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A new vaccine has been granted emergency approval to protect California condors from a deadly strain of avian influenza, federal officials said this week, amid attempts to pull the endangered species back from the brink of extinction.

The emergency action underscores an outbreak that has alarmed theconservationcommunity, which fears that condors, a vulnerable species that has spent decades in recovery, could be dealt a devastating blow. After first being detected in a deceased condor in late March, the illness has swept through the small flock of wild birds, which are closely monitored by agencies in the south-west. So far 21 condors have died, impacting eight breeding pairs, according to a statement issued by the US Fish and Wildlife service.

The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza, or HPAI, is a virus that has been described as “highly contagious” by the agency. An April statement confirming deaths of the first infected condors in early April said the virus can spread quickly though “bird-to-bird contact, environmental contamination with fecal material, and via exposed clothing, shoes and vehicles”.

Several condors remain in the care of experts, including a newly hatched chick whose egg was pulled from its contaminated nest before its mother succumbed to the disease. Officials and rescue workers remain hopeful that the orphaned baby, now being nurtured with the help of a plush condor at the Liberty Wildlife facility in Phoenix, Arizona, can soon be returned to the wild. For now the chick isnestled among blankets and its stuffed surrogate, awaiting placement with foster parents at the Peregrine Fund’s captive breeding facility.

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Despite it being limited to one flock in Arizona, conservation groups are concerned that the deadly illness has already taken a devastating toll on the delicate condor population. “In a matter of weeks, this event has set our recovery effort back a decade or more,” the Peregrine Fund, an organization dedicated to protecting birds of prey and a key federal partner in restoring and rehabilitating California condors to the wild, wrote in a late-April update on the HPAI impact on condors, adding that the new threat posed by avian flu “highlights the need to address preventable and manageable threats, and rely even more heavily on proven strategies such as captive breeding to increase the wild population”.

Once abundant in the skies across their western range, which spans from the Pacific north-west to Baja California, Mexico, only a few hundred of these iconic and enormous vultures remain in the wild even after decades of dedicated breeding and conservation efforts.

The fast-spreading disease is one of several threats condors have faced since populations were first decimated by hunting during the California gold rush, including dangers posed by the toxic DDT pesticide and lead poisoning from ammunition lodged in scavenged carcasses. Recovery has been slow. Condors don’t mate until they reach maturity at around eight years old, and females only produce a single egg every two years.

This dangerous strain of avian flu has rapidly spread across the US, killing millions of domestic and wild birds since it arrived in North America at the end of 2021. Though the virus is not considered a high risk to humans, it’s been among the most devastating outbreaks for birds in the country’s history. Roughly 58 million commercial poultry have had to be euthanized in attempts to slow the spread of the disease, which has also claimed the lives of hundreds of bald eagles and been detected in more than 6,700 wild birds, a figure widely considered to be underestimated.

While the emergency-use approval by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is limited to California condors, the agency is continuing work to develop options for other types of birds. Before administering it to condors, a pilot study has been initiated to test the vaccine on North American vultures – “a similar species” – to ensure there are no adverse effects.

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“APHIS approved this emergency vaccination of the condors because these birds are critically endangered, closely monitored, and their population is very small which allows close monitoring of the vaccine to ensure it is administered only to the approved population,” the agency said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

Along with the hopeful announcement that a vaccine may soon be ready to administer, efforts to isolate infected birds have been successful. Infections among the Arizona flock where the virus was found are holding steady.

“Our field teams have not detected any additional compromised California condors in northern Arizona since April 11,”the Peregrin Fund posted in an update this week, adding that four birds under its care are showing signs of recovery. “The Peregrine Fund’s captive breeding program is also in full swing, and new life is hatching,” it added. “Of 18 eggs laid, nine young have hatched and a new season for the recovery effort begins.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting

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SHAMSHY, Kyrgyzstan — “I was only 9 when I first saw a snow leopard with my father. He was a ranger bringing injured animals found in the mountains to the veterinarian,” says Asanbek Sasukilov, 62, a beekeeper and herder. “I was sitting close to the cage. Suddenly, the snow leopard started to roar, and I ran away.”

For Sasukilov, snow leopards (Panthera uncia) have always been a part of his life. The same is true for those in other communities living in the area surrounding the Ala-Too mountains, in northern Kyrgyzstan. The difference is that they’re now involved in big cat conservation programs being implemented by the Snow Leopard Trust (SLT) and the Snow Leopard Foundation in Kyrgyzstan (SLFK) that promote beekeeping, agroecology and ecotourism as alternative livelihoods to herding, in an effort to avoid conflict with wildlife like the rare big cats.

Here, locals have always seen snow leopards on mountaintops while herding cows or sheep. The big cats are also part of popular stories like farmer Beisheukaz Balasy’s memory of a snow leopard that was filmed for a movie during the Soviet era.

Beekeeper and conservationist Asanbek Sasykilov (r) with his wife (l) and granddaughter in their home, Shamshy, Kyrgyzstan, December 2022. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

Both Sasukilov and Balasy now keep bees in Shamshy, a village of 1,000 inhabitants that’s a 90-minute drive from the capital, Bishkek. Once outside the city, the gray cityscape disappears, melting into blue skies and snowy mountains. Flocks of sheep, cows and horses graze on the country roads of this border area, located a few kilometers from Kazakhstan and, further on, China, hidden behind high mountains.

Here, on the northernmost edge of Kyrgyzstan’s snow leopard habitat, nearly 200 square kilometers (77 square miles) of habitat is shared with other wildlife such as ibex, lynx, wild pigs, wolves and jackals. This is part of the Shamshy Nature Reserve, an area comanaged by the Kyrgyz government, local communities, and the two snow leopard NGOs. Though Shamshy was once a hotspot for trophy hunters, it’s now a snow leopard sanctuary where the stakeholders manage projects including research, community education, ecotourism, and the training and compensation of wildlife rangers.

Snow leopard at ease in its high-mountain habitat. Image courtesy of Madhu Chetri.

Hear them roar?

Kyrgyzstan is the fourth most mountainous country in the world, sitting at an average elevation of 2,989 meters (9,805 feet), with a snow leopard population estimated at 300-400 individuals living along its highest peaks. The species is distributed across 12 Asian countries, from India to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and as far as Mongolia, and faces many of the same risks as other big cats globally, with its population listed as vulnerable to extinction, and decreasing, on the IUCN Red List.

“The main dangers for snow leopards are poaching, mining, roads, hunting, and competition with livestock. All of these threats will be amplified by climate change,” Koustubh Sharma, the SLT’s science and conservation director, says in an interview with Mongabay. “Indeed, the climate emergency has a double impact: snow leopards approach villages to find food, where they possibly attack livestock. On the other hand, herders are pushed high in the mountains [to find better pasture for their animals], closer to their ecosystem.”

To assess and monitor snow leopard populations, the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection Program (GSLEP) is coordinating an effort across all of the countries where the big cat lives, in collaboration with their governments and more than 50 organizations.

“Although some Kyrgyz regions are now well studied and the populations known, there are still many gaps,” says Bastien Chaix, a science educator for OSI-Panthera, which has studied snow leopards in Kyrgyzstan since 2013. “Since reliable population studies using camera traps and genetic analyses are fairly recent, it is difficult to have a clear trend. Indeed, 20-30 years ago, the only methods of estimating populations consisted of a survey of signs of presence (tracks, urine marks, scraping, scat, etc.), which gave an idea of the distribution, but not of the precise density, as is possible with modern techniques.”

