What Happened to North America's Birds?

The United States and Canada have lost over 3 billion birds in the last 50 years. What is causing the emptying of our skies?

A gaggle of Canadian geese marches across a bike path in Chicago, Illinois.

Over 50 years ago, environmental author Rachel Carson helped launch the environmental movement with her landmark book, Silent Spring. Concerned with the increasing use of pesticides in our everyday life, Carson predicted the negative environmental impacts from the spraying of potentially toxic chemicals. One of her key predictions was eradication of the bird population, resulting in eerily silent springs. Unfortunately, her premonitions were spot on.

This week, a study in the journal Science reported that bird abundance in North America has decreased 29 percent since 1970. To add some context, three billion less birds soar through our skies today than fifty years ago. According to the study, the amount of birds migrating through North America has similarly dropped in only the last 10 years. The disturbing disappearance of birds appears to be a canary in a coal mine for future ecological disaster if things do not drastically change.

A lone black-crowned night heron in Wilmette, Illinois.

So what caused this severe decrease in birds? The driving cause is habitat loss. The study estimates that forests alone have lost nearly one billion birds as they are cut down in the name of progress. Birds of the plains, like the greater sage grouse, have seen their populations cut in half. The use of pesticides is also a major factor, as it was in Carson’s day. Many birds act as natural pest controls and often eat consume the poison in their food. Certain pesticides, such as neonicotinoids, also decrease a bird’s ability to put on weight, something that is vital before long migrations.

A red-winged blackbird looks for food in Chicago. Keep a look out for these guys when on a run or a bike ride in a forested area—they are very aggressive during nesting season and will swoop down to scare people that venture too close.

The deeper you dig into the results of the study, the more dire the situation seems. The study analyzed the populations of 529 bird species through the use of radar images and the largest collection of long-term-monitoring surveys ever used for one wildlife study. Surprisingly, the birds we see at our bird feeders everyday, like sparrows, warblers, blackbirds and finches, were hit the hardest. The population of white-throated sparrows declined by 90 million while the population of red-winged blackbirds declined by 92 million. Two out of every five Baltimore oriole has disappeared since 1970.

A hummingbird feeds at a feeder in Los Angeles, California.

Interestingly, some groups of birds have increased their populations in the last 50 years. Hawks and other raptors have tripled their populations, thanks to the ban of harmful pesticide DDT that would often work its way into the raptors body from their prey. The pesticide contributed to incredibly thin egg shells and almost resulted in the extinction of raptors last century. The other big winners over the last 50 years are waterfowl who have experienced a 50 percent increase over the period studied. The biggest reason why their populations have grown are initiatives for the preservation of wetlands, highlighted by a federal no-net-loss wetlands policy.

Ducks and other waterfowls are one of the only groups of birds that have experienced an increase in population size thanks to renewed efforts to preserve wetlands. Picture taken in Easton, Maryland.

But the overall results of this study are incredibly negative, especially when combined with the dramatic drop in the United State’s amphibian population. A similar study, published in 2013, found that the country’s populations of frogs, toads and salamanders was decreasing 3.7 percent each year on average. Alarmingly they could be erased from half of their habitats in as little as 20 years. The combination of the loss of amphibians and birds point to an ecological crisis that is taking place across our continent right now.

But there is still time to act as 70 percent of the continent’s birds are still around, but measures must be taken immediately to protect them. Habitat will need to be protected as greater care is taken in building design to prevent the 100 million birds that die from flying into windows each year. Simply using patterned glass and turning off the lights at night go a long way in making a building less dangerous to migrating birds. Carson was also extremely prophetic in predicting that pesticides could one day silence the world’s springs. Banning the use of harmful chemicals will go a long way to preventing further eradication of majestic bird populations who soar through our skies.

A Cooper’s hawk perched on shingles in Wilmette, Illinois. Cooper’s hawks kill other birds by grabbing them with their sharp talons and repeatedly squeezing its feet.

All photographs by Jack Tamisiea

Sources:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/09/18/science.aaw1313

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/science/bird-populations-america-canada.html

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/nearly-30-birds-us-canada-have-vanished-1970

https://www.rachelcarson.org/SilentSpring.aspx

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/amphibians-declining-alarming/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/07/how-many-birds-killed-by-skyscrapers-american-cities-report

Refuge for the Mako

The world’s fastest shark is on the fast track to extinction. The fate of the ocean’s “cheetah” may have just become a little bit brighter thanks to an international trade restriction.

The shortfin mako shark!

While many would consider Michael Phelps to be the greatest Olympian to grace the water, he would be left in the wake of the shortfin mako shark. The 12-foot, 1,200 pound shark is capable of slicing through the water in bursts of speeds of 45 miles per hour and can cover 51 feet in a single second, numbers that would even blow past legendary sprinter Usain Bolt on a track. They are easily the fastest sharks and have rightfully earned their distinction as the “cheetahs” of the sea. But some of the adaptations that help propel it to incredible speeds have also put the ocean’s most graceful hunter in peril.

If the great white shark is the luxury SUV of the shark world, the mako shark is the high-end sports car thanks to a sleek and efficient design. The slender shark’s pointed snout helps it shoot through the water like a torpedo. Its smooth and powerful tale stroke is the efficient engine that helps the shark maintain high speeds. The mako’s muscles are adapted to take in oxygen twice as fast as other sharks, helping it recover in time to quickly take off again. Makos also trap heat better than most sharks, keeping their internal organs warm and ready to perform. This is especially useful when chasing prey in colder waters.

Moreover, the mako also has well-adapted fins to help it reach dizzying speeds in the water. Their crescent-shaped tail propels it forward with less resistance compared to other sharks. The shark’s pectoral fins are ultimately the difference between a fast mako and a slow one. The shortfin mako is named for its relatively shorter fins compared with the world’s other species of mako, the aptly named longfin mako. The longfin mako’s pectoral fins are sometimes longer than their head and jut out of their slender bodies, creating drag and slowing them down as shortfin makos speed by thanks to their compact fins.

A mako model at the Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand.

These fins have unfortunately started to compromise both species of makos. The elusive speed demons are found throughout the world’s open oceans, landing them outside any one nation’s jurisdiction in the high seas. This has led to years of over-harvesting the explosive swimmers for their fins and meat (supposedly the tastiest of all sharks). Their fins, like the fins of so many other species of sharks, often find their way into shark fin soup in China. To make matters worse, the sharks are often accidentally caught as bycatch along with their prey of yellowfin tuna and schooling fish. Add in the fact that these sharks are slow breeders and makos seem to be swimming straight into the jaws of extinction.

In addition to their blistering speed, mako sharks can also launch themselves over 20 feet out of the water. Add a high jump to their gold medal collection!

But both species of makos received some hope this weekend thanks to a successful proposal to increase trade restrictions for the speedy sharks at the Global Wildlife Trade Summit in Geneva. Despite opposition from Japan, Canada and sadly the United States, all of whom have large mako fisheries, the proposal was adopted 102 votes to 40.

Both species will be moved to Appendix II of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). CITES is the preeminent global treaty dealing with the trade of endangered species and a placement on Appendix II means that the shark will no longer be fished unless data is found suggesting that their population is no longer endangered.

This could not have come at a better time for the lighting-quick sharks. Conservationists feared the global mako population was on the precipice of collapse, with both species recently being listed as endangered. Shortfins, in particular, have experienced up to an 80% decline in the Mediterranean over the last 75 years alone. Similar to most species of sharks, their numbers are rapidly declining all over the world. Over 100 million sharks are killed each year, many for only their fins as the rest of their carcass is either left to rot or thrown back into the ocean. Steps like the new CITES listing are encouraging, but the ocean’s greatest athletes cannot out-swim extinction on their own.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea.

To learn more about our oceans’ incredible creatures check out The Abyss series.

Read more about ongoing wildlife conservation efforts below:

Sources:

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-cites-votes-endangered-otters.html

https://oceana.org/marine-life/sharks-rays/longfin-mako-shark

https://oceana.org/marine-life/sharks-rays/shortfin-mako-shark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5fo19s4aAc

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/08/mako-shark-protections-cites/

Reef In Peril

The world’s largest living reef, visible from space, is in rapid decline thanks to threats ranging from an acidifying ocean to an outbreak of coral-destroying starfish. Will the priceless natural wonder be able to recover?

Great Barrier Reef in Hot Water

Almost all of us have seen the frightening headlines scroll through our social media timelines: “Half of the Great Barrier Reef is Dead” or “The Great Barrier Reef: Bleached Beyond Repair.” These headlines are rightfully terrifying, accurately illustrating the damage the Reef has endured thanks to man’s wanton environmental disregard.

The Great Barrier Reef is in very warm water, both literally and figuratively. The headlines have done a great job of making us aware of the dire situation, but many people do not dive deep enough into the associated articles to understand that, while overwhelming, the threats facing the Reef can be mollified with united conservation efforts from both Australia and the rest of the world. It’s not too late to reverse the troubling trend and help this World Heritage Site rebound.

