produces more eggs, but sometimes they choose their incubator poorly. If the parents don't pick a large enough carrion for the number of larvae, they will cannibalize some of the brood — a brutal but effective method to improve the survival of their surviving larvae. 

The American burying beetle is the largest of the carrion beetles in North America. It measures up to 1.8 inches (4.5 centimetres) in length, and has distinctive orange-red antennae tips and a large orange-red marking on its pronotum (the section behind the head). 

The American burying beetle is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, as it had become extinct across much of its natural range. Scientists are now working now to breed and reintroduce the species, and in 2015 it was chosen as the state insect of Rhode Island. 

Editor's note: This article has been corrected to say the American burying beetle is the the largest of the carrion beetles in North America.

A tiny but deadly species of cat appears to be inbreeding at an "alarming" rate, putting the threatened feline at a heightened risk of a rare, deadly disease, scientists have discovered.

Black-footed cats (Felis nigripes) are the smallest species of felid in Africa, standing at just 8 inches (20 centimeters) tall and weighing 2 to 6 pounds (1 to 3 kilograms). Adapted to a nocturnal life in the desert, they sport big eyes and ears and are considered the deadliest cats on Earth in terms of kill rate.

Due to increasing habitat loss as well as persecution by farmers that mistake them for jackals, these cats are at a high risk of endangerment. They are listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species.

A new study, published on Jan. 2 in the journal PNAS, suggests that black-footed cats may now be suffering from genetic isolation and inbreeding.

The researchers sequenced the genome of 10 black-footed cats and combined them with previously public genomic data. Their analysis showed markers of recent inbreeding events, which may have increased as a result of habitat fragmentation.

Projects such as roads or farms can fracture an animal's natural habitat, splitting up communities of potential breeding partners.

Related: Clouded leopard: The cat with saber-like teeth that can walk upside down in trees

The scientists linked this higher level of inbreeding to a heightened chance of developing amyloidosis, a rare disease that causes the mortality of about 70% of the captive black-footed cat population.

Amyloidosis causes a protein build-up in organs, like the kidneys, which can be fatal. In an interview with Live Science, Nadine Lamberski, the chief conservationist at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, who was not involved in the study, said she has witnessed many such deaths while studying black-footed cats in captivity.

Inflammation could not only lead to kidney failure but also an inflammation of the cats' auditory canals, she said. The bony structures of the black-footed cats' inner ears take up 25% of their skull, making them particularly sensitive to such inflammation.

The researchers looked at gene variants previously associated with the development of amyloidosis in black-footed cats. They identified two potentially harmful gene variants that cause a loss or alteration of normal gene function.

Inbreeding may increase the prevalence of these mutations, the researchers suggest, as it increases the chances that offspring inherits the same gene variant from both parents, because genetic diversity in the population is overall lower. Many harmful mutations are also recessive, meaning that they would only be expressed if both parents carried it. Such risk is increased if the parents are related.

The researchers wrote that they had uncovered "alarming levels of inbreeding" among black-footed cats, and that this appears to have happened recently as a result of "severe genetic isolation" from habitat fragmentation.

Lamberski said she has not come across the issue of inbreeding in her own work, adding the size of the sample in the study may not have had enough diversity to give a clear picture.

However, she added that inbreeding and the lack of genetic diversity may have become a more prominent risk over time. "Cat population numbers have declined dramatically, so you would have to think that genetic diversity has also declined as a result," she said.

The study highlights that more needs to be done to study the conservation risks of small felines, she said.

"There are very few publications on small cats," she said, "Cheetahs, lions and tigers tend to get the large amount of research dollars but small carnivores also have unique roles they play in the ecosystem."

Editor's note: Nadine Lamberski's affiliation has been corrected.

Hammerhead sharks have seemingly disappeared from two underwater mountains in the southwestern Gulf of California, and fishing is likely to blame, a new study has found. 

Researchers looked at observations from divers over the last 50 years and found that scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) experienced a 97% decline at the El Bajo seamount and a 100% decline at the Las Animas seamount — both off the coast of Mexico — between the 1970s and 2010s.

Study lead author Kathryn Ayres told Live Science in an email that she was "saddened but not surprised" by the results.

Ayres investigated the sharks' decline as part of an internship with nongovernmental organization (NGO) Pelagios Kakunjá and is now a research scientist at a separate NGO called Beneath The Waves. The study will appear in the January 2024 issue of the journal Marine Policy but has been available online since Nov. 22. 

Scalloped hammerhead sharks are a critically endangered species threatened by fishing, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The sharks are targeted for their large fins, which are used in shark fin soup, the authors noted. Researchers don't know how many of these sharks are left globally.

"Scalloped hammerhead sharks, and most shark species in general, are vulnerable to extinction as they produce few offspring, have long gestation periods and are slow growing," Ayres said. 

The El Bajo and Las Animas seamounts were once hotspots for large schools of hammerhead sharks — one survey carried out in the late 1970s and 1980s recorded 225 hammerhead sharks at El Bajo, according to the study. Ayres said the sharks use seamounts as a refuge during the day, where strong currents force oxygenated water over their gills so they don't have to use energy swimming around. 

To learn more about hammerhead shark decline at the seamounts, the authors sent a questionnaire to divers between 2017 and 2020. All of the people who participated — 50 for El Bajo and 32 for Las Animas — were either diving guides, experienced recreational divers, researchers or photographers. However, their responses were still based on memories from up to 50 years ago.

Ayres said she believes human memories are reliable enough for studies like this with such a charismatic species. "When a scuba diver encounters a large school of hundreds of hammerhead sharks, it's not something you forget, and a school of over one hundred compared to a school of less than ten is very noticeable," Ayres said.

The authors acknowledge that relying on people's memories is a limitation of the study — and only some of the participants had observed the seamounts in the 1970s, the team wrote. 

Divers reported seeing an average of 150 sharks at El Bajo and 100 sharks at Las Animas per dive in the 1970s, but only five sharks at El Bajo and zero sharks at Las Animas per dive in the 2010s. According to the study, participants put the decline in shark numbers at the two seamounts down to overfishing, fisheries management, changes to prey abundance, habitat degradation and climate change. 

Ayres noted that some of the study participants believed the decline was due to increasing noise from boats and bubbles from scuba divers, but she thinks the decline is primarily down to fishing and called for better protection of the seamounts. 

"In other areas that are protected from fishing such as The Revillagigedo Archipelago, also in Mexico, divers encounter very large schools," Ayres said. "Although they might not hang around the divers for a long time, they are still evidently present."

Editor's note: Ayres' affiliation has been updated. 

Name: Earless monitor lizard (Lanthanotus borneensis)

Where it lives: Borneo, near streams in lowland rainforests 

What it eats: Earthworms, crabs and fish  

Why it's awesome: Earless monitor lizards are dragon-like reptiles that are so rare they're dubbed the "Holy Grail" of herpetology — the study of reptiles and amphibians. 

The species is the only known member of its family, Lanthanotidae, which means researchers haven't found anything else quite like them alive today. The most recent common ancestor of this lizard is thought to have diverged in the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago).

Earless monitor lizards grow up to 1.6 feet (50 centimeters) long, with slender bodies, tiny limbs and tails they can grasp things with. Their heads lack external ears, hence the earless monitor lizard moniker, and their lower eyelids — which they close when underwater — are translucent.

Scientists still don't know much about these mysterious lizards, but they believe the animals' adaptations suit a subterranean lifestyle, according to a 2014 report by TRAFFIC, a wildlife organization focused on the trade in wild species. 

Related: Watch this monstrous 'sea devil' goosefish walk along the bottom of the ocean off the Galapagos Islands 

Earless monitor lizards spend their days burrowing underneath vegetation and rocks on the banks of rocky streams, coming out at night to find food on land and in the water, according to a 2013 article published in Herpetological Review. Dirt sticks to their lumpy scales, so when they do come out, they have camouflage. 

It is thought they use their tails as an anchor, wrapping them around stones and roots to avoid being swept away in floods. They mate in water, with sessions lasting for hours.

According to Animal Diversity Web, earless monitor lizards' unusual appearance led scientists to think they were a missing link between snakes and lizards, but this was later refuted.  

They are endemic to Borneo, where they are threatened by a combination of deforestation and the pet trade, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.  

Nature is a complex web that humans have barely begun to untangle. And sometimes, when we try, we just wind up making an even bigger tangle. 

From causing roofs to collapse to instigating emu wars, here are 10 times humans messed with nature and it backfired.

1. Operation Cat Drop

In response to a malaria outbreak in Borneo in the early 1950s, the World Health Organization (WHO) sprayed the island with a powerful insecticide called DDT. This successfully killed off the mosquitoes that carried the disease, but it also triggered a cascade of catastrophic, unforeseen events.

DDT is an indiscriminate poison that, it turned out, also exterminated parasitic wasps that preyed on thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to keep them at bay, the caterpillars multiplied and gnawed at people's roofs, eventually causing the structures to suddenly collapse. 

Then, the islanders' cats started dying. The insecticide had moved up the food chain, with geckoes eating the poisoned insects and cats feasting on the geckoes. As the cats died out, the number of rats skyrocketed. The rodents spread disease across the island, sparking outbreaks of typhus and plague. 

In 1960, the WHO finally launched Operation Cat Drop to stem the wave of problems it had created, which involved parachuting cats into Borneo. While some reports say 14,000 cats were airdropped in the successful operation, others put this number at 23. 

2. The Emu War

When Australian veterans returned from fighting in World War I, the government gifted them land in Western Australia for farming. These holdings started out small, but as the Great Depression gripped the country in 1929, the new owners were encouraged to expand wheat production.

In October 1932, farmers who were already in trouble due to falling wheat prices encountered another threat to their livelihoods. Mobs of emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) — large flightless birds that look similar to ostriches and are indigenous to the outback — suddenly appeared, trampling and chowing down on their crops. Emus migrate southwest after their breeding season in May and June, and the wheat fields likely provided safe habitat, plentiful food and a reliable source of water.

By November, the damage was so severe the minister of defense sent soldiers to wage war against the emus. On the first day of the Emu War, as it became officially known, the army faced a 50-strong flock with a barrage of machine-gun fire that turned out to be largely ineffective. The birds scattered and ran, dodging the bullets. Six days later, with just a dozen feathered casualties, the war was deemed a lost cause, and the soldiers traipsed home. Major Meredith, who led the troops, was quoted in a 1953 newspaper article, saying the emus "can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks." 

3. Chasing rat tails

When rats began infesting houses and spreading the plague in 1902, French colonialists in Hanoi decided it was time to tackle the city's rodent problem. They sent the inhabitants of what is now the capital of Vietnam into the sewers to hunt the rats down, which yielded significant results — at first.

To spur the eradication effort and encourage entrepreneurialism, French officials created a bounty for each rat killed of 1 piastre (the currency used in French Indochina between 1887 and 1952). People could collect the reward in exchange for every rat tail handed over as proof of elimination. But as the death toll rose to tens of thousands of rats a day, officials noticed a strange increase in tailless rats scurrying around the city.

Despite the growing mounds of tails, there also seemed to be no decline in the number of living rats. Officials realized that people were releasing amputated rats so they could reproduce, expanding the opportunity to make a profit. Health officials also discovered farming operations dedicated to breeding rats in the city's outskirts. The French later scrapped the bounty. Left unchecked, rats carrying the bubonic plague caused an outbreak in 1906, resulting in 263 deaths. 

4. Indestructible starfish

The Indo-Pacific is home to threatened coral reef ecosystems, and one of their natural predators can decimate entire reefs in a matter of months. Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) can reach 31 inches (80 centimeters) in diameter and sport up to 21 arms covered in hundreds of toxic thorns. They satisfy their voracious appetite by inverting their stomach so it hangs out of their mouth, and sucking the tissue off coral skeletons.

Related: Humans are practically defenseless. Why don't wild animals attack us more? 

In some places, people attempted to kill the starfish by chopping them into pieces — forgetting that starfish can regenerate body parts, and so inadvertently multiplied their numbers. People also injected the animals with poisonous chemicals and accidentally caused them to spawn, releasing thousands of sperm and eggs into the water. A more efficient method is to remove the starfish from the reef, according to Oceana.

5. A 100-year-old miscalculation

The Colorado River is a critical source of water for more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states. However, it has shrunk dramatically in the last few decades, in part because of climate change and in part due to a 100-year-old miscalculation. 

In 1922, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming divided the Colorado River's water supply among themselves. But their estimate of the river's yearly flow was derived from an unusually wet period of time and was never adjusted, meaning the states had assigned themselves higher amounts of water than the river could provide in normal times. Over the course of a century, this political oversight has led to a 20% decline in the flow of the Colorado River and record-low water levels in the Hoover Dam reservoir and Lake Powell — the two largest reservoirs in the country. 

6. Cane toad bonanza

Toward the end of the 19th century, Australia's budding sugarcane industry encountered a bump in the road. Native beetles had acquired a taste for the crops that were introduced a century earlier and were causing huge losses by chomping on the roots.

Entomologists heard about the American toad's (Rhinella marina, formerly Bufo marinus) apparent success in curbing cane beetle populations in Puerto Rico. In 1935, after importing a breeding population from Hawaii, scientists let 2,400 toads loose in the Gordonvale area of Queensland. But they had failed to check whether the toads actually eat cane beetles and, according to the National Museum of Australia, did not assess the potential environmental impacts.

Cane beetle populations held steady, and the bugs continued to ravage sugarcane plantations. Meanwhile, the cane toad population exploded and the amphibians spread from Queensland to coastal New South Wales, the Northern Territory and parts of northwestern Australia. Cane toads secrete venom that can kill animals that eat them, which soon triggered declines in native predators — including northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus), now listed as endangered — and caused huge damage to ecosystems.

The invasive toads still wreak havoc today, but "there is unlikely to ever be a broadscale method available to control cane toads across Australia," the Australian government said on its website. 

7. Underground inferno

In May 1962, a fire started in the small borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which reportedly originated as an intentional burning of residential trash in an abandoned mine. As the flames spread, people tried to douse them with water several times over the next few days, but no amount of effort seemed to extinguish the fire. The waste continued burning into August, when the council alerted local coal companies and state mine inspectors of the possibility of a mine fire.

Centralia sits atop a labyrinth of abandoned coal mines, which may have been set ablaze by an unsealed opening in the trash pit. The fires are still burning today. Federal and state governments gave up fighting the flames in the 1980s, opting to relocate inhabitants instead. The smoldering coal seams have baked the town through the ground, bleaching trees white and opening fissures that leak poisonous gases. Little remains of Centralia except a deserted grid of streets and a dozen people who refused to leave. It could be another 250 years before the coal fueling the underground inferno runs out.

8. Electrocuting fish

Asian carp were imported to the U.S. in the 1970s to deal with algal blooms in water treatment plants and aquaculture ponds. But they soon escaped confinement and made their way into rivers and streams — some species can even jump over low dams and overcome barriers in waterways. Having escaped, they became invasive and interfered with fishing activities. 

Carp have spread to the Mississippi River and its tributaries and are on the verge of spilling into the Great Lakes, where they could wreak ecological havoc and tank the annual $7 billion fishing industry. As a preventive measure, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected an underwater electric barrier in Chicago's waterway system in 2013. The design stuns fish as they swim upstream, and their limp bodies drift back down. While it seems to have kept carp at bay so far, the barrier may not be completely reliable and could let small fish sneak through. 

9. Smash sparrows

Under the rule of leader Mao Zedong from 1949 to 1976, China underwent an industrial makeover like no other. The slogan "man must conquer nature" became a rallying cry during the Great Leap Forward — a radical social and economic project designed to outproduce Britain and achieve Mao's idea of communism.

Mao launched the "Four Pests" campaign in 1958 and called upon people to eradicate flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows. He was convinced sparrows were diminishing crop yields by eating the grain and ordered them to be shot, their nests destroyed and any survivors eliminated by banging pots and pans until they died of exhaustion. 

As sparrow numbers dwindled across China, the birds' prey swarmed in. Locusts boomed and crop-eating insects surged. Combined with other effects of Mao's war on nature — including widespread deforestation and pesticide use — and other disastrous policies, the "Smash Sparrow" effort contributed to a devastating famine that killed tens of millions of people.

10. Flushed away

For 7,000 years, the Mississippi River has carried sediment from across North America and deposited it in the Gulf of Mexico. There, the mud piled up into lobes of land separated by swampy water channels, shaping the famous river delta and its marshes. But in 1718, French colonists who founded New Orleans on a finger of land alongside the Mississippi's main channel were dismayed when spring floods sent water streaming through the half-finished buildings. They ordered the construction of a levee — a mound of earth acting as a barrier to keep the city dry. Over the decades, more and more levees were erected until they merged into a wall stretching thousands of miles north into Missouri.

These constructions enabled cities and farmland to flourish, but they also funneled the river into a single torrent. While the Mississippi formerly recycled the soils it flushed away by creating marshland, it now shoots straight out into the gulf and dumps them in the deep sea. As a result, since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) of land to the ocean — an area equivalent to a football field drowning every 100 minutes.

The loss of protective wetlands worsens the impact of storms and hurricanes on coastal communities. Compounded by rising sea levels, land loss also threatens Louisiana's commercial fishing industry — which makes up 30% of the U.S. yearly catch — five major ports and rich wetland ecosystems. 

An unusual, all-female assembly of great hammerhead sharks has been gathering in the tropical waters of French Polynesia every summer for over a decade, with numbers peaking around the full moon, scientists have discovered.

These critically endangered sharks convene during the austral summer, between December and March, around openings in two neighboring atolls — Rangiroa and Tikehau — in the Tuamotu archipelago. An atoll is a ring-shaped island or coral reef enclosing a lagoon that forms when land erodes and sinks below the ocean surface.