According to Chaix, the core of a long-term conservation strategy is based on local communities’ involvement: “Integrating nature conservation with the local economy, in a mutually beneficial way, is the best way to ensure sustainability and gradually eliminate conflicts that may arise,” he says. “By bringing additional income to local communities, it allows them to value wildlife and reduce their economic dependence on domestic livestock, and the problems of cohabitation with wildlife.”

A snow leopard comes in close to a camera trap in Kyrgyzstan. Photo courtesy of Snow Leopard Trust.

A sweet shared business

Thus, Sasukilov and his fellow beekeepers are a crucial part of the conservation programs run by the SLT in five Kyrgyz communities. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked as a gas balloon supplier. Afterward, he returned to the family businesses of livestock herding and beekeeping. “My mother took care of the bees until she died at 83,” he says. “I still follow her and my father’s legacy.”

Now Sasukilov is one of the two lead beekeepers of Shamshy: when he started he had 80 beehives, but now has just 35, having shared the rest with his two students. All of them are trained and supported by the SLT program, which provides 50 beehives in each village, where each farmer produces approximately 4-5 kilograms (9-11 pounds) of honey per hive, earning about 400 soms ($4.60) per kilo, or $2.10 a pound.

“I’m aware of taking care of nature, as much as I can,” Sasukilov says. “I hope to get more people of the village involved as beekeepers. I know we can’t completely remove livestock, they are important. I have 35 cows in my cattle shed that I sell for meat.”

During the morning, he takes care of the bees, located at the corner of his organic vegetable garden among the apple trees. He wears the typical Kyrgyz ak-kalpak, a white felt hat, and high boots to walk in deep snow to the apiary.

One by one, he checks the beehives with a stethoscope, listening to ensure they’re in good condition. Relying on his long experience and recent training, he doesn’t open the boxes, to protect the pollinators from the near-zero temperature.

Asanbek Sasykilov, lead beekeeper of his community, checks the activity inside his 35 beehives with a stethoscope, to avoid exposing them to freezing air. Shamshy, Kyrgyzstan, December 2022. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

“By giving them materials and training, we promote alternative sources of income through beekeeping, fruit and berries, agroecology production, and ecotourism,” says Kubanychbek Jumabaev, director of the SLFK. “It is crucial to reduce competition with wild fauna.”

Last year, Sasukilov produced 82 kg (181 lbs) of honey, and like all the participants in the beekeeping program, he divided the income according to the economic model managed by the SLT. First, 50% is kept by the beekeepers and their apprentices; despite sharing much of the profits, last season Sasukilov earned around 16,000 soms ($180), a farmer’s average salary in the Kyrgyz countryside.

Of the remainder, 30% is invested back into the program to improve community beekeeping activities and buy materials, and the last 20% goes to fund environmental projects chosen by the local committee. Project ideas include an artificial glacier to store water during droughts, while others are already a reality: in Shamshy, Sasukilov and his neighbors invested the last round of honey income, around 12,000 soms ($138), to install trash bins along the snowy community roads.

But the benefits aren’t just economic. Beekeeping provides pollination services for their orchards, mostly apple and other fruit trees. Also, using honey instead of sugar improves people’s nutrition. For breakfast, honey is always on the table, usually accompanied by homemade bread, fruit, and rice with meat, all produced on the farm. On the day of Mongabay’s visit, Sasukilov and his wife are eating like this with one of their grandchildren, Cholpona, 15, visiting from Bishkek.

Beisheukaz Balasy, 68, with his grandson. He is a former ranger and now is a beekeeper involved in the Snow Leopard Trust program. Shamshy, Kyrgyzstan, December 2022. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

The future has leopard spots

“We consider local communities as our best allies in conservation. They agreed to do whatever it takes to protect biodiversity,” says the SLFK’s Jumabaev. “Regarding the snow leopard population, we estimate a decline of their population over the past few decades, but will only be able to provide reliable estimates once the surveys are over.”

Indeed, the effect of the SLT’s work with the communities can still only be evaluated in the long term. “We just started to count the population thanks to the 600 camera traps installed since 2017 across Asia. Around 80 are in Kyrgyzstan, giving us the chance to photograph approximately 50 leopards,” says the SLT’s Sharma. “We use statistical models to estimate the population of snow leopards by assessing those animals that did not get photographed on camera traps. This method is called spatial capture-recapture, and is one of the most effective methods to estimate the population of rare animals, as long as they can be identified as individuals.”

Another aspect of the project gives prizes for rangers for confiscating poachers’ weapons, for instance. Since 2015, 80 rangers have earned prizes totaling $10,000.

“We hope to continue strengthening, replicating, and scaling up our work on snow leopard conservation, based on research, community-based conservation, education, and policy,” Sharma says. “We aspire to make better scientific knowledge accessible to all [and] raise awareness among citizens about nature, so that more communities take ownership of conservation issues, and in turn encourage governments to make informed decisions that prioritize conservation, rather than treating it as a hindrance to economic development.”

The program’s future is focused on increasing activities such as traditional felt handicrafts, ecotourism — especially wildlife viewing — and agroecology (organic plums, currants and apples grown in an agroforestry setting), plus improving local education and participation, starting with the communities’ youths, like summer camps in the Shamshy nature reserve. The participants are dedicated 13- and 14-year-olds learning the fauna and flora, ways to set up camera traps, and how to monitor wild fauna, among other activities.

Ala-Archa National Park near Shamshy is a popular day trip for residents of the Kyrgyz capital who are interested in what ecotourism offers, and it is also home to a snow leopard population. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

“In Shamshy we can easily measure the positive results of the work of SLT following two observations,” says science educator Chaix. “The populations of ibex and snow leopard are stable or even increasing. The inhabitants all know snow leopards, all know that it is an endangered species and many already see it as a unique asset enabling them to develop their region through ecotourism. Also, there is a project set up in the neighboring region of Ak Shirak based on felt handicrafts made by women, that have made it possible to value the presence of the snow leopard, and almost eliminate poaching in the area.”

Local communities here seem quite aware of being on the frontlines of conservation. “Taking care of nature and animals is a priority for us,” Sasukilov says. “In our village, we are convinced that you have to give to nature — the other way, nature can’t give back to you.”

This article by Monica Pelliccia was first published by Mongabay.com on 10 May 2023. Lead Image: Snow leopard at ease in its high-mountain habitat. Image courtesy of Madhu Chetri.

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Off the coast of southeastern China, one particular fish species is booming: the oddly named Bombay duck, a long, slim fish with a distinctive, gaping jaw and a texture like jelly. When research ships trawl the seafloor off that coast, they now catch upwards of 440 pounds of the gelatinous fish per hour — a more than tenfold increase over a decade ago. “It’s monstrous,” says University of British Columbia fisheries researcher Daniel Pauly of the explosion in numbers.

The reason for this mass invasion, says Pauly, is extremely low oxygen levels in these polluted waters. Fish species that can’t cope with less oxygen have fled, while the Bombay duck, part of a small subset of species that is physiologically better able to deal with less oxygen, has moved in.

The boom is making some people happy, since Bombay duck is perfectly edible. But the influx provides a peek at a bleak future for China and for the planet as a whole. As the atmosphere warms, oceans around the world are becoming ever more deprived of oxygen, forcing many species to migrate from their usual homes. Researchers expect many places to experience a decline in species diversity, ending up with just those few species that can cope with the harsher conditions. Lack of ecosystem diversity means lack of resilience. “Deoxygenation is a big problem,” Pauly summarizes.