Blackface rabbitfish and other fish mill above a reef off Heron Island, part of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

Part One: The Threats

A key means to help preserve the remaining (relatively) intact areas of the Reef is to understand the threats it faces. The fundamental cause is man’s industrialization and the resulting climate change. As energy began to be created in mass quantities by burning fossil fuels in factories, greater amounts of gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), were released into the atmosphere. CO2 and a variety of other gases, including methane from cows and natural gas, act like a blanket over the earth, trapping solar energy as it is reflected by the earth and trapping it in the atmosphere, creating a warming, or “greenhouse effect”. As more light is trapped by the blanket of greenhouse gases, the surface of the earth warms as well as the world’s oceans.

But exactly why the Great Barrier Reef is doing so poorly in this warming world is slightly more nuanced. Logically, a warmer ocean would mean more coral reefs, incredibly diverse environments that require warm water to thrive. But the excess CO2 in the atmosphere causes the oceans to become more acidic as the ocean absorb the excess from the atmosphere. The ocean is slightly basic (pH>7) and as it acidifies and becomes more neutral in pH, coral fares as well as you would in a vat of acidified liquid.

Below a reef head during a dive off of Heron Island.

An acidifying ocean changes everything for coral, which are tiny animals related to jellyfish. They cannot easily form their calcium carbonate skeletons, which act as the bedrock for coral reefs, because less carbonate ions are available in acidic seawater. Corals are pretty much hindered from growing by ocean acidification, and will start to dissolve soon if emissions continue to rise. Outside of the chemistry of the water, temperature and light levels are key. Corals exposed to increased temperatures and increased amounts of light over a duration of time (sometimes only a couple of days) will become stressed and eventually bleach. The corals become ghost white as they are forced to expel symbiotic algae (called zooxanthellae) from their tissue as they cook under intense light and heat. The zooxanthellae are crucial to the coral, turning sunlight into energy through photosynthesis. The coral is not dead when it bleaches, but it is essentially starving. Bleaching events usually create mass coral mortality.

Small fish swim in and out of a patch of bleaching coral on Heron Island’s reef

In the Great Barrier Reef, the 1-2 threat of ocean acidification and coral bleaching have become more destructive over the last few decades as the oceans continue to warm and CO2 continues to be pumped into the atmosphere. Severe bleaching used to ravage a reef every 27 years. Since the 1980s, these events have occurred roughly every six years. The first truly severe bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef was in 1998, but the following bleaching event, in 2002, was disastrous, bleaching over 50% of the Reef.

But the 2002 monster bleaching event was dwarfed by one in 2016, when 80% of a large protected swath of the northern Reef was killed by heat stress. Badly bleached reefs need at least 10 years to rebound, but the Great Barrier Reef barely had time to catch its breath as a similarly unprecedented bleaching event hit the reef in 2017, wiping out 20% of the total coral cover. Since the massive warming event in 2016, over half of the Reef’s coral has died, particularly devastating the northern area of the Reef.

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Attack of the Crown-of-thorns

Natural to the Great Barrier Reef, crown-of-thorn (COT) starfish are efficient coral consumers. The large, venomous spine-studded starfish love to feed on branching corals, which are the type of corals most susceptible to bleaching. In recent years the relatively scarce starfish’s population has exploded in an outbreak.

Like other threats the Reef faces, the crown-of-thorn starfish (COTS) outbreak can be tied to human impact on the oceans. The most prevalent hypothesis of what causes COTS outbreaks, which feature over 30 times the natural COTS density, is the added nutrient levels on reefs caused by nitrogen- and phosphorous-rich runoff from agriculture. The increased amount of nutrients cause blooms of phytoplankton that offer plenty of food for COTS larvae. COTS outbreaks can also be linked to the removal of the venomous starfish’s predators, such as the giant triton snail, titan triggerfish and humphead Maori wrasse from the reefs through overfishing.

COTS outbreaks can prove fatal when combined with climate change. COTS outbreaks have been found to strip 90% of a reef’s living coral tissue. A healthy reef is capable of recovering from COTS outbreak in 10-20 years, but a stressed reef in warming water may never be able to recover. Moreover, these outbreaks appear to be occurring more frequently in recent years. A variety of methods is being tested to control the ruthless corallivores, from harvesting them with divers to injecting them with compressed air, but the starfish has been able to run rampant throughout the Great Barrier Reef.

Crown-of-thorns starfish lurks below coral off of Heron Island in the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef.

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Part Two: What Can Be Done

With half of the Reef’s coral dead, one of the most incredible natural wonders really seems to be heading toward the brink. Experiments are being conducted to find out ways to better equip coral to survive bleaching events. There is a dizzying variety of coral in the world’s oceans, especially in a corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans fittingly called the “Coral Triangle”, and not all coral’s respond to bleaching the same way. Researchers in Hawaii have researched how hardier corals react under the warm and acidic conditions they will face later this century. Depending on how well each species responds, they will be selectively bred with other resistant corals to form a sort of “super coral” through assisted evolution. Other projects have focused on trying to figure out ways to reinsert zooxanthellae into bleached corals. Some hypothesize that certain types of the symbiotic algae may be better suited in warmer water and will not be expelled from their hosts as quickly.

The hope with these projects is to engineer stronger coral and zooxanthellae that will be able to survive in the “new normal” environmental conditions caused by humans. This reactionary approach will always be similar to putting a bandaid on a wound. It will provide some level of healing but will not remedy the underlying causes. Humans everywhere need to cut back on emissions to slow the rapid change of our climate.

The reef’s edge, Heron Island.

Australia, in particular, needs to continue to fight the Carmichael coal mine, a billion dollar fossil fuel-monstrosity that could be the largest in Australia’s mining-heavy history and would be located just inland from the Reef. The mine, which was approved after a lengthy (and probably still ongoing) legal battle, plans to extract at least 25 million tons of coal per year which will result in 77 million tons of CO2 emissions. Most of the coal will be exported from Australia to India, which means transporting it over the Reef in large ships that leave pollution, sediment, and invasive species in their wake. For coral reefs to have any shot in the future, global temperature rise must be capped at around 1.5 degrees Celsius. Achieving that goal would be even more challenging as super-mines, like the Carmichael mine, continue to provide incredible amounts of fossil fuels to developing countries with huge populations like India.

The rusty skeleton of the HMAS Protector just off of Heron Island. Constructed in 1884, the battle ship saw action in the Boxer Rebellion and both World Wars before being intentionally sunk off of Heron in 1943 to act as a breakwater. Today it shelters sea turtles and hundreds of fish.

Some less staggering goals are fishing more responsibly and curbing the amount of agriculture runoff from the coast along the Great Barrier Reef. Both of these will act in tandem to limit COT outbreaks and limit the growth of algae on reefs. Algae, which thrives in nutrient-rich water, is encroaching on coral’s turf as more nutrients are flushed into the ocean and herbivorous fish that eat the algae are overfished. In the Caribbean, a die-off of herbivorous sea urchins in the 1980s led to dense thickets of algae usurping reefs throughout the area. Could the Great Barrier Reef be next?

The Great Barrier Reef is also home to an incredible diversity of marine invertebrates. Sea hares (shown here) are large sea slugs that feed on algae that grows on the shallow coral reef flats. Herbivores like sea hares are vital to maintaining the natural balance of coral vs. algae.

A variety of measures will have to be taken to address the plethora of problems ravaging the world’s largest reef. An important point that is often lost among the devastation is that we can all play a part, no matter where we live, by changing how we live. This involves being smarter about emissions and continuing to fight the creation of large fossil fuel operations, like the Carmichael mine, that not only threaten coral reefs, but everywhere on earth.

Part Three: Why Save the Reef?

 

Heron Island is a half mile-long speck of sand inhabited by thousands of birds, a small resort and a world-class coral research station.

I was lucky enough to visit the Great Barrier Reef twice during my semester abroad, including spending five days on the University Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, which is located at the southern tip of the immense reef. This area was sheltered from the worst of the recent mass bleaching events thanks to a cyclone in Fiji that sent crucial cool water westward.

A parrotfish gorges itself on the algae covering coral.

As someone relatively new to scuba diving who hails from the Great Lakes region (Chicago) far from the tropics, the breathtaking assortment of marine animals and coral was overwhelming. The variety of coral formed a kaleidoscope of soft yellows, pinks and greens as small fish darted between the large branching coral and squat, round brain corals. Large parrotfish, whose gaudy colors reflect the coral, messily chomped on the algae growing on the coral’s surface, sending chunks flying every which way. A snowflake moray eel, splattered with bright yellow and black spots, bared its teeth at me as I drifted a little too close to its rocky crevice. Around 10 percent of the world’s fish species can be found in this one reef system.

The strikingly named many-spotted sweetlips fish, one of over 1,500 species of fish on the Great Barrier Reef.

