reptiles

Chimpanzees Spotted Smashing Open and Eating Tortoises for the First Time

The discovery sheds light on how early humans developed the ability to eat meat.

All chimpanzees eat animals at least sometimes, including anything from ants and termites to bushpigs and even baboons. Monkeys, in fact, are typically the most frequent item on the menu, and in some cases chimpanzees can eat so many monkeys they threaten to wipe out entire populations. One group in Senegal even hunts tiny, mouse-like primates known as bushbabies by using spear-like tools to first probe the holes the bushbabies hide in during the day, before reaching in to grab their prey.

So chimpanzees are rightly known as resourceful eaters. But until now scientists had never observed them eating reptiles.

That has all changed, thanks to a group of wild chimpanzees in Loango National Park along the Atlantic coast of Gabon in Central Africa. These chimps have recently become used to the presence of humans, which means scientists can now see them act exactly as they would in nature. And, writing in the journal Scientific Reports, a group of researchers say they have already observed behaviour not previously seen in chimpanzees.

These chimpanzees regularly catch, kill and consume tortoises that have been grabbed from the forest floor. For people like us, who also research chimpanzee behaviour, the discovery is particularly exciting because the animals obtain the tortoise meat by pounding the shell repeatedly onto a tree trunk until it cracks.

Thought pistachio nuts were hard to open? Try eating tortoise.

This sort of “percussive foraging” – the pounding of certain food items until a breaking point – has been seen in chimpanzees elsewhere, but never to obtain meat. For instance chimps in Senegal have been observed pounding baobab shells to extract the softer fruit-covered seeds inside. From Sierra Leone to the Ivory Coast, Western chimpanzees use stone and wooden hammers to crack open encased nuts from protective outer shells.

Broadly, this sort of pounding has been suggested as the first step towards more complex tool use that allowed early human ancestors to flourish. The question of why other chimpanzee communities do not do this too, despite the clear benefits of obtaining otherwise protected nuts, seeds – and now meat – remains unanswered.

The reward is a tasty tortoise, helpfully served in a bowl-shaped shell.

This newly discovered percussive behaviour in chimpanzees leaves a significant damage pattern on the tortoise shell and potentially damages the anvil on which it was cracked. The evidence left behind is therefore of interest to us primate archaeologists who use archaeological techniques to understand the physical remains of non-human primates. Our work in this emerging discipline relies on material artefacts – shattered tortoise shells, for instance – to reconstruct contemporary primate behaviour in the same way we do for early hominins.

Also read: Did the World’s Most Famous Gorilla Ever ‘Talk’ Like Humans Did?

We have long assumed that reconstructing hominin meat-eating behaviour was dependent on our finding fossilised stone tools and cut marks left on processed animal bones. To this select list we can now add tortoise shell. Previously, scientists had looked at fractured turtle remains and argued the animals may have been an important part of early human diets, but the Loango chimpanzees provide us a glimpse of the role this meat may have played for our early ancestors.

The new findings also reveal something even more remarkable. Among their observations, the researchers describe another novel behaviour, the storage of one of the tortoise shells in the fork of a tree that is later retrieved and consumed by the same male chimpanzee.

Such “future-oriented cognition” has long been considered uniquely human, but experimental evidence suggests other species, including apes and some birds, may possess it as well. If chimpanzees can indeed anticipate a future state (I will be hungry) as being different than their current one (I am not hungry), then a more nuanced interpretation of their cognition is required. Indeed, a careful study of the species may uncover many more examples of this future planning.

It is now clear that with every new wild chimpanzee community that becomes used to humans, scientists observe new and unexpected behaviour – some of which challenges our understanding of evolution and what it means to be human. Furthermore, the difference in behaviour from group to group highlights the extraordinary cultural diversity among our closest living relatives.

The opportunity for comparisons with our own evolution has become a run against time as the human infestation of the planet threatens wild primate populations worldwide. We know that the presence of humans directly destroys not only the habitat and lives of primates but also leads to the loss of behavioural diversity. Conserving the last remaining populations of wild apes has become urgent, otherwise our fellow primates will disappear forever. With their extinction will disappear a part of their own heritage and a window back to our own evolution.

Lydia Luncz, Research Fellow, Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab, University of Oxford; Alexander Piel, Lecturer in Animal Behaviour, Liverpool John Moores University, and Fiona Stewart, Visiting Lecturer in Primatology, Liverpool John Moores University

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

A ‘Mysterious’ New Frog Species With Hidden Spots and an Insect-Like Call

Discovered in the Western Ghats of southern India, the species is unique enough to be placed in a newly-created genus as well.

It was after a heavy spell of rain during the 2015 monsoon that Sonali Garg walked out to a spot she had been visiting regularly, and unsuccessfully, for more than two years. A large muddy puddle.

But this time, she struck gold in the form of a new species of frog, Mysticellus franki sp. nov., which turned out to be so unique the study authors have assigned it to a newly created genus.

