Drones Are Dropping Poison on Recently Re-invaded Rats in the Galapagos – via Herp Digest

Scientists hope that they've built a better rat trap with flying poison distribution. Eliminate major predator of tortoise eggs and juveniles and bring back ex-situ breeding on islands.

By David Grossman 1/24/19 Source - Wired

ISLAND CONSERVATION

For as long as people have been creating organized communities, rats have been there to pick off the remains. As an invasive species, they're practically unparalleled in their success, much to the chagrin of the people living with them. But when they recently re-invaded Ecuador's Galápagos National Park, a new weapon proved extremely effective in the fight: drones.

While the Galápagos islands are historic for being the site of Charles Darwin's discoveries about evolution, other visitors have been less helpful. Rats first came to the Galápagos along with pirates or whalers sometime in the 17th or 18th century. While the exact timeline is unknown, they've done their damage over the years. They've curbed the births of tortoises and have laid waste to local fauna.

The rats were beaten back from the tiny North Seymour Island in 2007, but they found their way back ten years later. Since then, the challenge has been how to attack the rats without inflicting further damage on a very delicate ecosystem.

Drones provided an ideal solution. Painted blue to make them less noticeable to birds, they dropped poison pellets wherever rats were spotted. "The use of drones is more precise," says Karl Campbell, the South American director of the nonprofit group Island Conservation, in a press statement. "It also increases feasibility, and reduces eradication costs of invasive rodents in small and midsize islands worldwide.”

Earlier this month, two six-rotor drones began lacing North Seymour and a nearby islet with rat poison. Each drone could carry 44 pounds (20 kilograms) worth of poison and fly around for 15 minutes. While one of the drones suffered a mechanical difficulty, according to Nature, they were still able to cover half the island in valuable poison. The breakdown even afforded the chance for an experiment—workers spread the rest of the poison over the island by hand, allowing for an evaluation of the drones.

Island Conservation - A pilot remotely operating a drone as it flies over North Seymour Island.

Drones can't cover every part of the land—for some remote islands, only a helicopter will do. But as Campbell tells Nature, “you have to have a helicopter for a month, sometimes shipped by boat. Your expenses very quickly add up.” Drones allow for more flexibility at a cheaper price.

Craig Morley, an invasive-species specialist at the Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology in Rotorua, New Zealand, says that the drones have a chance to change how scientists view conservation work. “You used to be able to see your opponent. Now, you just a press a button and you fire a missile,” he tells Nature, drawing a comparison between scientific and military drones. “You become a little bit detached from the reality that you have killed something or somebody over there.”

While it is important to keep that detachment in mind, it is unlikely anyone in the Galápagos will miss the rats too much.

As Seas Warm, Galápagos Islands Face a Giant Evolutionary Test – via Herp Digest

NY Times 12/18/18 by Nicholas Casey a New York Times correspondent based in Colombia, and Josh Hamer,a Tmes Photographer traveled 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador to see how ocean warming is affecting Darwin’s first laboratory.

ALCEDO VOLCANO, Galápagos — When the clouds break, the equatorial sun bears down on the crater of this steaming volcano, revealing a watery landscape where the theory of evolution began to be conceived.

Across a shallow strip of sea lies the island of Santiago, where Charles Darwin once sighted marine iguanas, the only lizard that scours the ocean for food. Finches, the product of slow generational flux, dart by. Now, in the era of climate change, they might be no match for the whims of natural selection.

In the struggle against extinction on these islands, Darwin saw a blueprint for the origin of every species, including humans.

Yet not even Darwin could have imagined what awaited the Galápagos, where the stage is set for perhaps the greatest evolutionary test yet.

As climate change warms the world’s oceans, these islands are a crucible. And scientists are worried. Not only do the Galápagos sit at the intersection of three ocean currents, they are in the cross hairs of one of the world’s most destructive weather patterns, El Niño, which causes rapid, extreme ocean heating across the Eastern Pacific tropics.

Research published in 2014 by more than a dozen climate scientists warned that rising ocean temperatures were making El Niño both more frequent and more intense. Unesco, the United Nations educational and cultural agency, now warns the Galapagos Islands are now one of the places most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.By Jeremy White

To see the future of the Galápagos, look to their recent past, when one such event bore down on these islands. Warm El Niño waters blocked the rise of nutrients to the surface of the ocean, which caused widespread starvation.