Sea turtles lazily hunkered down on top of the coral or leisurely swam by, beating their fins every so often. Six of the world’s seven sea turtle species come to the Great Barrier Reef to breed, including the endangered loggerhead sea turtle whose females hoists their bodies up on the beaches of Heron Island to nest. Many were born at this same spot. Giant cow-tailed rays, each one bigger than the last, silently glide along the seafloor as eagle rays flap their wings along the outskirts of the reef, effortlessly flying through the water. Small white-tipped reef sharks joined them there, wary of the divers that had entered their reef. The Great Barrier Reef is home to 134 species of rays and sharks, including species as iconic as the manta ray and tiger shark. Many are at risk, reflecting the global trend of shark decline.

A white-tip reef shark coasts along the outskirts of the coral reef.

The Great Barrier Reef is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, spanning an area as big as Italy and housing thousands of species. Besides its intrinsic value as an incredible biodiversity spot, it attracts people from around the world and generates billions of dollars for the Australian government each year. Although it has been hit hard in the last few decades, the recovery of portions is still possible. We do not want to be the generation that let the world’s greatest reef erode into oblivion.

A green sea turtle off of Heron Island.

All pictures and art by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-atlas-great-barrier-reef-coral-bleaching-map-climate-change/

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/coral_bleach.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/16/why-adanis-planned-carmichael-coalmine-matters-to-australia-and-the-world

http://www.greatbarrierreef.org/about-the-reef/great-barrier-reef-facts/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests

The Tremendous Tuatara

The archaic reptile can live for over a century, survive refrigeration and is equipped with a third eye. So please don’t confuse it with a lizard.

The ancient, enigmatic tuatara, shrouded in darkness. Picture taken at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Tuataras are not lizards. In fact, they are the last survivors of a completely different order of reptiles that stretches back some 240 million years to when the dinosaurs were emerging. Tuataras, as the last members of the Rhynchocephalia Order, are incredibly ancient --- the very definition of a living fossil. Every animal closely related to them is entombed in stone.

The Rhynchocephalia reptiles experienced their heyday some 200 million years ago. They were essentially the ecological precursors to lizards, occupying many roles that lizards have now. After their 140 million year run, most of them bowed out, along with the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous Period. All except for the tuataras, which have carried the Rhynchocephalia torch for the last 60 million years. They are the ultimate survivors.

Two species of tuatara are left today, Sphenodon punctatus and the rare Sphenodon guntheri. The word tuatara is Maori for ‘spikes’ or 'peaks’ thanks to the spines that run along its back. On the surface, tuataras are somewhat mundane in appearance, resembling a medium-sized, brownish-green lizard that reaches between 12 and 30 inches long, making them New Zealand’s largest reptiles. But look a little closer and its prehistoric roots emerge.

A female Tuatara at the Auckland Zoo.

Being a vestige from the dinosaur age, tuataras are unlike any modern reptile. Tuataras sport a mouthful of saw-like blades. They have two rows of teeth on the upper jaw and one row on the lower jaw, an unusual arrangement for reptiles. But what distinguishes a  tuatara’s teeth is that they are really just jagged extensions of the jaw bone, not actual separated teeth. Because of this, if a tuatara breaks or wears down a section of teeth, it has lost those teeth for the rest of its life because its teeth do not grow back like other reptiles.

New Zealand’s Other Living Relic

The size of a hamster, the giant weta is the world’s heaviest insect. The huge insect happily eats carrots and is too heavy to jump! Many people would find an insect this large repulsing and its name reflects that. It comes from the Maori word for “god of ugly things.” Like its predator, the tuatara, the giant weta is a living fossil, closely resembling relatives from 190 million years ago. Unfortunately the giant weta population has dropped drastically since the arrival of rodents slightly bigger than itself. Today, the giant weta has been completely wiped off mainland New Zealand and only survives on small offshore islands that are sheltered from rats. Thanks to a breeding program at the Auckland Zoo, the monster insect may be making a comeback.

Tuataras have incredibly slow metabolisms and are capable of surviving close to freezing temperatures and holding their breath for an hour. They hibernate during the winter and are capable of surviving months of refrigeration. Where the average reptile’s body temperature hovers around 68 degrees, tuataras have their internal thermometer set between 41 and 52 degrees. This decelerates their metabolism and also causes them to mature gradually, growing until they turn about 30 years old. While not quite having the longevity of a tortoise, tuataras can live to over a hundred years old, especially if their teeth hold up.

The strangest feature of a tuatara is that it possesses a third eye on the top of its head. Known as a parietal eye and complete with retina, lens, cornea and nerve endings, it is not used for sight. Some burrowing lizards and sharks also possess a parietal eye, which is capable of detecting light. Shortly after hatching, this primitive extra eye is covered with scales, but has stuck around because it has some function. It could possibly be used by the reptiles to absorb ultraviolet rays and set their circadian clocks.

New Zealand’s Lizards

Although tuatara are not lizards, New Zealand has more than 110 species of geckos and skinks, most of which are found nowhere else on earth. New Zealand’s geckos, in particular, are unusual because they give birth to live young. The only other place with geckos that do this is New Caledonia. Pictured here is an endangered rough gecko from the Auckland Zoo.

The tuatara quietly lived out its existence on the remote islands of New Zealand for millions of years. Adults are nocturnal, searching the damp forest floor for insects and young birds among the ferns, themselves relics from the Jurassic Period. Tuatara hatchlings are active during the day to avoid run-ins with potentially cannibalistic adults at night. Life, as they knew it in their undisturbed primeval forests, was good.

But then arrived humans, bringing rats with them. Tuataras, along with many of New Zealand’s endemic birds, were ill-equipped to deal with a predator unlike anything they had ever seen before. Rats gorged themselves on tuatara young as well as the eggs, ultimately eliminating the ancient reptile from all of mainland New Zealand. It seemed unlikely that a living relic that had persevered through a mass extinction caused by an asteroid 60 million years ago would quietly succumb to a hoard of rodents, but that is, in fact, what happened.

Between approximately 1800 and 2005, tuataras bided their time on small offshore islands that offered refuge from the invasive pests. Tuataras have been protected since 1895, but the first successful attempt to reintroduce them to the mainland was not until 2005 when a few were released in a sanctuary. In 2008, a tuatara nest was found, the first successful breeding attempt by a tuatara on mainland New Zealand in two centuries, offering a glimmer of hope that the strange scaly beast may survive yet again. Today there are around 55,000 tuatara dispersed on several islands between the North and South Islands.

Tuataras are undoubtedly a strange, alien creature from the distant past. Their perseverance has been incredible, outliving the rest of their kind in New Zealand’s ancient forests. Living fossils like tuataras are like time capsules: they have witnessed the disappearance of dinosaurs on New Zealand, scurried underfoot as towering moas travelled through the forest and barely survived the arrival of mammals. They act as a window into prehistoric times and will hopefully live on for millions of years to continue to tell the tale of New Zealand’s ancient past.

Windows to the past: peering into the eyes of an ancient relic is thankfully still possible today thanks to arduous conservation projects to protect the Tuatara and New Zealand’s other endemic species from rats and stoats. This picture was taken at the Auckland Zoo.

All photographs and art by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/creatura-blog/2017/12/the-tuatara/

https://www.wired.com/2013/12/the-creature-feature-10-fun-facts-about-the-tuatara-or-just-the-tuatara-of-us/

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/reptiles-and-frogs/tuatara/

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/reptiles-and-frogs/lizards/geckos/

http://mentalfloss.com/article/64804/10-intense-facts-about-giant-weta

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New Zealand: A Bird Evolution Lab on the Brink

Only New Zealand can create a species as lovably odd as the kiwi, which is essentially a mammal masquerading as a bird.

New Zealand’s location and isolation cultivated a unique collection of birds. But the same factors that make these birds so interesting also make them susceptible to extinction, as New Zealand is overwhelmed by an invasion of mammals.

Evolution is founded in gene mutation, when some random rung of an organism’s DNA ladder is altered. This genetic change, however minor it may seem, can have a huge impact on how the actual creature looks or acts. For example, you and me as humans differ from chimpanzees in only 1.2% of our genetic material. An incredibly small amount of difference, but it has made all the difference.

So evolution, at its core, is random due to the fickleness of genetic mutation. These tiny mutations either create an advantage for an organism or damage it, which could be the difference between the longevity of s creature or its ultimate demise. If the mutation creates an effective enough trait, that may lead to a new species someday.

This is where isolation becomes the driving force that amplifies the effects of mutation. Isolation can be in the form of being geographically stranded on an island or isolated in the form of a mutated group being unable to breed with its species. Whichever form of isolation evolution chooses, it eventually leads to speciation as one group of a species goes down a different evolutionary pathway than another group on a different island or a different mountaintop.

You are probably wondering about the relation between this abbreviated high school biology lecture and New Zealand’s wild birds (which is what you came here for), but isolation is the backbone to the evolution of New Zealand’s amazing wildlife. New Zealand’s isolation for millions of years has created a living laboratory of evolution that has cooked up some wild animals. Gecko’s give live birth here, insects become large enough to eat large carrots, and you are more likely to stumble upon a bird on the ground than see one soaring above your head. Only New Zealand could be home to a 10 foot-tall ostrich on steroids, the world’s only flightless parrots, and a bird with whiskers.