It all started in 2013 when Garg encountered “strange looking” tadpoles in that muddy puddle when conducting amphibian surveys for her PhD from Delhi University. It was clear the tadpoles belonged to the frog family Microhylidae, but beyond that, “we couldn’t pinpoint what species the tadpoles belonged to,” said Garg in an interview with Mongabay.

When the researchers sequenced the tadpoles and examined the DNA, it was clear that the tadpoles were of a hitherto unknown frog species.

“We have a library of sequences of frogs and other amphibians from the country and we could compare the sequence of the unknown tadpole against them,” said Garg. “To our surprise, the sequence did not match any frog species from the country; it fell into the family [Microhylidae], but beyond that, it did not match anything that was known from India.”

With no knowledge about the adult frog — where it was found, whether it was big or small. Garg and her team started visiting the puddle where they collected the tadpoles regularly. An adult specimen was needed to carry out the necessary morphological analyses to delve into the mysterious new species.

“For the next two years, we kept going back to the same spot. It was the only spot we were sure we would get it,” said Garg. “So we went back there at different seasons and different times of the year because we didn’t know when this frog would come out.”

“Eventually, after two years of this exercise of repeated searching, one monsoon, a couple of days after the monsoon hit, when there was sufficient water that collected on the ground, around the puddles … we saw the frogs. They were there in the hundreds, it was magical. It was as if the frogs were welcoming us,” she added, the excitement still palpable in her voice even after nearly four years.

The new species “was an accidental discovery,” said Garg and supervisor S.D. Biju. “We just happened to be at the right place, at the right time. And of course, often we fail to look closely. In this case, we looked closely at every tadpole, and that’s how this discovery happened!”

Male and female specimens of the newly discovered Mysticellus franki sp. Credit: S.D. Biju

A new species … and a new genus

After making careful notes from the field and recording the calls of the male frogs serenading for females in the puddles, the researchers collected specimens and brought them to the lab to carry out genetic analyses.

A combination of genetic, morphological and call data threw up the final diagnosis. The frog was definitely a new species, and sufficiently different from other members of the family Microhylidae found in India to be assigned to its own genus as well.

The new species belongs to sub family Microhylinae. The genus name Mysticellus is derived from the Latin mysticus, meaning mysterious, and ellus, which means diminutive. The name highlights “the ability of this small frog to remain out of sight despite its occurrence in wayside areas surrounding human settlements,” write the authors in the paper. The species name franki honours Franky Bossyut, a professor and amphibian biologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

“I agree with assignment of the species status. The allocation of a genus status is motivated based on molecular evidence. The evidence is still tenuous because we have one member of the new genus,” said Karthikeyan Vasudevan, senior principal scientist at the Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LACONES), Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology.

“More than anything, it is surprising that it has not been already found and described. While very similar in shape, size, and colouration to other microhylid frogs in southeast Asia, there is nothing in the Western Ghats of India that resembles this,” said David Blackburn, the Associate Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It is only the secretive nature of these frogs that has resulted in them only now being known to science.”

The new species of frog was discovered when researchers came across a ‘strange’ looking tadpole. After continuously searching for an adult for two years, they spotted around 100 adult frogs around a roadside puddle. Credit: S.D. Biju

Hidden spots and an insect-like call

The researchers observed that the frogs started congregating in hundreds around temporary muddy puddles, two to three days after the first monsoon showers. After four to five days of intense breeding, the frogs disappeared completely, leaving the researchers mystified.

“After we first discovered this frog in 2015, we carried out several surveys in and around the region over a period of three years to study this frog. However, due to its secretive behaviour we were only able to locate it during a very short window of less than four days,” said the authors in an interview.

After the frogs disappeared, the researchers were not able to locate “even a single individual” at any other time of the year. “We don’t know where it hides, lives, and what it does for the rest of the year. The frog’s external appearance does not show morphological adaptations for burrowing. At the same time, we doubt that it simply hides under leaf litter, rocks and stone (the usual hiding places for frogs during the non-breeding time). It’s still a mystery for us,” they said.

When the males called to attract females, they raised the hind part of the body to show off “a pair of black false-eye like spots.” The frogs did the same when the researchers tried to approach them, said Garg.

“The effect is quite startling,” she said. “When the animal is sitting down, the spots are hidden. When we were close to the animal, the frog raised the hind part of its body. This movement really made the spots very visible.”

“The best guess we have is that it’s a defensive mechanism,” she said.

The call of the frog is also quite distinct, observed the researchers. “It resembles an insect chorus,” write the authors in the press release.

The frogs probably had such a unique call to attract females in the most efficient manner, said Garg. “Even if a puddle is crowded with multiple frog species and multiple individuals of the same species, even if it’s pitch dark, the female needs to be able to find her way to the male,” she said. “This is one reason to have unique calls. Also, for this species, with such a short breeding window of four or five days, the pressure to get it right is much higher,” she added.

