Tuatara numbers boosted at Orokonui Ecosanctuary - via Herp Digest

Press release from Orokonui Ecosanctuary and the University of Otago

15 December 2016

Modest tuatara numbers will be boosted at Orokonui Ecosanctuary with the release of 17 juvenile tuatara this Thursday, 15 December.

The young tuatara, aged 3-4 years, have been reared at the University of Otago. They join the population at Orokonui that was founded in 2012 when 87 adult and juvenile tuatara were released.

The tuatara have their genetic origins in the population on Stephens Island (Takapourewa) in Cook Strait, where they are recognised as a taonga and under the kaitiakitanga (guardianship) of Ngāti Koata iwi.

Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki will be present, alongside Ecosanctuary staff, Department of Conservation staff and others to warm their arrival and support any ceremonial duties.

Support for the release of more tuatara at Orokonui was made possible following positive results of monitoring last summer led by research assistant Scott Jarvie and Associate Professor Alison Cree of the University’s Department of Zoology.

“We recaptured more than half of the tuatara that had been released about three years earlier and they appeared healthy and well,” said Jarvie.

 

“We are delighted to be able to provide a home for these additional tuatara” said Chris Baillie, general manager of the ecosanctuary.

 

Orokonui is the only fenced ecosanctuary in the South Island where tuatara roam freely in the absence of predatory mammals such as cats and stoats. Until a few hundred years ago tuatara lived throughout much of the eastern South Island, but quickly disappeared following the arrival of humans and other land mammals.

“We see the establishment of a tuatara population at Orokonui as part of our commitment to help tuatara survive the challenges of climate change” says Associate Professor Cree. “Cooler, southern locations are likely to become increasingly important to tuatara as sea levels rise and conditions become hotter and perhaps drier on some northern islands.”

 

Members of the public who see free-roaming tuatara in the ecosanctuary are encouraged to take good-quality photographs without disturbing the reptiles and to show these to Orokonui staff or University researchers. Idiosyncracies of the spines or other body markings may enable individual tuatara to be identified.

Background information

Tuatara, known to scientists as Sphenodon punctatus, are the world’s only surviving rhynchocephalian reptiles. Rhynchocephalians or beak-headed reptiles were common about 200 million years ago. Tuatara are the closest living relatives of lizards and snakes, although their common ancestry is distant in time.

Like many other New Zealand reptiles, tuatara have “slow” life histories. Their eggs take about a year or more to incubate in the ground, hatchlings take about 15 years to reach maturity and females typically produce only about nine eggs every 2-5 years. The life span of a wild tuatara can reach about a hundred years.

Tuatara once lived on the North and South Islands, but became extinct there and on many offshore islands following the arrival of humans. Today they survive naturally on about 32 islands in Cook Strait and off the North Island coast. Since 1995, tuatara have been reintroduced to at least nine islands and four North Island sanctuaries, in addition to Orokonui.

Tuatara: Chester Zoo celebrate breeding 'living fossil'

1 February 2016

A reptile believed to have pre-dated most species of dinosaur has hatched at Chester Zoo for the first time.

A conservationist has been trying to breed tuatara - which are native to New Zealand - for the last 38 years.

Isolde McGeorge said tuatara, which first appeared 225 million years ago, "really are a living fossil and an evolutionary wonder."

She said she "broke down in tears" when the reptile hatched and that it was an "incredible achievement".

It followed "lots of hard work, lots of stressful moments and lots of tweaking of the conditions", Ms McGeorge added.

"Tuatara lived before the dinosaurs and they survived after dinosaurs had died out," she said. "They really are a living fossil and an evolutionary wonder.

"To be the first zoo to ever breed them outside of their homeland in New Zealand is undoubtedly an amazing event."

Continued ...

Rare footage captured of tuatara hatching (w/ Video)

Extremely rare footage of a tuatara hatching has been filmed at Victoria University of Wellington. Last to hatch, the egg was one of 23 being incubated in captivity this year as part of a joint initiative that helped to save a threatened population of tuatara from extinction.