Sadly, many of these creatures are already gone or teetering on the edge of extinction. New Zealand’s extinction rate for birds is incredibly high at 34%. Species like the Chatham Island snipe, fairy tern and kaki have populations with less than 150 individuals. The evolutionary processes that molded New Zealand’s incredible birds have also contributed to their demise in today’s world.

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The Antipodes

New Zealand owes a lot to its far-flung location. It is so remote, over 1,300 miles southeast of Australia resting about halfway between the equator and the South Pole, that it was one of the last places on earth to be settled by humans. The Polynesian ancestors of the Maori arrived to New Zealand in large, ocean-going canoes only around 850 years ago and dubbed it Aotearoa, “the land of the long white cloud.”

Early European explorers called New Zealand and nearby Australia the antipodes because of their existence on the opposite side of the globe from Europe. It’s not quite right, but it does sum up the otherworldly land and animals they found there.

This geographical isolation from the rest of the world was due to processes deep within the earth. New Zealand, along with the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, was once part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The most fateful moment in the evolutionary history of New Zealand is when it broke off from this massive landmass to do its own thing 85 million years ago. This breakup was caused by the phenomenon of plate tectonics, or the shifting and colliding of continental plates on the earth’s mantle. As the continental plates that formed Gondwana began to shift apart, New Zealand was essentially along for the ride, drifting farther and farther away from Australia. New Zealand’s islands are actually still drifting, with Christchurch in the South Island (on the Pacific plate) moving away from Auckland and the North Island (on the Australian plate) at about 4 meters every century.

New Zealand’s existence far from any other major landmass effectively cut it off from the rest of the planet, letting evolution run its course without outside interference. That all changed when the Maori hauled their canoes up onto the black sand beaches of New Zealand.

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The tui is one of New Zealand’s more interesting-looking birds, sporting distinctive white tufts under their throat. The aggressive and noisy bird plays a key role in New Zealand forests as a pollinator and seed disperser. This picture was taken at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown, New Zealand.

The Avian Ark

When New Zealand set out on its ‘continental drift’ odyssey, dinosaurs were its main inhabitants on land and large seagoing reptiles dominated the surrounding waters. Essentially missing from the drifting landmass were mammals, who were still toward the bottom of the biological pecking order during the Cretaceous Period. After non-avian dinosaurs and giant sea reptiles were wiped out following the last mass-extinction 65 million years ago, their evolutionary offspring, avian birds, took over a landmass unlike anywhere else on earth. It had no land-based mammals, save for three species of tiny bats.

This offered birds the incredible advantage of returning to the ground. With no land-based predators, wings began to become almost frivolous ornaments for birds who had nothing to fear on the ground. Even the native species of bats walked on the ground, using the elbows of their wings to scamper about. Evolutionarily speaking, the ability to fly is very energy intensive, and since there was nothing to eat you while on the ground, flying lost its evolutionary advantage. Many birds on the island have lost the ability to fly well, while many have even lost the ability to fly altogether.

Here are a few of the most interesting avian oddities cooked up in New Zealand’s wonky evolutionary lab:

A stuffed kakapo at Auckland’s War Memorial Museum.

• One prime example of complete flightlessness is the kakapo, a large nocturnal parrot that resides on the ground full-time. Besides being the only species of flightless parrot, the kakapo is also the world’s heaviest parrot at a hefty five to nine pounds. Without the presence of predators, the kakapo was able to pack on the pounds and lose the ability to fly. The wings are not quite vestigial, or functionless, as the stocky parrot uses them to balance while it ambles and climbs through the forest.

• Another remarkable bird from the “Land of the long white cloud” was the huia. The largest of the five wattlebird species native to New Zealand, this songbird had the most striking example of beak sexual dimorphism of all birds. Male and female huia have completely different beak structures, with the female sporting a longer, curved beak and the male possessing a shorter, heavier straight beak. Attached at the base of each of their beaks were bright, fleshy orange wattles that contrasted against the dark black of its feathers which would sheen green and blue when light danced on them. Like many of their fellow New Zealanders, the huia seemed to have been a reluctant flier, preferring to hop along low branches and the forest floor. Huias were reportedly the first birds to call in the morning, with each sex calling and responding with unique calls, answering one another during the day’s first light.

The two distinct beak shapes of the huia bird, the most extreme example of beak sexual dimorphism in all of birds.

• The most famous and strangest of all of New Zealand’s birds is the kiwi. The species is so beloved, it has become a national symbol. New Zealanders have proudly called themselves kiwis since 1917. The shaggy flightless national icon evolved from birds that flew to New Zealand millions of years ago. Like many other New Zealand birds, the absence of mammals not only allowed the kiwi’s ancestors to feel safe enough to leave the sky for the ground, but also offered many empty ecological niches that were filled by mammals elsewhere. Today there are five species of kiwis, all around the size of a chicken, with the aptly named little spotted kiwi and great spotted kiwi bookending the size spectrum.

The kiwi bird examines some kiwi fruit. Also known as Chinese gooseberry, the fruit is usually called kiwifruit in New Zealand to help Kiwis avoid confusion between the fruit and the kiwi bird.

Kiwis specifically are a great illustration of the evolutionary power of isolation. Although there are only five kiwi species today, over the last million years there have been at least 11 lineages of kiwis. The rapid evolution into different forms and possibly into distinct species is reminiscent of Darwin’s Galapagos finches who diversified when spreading to new islands with diverse food sources.

But instead of being isolated on different islands, the kiwis were isolated by glaciers throughout New Zealand, which have expanded and retracted numerous times over the last 800,000 years. Over this period of extreme cycles of glaciation, the kiwis diversified five times faster than usual according to a 2016 study. At that rate, they were diversifying faster than even the Galapagos finches!

Kiwis today are nocturnal, passing the day away sleeping in hollow logs and burrows. At night, kiwis forage for insects, berries and seeds along the forest floor with their impeccable sense of smell. They are, in fact, the only birds with nostrils on top of their long, slender beaks. At the base of their beak are cat-like whiskers that help them feel through the dark. In fact, the kiwi has many similar mammalian traits, including the lowest body temperature of any bird at a mammal-like 100 degrees Fahrenheit, well-developed hearing, and two ovaries (most birds have one).

While on the topic of ovaries, the kiwi’s egg is incredibly large compared to their body size, sometimes accounting for up to 20% of the females weight (the same as a 120-lb woman giving birth to a 24-lb baby)! A benefit of the egg being so large is that baby kiwis are very developed when they hatch, which is vital because by that point, the parents are gone.

A female kiwi and her massive egg at Auckland’s War Memorial Museum.

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Lost in all the hubbub about moas and kiwis is the recently discovered Kumimanu biceae, the world’s second largest penguin ever. Living 55 million years ago, only 10 million years after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, this penguin was massive, packing 220 pounds into a 6 foot frame (the largest species today tops out at 4.3 feet tall). The name reflects its impressive size: Kumimanu is a combination of the Maori words for “monster” and “bird”.

Gigantism vs. Dwarfism - What Gives?

The birds of New Zealand are very strange today thanks to being isolated from mammals. But the mere fact of being isolated on an island kicks evolution into overdrive as populations are isolated by large swaths of water. Islands have the ability to create giant and dwarf-sized species, and one of the best examples of this occurred on New Zealand.

Moas were a collection of ostrich-like, flightless birds that included the tallest species of bird ever, which stood as tall as a basketball hoop and weighed around 550 pounds. The smallest of the nine confirmed species was about the size of a turkey, tiny compared to its immense brethren but still a large bird in its own right.

Although large moas, like the South Island giant moa, may have looked intimidating, they were chiefly grazers and browsers, eating fruit, seeds and grasses. They are also the only flightless bird to not have wing bones, which shrouds their arrival to New Zealand in mystery. Growth rings in leg bones have led researchers to believe moas grew at incredibly slow-rates, taking ten years to stretch into the trees.

But why were moas so much larger than similar species from the mainland, like ostriches and emus? Gigantism on islands has been a phenomenon observed since at least 1964 when biologist J. Bristol Foster made some interesting general observations while looking at mammals on North American islands. He concluded that small animals, like rodents, tended to grow larger on islands, and bigger animals like deer (and, in one case off of California, mammoths) tended to shrink on islands. This became known as the “island rule.”

But this rule is not so cut and dry, as one island may have giants of a species while the same animal is dwarfed on a nearby island. The particulars of what spurs gigantism or dwarfism on islands is still hazy, but we can look at the moa example to figure out why the bird became so giant on New Zealand.

Having the benefit of not being hunted on New Zealand promoted larger size, as well as the general rule that larger animals can exploit a wider range of resources, which leads to healthier individuals and healthier (and larger) offspring. Being so large also helped moas survive drought and famine because of their larger stores of energy and water. Ultimately, the circumstance in New Zealand was perfect for moas to become gigantic. On New Zealand there were no other large land animals after the demise of the dinosaurs, leaving the large herbivore ecological niche wide-open and moas evolved to fill it, eventually dwarfing flightless birds almost everywhere else.*

New Zealand’s mighty moas.