The frog has two distinct eye-like spots on its rear-end which probably serve as a self-defence feature. Credit: S.D. Biju

A mysterious past

A phylogeny (a sort of family tree) of all known genetic data known from the family Microhylidae shows that the closest relative of the subfamily Microhylinae is the subfamily Dyscophinae, which is restricted to Madagascar.

The available molecular evidence gives us this story. The family Microhylidae would have originated on Gondwanaland, the ancient supercontinent which would eventually break up to form most of South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Australia and Antarctica. When Gondwanaland broke up, the subfamily Dyscophinae took up home in Madagascar and sub family Microhylinae moved on toward Asia on the Indian subcontinent. The split between Dyscophinae and Microhylinae happened about 67 million years ago, giving Microhylinae enough time to diversify in the Indian subcontinent as it drifted along towards Eurasia. Once the Indian subcontinent docked at Eurasia, frogs that make up the Microhylinae subfamily spread all over Asia.

For M. franki in particular, the closest relative on the family tree is the genus Micryletta, also belonging to subfamily Microhylinae but found in the Indo-Burma and Sunderland biodiversity hotspots in Southeast Asia and China.

Using algorithms that can parse out evolutionary timelines by considering the rate at which DNA changes over time, the researchers were able to give tentative dates to different nodes of the phylogeny.

The secretive frogs vanished after appearing for the breeding season which lasted for around four days. Credit: S.D. Biju

“Our study shows that the common ancestors of Mysticellus and Micryletta diverged about 40 million ago. Most likely they originally inhabited the Indian Peninsula and later diverged to give rise to both these genera,” said the authors.
The authors posit that the two genera are likely to have split when the Indian landmass moved close to mainland Southeast Asia through the Myanmar-Malay Peninsula during Middle/Late Eocene.

Karthikeyan Vasudevan from LACONES said, “Recent evidence from the study of arthropods in amber suggests that prior to the final collision at around 55 million years ago with Asia, India moved close to or had land connections with Africa and Europe.” Some models of continental drift show that species could have moved between the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia prior to the former’s collision with Asia, he added.

“This might help explain the presence of genera that are not present in the Eastern Himalayas, but are found in South India, Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia,” he added. He gave examples of the skink genus Dasia and the pit vipers (genus Tropidolaemus).

David Blackburn from the Florida Museum of Natural History agrees. “Clearly, some lineages must have survived on India as it moved across the Indian Ocean during the late Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, but several studies, including this one, now support that colonisation of the Indian subcontinent by animals from Asia before India had fully collided with the Asian mainland,” he said.

With inputs from Sahana Ghosh.

This article was first published on Mongabay. Read the original here.

Many Lizards Aren’t Dumb but If Their Embryos Were Colder, They Might Be Smarter

Bearded dragons that had been incubated at a colder temperature were able to learn a trick faster and more often than those incubated in warmer climes.

Bearded dragons learn to solve problems by watching others. Credit: Sophie A. Moszuti

Animals do the most amazing things. Read about them in this series by Janaki Lenin.

Egg-laying reptiles, except some pythons, don’t incubate their eggs. They bury their chalk-encased embryos underground or in a thick pile of leaves. The Sun baking the ground or rotting vegetation is enough to nurture developing embryos. Environmental temperature even assigns gender at a critical time in the incubation process since many species lack sex chromosomes. In recent years, scientists have been discovering the outsized role temperature plays in reptilian lives.

Incubation temperature shapes the brain of three-lined skinks (Bassiana duperreyi). Hatchlings incubated at warmer temperatures, called ‘hot’ hereafter, had a greater density of neurons and more of them in specific regions. On the other hand, those bred in cooler conditions, called ‘cold’, had larger forebrains.

Higher temperatures turned out larger and heavier skink hatchlings that ran faster and learned quicker. Another study found that the hot hatchlings of a different species, the velvet gecko (Amalosia lesueurii), were slow learners and poor survivors.

These studies focused on youngsters. When the animals reached adulthood, did they continue to have the advantages of speed, size, weight and longevity? Do conditions that shape embryos affect adult behaviour? Very few studies have tracked these changes over time.

Anna Wilkinson from the UK’s University of Lincoln and her colleagues studied the effects of incubation temperature on personality. Hot bearded dragon hatchlings were bolder. But as they grew older, they lost some of their audacity even as their cold siblings became more brazen. In an unpublished study cited by the researchers, any growth advantage that hot hatchlings had also disappeared with age as cold ones began to put on weight faster.

Could temperature affect their cognitive abilities? If the shape of young skinks’ brains could change, then their functions could also be altered.

Wilkinson and her colleagues from the University of Lincoln and Utrecht University, the Netherlands, studied central bearded dragons (Pogona vitticeps). Within a narrow range of temperature, sex chromosomes decide the sex of the offspring with an even hand.

The team divided 13 eggs of one pair of parents into two groups and incubated each at different temperatures within this temperature band. One batch got the hot treatment and the other, cold. When the hatchlings reached adulthood, the researchers tested one part of cognition. Do the lizards take cues and learn new tricks by watching others?