Our future ocean — warmer and oxygen-deprived — will not only hold fewer kinds of fish, but also smaller, stunted fish and, to add insult to injury, more greenhouse-gas producing bacteria, scientists say. The tropics will empty as fish move to more oxygenated waters, says Pauly, and those specialist fish already living at the poles will face extinction.

Since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 1.7 million square miles.

Researchers complain that the oxygen problem doesn’t get the attention it deserves, with ocean acidification and warming grabbing the bulk of both news headlines and academic research. Just this April, for example, headlines screamed that global surface waters were hotter than they have ever been — a shockingly balmy average of 70 degrees F. That’s obviously not good for marine life. But when researchers take the time to compare the three effects — warming, acidification, and deoxygenation — the impacts of low oxygen are the worst.

“That’s not so surprising,” says Wilco Verberk, an eco-physiologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “If you run out of oxygen, the other problems are inconsequential.” Fish, like other animals, need to breathe.

Oxygen levels in the world’s oceans have already dropped more than 2 percent between 1960 and 2010, and they are expected to decline up to 7 percent below the 1960 level over the next century. Some patches are worse than others — the top of the northeast Pacific has lost more than 15 percent of its oxygen. According to the IPCC’s 2019 special report on the oceans, from 1970 to 2010, the volume of “oxygen minimum zones” in the global oceans — where big fish can’t thrive but jellyfish can — increased by between 3 and 8 percent.

The oxygen drop is driven by a few factors. First, the laws of physics dictate that warmer water can hold less dissolved gas than cooler water (this is why a warm soda is less fizzy than a cold one). As our world warms, the surface waters of our oceans lose oxygen, in addition to other dissolved gases. This simple solubility effect accounts for about half of the observed oxygen loss seen so far in the upper 1,000 meters of the ocean.

Percent change in dissolved ocean oxygen per decade since 1960. SCHMIDTKO ET AL. / GEOMAR

Deeper down, oxygen levels are largely governed by currents that mix surface waters downward, and this too is being affected by climate change. Melting ice adds fresh, less-dense water that resists downward mixing in key regions, and the high rate of atmospheric warming at the poles, as compared to the equator, also dampens winds that drive ocean currents.

Finally, bacteria living in the water, which feed off phytoplankton and other organic gunk as it falls to the seafloor, consume oxygen. This effect can be massive along coastlines, where fertilizer runoff feeds algae blooms, which in turn feed oxygen-gobbling bacteria. This creates ever more “dead zones,” including the infamous one in the Gulf of Mexico.

Researchers have even suggested that the rise of microplastics pollution has the potential to exacerbate the low-oxygen problem. This theory predicts that if zooplankton fill up on microplastics instead of phytoplankton — their usual prey — phytoplankton will proliferate, again feeding all those oxygen-gobbling bacteria on their way to the seafloor.

The Global Ocean Oxygen Network — a scientific group set up as part of the United Nation’s Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 — reports that since the 1960s, the area of low-oxygen water in the open ocean has increased by 1.7 million square miles. That’s an area a little more than half the size of Canada. By 2080, a 2021study reported, more than 70 percent of the global oceans will experience noticeable deoxygenation.

Low oxygen levels affect almost everything, including fish growth, reproduction, activity levels, and outright survival.

In 2018, hundreds of researchers concerned with oxygen loss signed the Kiel Declaration to urgently call for more awareness of the problem, alongside work to limit pollution and warming. Researchers are now in the midst of establishing a Global Ocean Oxygen Database and ATlas (GO2DAT) to consolidate and map all the data.

Andrew Babbin, a biogeochemist at MIT who is on the steering committee for GO2DAT, in 2021 mapped out huge areas of extremely low oxygen in the Pacific. “It’s concerning for sure,” says Babbin, who hopes to repeat the mapping exercise in a decade or so to see how things change. One issue, he notes, is that low-oxygen conditions tend to host a class of anoxic bacteria that produce methane or nitrous oxide — potent greenhouse gases.

Modelling the net impacts of the three factors — solubility, mixing, and microbiology — has proven tricky. “Any one of those is hard,” says Babbin. “And then you put them all together, and it’s dramatically difficult to make any predictions.” In the tropics, for example, one model suggests that a shifting balance of biological factors that deplete oxygen, versus ocean mixing that delivers oxygen, will drive oxygen levels down until about 2150 but then raise them — a spot of potentially good news for tropical fish. On the whole, though, climate models seem to have underestimated changes in oxygen levels, which have been dropping faster than expected.

Researchers at the Germany-based GEOMAR Institute deploy equipment to measure ocean oxygen levels. MARTIN VISBECK / GEOMAR

The impacts on marine life are going to be complicated — and not good.

In general, a hot fish has a higher metabolism and needs more oxygen. Trout, for example, need five to six times more dissolved oxygen when waters are a balmy 75 degrees F than when they are a chilly 41 degrees F. So as waters warm and the oxygen seeps out, many marine creatures take a double hit. “Fish require a lot of oxygen, particularly the large ones we like to eat,” says Babbin.

Right now, there are about 6 milligrams of oxygen per liter of seawater in the tropics, and 11 milligrams per liter at the colder poles. If levels drop below 2 milligrams g (a 60 to 80 percent reduction), as they often do in some patches, the water is officially hypoxic — too low in oxygen to sustain many species. But subtler drops can also have a big impact. Fish already expend tens of times more energy to breathe than people do, notes Pauly, since they must pump the paltry oxygen out of viscous water.

The effects of low oxygen are well known to mountaineers, who experience headaches and potentially fatal confusion at high altitudes. Fish often try to swim away from low oxygen waters, but if they can’t escape, they become sluggish. Low oxygen levels affect almost everything across the board, including fish growth, reproduction, activity levels, and outright survival. A host of genetic and metabolic changes can help fish conserve energy, but only within limits. In general, larger fish are more affected simply because their body-volume-to-gill ratio is larger, making it harder to feed their cells with oxygen. Overfishing has already had the effect of decreasing the number of large fish in the ocean; deoxygenation looks set to exacerbate that effect, says Verberk.

Even if CO2 emissions stopped immediately, the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss.

The long-term chronic effects of slightly decreased oxygen levels are harder to evaluate than the short-term effects of hypoxia, says Verberk, and researchers have urgently called for more research on the subject. “For mild hypoxia over longer terms, there’s not that many studies, but it’s likely to have quite a strong impact,” he says. “If you continually have 7 percent less energy [from 7 percent less oxygen], that’s going to accumulate to quite a large deficit.”

Fish are already moving to find more oxygen. Those living in deeper waters may move down to colder, and therefore more oxygenated waters, while fish living in the top few hundred meters of the water column, like coastal rockfish, may move toward the surface to catch a breath. In a study of California reef fish from 1995 to 2009, 23 species moved up an average of 8.7 meters per decade toward the surface as oxygen levels declined. In the tropical northeast Atlantic, tuna have been driven into a narrower layer of water by oxygen declines; overall, they lost 15 percent of their available habitat from 1960 to 2010.

While warming and deoxygenation often go hand in hand, the two effects are not completely matched everywhere, all the time, says Verberk. The result is a patchwork of areas too hot or too low in oxygen for various fish to thrive, leading to a mishmash of different escape routes. Researchers are currently trying to trying to map the anticipated effects for different species, studying how temperature and oxygen might restrict their future habitats and how those ranges will overlap with each other.