Since the early 1990s, Victoria University, the Department of Conservation (DoC) and local Mana Whenua Ngati Manuhiri have run an intensive conservation recovery plan for tuatara on Hauturu ō Toi/Little Barrier Island, partly-funded by The Hauturu Supporters Trust and Auckland Zoo.

Hauturu ō Toi is a nature reserve located 80 kilometres north-east of Auckland, which is now home to around 300 tuatara, most of which have been incubated at Victoria University.

Read more and watch video at: 

Why are scientists studying this weird reptile’s genes (tuatara) – via Herp Digest

July 1, 2013,Philly.com by Matt Soniak-- Not every line of scientific enquiry will make your teeth whiter or improve the gas mileage on your car, but that doesn't render scientific endeavors that don't deal with optimum petroleum efficiency or dental cleanliness entirely worthless. Where the value in a specific enquiry lies can be hard to pin down for the everyman, though, especially if news stories about said research don't make that clear. 

For their tuatara genome sequencing project, a group of scientists in New Zealand are cutting out the middleman and blogging their way through their research. Their first post is "Why sequence the tuatara genome?" So, straight from the horse's mouth, here's why they're looking at the genome of lizards' cousins (SPOILER ALERT: Evolution). 

To understand why a tuatara genome is such a tantalising prospect for scientists you need to know how the tuatara relates to other reptiles. All life on earth is connected by a shared evolutionary history. When biologists try to organise the diversity of life on earth, we reconstruct that history by finding groups of species that all descend from a shared common ancestor. 

You sometimes hear people mistakenly call tuatara “living dinosaurs”. In fact, as you can see in the figure above, tuatara are much more interesting than that. If you want to study a living dinosaur you only need to look out the nearest window. Modern birds descend from one branch in the diverse group we call dinosaurs, but each of those ten thousand species are dinosaurs. The tuatara, on the other hand, are the only living members of a lineage that separated from other reptiles more than 200 million years ago. 

By placing modern organisms in the context of their evolutionary history, we can work out which traits were present in ancestral species, and reconstruct the changes that gave rise to modern ones. As the tuatara is the only living witness to hundreds of millions of years of evolution, its genome sequence will be immensely valuable in understanding the genetic changes that have allowed reptiles to evolve and diversify. 

In fact, even the tiny amount that we already know about tuatara genetics has helped us understand not just the evolution of reptiles, but how mammals (like us) have evolved. [Sequencing the Tuatara Genome]

Why Are There So Many Species of Beetles and So Few Crocodiles?

ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — There are more than 400,000 species of beetles and only two species of the tuatara, a reptile cousin of snakes and lizards that lives in New Zealand. Crocodiles and alligators, while nearly 250 million years old, have diversified into only 23 species. Why evolution has produced "winners" -- including mammals and many species of birds and fish -- and "losers" is a major question in evolutionary biology.

Scientists have often posited that because some animal and plant lineages are much older than others, they have had more time to produce new species (the dearth of crocodiles notwithstanding). This idea -- that time is an important predictor of species number -- underlies many theoretical models used by biologists. However, it fails to explain species numbers across all multi-cellular life on the planet, a team of life scientists reports Aug. 28 in the online journal PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120828171744.htm

Tuatara reptile slices food with 'steak-knife teeth'

New Zealand's tuatara has a unique way of chewing its food, say scientists who have studied its jaws in detail.

This beak-headed reptile uses a "steak-knife sawing motion" as it chews.

This could help explain how the species has continued to adapt to a changing world - and changes in available prey - over more than 200 million years.

A computer model of the tuatara, recreating its jaws as it munched on prey, has revealed that it chews like no other land animal.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18249270

Sixty tuatara released onto Auckland island

Tuatara to be released on Motuihe Island
March 2012. Sixty tuatara are now living in the wild on Motuihe Island easily accessible by ferry from downtown Auckland. The tuatara were released on Motuihe in a translocation project led by the Motuihe Trust and supported by the Department of Conservation (DOC).

Motuihe Trust chairman John Laurence says the trust is aiming to establish a population of tuatara in the heart of Auckland that's easy to reach and can be enjoyed for generations to come.