Large marine iguanas died, while others shrank their skeletons to survive. Seabirds stopped laying eggs. Forests of a giant daisy tree were flattened by storms and thorny invasive bushes took over their territory. Eight of every 10 penguins died and nearly all sea lion pups perished. A fish the length of a pencil, the Galápagos damsel, was never seen again.

That was in 1982. The world’s oceans have warned at least half a degree Celsius since then.

David J. Anderson, a biologist at Wake Forest University who studies the blue-footed booby, a seabird, said the ravages of El Niño were a surprise when he began working on the islands in the 1980s.

“Now we are wondering, how frequent do these things get? El Niños have a bulldozer effect,” he said. “And they are happening more and more.”

Though the Galápagos lie at the heart of the geographic tropics, it’s hard to guess that, standing on one of the islands, because of a vast current that flows north from southern Chile. That stream, the Humboldt Current, keeps the islands cool and rainless most of the year, unusual given that the Equator crosses through the archipelago. It means the islands are subtropical in climate, a rare place where penguins and corals exist side by side.

This cold Antarctic current brings rich nutrients. Fish are abundant. For penguins, it is a tropical paradise. But sometimes the cool Humboldt Current suddenly slows.

The ocean waters start warming rapidly, heating up as much as 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, within months. Storms begin to strike the islands with rain and flash floods. And, as if overnight, the Galápagos become warmer: It is the start of El Niño, Spanish for “the boy child,” a reference coined by Peruvian fisherman because the changes can occur around Christmas.

“The Galápagos marine system is analogous to a roller coaster,” said Jon D. Witman, a professor of biology at Brown University who studies coral ecosystems in the Galápagos, noting that the spikes of hot temperatures were followed by spells of falling temperatures, known as La Niña.

The problem with global warming, Dr. Witman said, is that the baseline from which these swings occur is rising as the ocean temperatures do. This, as the intensity and frequency of El Niño is increasing.

Before he published “Moby Dick,” Herman Melville sailed past the Galápagos and saw the black marine iguanas clinging to the rocks. They were “that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature,” he wrote in a literary sketch published in the 1850s.

One particular anomaly of the marine iguanas offers a clue into what warmer Galápagos seas may have in store for them.

Martin Wikelski, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany, was spending his research seasons off the coast of Genovesa Island when he noticed something strange in his calculations. When the seas warmed, the size of the iguanas started to decrease.

“Obviously an animal can’t shrink, it’s impossible,” he said he initially thought. “But they looked odd, like frogs where the legs were too long for the body.”

It turned out the iguanas were in fact becoming much smaller.

Rising ocean temperatures mean less algae, the main source of food for marine iguanas. Scientists say they believe that the reptiles may reabsorb parts of their skeleton in order to decrease their size and increase their chances of survival on a smaller diet. Stress hormones may trigger the process, but little more is understood about how the iguanas adapt. Nevertheless, the changes could be central to their survival as El Niño cycles become more frequent.

Evolution has led other animals in different directions, which could now prove fatal as ocean temperatures rise.

On a recent day on the southern shores of Isabela, the largest island in the Galápagos Archipelago, a male sea lion howled over a gaggle of pups in a tide pool. Sea lions and fur seals here have no set breeding season, so males are constantly on the defense against competitors — a costly vigilance that takes away from their time to hunt fish.

When sea temperatures rise, the sardine population around Isabela Island drops. In the 1982 El Niño, nearly every large adult male fur seal died of starvation. Most of the sea lion pups born that year died as well because parents couldn’t feed their young, according to a study by Fritz Trillmich, a behavioral ecologist.

“It’s like if our generation didn’t have kids,” said Robert Lamb, a doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University.

Last month, the craggy rocks in a cove off the north shore of Isabela Island were strewn with the bones of a massive fish — tuna, which scientists say they haven’t seen sea lions eat before.

But just after dawn on a recent morning there, sea lions chased one large tuna into the cove, then slaughtered it in the shallows.

Whether this is simply a new behavior that emerged when populations of smaller fish grew scarce hasn’t been studied, but the new diet could prove advantageous to sea lions as El Niños become more frequent.

Other animals have fewer options to change their diet.

Blue-footed boobies, birds known for their bright feet and clownish waddle, line the shores here. But at sea, these specialized fish-eaters soar gracefully above the waves before plunging into the ocean like competitive divers, scattering the clouds of fish so they can be picked off individually.The blue-footed boobies once lived principally on sardines. But for reasons unknown, sardine populations plummeted in 1997 and the fish remain scarce, forcing the birds to eat other fish. When sea temperatures rise during El Niño, these other fish also start to disappear.