In the summers of 2020 and 2021, researchers recorded 54 female great hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna mokarran) and one whose sex could not be determined at the two atolls, which are 9 miles (15 kilometers) apart.

They noted that more than half of the sharks were seasonal residents, meaning they spent up to six days a month there, for up to five months. The findings were published Tuesday (Aug. 29) in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Related: Critically endangered hammerhead shark found dead on US beach was pregnant with 40 pups

Female sharks in the vicinity of Rangiroa atoll mostly gathered in a spot called "hammerhead plateau" —  an area 150 to 200 feet (45 to 60 meters) deep, according to the study. "They were mainly sighted roving around the bottom of the plateau, independently from one another," the researchers wrote.

Great hammerhead sharks are a solitary species, so the high number of females sighted at the same time around Rangiroa and Tikehau atolls indicates the area is an aggregation site, according to the study. The sharks likely have no relationship to each other but are drawn there by external factors that appear to be linked to the lunar cycle and the presence of ocellated eagle rays (Aetobatus ocellatus), the study found.

The number of sharks peaked in the days shortly before and after a full moon during both summers — perhaps because the increased moonlight enhanced their ability to hunt around the atolls at night, the researchers suggested. The sharks may also have responded to changes in Earth's geomagnetic field as the moon waxes and wanes, they posited.

Large gatherings of great hammerheads in the area coincided with high numbers of ocellate eagle rays entering the lagoons to reproduce. Sharks prey on these rays, whose mating season is "a predictable event that sharks could try to intercept," the researchers wrote.

Increased water temperature after the winter months may also lure sharks to the Tuamotu archipelago, the scientists added.

The researchers compared their observations with long-term data collected on the atolls, which revealed that some sharks have been returning every summer for 12 years. The team identified an additional 30 male and female sharks from these records and found that males were primarily sighted from August to October, rather than during the summer.

Segregation between males and females has previously been reported for scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini), the researchers noted, but not for great hammerheads. The researchers' findings suggest that males remain at a distance from the sites occupied by females during the austral summer, which could be linked to their breeding period.

"Lagoons and their protected warm-shallow-coastal waters are known to serve as nursery areas for various shark species," the researchers wrote. While they could not confirm this in the new study, further investigation is underway to determine whether Rangiroa and Tikehau atolls provide nursery grounds for great hammerhead sharks, they added.

A group of orcas recently nearly sank another sailboat in the Strait of Gibraltar and followed the vessel all the way to port — marking the first-known case of the killer whales stalking a boat after destroying its rudder.

Orcas started behaving unusually and attacking boats in 2020. Since July 2020, there have been 744 reported encounters, 505 of which involved contact between the animals and the ship, according to the Atlantic Orca Working Group (GTOA). One in five interactions have prevented boats from sailing on and three have ended in vessels sinking.

Most of these interactions ended in the orcas losing interest in the boat once they'd broken its rudder. But during the recent attack on the night of May 24, the orca pod continued to stalk the yacht "Mustique" even after damaging the vessel. It is unclear whether this marks a shift in the orcas' learned pattern of aggressive behaviors towards sailboats.

Related: In rare attack, 30 orcas 'badly wounded' 2 adult gray whales in California 

"They didn't leave after the rudder was removed," April Boyes, an experienced sailor who was aboard the Mustique, told Live Science in a message on social media. 

The crew first spotted the orcas around 9:30 p.m. local time as they were sailing through the Strait of Gibraltar. "It didn't take long for them to start hitting our rudder and the force of this would spin the helm violently and you could feel the vibration through the deck," Boyes wrote in a blog post.

After breaking the rudder, the orcas seemed to lose interest and swam away. But 20 minutes later, the pod returned and began circling the boat. "After an hour of the orcas continuing to hit the rudder it was evidently now completely destroyed and water started to flow into the boat," Boyes wrote. 

The crew alerted the Spanish coastguard, which towed the boat to the port of Barbate. But even then the orcas lingered. "The orcas continued to follow the boat until we got inshore," Boyes wrote.

Experts with the GTOA, who have been keeping track of the unusual encounters between orcas and boats off the Iberian coast, declined to comment on whether the new behavior of pursuing the battered boat signified a shift in the orcas' strategy.

"Navigators are not sending us reports of the interactions so we cannot answer blindly and without information about these cases," Alfredo López Fernandez, a biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal and representative of the GTOA, told Live Science in an email.

Spanish officials and researchers from the group Conservation, Information and Research on Cetaceans (CIRCE) plan to use satellite trackers to monitor six orcas that have been involved in attacks. One orca has already been tagged, government representatives said in a statement.

"Thanks to the GPS of the killer whales and prediction models, we have some variables that allow us to predict where these animals are going to be," Renaud de Stephanis, the president of CIRCE, told the Spanish broadcaster RTVE. "100% of the attacks that have occurred since March until now could have been prevented simply by people being informed." 

But some experts think the measure could backfire. "Many of us have reservations because we think that satellite tagging is not going to be of any use in relation to interactions, if not to aggravate the situation, because it is done by shooting and the killer whales will surely not find it very funny," López Fernandez told RTVE. 

De Stephanis also recently suggested that sailors could deter orcas by gluing anti-pigeon spikes onto the rudder. "We believe that one solution to reduce the impact, which is cost-effective and highly effective, would be to install anti-pigeon spikes cut to 3 cm [1.2 inches] on the back of the rudder," he wrote in a Facebook post on June 2. "The system should be easy to install (using Velcro or underwater glue) and easy to remove."

For now, sailors should "be prepared if they sail in those areas, avoid sailing at night and approaching the coast, as far as possible," López Fernandez told Live Science.

Freshwater mugger crocodiles and gharials are turning orange in Nepal, and scientists think it's down to iron in the waters where they hang out.

The orange crocs were spotted in Chitwan National Park, a protected area of the Himalayan foothills. "Have these crocs been drinking too much Sunny D? Messily eating Cheetos? Or could they be taking fashion advice from Donald Trump?" Phoebe Griffith, a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, wrote in a Twitter thread on May 29. 

To find out why the crocs have become tangerine-colored, researchers collaborated with Project Mecistops — a conservation project working to preserve and reintroduce critically endangered West African slender-snouted crocodiles (Mecistops cataphractus) in Côte d'Ivoire and throughout western Africa. 

It turns out some of the rivers and streams in the park have extremely high levels of iron, which could explain why some crocodilians are sporting orange coats.

"Gharial and mugger crocodiles who spent lots of time in some streams, or near the mouths of them, were getting a serious fake tan," Griffith explained on Twitter. "Turns out some areas of Chitwan have seriously high levels of iron in the water, and iron reacts with oxygen to form an orange substance called iron oxide."

Related: How are alligators and crocodiles different?

As these crocs spend most of their time in the water — gharials are not well-suited to walking on land and typically only crawl onto sandbanks to bask in the sun or nest — the iron-rich rivers could have coated their scales and teeth in a temporary layer of rusty particles.

Gharials (Gavialis gangeticus) are critically endangered freshwater crocodiles that have a long, narrow snout tipped with a bulbous growth. Males can grow to be around16 feet (5 meters) long and weigh up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms). 

The gharial population in Nepal has plummeted by 98% since the 1940s due to overhunting, according to the Zoological Society of London. Most of the 200 remaining gharials live in Chitwan National Park, where they face additional threats linked to pollution, mining and declining fish populations.

Mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris) are more widespread and inhabit marshes and waterways stretching from southern Iran to the Indian subcontinent. They are broad-snouted and similar in size to gharials, but they can weigh twice as much due to their girth. 

The discolored gharials’ and crocodiles’ new orange look is temporary, and the rusty particles could wash off in less iron-rich waters. "It should go off automatically in clean(er) water," Lala Aswini Kumar Singh, a zoologist and wildlife researcher in India, wrote in a comment on Twitter.

These aren't the first rust-colored reptiles on record. A 2016 study in the African Journal of Ecology reported that orange dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis) living in caves in Gabon may have turned orange after being exposed to bat guano, which contains high levels of urea — a substance with a bleaching effect that forms when protein is broken down in the liver.

Iron oxide may also have tinted an orange-hued alligator in South Carolina in 2017, after it spent the winter in a rusty iron culvert. 

The Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei), the world's largest freshwater turtle and one of the most endangered species on Earth, is now essentially doomed to extinction after the last known remaining female washed up dead in Vietnam.

The female turtle, which was around 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and weighed 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was discovered dead on April 21 on the shores of Dong Mo Lake, in Hanoi's Son Tay district. The turtle likely died several days earlier, but the cause of death is still unknown, Vietnamese news site VNExpress reported.

This particular female Yangtze giant softshell turtle was just discovered in October 2020. At the time, no other female Yangtze giant softshell turtles were known to exist; the last known female of the species had died after a failed attempt at artificial insemination at Suzhou Zoo in China in April 2019.

When the dead turtle was discovered last month, conservationists had hoped that it belonged to another unknown female, and that the known female might still be alive in the lake. But experts have now confirmed this is not the case.

"It is the same individual that we've been monitoring in recent years," Tim McCormack, director of the Asian Turtle Program for Indo-Myanmar Conservation, told TIME magazine. "It's a real blow."

Related: Most of Florida's newly-hatched sea turtles are female. Why? 

There are now just two known R. swinhoei males left in existence: one in Suzhou Zoo and another that still resides in Dong Mo Lake.

Researchers had hoped that the female and male in Dong Mo Lake would eventually mate and produce a clutch of eggs. Based on its size, the female was likely several decades old, meaning it was probably sexually mature.

"It was a large female that obviously has great reproductive capacity," McCormack said. "She could have potentially laid a hundred eggs or more a year." However, the pair never mated, even though researchers built an artificial nesting beach at the lake for the female to lay her eggs if she ever needed it.

Yangtze giant softshell turtles, also known as Hoan Kiem turtles and Swinhoe's softshell turtles, were once abundant throughout the Yangtze River in China and the surrounding freshwater ecosystems, like Dong Mo Lake. However, historically, humans hunted the turtles for their meat, and they have lost most of their natural habitat, according to the Asian Turtle Program.

There is a chance that other males and females may be found in the future. After all, this female did evade detection for years. But if another female cannot be found in the wild, R. swinhoei will eventually become the latest name on a growing list of species that have been wiped out by humans.

The Devils Hole pupfish is small, blue and incredibly endangered. It also may be the most inbred creature on Earth. 

All 263 wild Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) live in one location: a 10-foot by 20-foot (3 by 6 meters) cavern in the middle of Devils Hole in Nevada, a detached part of Death Valley National Park, one of the hottest places in the world. Their cavern oasis, located just 50 or so feet (15 meters) below the desert floor, is at least 500 feet (152 m) deep (scientists have yet to find the bottom) and stays at a balmy 92 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) year-round. The species has lived there, isolated from all other pupfish, for at least 1,000 years, and possibly as long as 20,000 years, according to the National Park Foundation. 

That isolation has led to some very dramatic genetic consequences, scientists reported Nov. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They found that Devils Hole pupfish genomes are 58% identical, on average — "the equivalent of five to six generations of full sibling matings," said Christopher Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and senior author of the new study. That's enough to make the infamously inbred Habsburg dynasty look wildly diverse.

Related: 'Hell fish' likely killed by dinosaur-ending asteroid is preserved in stunning detail

For the new study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of eight Devils Hole pupfish, as well as one preserved specimen from the 1980s. They found that the fish were missing some seemingly important genes. For example, they lacked a gene normally involved in producing sperm — one that causes infertility if knocked out in other species. "It's kind of surprising that they're even able to reproduce at all," Martin told Live Science.

The fish had also lost a gene that helps other types of pupfish survive in low-oxygen environments — a surprise, given that the warm, stagnant pool they call home is very deoxygenated. At the moment, it's unclear to what degree the absence of these genes is harming the pupfish's overall health. 

"The genome is a complex place," Martin said. He and his team plan to study the fishes' genetics in greater detail to determine what, exactly, each of their genes is doing and how they're compensating for genomic losses.

The intense inbreeding observed in the fish is likely due to their geographic isolation, coupled with multiple population bottlenecks in recent years. In the past two decades alone, the population nearly crashed twice — dipping to 38 individuals in 2006 and as low as 35 in 2013, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This unique fish was one of the first species to be officially added to the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1967, which was later folded into the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Since then, thanks to considerable conservation efforts — including the construction of a 100,000-gallon (379,000 liters) replica of Devils Hole that houses a separate captive-bred pupfish population — the species has survived, though it has not always thrived.

"They're still in a precarious situation," Martin said. "But the good news is that human interventions and accidents haven't really made the population worse than it was … I don't think they're doomed."

Fishers in Cambodia recently received a massive surprise when they reeled in a gigantic 400-pound stingray. The hefty ray was dragged up from the murky depths of the Mekong River after it swallowed a fish that had already been snagged on the fishers' line. 

The monstrous ray, which has been identified as a giant freshwater stingray (Urogymnus polylepis), was accidentally caught by locals on May 5 in the Stung Treng province in northeastern Cambodia. The fishers immediately alerted team members from the Wonders of the Mekong project — a conservation group run by the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), in collaboration with local fishing authorities — who helped remove the fishing line and measure the ray before safely releasing it back into the river.

The massive specimen weighed a hefty 397 pounds (180 kilograms) and measured 6 feet (1.9 meters) wide and 13 feet (4 m) in length including its whip-like tail, which terminated in a 6 inch (15 centimeter) venomous, serrated barb, UNR representatives said in a statement.

Giant freshwater stingrays are the world's largest stingray species and "are contenders for the title of world's largest freshwater fish," Zeb Hogan, a UNR fish biologist and director of the Wonders of the Mekong project, told Live Science. 

Related: 7-foot 'monster' sturgeon found in Detroit River could be over 100 years old 

Little is known about these remarkably large fish because "catches are almost never reported," Hogan said, "which also makes it difficult to determine true abundance or population trends." 

However, past reports suggest that individuals can grow even bigger than this behemoth. "The size of this stingray was surprising," Hogan said. "But what's more surprising is that it's dwarfed by accounts of [individuals] twice the size reported by fishermen in the same area." 

The current record-holder for the largest fish in the Mekong River — which flows through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam — is a 646-pound (293 kg) Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas) that was caught in Thailand in 2005, Hogan said. Giant freshwater stingrays can likely grow larger than this, he added. In 2009, a giant freshwater stingray caught in Thailand was estimated to weigh between 550 and 770 pounds (249 and 349 kg) but was never officially weighed. 

The largest freshwater fish in the world are beluga sturgeon (Huso huso); these enormous fish, which are found in Russia, can reach a maximum length of more than 26 feet (8 m) and weigh up to 2.2 tons (2 metric tons).

The Mekong River is also home to a number of other large aquatic species, including Irrawaddy dolphins, giant softshell turtles, Mekong giant catfish, giant barbs (a type of carp), giant goonch catfish and giant sheatfish (another type of catfish), according to the statement. "This remote and relatively pristine stretch of the Cambodian Mekong River appears to be the last place on Earth where all of these iconic giant freshwater species live alongside one another," Hogan said.

These giant species are able to grow to extreme sizes because the Mekong River has a wide variety of different habitat types including deep pools, braided channels, sand bars and islands that "provide refuge and space for the species to grow," Hogan said. Historically, the Mekong River is one of the "most productive rivers in the world" and would have provided an abundance of food for larger animals, he added.

However, the health of the Mekong River has seriously declined in recent decades due to water pollution, overfishing and habitat fragmentation due to river developments, such as dams, Hogan said. As a result, giant freshwater rays are now listed as endangered, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of endangered species.

Originally published on Live Science.

More than one-fifth of reptile species across the globe are threatened with extinction, with those living in forests found to be in far greater danger than those inhabiting arid areas, a new study reports.

In the most comprehensive extinction-risk assessment ever carried out on reptiles, researchers discovered that as many as 21.1% of all known species were at risk.

"It's just overwhelming the number of species that we see as being threatened," said study co-author Neil Cox. The researchers published their findings on April 27 in the journal Nature.

Prior to this new research, there had been no formal attempt to determine how many reptiles were at risk of extinction. Instead, conservationists relied on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which provides the risk status of birds, mammals and amphibians.

By using the Red List's criteria, the study researchers discovered 1,829 out of 10,196 reptile species were vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered — a total of 21.1% of the known species.

They also found that 57.9% of turtles and 50% of crocodiles are threatened; overall, 40.7% of amphibians, 25.4% of mammals and 13.6% of birds are considered threatened by the IUCN, according to the Red List.

The global study was carried out over 15 years with the help of 961 researchers representing 24 countries across six continents.

For the study, researchers assessed preexisting surveys and datasets of turtles, crocodiles, lizards, snakes and tuatara in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, the Caribbean, Europe and Oceania. Tuatara are endemic to New Zealand and are considered to be the last survivors of an order of reptiles that can be "traced back to the Triassic period, according to the New Zealand Department of Conservation.

The authors said reptiles were being threatened globally by agriculture, logging, urban development and invasive species. This would explain why the researchers found that 30% of reptiles living in forests were at risk of extinction compared to 14% of reptiles living in arid habitats, the authors said.

The researchers also found that threatened reptiles were concentrated in Southeast Asia, West Africa, northern Madagascar, the Northern Andes and the Caribbean — a finding that will enable conservationists to concentrate their efforts in places with the greatest need.

The study authors also narrowed down the primary threats for different groups of reptiles. For instance, lizards that live on islands are threatened by predators that have been introduced there by people. By comparison hunting and poaching are the main threats to turtles and crocodiles, the IUCN said.

How climate change is threatening reptiles is not known for certain due to a lack of long-term studies, the authors said. However, they wrote in the paper that climate change is a "looming threat" because it reduces the window when temperatures are right for the cold-blooded animals to forage, and it can also alter the sex ratios of offspring in species where that is determined by temperature.