Before Wilkinson and her colleagues began the study, they weren’t sure what to expect. “We have found that cold incubated animals were better at asocial learning [unpublished study] and as such, we predicted that we would see similar effect in social learning,” she says.

Bearded dragons can follow the gaze of another, showing social intelligence. Credit: Sophie A. Moszuti

The choice of bearded dragons for a study on social cognition is odd, as Maria Thaker points out. Scientists don’t typically consider the lizards to be social animals. “They are regular territorial lizards that may not have an opportunity to closely watch others in the wild,” she says. “Why would social learning be relevant for a territorial agamid?” An assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, Thaker was not involved in the study.

“There is now impressive evidence of learning in a number of reptile species,” Wilkinson told The Wire. “We have recently shown that red-footed tortoises can remember learned responses for 18 months, and bearded dragons are able to imitate the actions of another lizard – something thought to be unique to humans and great apes a few decades ago.”

Wilkinson and her colleagues chose bearded dragons for the study because, unlike other lizards, they watch videos, which makes them ideal candidates for this innovative experiment. The researchers recorded an unrelated dragon looking upwards or to the side and played the video recording to the experiment’s 13 subjects.

Gaze-following is a classic test scientists use to assess social intelligence in animals. One has to interpret the other’s face and eyes, and realise what it may be seeing could be an advantage, revealing a source of food or the presence of a predator.

When watching the video playback, all the 13 turned in the direction the bearded dragon on the screen looked. But they didn’t look upwards or to the sides, when the demonstrating lizard looked straight ahead. Clearly temperature didn’t curb their curiosity to know what the other was seeing.

The researchers pushed the animals further. They blocked a part of the enclosure and played the videos again. To follow the gaze of the recorded lizard, the bearded dragons would have to walk around the barrier. None of the lizards realised that the screen obstructed their line of sight. Perhaps this level of reasoning is beyond the scope of bearded dragon intelligence. So far, only primate, crow and dog families have shown this complexity of understanding.

In the last part of the experiment, the researchers tested if the lizards could solve a problem by watching and learning from another. This is faster and easier than trial and error.

They played a video of a dragon sliding a screen door open to reach a mealworm. Then they placed the 13 lizards in turn in a similar experimental setup and gave them five minutes to figure it out. If the reptiles mimicked the lizard in the video, they were capable of social learning.

“We had previously shown that lizards can only solve this task if they have watched another lizard do so,” says Wilkinson. “Therefore, we felt it was the ideal experiment to test differences in social learning under different incubation conditions.”

Plan of the experimental arena for (a) the gaze following experiment (left panel) and (b) the social learning experiment. Credit: Sophie A. Moszuti

“Very few people have successfully tested social learning and gaze following in lizards,” says Thaker. “Although we may argue about how relevant these behaviours are for a generally non-social animal, the methods to test these behavioural responses are great.”

The cold animals of the 13 had an edge, learning the trick faster and opening the sliding door more times than the hot ones.

“If your environment is colder, an ectotherm like these lizards will be moving around less and will have less opportunity/time to maximise the use of their environment (fewer hours that are warm enough and within operative temperature conditions),” says Thaker. “Maybe then, there is less time to independently learn about the world and social learning comes in handy. I have no idea if this is the case, but I’m certainly looking forward to the next generation of papers that examine multiple cognitive axes [functions] in the same individual. Only then will we understand the learning brain. I do think that we need to get a handle on how animals are going to respond to temperature changes in their world.”

Martin Whiting, an associate professor at Macquarie University, Australia, says the study is an “important early contribution to our understanding of the thermal environment’s influence on learning ability.” He thinks in future, studies using many more lizards would help us understand how warmth influences learning and what those temperature thresholds are. Whiting studied the effects of high incubation temperatures on three-lined skinks and wasn’t involved in this study.

How does one reconcile the contradictions in the performance of bearded dragons, velvet geckos and three-lined skinks? They are representatives of three different reptilian groups and could respond in various ways to heat.

“We don’t really have enough studies to establish any kind of pattern at this stage,” says Whiting. “Their study highlights the need to conduct similar studies on a greater range of species from across the lizard phylogeny (evolutionary tree) in order to establish whether there are general patterns. It is certainly an intriguing difference, though.”

Thaker felt such experiments although elegant seldom mimic the real world. “Every individual in every population will face a different incubation temperature and so our understanding of a ‘hot’ world and a ‘cold’ world is still far from realistic. Will dramatic changes in development occur at threshold shifts in temperature? Or will we find socially inept lizards in a warming world? I am resisting the urge to compare the social ineptness of humans in a warming world – that is a different study altogether!”

Until recently, no one would have thought to test cognition in reptiles. They are slow and sluggish and thought to be dumb. Studies like these are beginning to reveal these animals may be smarter than they look.

The study was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on November 22, 2017.