Bombay duck, a fish that thrives in low-oxygen waters, dominates a trawler’s catch in southeast China. BIN KANG

Once in waters where they can breathe, fish will then have to see what food they can find — and what predators they need to avoid. “Low oxygen is going to be a trigger to move to other places, but those other places are not empty,” says Verberk. “They will encounter other animals living there. It’s going to change competitive interactions between species.” Crabs, says Pauly, are currently marching on the Antarctic as those waters warm and will feast on unprotected mollusks. “There will be a mass destruction,” he says.

Over the past century, says Pauly, the greatest pressure on marine life has been overfishing, which has caused huge declines in fish numbers. That could change. If we get overfishing under control, he continues, climate-related pressures will pose the biggest problem for marine life in the coming decades. A 2021 paper showed that the oceans are already committed to a fourfold greater oxygen loss, even if CO2 emissions stop immediately.

If you chart out the trends in warming and oxygen loss, the cataclysmic endpoint for the ocean thousands of years from now would be “a soup that you that you cannot live in,” says Pauly. The ocean already has sporadic hypoxic zones, he says, “but you could imagine all the dead zones of the world coalescing into one, and that is the end of the thing.” If we don’t get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions, he says, “we have to expect this to happen.”

This article by Nicola A. Jones was first published by e360.yale.edu on 11 May 2023. Lead Image: Atlantic bluefin tuna, shown feeding on a school of herring, have been driven into narrower layers of water by oxygen declines. MARKO STEFFENSEN / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO.

What you can do

Support ‘Fighting for Wildlife’ by donating as little as $1 – It only takes a minute. Thank you.

Fighting for Wildlife supports approved wildlife conservation organizations, which spend at least 80 percent of the money they raise on actual fieldwork, rather than administration and fundraising. When making a donation you can designate for which type of initiative it should be used – wildlife, oceans, forests or climate.

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Cycads are the most threatened group of plants in the world. These ancient plants date back about 280m years, before the age of the dinosaurs, and they look primeval, with a rugged chunky trunk rising into a crown of stiff feathery leaves.

They are disappearing as their tropical forest habitats are rapidly vanishing, and they also face extinction from an illegal multimillion-pound global trade in wild cycads. The rarer they become, the more their value increases, with some individual specimens selling for millions of pounds each.

The loss of such rare plants removes their gene pool from the wild, depletes their numbers and brings them closer to extinction. Poachers can also destroy whole habitats plundering the plants, and the trafficked plants are at risk of disease. Trying to protect the cycads is highly dangerous, and rangers in Kruger national park in South Africa have been killed in order to steal the plants.

There are no dedicated funds or organisations to combat the illegal cycad trade. If these were giant pandas, black rhinos or elephants there would be an outcry – a familiar story for other endangered, rare plants.

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Scientists have warned an ancient fish species that has survived since the time of the dinosaurs could be one extreme weather event from extinction after its population crashed by nearly half in seven years.

The Maugean skate, described by marine scientists as a “thylacine of the sea”, is found only in Macquarie Harbour, a vast body of water on Tasmania’s remote west coast.

Studies have found its numbers have fallen sharply over the past decade as its environment has been degraded by human influence, including from salmon farming pollution, hydro power stations altering upstream river flows and rising harbour temperatures due to the climate crisis.

These factors had contributed to a sharp drop in dissolved oxygen levels, which particularly affect survival rates in young skates. The number of surviving Maugean skate is not clear, but an interim monitoring report estimated the population had slumped by 47% between 2014 and 2021.

The decline is believed to have been hastened by an extreme event in 2019 – an “inversion” in which the water column was overturned by a westerly storm, lifting poorly oxygenated water from the harbour floor nearer to the surface. “Widespread mortalities” were found among electronically tracked skates after the event.

Scientists from the University of Tasmania said it showed rapid action was needed to prevent the species’ extinction, including funding for a captive breeding program to create an “insurance population” outside the harbour. The Australian environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has set a goal of zero extinctions for the country’s plants and animals.

The health of Macquarie Harbour plummeted over the last decade after significant expansion of salmon farming nearby. Photograph: Dave Moreno

“It’s incredibly urgent because it would just take one event like we’ve seen and we may not be able to do anything [to prevent extinction],” Dr Jayson Semmens, a biologist with the university’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (Imas), said.

The leader of the monitoring program, Dr David Moreno, said few juveniles were coming through to keep the population viable. “What’s happened is that in the past 10 years or so we have seen a massive decline in dissolved levels of oxygen deep in the harbour; that hasn’t improved and it’s now chronic,” he said. “We risk losing an important species.”

The scientists called for a curb on activities managed by the Tasmanian government that could affect the skate, including fish farms, recreational fishing and changes in river flow from upstream dams. They also said funding was needed to extend the monitoring project, which began in 2012 and is due to end this year.

The health of Macquarie Harbour, an area about six times larger than Sydney Harbour, plummeted last decade after a significant expansion of salmon farming was approved in 2012 despite warnings of potential impact on marine life. The cap on fish farm production was later lowered back to near pre-expansion levels. The health of some species improved, but oxygen levels did not rebound.

Map showing location of Macquarie Harbour in Tasmania

The Maugean skate lives to about 10 years of age, mostly in a layer of brackish water between 7.5 and 12.5 metres deep between surface freshwater that flows from the Gordon and King rivers and saline bottom water from the Southern Ocean.

It was discovered in Bathurst Harbour, in Tasmania’s deep south-west, in 1988, but only four specimens were seen there and none since 1992. A DNA study last year suggested the species was likely now restricted to Macquarie Harbour.

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A 2016 study suggested about 3,200 remained, though that figure was later described as a broad estimate. The Tasmanian Inquirer reported that Dr Neville Barrett, a Imas marine scientist, last year told a public event that he believed the species was likely to be extinct within a decade on its current trajectory.

The federal government’s threatened species scientific committee will assess next month if the skate should be listed as critically endangered, up from endangered, after receiving a submission from conservation groups. It was included last year on a list of 110 priority species for government action over the next decade.

Dr Leonardo Guida from the Australian Marine Conservation Society says the Maugean skate is being ‘choked to death in its home’. Photograph: Jane Ruckert

The Australian Marine Conservation Society and Humane Society International called on the government to do “everything in its power” to avoid an extinction. Dr Leonardo Guida, from the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said the species had “been around since Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth” but was now being “choked to death in its home”.

“Tasmania is home to Australia’s most infamous extinction, that of the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger,” he said. “Does the state really want the ignominy of hosting the world’s first extinction of a shark or ray in modern times due to human activity?”

A spokesperson for Plibersek said Labor did not accept extinctions as inevitable, “unlike the previous government”. “It’s important we do what we can to understand the threats to species and use the most-up-to-date advice to better protect them,” the spokesperson said.

The Tasmanian government referred questions about the study to the state’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment. A department spokesperson said it provided substantial support for research into the skateand was working with stakeholders on its conservation.

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A flagship law to restore nature across Europe must be agreed by member states or risk sending “a dangerous, negative signal to the world”, the EU’s environment commissioner has warned, amid growing opposition to the legislation.

Last June, the European Commission revealed proposals for legally binding targets for all member states to restore wildlife on land, rivers and the sea. The nature restoration law was announced alongside a separate law proposing a crackdown on chemical pesticides, and both were welcomed as a milestone by environmentalists ahead of the Cop15 biodiversity summit in Montreal.