New Zealand’s most fearsome bird evolved to prey on these mammoth moas. The Haast eagle was the largest eagle ever and was equipped with talons as large as tiger claws. Both the Haast eagle and the moas had to deal with periods of glaciation over the last million years of New Zealand, and bigger body size probably helped them survive the cold.

Haast eagles were perfectly evolved to target even the largest moas on New Zealand’s island. It would dive down on top of the massive bird, knocking it down with its large feet before crushing its skull. Ancient Maori stories tell of giant birds called “pouakai”, which were probably Haast eagles. Terrifyingly, these stories tell of the giant birds sweeping in and taking the occasional child for dinner, which is no exaggeration when considering the size of these eagles.

*While the Southern Island giant moa was the world’s tallest bird, the heaviest bird was the elephant bird from the island of Madagascar. Elephant bird eggs are the only thing capable dwarfing a moa egg with a volume equal to over 150 chicken eggs!

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The morepork is New Zealand’s only species of owl. It gets its name from its call, which actually sounds like the owl is asking for “more pork”. Although considered not threatened, small mammals like possums raid morepork nests to steal eggs. Picture taken at the Kiwi Birdlife Park in Queenstown, New Zealand.

The Mammalian Invasion Threatens to Topple the Avian Ark

Unfortunately, these two magnificent birds are extinct, disappearing a few hundred years after the arrival of humans. The moa was most certainly hunted to extinction by early settlers. A 2014 study of the bones from 281 moas found no DNA evidence for genetic decline before the arrival of humans, with the population looking remarkably healthy before the first Polynesians arrived. Moas were over hunted to extinction by the late 1600s. With the disappearance of its food sources, the Haast eagle faded into extinction with the moa, denying us the ability to see one of the most spectacular hunts in our planet’s history.

But for most species of New Zealand birds, the most dangerous thing about the arrival of humans was not the humans themselves but what they brought with them. For millions of years, New Zealand offered a safe haven for birds to evolve and adapt without the presence of mammals. The arrival of the Maori 850 years ago, followed by European settlement 600 years later, threw a wrench into the bird evolutionary eden by introducing a plethora of mammals that outcompeted and ate these marvelous birds. Sheep, elk and cattle were brought in to graze upon the fields that were once forests. Rabbits, rats and mice also found their way over, outcompeting smaller birds and eating their eggs.

Brushtail possums were brought across the Tasman Sea from Australia to jumpstart an ultimately fruitless fur trade in the 1850s. Today the possum population is at an astounding 30 million and the cute marsupials wreak havoc on native New Zealand forests, chewing through trees never adapted to such an efficient omnivore. Their presence causes trees hundreds, if not thousands, of years old to collapse. Like rats, they also outcompete native birds and eat their eggs.

Early attempts to solve the invasive mammal problem only exacerbated it. The weasel-like stoat was brought over to control the exploding rabbit population. The predator soon found the naive ground-dwelling birds to be much easier prey than rabbits, which led to a spike in stoat populations and little effect on the rabbit population. Similar to Australia, the cats and foxes brought over as pets and for sport have proved to be the most damaging, as the small, flightless birds are the optimal prey size for the ruthless and efficient predators.

The ruthless and invasive stoat, bane to New Zealand’s birds.

All of these introduced mammals have greatly damaged the populations of New Zealand’s birds, who evolved in their absence for millions of years. The huia is no longer the first bird to sing at dawn, having disappeared in 1907.

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The whio, or blue duck, is an endemic species to New Zealand threatened with extinction. Its current population is estimated to be around 3,000. The duck prefers to live in clean, fast-flowing mountain streams which have become degraded and lost as New Zealand’s human population has grown. Like many of New Zealand’s birds, they are also hunted by invasive mammals, such as stoats. This individual resides at the Auckland Zoo.

Restoring the Embattled Birds

Many of New Zealand’s birds are incredibly close to joining the huia, moa and Haast eagle in the finality of extinction. According to New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, there are only 142 kakapos left today, up from 51 in the mid 1990s. The large, awkward parrot has been hit particularly hard by the introduction of cats and stoats because it has very slow reproductive rates, only breeding every two to four years. When they do breed, 1/2 of the eggs are infertile due to low genetic diversity among the surviving kakapos.

All of the kakapos have been relocated to three predator-free islands off New Zealand’s coast, which has become commonplace for conservation in New Zealand. Small island’s offer easier confined spaces to eradicate pests, making them the final refuge for several species of embattled native birds.

Luckily, 2019 is looking like a record year for the kakapo as 52 live chicks were produced from 218 eggs laid since last December. This record-setting number of viable kakapo offspring is due to the help of cutting-edge conservation technology such as transmitters tracking which individuals have mated and 3D-printed eggs being swapped with actual eggs to allow the eggs to be hatched in captivity while not disturbing the mother’s incubation instincts. The recent sequencing of each remaining kakapo’s genome has even allowed a drone to inseminate willing kakapo females with semen from genetically-viable males, which is wild to picture.

Even the beloved kiwi has been knocked to the edge of extinction. New Zealand’s national icon had been decimated by stoats, cats and dogs for decades by 2016, when only 68,000 kiwis remained. Kiwi chicks already face long survival odds because they are abandoned when they hatch. Introduced predators effectively wipe out almost all of these fledglings. In addition to harvesting kiwi eggs in the wild and rearing them in captivity, an expensive and strenuous process, New Zealand has made a goal to become predator-free by 2050. This ambitious goal is key to restoring New Zealand as a bird haven.

But the only way to accomplish this is by conservationists getting their hands dirty, setting traps for stoats and cats where accessible and using cyanide-like poison called 1080 to target these predators in remote areas. Poisoning of feral cats in Australia has caused uproar from animal rights activists, but wide-scale poison is the only way to reduce the staggering numbers of these destructive predators. There is a choice between eliminating the pests or allowing native wildlife to disappear. In New Zealand, where 80% of bird species are at risk of extinction, this should not even be a discussion.

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I was lucky enough to come across this kea in Fiordland National Park on the way to Milford Sound. The inquisitive bird was enamored with this red car, continually trying to pick rubber off of the windows and the tires.

The Plight of the Kea

It is important to understand what could be lost when thinking about conservation. New Zealand has so many amazing bird species sculpted by its remote location and predator-devoid ecosystems. One of these species is the world’s only alpine parrot, the kea, which has been completely eradicated from the North Island. Today, it soars through the icy pinnacles of the South Island’s mountains, its last refuge. In 2018, the incredibly smart parrot, which is called “Clown of the mountain” for its antics involving stealing tourist’s keys and picking rubber off of cars, was listed by the IUCN as endangered. The personable birds are at increased danger as their inquisitive nature leads to humans feeding them junk food and accidentally striking them with their cars. Most egregiously, a bounty was even placed on the bird’s head for attacking sheep until 1971, when 150,000 keas were killed, mostly by sheep farmers. Today there are only 6,000 left.

Only in New Zealand will you find a parrot flying through snowy mountains, capable of solving puzzles and willing to walk up and pose for humans. New Zealand’s incredible environments, from the high mountains where the kia lives to the forrest floor where kiwis and kakapos sift through the dark, and lack of predators offered an incredible space for birds to rapidly diversify into several strange and wonderful forms. But these very adaptations that helped them persist across New Zealand, from the keas curiosity to the kakapos bulk, have increased their chances of going extinct. Losing the moa was an incredible loss, and New Zealand needs to increase conservation efforts to save the kiwi and several other species from the same fate.

Check out more pictures of the kea and New Zealand birds at the Natural Curios Instagram page. Click on the icon at the bottom of the page!

All artwork and photography by Jack Tamisiea

Related Articles:

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/animal/moa

http://nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/haasts-eagle

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/gigantism-and-dwarfism-islands/

https://www.kiwisforkiwi.org/about-kiwi/kiwi-facts-characteristics/honorary-mammals/

https://www.livescience.com/57813-kiwi-facts.html

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/rise-of-kiwi-bird-new-zealand/

http://nzbirdsonline.org.nz/species/huia

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/native-animals/birds/birds-a-z/kakapo/behaviour/

https://www.doc.govt.nz/ourbirds

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/03/endangered-kapako-breeding-technology/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37538170

https://www.doc.govt.nz/nature/pests-and-threats/methods-of-control/1080/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1fHbsOPb4gIVRh0rCh3AXgwzEAAYASAAEgJD6vD_BwE

https://www.birdlife.org/worldwide/news/curiosity-shouldn’t-kill-kea-we-need-stop-giving-parrot-junk-food

Alien Invasion

Examining the rapid takeover of Australia by the cane toad and its invasive brethren.

A cane toad poses next to a vanquished foe — a species of goanna with a mouthful of poison.

Cane toads were introduced onto the continent of Australia for one simple reason in 1935 --- to control the cane beetle population. It was easy to see why farmers clamored for a natural solution to the cane beetle predicament as cane beetles were destructive pests to sugarcane crops. Adult cane beetles ate the leaves of the crops while cane beetle larvae ate the roots, potentially killing the entire plant. At the time cane toads seemed like a logical, and less destructive, alternative to harmful chemical pesticides. But those who decided on the introduction of the large, toxic toads failed to take into account two glaring problems which thwart their ability to effectively serve as pest control agents against cane beetles --- The stocky toads do not climb (making it difficult to feed on the arboreal cane beetles) and cane toads are nocturnal, while cane beetles are diurnal. Now Australia is stuck with more than 200 million introduced toads and cane beetles.