Janaki Lenin is the author of My Husband and Other Animals. She lives in a forest with snake-man Rom Whitaker and tweets at @janakilenin.

Not a Lizard nor a Dinosaur, Tuatara Is the Sole Survivor of a Once-Widespread Reptile Group

A national icon in New Zealand, tuatara are the only living example of a reptile group that was widespread 60-240 million years ago.

The unique tuatara. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever heard of the tuatara? It’s a reptile that decapitates birds with its saw-like jaws, lives to about 100 years old and can remain active in near-freezing temperatures.

It’s also the sole survivor of a lineage as old as the first dinosaurs.

May 2017 marks 150 years since the tuatara was first recognised not to be a lizard.

Most tuatara exist on windswept offshore New Zealand islands, where they spend their days in burrows or basking lazily in the sun.

In the evening they are more active, and use their large eyes to spot a variety of prey such as beetles, spiders and snails. They also occasionally eat lizards, frogs, baby tuatara and birds – the headless bodies of birds are not infrequently reported from their island homes.

Although capable of bursts of speed, tuatara have a reputation for slowness. They grow slowly, they reproduce slowly and they live for a long time.

Interestingly, they are most active at cool temperatures (5-18℃) that would put many other reptiles out of action. New Zealand lizards have similar traits, suggesting that these characteristics are relatively recent adaptations to local conditions.

The tuatara is often referred to as having a third eye because of a light-sensitive organ on the top of its head, similar to the ones found in many lizards.

Ancient isolation

Ancestors of the tuatara have probably been on land associated with New Zealand since it separated from the rest of the Gondwana supercontinent about 80 million years ago. During that time, they have had to cope with big changes in the region’s shape and size (New Zealand may have been mostly submerged 23 million years ago) and, until recently, a cooling climate.

Recent fossils from the past few thousand years show that tuatara were widespread across the mainland until humans arrived (with Pacific rats) about 750 years ago.

Tuatara are now threatened by climate change. This is because the sex of a tuatara is determined by the temperature that their eggs experience – rising temperatures will skew populations towards males.

Mainland reintroductions to cooler latitudes will hopefully reduce this problem. Captive breeding programs are also showing signs of success.

A special place in biodiversity

The initial claim that the tuatara is not a lizard was based on anatomical differences such as the presence of a second row of upper teeth, which is not seen in any lizard.

Subsequent genetic and fossil discoveries have confirmed that the tuatara has a separate heritage.

We now know that the tuatara is the only living member of Rhynchocephalia, a reptile group that was diverse and widespread between 240 million and 60 million years ago. Its fossil relatives included small carnivores with scissor-like jaws, large chunky herbivores, and even aquatic forms with crushing tooth plates.

The tuatara is often referred to as a “living fossil” or even a “living dinosaur”. Although these labels are not helpful scientifically, they reflect a widespread appreciation that the tuatara has a special place in the animal kingdom.

The animal group known as “amniote vertebrates” includes more than 30,000 species divided between six major radiations: mammals (5,416 species), turtles (341), crocodylians (25), birds (at least 15,845), lizards and snakes (10,078), and (tuatara).

A tree showing the six major branches of the Amniota. The numbers along the top are numbers of species and the numbers at the branching events are estimate times from TimeTree.org. Animal silhouettes are from PhyloPic. Credit: Marc E H Jones/The Conversation

As the only living member of Rhychocephalia, and only living cousin to Squamata (lizards and snakes), the tuatara has an important role to play in understanding the evolution of all animals with backbones.

Recent contributions to science

Despite several hundred research articles on the tuatara, we are still learning new things about this species all the time.

The origin of male genitals

Recent examination of tuatara embryos suggests that although adult male tuatara lack external genitalia (that is, they have no external penis), their ancestors did possess a penis of some kind.

This evidence in turn supports a hypothesis that external genitalia originated just once within amniotes (mammals, birds, crocodiles, lizards, tuatara) but has since undergone dramatic modification and was even lost in some groups of birds as well as an ancestor of the tuatara.

Biomechanics of biting

The frame-like skull of the tuatara has also become an important subject for biomechanics.

Sophisticated computer models have been used to predict muscle activity, bite force, sensory feedback from the jaw joints and stress distribution in the bones during biting.

These models have also shown that the shearing action of the lower jaw involves tooth on tooth contact and that the soft-tissue connections between bones are important for spreading stress around the skull more evenly.

How kneecaps developed

Recently, X-ray micro CT scans of several tuatara specimens helped established which sesamoid bones – structures at joints such as the knee cap – are likely to be relatively ancient and which are relatively new.

Culture, myths and legends

The tuatara is a national icon in New Zealand, where it has appeared on the five cent coin and several postage stamps.

The tuatara on the New Zealand 5 cent coin from 1967 to 2006. Credit: The Conversation

Further afield, it has also given its name to a brewery, musical group, a DC super hero, a backpackers accommodation, a tour company, a scientific journal, a company selling mobile phone covers, and, with no hint of irony, a V8 sports car that can reach a top speed of 444km per hour.