But they have since faced strong opposition from agricultural, fishing and forestry lobbying groups and some member states. The centre-right European People’s party (EPP) – the largest group in the parliament – has called for the legislation to be scrapped, saying it would have a negative impact on farmers and claiming it would jeopardise climate commitments.

Documents seen by the Guardian indicate that some member states are trying to water down both proposals, with particularly strong opposition to the creation of areas designated for restoration and to curbs on pesticide use.

“We are standing on the edge of the cliff with biodiversity collapse and the rejection of the nature restoration law would be jumping into the void,” Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries, told the Guardian. “The rejection of the most ambitious proposal ever to restore nature would send a dangerous, negative signal to the world that the EU and its member states backtrack on commitments.” A separate commissioner oversees the pesticides law proposal.

“There is no possibility to implement the Green Deal without nature,” Sinkevičius added. “We can do excellent work in decreasing emissions. We can get to zero. But if ecosystems degrade, if soil degrades, if our forests degrade, if marine ecosystems degrade, they are not able to absorb carbon or mitigate heat. We have no technologies to replace them. The nature restoration law is equivalent to the climate law and I hope it will be taken as seriously,” he said.

Ariel Brunner, regional director at BirdLife Europe, said the opposition from member states and lobbyists went beyond normal horse-trading in Brussels, and said abandoning commitments in Europe would undermine calls from member states to protect key ecosystems in other parts of the world, such as the Amazon rainforest.

“This is very serious. There is a high-level attempt by the farming, forest and fishing lobby to kill the legislation. This is not a debate about details with the usual games, here there really is an attempt to just knock it off,” he said.

“These two pieces of legislation [nature restoration and pesticides] are one of the three legs of the European Green Deal. Killing them means abandoning the Green Deal. It would be terrible for Europe’s standing in the world and would give credence to the Bolsonaros of this world who say that all the climate and biodiversity stuff is an attempt to keep us poor by the rich world so they can stay rich,” Brunner added.

Time is running out on the EU’s legislative agenda to pass the proposals ahead of European elections next year.

The EU was a key player in driving the environmental ambition of the final agreement at Cop15 in Montreal, which included targets to protect 30% of the planet for nature by the end of the decade and restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems.

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“It was not an easy task to find a balanced position between 27 member states in Montreal and negotiate with the rest of the world, but we managed to achieve it,” Sinkevičius, leader of the EU negotiations, said. “We helped set the standards of the agreement and it would do huge damage to lose this strategic position [if we do not pass the nature restoration law].”

He said the bloc would make good on a scale-up of financing for biodiversity, as well as supporting public-private investments on nature.

He added: “I’m extremely worried that Europe is heading to one of the worst droughts in its history. This summer could be truly difficult and those pressures will be felt by those who work day by day with the environment. By that, I mean our farmers. We have to do all we can to build in resilience and at some point it’s going to be too late.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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The “completely unique,” wolf-like Tasmanian tigers that thrived on the island of Tasmania before they went extinct in 1936 may have survived in the wilderness for far longer than previously thought, research suggests. There is also a small possibility they are still alive today, experts say.

Tasmanian tigers, also known as thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus) were carnivorous marsupials with distinctive stripes on their lower back. The species was originally found across Australia but disappeared from the mainland roughly 3,000 years ago due to human persecution. It persisted on the island of Tasmania until a government bounty introduced by the first European settlers in the 1880s destroyed the population and drove the species to extinction.

“The thylacine was completely unique among living marsupials,” said Andrew Pask(opens in new tab), a professor of epigenetics at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the new research. “Not only did it have its iconic wolf-like appearance, but it was also our only marsupial apex predator. Apex predators form extremely important parts of the food chain and are often responsible for stabilizing ecosystems,” Pask told Live Science in an email.

The last known thylacine died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania on Sept. 7, 1936. It is one of the few animal species for which an exact date of extinction is known, according to the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab(opens in new tab), which is led by Pask and aims to bring Tasmanian tigers back from the dead.

But now, scientists say thylacines probably survived in the wild until the 1980s, with a “small chance” they could still be hiding somewhere today. In a study published March 18 in the journal Science of The Total Environment(opens in new tab), researchers pored over 1,237 reported thylacine sightings in Tasmania from 1910 onwards.

The team estimated the reliability of these reports and where thylacines could have persisted after 1936. “We used a novel approach to map the geographical pattern of its decline across Tasmania, and to estimate its extinction date after taking account of the many uncertainties,” Barry Brook(opens in new tab), a professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania and lead author of the study, told The Australian(opens in new tab).

Thylacines may have survived in remote areas until the late 1980s or 1990s, with the earliest date for extinction in the mid-1950s, the researchers suggest. The scientists posit that a few Tasmanian tigers could still be holed up in the state’s southwestern wilderness.

But others are skeptical. “There is no evidence to confirm any of the sightings,” Pask said. “One thing that’s so interesting about the thylacine is how it evolved to look so much like a wolf and so different to other marsupials. Because of this, it is very hard to tell the difference at distance between a thylacine and [a] dog and this is likely why we still continue to have so many sightings despite never finding a dead animal or unequivocal picture.”

If thylacines had survived long in the wild, someone would have come across a dead animal, Pask said. Nevertheless, “it would be possible at this time [in 1936] that some animals persisted in the wild,” Pask said. “If there were survivors, there were very few.”

While some people search for surviving Tasmanian tigers, Pask and his colleagues want to revive the species. “Because the thylacine is a recent extinction event, we have good samples and DNA of sufficient quality to do this thoroughly,” Pask said. “The thylacine was also a human-driven extinction, not a natural one, and importantly, the ecosystem in which it lived still exists, giving a place to go back to.”

De-extinction is controversial and remains extremely complex and costly, according to the National Museum Australia(opens in new tab). Those in favor of reviving thylacines say the animals could boost conservation efforts. “The thylacine would certainly help rebalance the ecosystem in Tasmania,” Pask said. “In addition, the key technologies and resources created in the thylacine de-extinction project will be critical right now to help preserve and conserve our extant endangered and threatened marsupial species.”

Those against it, however, say that de-extinction distracts from preventing newer extinctions and that a revived thylacine population could not sustain itself. “There is simply no prospect for recreating a sufficient sample of genetically diverse individual thylacines that could survive and persist once released,” Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University, told The Conversation(opens in new tab).

This article by Sascha Pare was first published by Live Science on 12 May 2023. Lead Image: The last known thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) died in captivity at Hobart Zoo, in Tasmania, on Sept. 7, 1936. (Image credit: Dave WATTS / Contributor via Getty Images).

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In 2019, the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia died. Her name was Iman and ever since her capture in 2014, she had been under the care of the Bornean Rhino Alliance (BORA), headed by executive director John Payne in the Malaysian state of Sabah.

After her death, Payne, who’d worked on Sumatran rhinos since 1979 (with an admittedly long break in the middle due to “frustration”), was suddenly left without any rhinos to care for, after years of trying to breed the last male and female in Malaysia.

The disappointment hasn’t slowed him down. He’s now working with other species — Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), Bornean elephants (Elephas maximus) and banteng (Bos javanicus) — and he’s written a book, The Hairy Rhinoceros: History, Ecology and Some Lessons for Management of the Last Megafauna, where he argues that the strategy to save Sumatran rhinos from extinction was flawed from the start by poor compromises and stifled over and over again by bureaucracy.