Cane toads (Rhinella marina) are native from South America up to the southern U.S. In their native ranges, the toads populations are kept in check by an assortment of predators capable of tolerating the toad’s poison that is produced in two large large parotoid glands behind the toad’s ears. This poison is spread throughout their bodies and can be secreted from the parotoid glands as a milky, white substance. The deadly cocktail of toxins produced by the cane toad targets the functioning of the heart. When these toads were introduced to Australia, this new poison knocked every Australian predator, from venomous snakes to large goanna lizards and even beloved pet dogs and cats, back on their heels.

In addition to being a hopping toxin-producing machine, cane toads possess several other tools that make them a particularly destructive invasive species. The toads are voracious eaters, and will eat anything they can get their wide mouths around (except cane beetles, of course) and have outcompeted several insectivores, such as native skinks, in addition to depleting populations of native insects. They breed quickly and in almost any source of water. Even their tadpoles and eggs are poisonous to most animals.

Around 3,000 cane toads were released in northern Queensland in 1935 and they have spread like wildfire throughout the eastern and northern coasts of Australia. Moreover, their range is continuing to expand as they order their populations forth. Cane toads have even been found on the far-flung southwest corner of the continent. And they are not content with just Australia, either. They have been found in New Guinea and up into the Philippines. With their destructive traits, cane toads may circumvent the globe and arrive back in South America in a matter of decades.

The spread of the durable and leathery toad is not an isolated incident for Australia. The continent has been ripe for the spread of invasive species since Europeans arrived in the late 1700s. Australia’s isolation from most of the world, since its break from Antarctica about 35 million years ago, has produced a variety of incredible endemic species and allowed marsupials to dominate while being outcompeted by placental mammals (more advanced group of mammals including humans) everywhere else on earth. But this isolation has left the continent susceptible to outside invaders completely alien to native wildlife.

The most destructive invasive species have been nondescript species such as feral cats and foxes. Over the two centuries these European animals have been on Australian soil, at least 34 mammal species have gone extinct, giving Australia the dubious distinction as the world’s leader in mammal extinction. Most of these species are smaller-sized marsupials, like the lesser bilby or the beautiful toolache wallaby (who only survived 85 years of European colonization), that are the perfect size for cats and foxes to prey upon. Cane toads are extremely destructive and difficult to eliminate, but feral cats are a whole different story. The cuddly felines are one of the only animals known to kill for sport, creating depressingly steep kill totals of Australia’s small mammalian fauna.

Although these invaders may seem too staggering in numbers and destruction, there are several measures being undertaken by the Australian government to attempt to rid the continent of these dangerous aliens. Large-scale cat culls are underway throughout Western Australia, including an initiative to drop crate-fulls of poisoned sausages to the two to six million cats that live there.*

Intensive fox eradication programs have been undertaken on many islands, whose contained settings offer the only real chance of eliminating the elusive predators. On Phillip Island, off of Victoria, foxes have been successfully removed from the island in recent years. The bridge between the mainland and the island, the only way on and off the island for anything that does not want to get wet, is under constant surveillance to make sure no fox is able to sneak back on the island. Their eradication on Phillip Island has led to the reintroduction of the Eastern barred bandicoot, which has gone extinct in the wild because of foxes. In 2017, 44 captive bred bandicoots were released on the Summerland Peninsula, itself a symbol for effective conservation implementation. Hopefully the bandicoots can recoup their population on the island away from the threat of foxes.

The management of cane toads will take a concerted team effort by people all over Australia. In southern Australia, quarantine checks for the deadly amphibian, as well as education programs, have helped to curb its spread into the region. If a suspected cane toad is seen, the best outcome would be to capture the toad and report it to the nearest Parks office, as 2/3 of suspected cane toads end up being native frog species. Oftentimes these native frog species are harmless and themselves cane toad victims due to diseases the South American toad spreads.

Cane toads, foxes and cats, along with many invasive species of plants, are incredibly well-equipped and destructive invaders. It will take decades to wipe them out and save Australia’s unique wildlife, and even that may not be enough as these animals become more engrained in the Australian ecosystem. But progress is possible and needs to start right now in order to help Australia lose the title of being the global extinction capital and chart a new path towards saving the vulnerable local wildlife under siege by these ruthless invaders.

*Because cats, beloved pets to some and brooding houseguests to others, are the target of this mass culling, many public figures decried the decision. More than 160,000 people signed online petitions to prevent the killings of the cats, even as they wipe out species after species. Educated public outcry can be beneficial, but there clearly was a lack of understanding about the cats’ destructive capabilities. Thankfully, the Australian government persevered and proceeded with the plan, which killed 211,560 cats during the first year of the program and aims to shrink the population by 2 million cats by 2020.

Sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/amphibians/c/cane-toad/

https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/animals/frogs/cane-toad/

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-australia-mammal-extinction-worsen-scientists.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/magazine/australia-cat-killing.html

https://www.penguins.org.au/conservation/research/eastern-barred-bandicoots/

Marvelous Monotremes

The marvelously odd platypus

Eggs, venom and four-headed penises: Inside the wild world of Australia’s Monotremes

Some of the earliest ancestors of mammals were reptiles that lived some 260 million years ago. These tiny reptilian rodent-like creatures, known as cynodonts, would eventually give rise to actual mammals, the first of which occurred around 160 million years ago. These minuscule shrew-like mammals scurried around a world dominated by the prehistoric rockstars known as the dinosaurs. These early mammals evolved into the advanced mammals we see today: the marsupials and the placentals (which includes us). Those primitive reptiles, known as synapsids today, also led to the third and strangest modern group of mammals, the monotremes.

Though they are still around Australia today, monotremes are primitive and reptile-like, lacking many features we equate with being a mammal. They have no teats, but instead secrete milk through pores along the belly of the female. They also lay eggs and have a cloaca, or single opening for their intestinal, urinary, and genital tracts for excretion purposes (the term monotreme, in fact, means “one hole”). These are traits they retained from their reptilian ancestors.

But monotremes do possess several distinct mammalian features, including a segmented jaw. They are warm-blooded and lactate, albeit in the way you would think a lizard would lactate. Although their primitive features make monotremes seem ancestral to the more advanced mammals of today, they just radiated into a different group fairly early on in mammalian history. After millions of years doing their own thing, they simply did not adapt the way other mammals have, thus retaining their archaic features.

Today there are five species of monotremes that all share the prerequisite strangeness of laying eggs, secreting milk through their stomach and having a cloaca. But they each add their own wacky features on top of those that distinguish them as the strange black sheep of the mammal family.

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A perplexed echidna tries to understand why mammals laying eggs is so strange.

Probably the most famous monotreme is the platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus), an iconic Australian species. It was so strange that early specimens brought back to Europe from the mysterious land Down Under were thought to be hoaxes. This is both due to its composite body plan, combining aspects of a beaver and a mole with the bill of a duck, and the unbelievable assertion that these creatures laid eggs. Their otherworldliness led someone to shoot a vulnerable platypus while it laid its eggs just to prove it.

But there are benefits to the strange amalgamation of parts that make up a platypus. Their duck-like bill is used to sift through the sand on the river bed in search of crayfish. It is studded with touch and electro-receptors that can detect the movement of prey (check out our Instagram page for a video of a platypus using its bill). Its webbed feet and beaver-like tail help propel it through the water. Its otter-like fur helps it stay warm and quickly dry while out of the water. They are so adapted to an aquatic lifestyle that flaps of skin even cover their eyes and ears to keep water out as they let their bills do the prey-detecting.

Perhaps the most outlandish things about platypuses is that males sport a venomous spur on their hind foot capable of delivering a painful sting to any predator or other aggressive platypus. Echidnas, the other group of monotremes, also have a similar venom gland in their hind feet, but it has become vestigial, which means it no longer produces venom. The existence in both animals does point out an evolutionary common ancestor, linking both groups of monotremes.

The four remaining species of monotremes are all echidnas. There is one species in Australia, the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus), and three, longer-beaked species in New Guinea. They look like a large hedgehog (weighing as much as 20 some pounds) with a long snout (not actually a beak), that encases a long, sticky tongue to lap up termites and ants. They need to eat small prey because they no longer have teeth. They sport large claws to dig through the ground and break apart logs in search of insects and are covered in spines to deter predation. Unlike porcupines, their spines are hollow and barbless.

A short-beaked echidna

Like the platypus, echidnas have electro-receptors in their nose that help them feel vibrations. Male echidnas find a use for the spurs on their hind feet even though they no longer secrete venom. Instead, a milky substance oozes out during the breeding season as a means of scent communication to help the lady echidnas track him down.

When breeding does ensue, it is wildly strange. To start things off, the echidna has one of the oddest and most terrifying penises on the planet. It has four heads! Only two of them are working at a time, but it makes for an ungainly sight. The belief as to why their penises have three extra heads is that it helps create more sperm, which comes in handy when competing with other males.