Tuatara are highly important to māori culture. The word “tuatara” is itself māori, meaning “peaks on back” (referring to the crest along its neck and back). Tuatara are regarded as “taonga” (treasure), viewed as guardians of knowledge, and sometimes associated with bad omens.

A curious urban legend associated with the tuatara is that of the cenaprugwirion, a “curious 1-ft-long lizard-like reptile supposedly inhabiting burrows in and around Abersoch in North Wales”.

Before tuatara were protected in 1895, they were commonly imported to Europe as pets and curios. Some have suggested these animals might represent escaped tuatara from that time.

Tuatara are frequently in the news. During the 1980s, wild population of tuatara were targeted by poachers who were suspected to be selling them in exchange for drugs.

Henry the tuatara acquired celebrity status when he became a dad at 111 and met Prince Harry several years later.

Marc Emyr Huw Jones is an ARC fellow and lecturer at the University of Adelaide.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Trading in Extinction: Is Pet Trade Killing off Animal Species?

Entire populations of ‘pets’ are being collected using academic publications targeting them, as soon as they are scientifically described.

Entire populations of ‘pets’ are being collected using academic publications, targeting them as soon as they are scientifically described.

A keeper gives peanut to an orangutan inside a cage shortly after it arrived from Thailand at Halim Perdanakusuma airport in Jakarta, November 12, 2015. Fourteen orangutans smuggled into Thailand illegally were sent back to Indonesia on Thursday, but the operation was not without incident one of the powerful apes tore a wildlife officer’s finger off when he tried to put them in cages. Credit: Reuters

Global biodiversity loss doesn’t just result from the destruction of habitats, or even hunting species for meat. Huge number of species are threatened by trade – both alive as pets or exhibits, or dead for use in medicines.

Though people have become increasingly aware of the threat posed by the trade of high-value species, such as the elephant for ivory, and various animals such as tigers, rhinos and the pangolin for medicine, few realise the risk that the pet trade poses to the future survival of many less well-known species.

On visiting a zoo or pet shop, you may expect that the reptiles and amphibians on show are bred in captivity, but many of these animals may have been imported live. In fact, 92% of the 500,000 live animal shipments between 2000-2006 to the US (that’s 1,480,000,000 animals) were for the pet trade, and 69% of these originated in Southeast Asia.

These exports, majority from tropical countries, are increasing annually. And without careful regulation, this trade may be disastrous for many species.

Legal trade?

Many zoos, aquaria and pet stockists formerly relied on “certified breeders” in many parts of the world (especially Southeast Asia and South America) to provide stock for pets and exhibitions. But it’s now well established that only a small proportion of these animals are, in fact, captive bred. The vast majority may be harvested from the wild and laundered to appear legal.

One such case is the common Tokay Gecko (Gecko gecko), of which Indonesia can legally export three million live annually (as designated by CITES which determines legal exports quotas of all internationally traded species), in addition to further 1.2 million dried for its mythical medical properties.

But breeding three million of these animals would require at least 420,000 females and 42,000 males; 90,000 incubation containers and 336,000 rearing cages; plus food and hundreds of staff. All that outlay would need to be recovered at the cost of under $ 1.90 per gecko, and that’s before considering death rates and the 1.2 million that are sold dried. As a result, the majority of these geckos are caught in the wild.

The same is true for an estimated 160 reptile species. Around 80% of Indonesia’s green pythons (Morelia viridis) (more than 5337 annually) are estimated to be exported illegally, and almost the entire population of the Palawan forest turtle was captured by a single group to export across the region.

Due to collector demand for new and rare species, entire populations can be collected using academic publications to target animals as soon as they are scientifically described. At least 21 reptile species have been targeted this way and wild populations may become extinct soon after their discovery as a result. Academics have begun leaving precise locations of new species out of their publications to try to prevent this.

Collector demand has driven a number of species to extinction in the wild, including the Chinese Tiger gecko (Goniuorosaurus luii) and many other geckos known only to collectors and scientists. Yet these extinct in the wild, critically endangered and unclassified species are easily available from unscrupulous traders in America and Europe, via the internet or reptile fairs.

These threats are a particular risk to any newly described reptile species, particularly the reptiles of Asia as well as New Zealand and Madagascar.

For the majority of these species, legal trade has never been permitted internationally; all available animals come from illegal stock, and may represent the global population of some of these species.

An estimated 50% of live reptile exports are thought to be caught in the wild despite the fact under half of the 10,272 currently described reptile species have had their conservation status assessed. Under 8% have their trade levels controlled so developing appropriate priorities, quotas or management guidelines is almost impossible.

But this exploitation is not limited to reptiles and amphibians alone. Any species can fall prey to collectors, with primates, and orchid and bird species often suffering the same fate. More than 212 over-exploited amphibian species have been classified so far, with at least 290 species targeted for the international pet trade.