“They basically stop trying to breed,” Dr. Anderson, the Wake Forest biologist, said of the boobies. He said the pattern had become more frequent in parallel with El Niños.

Blue-footed boobies catching fish near Isabela Island.

“One hundred years from now, I would not be surprised if the blue-footed boobies were gone” if current trends continue, Dr. Anderson said.

Similar behaviors are seen in other aquatic birds here. Galápagos penguins, which are only found on these islands, stop breeding when the water reaches 25 degrees Celsius, or about 77 degrees Fahrenheit.

Flightless cormorants starve at their nests because they cannot travel to find food elsewhere when fish populations drop near the islands.

Flightless cormorants at their nesting ground on Fernandina Island.

While warmer temperatures often spell doom for native species that evolved to the Galápagos’ cool subtropical climate, invasive species flourish.

Forests of the Scalesia, a giant daisy tree that is unique to the Galápagos, were already shrinking because of clear-cutting for agriculture in the highlands. The trees are accustomed to mild weather, so the violent storms that come with extreme El Niños can flatten their forests. While destructive, storms have long been part of a natural cycle for these daisy trees, allowing a new generation to take root after the last.

With climate change, however, the process is being short-circuited. Below the Scalesia forests, the seeds of an invasive blackberry wait for the giant daisy trees to fall. The blackberry plants quickly spread, blocking the next generation of the trees.

“I’m afraid if nothing is done about the blackberry, the Scalesia forests will not recover in the long run,” said Heinke Jäger, an ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation in the Galápagos, referring to repeated blows from El Niño.

Dr. Jäger noted that an extreme El Niño in 1997 and 1998 was thought to have coincided with the introduction of the first frog on the islands, Fowler’s snouted tree frog, which may have helped them thrive. They threaten to wreak havoc on the island’s insects and other invertebrates.

Another invasive species that worries scientists is the fire ant, which flourishes in wetter temperatures and eats the eggs of giant tortoises and attacks the legs and eyes of adults.

“You can see them laying one or two eggs and being attacked by the ants,” said Christian Sevilla, a conservationist at the national park here. “They’re just throwing off the rest of the eggs as they walk off trying to escape, with the ants still biting at their legs.”

(Not without irony, Darwin was a predator of the tortoises well before the ants were. “The young tortoises make excellent soup,” he wrote in 1839.)

Mr. Sevilla and other workers at the park are now considering mitigation efforts to try to protect threatened species from the more frequent El Niño events that have come with climate change. The park already has a program to breed giant tortoises in captivity.

But not all giant tortoises can be bred in a pen. Nor can many of the other creatures on these islands. As the climate changes, so will the Galápagos.

Galapagos bans fireworks to protect unique wildlife

December 28, 2018

Fireworks have been banned on the Galapagos Islands to protect the archipelago's unique fauna, the local government said on Friday.

The local council said in a statement that it had agreed "unanimously a resolution that prohibits the importation, sale, distribution and use of fireworks or pyrotechnics in the Galapagos province."

Those fireworks that produce light but no noise have been excluded from the ban.

The islands are home to thousands of residents as well as being a tourist destination, and the measure comes just days before New Year celebrations in which many people traditionally set off fireworks.

"Ecosystems as sensitive as the Galapagos Islands are affected (by fireworks), principally its fauna that is unique," said the council.

It also wants to avoid any potential deterioration in air quality or pollution of water sources.

Read more at: 

Snake names honor Darwin, fire god, Louisiana professor - via Herp Digest

Updated: Oct. 21, 2018, 9:44 p.m.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) 10/21/18 — A Louisiana professor is in heady company, honored by having one of three newly identified species of snakes from the Galapagos Islands named after him.

“They named one after Charles Darwin — that’s a no-brainer — and one after the Greek god of fire, and one after me, of all people,” said Robert A. Thomas , an environmental biologist and head of head of the Center for Environmental Communication at Loyola University New Orleans.

The snake in question, a handsome critter with lengthwise brown and creamy yellow stripes, is called Pseudalsophis thomasi (sood-al-SO-fis TOM-uhs-eye).

“I’ve got a picture of it taped up here in the office, and it makes me smile every time I look at it,” Thomas said.