Among Sumatran rhino experts, Payne has always been known for his candor, his acerbic wit, and his sometimes controversial positions. And he pulls no punches in his latest interview with Mongabay. He criticizes both the rising bureaucracy of conservation organizations, and what he sees as the attitude of Indonesian officials for the delays and inaction on Sumatran rhino conservation.

“The problem was very much Indonesia and the international framework not working,” Payne says, adding that “it’s shocking in this day and age, that Indonesia has its forestry and environment now under one ministry.”

He also thinks Sumatran rhino are only breeding in the Leuser Ecosystem, in Indonesia’s Aceh province, on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. And if he were in charge, he’d be catching rhinos from there for captive breeding; he’d be collecting egg cells from young rhinos for in-vitro fertilization; and he’d consider maximizing birth intervals by taking rhinos away from their mothers once they are weaned.

John Payne, executive director of the Bornean Rhino Alliance, wrote the book The Hairy Rhinoceros: History, ecology and some lessons for management of the last Asian megafauna. Images courtesy of John Payne and Natural History Publications (Borneo).

For years, Payne was advocating for more captures of wild rhinos even when it was a very unpopular idea. Today, his advocacy seems prescient. Not only has the Sumatran rhino gone extinct from Malaysia in just a couple decades, but it is nearly extinct in Indonesia, the only country where it’s found today. The most recent estimates puts the total number of rhinos at less than 50, spread across three locations. And, if the past is any guide, the real number may be lower — note the recent news on the potentially inflated numbers for Indonesia’s other critically endangered rhino, the Javan rhino (Rhinoceros sondaicus).

Given the dire situation in the wild, and the fact that there are only nine Sumatran rhinos in captivity, many of them are interrelated, Indonesia announced in 2018 — along with numerous partners, including National Geographic — that it would begin catching more rhinos from the wild. A rhino named Pahu was captured a few months later, but breeding has never been attempted with her.

Not a single rhino has been captured since.

“I have this feeling: it’s never going to happen. Actually, I think it’s just talk,” Payne says of Indonesia’s plan to capture and breed more wild rhinos.

Despite the loss of all rhinos in Malaysia, Payne continues to work in conservation. He’s working with many of the same colleagues, such as wildlife vet Zainal Zainuddin, on building food habitats for threatened species in Sabah, including orangutans, elephants and banteng, a species of wild cattle.

“With the Sumatran rhino, I’m pissed; I’m not distressed, I’m just pissed off,” he says.

Wildlife vet Zainal Zainuddin feeding the female rhino Iman with papaya tidbits. Image courtesy of John Payne.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: How did you get started with the Sumatran rhino in 1979?

John Payne: In the days before Margaret Thatcher, the British government was very strange: I got a scholarship from the British government in 1975 to study macaque monkeys in Malaysia. I spent more than two years in Peninsular Malaysia in the mid-1970s. WWF-Malaysia amazingly already existed. It was one of the earliest WWFs outside Europe.

So, it was a natural progression, which I was very happy with, that when I got my Ph.D. in 1979 that WWF was looking for people to do fieldwork in Malaysia. I have to say at that time no right-thinking Malaysian would want to do wildlife fieldwork, it was a different era. It was wide open for young chaps like me in a way that it certainly isn’t anymore. I was in the right place at the right time to get a job in WWF-Malaysia.

A survey with the Forestry Department of Sabah showed two things. Number one, that Sumatran rhinos still existed. That was a debate. And it was on the verge of extinction in 1979 and 1980: there were just still a few left.

That result came out after two and a half years of going around various forests in Sabah, trying to map the distribution of the larger mammals and larger birds.

Mongabay: You were at the 1984 meeting that really kick-started humans interacting with the Sumatran rhino in a much more planned and sometimes unplanned ways. What do you see as the legacy of that meeting today, both for rhinos and in general?

John Payne: All the right people were there, but straight away there was a division. There was [Basel Zoo rhino expert] Rudolph Schenkel saying, “Rhinos [are] a part of the environment, we shouldn’t take them out.”

And [conservation coordinator for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums] Tom Foose who I admired greatly — he was a real pioneering thinker — said, “No, they’re going to get extinct if you leave them there.” That was the essence of that meeting. As you’ll know, the compromise was to catch only the ‘doomed ones,’ the rhinos that were least fertile, as we learned subsequently.

So, the legacy? Nowadays, people … like to build a consensus, but it means you end up with a compromise that satisfies everyone, but is the wrong result, because it doesn’t achieve the aim.

There were a lot of changes around 1980 in the world conservation strategy. There was a big shift in moving away from a small number of dedicated, passionate people — doesn’t matter where they’re from — working together. Unmolested by the IUCN and unmolested by governments or other NGOs.

From 1984, you can almost never get what you really need to do because of this [interference]. There’s an odd phenomenon of humans being divided into two, right? This always comes out: There’s two [opposing] groups. At the same time wanting to reach a compromise, which doesn’t really satisfy either. I’ve seen that … time and again.

Zainuddin with a female rhino named Puntung, a day after her capture, still inside the forest of Tabin Wildlife Reserve. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: That meeting made some big decisions, pretty bold stuff at the time. As you say it was a compromise: At the time neither side could really know what was the right strategy. So instead of going all in on one side, they compromised. What do you see as the failures from 1984 to today?

John Payne: I think one of the immediate ones is there’s always these international tensions, right? U.K. and France, Canada and U.S.A. But Indonesia and Malaysia — it’s even worse.

Indonesia regards Malaysia — of course not everyone — but the general mood in Indonesian governments, politicians, is that Indonesia regards Malaysia as an upstart. And Indonesia knows best.

Just an upstart neighbor. Very small. So tiny in comparison of land area, population size, extent of oil palm, everything.

Now, once you get two countries, then you’ve got CITES [Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] in the way. Which is often used as an excuse for inaction. Then you’ve got this Nagoya Protocol on who owns biological resources, all these things that come into play. And whereas you need a decision within a few weeks, like, “Should Tam [a male rhino from Malaysia] go to Indonesia?” It gets bogged down in bureaucracy, CITES and the Nagoya Protocol.

I think that the Indonesian and Malaysian situation might be a bit worse than average. But I can foresee that coming in again and again.

The IUCN just doesn’t work in this situation. There’s just so many people — and people who are well-meaning but really don’t know the background — and they come into play. Then the IUCN Asian Rhino Specialist Group, and what was called the Captive Breeding Specialist Group, which is now the Conservation Planning Specialist Group. They don’t really agree with each other, and neither of them really are fit for purpose. It’s not against the individuals who work there.

They’re just this accumulation of people who are in the right place at the right time and who have no particular knowledge of, in this case, the Sumatran rhino.

Somehow you have to have the model, which we can’t do anymore, [where] small groups of passionate people [do conservation]. But now they’re already constrained by national legislation, CITES, bureaucracies. The IUCN doesn’t help get through that, those obstacles, it actually hinders them, it makes them even worse.

So, it sounds very negative on the IUCN, and I am really.

I’m quite bitter. Someone at Singapore Zoo said to me the other day, “Yes, John Payne, you’re still very bitter.” Yes, I am. The IUCN didn’t help. I don’t know what the solution is.

Tam, under anaesthesia, with the Malaysian team obtaining semen. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: You mentioned this in the book: how the number of stakeholders and the bureaucracies make it more complicated and make decision-making more difficult. When you headed BORA and were working with the rhinos, it seemed like you had a lot of independence and a lot of latitude, or is that just the way that you communicate?