"Reptiles are not often used to inspire conservation action, but they are fascinating creatures and serve indispensable roles in ecosystems across the planet," Sean T. O’Brien, President and CEO of NatureServe, which led the study in collaboration with the IUCN and Conservation International, said in a statement. We all benefit from their role in controlling pest species and serving as prey to birds and other animals."

Tigers are the largest members of the cat family and are instantly recognizable thanks to their striking orange and black stripes. These apex predators are capable of taking down prey of all sizes, from rodents to elephant calves. 

Increasingly in recent decades, human activities such as poaching have pushed tigers to the brink. Their range in Asia is a tiny fragment of what it once was, and all remaining tiger populations are threatened with extinction. 

Are tigers bigger than lions?

Tigers grow to between 6 and 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) long and weigh up to 660 pounds (300 kilograms), according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Lions can reach similar body lengths as tigers, but lions are lighter, weighing up to about 550 pounds (250 kg), according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo. 

No two tigers have the same markings, and like human fingerprints, their stripes are unique, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. In the wild, tiger stripes act as camouflage to help the animals blend into their environment.  

Related: Why are tigers orange?

Where do tigers live?

Wild tigers live in Asia. Most populations inhabit tropical regions in countries such as Thailand, India and Indonesia, but tigers can also be found in much colder environments, including in the far east of Russia, according to Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization. Tiger habitats include tropical forests, arid forests, flooded mangrove forests and taigas (cold forests with coniferous trees), according to the San Diego Zoo.

Tigers used to have a much larger range, but poaching, deforestation and other human activities have caused tiger populations and habitats to shrink. Today, scientists estimate that tigers occupy less than about 6% of the land they once did, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 

What are the different types of tiger?

For many years, scientists separated tigers into nine subspecies, including six living subspecies and three extinct subspecies. The living subspecies were Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Amur tigers (P.t. altaica), South China tigers (P.t. amoyensis), Sumatran tigers (P.t. sumatrae), Indochinese tigers (P.t. corbetti) and Malayan tigers (P.t. jacksoni). 

Humans wiped out the extinct tiger subspecies by hunting them and destroying their habitats. Bali tigers (P. t. balica) were last documented in the late 1930s, Caspian tigers (P.t. virgata) went extinct in the early 1970s and Javan tigers (P.t. sondaica) disappeared by the early 1980s, according to the IUCN Cat Specialist Group.  

In recent years, some researchers have challenged the traditional tiger classification. A 2015 study published in the journal Science Advances argued that there are only two subspecies of tigers: Sunda tigers, which combined Sumatran tigers and extinct Bali tigers and Javan tigers into one subspecies under the name P.t. sondaica, and continental tigers, a subspecies that contains all other tigers under the Bengal tiger name P.t. altaica. However, a study published in the journal Current Biology in 2018 presented genomic evidence supporting the traditional classification of six genetically distinct subspecies of tigers 

Related: The strange history of white tigers 

Are white tigers natural?

The white tigers seen in some zoos are not a separate species or subspecies from orange tigers; rather, they are the result of a mutation in a single gene. A 2013 study published in the journal Current Biology found that a mutation in a pigment gene called SLC45A2 is responsible for stopping the production of red and yellow pigments that give normal tigers their color, resulting in tigers that are white with black stripes.

White tiger gene variations originate from the Bengal tiger population. However, the mutation is extremely rare in the wild, and the last known wild white tiger was hunted and killed in 1958. A white tiger that was captured in central India in 1951 and named Mohan is the ancestor of almost all white tigers in captivity today. Mohan's descendants were deliberately inbred by humans to increase the chances of passing on his mutation. This inbreeding led to a range of health problems in the white tiger population, including premature deaths, deformities and stillbirths, according to the 2013 study. 

Humans can also selectively breed tigers in captivity to change the color of their stripes to make them lighter and more golden. A rare genetic variation can even cause tiger stripes to broaden and fuse together so that the tiger appears blacker than usual. This "black tiger" coat is also seen in one population of wild tigers in Similipal Tiger Reserve in eastern India, likely because the population is small and isolated, with limited genetic diversity, according to a 2021 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

What do tigers eat?

All tigers are carnivores, and most of their diet consists of large prey weighing 45 pounds (20 kg) or more, such as pigs and deer. They can also take down larger, more challenging prey, including elephant calves and leopards, according to SeaWorld. 

To hunt their prey, tigers stalk an animal to get as close to it as possible without being seen and then launch a swift attack by sinking their teeth into the animal's neck. The tiger's canine teeth have pressure-sensing nerves, so it can feel where to deliver a fatal bite. Tigers are capable of eating more than 80 pounds (36 kg) of meat in a single sitting, according to the WWF.

A tiger's hind legs are longer than its front legs, allowing it to jump distances up to 33 feet (10 m), according to SeaWorld. Tigers also have retractable claws that extend up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) long and are used to grab and hold on to their prey.

Related: Hunters may lure 'man-eating' tiger with Calvin Klein's Obsession

How do tigers reproduce?

Tigers are solitary creatures and spend most of their time alone, roaming their massive territories. According to the San Diego Zoo, Amur tigers have the largest range, with individuals capable of having a territory of more than 4,000 square miles (10,300 square km). Tigers mark their territory in a variety of ways, such as scratching trees and leaving feces out in the open. 

Male tigers can tell when a female is ready to mate by the scent of her urine. Tigers have a range of vocalizations they can use to communicate with other tigers, including roars and hisses, and a male and female will call to find each other. After mating, female tigers have a gestation period of about 100 days before giving birth to two to four cubs on average, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo. 

Life is dangerous for young tigers, and only about half of all cubs live longer than two years, the age at which they become independent, according to the WWF. Mothers must leave their cubs while they hunt, which means cubs are unprotected from predators. When tigers reach independence, they must then compete with other tigers for territory. Wild tigers usually have a life span of 10 to 15 years, but they occasionally live 20 years, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo. The oldest tiger in captivity is more than 25 years old, according to Guinness World Records. 

Related: Adorable clip of tiger cubs learning to wrestle will melt your heart on this 'Arctic' day

Why are tigers endangered?

The IUCN categorizes tigers as endangered and lists illegal poaching as the main threat to the species. Tigers are poached so their body parts and fur can be sold as part of the illegal wildlife trade. Tiger bones are used in traditional Asian medicines, and similar markets seek tigers' skin, teeth and other parts. 

In addition to the threat of poaching, tiger habitat is being converted into agriculture or human settlements and commercially logged. Tiger attacks on humans and livestock also bring the big cats into conflict with people, who kill them in retaliation. 

A 2013 study published in the journal Wildlife Biology in Practice found that tigers in the Sundarbans Reserved Forest region of Bangladesh killed an average of 22 people per year over a 63-year period. While the relative risk of a human being killed by a tiger in its range is low, such killings have a big impact on the families of the people who are killed and give tigers a bad reputation. 

How many tigers are there?

There are fewer than about 3,900 tigers left in the wild, but the captive tiger population is much larger. According to the WWF, the U.S. alone has about 5,000 tigers in captivity. However, experts say that captive breeding won't be enough to save the dwindling wild tiger populations.

"The problem is not that tigers can't breed in the wild," Dale Miquelle, coordinator of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Tiger Program and director of the WCS Russia Program, previously told Live Science. "They are perfectly capable if they are provided with the minimum needs for survival — sufficient space, sufficient prey and protection from poaching."

Related: There are more 'pet' tigers than there are in the wild. How did that happen?

Accredited zoos such as those belonging to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) strictly monitor animal breeding and raise money and awareness to support wild tiger research and conservation; however, only about 6% of the captive U.S. tigers are in AZA collections, Live Science previously reported. Many captive tigers are privately owned, as seen in Netflix's controversial "Tiger King" series.

Tigers don't make suitable pets. They require expert care, including appropriate nutrition and adequate space. Captive tigers also sometimes attack their owners or keepers. A 2013 study published in the journal Forensic Science International noted that most of the reported fatal or near-fatal tiger attacks have involved captive tigers.  

Additional resources

To learn more about big cats and how they evolved, check out "The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives" (Columbia University Press, 2000). To see a tiger mother care for her cubs, watch this short YouTube video by BBC Earth. For more information about tiger conservation, check out the IUCN website, where you can read about their Integrated Tiger Habitat Conservation Programme.

Bibliography

Barlow, A. C. D., Ahmad, I., & Smith, J. L. D. (2013). Profiling tigers (Panthera tigris) to formulate management responses to human-killing in the Bangladesh Sundarbans. Wildlife Biology in Practice, 9(2). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260158565_Profiling_tigers_Panthera_tigris_to_formulate_management_responses_to_human-killing_in_the_Bangladesh_Sundarbans 

Evon, D. (2021, April 13).  Is this a tiger with Down syndrome? Snopes.  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tiger-with-down-syndrome/

Goodrich, J., Lynam, A., Miquelle, D., Wibisono, H., Kawanishi, K., Pattanavibool, A., Htun, S., Tempa, T., Karki, J., Jhala, Y. & Karanth, U. (2015). Panthera tigris. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2015. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2015-2.RLTS.T15955A50659951.en 

IUCN Species Survival Commission Cat Specialist Group. (n.d.). Tiger. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from http://www.catsg.org/index.php?id=124&L=0

Liu, Y. C., Sun, X., Driscoll, C., Miquelle, D. G., Xu, X., Martelli, P., Uphyrkina, O., Smith, J. L. D., O'Brien, S. K., & Luo, S. J. (2018). Genome-wide evolutionary analysis of natural history and adaptation in the world's tigers. Current Biology, 28(23), 3840-3849. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.09.019 

Panthera. (2016).  Meet the tiger.. https://panthera.org/cat/tiger

Pathaka, H., Borkara, J., Dixita, P., Dhawanea, S., Shrigiriwar, M., & Niraj, D. (2013). Forensic Science Journal, 232(1-3), e1-e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2013.08.003 

Sagar, V., Kaelin, C. B., Natesh, M., Reddy, P. A., Mohapatraa, R. K., Chhattani, H., Thatte, P., et al. (2021). High frequency of an otherwise rare phenotype in a small and isolated tiger population. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(39). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2025273118 

San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. (n.d.)  Tiger. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/tiger

SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment. (n.d.). Tigers. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://seaworld.org/animals/all-about/tiger/

Smithsonian's National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute. (n.d.). Lions. Retrieved April 21, 2022, from https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/lion

Stephenson, K. (2021, July 27). Bengali the tiger is confirmed as the world's oldest in captivity. Guinness World Records.https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2021/7/bengali-the-tiger-is-confirmed-as-the-worlds-oldest-in-captivity-669312

Wildlife Conservation Society. (2015).  Sumatran tiger. https://indonesia.wcs.org/Wildlife/Sumatran-Tiger.aspx

Wilting, A., Courtiol, A., Christiansen, P., Niedballa, J., Scharf, A. K., Orlando, L., Balkenhol, N., et al. (2015). Planning tiger recovery: Understanding intraspecific variation for effective conservation. Science Advances, 1(5).  https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.1400175

World Wildlife Fund. (2020, April 13). Why breeding tigers for entertainment is not conservation. https://tigers.panda.org/news_and_stories/stories/why_breeding_tigers_for_entertainment_is_not_conservation/

World Wildlife Fund. (2022). Tiger. https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/tiger

Xu, X., Dong, G. X., Miao, L., Zhang, X. L., Zhang, D. L., Yang, H. D., Zhang, T. Y., Zhang, Y., et al. (2013). The genetic basis of white tigers. Current Biology, 23(11), 1031-1035. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.054 

This article was originally written by Live Science contributor Alina Bradford and has since been updated. 

Spanish police have seized more than 1,000 taxidermy animals that were part of a private collection worth around $32 million in what they have described as "one of the largest ever" illegal wildlife busts in Europe. Almost half of the specimens recovered are either listed as endangered or have already been declared extinct.

Officers from Spain's Civil Guard seized the collection o from a massive warehouse in the town of Bétera near Valencia in Eastern Spain, according to a statement released on April 10. 

In total, officials recovered 1,090 taxidermy specimens, including entire elephants, white rhinos, cheetahs, leopards, lions, crocodiles, tigers and a polar bear, as well as 198 elephant tusks. The team also found other items, including stools that appeared to be made from elephants' feet and chairs upholstered with crocodile skin, according to a video by ABC News. 

Related: Man caught at Mexican border allegedly had more than 50 reptiles stuffed into his clothing

The officials said 405 of the specimens belong to species that are illegal to trade internationally under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The collection also included a scimitar oryx, which was declared extinct in 2000, and an addax, a type of antelope that is functionally extinct in the wild, which means there as so few left that it is almost a certainty they will eventually disappear.  

The collection is estimated to be worth around $31.6 million (29 million euros) on the black market, according to the statement. 

The interior of the warehouse, which is around 538,000 square feet (50,000 square meters), looks like a natural history museum in images; some of the walls are painted with vistas from some of the animals' natural habitats, and some specimens were housed in glass display cases. The warehouse also contained basic living quarters and two boats, according to the statement.

The owner of the property has been the target of a major international investigation since November 2021 but has not been arrested. However, he continues to be investigated for wildlife smuggling, according to the statement. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Your pet's dinner may contain endangered shark — even if the ingredients on the label don't explicitly include "shark," a recent analysis of commercially produced pet foods has found.

Pet foods often describe their ocean-sourced ingredients with generic terms such as "fish," "white fish," "white bait" or "ocean fish," and researchers wondered if genetic testing might reveal information that was missing from the labels. They collected and sequenced samples from 45 pet food products representing 16 brands sold in Singapore. Though none of the product labels listed sharks among the ingredients, the researchers found that 31% of the samples contained shark DNA. 

In a number of cases, the DNA came from sharks that are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN); such species included the silky shark (Carcharhinus falciformis) and the whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus).

Related: Will eating pet food kill me?

The scientists tested the samples with DNA barcoding, which identifies species by comparing short DNA sequences to a database of so-called genetic barcodes from the genomes of known species. Because canned pet foods are highly processed, which destroys DNA, the researchers used a technique known as mini-barcoding, which can amplify even small genomic sequences in degraded samples.

Blue sharks (Prionace glauca) were most common in the tested samples, appearing seven times; these sharks are ranked as near-threatened by the IUCN. Other studies have shown that blue sharks are frequently caught as bycatch in commercial fishing, and their occurrence is high in the shark fin trade in Southeast Asia, the scientists said in the study. Both of these factors could explain why blue sharks wind up in pet food, which would prevent the carcasses from going to waste. 

After blue sharks, silky sharks and whitetip reef sharks were most common in the samples; the researchers identified nine species in all, including spottail sharks (Carcharhinus sorrah), sliteye sharks (Loxodon macrorhinus) and sand tiger sharks (Carcharias taurus). They also noted that 16 samples included DNA from sharks that could be identified only by their genus: Carcharhinus.

While it isn't illegal for pet food companies to omit specific mention of shark meat in their products, the vagueness of terminology like "ocean fish" prevents pet owners from making "informed and environmentally conscious decisions" about what they're feeding their animals, the scientists wrote. 

"We argue that many pet owners and lovers would be alarmed to find out that they are likely contributing to the unsustainable fishing practices that have caused massive declines in global shark populations," reducing shark numbers by over 70% worldwide over the past 50 years, the study authors reported.

The findings were published March 4 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

Just six months have passed since the killing and mutilation of six lions in the Ishasha sector of Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park (QENP). 

If you were to visit the park, you would see these so-called Ishasha lions lazing around in the myriad branches of towering fig trees. This group is one of only two populations of lions known to climb trees, making the majestic beasts fascinating subjects for study and a popular tourist attraction. Sadly, however, these lions face numerous threats, including habitat loss, snaring, human-wildlife conflict, illegal wildlife trade and the trafficking of lion body parts.

Because of these threats, the Ishasha lion population includes just 20 to 30 individuals; with increasing threats to this endearing fauna, tourism revenues — which make up close to 8% of Uganda's gross domestic product (at least before the COVID-19 pandemic) — are also threatened. To provide the protections, the global Red List of threatened species maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has labeled this population as "vulnerable" to extinction; Uganda's national list places them in the "critically endangered" category. 

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

The lshasha lions recently graced the country with several cubs that now require our collective effort to protect so they may grow into adults. Luckily for the cubs, six other males — including Sultan and Sula (the fathers of the cubs), Jacob (a snare survivor), and three adolescent brothers — are ready to protect and groom them, according to Bazil Alidria, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Carnivore Officer who monitors the lion pride regularly.

Unfortunately, knowledge about lion population dynamics and threats in Uganda remains limited. In 2005 and 2008, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) conducted monitoring efforts for lions in the Queen Elizabeth park and Uganda's Murchison Falls National Park (MFNP), respectively, using Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled collars. 

This work was built upon research previously conducted by Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) Veterinary Doctor Margaret Driciru (2001) and Ludwig Siefert of the Uganda Carnivore Program. While monitoring the lions, WCS also removed snares from the parks that threaten this iconic species and worked to reduce human-lion conflict by building carnivore-proof pens to prevent lions from attacking livestock and inviting retaliatory killings by angry herders.

In 2010, a survey of three national parks engaged in lion conservation — Queen Elizabeth NP, Murchison Falls NP and Kidepo Valley NP — conducted by WCS reported the estimated lion population there to be 408 individuals. 

Although it has been 10 years since the last census, lion sightings during monitoring work by WCS, the Uganda Carnivore Program (UCP) and UWA in the Queen Elizabeth park, suggest that the lion population trend is relatively stable, according to Simon Nampindo, WCS Uganda country director. A 2021 study commissioned by WCS indicated that the greatest threat to lions today is human-induced mortality, including retaliation for the killing of livestock, exacerbated by Ugandan beliefs that parts of these lions have medicinal value and customary beliefs that lion body parts should be kept in homes and shops as a source of power and wealth.