He’s been studying snakes since the 1970s and began studying those in the Galapagos Islands in 1984. In 1997, he published an overview of Galapagos snakes based on features such as scale counts, patterns and other shapes and forms.

A team of Brazilian and Ecuadorian biologists led by Dr. Hussam Zaher of the Universidad de Sao Paolo used genetic analysis to restudy the snakes and work out their evolutionary route through the chain of islands. That study identified the three new species. In addition to Pseudalsophis thomasi, they are Pseudalsophis hephaestus, for the island chain’s volcanic origins; and Pseudalsophis darwini, for the scientist whose theory of evolution grew out of a voyage through the Galapagos.

Their findings were published online Aug. 22 by the journal Systematics and Biodiversity, and on Sept. 3 in the Brazilian journal Pesquisa.

The scientists invited Thomas to join the team five years ago. He shared the information he had collected and got more from U.S. museums. Then the others told him they wanted to name one of the new species after him, to honor his work studying the islands’ snakes.

“I had to drop off the paper. The rules are that you cannot be an author on a paper where something is named after you,” Thomas said. “I thought about it deeply and decided there are just some fun honors you shouldn’t pass up in life. This is one of them.”

Thomas said the species is mildly venomous but not dangerous to people — only to lizards and other small animals. The one used for the species’ formal description was 726 millimeters (about 28.6 inches) long and weighed 105 grams (3.7 ounces).

Thomas said he has photos of the snake that he took in 1984, not knowing it was a different species. They weren’t very good, he said, because the snake was wriggling, but they did let him describe the belly scales and back pattern.

“A friend could have named a bacterium after me from Outer Slobovia and that would have been a real honor. ... But this is a snake that I’ve worked on, so it’s very meaningful to me,” he said. “I’m very honored.”

Exploring Galapagos snakes on volcanoes – via Herp Digest

Massey University, Te Kunenga Ki Purehuros, University of New Zealand 

Press Release 7/27/18

Finding snakes in the Galapagos islands is a gargantuan undertaking, one that has lead Massey University’s Dr Luis Ortiz-Catedral to the summit of an active volcano.

The Islands are home to reptiles of all shapes and sizes from giant tortoises, iguanas, lizards and geckos, but little thought is ever given to its snakes, who are elusive and seldom seen.

Dr Ortiz-Catedral says the snakes are not often thought of as worthy of conservation and portrayals like that of the Iguana chased by snakes on BBC’s Planet Earth II, have reinforced the idea they are something to fear.

“They may not be cute and fuzzy, but they are incredible creatures who are worthy of conservation and are actually very docile. However, since Darwin collected the first specimen in 1835, their biology has largely remained a mystery and has been understudied. In order to protect them, and even reintroduce them to islands where they once lived, field work and lab work was needed to get a firm grasp of their diversity, biology and more,” he says.

The work has been on-going since 2015, when Dr Ortiz-Catedral started a joint project with colleagues from the Galapagos National Park Directorate (GNPD), and University of California (Merced and North Carolina) to understand this diversity, and the evolutionary relationship between these species and snakes on the South American continent.

He says several new species, subspecies and “morphs” have been described, but much of this knowledge comes from preserved museum specimens and outdated morphological analyses. 

“Snake taxonomy is very complicated, but the Galapagos terrestrial snake taxonomy may be in a league of its own. This complexity makes studying museum specimens hard as they are often faded as a result of the method of preservation and are sometimes mislabelled. The resulting descriptions and actual distinctions between species end up being rather fuzzy,” he says.

Therefore, the research team focused on studying live specimens in the wild. In 2017-2018, thanks to strategic funding from the Galapagos Conservancy and The Galapagos Conservation Trust, field trips of park rangers, volunteers and students, have been working hard to get the job done. This has required visiting numerous locations across most islands, finding more than 400 snakes, photographing them and obtaining valuable morphometric information as well as tissue samples for advanced genetic analysis.

“The task of locating, surveying, measuring and photographing more than 400 live Galapagos snakes throughout the Archipelago has been monumental in terms of personnel, logistics, time and effort, but it is paying off. Our research has determined that most species and subspecies are restricted to a single island and its adjacent islets. However, the Striped Galapagos snake [Pseudalsophis steindachneri], the most graceful and elusive snake species in Galapagos, was found on Santa Cruz, Baltra, North Seymour, and Santiago.”

The molecular analysis of the tissue samples will be directed by University of California’s Dr Danielle Edwards. Her results, in combination with field data, will get us closer to answering not only the question of how many species are present in Galapagos, but also their relationship to other South American species. 