Surveys in Thailand revealed more than 347 orchid species available in a single market. They come from across the region and include many undescribed species, as well as those illegally transported into Thailand.

These species suffer the same fate as reptiles, with new discoveries often being exploited by the market, sometimes encouraged by researchers. They’re easily available over the internet, resulting in the extinction of these species based on trade alone and the refusal to accept the threat of trade.

Many bird species are also under severe extinction threat because of the pet trade. They include thousands of birds in South America, and an estimated 3.33 million annually from Southeast Asia (1.3 million from Indonesia alone).

The pressure on Indonesian birds is so severe that in just one day in a single market over 16,160 birds of around 206 species were reported to be for sale, of which 98% were native to Indonesia, and 20% occurred nowhere else in the world.

Fish have similar statistics. Up to 98% of those in aquaria are wild caught from reefs and suffer death rates of 98% within a year. As a result, wild fish populations of species, such as the clownfish, have decreased by up to 75%.

Whose responsibility?

The illegal wildlife trade is the fourth largest illegal trade globally, worth about $20 billion annually. About half comes from Southeast Asia.

But unlike other illicit trade, much of the illegal wildlife trade is not buried in the “dark web”. Enforcement is generally so weak that traders of the majority of live animals and plants can operate in plain sight with little fear of reprisal.

The Lacey Act in the US prevents the import of live organisms from their countries of origin, in order to prevent potential laundering of wild-caught animals. But as Europe has no similar legislation, it provides a conduit in addition to an end point for trade.

The majority of the demand for these species, and especially rare species is from European and North American collectors. But, as only a tiny portion of this trade is regulated (2% of international amphibian trade, and 10% of global reptile trade), urgent action is needed to protect vulnerable species from possible extinction.

As many species of reptiles, amphibians and orchids have not been listed by CITES (due to insufficient information, or recent discovery), there is no real regulation in the animal trade. And customs officers cannot be expected to distinguish between a rare and a common orchid or frog, so simpler restrictions are required to prevent this potentially damaging trade.

Innocent until proven guilty?

As so many species have no CITES classification perhaps what we need is a paradigm shift so that only species classed as tradable, and certified as such can be traded. This would mean all specimens without a certificate could not be transported internationally.

At present, tracking trade of whole groups is difficult as organisations that are in a position to do this, such as the World Customs Organisation, do not include records for amphibians.

Many species in the West can only have arrived through illegal routes, yet domestic trade of these species once in a country is currently unrestricted. Licensing or certification systems should be created as a mandatory part of the sale of any taxa vulnerable to exploitation, with confiscations and punishments used to assist compliance.

Collectors of live animals and plants are predominantly hobbyists, so the majority are unlikely to go to great lengths to procure specimens if any level of enforcement were instigated. Such action also needs to extend to finally restrict the thriving trade via the internet in these species which currently exists.

Though pledges have been made by European governments to restrict wildlife trade, their efforts normally fail to account for the huge numbers of species at risk as pets and live specimens. Given the laundering and corruption in these species ranges, restrictions on import by consumer countries are urgently needed.

If we want any future for wild populations of these species, drastic action is needed to control their international and domestic trade. Without such action, we can expect to see the loss of many rare species to greed alone.

Alice Catherine Hughes is an Associate Professor of Landscape Ecology & Conservation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A Brief History of Earth: The Triassic, a Time for New Beginnings and a Few Endings

In the Triassic period, life slowly bloomed into some of the groups we know today: true mammals, true trees and the exciting new type of swimming and walking creatures called the dinosaurs.

Until now: After Earth was left impoverished by the Permian-Triassic extinction event 252 mya, life took a very long time to recover. In fact, it was 10 million years before life could reawaken, and some thirty million more to diversify and flourish. This is a long period of time even by evolutionary and geological standards. With the onset of the Triassic period, life then slowly bloomed into some of the groups we are familiar with today: true mammals, true trees and the exciting new type of swimming and walking creatures called the dinosaurs.

The Triassic period lasted from 252 mya to 200 mya. It is also the only period to begin and end with a major mass extinction as the continent Pangea started to break up and drift apart, causing cataclysmic upheavals of Earth’s innards.

Today, the surviving descendants of the gigantic, ferocious dinosaurs are crocodiles and birds. But in the early Triassic, dinosaurs started out small and meek. The ones that roamed Earth then, called the archosaurs, were ultimately to be the ancestors of all giant dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds. While the lystrosaurus pretty much dominated the first half of the Triassic, the herbivore group rhynchosaur saw a meteoric rise in numbers, and then a drastic fall. Indeed, they were probably the second most abundant type of life on Earth at the time. And sadly they all died out at the end of Triassic.