John Payne: Well, it’s an interesting point. No, I did. I have to say it’s always easy to criticize governments. But I did have latitude. I think I was lucky because I’ve been in Malaysia so long. And I’m older than most people in government, so automatically they tend to not be quite so harsh to me as they might have done with younger upstarts. I think it was to some extent luck, but Malaysia, both at national level and the Sabah level, were actually quite good.

The problem was very much Indonesia and the international framework not working.

For example, in my time, let’s say 2009 to 2018, there were three cabinet decisions [in Sabah]. The chief minister and the ministers got together and said, “OK, we approve to capture rhinos from Danum Valley.” That was done fairly easily, but that’s partly because Sabah is one unit. It’s not like a big thing like Indonesia. It’s always lucky in that sense.

Sabah is a nice small unit, but even at federal level we had a bit of luck. The federal level quickly latched on, seeing how the wind was blowing in 2014-15, they agreed that assisted reproductive technology should be introduced.

Somehow the Malaysian system with endangered species seem to work better than it does in Indonesia.

It’s shocking in this day and age that Indonesia has its forestry and environment now under one ministry.

There are various hierarchies in Indonesia’s ministry. There are 10 or 11 directors-general, ranging from education, plantations, fire control [etc.]. There is one for conservation out of all of those directors-general. Then under that, there’s the biodiversity section. Under that comes the parks and species. Under species — all the Indonesia species, one of the most biodiverse regions of the world — and there’s nothing special for the rhino. It’s right at the bottom of the hierarchy at national level.

I think that’s one reason, not the only reason, but it’s a stark difference between Malaysia and Indonesia. Despite Indonesia’s prominence as a biodiversity area, there’s no special department about endangered species. It’s a tiny little, not even a division, it’s part of a biodiversity division in a special ministry.

Zainuddin with Puntung in her forest paddock. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: One of the main points you make in your book is that there was so much attention and money paid to concerns about habitat loss and poaching for the Sumatran rhino. But the real problem, in your mind, is there were just too few rhinos. Can you unpack that a little bit for us?

John Payne: Sumatran rhino habitat at the end of the Pleistocene around 18,000 years or so ago was well double what it is now [before sea level rise].

The South China Sea was mostly dryland and swamp, so it would’ve had all these tapirs, tigers, rhinos, elephants running around there. So, the natural rise in sea level from 18,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago wiped out half — and probably the better half — of the habitat for these large mammals.

Then more habitat loss in all the lowlands due to the spread of humans growing rice.

The fact that the first specimen of the Sumatran rhino was shot in Sumatra is not surprising, because that’s probably where the biggest population was left 200 years ago. But my point was: We only have a few percent of the original habitat left 100 years ago, and by 1980 it was less than 1% of the habitat. And crucially it is the worst habitat, because as you’ll know, large mammals always have trouble in tropical rainforests. There’s not much food productivity, and they get very hot because it’s humid.

The loss of habitat was trivial by 1980.

Mongabay: Why do you think the focus on poaching was also misguided?

John Payne: I find that more tricky. To answer that question, when the species is in very low numbers, the concern really ought to be in principle more geared toward how to increase births rather than decrease deaths, because everything dies.

With large mammals, the last few years of their life tend to be infertile anyway: either they have kidney disease, or they’ve run out of sperm production. You’ve got that window of time, which for Sumatran rhinos would be maybe six years to 25 years at the most. The emphasis should have been on how to increase the births.

Anti-poaching means you slow down the death rate, but you’re not addressing the birth rate at all. I think the emphasis should have been on how to increase births. Not easy, right?

There are a few camera trap images of baby rhinos over the last 40 years, but the demography was mostly old animals. I hope that illustrates the point a bit.

Mongabay: Can you talk a little bit about the Allee effect and extinction debt?

John Payne: Allee effect is to do with a positive correlation between population density and reproductive fitness.

In general, the more dense the population, the more reproductive fitness there is. That applies at the population level, and individual … If there are plenty of animals, every animal has a mate choice … You can maximize reproductive rate because you can find a mate any time. Crucially, it’s to do with the density rather than numbers [of the animal surviving in total].

Another thing that irritates me is this obsession with numbers. How many are left? It doesn’t really matter. It’s whether they’re all in one area or not. The population density is the key thing. And once it goes below what you call a generally normal range, then you start to get fewer and fewer births because males and females are not meeting each other. Then you get the reproductive pathologies coming in.

Iman shortly before her death, with John Payne, a keeper from BORA and Sabah minister for wildlife, Christina Liew. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: Right now, the only place where people are saying that there might be a viable population is in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

John Payne: Indeed, yes.

The remaining rhinos where there’s still evidence of breeding in the last 10 years is in the Leuser Ecosystem. If you ask the Leuser Conservation Forum, which I admire greatly as probably the most hardworking and competent NGO in Sumatra, they’re convinced there’s still lots of rhinos and they’re breeding and there’s even more rhinos out in the hills.

But I really believe they’re wrong that the population is really a cluster. I’m certain it’s much fewer than [in the 1970s]. It’s just because every other cluster has the same thing: Every cluster of Sumatran rhinos goes down and down and down. It doesn’t go up.

That [Leuser] cluster, in my view, must have gone down just to mirror the demise of other clusters. I think it’ll go extinct. Why would numbers increase, really? There’s no reason to think why the numbers have increased. At best they’ll stay stable.

So, if you look at extinction debt and species-area curve, you expect if you decrease habitat by 50%, you expect 10% of species to go extinct. If you cut down habitat by 90%, you expect 50% of species to go extinct. Crucially, it doesn’t happen immediately. It’ll play out over 100 years or so.

Did you ever go to Sepilok [orangutan rehabilitation center in Sabah]?

Mongabay: Yes, I did.

John Payne: I thought you might. That’s 4,300 hectares [10,600 acres], right?

The last elephants were there in 1981 and then they just disappeared. There are no signs of clouded leopards [Neofelis diardi] from numerous camera trapping in the last 10 years. You’d expect the elephants, clouded leopards and bears [Helarctos malayanus] to go extinct. But it’ll take 100 years before all those species you expect to go extinct. It’ll take decades or even 100 years to find if the last one dies. It won’t all happen all suddenly. That’s my point. Hence that extinction debt, that idea that you need to wait a long time for that debt to play out and all those species that you expect to disappear to go extinct in that area, whether it’s Sepilok or Sumatra.

Zainuddin with Puntung, a day after her capture, still inside the forest of Tabin Wildlife Reserve. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: This poses an interesting question. I’m curious if you’ve thought about when the extinction debt hit for the Sumatran rhino? Did it hit in the 19th century? Did it hit in the 20th century? By the time when you started working with them in 1979, do you think that without any human intervention there was potentially no chance? Do you think that there were maybe some populations that could have survived had they not been hit by poaching or had there not been deforestation?

John Payne: Curiously, I haven’t really thought about that before. Oddly, it’s almost a fundamental question, isn’t it? To answer it very ballpark: actually, it probably happened a few hundred years ago with the Sumatran rhino. Thinking back to my earlier comments right about Sundaland losing all its lowlands after the Pleistocene and leaving the rhinos in the very infertile slopes.

Leuser is a bit different because it’s volcanic … so it’s a much more fertile soil, so they could probably hang on much longer. I think of that time scale, I’d say probably that was playing out a few hundred years ago.

