May | 2025 | ConservationBytes.com

Genetics to the rescue

27 05 2025

Procreating with a relative is taboo in most human societies for many reasons, but they all stem from avoiding one thing in particular — inbreeding increases the risk of genetic disorders that can seriously compromise a child’s health, life prospects, and survival.

While we all inherit potentially harmful mutations from our parents, the effects of these mutations are often partially or completed masked if we possess two alternative variants of a gene — one from each parent. However, the children of closely related parents are more likely to inherit the same copies of harmful mutations. This is known as ‘inbreeding depression’.

But inbreeding depression can happen in any species, with the risk increasing as populations become smaller. Because many species are rapidly declining in abundance and becoming isolated from one another predominantly due to habitat destruction, invasive species, and climate change, the chances of inbreeding are also increasing.

Not only are such populations more susceptible to random disturbances, they are also victim of reduced population growth rates arising from inbreeding depression. This produces what is generally known as the ‘extinction vortex‘ — the smaller your population, the more you inbreed and produce sub-optimal offspring, leading to even more population decline and eventually extinction.

One emergency intervention that can ‘rescue’ such inbred populations from extinction (at least in the short term) is to introduce unrelated individuals from other populations in an attempt to increase genetic diversity, and therefore, the rate of population growth. While somewhat controversial because some fear introducing diseases or eroding local-area specialisation (so-called ‘outbreeding depression’), the risk-benefit ratio of this ‘genetic rescue’ is now widely considered to be worth it.

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Tags: bandicoot, demographic stochasticity, devil, EPBC Act, genetic drift, genetic load, genetic rescue, koala, marsupials, microsatellite DNA, mitochondrial DNA, mtDNA, natural selection, possum, quoll, single-nucleotide polymorphisms, SNPs, whole-genome sequencing, woylie
Categories : Australia, conservation, demography, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, genetic diversity, genetics, inbreeding depression, mammal, threatened species

Journal editors struggling to find reviewers — there are some bloody good reasons why

7 05 2025

I used to think it was merely a post-COVID19 hiccough, but the extensive delays in receiving reviews for submitted manuscripts that I am seeing near constantly now are the symptoms of a much larger problem. That problem is, in a nutshell, how awfully journals are treating both authors and reviewers these days.

I regularly hear stories from editors handling my papers, as well as accounts from colleagues, about the ridiculous number of review requests they send with no response. It isn’t uncommon to hear that editors ask more than 50 people for a review (yes, you read that correctly), to no avail. Even when the submitting authors provide a list of potential reviewers, it doesn’t seem to help.

The ensuing delays in time to publication are really starting to hurt people, and the most common victims are early career researchers needing to build up their publication track records to secure grants and jobs. And the underhanded, dickhead tactic to reset the submission clock by calling a ‘major review’ a ‘rejection with opportunity to resubmit’ doesn’t fucking fool anyone. The ‘average time from submission to publication’ claimed by most journals is a boldface lie because of their surreptitious manipulation of handling statistics.

The most obese pachyderm in the room is, of course, the extortionary prices (and it is nothing short of extortion) charged for publishing in most academic journals these days. For example, I had to spend more than AU$17,000.00 to publish a single open-access paper in Nature Geoscience last year. That was just for one paper. Never again.

Anyone with even a vestigial understanding of economics feels utterly exploited when asked to review a paper for nothing. As far as I am aware, there isn’t a reputable journal out there that pays for peer reviews. As a whole, academics are up-to-fucking-here with this arrangement, so it should come as no surprise that editors are struggling to find reviewers.

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Tags: academic journals, Academic publishing, publishing, reviewer crisis, scientific journals, scientific publishing
Categories : co-author, exploitation, research, science, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, societies

The colour of survival

6 05 2025

In boreal forests, many hares adopt white winter coats before the snow arrives. In a snowless landscape, these white hares lack camouflage against predators. However, their early moult from brown into white fur can increase their survival and offers an advantage as the snow season becomes progressively shorter with climate change.

Throughout the year, we wear different clothing to protect ourselves from the cold or heat and for aesthetic reasons depending on the occasion. Likewise, many animals change the colour, thickness and structure of their fur and feathers in tune with the seasons.

_{Snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) in a snowy (Kluane Lake/Yukon, Canada) and snowless habitat (Seely Lake/Montana, USA). This mammal moults its coat as colder temperatures, shorter days, and snowfall arrive. In the genetic populations of the temperate forests of the Rocky Mountains and the boreal forests spanning the North American continent, hares that moult from brown to white are abundant (20). However, in coastal areas, and in the third genetic population in the North Pacific, snowfall is brief and less intense, resulting in fewer white individuals. This is due to hybridisation with the black-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus californicus) over 3,000 years ago (17). The hare’s coat has an outer layer, where the longer fur gives each individual its colour, and an inner layer of short fur (19). In winter, the outer layer becomes thicker and denser, while the inner layer maintains a consistent thickness but increases in density. By biomass, the snowshoe hare is the primary herbivore in the North American boreal forest and distinguishes the trophic relationships between continents (21). In Europe, much of the boreal understory remains under snow, providing food for rodents with four-year abundance cycles controlled by small generalist predators (mustelids). In North America, the boreal understory grows above the snow and provides food for hares. In this region, snowshoe hare populations follow 10-year abundance cycles regulated by specialist predators (those that feed almost exclusively on hares), primarily the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) (6). Photos courtesy of Alice Kenney and Charles Krebs (Yukon) [see their ecological monitoring program here] and Marketa Zimova (Montana).}

However, as the climate changes, springs arrive earlier, winters are delayed, and the frequency and intensity of precipitation have become highly variable. All of this makes it harder for species to adjust their wardrobe to temperature changes (1).

In this context, body colour is a critical factor for birds and mammals that undergo an annual moult (2). In 21 species from the cold latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, some individuals are brown in summer, but turn white in winter, while others remain brown year round (3). This phenomenon includes weasels, rodents, ptarmigans, foxes, rabbits and hares.

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