A rhynchosaur. Credit: Ita Mehrotra

Several of the archosaurs were reptilian, both by looks and nature. Just like the modern-day crocodiles, they lived on land, spent a considerable amount of time swimming in waters, had long snouts and hunted fiercely. They soon evolved to several sizes, ranging right from about the size of a pig to that of a horse. Some looked like heavily armoured anteaters while others like scaly dogs, The phytosaur, the most common type of archosaur that lived during the Triassic, resembled the modern crocodile very closely. Postosuchus, a kind of archosaur, looked like it had T-rex’s head and a crocodile’s body. The plateosaur was striped like a tiger, had a large, heavy lower body like the T-rex and a thin stretched out upper body – like it was squeezed too much. The unaysaurus had either a giraffe-like mottled pattern or a zebra-like stripes (depending on who you ask) and were as tall as our largest dogs.

Also, the ancestors of modern mammals appeared on Earth at this time. They were called the cynodonts. They had typical mammalian characteristics – of differentiated teeth and bulged skulls that accommodated large brains. They were small in size, having had to wait a few million years, before the dinosaurs died out, to proliferate. Other animal life included the now-extinct primitive amphibian class that were the ancestors of modern day salamanders and frogs. The first turtles also made their appearance at this time.

Proto-dinosaurs, the descendants of archosaurs that were one step away from being full dinosaurs, appeared in the form of theropods. These dinosaurs were quite small, about the size of a cat or a dog, and didn’t evolve much in size during the Triassic. They came in many varieties, especially in terms of dietary choices. There were theropods that were herbivorous, carnivorous, omnivorous, piscivorous and even insectivorous. They also had several other characteristics that are familiar to us today, like feathers. Some had them only when they were young or newly hatched. Several groups of these theropods could also swim and hunt underwater.

In the oceans, new kinds of corals appeared, in turn building new kinds of reefs. A single line of molluscs – called shelled organisms – had survived from the Permian era and slowly diversified into the recognisable, whorl-shelled ammonites. The ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, the uniquely identifiable marine dinosaurs, grew in size and numbers. Conodonts, large eel-like swimmers, were all over the place.

An ammonite. Credit: Ita Mehrotra

Plants didn’t see much variety in this period. Planktons grew in the waters but it was still ferns, horsetails and conifers everywhere on land.

And then Pangea started to breakup. The events that followed were nothing surprising (anymore). There was an immense release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. There were mega flood-basalt events, global warming, toxins in the air, climate change, a drop in sea levels, oceanic acidification and everything else we’ve seen before caused by supercontinents breaking apart. The extinction event that followed is called the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, and is the fourth of the Big Five.

Where we are. Credit: Ita Mehrotra

And just like the symptoms, the effects of a major mass extinction are also familiar to us: devastation. Several animal species that were transitionary between amphibians and mammals, such as the placerias that looked like a mix between a walrus, hippopotamus and Zoidberg, were lost forever. Marine animals suddenly and quickly began to disappear. The eel-like conodonts were completely eliminated. A large portion of plant life was also lost, and the exposed land then killed several archosaurs that had just started to grow in size. Over 50% of all life on Earth became extinct. And all of these occurred in less than 10,000 years.

Then, the age of dinosaurs dawned.

By the onset of the Jurassic period some 201 mya, Pangea had separated into two landmasses: Laurasia in the northern hemisphere and Gondwana in the southern. This splitting up of a giant landmass led to the opening up of new oceans, which in turn increased water circulation around the two continents. As a result, several of the arid desert regions that formed in the Triassic turned into thick, green forests bathed in water. In this time, both continents remained relatively close to the equator. There were no landmasses near the poles and so no ice caps anywhere on the planet.

In the freshly swirling oceans, aquatic dinosaurs flourished. The ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs came out of the mass extinction intact and were diversifying rapidly. Different types of reef-building organisms multiplied – as did the reefs they had built. There was a spike in the number of shelled marine animals. Plankton diversified intensely, forming new groups and species.

On land, the dinosaurs dominated. Among them, the herbivores emerged at the top. The diplodocus and brachiosaurus – the one Ellie and Alan first see, then Tim and Lex touch, in Jurassic Park (1993) – were particularly common. There were fewer carnivores; the most populous of these were the megalosaurus and allosaurus, both cousins of the T-rex. Perhaps the most recognisable of the animals was the stegosaurus, which would have been hunted by the former two.

A stegosaurus. Credit: Ita Mehrotra

Lizards and salamanders appeared. Smaller reptiles abounded while mammals continued to remain inconspicuous. In the skies, dinosaurs flew. Pterosaurs (often incorrectly called pterodactyls) were everywhere. They were the first dinosaurs to take to the skies, and are the earliest ancestors of birds alone, as opposed to being a common ancestor of birds and crocodiles. They evolved quite rapidly. Archaeopteryx, the transition between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds, also appeared in the Jurassic period. In fact, the Jurassic period is believed to have contained the largest animals to ever fly in the sky.

In the next instalment: the next time period, small extinction events, diversification of dinosaurs, a surprising splash of colour – everything leading up to a giant space rock.

Sandhya Ramesh is a science writer focusing on astronomy and earth science.