"Tuatara were once found all over New Zealand but were wiped out on the mainland by rats. They now survive only on islands, like Motuihe, that have been cleared of rats," says John Laurence.

"Trust volunteers have worked hard creating a home for tuatara and other native wildlife on Motuihe by planting more than 350,000 native trees on the pest-free island."

Tuatara released on Motuihe Island
The tuatara were released into burrows prepared by the Motuihe Trust. Department of Conservation Auckland Area Manager Brett Butland says DOC and the Motuihe Trust are working together to restore the natural heritage of Motuihe.

"DOC eradicated Norway rats and mice from Motuihe in 1997. We made the island completely pest-free by removing feral cats and rabbits in 2005," says Brett Butland.

"Removing the pests, particularly rabbits enabled the Motuihe Trust to establish a nursery on the island that produces up to 55,000 native plants a year. The trust is doing a fantastic job restoring the native forest on Motuihe to provide a habitat for rare and threatened wildlife. The tuatara join little spotted kiwi, kakariki, tieke (saddleback), bellbird and shore skinks that the trust and DOC have released on Motuihe."

Pest traps and tunnels
The survival of the native wildlife on Motuihe depends on keeping the island pest-free. DOC maintains a network of traps and pest detecting tunnels on the island.

"We need everyone travelling to Motuihe, and other pest-free islands in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park, to check their boat, kayak and gear to ensure they're not carrying stowaway pests," says Brett Butland.

Background information
Rats drove tuatara off mainland New Zealand. To secure their survival DOC has created sanctuaries for these unique reptiles by eradicating rats on a number of islands with tuatara populations.

The 60 tuatara released on Motuihe came from Lady Alice Island off the east coast of Northland. Lady Alice, Whatupuke and Coppermine islands are in the Hen and Chickens group of islands managed by DOC. They were cleared of Pacific rats in the 1990s.

Each island now has a self-sustaining population of tuatara. Tuatara are doing well on Lady Alice Island. The 60 tuatara moved to Motuihe represent less than 1% of the island's tuatara population.

Tuatara were released on pest-free Tiritiri Matangi Island in 2003. The release of tuatara on Motuihe means there are now two islands in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park the public can visit to see tuatara in the wild.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/tuatara-auckland.html

Tuatara: one species or two?

Photo / Mark Mitchell

By Dr Hilary Miller
11:29 AM Monday Aug 23, 2010

This post originally appeared on sciblogs.co.nz.

New Zealand's most iconic reptile, the tuatara, is currently regarded as two separate species - Sphenodon guntheri, which is found naturally only on North Brother Island in Cook Strait, and Sphenodon punctatus, which are found on other islands in Cook Strait and off the north-east coast of the North Island.

But recent research online in Conservation Genetics shows that Sphenodon guntheri is not as genetically distinctive as first thought, and suggests tuatara should be regarded as one species.

Deciding where to draw the line between species is a common dilemma in biology. There are many different ways of defining what a species is (John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts lists 26 different "species concepts").

One of the most common definitions is the evolutionary species concept, which classifies a species as "a single lineage of ancestor-descendant populations which maintains its identity from other such lineages and which has its own evolutionary tendencies and historical fate" (Wiley 1981).

Under this definition it doesn't matter whether species are reproductively isolated (as in the Biological Species Concept); what is important is whether they remain genetically or morphologically distinct from one another over time. A major problem with this definition, however, is deciding just how genetically or morphologically distinct two populations need to be before they are regarded as separate species. (See here for more on these and other species concepts).

In small, geographically isolated populations founder effects can be an additional complicating factor. This occurs when populations are founded by only a few individuals, or when a large population suddenly becomes very small (a bottleneck). In these situations genetic variation can be rapidly and randomly lost, and result in the new population looking quite different from the old even if they have only been separated for a short period of time. This is particularly relevant to the North Brother tuatara population, which was almost exterminated in the 1800s and is now restricted to a 1.7ha patch of scrub on the island.

Read more: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10668497