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Fancy a pangolin infected with coronavirus? Apparently, many people do

30 12 2021

The logic of money contradicts the logic of species conservation and human health. As illegal trade has driven pangolins to near extinction, their hunting and market value has kept increasing ― even when we have known that they act as coronavirus reservoirs in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.

_{Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) in a monsoon forest (Sumba Island, Indonesia). With adult weights up to 10 kg and body lengths around half a metre, these animals are mostly solitary and nocturnal, feed on ants and termites, and love tree climbing using bark hollows to shelter and give birth to singletons. The species occurs across mainland and islands of South East Asia, and became ‘Endangered’ in 2008 and ‘Critically Endangered’ in 2014, following a 80% decline in the last 20 years due to hunting and poaching. It has been the most heavily trafficked Asian species, and the IUCN’s assessment states: “… the incentives for harvesting and illegally trading in the species are universally high based on the high financial value of pangolin parts and derivatives”. Captive breeding is unlikely to deter wild collection because (among other reasons) farming costs are high (more so on a large scale) and, even if the species could be traded legally, wild versus farmed pangolin products and individuals are difficult to distinguish (23). Photo courtesy of Michael Pitts}

Urbanites are attracted to exotic species, materials, and places. Our purchasing power seems to give us the right to buy any ‘object’ that we can pay for, no matter how exotic the object might be. In such a capitalist rationale, it is no surprise that > 150 thousand illegal cargos with wild animals and plants have been confiscated in 149 countries over the last two decades, moving some 6000 species from one place of the planet to another (1).

Social networks show people interacting with all kinds of fauna, creating the illusion that any animal can become a pet (2). And there’s a multi-$billion market of wildlife for a diverse array of uses including collecting, food, ornamentation, leisure, clothing and medicine (3-5). The paradox is that the rarer a species is, the higher its market value runs and the more lucrative selling it turns out to be, leading to more exploitation and rocketing extinction risk (6).

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Tags: CITES, COVID, COVID-19, covid19, endangered, illegal wildlife trade, pangolin, SARS-COV-2, wildlife, Wildlife trade
Categories : Africa, Asia, biodiversity, China, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, decline, disease, economics, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, harvest, Malaysia, mammal, poaching, poverty, South East Asia, threatened species, tropical

Politics matter: undoing conservation progress in the land of the dodo

4 02 2019

The island of Mauritius is known, particularly in conservation circles, for the ill-fated extinction of the dodo, but also for its many conservation success stories. These include the recovery of emblematic birds such as the Mauritius kestrel (Falco punctatus) and the pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) that narrowly avoided extinction several decades ago.

Mauritius (greater Mascarene) flying fox *Pteropus niger*

Behind this veil of achievements, however, local political realities are increasingly making the protection and management of Mauritian biodiversity more complex and challenging as new conservation issues emerge.

Emergence of human-wildlife conflict

In the midst of the third government-led mass cull of the Endangered Mauritian flying fox (Pteropus niger) in 2018, a paper published in the Journal for Nature Conservation shed light on the events that led to the government’s choice to do the first two mass culls of the Mauritian flying fox in 2015 and 2016. Documentation of human-wildlife conflict in Mauritius is relatively new, as noted by the authors, but provides a unique case study.

Given that the mass-culling opted for did not increase fruit growers’ profits (in fact, fruit production dropped substantially after the mass-culls) and that the flying fox, a keystone species for the native biodiversity, became more threatened with extinction following the mass culls, it appears that Mauritius provides a rare opportunity to study what precisely should be avoided when trying to resolve such a HWC [Human-wildlife conflict],
Florens & Bader (2019)

Indeed, to mitigate rising conflicts between fruit farmers and the Mauritian flying fox, the Mauritian government opted in 2006 to cull this threatened species (only six individuals were culled at the time). Despite disputes over the population size of the Mauritian flying fox and the extent of damage it caused to commercial fruit growers, as well as scientific arguments against the cull, culling continues to be the preferred approach.

The law that kills threatened wildlife

This focus on culling as a solution contributed to a legal amendment in October 2015 that now facilitates the population control of any species of wildlife, irrespective of its origin and its conservation status. The Native Terrestrial Biodiversity and National Parks Bill was passed on 20 October 2015, just two weeks after the government announced its plan to cull 18,000 threatened native bats.

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Tags: Île Maurice, conservation, culling, endangered, extinction, flying fox, fruit bat, human-wildlife conflict, Mauritius, Pteropus, Pteropus niger, threatened
Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, decline, environmental policy, extinction, human-wildlife conflict, mammal, management

Ghosts of bottlenecks past

25 05 2012

I’ve just spent the last week at beautiful Linnaeus Estate on the northern NSW coast for my third Australian Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (ACEAS) (see previous post about my last ACEAS workshop).

This workshop is a little different to my last one, and I’m merely a participant (not the organiser) this time. Our task was to examine the mounting evidence that many Australian species appear to show a rather shallow genetic pool from a (or several) major past bottlenecks.

What’s a ‘bottleneck’? In reference to the form after which it was named, a genetic bottleneck is the genetic diversity aftermath after a population declines to a small size and then later expands. The history of this reduction and subsequent expansion is written in the DNA, because inevitably gene ‘types’ are lost as most individuals shuffle off this mortal coil. In a way, it’s like losing a large population of people who all speak different languages – inevitably, you’d lose entire languages and the recovering population would grow out of a reduced ‘pool’ of languages, resulting in fewer overall surviving languages.

Our workshop focus started, as many scientific endeavours do, rather serendipitously. Several years ago, Jeremy Austin noticed that devils who had died out on the mainland several thousand years ago had a very low genetic diversity, as do modern-day devils surviving in Tasmania. He thought it was odd because they should have had more on the mainland given that was their principal distribution prior to Europeans arriving. He mentioned this in passing to Steve Donnellan one day and Steve announced that he had seem the same pattern in echidnas. Now, echidnas cover most of Australia’s surface, so that was equally odd. Then they decided to look at another widespread species – tiger snakes, emus, etc. – and found in many of them, the same patterns were there. Read the rest of this entry »