The Guardian: Eight bird species are first confirmed avian extinctions this decade
Spix’s macaw, a brilliant blue species of Brazilian parrot that starred in the children’s animation Rio, has become extinct this century, according to a new assessment of endangered birds.
The macaw is one of eight species, including the poo-uli, the Pernambuco pygmy-owl and the cryptic treehunter, that can be added to the growing list of confirmed or highly likely extinctions, according to a new statistical analysis by BirdLife International.
The Poʻouli was a distinctive Hawaiian species, apparently related to a group known as Honeycreepers. In the past, it seemed to live on much of the island of Maui. Like many other native birds, it declined rapidly due to habitat loss, competition from invasive mainland species, nest destruction by imported mammals and reptiles, imported diseases, and pollution. On any list of extinctions, isolated island species facing the onslaught of creatures from outside do no fare well.
The last pair of Poʻouli were seen in 2004. Efforts to capture and breed the bird in captivity were unsuccessful. And now it’s gone.
But even though past extinction lists have been dominated by island species, that’s changing.
“People think of extinctions and think of the dodo but our analysis shows that extinctions are continuing and accelerating today,” he said. “Historically 90% of bird extinctions have been small populations on remote islands. Our evidence shows there is a growing wave of extinctions washing over the continent driven by habitat loss from unsustainable agriculture, drainage and logging.”
The New York Times: Scientists Are Retooling Bacteria to Cure Disease
In a study carried out over the summer, a group of volunteers drank a white, peppermint-ish concoction laced with billions of bacteria. The microbes had been engineered to break down a naturally occurring toxin in the blood.
The vast majority of us can do this without any help. But for those who cannot, these microbes may someday become a living medicine.
The trial marks an important milestone in a promising scientific field known as synthetic biology. Two decades ago, researchers started to tinker with living things the way engineers tinker with electronics.
That last paragraph is both enormously exciting … and more than a little frightening. There are, as with most tools, both really amazing possibilities and really sobering threats rolled up in this ability.
National Geographic: Tiny U.S. Island is Drowning. Residents Deny the Reason.
Tangier Island is a squiggle of mud and marsh in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, which is about 30 miles wide at that point, and a dozen miles from the nearest mainland port, Crisfield, Maryland. It is home to roughly 460 people, all of them descended from the first settler on the island, a guy named Joseph Crocket, who moved there in 1778. Though it’s only 100 miles from Washington, D.C., it’s among the most isolated communities in the East. The island’s isolation has spawned a style of speech that you’ll not hear anywhere else in America. …
Rising sea levels may make the island uninhabitable in 50 years. Yet the islanders think global warming is a hoax. How do they square those two things?
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed spends a lot of time looking at isolated island communities, as their scale and resource limits make them models for disasters whose underlying causes can be harder to see in the failure of larger civilizations. Tangier Island, can be considered the bellwether of Trumpists.
Discover Magazine: The CRISPR Antidote
An arms race is playing out inside your body. It’s part of an invisible war that’s raged for billions of years. When viruses hunt and infect bacteria, the bacterial survivors store pieces of their vanquished foes — DNA snippets — within their genomes so that next time, they can detect and defend against the attack. In response, viruses evolve their own counterattack.
The bacteria’s natural defense system is called CRISPR-Cas9. And in 2012, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, together with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, upended genetics with an ingenious idea. What if scientists could exploit CRISPR as a gene-editing tool? Since then, Doudna and others have hacked these cellular weapons in an effort to treat diseases and create stronger crops. Now scientists are attempting another task: avoiding unintended mutations resulting from their gene edits.
The apparent ease with which CRISPR has ushered in a new era of gene editing has been somewhat belied by the discovery that the editing is far from as neat or predictable as some articles have suggested.
But despite its track record, sometimes CRISPR brings unintended consequences — gene edits in undesired locations. Scientists call these “off-target effects.” Cas9’s scissors don’t always stop once the targeted cuts are made. Sometimes the scissors will roam for another day or two, cutting other sites that resemble the target but aren’t quite a perfect match.
Ars Technica: Transplanted mammals take a century to learn to “surf the green wave”
In many areas of the globe, native species have been wiped out of large areas of their range even though some habitats that could support them were left intact or later restored. That has allowed conservationists to reintroduce these species, sometimes with spectacular success. The North American bison, for example, has gradually returned from near extinction largely due to reintroductions from the few small herds that were once left.
But not all of these reintroductions have worked out, and a paper in this week's Science suggests a reason: over generations, native populations develop a "culture" that helps them to understand when and where to migrate. New populations, dropped into an unfamiliar landscape, tend to sit still and don't make the most out of their habitat.
And an ‘extinction’ almost as sad as the departed birds …
Science News: Before it burned, Brazil’s National Museum gave much to science
A natural history museum isn’t just a place to take visiting relatives or for entertaining kids on the weekends. These museums’ collections also play a vital, but under-celebrated, role in scientific research.
That’s why, when Brazil's National Museum in Rio de Janeiro caught fire on September 2, more than just a catalog of natural and human history was lost. The museum was full of valued datasets that could have driven research to come, raised new scientific questions and answered old ones.
Just a small part of what was lost …
The museum’s paleontology collection gathered a catalog of the region’s biodiversity going back hundreds of millions of years — dinosaurs, flying reptiles, ancient lizards, crocodiles, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and more. It’s introduced a bevy of ancient species over the years.