Thinking even more clearly, rhinos were in the Riau province on the east coast of Sumatra, which is very big deal, because of APRIL [a major pulp and paper company] and all these big companies cutting down the whole area in the 1990s. There was obviously quite a dense population in Riau in the 1950s when the two groups from Denmark and Switzerland tried to catch them for European zoos.

It looks like about seven to nine rhinos were caught fairly easily in surface traps … implying that the population density was high. It’s swampy, very flat land in Riau, which is now under acacia plantations. That population density of rhinos was probably high just by luck. Didn’t have anyone living there except on the main rivers.

Where does that leave us logically? You could either imagine that if they’d been left there with no poaching, they might still be there, but you could also imagine maybe that what I’ve said earlier — the productivity, their plants were poor — it might be they were in a long process over a few hundreds of years to extinction there.

A Sumatran rhino in Lampung, Sumatra. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Mongabay: Let’s look a little bit at the future. There’s a plan now in Indonesia to go out and capture some more rhinos. They’ve been talking about this for a few years. I know COVID-19 halted some of the movement on that, but they’re building a new facility. Do you think that is the right call at this point? Is there anything else that you would be doing?

John Payne: I’m not being over-cynical … because the intent to capture rhinos in Sumatra has been several years now. COVID is a convenient excuse, since I have this feeling: it’s never going to happen. Actually, I think it’s just talk.

I really believe, based on my experience, that the only place to get wild rhinos now that might breed is in Leuser.

There’s the fiasco of the rhinos in Kalimantan [Indonesian Borneo]. There was a multimillion-dollar project to build this enormous sanctuary with a mosque and quarters in the middle of nowhere. You remember that one rhino died in the trap, and then there was another one, [Pahu]. I’m told that she’s going to be moved to Taman Safari [a zoo] in Bogor [south of Jakarta] because they can’t find any more rhinos in that area anymore, which was sort of predictable.

Even there it was obvious to an experienced observer … They were both old females. You could see the numbers are very low. There’s no sign of breeding in the last 10 years. That probably was never going to be very useful.

If it was up to me, I’d say go all out to catch rhinos from Leuser. Technically difficult. Yes, it’s a remote, steep area, but our two last female rhinos [in Sabah] came out by Sikorsky helicopter, nearer and therefore easier than the Leuser hills and valleys, but not that different. In my view, it is a bigger risk to leave those rhinos in Leuser where the experience is small clusters of rhinos decline to extinction everywhere else that’s happened. Whether it’s poaching or not, doesn’t really matter. That’s empirically the story. Catch them now whether there’s still a few left.

There might be a small number of fertile females still breeding in that valley.

Frankly, it doesn’t really matter if new-caught rhinos are in Aceh or Way Kambas [the captive-breeding facility in southern Sumatra] as long as it’s part of one program. You move one or two around from time to time.

Another thing as you may know, generally, baby infant mammals have a lot of egg cells already there lurking away in their ovaries. You could do two things. One is, you could get them out when the animal is still young and healthy and do in-vitro, which is now doable with rhinos. It’s possible to make embryos in the lab.

The other thing is really — this is again coming in for criticism — is [to] really maximize the birth rate, so put the male and the female [together to breed] when they’re quite young: 4 years old, rather than wait till they’re 10 or 12.

Put them together early, and if there’s a birth, take the baby away within less than a year. Now at Way Kambas, they keep the baby with the mother until it’s 3 or 4 or 5 years old. In the wild that would happen, but it suppresses the [mother’s] estrus cycle as long as the baby’s still there trying to get milk.

As you may recall from Nico van Strien [late Sumatran rhino expert] and Terry Roth [who cracked the code on how to breed Sumatran rhinos in captivity at Cincinnati Zoo], they reckoned the shortest birth interval could be about three years. Zainal Zainuddin [a vet and expert on Sumatran rhinos who works closely with John Payne] believes it could be even less if you take away the baby when it’s weaned. You could potentially have a one-year birth interval. There’s no reason why not. Again, you get why snowflaky people say it’s not natural, but it’s doable. Mammals evolve to reproduce. You are enhancing, in my view, what nature could do anyway.

Catch, maximize reproduction rate, and why not as a precaution, keep frozen embryos just because it’s possible — which of course it won’t be in the future, when there’s hardly any rhinos left to carry or present embryos.

Obtaining egg cells from Iman, under anesthesia by (Zainuddin in peaked can), IZW experts and Cesare Galli, a professor. Image courtesy of John Payne.

Mongabay: Is there anything that gives you hope for the long-term future of this species?

John Payne: I don’t know if you follow the story of the northern white rhino, and the fact there’s now embryos. It’s a lesson that one can make in-vitro embryos, which may in the future be useful.

My general point is that reproductive and cell biology are advancing. One of the pioneers is an Indonesian, Arief Boediono. [He’s] an Indonesian who is a vet.

There’s expertise in Indonesia. I wanted to make that point. There’s expertise in Indonesia, not necessarily in this assisted reproductive technology, but in a really, on-the-ball, advanced-thinking, willing to try out new things.

Mongabay: You worked with the Sumatran rhino now in Sabah for 40 years. What do you do after the species that you’ve worked with goes locally extinct? What did you turn to? How did you handle that?

John Payne: Busier than ever. With the Sumatran rhino, I’m pissed; I’m not distressed, I’m just pissed off.

Zainal and I work very well together, and we have an excellent academic, Abdul Hamid Ahmad, who is our chairman in BORA. We decided to stay on at BORA, and we’re very bullish. Among the things we’re doing now is starting a program to plant the favorite food of orangutans in oil palm plantations in Sabah in the belief that the residual population doesn’t need to be moved out. In fact, it shouldn’t be, it should stay there. Orangutans are really smart: if they have food, they’ll survive … There are little patches that you can stuff with orangutan food plants. We’re doing that in the expectation that orangutans in the long term can live in a mixed oil palm and forest for its landscape.

The other is the elephant. The numbers are going up, although everyone denies it, but the numbers are going up. The problem is now the conflict with humans is getting worse rather than better. One of the reasons is that there are more elephant foods outside forest reserves than in protected areas. And that’s not only oil palm, it’s grass. They go for monocultures. We started planting specific areas with grassland for elephants in Tabin Wildlife Reserve. It’ll be a slow process, but the general thinking is you need to put a lot more elephant food guaranteed so they come back. They know there’s lots of lush grass, there’s artificial mineral blocks. There’s a pond nearby, with water even in the dry season.

So that habitat in the long term becomes at least as attractive as going out into villages and getting harassed.

Similar, but different, the wild cattle of Malaysia, the Bornean banteng: we’re growing pastures for those as well. Similar thing, there’s no contact with humans, but their limiting factor in the remote areas is the same thing: there is not enough grass. Even more so because they’re bovids, so they need grass and there’s just not enough grass in the different kinds of forest in the north.

So, we’re starting in the last two years to plant grasses in Tabin and in Perak state in west Malaysia, where there’s wild cattle species. We are already proving it with camera trap images. They need grass. Their limiting factor, again, is not poaching, they just don’t have enough food. And we see it with the body condition of the cow and their birth rate. With grass, they start breeding more frequently and their body condition is better.

In a sense, it’s a funny lesson from the Sumatran rhino, isn’t it?

How do you boost the numbers? In this case, make sure they have lots of food in suboptimal habitat in protected areas.

This article by Jeremy Hance was first published by Mongabay.com on 11 May 2023. Lead Image: umatran rhinos in Lampung, Sumatra. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

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