Earlier this year, other researchers attempted to resolve the taxonomy of Galapagos snakes by using run-of-the mill molecular techniques, outdated morphological analyses and incomplete datasets. Their results only poorly explain the diversity and history of Galapagos snakes.

“What sets our project apart is that the team are using the most complete dataset of live specimens to date [30 lineages from across the archipelago] and advanced genotyping methods to compare thousands of genomes,” Dr Ortiz-Catedral says.  

The team has a busy few months ahead — analysing the most comprehensive dataset on morphology of live snakes from Galapagos and completing the DNA analysis of the tissue samples. 

“Our work goes beyond simply stating how many species of snakes exist in Galapagos,” he adds. “We will also describe their evolutionary relationships and update the conservation status of each species to assist the GNPD in its task of preserving the species and ecosystems of these wonderful islands. I believe this is a signature of conservation science at Massey University. We make contributions for biodiversity preservation worldwide.”

How a Giant Tortoise Gets Off Its Back – via Herp Digest

The shells of tumble-prone saddlebacks on the Galápagos-Islands may not do them any favors, according to a new study.

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA NOV. 30, 2017, New York Times

The giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands have no natural predators, but their shells represent a mortal danger of their own. When flipped over, the animals — who regularly weigh in at more than 90 pounds — often struggle to find their feet. If they fail, they eventually die.

And for a giant tortoise with one shell type, the saddleback, big spills are a regular part of life.

“The saddlebacks live in places where you have a lot of lava rocks, so they should fall more often,” said Ylenia Chiari, a biologist at the University of South Alabama, comparing them with domed tortoises, another type that lives on flatter terrain.

Although they are closely related, these two giant tortoises have very different shells. Domed tortoises have rounded shells, and saddleback tortoises have flatter shells with flared edges and a raised neck opening.

Dr. Chiari thought the shells on the saddlebacks, with their edges and corners, had evolved to make it easier for these tortoises to get back up, and set out to test her hypothesis in a study that was published Thursday in Scientific Reports. She was wrong, but her research offered additional insights into the anatomies of these endangered creatures and how they may have evolved to get back on their feet.

To test her idea, Dr. Chiari and her team first made digital 3D models of both types of shells using 89 tortoises, some in the wild and some at the California Academy of Sciences.

The researchers also determined centers of mass for the two different types of tortoises by placing them on an unstable platform and photographing them. The scientists were then able to calculate which shell would require a tortoise to expend more energy when rolling off its back.

The results suggested that a tortoise with a saddleback shell would have to work harder to get back on its feet. In general, the study found, the rounder the shell, the easier it is for the animal to right itself — seemingly an advantage for the domed tortoise.

But there is another significant anatomical difference between the saddleback and domed tortoises: the larger size of the saddleback’s neck opening. This allows the saddleback to extend its longer neck farther, which biologists long assumed was a trait that helped the tortoise reach food in a drier climate.

The shell’s larger front opening also allows the saddleback tortoises to use their long necks to help pick themselves up (they wiggle their feet to shift their balance, too). That hole and the longer necks “could have evolved to overcome the fact that self-righting would have been more difficult in saddlebacks,” Dr. Chiari said, although more research will be required to confirm that idea.

Iguanas partner with the plants of the Galápagos Islands

Date: December 7, 2016

Source: Plataforma SINC

The isolation of ocean islands like the Galápagos prevents the arrival of large mammals, which disperse the seeds of many plants by ingesting them. In the absence of mammals, this function is filled by birds, tortoises, lizards and iguanas. To date, no investigation had been carried out into the role iguanas play with at least ten species of plants.

The survival of many native and introduced plants depends in part on the role of animals in pollination and seed dispersal. The ingestion and subsequent expulsion of seeds in animal faeces means a proportion of them return to the soil at a more distant location.

In addition to birds, the Galápagos giant tortoise is the animal that disperses most of seeds over great distances on the islands, followed by the endemic land iguanas, of which there are three species which feed on fruit and vegetation near ground level, as they do not climb. However apart from anecdotal records, their potential for seed dispersal had not to date been confirmed.

A study published in the journal 'Integrative Zoology' demonstrates for the first time how by dispersing seeds, the Galápagos land iguana (Conolophus subcristatus) contributes to the survival of indigenous and introduced plants plant species on Fernandina Island, which covers 642 km2 of land.

Continued