Nampindo notes that the 2021 study on the triggers and motivations for lion killings in QENP revealed an increased demand for lion body parts by community members, traditional healers, business people, religious leaders, poachers and cattle keepers in Uganda, requiring a more comprehensive approach to stop this crime.

The lions also face a multifaceted challenge for survival driven by climate change. The loss of suitable habitat for both prey and predators attributed to climate change and variability favoring the growth and spread of invasive species in most of Uganda's national parks, have triggered lions and elephants to move outside the parks into the communities. This exodus has resulted in livestock predation and crop damage, hence escalating the human-wildlife conflict around these protected areas. 

WCS has called upon private sector companies, local governments, conservation organizations, individuals and development partners to join hands to address these threats before our natural heritage is lost.

Despite the numerous challenges, we take heart in the resilience of the lshasha lions. WCS has long-term commitments to its strongholds and landscapes and uses science to inform conservation and build solid partnerships and collaborations while inspiring people to love nature.

Together with Uganda Wildlife Authority, the private sector and other devoted conservation organizations, we will continue to monitor lion populations and remove wire snares and traps to save the lion populations and ensure that the tourism sector thrives.

Editor's note: This article was updated to correct the number of Ishasha lions in that population and to indicate the image shows lion cubs from the Queen Elizabeth National Park.

Originally published on Live Science.

Wildlife officials plan to kill or rehome more than 10,000 wild horses in Australia as part of a new plan to limit the species' numbers. But scientists have criticized the proposal for not going far enough.  

There are more than 25,000 wild, or feral, horses in Australia, based on a 2019 aerial survey, according to Australian Alps National Parks. A majority of these horses, also known locally as brumbies, live in Australia's alpine region, located at the intersection of three states: New South Wales (NSW), Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory. 

Australia's alpine environment covers just 1% of the continent and has many endemic and threatened species that are found nowhere else, David Watson, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia, told Nature. The horses, which are an invasive species in Australia, rapidly reproduce and cause widespread ecosystem damage in that region. 

One area under particular threat is Kosciuszko National Park in NSW, which is home to more than 14,000 wild horses. A new draft plan, released Oct. 1 by the National Parks and Wildlife Service in NSW, aims to reduce the number of feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park to 3,000. That thinned population would then be contained to 32% of the park. Officials say the plan will safeguard the area while preserving the brumbies' "heritage value" — a controversial concept introduced by a 2018 state law that identifies brumbies as culturally important to the park, despite being introduced to the area by European settlers.

Related: 8 of the world's most endangered places 

However, in an open letter released Oct. 29, 69 scientists from the Australian Academy of Science argue that the draft plan leaves too many remaining brumbies and will not properly protect the park from their impacts. The scientists say officials are bending to the will of pro-brumby lobbyists and are ignoring the scientific evidence.   

Officials need to "listen to the science, the latest evidence and recommendations on how best to protect the park from the significant damage being done by feral horses," John Shine, president of the Australian Academy of Science, said in a statement. "To do otherwise would show a disregard for the threatened native Australian ecosystems and species facing imminent extinction and under threat by feral horses."

In the letter, the scientists urged the National Parks and Wildlife Service to reduce the number of brumbies to "well below" the proposed 3,000 and to protect the entire park from the animals rather than just two-thirds of it.

The NSW government "couldn't have picked a worse place" to allow feral horses to roam, Watson told Nature. Australia's alpine region is home to a number of endangered and vulnerable species, including the stocky galaxias fish (Galaxias tantangara), the alpine tree frog (Litoria verreauxii alpina) and the broad-toothed rat (Mastacomys fuscus), Nature reported. There are no indigenous hoofed mammals in Australia, so the brumbies also cause a lot of damage to delicate vegetation that has not evolved to withstand them. Their population increase has also led to severe overgrazing.

"These areas are just too fragile to have large herbivores trampling around in them," Don Driscoll, an ecologist at Deakin University in Australia, told Nature. 

The two other alpine states have taken a much stronger stance on wild horses. The Australian Capital Territory, which borders Kosciuszko National Park, has a zero-tolerance approach to wild horses and "removes" any that spill over its border. On Nov. 1, Victoria also released its own management plan, which aims to completely "remove" all wild horses from the state's most at-risk alpine habitats, according to ABC News in Australia.

The preferred method for removing brumbies from wild habitats is to rehome them on private land. But this is time-consuming and expensive, and only around 1,000 brumbies in NSW have been successfully rehomed since 2002, according to Nature. If that approach fails, officials plan to cull horses via aerial shooting, in which trained experts shoot the horses from helicopters.

In the open letter, the scientists pointed to a new study published Sept. 17 in the journal Biological Conservation that found that 71% of surveyed Australians agree that it is acceptable to cull animals to protect endangered species.

The brumby problem in Australia resembles an issue with overpopulated mustangs in national parks in the U.S., according to The New York Times. However, current legislation bans culling mustangs, so conservationists must rely on sterilization and rehoming in that instance. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Around 126,000 gallons (573,000 liters) of crude oil has spilled from a ruptured pipeline off the California coast and begun washing up on beaches and wetlands, along with several dead animals.

The U.S. Coast Guard reported the spill at 9 a.m. local time on Saturday (Oct. 2), after boaters noticed a sheen on the ocean surface, according to CNN. The oil slick now covers around 13 square miles (33.7 square kilometers) and has begun washing up on the shoreline between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach, causing widespread beach closures that could last for weeks or months, according to  Reuters.

"In a year that has been filled with incredibly challenging issues, this oil spill constitutes one of the most devastating situations that our community has dealt with in decades," Kim Carr, the mayor of Huntington Beach, told the Associated Press. She also described the spill as an "environmental catastrophe" and said that it could become a "potential ecological disaster."

Related: The 10 weirdest spills in nature

Officials believe the oil originated from a leak in an underwater pipeline connected to an offshore drilling facility owned by Beta Offshore, a subsidiary of Houston-based Amplify Energy. The company has shut off the pipeline and suctioned out all the remaining oil to prevent further spillage. The company also sent a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to the site to determine exactly what went wrong, according to an Amplify Energy statement.

A wide-scale clean-up including both federal and state agencies is now well underway. "This response is currently a 24/7 operation and response efforts are scheduled to continue until federal and state officials determine that the response to the crude oil spill is complete," the U.S. Coast Guard told CNN.

However, there are fears that the spill could have wide-reaching implications for marine wildlife. Already, several dead oil-covered fish and birds have been confirmed in the area, with many more unconfirmed reports starting to come in, officials with the  City of Huntington Beach said in a statement.

Wildlife experts are also warning of long-term environmental problems as a result of the spill. "It has long-lasting effects on the breeding and reproduction of animals," Miyoko Sakashita, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s oceans program, told AP News. "It’s really sad to see this broad swatch oiled."

Local conservationists are particularly worried about several protected wetland habitats in the area, which are home to numerous bird species, including the snowy plover (Charadrius nivosus) and the California least tern (Sternula antillarum browni), which are both listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, according to AP News.

"The oil has already infiltrated many of our wetlands in Huntington Beach and the Talbert area," Katrina Foley, an Orange County supervisor, told CNN. "And we want to do everything we can to prevent it from intruding into that area even further."

Around 2,000 feet (610 meters) of protective booms — floating barriers that contain oil spills — have been released at seven wetland locations in an attempt to limit the amount of oil that pollutes them, according to the City of Huntington Beach statement. 

The Coast Guard is also using absorbent booms to remove oil from the water's surface, but so far, only around 3,000 gallons of oil just 2.4% of the amount spilled, has been removed, according to Reuters.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has ordered a fisheries closure in waters up to six miles off the coast due to fears that oil may also contaminate seafood and cause public health problems, according to Reuters.

Originally published on Live Science.

The American bumblebee (Bombus pensylvanicus) population has plummeted by 89% over the past 20 years, and an "endangered species" listing could be imminent, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

The agency will conduct a one-year review, after which the species could become protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which provides a legal framework for safeguarding imperiled species from extinction.

The announcement comes in response to an August 2021 petition in support of the listing made by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and an Albany Law School student group called Bombus Pollinator Association of Law Students. 

Related: In photos: The world's most efficient pollinators

According to the CBD, the American bumblebee — a vital pollinator of wildflowers and crops across North America — has completely vanished from eight U.S. states — Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming — and in New York state, the species has experienced a population decline of 99%. In 19 other states across the Southeast and Midwest, populations have dropped by more than 50%. 

"The American bumblebee was once the most common bumblebee species in North America, but without immediate action to protect it under the ESA, it will continue its alarming decline towards extinction," the petition authors wrote. 

The bumblebee's decline is attributed to habitat destruction, exposure to disease and pesticides, climate change, loss of genetic diversity and competition with non-native bees, according to the CBD. In fact, the states with the largest declines in American bumblebee populations "are the same states that have seen the largest quantified increase in pesticide use, including neonicotinoid insecticides and fungicides."

Research has shown that chemical pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, that are commonly sprayed over agricultural land can disrupt various bees' natural homing systems; make them more susceptible to parasites, such as the varroa mite (Varroa destructor); and interfere with their "waggle dance" — the butt-shaking method of bee communication. A further study conducted on buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) found that neonicotinoids disrupted the bees’ natural sleep patterns, reducing their daytime foraging opportunities and potentially limiting a colony’s ability to grow.

If American bumblebees are placed under the protection of the ESA, developers and farmers who kill the insects could incur legal liability — including fines up to a maximum of $13,000 each time a protected animal is killed.

"The implications could be really significant," Keith Hirokawa, an environmental law professor at Albany Law School, told Bloomberg Law. "A far-reaching solution would be a fundamental change in the way we build our agricultural operations," to protect the bees' habitat from further damage.

If the American bumblebee is added to the list, it would become the third species in the Apidae family in the continental United States to be officially registered as an endangered species — alongside the rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis) and the presumed extinct Franklin's bumblebee (Bombus franklini), the last sighting of which was in Oregan in 2006.

Originally published on Live Science.

In a bizarre incident, 64 endangered African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) have been killed in South Africa after being stung in and around their eyes by Cape honeybees (Apis mellifera capensis).

Rangers from the South African National Parks organization (SANParks) discovered 63 of the 64 dead penguins among a colony near Cape Town in Table Mountain National Park on Friday, Sept. 17. African penguins are a protected species in South Africa and are currently listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, with around 42,000 mature individuals globally. 

"The deaths occurred suddenly sometime between Thursday afternoon and Friday morning," SANParks said in a Facebook post. "No external physical injuries were observed on any of the birds."

Related: The 10 weirdest medical cases in the animal kingdom

The dead birds were transported to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) for necropsies (animal autopsies) to determine why so many penguins had suddenly died.

"After tests, we found bee stings around the penguins' eyes," David Roberts, a clinical veterinarian at SANCCOB, told French news agency AFP. "There were also dead bees on the scene."

The leading hypothesis is that a swarm of Cape honeybees attacked the penguin colony, although it is unclear why the bees attacked the penguins or why they stung them particularly around their eyes, SANParks said.

"This is a very rare occurrence," Roberts said. "We do not expect it to happen often, it's a fluke."

Another dead penguin with stings around its eyes was discovered on Saturday morning (Sept. 18) at a nearby beach; that penguin likely died from the initial bee attack and not during a second attack, SANParks said. 

"No more dead African penguins were found on site today, and we will continue to monitor the situation," Alison Kock, a marine biologist at SANParks, said in the statement on Saturday.

Originally published on Live Science.

A young shark glides to the ocean floor, slaps the sandy ground with its head and disappears in a cloud of dust. A pause. A small fish swims by. And then... SNAP! The fish doesn't know what hit it. 

This is the scene in a stunning new video of a rare juvenile angel shark, recorded for the first time off the coast of Wales. Besides showcasing the elusive animal's ninja-like ambush skills, the footage provided hope that the critically endangered sharks are still breeding in British waters, according to the researchers who shot it.

Marine biologist Jake Davies spent about 15 minutes recording the young shark during a recent dive. The shark, measuring about 12 inches (30 centimeters) long, is the first angel shark ever filmed in Wales, Davies said in an email. Thankfully, the elusive predator wasn't camera shy; the shark displayed a wide range of swimming and hunting behaviors while Davies trailed it like a personal paparazzo.

"It was incredible to watch and film it swimming, burying into the sand and then using its camouflage to ambush prey," said Davies, who is a project coordinator with the shark conservation group Angel Shark Project: Wales. "This footage is far beyond what we thought would be possible to capture in Wales."

Angel sharks, which belong to the genus Squatina, have flat bodies that taper into wing-like fins on each side, similar to rays. They are ambush predators that lie in wait on the ocean floor, sometimes burrowing into the sand to camouflage themselves, according to Britannica. When prey swim by — usually small, bottom-feeding crustaceans and fish, such as gobies — the sharks emerge and attack with ninja-like precision. 

While this sneaky, seafloor lifestyle gives the sharks a predatory edge, it also leaves them highly susceptible to trawling nets. Because of this, populations of all angel shark species have been in decline for the last 50 years, leaving them critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. They live in relatively small numbers throughout the northeastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, from Norway to Morocco.

To see the sharks breeding near Wales offers a small ray of hope for the genus, Davies and his colleagues said, and the dives could reveal valuable new information about angel shark range and ecology.

Originally published on Live Science.

A record-breaking number of manatees have died this year in Florida's waters, mostly due to starvation, according to recent news reports. 

Between Jan. 1 and July 2, 841 manatees died near and off the coast of Florida, according to a preliminary mortality report published by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Florida's previous deadliest year for manatees was 2013, when 830 manatees died, mostly from exposure to toxins from a harmful algal bloom known as red tide, according to The Associated Press. 

The main cause of this year's die-off, however, is starvation, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Most of these manatees died during the colder months, when they migrated to and through the Indian River Lagoon, a group of three lagoons located southeast of Orlando, on Florida's east coast, where most seagrass had died out.

Related: Photos: See the world's cutest sea creatures

The loss of seagrass, a food that manatees rely on to survive, is likely a result of increasing pollution in Florida's waters; fertilizer runoff and sewage leaks have led to increased levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in the waters, which, in turn, can drive algal blooms, according to TC Palm, a local news site. 

Since 2011, persistent algal blooms have reduced the clarity of the water, which has led to less sunlight reaching the seagrass beds; seagrass, like many plants, needs sunlight to survive, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The commission is now working with other organizations, universities and government agencies to help restore the habitat.

In March, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission declared an "unusual mortality event" for the manatees — a designation that allows the federal government to work with the state government and nonprofit organizations to help the manatees and figure out the cause of the die-off, according to TC Palm.

"The long-term health effects of prolonged starvation in manatees that survived the Atlantic event to this point are not yet known," the commission said. 

But as the weather got warmer, and manatees traveled elsewhere in Florida to forage for food, the "numbers of malnourished carcasses and manatees in need of rescue decreased," according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. In June, the leading cause of death in manatees became boat strikes. So far this year, 63 manatees have been killed by boats, according to TC Palm. 

Previously known threats to manatees, including boat strikes, need to "continue to be recognized as a concern for the population," according to the commission. 

Manatees (Trichechus manatus) were once classified as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife (FWS). There were only a few hundred remaining in the 1970s,  according to the FWS. Thanks to conservation efforts, their numbers rebounded, and they were upgraded to "threatened" status in 2017, according to the FWS. About 6,300 manatees currently live in Florida waters, according to The Associated Press. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Lemurs are a unique group of primates native to Madagascar, an island off the coast of east Africa. Although they are related to monkeys and apes, lemurs make up a separate branch of the primate family tree and are classified as a superfamily, made up of five individual lemur families and more than 100 different species.

Lemurs have pointed snouts with wet noses and rely more on their sense of smell than monkeys do, according to the Lemur Conservation Foundation. The lemur superfamily includes ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) popularized by the "Madagascar" film franchise, and the peculiar aye-ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis) — previously described by Live Science as "so ugly it's cute." Lemurs’ appearance, diet and habitat vary between the different species, but each one plays a role in the rich and varied ecosystems of Madagascar. 

After a 2012 assessment of the world's lemur population, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) called lemurs the most endangered mammals on Earth, Live Science previously reported. Almost all of the lemurs alive today are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN.

Types of lemur

There are 113 known lemur species, according to the IUCN, with the potential for more to be discovered. Indri (Indri indri) is the largest lemur species, and can grow to between 24 and 35 inches (61 and 90 centimeters) long and can weigh up to 22 lbs. (10 kilograms), according to the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Lemurs often have long tails, but indris are the only species to not have one at all. 

The smallest lemurs are Madame Berthe's mouse lemurs (Microcebus berthae), which are also the smallest primates in the world. These lemurs grow to just 3.5 to 4 inches (9 to 11 cm) long excluding their tails, which add another 5 to 6 inches (12 to 14 cm) to their length. The tiny lemurs only weigh an average of 1 ounce (30 grams), according to the University of Michigan's Animal Diversity Web (ADW). 

Giant lemurs, some the size of gorillas, roamed Madagascar just a few thousand years ago. These included giant sloth lemurs, which had long limbs and hooked fingers like the claws of a modern sloth, although they were lemurs and not sloths, which are a separate group of mammals. Giant sloth lemurs were still living in Madagascar until at least 1,000 years ago, as evidenced by a single cave drawing of a giant sloth lemur being hunted by humans with dogs, according to The Natural History Museum in London.

Size is not the only way to tell lemur species apart — they are often also very unique in appearance. Ring-tailed lemurs are easily recognized by the black rings on their white, fluffy tails. Blue-eyed black lemurs (Eulemur flavifrons) are striking, as they are the only primates other than humans to have blue eyes, according to the San Diego Zoo. Aye-ayes have perhaps the strangest appearance of all lemurs and primates in general, with tiny, bulging eyes, enormous ears and fluffy, long tails. These nocturnal lemurs also have long, skinny fingers that they tap on branches to locate and collect grubs for food.