During the winter months, they hibernate. Horrifyingly, sometimes males will come into a female’s burrow and mate with her while she hibernates and she will awaken pregnant. However the female becomes impregnated, she usually lays one egg at a time which she incubates in her stomach pouch, similar to Australia’s marsupials. After about a week, the egg hatches and the baby echidna (called a puggle) stays in the mother’s pouch for eight more weeks.

Although there is only one species that lives in Australia, it is the most widespread native mammal in the continent. It lives, preferably alone, in a variety of habitats from alpine meadows to dense forests to even desert. They could possibly live for up to 45 years in the wild, although there is no definitive proof about how long the lifespans actually is. Two of the species in New Guinea, including the Sir David’s long-beaked echidna (named after famed British naturalist David Attenborough), are classified as critically endangered. Habitat loss is likely the main culprit as the Western long-beaked echidna has possibly seen its population decline by close to 80%.

The platypus is listed as near threatened by the IUCN, but its population is trending downward. Their biggest threat is the alteration of their river habitat by development and damming.

Australia’s marvelous monotremes, which are two of the strangest creatures on the planet, are an incredible look into an alternate route of mammal evolution. While placentals and marsupials diverged one way, monotremes went another way and remained very reptile-like mammal. Although they are not our ancestors, it truly is like looking at a living fossil when a platypus darts through the water or an echidna lumbers around the forest floor.

A short-beaked echidna, one of Australia’s two species of monotremes, out for a stroll at the Featherdale Wildlife Sanctuary.

All artwork and photography by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/p/platypus/

https://www.livescience.com/57267-echidna-facts.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/monotreme

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-ancient-reptile-that-gave-rise-to-mammals/?redirect=1

https://australianmuseum.net.au/learn/species-identification/ask-an-expert/what-is-a-monotreme/

Exploring Daintree

The Daintree Rainforest

Exploring the world's most ancient rainforest, inhabited by the world’s most dangerous bird, immense crocodiles and some of Australia's most primitive marsupials.

When people think of Australia, the terrain they immediately picture is arid and barren, orange dirt stretching out as far as the eye can see, occasionally broken up by a lone eucalyptus tree bleached completely white by the unrelenting sun. Yes, people think of the outback, which makes sense as over 70 percent of Australia is arid or semi-arid. The interior desert, an area of unforgiving sun, little water, and poor soil, has been imprinted on the collective imagination of those outside Australia as what the land down under really is.

But the coasts of Australia are bursting with life, especially in North Queensland, home to some of the world’s oldest rainforests, which are, in fact, over 120 million years older than the Amazon. The Wet Tropics of Queensland is a UNESCO World Heritage Site encompassing some 894,420 acres of tropical rainforests, home to some of the most bizarre and dangerous creatures in Australia, which is saying a lot thanks to Australia’s penchant for strange and deadly creatures. UNESCO deems it as an area of outstanding universal value in part because of the biodiversity it protects, but also because it offers a unique glimpse into what earth was like millions of years ago as the world we know today was forming. Read on as we venture into the prehistoric Daintree Rainforest National Park.

A tour boat travels along the Daintree River.

 

A Living Relic

180 million years ago, Australia, along with the rest of the Southern Hemisphere, was part of the supercontinent Gondwana. At that time Gondwana was starting to fracture apart into the continents we know today: Australia and Antartica in one big chunk drifting toward the south; India drifting north; South America and Africa drifting together west. Continental drift, as this natural phenomenon is known, happens because of volcanism and plate tectonics, or the movement of huge plates over the earth’s mantle. At deep ocean ridges, fresh magma bubbles up and hardens, pushing that plate further away from the ridge. The continents that rest on these plates are essentially along for the ride, as Australia and Antartica found themselves when Gondwana split.

While all of this was happening in the Jurassic Period, the world was a much warmer place, covered in lush tropical jungles and home to dinosaurs. Even Antarctica was warm and supported a variety of dinosaurs and rainforests of its own. In fact, it shared many species with Australia because the two continents were fused together the longest of any of the former Gondwana continents.

They did not completely split until 45 million years ago. Australia drifted north while Antartica stayed south, eventually freezing as the climate cooled and the Antarctic Circumpolar Current formed around Antarctica, ensuring that cold water always flowed around the frozen continent. All of the rainforests were lost on Antarctica. Australia’s rainforests did not fare much better.

As Australia drifted north, its climate became drier and the rainforests began to retract. Rainforests that had once covered most of the eastern coast of Australia were reduced to the current minuscule cover by the beginning of the ice ages during the Pleistocene Period. As the continent became warmer and drier, the grasslands, eucalyptus forest and arid deserts that comprise most of Australia today began to dominate. Today only 3 percent of Australia’s forests can be classified as rainforests, a tiny amount when considering that much of Australia is not forested. However, continental drift actually helps support Daintree and other rainforests along Australia’s east coast. Australia has been drifting over a volcanic hotspot for the last 30 million years which has led to volcanos dotting much of the coast from Cairns all the way down to Victoria. Daintree and the other rainforests of the Wet Tropics can thank these ancient (mostly dormant) volcanoes for producing the nutrient-rich soil they depend on.

The early rainforests of Australia were spectacular. After the demise of the dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic Era, mammals began to fill the empty ecological vacuum left by their former scaly overlords. In the early rainforests of Australia during the Cenozoic Era (65 - 2.6 million years ago), many of the earliest relatives of the marsupials we know today evolved as global mammal diversity exploded. Many of these species probably also inhabited the similar rainforests of Antarctica before it broke away.

Light filters through a rare opening in the dense canopy of the Daintree Rainforest.

The amazing biodiversity of these ancient rainforests is still around in a few pockets. New Guinea has a tremendous overlap of species in its rainforests due to the fall of sea level that has created a land bridge with Australia a few times over the last several million years. In Australia, the wet tropic rainforests of Queensland are the best spot to travel back in time and see what a large swath of Australia and Antarctica used to be like.

In the Daintree Rainforest, the world’s most primitive marsupials still hop, climb or scurry through the leaf litter, living relics from Australia’s tropical past. A perfect example of these living fossils are bandicoots, a rabbit-sized omnivorous marsupial with a pointy nose and large hind feet. They are a part of the more primitive order of marsupials, the Peramelemorphia order (today only consisting of bandicoots and bilbies). These were the dominant marsupials in Australia early on, but have seen their ecological importance retract with the rainforests. The arrival of rats from Southeast Asia was also detrimental to bandicoots. A few species of bandicoot still scurry throughout Daintree, but only 20 exist in Australia overall.

Queensland’s Wet Tropics are one of the last refuges in the world where rainforests have persisted since the time of Gondwana. Along with the ancient marsupials that hide out here in one of their last refuges, ancient plants from the Jurassic Period, like cycads and ferns, mingle with conifers and relatively modern flowering plants in the dense undergrowth competing for the rare ray of light that makes it to the forest floor. It truly is a land before time and offers a glimpse of how the earth used to look.

Daintree Rainforest and Its Amazing Biodiversity

The Daintree Rainforest, Australia’s largest remaining rainforest, is estimated to be around 180 million years old. However, it was only discovered by European explorers very recently. George Dalrymple first explored the region in 1873, naming the river he traveled down after the government geologist, and his boss, Richard Daintree. Of course, the area has been inhabited for thousands of years by the Kuku Yalanji people, but the Daintree name stuck and today the river and the surrounding rainforest still bear his name.

In addition to being the world’s oldest rainforest, Daintree is also one of the most important to science because of its high levels of biodiversity and opportunity for scientific breakthroughs as a time capsule of Gondwana rainforests. While roads were being built throughout the park in the 1970s, one of the most important scientific discoveries in Australian history happened when the so-called idiot fruit, Idiospermum australiense, was discovered in the rainforest. It is one of the world’s most primitive flowering plant and incredibly rare. It only occurs in the World Heritage-listed rainforests surrounding Daintree and is called the idiot fruit because of its idiosyncratic nature. It also has the largest single seed of any tree in Australia, which is similar in size to a human’s balled-up fist. Its re-discovery in 1970, when the last specimen had been found in 1902, highlighted North Queensland’s tropical rainforest as a treasure trove for scientific discovery.

In addition to its importance to science, UNESCO also lists these rainforests because of the amazing biodiversity they protect. These rainforests are home to 3,000 species of vascular plants, with 576 species being found nowhere else on earth. The Daintree Rainforest, in particular, is home to 30% of Australia’s frog species, 20% of Australia’s reptile, and 30% of the continent’s marsupial species. 65% of the country’s bat and butterfly species fly through the forest. Out of the 368 species of birds found in the region, 11 are found nowhere else. This is spectacular because the Wet Tropics of North Queensland covers only 0.2% of Australia. These forests are a bastion for endemic species conservation.

The diversity of species here is outstanding, but the species are also incredibly interesting. If you are traveling along and see a glint of iridescent blue flash in front of you, it is from the sun reflecting on the wings of the Ulysses butterfly. It is one of the most beautiful creatures to watch as it erratically flies through the dense undergrowth of the forest.