Related: 'Cursed' primate weirdos have extra thumbs. Scientists didn't know about them until now

Where do lemurs live?

All lemurs are found on Madagascar, an island country off the west coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Populations of mongoose lemurs (Eulemur mongoz) and brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) also live on the nearby Comoros Islands, between Madagascar and Mozambique, but they were almost certainly introduced to these islands by humans, according to the IUCN. 

Related: Species hitched ride to Madagascar on floating islands

Lemurs occupy many different habitats on Madagascar, including rainforests, dry deciduous forests, spiny forests, wetlands and mountains. For example, Sibree's dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus sibreei) live in rainforests at altitudes above 4,590 feet (1,400 meters), and white-collared lemurs (Eulemur cinereiceps), also known as gray-headed lemurs, live in a thin strip of tropical, moist lowland forest from sea level up to 2,950 feet (900 m). Lemur habitat is disappearing due to deforestation and their ranges are often highly restrictive.

Some animals, such as Sunda flying lemurs (Galeopterus variegatus) from Southeast Asia, have lemur in their name but are not actually lemurs. True lemurs are only found on Madagascar and nearby islands.

What do lemurs eat?

Many lemurs are herbivores and feed on fruit, flowers, tree bark and sap. Lemurs can be very picky about what they eat, with most of their diet coming from a few tree species, according to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). For example, greater bamboo lemurs (Prolemur simus) are highly specialized to eat bamboo, making them Madagascar's equivalent of China's giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca). A 2017 study published in the journal Current Biology found that greater bamboo lemurs living in Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park get almost all of their food from a single species of woody bamboo called Cathariostachys madagascariensis.

Lemurs are key seed dispersers on Madagascar, which means they help plants reproduce by carrying seeds in their stomach after eating fruit and depositing the seeds into a new area through their feces. Certain plants can be dependent on a single lemur species to disperse their seeds. For example, a 2013 study published in the Journal of Tropical Ecology noted that brown lemurs in a tropical dry forest in northwestern Madagascar are the only disperser for plants with seeds that are more than 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) in diameter. These characteristics make lemurs important for maintaining healthy forests, just as healthy forests are important for providing lemurs with food. 

Some lemurs are omnivores and will also eat insects and small vertebrates. Ring-tailed lemurs, for example, will feed on anything that is easily available to them, and their diet can include spiders, chameleons and even small birds, according to ADW. 

Lemurs' main predators are fossas (Cryptoprocta ferox) — carnivores that looks a bit like a cat or weasel. Lemurs can also become prey for large snakes, birds, humans and animals humans have introduced to Madagascar, such as domestic cats. 

Activity patterns

Lemurs can be diurnal (active during the day), nocturnal (active at night), or cathemeral (active during the day and night), depending on the species, according to the Duke Lemur Center, a research foundation in North Carolina. The time of day cathemeral lemurs, such as brown lemurs, choose to be awake and active can also depend on weather, season and what foods are available to them. 

A few lemur species hibernate, such as fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus medius). They can hibernate for up to seven months during the dry season when food is more scarce. Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs usually spend this dormant period in hollowed-out tree trunks and survive off fat reserves stored in their tails, according to the Duke Lemur Center. 

Ring-tailed lemurs warm up after a cool night by basking in the warm morning sunshine, according to Bristol Zoo Gardens in the U.K. They often sunbathe by sitting upright with their arms spread wide, making it appear as though they are worshipping the sun. Other lemur species, including black-and-white ruffed lemurs, also sunbathe to warm up.

Related: Lemurs snooze in caves like early humans

Lemur life

Lemurs that are active during the day are highly social and live in family groups known as troops. This allows them to alert each other to predators. Nocturnal lemurs, on the other hand, use the cover of darkness to help them hide from predators, according to the San Diego Zoo. However, lemurs have complex social lives and even solitary species may sleep together. 

A 2005 study published in the International Journal of Primatology found that nocturnal Madame Berthe's mouse lemurs spent half of their nights sleeping alone and the other half sleeping in groups, which is similar to other mouse lemurs. Sleeping in groups may help largely solitary lemurs stay warm and provide protection against predators that could hunt them while they are resting. Sahamalaza sportive lemurs (Lepilemur sahamalaza) rest and sleep alone, but they use the alarm calls of birds and other lemurs to know when predators are nearby, according to a 2013 study published in the journal PLOS One.

All lemur species apart from aye-ayes have a tooth comb — six teeth fused together at the front of their lower jaw to groom themselves and other lemurs. They also have a secondary tongue under their main tongue called a sublingua, which they use to clean the tooth comb like a toothbrush, according to the Duke Lemur Center.

Related: Lemur faces are unique, facial recognition reveals

Scent is very important when it comes to lemur mating. Male ring-tailed lemurs "stink flirt" with females by rubbing aromatic chemicals secreted from their wrists onto their tails and waving their tails around in the presence of females. The secreted liquid smells bitter and leathery to the human nose for most of the year but becomes more fruity, floral and sweet during the breeding season from April to May, Live Science previously reported. The change in smell could be a sign for females that a male is ready to mate. Male lemurs also use their smelly tails to have stink fights with rival males when competing for the opportunity to breed with females, by seeing who has the strongest scent. 

After mating, female lemurs have a gestation period of 102 to 170 days, depending on the species. A female can give birth to between one and six young at a time. Smaller species of lemurs tend to give birth to more babies, according to the San Diego Zoo. 

Baby lemurs, called pups, generally cling to their mother's belly for the first three to four weeks of life and then ride on her back until they are 3 to 4 months old. Lemurs can take between one and three-and -a-half years to reach adulthood, depending on the species. The lifespan of lemurs depends on the species as well. According to ADW, gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) live an average of 14 years in captivity; ring-tailed lemurs usually live 16 years in the wild but may reach 33 years old in captivity; and black-and-white ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata) can live for more than 35 years in captivity. 

Can you have a lemur as a pet?

Lemurs are occasionally kept as pets in the U.S., but many science and conservation organizations, such as the Duke Lemur Center and the Lemur Conservation Foundation, oppose the practice. Lemurs naturally live in complex social groups and are not suited to living with humans in a domestic setting. Pet lemurs also have a strong, unpleasant odor, and often become aggressive when they reach sexual maturity. 

A 2019 study published in the journal PLOS One estimated that more than 30,000 wild-caught lemurs were being kept as pets in Madagascar. The study noted that one-third of attempts to keep pet lemurs resulted in the death of the lemur and once they are kept as pets, it's almost impossible to return them to the wild. The motivation for capturing wild lemurs often comes from the tourism industry. 

"Tourists love to see lemurs up close and are often willing to pay seemingly small amounts of money to interact or take selfies with lemurs, particularly baby lemurs," Marni LaFleur, an assistant professor at the University of San Diego and co-lead author of the study, said in a statement at the time. "These superficially harmless behaviors, however, in part fuel the illegal extraction of lemurs from the wild and are detrimental to the wellbeing and survival of wildlife globally." 

Conservation status

In 2020, the IUCN announced that 98% of all lemurs are threatened with extinction. The main reasons lemur populations have declined so significantly is because of habitat loss due to deforestation and hunting in Madagascar. Their habitat is often destroyed so that it can be used for agriculture, and they are hunted for food. 

Related: More than half of all primates threatened with extinction 

IUCN data show that 31% of lemur species are listed as critically endangered, which is just one category away from extinction in the wild. Critically endangered lemur species include indris, black-and-white ruffed lemurs, Sibree's dwarf lemurs, blue-eyed black lemurs and mongoose lemurs. 

Over 40% of the remaining species of lemurs, including ring-tailed lemurs and aye-ayes, are listed as endangered by the IUCN, and another 20% are classified as being vulnerable to extinction. Gray mouse lemurs and gray-brown mouse lemurs (Microcebus griseorufus) are the only lemur species that are currently not threatened with extinction and are placed in the lowest-risk category. However, the IUCN notes that even these species are likely in decline and may be moved into the threatened category in the future. Finally, Groves' dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus grovesi) and Nosy Boraha mouse lemurs (Microcebus boraha) are listed as data deficient, which means there isn't enough information about their populations for the IUCN to make an assessment.

Additional resources

• Illustrated book: "Lemurs of Madagascar" (Conservation International, 2010). Available to buy at Amazon.
• The Lemur Conservation Network website offers more information about lemur conservation.
• The American Museum of Natural History website has a short film about lemurs.

This article was originally written by Live Science contributor Alina Bradford and has since been updated. 

Tasmanian devil joeys have been born in the wild on mainland Australia for the first time in over 3,000 years, according to Aussie Ark. Conservationists say it is a landmark moment in the effort to reintroduce the marsupials to the mainland.

Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) are the world's largest carnivorous marsupials and were once found across mainland Australia. But the introduction of invasive dingoes (Canis lupus dingo) by early human settlers quickly wiped out Tasmanian devils there, Live Science previously reported. As a result, Tasmanian devils are now endemic to Tasmania, an island off the south coast of the mainland. However, even there, the species is now endangered due to the rapid spread of devil facial tumor disease (DFTD), which has killed 90% of their population since 1990, Live Science reported.

To save the species from extinction, conservation organization Aussie Ark, in partnership with Re:wild and WildArk, started a rewilding project in 2011 to reintroduce Tasmanian devils to mainland Australia. That year, they transferred 44 Tasmanian devils to a captive breeding site, Devil Ark, in Australia,  where more than 390 joeys have since been born under human supervision, according to Aussie Ark. 

Related: 15 of the largest animals of their kind on Earth

Last year, the team at Devil Ark released 26 of the captive Tasmanian devils, including seven reproductive-age females, into a 1,000-acre (400 hectares) sanctuary, making them the first wild Tasmanian devils in Australia since they were wiped out, Live Science previously reported. Now, at least seven joeys have been born among the wild devils, with the actual number likely to be closer to 20, Aussie Ark said.

"We have been working tirelessly for the better part of 10 years to return devils to the wild of mainland Australia, with the hope that they would establish a sustainable population," Tim Faulkner, president of Aussie Ark, said in a statement. "Once they were back in the wild, it was up to them."

 Tiny joeys 

Tasmanian devils reproduce in the same way as kangaroos: Offspring are born prematurely and then continue to develop inside the mother's pouch. Females give birth to between 20 and 30 tiny joeys after just three weeks of pregnancy. These hairless, peanut-size babies, which are not much more developed than embryos, then crawl up the mother's fur, toward her pouch, where they attach to the mother's teats and continue to develop for another three months, before becoming big enough to leave the pouch. However, the mother has only four teats in her pouch, so a maximum of four joeys survive, Live Science reported. 

Because of the way Tasmanian devils reproduce, conservationists can't determine by observation alone if reproduction has been successful in the wild. Therefore, rangers had to recapture the released female devils to look inside their pouches for developing joeys, according to Aussie Ark.

Australian devils 

Reintroducing Tasmanian devils to mainland Australia will not only safeguard the species from DFTD but also benefit the rest of the ecosystem. 

Tasmanian devils are predatory animals but prefer to scavenge on carrion left behind by other predators and from roadkill. They have an excellent sense of smell to detect these leftovers and also powerful jaws that allow them to devour bones. Scavengers like Tasmanian devils are important because they help keep ecosystems clean and free of diseases that sprout up in decaying corpses, according to Aussie Ark. The devils may be able to keep small pests — like mice, feral cats and foxes — under control, according to CNN.

The wild population will continue to develop within the safety of the devils' sanctuary, which protects them from cars, feral pests, noxious weeds and wildfires, according to Aussie Ark, which also plans to reintroduce 20 additional captive devils to the sanctuary in late 2021 and 2022. 

"The fact that the adults have adapted so quickly is remarkable, and the joeys are one of the most tangible signs that the reintroduction of Tasmanian devils is working," Don Church, president of Re:wild, said in the statement. "This doesn't just bode well for this endangered species but also for the many other endangered species that can be saved if we rewild Australia."

Aussie Ark plans to reintroduce six other "cornerstone species" to the Australian ecosystem in the future: the eastern quoll, brush-tail rock wallaby, rufous bettong, long-nosed potoroo, parma wallaby and southern brown bandicoot.

Originally published on Live Science.

Madagascar may be a secret stronghold for coelacanths, the "living fossil" fish that were considered extinct until a fisherman caught one in 1938.

That incredible first specimen hailed from the coast of South Africa, but coelacanths of the same species — Latimeria chalumnae — have since turned up off Tanzania, the Comoros (a group of islands off the eastern coast of Africa) and Madagascar. Now, a new review of the Madagascar fishery bycatch, or accidental catch, reveals that at least 34 confirmed specimens have been caught and that many more likely have been pulled up that never reached the attention of biologists or conservationists. Though the overall population numbers remain a mystery, the authors of the new study suspect that Madagascar may be an important habitat for coelacanths and that it may even be their ancestral home. 

With 420 million years of history behind them, coelacanths are older than Madagascar, which has had a coastline for 88 million years and has been in its current location for about 40 million years. But they're best known from the Comoros, which are only about 15 million years old. Researchers think the fish may have been living in Madagascar longer, colonizing the Comoros later in history.

Related: See photos of the freakiest-looking fish

Madagascar "has got a vast shoreline, and we know that there are canyons along its coast," study co-author Mike Bruton, an ichthyologist based in Cape Town, South Africa, told Live Science. "And we know that coelacanths like to live in canyons from depths of about 150 to 500 meters [500 to 1,600 feet]."

Madagascar is also much older than the Comoros, where most recorded coelacanth catches come from. Because coelacanth fossil history stretches back 420 million years, Bruton and his colleagues believe that, compared with the Comoros, Madagascar might have been home to coelacanths for longer.

Fossil fish

That long history is what makes coelacanths fascinating, said Bruton, the author of "The Annotated Old Fourlegs: The Updated Story of the Coelacanth" (University Press of Florida, 2018). These fish evolved 180 million years before the dinosaurs first emerged, surviving even as continents shifted and an asteroid wiped out much of life on Earth, including marine "sea monsters" like mosasaurs. Known first from fossils, coelacanths were believed extinct until a trawler caught one in a gill net in December 1938 near South Africa. According to the Australian Museum, the crew was intrigued enough by the large, bizarre-looking fish that they alerted a museum in East London, South Africa, whose scientists brought the specimen to the attention of South African ichthyologist J.L.B. Smith. Smith confirmed that the creature was a coelacanth and gave it a scientific name. (Another species, Latimeria menadoensis, was discovered in 1998 near Indonesia.)

Information on coelacanths in Madagascar waters has always been scattered and disorganized, Bruton said; there has never been a coelacanth specialist based on the island. Given the promising habitat around the coast, the researchers started to gather reports of coelacanth catches. They found an increasing number of reports with time, possibly because of the rising popularity of large-mesh gill nets used to catch sharks for the shark-fin market. These gill nets, called jarifa nets, are left in deep water and sometimes baited with small fish. The nets probably go undetected by coelacanths until it's too late, as the fish hunt by night and mostly by using electroreception, the detection of tiny electric fields made by prey in the water. The nets don't generate electric fields. Making matters worse for coelacanths, the nets can be deployed in the rocky canyons they prefer, unlike trawl nets, which must be used on relatively smooth seafloor.

Of 34 catches with enough detail recorded to be confirmed coelacanths, the fish ranged in weight from 66 to 198 lbs. (30 to 90 kilograms). The lengths ranged from almost 4 feet to more than 6 feet (121 to 190 centimeters).

Protecting the coelacanth

The catches occurred across 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of the western coast of Madagascar, from the southernmost point of the island all the way to the northwestern coast. The largest cluster was caught in Onilahy Canyon, off the southwest coast of the island. This level of bycatch could be dangerous to the coelacanths' survival. The species is critically endangered and has many of the features that put fish at risk of extinction, Bruton said: It is slow-growing, it reproduces rarely, and it is a high-level predator easily threatened by habitat loss and environmental degradation. 

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

It's possible that coelacanths also live off the east coast of Madagascar, the researchers reported March 29 in the South African Journal of Science. Fishing activity is lighter to the east, so surveys using remotely operated vehicles would be helpful to search that side of the island for the ancient fish, Bruton said. The African Coelacanth Ecosystem Programme, a project of the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, has a submersible that is capable of doing these surveys, Bruton said, but a planned expedition that included Madagascar was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He and his colleagues hope the expedition will be rescheduled.

"Only then will we know the full extent of the population, how healthy it is, and be able to recommend measures to ensure their survival," Bruton said.

For now, the researchers recommend that Madagascar set up a coelacanth sanctuary in Onilahy Canyon and pass legislation adding L. chalumnae to the country's protected species list. Fishing with jarifa nets should be banned in coelacanth-rich areas, they wrote in the South African Journal of Science, and fishing crews should be given incentives to tag, photograph and throw back any live coelacanths they catch. The fish make for poor eating, as their tissues contain a variety of rancid-tasting oils and a waste product called urea (the main ingredient in urine), but they are sometimes consumed in Madagascar.

If fishing crews can be brought onboard the conservation bandwagon, they might also help advance coelacanth research, Bruton said. Fishers could be taught to deep-freeze any dead coelacanths they do catch to preserve tissue for genetic analysis. Gene sequencing could help reveal whether there is any breeding of coelacanths between Madagascar and other West Indian Ocean populations, Bruton said.

"That would be very valuable information that we don't know at this stage," he said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

How do you save a herd of giraffes that are trapped on a rapidly sinking island? Float them to the mainland on a custom-built barge — a "GiRaft." 

That's how a months-long giraffe rescue operation in Kenya recently concluded on April 12, delivering the last of nine stranded giraffes to safety, according to a statement by Save Giraffes Now (SGN), an American nonprofit organization that partnered with conservationists in Kenya to relocate the giraffes.

The threatened giraffes, a highly endangered subspecies called Rothschild's giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi), had been living on Longicharo Island in Kenya's Lake Baringo since 2011. But rising waters repeatedly flooded their habitat, and conservationists, concerned that the giraffes could no longer find enough food on the island, decided to evacuate the animals. 

Related: Rare white giraffe photographed

"Water levels in Lake Baringo have been rising for some time, but in 2020 the rate of rise increased," flooding coastal homes and businesses and threatening the survival of the giraffes, representatives of Kenya's Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) posted on Facebook on Dec. 2, 2020, when the giraffe evacuation began.

To carry the gangly giraffes from their disappearing home to a new sanctuary on the mainland, SGN worked with NRT and other local conservation agencies: Ruko Community Conservancy and Kenya Wildlife Service. People from the Njemps and Pokot communities designed and built a giraffe-toting barge with tall, reinforced sides, buoyed by 60 empty drums and towed by boats.

Rangers helped the giraffes get used to the GiRaft over time by parking it on land and encouraging the animals to investigate it by loading the barge with delicious treats, such as mangos, seed pods, food pellets and acacia leaves, according to the SGN. Once the giraffes were familiar with the GiRaft, rescuers transported them one at a time to higher ground in an enclosed sanctuary at the 44,000-acre (178square-kilometer) Ruko Conservancy, located about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) across the lake from the island. 

The first passenger to board the GiRaft was a female giraffe named Asiwa, as rising waters had already separated her from the rest of the herd, NRT representatives wrote on Facebook. Over the following months, more giraffes were taken across the lake, and on April 12, the last remaining giraffes — a female named Ngarikoni and her baby Noelle, born at the end of December — completed the journey, according to the statement.

Giraffe populations in general have declined by about 40% over the past three decades, but Rothschild's giraffe numbers have dwindled by approximately 80%, making it "arguably one of the most imperiled giraffe subspecies," according to a study published in 2019 in the African Journal of Ecology. Rothschild's giraffes were once widespread across Kenya, Uganda and southern Sudan. Now only around 3,000 remain in isolated populations in Uganda and Kenya, lending a greater urgency to the GiRaft rescue mission, SGN president David O'Connor said in the statement.

"With giraffes undergoing a silent extinction, every one we can protect matters, making this rescue an important step in supporting the survival of this species," O'Connor said. 

The happy ending to the island giraffes' story also reflects a landmark collaboration between the Njemps and Pokot communities, which have united in conservation efforts after years of conflict.

"Ruko is an example of how much peace is linked to everything else — conservation, livelihoods, business, gender equality, governance," Rebby Sebei, manager of Ruko Community Conservancy, said in the statement. "It all starts with peace."

Originally published on Live Science.

The largest sawfish ever measured by scientists was found dead in the Florida Keys last week.

The 16-foot-long (4.9 meters) sharp-snouted fish was a mature female with eggs the size of softballs found in her reproductive tract. Scientists are now studying her carcass to determine her age and to learn more about her reproductive past.

"Although it's a sad occurrence when a big animal like that dies, from a scientific standpoint we knew we could learn a lot from it," said Gregg Poulakis, a fish biologist at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. "That makes us feel a little bit better about having lost such a big female."

Related: See photos of the largest fish on Earth

Studying sawfish

The record-breaking sawfish was one of two dead sawfish that washed ashore in the Keys last week, one near Cudjoe Key and the other near Marvin Key. They were found far enough apart that the timing of their deaths is most likely coincidental, Poulakis told Live Science.

Citizens reported the fish via the Commission's sawfish hotline, and local law enforcement helped tow the carcasses to shore so that researchers could measure them and take tissue samples. Sawfish have been on the Commissions' research radar since 2003, when they were added to the U.S. federal endangered species list. (All five species of sawfish are also listed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.) 

Sawfishes are a kind of ray fish known for their flat, chainsaw-like snouts. Little was known about them before their endangered species listing, Poulakis said.

"Basically, any question you could ask — 'How big do they get?; what kind of habitat do they need?; how long do they live' — we just didn't have an answer," he said.

Now, Poulakis and other collaborators within the Commission and at other Florida research agencies regularly catch,tag and release sawfish along the coast. They also get about 20 to 30 reported sightings a month from boaters and fishers. Five or six times a year, a dead sawfish washes ashore. Even carcasses that have partially decomposed are scientifically useful, Poulakis said: Rays' vertebrae show a growth line each year, much like a tree trunk, so by slicing the calcified cartilage and counting the lines, scientists can tell how old the animal was when it died.

A sawfish matriarch

The oldest sawfish studied by Poulakis' team so far was 14 feet (4.7 m) long and 14 years old. The smaller of the two sawfish found dead last week was 12 feet, 4 inches (3.8 m) long and was still a juvenile, Poulakis said. She had immature eggs in her ovaries. The 16-foot sawfish, on the other hand, was a mature adult.

"We're excited to see how old the 16-footer that we got this week is," Poulakis said last week. "My guess is that she is older than [14]."

The two sawfish had no injuries or other indications of why they had died, Poulakis said.

The researchers are studying the reproductive tracts of the fish to understand more about when they reach maturity. Sawfish pregnancies last approximately a year, Poulakis said, and they give birth to live young measuring about 2.5 feet (0.7 m) long.

The researchers also plan to take DNA samples, which they can compare to the DNA of the juvenile sawfish that they catch to look for relationships along the maternal line. They'll also check the animals for parasites to understand the baseline parasite load in a sawfish's body.

Anyone in Florida who sees a sawfish should report the sighting to the state sawfish hotline, Poulakis said. Sightings can be reported by phone at 844-4SAWFISH, by email at sawfish@myfwc.com, or via the FWC reporter app. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to indicate this record is for the largest smalltooth sawfish, which is one of five sawfish species. Also, the article was updated to correct the reference to "bone," which is actually calcified cartilage.

Tapanuli orangutans, the most gravely endangered great ape species on Earth, may be even closer to extinction than previously thought, The Hill reported.

The great apes can now be found in the mountains of Batang Toru in North Sumatra, Indonesia, where they occupy less than 3% of the habitat they did in the late 1800s, according to a study published Jan. 4 in the journal PLOS One. With fewer than 800 Tapanuli orangutans left in Batang Toru, the species faces the looming threat of extinction. 

If more than 1% of the adult population is killed, captured or translocated each year, the Tapanuli orangutan will become the first great ape species to go extinct in modern times, study author Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist and founder of conservation group Borneo Futures, told The Hill.

Related: 8 human-like behaviors of primates 

The study, based on historical records from the region, found that the apes were driven into their current home in the Batang Toru mountains by hunters who targeted the apes, as well as the fragmentation of their former habitat, The Hill reported. Ideally, the orangutans should be able to move between a variety of environments, including lowland areas, to maximize their chance of survival, but instead they remain stuck in highlands that they're not optimally suited for, the authors said.

Even this limited habitat could soon be threatened by a new hydroelectric power plant, which would be located on the Batang Toru River in South Tapanuli Regency, North Sumatra. The 301-acre (122 hectares) plant would block several subpopulations of Tapanuli orangutans from intermingling, which could lead to inbreeding and limit the genetic diversity of the species.

The PT North Sumatera Hydro Energy (PT NHSE) company has paused construction of the plant due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also lost key funding from the Bank of China, so the construction may remain on hold for several years. Meijaard and his co-authors want the developer, government, IUCN and Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) to use this pause to launch an independent investigation to assess the threat to orangutans. 

PT NHSE financed its own assessment previously and concluded that the plant would not threaten the apes’ habitat. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) then released its own report, disputing the PT NHSE assessment.

Beyond the power plant, other factors threaten the Tapanuli orangutans' survival. You can read more at The Hill. 

Originally published on Live Science. 

Researchers have successfully cloned a highly endangered ferret species using cells that were frozen more than three decades ago, according to news reports.

The adorable clone, named Elizabeth Ann, is a species of black-footed ferret, one of the most endangered mammals in North America, according to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature. Born on Dec. 10, 2020, Elizabeth Ann was created using cells from "Willa," a wild black-footed ferret who died and had her cells cryopreserved in 1988, according to a statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which was involved in the cloning.

The feat marks the first time an endangered species in the U.S. has been cloned, the statement said. Researchers hope Elizabeth Ann will help bring genetic diversity to the black-footed ferret population, which today is descended from just seven individual ferrets, making all living members of the species essentially half-siblings, according to The New York Times. 

"It was a commitment to seeing this species survive that has led to the successful birth of Elizabeth Ann," Ryan Phelan, executive director of Revive & Restore, a conservation organization that was involved with the cloning, said in the statement. "To see her now thriving ushers in a new era for her species and for conservation-dependent species everywhere. She is a win for biodiversity and for genetic rescue."

Related: 8 mammals that have been cloned since dolly the sheep

Black-footed ferrets were once thought to be extinct, but scientists found a small population in 1981, which allowed conservationists to start captive breeding programs for the species. About 250 to 350 of the ferrets live in captivity, and 300 more live in reintroduction sites in the wild, according to Revive & Restore. But the limited genetic diversity of the species has challenged its recovery, making the creatures prone to health disorders and certain infections, the Times reported.

Since Willa was not one of the "seven founders" of the population, her genes — which are now possessed by Elizabeth Ann — could bring much-needed variation to the population's genetics.

The project to clone a black-footed ferret began in 2013, and was a result of a partnership between USFWS, Revive & Restore, the company ViaGen Pets & Equine, San Diego Zoo Global, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Several other endangered animals have been cloned in other parts of the world, including gaur, or wild cattle, in 2001, bucardo, or wild goats, in 2009, and wild coyotes in 2012, according to Scientific American.

Originally published on Live Science.  

A 38-foot-long (11.5 meters) whale that washed ashore in the Florida Everglades in January 2019 turns out to be a completely new species. And it's already considered endangered, scientists say.

When the corpse of the behemoth washed up along Sandy Key — underweight with a hard piece of plastic in its gut — scientists thought it was a subspecies of the Bryde's (pronounced "broodus") whale, a baleen whale species in the same group that includes humpback and blue whales. That subspecies was named Rice's whale. Now, after genetic analysis of other Rice's whales along with an examination of the skull from the Everglades whale, researchers think that, rather than a subspecies, the Rice's whale is an entirely new species that lives in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The discovery, detailed Jan. 10 in the journal Marine Mammal Science, also means that there are fewer than 100 members of this species living on the planet, making them "critically endangered," according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Related: Amazing new video shows baby humpback whales nursing from their moms

According to the study, the researchers looked at records of the Bryde's whale in the Caribbean and greater Atlantic Ocean and concluded the whales they spotted were evidence "of an undescribed species of Balaenoptera from the Gulf of Mexico." 

The lead study author Patricia Rosel and her co-author, Lynsey Wilcox, both at Southeast Fisheries Science Center, completed the first genetic tests of this whale in 2008, finding that the skull of the Rice's whale was different than that of Bryde's whales.

In addition to having different skulls, Rice's whales are slightly different in size than Bryde's whales, the new analysis showed. They can weigh up to 60,000 pounds (27,215 kilograms) and grow up to 42 feet (12.8 meters) long, according to NOAA, whereas Bryde's whales have been known to reach upwards of 50 feet (15.2 m) and weigh more than 55,000 pounds (24,947 kg).

Rosel and her colleagues think the whales in the new species can live approximately 60 years, but given that there are so few in existence, researchers need further observation of the whales to get a better idea of their life expectancy.

Given their location in the Gulf of Mexico, Rice's whales are particularly vulnerable to oil spills, vessel strikes and energy exploration and production, NOAA added.

Originally published on Live Science.

African elephants are the first animals to be successfully counted from space while moving through a complicated landscape that ranged from open grasses to forests. 

Researchers combined high-resolution images captured 372 miles (600 kilometers) above Earth's surface by the satellites Worldview 3 and 4, along with deep computer learning to count the number of elephants in Addo Elephant National Park in South Africa.

Typically, conservationists do this from low-flying planes in order to count and monitor African elephants (Loxodonta africana), a method that takes many hours. With the new technique that combines satellite imagery with artificial intelligence, up to 1,930 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) can be surveyed on a single blue-sky day in minutes. Then, the researchers' deep-learning computer algorithms analyze those images and pick out individual elephants. The results of this new proof-of-concept study showed the AI was as accurate as the human eye at spotting each elephant.

"While this is a proof of concept, it's ready to go," lead study author Isla Duporge, a zoologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told the BBC. "And conservation organizations are already interested in using this to replace surveys using aircraft."

Related: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth

The new technique is a key part of ensuring the survival of this species, which is listed as endangered by the IUCN Red List, the world’s leading database surrounding extinction threats to wildlife created by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Due to poaching and habitat destruction, just 415,000 African elephants roam the wild, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

"Accurate monitoring is essential if we're to save the species," Olga Isupova, a computer scientist at the University of Bath in the U.K. who wrote the deep learning algorithms used in the study, said in a statement. "We need to know where the animals are and how many there are."  

 What really makes this study stand apart from other satellite-tracking projects is how successful the computer program was at picking out the elephants from their complex backgrounds — known in ecology as heterogeneous landscapes — including grasslands and partially tree-covered savannah. 

"This type of work has been done before with whales, but of course the ocean is all blue, so counting is a lot less challenging," Isupova said in the statement. 

Satellite imagery is a much more efficient survey method than the current flyover surveys carried out. Most importantly, it is faster and avoids double-counting the same elephants. The remote survey also reduces the impact researchers have on the animals and allows them to count individuals moving between countries, something that can be tricky to do from planes due to strict border control and areas of conflict, according to the statement. 

 It is also a survey method that will only get better with time.

"Satellite imagery resolution increases every couple of years, and with every increase, we will be able to see smaller things in greater detail," Isupova said in the statement.

As satellite imaging improves other smaller species may soon be able to be counted from space too. 

The study was published online Dec. 23, 2020, in the journal Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.

Originally published on Live Science.

Editor's Note: This article has been updated to correct the conversion for the area they surveyed; it is 1,930 square miles (5,000 square km), not 3,100 square miles. In addition, the elephants are endangered, not vulnerable, according to ICUN.

A manatee with the word "Trump" scratched into its back has triggered a federal investigation that could end in jail time for the culprit. Whether the mutilation will harm the animal’s long-term health, however, is not yet known.

According to the Citrus County Chronicle, the manatee was found swimming in Blue Hole in the headwaters of the Homosassa River on the Gulf Coast of Florida. In large, capital letters, the word "Trump" stretched across the animal's back almost from its the manatee's neck to its tail in large, capital letters. It wasn't clear how the word was etched and how much damage was done to the manatee's skin in the process. However, even minor harassment of manatees can lead to major consequences. Late last year, a Florida boat captain was sentenced to 50 hours of community service after poking a manatee on the back with a fishing pole.

Manatees are listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act, and harassing or harming them is a Class A, federal criminal offense punishable by a $50,000 fine and/or up to one-year in federal prison, Florida Fish & Wildlife (USFW) officer Craig Cavanna, who is heading up the investigation, told the Chronicle. Manatees are also protected by the Marine Mammals Protection Act and by Florida state law. 

Placid, slow-moving manatees are large enough to have no natural predators, but they are often injured by boat collisions, according to the nonprofit Save the Manatees. White or gray scars, as seen on the manatee in Blue Hole, indicate that the wound has healed. By adulthood, many if not most manatees have at least one scar, U.S. Geological Survey biologist Cathy Beck said in 2016 in a USFW Q&A. Most healed manatees seem to be healthy despite multiple scars, Beck said, but others may not be, and little is known about how scarring affects manatees' long-term health and reproductive prospects.

West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus) are migratory herbivores. They winter in Florida's warm waters, but travel as far north as Massachusetts in the summer months. Their winter range in shallow waters and estuaries brings them in close contact with human boaters and swimmers.

Anyone with knowledge of the incident should call the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at 888-404-FWCC (3922). The Center for Biological Diversity is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to “a conviction for the cruel and illegal mutilation of a threatened Florida manatee,” officials said in a statement Monday (Jan. 11).

Originally published on Live Science.

 The world's oldest known orangutan, a 61-year-old Sumatran female called Inji, has died at her home at the Oregon Zoo. 

Although her exact birth date is unknown, Inji had been at the zoo since 1961 and was suspected to be a 1-year-old at the time, according to a statement from the zoo. She was brought to the U.S. through wild animal trade that was legal at the time. 

"We knew she couldn't live forever, but this really hurts, and I know many visitors are grieving along with us," Bob Lee, who oversees animal welfare at the zoo, said in the statement. "Inji's ability to connect with people was incredible."

Related: In photos: Adorable orangutan shows off knot-tying skills

Throughout her long life, Inji remained active and spent most of her days interacting with visitors through the windows of her habitat. Staff and visitors would often bring colorful items to help keep her entertained.

"She seemed to study humans and enjoy watching them, especially children," Lee said in the statement. 

The high level of interaction with visitors and the excellent care she received at the zoo allowed her to live long past the average age of her species. In the wild, the average life span for orangutans is only 30 to 40 years, according to National Geographic.

Inji was also a mother to 33-year-old daughter Markisa, a resident at Como Park Zoo & Conservatory in Minnesota, who she conceived with mate Harry at Oregon Zoo. She even became a grandmother to Markisa's own offspring, something very few orangutans will ever live long enough to achieve. 

However, age did eventually catch up to Inji and her health had deteriorated drastically over the last few weeks. She was moving stiffly, rarely left her nest box, and she was no longer interested in even her favorite foods, according to the statement. Eventually, she stopped responding to pain medication and the zoo medical staff decided to humanely euthanize her on Saturday (Jan. 9).

Threatened in the wild

All three species of orangutans — Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) and Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), of which Inji belonged — are listed as critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List. 

There are currently only 15,000 Sumatran orangutans, like Inji, left in the wild; the most endangered of all great apes, the Tapanuli orangutans are native to Sumatra as well, with just 800 individuals left in the wild. 