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A Lumholtz’s tree kangaroo using its meter-long tail to help it climb a tree.

Although one is unlikely to cross paths with a tree kangaroo, the Wet Tropics are home to two species of them, the Lumholtz’s and the Bennett’s tree kangaroos. Unlike their iconic relatives that bound across the outback, these kangaroos prefer to spend most of their time in trees, bouncing from tree top to tree top, in pursuit of fruit to eat. The 13 species of tree kangaroos decided to diverge from their macropod relatives (kangaroos and wallabies) and return to the trees where they first evolved from many millions of years ago in forests like Daintree. They are an interesting example of continuing evolution as they re-adapt to life in the trees: their legs are becoming shorter and their forearms are becoming stronger for all the climbing they have to do. These two species of tree kangaroos are the largest tree-dwelling mammals in Australia.

Several interesting species of reptiles live in the Daintree Rainforests. Australia’s largest snake, the Amethystine Python (aka the scrub python), uses heat-sensing pits in its head to hunt down its prey throughout the rainforests. It can grow up to 25 feet long and in the right light, its scales will give off a similar hue to the purple amethyst gem. The curious snake occasionally ventures out of the rainforest and into suburban homes. Racing through the forest floor is the Boyd’s forest dragon, a medium-sized lizard that usually has a large yellow blotch behind its eye as a striking contrast against their brownish-green body. Unlike most other lizards, they do not bask. Their body temperature instead fluctuates with the air temperature. This means the lizards are only active during the day and are quite cryptic due to their camouflage.

Boyd’s forest dragon

In addition to bandicoots, several other primitive marsupials exist in the rainforest trying to avoid scrub pythons. In the trees, the common striped possum uses its extended fourth finger to dig grubs out of bark. On the ground, swamp wallabies hop around, content with their decision to stay terrestrial as the tree kangaroos crash through leaves high in the trees. The most primitive and smallest species of the macropod family also exists in these ancient rainforests. The musky rat kangaroo searches the rainforest floor for fruit and insects and hops around like its much larger descendants. As the name suggests, it is a similar size to a rat. The spectacled flying-fox is one of the Wet Tropics most recognizable non-marsupial mammals. They have a light patch of fur around their eyes that gives them their namesake “spectacles” (read more about the dangerous climate facing Australia’s flying foxes here).

A swamp wallaby munches on a piece of sweet potato at a wallaby rehabilitation center in the rainforest. Being able to hand-feed wallabies sweet potatoes is as great as it sounds.

The two most interesting species in the Daintree Rainforest and Wet Tropics as a whole were the two most iconic and dangerous species in the jungle. Lurking throughout the Daintree River and other waterways are saltwater crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus), the largest and most widespread species of crocodile in the world. In Northern Queensland, swimming in any open waterway carries a deadly risk as the saltwater crocodile can tolerate both fresh and saltwater and has one of the strongest bites on the planet. They can grow up to 20 feet and eat anything foolish enough to get near the water’s edge.

Crocodiles have been existing in rainforests like these for tens of millions of years. But the amount of crocodiles in the Daintree River got dangerously low in the early 1970s as the tremendous animals were hunted for their hides. In 1974, legislation was passed to protect them and today the population has rebounded to a respectable 70 estimated adults in the Daintree River. Spotting crocodiles on boat cruises throughout the river is a big tourist draw. When I went, I was lucky enough to spot three crocodiles, including one juvenile, one adult female and one huge adult male close to 20 feet named Scarface because of a large scar over his mouth. I would not want to see what the crocodile that did that to him looks like now.

Above: a juvenile, an adult female and an adult male (“scarface”) saltwater crocodile

The other iconic creature in this area is one of the most spectacular birds in the world (it does adorn this site’s homepage). It looks like Big Bird with a bright blue head, black feathers and legs that belong to a large predatory dinosaur. The Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius) is one of the world’s largest birds, weighing easily over a hundred pounds and standing 6 feet tall. Although it eats fruit (including those with seeds laced with cyanide that the bird can pass through its system without being poisoned), it has a nasty reputation as the world’s most dangerous bird, thanks to its aggressive and territorial nature and a deadly inner nail (on their middle toe) which can slice someone open just like a dagger. A few days before we visited Daintree, a Florida man had been killed by a cassowary after he was kicked by the large bird. This was the first confirmed cassowary kill since 1926, although attacks seem to happen at least once every year. This tragedy seemed to have the macabre effect of making us want to see a cassowary even more than we already did. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view), the deadly birds are very reclusive in the wild.

A southern cassowary poses for the camera at the Featherdale Wildlife Sanctuary in New South Wales. Their crests are made out of keratin, the same material our fingernails are made of.

Cassowaries, which also live in rainforests in New Guinea, are very ecologically important to the wet tropics. Because they eat fruit, they pass the seeds throughout the forest after it passes through their system. Unfortunately, cassowaries are endangered throughout their range. The World Heritage site offers some safe haven but the magnificent birds are still struck by vehicles as they try to cross the road. In 2014, there were estimated to be only 4,000 cassowaries in the entire Wet Tropics region and their population is decreasing according to the IUCN.

A poignant edit someone made on one of the signs along the main drag through Daintree National Park.

Threats to Daintree and the Wet Tropics

UNESCO estimates that roughly 80% of the Wet Tropics rainforest is still intact since the arrival of Europeans, which is extremely great compared to other swaths of tropical forests around the world. Its distinction as a World Heritage site, as well as efforts by the Australian and Queensland governments to ban logging in 1987, have helped the forest remain pristine over the past few decades. However, much of the lowland forests around the protected rainforests have been cleared, leading to rainforest fragmentation. Human disturbances, such as roads and abandoned mine shafts, throughout the rainforest still affect the natural environments.

A truck drives through a river in the Daintree Rainforest.

Another threat toward the unique wildlife of the Wet Tropics is the continued existence of invasive species, like feral pigs and cats, that threaten ecological roles by outcompeting or hunting native animals. Most of these animals are not equipped to face these strange animals from other parts of the world.

Of course, as with every other inch of our remarkable planet, climate change will threaten the existence of this tremendous pocket of Gondwanian rainforest. As the temperatures continue to warm, UNESCO predicts that the rainforest size will shrink and the range of suitable habitats for every animal in the rainforest will likewise retract. Although climate change may seem overwhelming at times, a huge part of the solution is forests like the Wet Tropics because trees can act as a carbon sink. They are able to absorb the harmful atmospheric CO2 from the air and recycle it into safer, less harmful gases. Planting more trees, as well as protecting the forests we have left, will be key to curbing the effects of climate change. Several deforested areas around the Daintree National Park have been replanted with trees to protect the forest’s integrity, take carbon out of the atmosphere and offer habitats to threatened species of animals. The survival of unique and incredible rainforests like Daintree and the Wet Tropics are not only vital for the animals that live there, but also for our survival on this planet.

The stunning view of the mouth of the Daintree River from Mount Alexandra lookout.

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At Cape Tribulation Beach, you literally stumble right out of the rainforest onto one of the most pristine, and dangerous, beaches in the world.

Four scoops of Daintree ice cream (clockwise from top): mango, wattle seed and Davidson plum with banana on the bottom.

Me taking a dip in one of the crocodile-free swimming creeks in the Daintree Rainforest.

Three Things You Must Do When At Daintree Rainforest

1. Definitely head to the amazing views at Cape Tribulation. The area was named by legendary explorer James Cook after his ship ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, which is right off the coast from Daintree, in 1770. Today it offers the spectacular combination of intact rainforest and pristine beach, although be wary of swimming. Saltwater crocodiles and box jellyfish make this one of the most dangerous beaches in the world.

2. Stop at the Daintree Ice Cream Company. Well worth it for anyone who likes ice cream (who doesn’t like ice cream?), the Daintree Ice Cream Co. offers four unique flavors every day from their tropical fruit orchards. When I was there, the flavors were wattle seed (creamy, coffee-like flavor), Davidson plum (the best one in my opinion, very fruity), mango and banana. When is the next time you’ll have wattle seed ice cream?

3. Take a dip in one of the swimming holes throughout the park. There is definitely nothing like hopping in a natural creek in the middle of a rainforest, especially on a nice warm day. The cool, clear water is full of tiny fish that will swim up and examine you. Before jumping in, it would be a good call to check to make sure there are no crocodiles in that particular swimming hole. That would be a tough way to end your trip to Daintree!

All photographs and art done by Jack Tamisiea.

Sources:

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/486/

https://www.discoverthedaintree.com/daintree-rainforest-6/

https://www.livescience.com/37285-gondwana.html

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2017/07/the-idiot-fruit-tree/

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/tree-kangaroo

http://www.destinationdaintree.com/the-daintree/wildlife/mammals

https://daintreerainforesttour.com.au/blog/the-salt-water-crocodiles-of-the-daintree-rainforest/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/04/14/florida-cassowary-attack-man-dies-after-encounter-with-worlds-deadliest-bird/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.63c5e78cb73d

https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/22678108/131902050