"We're thankful that we were able to give Inji a good home, but it's heartbreaking to think about the circumstances that brought her here," Asaba Mukobi, Oregon zoo's senior primate keeper, said in the statement. "Even though the wild animal trade is illegal now, it still exists. It is considered a major threat to orangutans' survival, along with human encroachment and habitat loss from palm oil plantations. Orangutans are at the brink of extinction."

The Oregon zoo partners with the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation to send care staff to help ensure the successful wild release of orphaned orangutans, and to improve the lives of orphans that can't be released.

According to Mukobi, the connection between captive animals like Inji and visitors, is the key to saving wild populations. 

"Building on that connection, we're trying to create awareness about what's happening to orangutans in their native lands and let people know how they can help," he said in the statement.

Originally published on Live Science.

While humans are still awaiting a jab with a coronavirus vaccine, endangered black-footed ferrets in Colorado have already gotten their shots. 

One hundred and twenty of the ferrets (Mustela nigripes) — once thought completely extinct — have been vaccinated with an experimental veterinary COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Associated Press. 

Ferrets are highly susceptible to dying from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Minks, a close cousin of ferrets, have already been found to contract coronavirus in fur farms and, alarmingly, in the wild. This is dangerous because any time the virus transmits between humans and animals, it has more opportunities to develop mutations. 

Related: Fast-spreading UK coronavirus variant: All your questions answered

"For highly contagious respiratory viruses, it's really important to be mindful of the animal reservoir," Corey Casper, a vaccinologist and chief executive of the Infectious Disease Research Institute in Seattle, told Colorado Public Radio (CPR). "If the virus returns to the animal host and mutates, or changes, in such a way that it could be reintroduced to humans, then the humans would no longer have that immunity. That makes me very concerned."

Black-footed ferrets are native to grasslands on the northern Great Plains. They were once believed to be extinct, but a few individuals were rediscovered in Wyoming in 1981, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Thanks to a captive breeding and release program, an estimated 370 black-footed ferrets exist in the wild. 

Due to these low numbers and ferrets' susceptibility to coronaviruses, conservationists feared the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic would threaten this fragile recovery. Scientists at the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colorado, began injecting their captive breeding population with an experimental vaccine in late summer. The vaccine is different from the ones thus far approved in humans. It uses a purified segment of the vaccine — the spike protein — and an adjuvant chemical that promotes immune response rather than the mRNA platform used by the human coronavirus vaccines.

The center has now completed the inoculations, leaving 60 ferrets unvaccinated in case something goes wrong with the vaccine, according to CPR. 

So far, the vaccinated ferrets appear healthy, and tests show SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in their blood. However, it's not yet clear whether the vaccine actually protects against the disease, because those efficacy trials have not yet been completed in the ferrets. Efficacy trials are the equivalent of the Phase 3 trials in humans that recently enabled Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines to receive emergency use authorization (EUA) from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

"We can do these sorts of things experimentally in animals that we can't do in humans," Rocke told CPR. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Many of us might struggle to see a moose on a moonless night, let alone a mosquito. But some bats have a nifty trick — they use their ears to locate their bug prey. It's not that bats can't see — many have excellent full-color vision — but most don't depend on their eyes to navigate. For many bats, the challenge they must overcome to survive is detecting prey that move in the dark.

Enter echolocation. Many bats can use returning echoes to detect objects as fine as a human hair in total darkness. Bat brains map the echoes in a way that lets them home in on insects or avoid obstacles. Bats use of echolocation can help us protect them. 

These cryptic creatures flit around at night and hide by day, making it difficult to monitor them by sight. 

Related: Photos: The eerily beautiful bats of Arizona

How many bats are there and what species are where? This is increasingly important information to know, because North American bats are being devastated by a deadly fungal disease called white nose syndrome (WNS).

In eastern North America, WNS has reduced bat populations by an estimated 90% or more. By studying bats in British Columbia and Alberta, where the fungus has not yet arrived, we hope to help bats survive when the fungus inevitably shows up there. Understanding how bats echolocate, and then recording them appropriately, is fundamental to that effort.

Some bats are loud, some less so; some species prefer to feed amongst trees, others over water. Some bats, particularly ones that can snatch prey off of the ground or leaves, have huge ears to capture both echoes and the soft sounds generated by their prey — like the flutter of moth wings. Most others rely on smaller ears that are adept at listening for echoes but not necessarily to the sounds that their prey generate.

The one problem with this system is that sound waves need to bounce off an object to generate an echo. That means the length of the sound wave has to match the size of the object so that the sound is blocked and bounces back to the bat. Insects are small, so the sound's wavelengths must be small. These short wavelengths result in high-frequency sounds. Most bats produce such high-frequency sounds that human ears can't hear them — hence, it is called ultrasound. 

Ultrasound doesn't actually travel very far in air, though, so most bats have to really belt their echolocation calls out in order to have enough sound range to avoid flying into an object before they detect it or to find a tiny insect in front of them. It's sort of like headlights on a car — bright lights are needed to drive fast. Faster bats must be loud and have their sound travel far. 

This results in another problem. The sounds bats make can be absolutely deafening to bats themselves — the equivalent of holding a shrieking smoke detector up to your ear if the sound were within human hearing range. Bats generate these really loud sounds right next to their own ears so how do they not deafen themselves? 

Bats use their middle ear muscles to essentially "close their ears" while they are sending out sound waves. Of course, to hear the reflected sound waves, they must quickly re-open their ears. Bats can do this 10 times per second. Interestingly, some bat prey have also developed the ability to hear bats' sounds and take evasive action, setting up a relentless battle of who hears who first.

Bats also tailor their sound to what they are finding. They may use only a small range of relatively lower frequencies while se arching for insects, then switch to higher frequencies to discover size, distance and speed of movement to narrow in on a target.

The way that different species use different sound frequencies can help us identify species flying around unseen in the night sky. Using acoustic detectors, we can listen in on ultrasonic bat calls and then analyze the acoustic patterns to figure out what species of bats are in the neighborhood. But the variation in the calls that one individual can make is tremendous, making the study of bat sounds challenging.

Listening for bats is an excellent way for us to fill in the many gaps in our understanding of which bats are present in different habitats. This monitoring is critical at a time when bats are facing many challenges like the steady spread of WNS. We're keeping our ears open to better understand how we can help these fascinating creatures. What we don't want to be listening to is silence.

Cori Lausen is Associate Conservation Scientist with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Canada, where she leads the Western Bat Program.

[If you want to hear some bat sounds for yourself, listen to this audio interview with Dr. Lausen. For more information on WCS Canada bat conservation science, visit WCSbats.ca.]

Two rare newborn North Atlantic right whale calves were recently spotted in U.S. waters, according to news reports.

This is hopeful news, as the North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) are critically endangered with only about 400 of them left in the wild, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries. 

Biologists from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida spotted the first of the calves on Dec. 4 near Cumberland Island, Georgia. The young whale was born to 13-year-old Chiminea, who is believed to be a first-time mom, according to CNN. The second calf, found off Vilano Beach in Florida on Dec. 7, was born to 16-year-old Millipede and was seen swimming alongside bottlenose dolphins.

Related: In photos: tracking humpback whales

The North Atlantic right whale breeding season, which runs from mid-November to mid-April, is an important time of year for researchers to monitor the number of calves that are born.

Historic whaling left the species on the brink of extinction by the early 1890s, according to NOAA. Though whaling is no longer a serious issue for right whales — thanks to an international moratorium on whaling set up by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) — other human impacts have kept their numbers low. Entanglement in fishing gear, vessel strikes and increasing ocean noise pollution from human activities all pose a serious threat to their survival, according to NOAA.

The last three years in particular have been very challenging for North Atlantic right whales. Since 2017, the North Atlantic right whales have been experiencing what NOAA calls an "unusual mortality event." They report that during this time, 32 of these whales died and 13 were seriously injured due to entanglement and vessel strikes.

This year's breeding season also got off to a poor start after a calf was discovered dead on the shore of a barrier island off North Carolina at the end of November, according to a statement from NOAA Fisheries. 

"With a population at such low levels, every individual counts, and it is great to see these two new calves at essentially the beginning of the calving season," Jamison Smith, the executive director of the Blue World Research Institute, who took photos of the newborn whales via drones, told CNN.

However, there is still a long way to go. To maintain their population, at least 20 calves a year need to be born, according to NOAA, USA Today reported. But in the last four seasons, North Atlantic right whales have failed to achieve this target, only birthing a combined total of 22 calves. 

Originally published on Live Science.

The critically-endangered blue whale — the largest animal known to have ever existed — has returned to the waters near the remote island of South Georgia near Antarctica, almost 100 years after the mega-mammal was nearly made extinct by industrial whaling.

Researchers say a recent survey of the waters around the sub-Antarctic island — a center for industrial whaling until it was banned in the 1960s — recorded dozens of blue whales where only a single whale had been seen between 1998 and 2018.

"We've had indications in previous years that there might be more blue whales starting to come back to South Georgia," marine mammal ecologist Susannah Calderan told Live Science. "But we were very favorably surprised by quite how many we did see this year."

Related: 15 of the largest animals of their kind

Calderan, a research fellow at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), is the lead author of a study into the resurgence of blue whales near South Georgia published Thursday (Nov. 19) in the journal Endangered Species Research.

In January and February this year, she was on board the New Zealand research ship Braveheart for an expedition into the waters around South Georgia led by whale biologist Jen Jackson of the British Antarctic Survey, a co-author of the new research.

The scientists, she said, were amazed to find numerous blue whales in a region where they were once eradicated — — 38 sightings on the surface over a few weeks, comprising a total of 58 individual whales, along with many acoustic detections by "sonobuoys" equipped to monitor underwater whale songs.

Subpolar island

South Georgia is the largest island in a remote South Atlantic archipelago, known as South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. 

The island is about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the coast of Antarctica, but it is situated within the Antarctic convergence — the hydrological boundary between the cold waters around Antarctica and the warmer waters farther north.

It's now only inhabited by people for a few months every summer, but South Georgia had a prominent role in the history of Antarctic exploration.

In the early 20th century, it became a center for industrial whaling — effectively the "Ground Zero" of whaling, first for humpbacks, and later for blue whales.

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

According to Calderan's study, more than 42,000 blue whales were killed around South Georgia between 1904 and 1971, most of them before the mid-1930s. "In the early 1900s, South Georgia waters thronged with blue whales; within a little over 30 years, they were all but gone," the researchers wrote.

"It was just a matter of luck that they weren't wiped out altogether," Calderan said. "By the end of whaling, it was estimated that blue whale populations were 0.15% of their pre-whaling levels. They couldn't have hung on much longer."

Although populations of blue whales have been increasing in other parts of the Antarctic in recent decades, the majestic ocean dwellers were almost unseen in the waters around South Georgia until the recent expedition, she said.

Whale resurgence

The near-extinction of blue whales around South Georgia in the early 20th century may have resulted in the loss of their "cultural memory" of the abundance there of Antarctic krill — tiny swimming crustaceans found in huge swarms in the Southern Ocean and the only food of blue whales.Knowledge of whale feeding grounds may be passed on from mother whales to their calves. "There was a cultural memory, maybe, of animals that used to come to South Georgia that was lost because they were wiped out," Calderan said. "They couldn't pass on the knowledge of the feeding grounds because there weren't any of them left."

But the evidence of the recent survey suggested at least some blue whales have rediscovered South Georgia's abundance of krill.

"I think we may well be seeing evidence of site fidelity to certain feeding areas, which would be an explanation for why [blue whale] numbers started recovering in the wider Antarctic, but has taken longer to recover at South Georgia," Calderan said.

The increase in blue whales around South Georgia comes after BAS research indicating the population of humpback whales in the region has also increased — like blue whales, humpbacks were all but driven to extinction by industrial whaling.

"It's a good sign," Calderan said. "This was an area that was particularly hard hit by whaling, and it is really encouraging that we're starting to see whales there again."

Originally published on Live Science.

A 2-inch-long (5 centimeters) spider thought to be extinct in Great Britain is actually alive and thriving on a British military base. 

A program manager at the Surrey Wildlife Trust rediscovered the great fox-spider (Alopecosa fabrilis) on an undeveloped portion of a military installation in Surrey, England, after a two-year search. The last time the spider was seen before this in Britain was in 1993, or 27 years ago. 

"It's a gorgeous spider, if you're into that kind of thing," the program manager Mike Waite told The Guardian.

Related: Goliath birdeater: Images of a colossal spider

Nocturnal hunter

The great fox-spider is a wolf spider, a family of arachnids that hunts down its prey rather than building webs. The spider is nocturnal, which makes it an elusive quarry for spider enthusiasts. According to The Guardian, Waite used aerial photography of the military installation to find bare patches where the spiders like to hunt. His search in these sandy spots paid off after many fruitless nights. 

"As soon as my torch fell on it I knew what it was. I was elated," Waite said. "With coronavirus, there have been lots of ups and downs this year, and I also turned 60, so it was a good celebration of that."

Waite found several male spiders, one female and possibly some immature spiderlings, though the latter were difficult to identify conclusively.

Related: Photos: Wolf spiders caught having threesomes

The adult spiders have gray-and-brown furry bodies. They can spin silk, but instead of making webs, they use that silk to line the burrows that they dig in order to hibernate over the winter. Great fox-spiders are critically endangered, but they are also found on the European mainland, particularly on coastal sand dunes in Holland and Denmark, according to The Guardian. Waite wonders whether the spiders are also quietly surviving on Britain's coastlines. 

"It makes me think how hard have we looked for it on our coasts? Have we been looking hard enough?" he told The Guardian.

Conserving space for wildlife

The Surrey Wildlife Trust manages thousands of acres of undeveloped land in the Surrey area to protect wildlife. Ministry of Defence sites are also prime real estate for animals, because they're left relatively undisturbed other than the military training exercises that occur there. For security reasons, the researchers are keeping confidential the identity of the site where they found the great fox-spiders, but it consists of scrubby heartland that also provides a home for native birds, snakes, lizards and butterflies.

"Many people are unaware of the size and diversity of the Defence estate and its tremendous wildlife richness," Rich Lowey, the head of technical services at the Defense Infrastructure Organization, said in a statement. "It has generally been protected from agricultural intensification and urban development, so it now provides a vital sanctuary for many of the country's most rare and endangered species and habitats."

Waite now plans to continue his survey for the spiders in order to estimate the size of their population.

Originally published on Live Science.

For ecologists studying wolverines — mid-sized carnivores found across the boreal forest and Arctic tundra of North America, across Europe's Nordic mainland, and throughout the Russian north — technology that you'd find in a smartphone is offering an unparalleled glimpse of how these animals behave. 

Twenty-five years ago, the only technology available to study wild wolverine behavior were collars that sent out a radio signal revealing an animal's location. Biologists would be lucky to locate a collared animal 50 times in a year, and they'd actually see the animal only a handful of times. 

Today, we can attach a collar of similar weight to the animal and know what that creature is doing for every second of every day for months on end. For that, we can thank the tri-axial accelerometer.

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

While the name is a mouthful and sounds like something that you'd see on a futuristic spaceship, the tri-axial accelerometer can be found in plenty of consumer devices. Smart phones, exercise watches, and health monitors all use accelerometers to quantify daily activities by assessing movement in three directions and storing the data over time.

Simple accelerometers differentiate when we are resting from when we are exercising (and perhaps prod us to move a bit more). More complex accelerometers can distinguish between specific activities. Ever wonder how the Nintendo Wii knows that you're hitting the virtual tennis ball? That's an accelerometer. Or how your smartphone knows how many steps you take, or when you're driving a car? Accelerometer, again.

This technology also provides an exciting new tool for wildlife professionals. Normally, we get only brief glimpses into the lives of wild animals, particularly elusive ones like wolverines. Now, we can attach an instrument to them — a kind of miniaturized smartphone, if you will — capable of tracking their behavior constantly for months on end.

Adapting accelerometer usage from people to wildlife wasn't easy. How do you get a device to understand when a wolverine is tearing apart a caribou, versus simply strolling across the Arctic tundra? In applications for humans, the tri-axial accelerometer "learns" how to recognize actions like walking, dancing, or exercising, which can then be applied to a smartphone app or Wii remote.

We found that parallel algorithms can be established for wildlife with the help of zoological parks, as we describe in our study detailed in the November issue of the journal Ecological Informatics. The same technology that enabled mobile device engineers to train smartphones using data from people enabled us to train accelerometers to recognize behaviors of wild wolverines based on observations of captive animals.

For two weeks, we monitored three wolverines equipped with tri-axial accelerometers at Nordens Ark, a wildlife park in Bohuslän, Sweden, devoted to conserving threatened and endangered species. Every day, we recorded the times and durations of wolverines' different behaviors. We then extracted the accelerometer data in the lab and created an algorithm linking the data to actions such as running, resting, grooming, and eating, to name a few. 

The exciting part was applying all of this to wolverines in the wild. To do that, we equipped seven wolverines in Arctic Alaska with GPS collars and accelerometers for approximately three months. To ensure that the collars would eventually drop off, we attached them with "rot-away" strips that deteriorate steadily over that time. When we recovered the instruments, we applied the algorithm we'd developed to these wild wolverines, giving us an unprecedented window into their lives.

We're still working through all the data, but we've already learned that wolverines generally like to rest in the late afternoon and evening, beginning their patrols around midnight. We've also begun looking into how vigilant they are (how much time they spend scanning their surroundings) under different conditions, an important survival technique for an animal that is sometimes hunted and killed by wolves. The data could also reveal the impacts of climate change and human infrastructure on wolverine behavior.

Moving forward, our ability to learn from tri-axial accelerometers will likely only grow, fueled by new developments for use in smart devices and home entertainment. So, the next time you download the latest offering from the App store, remember that you just might be previewing the next great technology for conservation.

Robards and Glass contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

The pitter-patter of Tasmanian devil feet was heard in the wild of mainland Australia for the first time in 3,000 years, after a group of devils was released in Barrington Tops, a protected national park about 120 miles (200 kilometers) north of Sydney.

Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii), the world's largest carnivorous marsupial, have been long gone from most of the Australian continent, and until now the only remaining wild populations were on the island of Tasmania. Mainland devils were likely outcompeted by dingos, the wild dogs that were introduced to Australia at least 3,500 years ago, and which are now considered a pest species.

However, a decade of dingo eradication has offered Tasmanian devils a second chance. By clearing out dingos and reintroducing devils to Barrington Tops, conservationists hope to not only reestablish thriving wild populations of the iconic marsupials, but to also help protect other native species that are threatened by invasive predators, according to a statement released on Oct. 5 by Global Wildlife Conservation (GWC).

Related: Australia's struggling marsupial: Photos of the Tasmanian devil

Aussie Ark, a wildlife nonprofit in Australia, has been breeding and studying Tasmanian devils for more than a decade, with the goal of eventually reintroducing devils into the wild once conditions were sustainable for their survival, according to the statement. For the recent release, Aussie Ark partnered with GWC and WildArk, another wildlife conservation nonprofit; they released 11 Tasmanian devils on Sept. 10.

Tasmanian devils are black-furred and stocky with blunt muzzles and short limbs, measuring about 22 to 26 inches (55 to 65 centimeters) long and standing about 12 inches (30 cm) high at the shoulder, according to the Australian Museum. Devils on the island of Tasmania were safe from dingos, which never got a foothold there. But Tasmania's devils face another deadly threat: a highly contagious and fatal cancer known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). First detected in the 1990s, the cancer has since wiped out about 90% of Tasmania's devils, leaving only 25,000 in the wild, according to the GWC statement.

Conservation experts in Tasmania work to isolate healthy devils from sick ones, and to breed healthy populations. But there are limited opportunities on the island for reintroducing the healthy devils and keeping them separated from infected devils, "and it's impossible as yet to eradicate the disease," GWC president Don Church told Live Science.

Because the cancer only spreads through direct facial contact between devils — usually when they nip each other's faces while competing over prey — a cancer-free devil population on Australia's mainland would therefore be safe from infection, Church said.

Bringing Tasmanian devils back to the Australian continent could also help address another dire ecological threat posed by domestic cats and foxes; neither species is native to the continent, and both were introduced to Australia in the 18th century by European colonizers. Dingos once helped keep cat and fox populations somewhat under control, but as dingos were eradicated over the last decade, the number of cats and foxes has skyrocketed — and their impact on native wildlife is devastating. Cats in Australia kill more than 2 billion wild animals each year; in just one day, Australia's millions of cats kill an estimated 1.3 million birds, 1.8 million reptiles and over 3.1 million mammals, Live Science previously reported. 

But introducing devils might deter these invasive predators or disrupt their hunting habits, Church said. 

"In the presence of devils, cats are less able to hunt at night, because devils are nocturnal," he explained. "So they shift to hunt during the day, and they're not as effective when they hunt during the day." 

As for foxes, European colonizers tried to introduce them to Tasmania at least six times and failed every attempt — possibly because Tasmanian devils were already established there. 

"There was never a scientific study done as to why it never took — the habitat seemed perfect for them, the prey was there," Church said. But one hypothesis is that the presence of the Tasmanian devil prevented foxes from gaining a foothold.

Though Tasmanian devils are carnivorous, they would be less detrimental to native biodiversity than cats or foxes because devils are marsupials. As such, they have a lower metabolic rate than placental carnivores, and don't need to eat as often, Church said. Devils also prefer to eat animals that are already dead, which further reduces their impact on an ecosystem's resources, he added.

"That Barrington Tops area has about 40 species that we know of that are in trouble," Church said. "Our hope is that the presence of the devils will be an ecological solution, a contribution to addressing the main driver of extinction on the Australian continent, which is the presence of feral cats and foxes. We hope long-term that the presence of the devil on the landscape will help keep the numbers of those introduced species at bay, and it'll be a natural, self-replicating solution to the problem."

After a few weeks, scientists will recapture some of the released devils and fit them with radio transmitter harnesses; the animals can't wear collars because "they don't really have a neck," Church said. Surveys and camera traps will provide additional data on how the devils are adapting to their new home. But the real proof of their success will arrive around June 2021, if new devil joeys are spotted peeping out of their mothers' pouches, Church told Live Science.

"That'll be a great indicator that the population can survive on its own," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Picking the kids up from school takes on a different meaning for crocodylian parents.

In this photo, taken by India-based photographer Dhritiman Mukherjee, a male freshwater gharial shows us why. Bobbing in the waters of northern India's National Chambal Sanctuary, the croc waits as more than 100 of his month-old children clamber onto his back for safe passage.

"Other crocs carry their young about in their mouths," Patrick Campbell, the senior curator of reptiles at London's Natural History Museum, told BBC.com. "But for the gharial, the unusual morphology of the snout means this is not possible. So the young have to cling to the head and back for that close connection and protection."

Related: 20 Amazing animal tongues

Gharials can measure up to 15 feet (4.5 meters) long and weigh more than 2,000 lbss. (900 kilograms). They are named for the bulbous nobs that males sport on the ends of their snouts. (These nobs are called gharas, which is the Hindi word for "mud pot," according to National Geographic). Crocs use their gharas to amplify vocalizations and blow bubbles during mating season — an adaptation that seems to have served this particular croc well. According to Mukherjee, the pictured papa mated with seven or eight different females to achieve this brood of 100-plus hatchlings.

Hopefully, all those kids grow into healthy adults and become parents themselves. Gharials are critically endangered, with an estimated 650 adults left in the freshwaters of India and Nepal, according to the Natural History Museum. India’s National Chambal Sanctuary, which Mukherjee patrolled for weeks to get this shot, contains 500 of those full-grown gharials.

Mukherjee's photo is one of 100 "highly commended" images in this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, hosted by the Natural History Museum of London. Chosen from more than 50,000 entries, the image will join 99 others on the museum's walls and eventually in a traveling exhibition, after the overall winners are announced on Oct. 13.

One of last year's winning entries showcased two subway mice in a desperate struggle over a scrap of snack food. Does Mukherjee's Gharial Father of The Year have what it takes to dethrone them? Check back in October to find out.

Originally published on Live Science.

More than 350 elephants in Botswana have mysteriously died since May, in a phenomenon that some scientists have dubbed a "conservation disaster," and one that has evaded explanation.

The elephants — which died in the swampy Okavango Delta — still had their tusks intact, suggesting that ivory poaching hadn't driven the deaths, The Guardian reported. A flight over the delta in May by researchers with Elephants Without Borders, a wildlife conservation organization, first spotted 169 carcasses; that number jumped to 356 in June, when the conservationists took another flight over the area.

Botswana's Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation, and Tourism has verified 275 of those elephant carcasses, according to a statement from the African Wildlife Foundation.

Related: Elephant images: The biggest beasts on land

The mass die-off could be explained by either a poison or some as-yet unknown pathogen, according to The Guardian. Already, officials have ruled out anthrax,  the carcasses tested negative for that bacterium, said Scott Schlossberg, a research consultant for Elephants Without Borders. 

The bacterium that causes anthrax disease, called Bacillus anthracis, occurs naturally in soils, where it can stay inactive as spores for decades, scientists reported in 2019 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Grazing animals can ingest anthrax-tainted soils along with plants or while drinking from watering holes. 

This isn't the first elephant die-off in the region; more than 100 elephants died over a two-month period in the fall of 2019 in Botswana's Chobe National Park, primarily driven by drought. Some of those deaths may have been due to anthrax, as the elephants would have ingested soil (possibly contaminated with anthrax spores) while grazing around dried-up watering holes and across wilted grasslands, the AFP reported at the time.

What's behind the recent deaths?

Local sources told The Guardian that 70% of the elephant carcasses — which span all ages — have been found around watering holes, so perhaps the culprit is somehow linked to watering holes, The Guardian reported. Also, locals have reported that some of the elephants were walking in circles before their deaths, suggesting a neurological issue. 

"If you look at the carcasses, some of them have fallen straight on their face, indicating they died very quickly," Niall McCann, director of conservation at the U.K.-based conservation organization National Park Rescue, told The Guardian. "Others are obviously dying more slowly, like the ones that are wandering around. So it's very difficult to say what this toxin is."

Related: In photos: The most surprising elephant relatives on Earth

Another idea, though unlikely, is cyanide, which poachers often use to poison elephants. However, in the case of cyanide poisoning, the elephants are generally clustered in one area where the poison was deployed, and other animals scavenging on their carcasses also show up dead, The New York Times reported. This hasn't been the case in Botswana.

Rather than foul play, the elephants might have died from a natural culprit, said Chris Thouless, the head of research at the conservation organization Save the Elephants, which is based in Kenya, The New York Times reported. Thouless suggested the viral disease encephalomyocarditis, which is transmitted by rodents, could be to blame. The disease causes neurological impairment and is known to have killed 60 elephants in South Africa's Kruger National Park in the mid-1990s, according to a report published in 1995 in the Onderstepoort Journal of Veterinary Research.

He added that Botswana recently emerged from a drought, which can leave elephants stressed and more susceptible to diseases. 

Conservation disaster?

Botswana supports a population of about 130,000 elephants, more than in any other country in Africa, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. The delta where these carcasses were found is home to about 15,000 of those elephants, according to The Guardian. 

The loss of hundreds of elephants (a number that could climb if the culprit isn't discovered and addressed soon) may impact the country's ecotourism, which relies on elephants and other wildlife, and contributes 10% to 12% of Botswana's GDP, The Guardian reported. 

"You see elephants as assets of the country. They are the diamonds wandering around the Okavango delta," said McCann, as reported by The Guardian. "It's a conservation disaster — it speaks of a country that is failing to protect its most valuable resource."

Thouless disagrees with the idea that these deaths represent a "conservation disaster," pointing to the fact that the deaths represent such a small percentage of the delta's total population. 

However, that number could climb if the cause isn't determined and mitigated. As for whether or not the mortality is continuing, the last time we flew over the area in mid-June, we were still finding very fresh carcasses from elephants that had died a few days to a few weeks previously," Schlossberg told Live Science. "So, the mortality appears to have been continuing into June. We would not be surprised if elephants were still dying, but we would need to do another survey to confirm this."

Slow response?

Experts contacted by The Guardian were concerned by how slowly the official investigation of the deaths is proceeding. The Botswana government has yet to get, or release, results from lab tests on the carcasses and the surrounding environment. 

Related: Incredible photos capture last glimpse of long-tusked 'elephant queen'

"Toxicological tests of elephant remains, water and soil in the areas where the remains have been found are currently [being] undertaken by the National Veterinary Laboratory," Cyril Taolo, the acting director of Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, told Live Science in an email.

Taolo added, "We are not in a position [to] divulge details of the investigation that is ongoing and we do not wish to speculate on the cause of the mortalities."

Although some conservationists have suggested the government is not taking these deaths seriously, Taolo said otherwise. The die-off is "taken with all the due seriousness that it deserves. That is why resources have been expended to establish the extent of the mortalities and the cause."

Originally published on Live Science.

Just like the hordes of mountain bikers, hikers and trail runners that migrate from their comfortable couches to more open spaces in spring, western rattlesnakes are also on the move, emerging from deep winter dens to their summer foraging grounds.

For years, our research group at Thompson Rivers University has been investigating population trends and movements of the world's most northerly populations of rattlesnakes, found in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia. The western rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus) is one of three species of rattlesnake found in Canada, and the only one in B.C., although they also live as far south as Baja California.

Snakes are particularly interesting in Canada because their active season — warm temperatures that allow them to go about their lives — is far shorter than it is for their relatives to the south. The harsh Canadian winters limit the places where a rattlesnake can hole up and wait out the snow. This historically lead to dozens of snakes of all different species using communal dens, but this phenomenon is becoming increasingly rare.

Rattlesnakes are threatened in B.C., and many populations are declining at alarming rates. Although the idea of being rid of snakes may be inviting to some, it will surely have cascading consequences for already threatened grassland ecosystems. For example, rattlesnakes are key players in grassland food chains, acting as mid-level predators that control rodent populations and serve as a food source for larger predators like the endangered North American badger.

What can you learn from following rattlesnakes?

Rattlesnakes often make substantial migrations from their winter dens to their summer habitat, sometimes several kilometers. The dens are often in secluded areas, yet snakes can encounter a number of dangers on their path.

Perhaps the biggest threat to snakes in Canada is roads, where even low traffic back-roads can have catastrophic impacts on otherwise healthy snake populations. Road mortality is a leading cause of the decline for snakes in B.C. One study found the population was being reduced by 6.6 per cent per year, which would lead to a 97 per cent decrease in the population in just 40 years.

Snakes are also threatened by pollution, human persecution and steady habitat degradation and fragmentation. When their habitat overlaps with human landscapes, such as vineyards, orchards, golf courses, campgrounds or hiking trails, they tend to be of poorer body condition than snakes that inhabit relatively natural environments.

Historically a large number of the rattlesnakes in B.C. were found in the Okanagan Valley, a region that is experiencing one of the fastest rates of urban and agricultural growth in Canada. Unfortunately, this means snake habitat isn't about to improve. Still, the animals persist in select pockets of quality habitat.

Beware the 'danger noodle'

Despite their iconic buzzing rattle, the warning display for which these animals are named, rattlesnakes are notoriously difficult to find. This is because the rattle that tips off unsuspecting hikers to the presence of a "danger noodle" is really the last-ditch effort to scare off intruders before the animals resort to biting.

Rattlesnakes rely heavily on their mottled camouflage to hide among rocks and bushes to avoid detection completely — and they are quite good at it. Their skill at hide-and-seek means it is incredibly difficult for scientists to estimate their population numbers — how can you count something you can't see?

Because rattlesnakes are so difficult to count, there has only been one comprehensive study of a rattlesnake population in B.C., which dates back to 1985, when graduate J. Malcolm Macartney studied a population on a private cattle ranch.

In an effort to determine how rattlesnake populations have changed over the past 35 years, we have been scrambling up cliff faces in search of the same rattlesnake dens that Macartney surveyed decades ago.

These steep cliff faces, dotted with towering ponderosa pines, give way to lush grassland meadows fringed by azure lake waters. Although the location has not changed, the landscape certainly has. In 1986, just one year after Macartney wrapped up his rattlesnake population study, half of the area was fenced off and established as a provincial park dedicated to recreation.

This creates a unique natural experiment where half of the rattlesnake population has remained on an active cattle ranch closed to the public, and the other half within one of the busiest parks in the area seeing nearly 250,000 visitors per summer.

Keeping snakes for years to come

Although we may still be several months away from fully understanding the trends of this rattlesnake population, we have learned much about how these animals interact with the land, and those who share it with them.

Are rattlesnakes that dwell on landscapes largely devoid of humans more likely to be larger and more abundant than snakes in areas with high levels of human visitation? We are currently analyzing our data to answer this very question.

Rattlesnakes living in areas where humans seldom visit also appear more likely to rattle at passersby. Snakes that regularly encounter people are 10 times less likely to rattle than those living in areas undisturbed by humans.

Although this work is very preliminary, it suggests that rattlesnakes are altering their behavior according to the presence of humans in their foraging grounds. Perhaps they are learning that they don't necessarily need to waste precious energy with exuberant warnings.

Understanding exactly why these animals are declining and shifting their behavior is a much more complicated issue, but it brings to attention the delicate balance between conservation and recreation. If we hope to keep rattlesnakes around, we will have to adjust how we interact with the limited amount of habitat available to them.

So, if you plan to spend some time in B.C.'s beautiful grasslands, remember to stay snake awake!

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The San Diego Zoo recently announced its newest (and arguably cutest) arrival: a newborn male pygmy hippo, born on April 9 to its 4-year-old pygmy hippo mama Mabel.

Within hours of birth, the very tubby youngster was standing up and following its mother around, toddling after her in the hippos' indoor habitat, zoo representatives said in a statement.

The baby, which has not yet been named, weighed 12.4 lbs. (5.6 kilograms) at birth and now weighs about 25 lbs. (11 kg). This is the first successful pygmy hippo birth at the zoo in more than three decades, offering hope for the future of this endangered species, according to the statement.

Related: Photos: World's cutest baby wild animals

In the maternity "ward" of the hippo habitat, the calf now has access to a pool, after first testing the waters in a shallow tub. Over the last few weeks, the baby demonstrated that it was able to close its nostrils and hold its breath underwater.

As their name implies, pygmy hippos (Choeropsis liberiensis) are significantly smaller than river hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius), according to the San Diego Zoo. Adult pygmy hippos weigh about 350 to 600 lbs. (160 to 270 kg), while river hippos can weigh up to 10 times more. The heads of pygmy hippos are also blunter and rounder than those of their bigger hippo cousins, and pygmy hippos' eyes are located on the sides of their heads rather than at the top.

Pygmy hippos often look shiny and slick even when they aren't in the water, thanks to a pinkish fluid called "blood sweat" that oozes from their skin. This liquid acts like a moisturizing sunscreen; it keeps their skin from drying and cracking in the heat and protects the hippos from sunburn, according to the zoo.

Fewer than 2,500 pygmy hippos remain in their native habitats in West Africa, where they live in forest rivers in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire.

Mabel and her calf will remain separated from the calf's father, a 13-year-old named Elgon, as pygmy hippos do not typically live together as families, zoo representatives said. In about a month, the baby and his mother will emerge from their seclusion in the indoor enclosure and will begin taking turns with Elgon to spend time in the main hippo habitat.

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• Cute clouded leopard cubs born in Denver (photo)

Originally published on Live Science.