Today, Marra is helping launch an Animal Mortality Monitoring Program (AMMP) in Africa sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development that will alert authorities to animal deaths—“mortality events”—that occur on a larger-than-normal scale. Known as AMMP, the network is intended to serve as an early warning system for emerging infectious diseases that can pass from animal populations into the human population. Recently, Marra and his collaborator Isabelle-Anne Bisson, a research associate at the Migratory Bird Center, took a few minutes to answer some questions about this new initiative.

Image right: A flag representing “56 dead rats” set out during an animal mortality monitoring training workshop for park staff at the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area in Uganda.

Q: What is the aim of the animal mortality monitoring program in Africa?

A: Marra: In cases of zoonotic diseases—such as West Nile virus and Avian Influenza which each began in animals and then jumped to humans—an epidemic of human sickness usually occurs after there’s already been a noticeable sickness in animals. By having local people keeping an eye out for sick and dead animals we think we have the potential to get an early warning on emerging zoonotic pathogens before they move to the human population. We want to have some sort of surveillance mechanism out there that is looking for sick and dead animals that have fallen victim to an emerging disease. This way we may catch a disease before it becomes a human epidemic.

Image above: Isabelle-Anne Bisson conducts a workshop with park staff from Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area in Uganda. (All images courtesy Isabelle-Anne Bisson)

Q: Why Africa?

A: Marra: We are starting in Uganda because it, as well as other “hotspots” in Africa, tend to be places where you get a lot of zoonotic diseases occurring. In such areas there is a lot of mixing of things—people, domestic animals, wild animals—that don’t normally come together. People are hunting animals and eating wild game and there’s just a lot of human-animal interface.

Once a pathogen emerges and disease begins to appear in hosts, given how much globalization is taking place today and how much trade there is all over the planet, an epidemic can move today in ways that we never would have predicted. The tiger mosquito that may have brought West Nile Virus to North America could have easily been transported on planes. There’s a lot of illegal trade in animals and food that goes on too. Every time you move an animal, legally or illegally, you not only move the animal but also move what is inside the animal—including pathogens and parasites. There are a lot of different factors that determine whether or not and how a pathogen can move.

Image right: A park staff member finds the first flag set out by AMMP staff.

Q: How is the AMMP network being launched?

A: Bisson: In April 2011 we launched the first pilot project in the Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area with the Uganda Wildlife Authority. Some 50 Nokia mobile phones were deployed. We started with an intensive month-long training program, which included several workshops where park staff learned how to use the phones and the mobile data collection application EpiSurveyor. The phone acts as a small mobile computer where staff can enter animal mortality events using EpiSurveyor while on field patrols.

We next used “mock” dead animals by printing yellow flagging tapes that contained project logos and information the staff needed to enter once they found a flag. For example, a flag might say “56 dead rats.” We distributed more than 100 of these flags across the park tied to trees and recorded the GPS data for each flag.

Image left: During a training session, park staff in Uganda learn to capture data from a flag representing “mock” dead animals on a Nokia cell phone.

When park staff found a flag, they entered its data into the cell phone and the phone also captured the flag’s GPS position. The data is sent to a central server via cellular networks and anyone with a computer, Internet connection and access to the account can view the data in real time.

Q. How did the park staff do finding the flags?

A: Bisson: From May to August park staff looked for the flags while on patrol and entered the data for the flags they found. From August to September we returned to Uganda to evaluate the training and practice and speak to park staff for feedback.

We heard a lot of stories about taking hours to find a single flag and their frustrations with the network, but all-in-all the feedback was positive—they love the phones and they love EpiSurveyor. One quarter of the flags were recovered of which 65 percent were entered correctly without missing data. Some flags were eaten by ants, others were destroyed by elephants, some disappeared mysteriously while a few had faded to a pale, imperceptible yellow.

All-in-all the workshops exceeded our expectations. Queen Elizabeth Conservation Area staff are now ready to monitor real animal deaths and we plan to fully integrate the program into existing Uganda Wildlife Authority systems at the end of June 2012. We are also working on the development of a custom mobile phone data form application with a local company MindAfrica.

Image above: Uganda Wildlife Authority staff celebrate following the successful completion of the AMMP workshop.

Q: What follows when a real mortality event is reported?

A: Marra: Another main AAMP partner is RESPOND, a project that links schools of public health and veterinary medicine in Africa with institutions in the United States to help strengthen their ability to identify and respond to outbreaks. Once a mortality event occurs an animal pathologist will come to the scene, someone say from the School of Veterinary Medicine at Makerere University in Uganda, and take samples of animal tissues and transport them to a lab for analysis.

These projects are part of a larger Emerging Pandemic Threats program overseen by USAID, which includes PREDICT, a program focused on responding to, identifying, preventing and preparing for emerging pandemic diseases.

Q. Other than national park staff what other groups will you be working with to establish an AMMP network?

A. Marra: Our goal now is to expand the program to people in the agricultural sector in Uganda—people with large and small farms, say down to only one cattle herd.

But on a larger scale, it is basically a sound idea to keep track of all animal mortality, period. AMMP is focused on emerging infectious diseases, but I have had a long-time interest in developing a central database for keeping track of and quantifying animal mortality. We don’t have anyone compiling these sort of data today…say how many birds and what species were killed by airplanes, how many birds and what species are killed by wind turbines…. There are all sorts of ways animal mortality data can be analyzed and actions we can take to minimize the impacts on birds and other animals and, thus, minimize the impacts on humans. Many places in the world are prime areas for a dead animal surveillance networks.

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Image left: A desert tortoise, Gopherus agassizii. (Image by Mike Jones, courtesy Encyclopedia of Life)

“Roads are barriers to dispersal for lots of species and usually it takes many generations to show up in the genetic structure of an animal,” says one of the paper’s co-authors Emily Latch, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, and now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Because tortoises have such a long life span, we didn’t think the roads would influence their genetic structure so quickly, but they did.”

The study shows for the first time that recent landscape features such as roads “can have rapid effects on the genetic structure of a localized population and are detectible almost immediately,” in as little as one generation, the scientists report. As a result, the scientists conclude, “Roads may become increasingly important in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of desert tortoise populations.”

For the study, DNA samples were taken from 859 tortoises living in an area of 23,969 acres. “A huge number of samples,” for such a small area, Latch says. Data also was taken on each animal’s sex, location, and location elevation and slope.

Image right: A tortoise in the Mojave Desert. (Image courtesy Wikipedia)

The tortoises were sampled as part of a tortoise relocation effort at Fort Irwin Army Training Center and the animals were located by having people walk map transects in the desert. They picked-up, labeled and took data and DNA samples for every tortoise encountered.

“The adult individuals were initially genotyped to develop a baseline genetic database of translocated and resident tortoises so that family groups hatched after the translocations could be identified to particular parents, and the reproductive success of translocated and resident tortoises compared,” says Smithsonian geneticist Rob Fleischer, head of the Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics and senior author on the paper. “This is important to determine if translocation is really an effective mitigation step. It was serendipity that led to our finding a surprising level of genetic structure.”

Roads may inhibit gene flow in desert tortoises by the reptiles being hit by cars, picked up by travelers, and predation and disease associated with pets released by the roadside. Eroded banks and increased vegetation along desert roads also may provide places for the tortoises to burrow and forage for food, causing them to move along a road rather than to cross it.

The article “Fine-Scale Analysis Reveals Cryptic Landscape Genetic Structure in Desert Tortoises,” by Emily K. Latch, William I. Boarman, Andrew Walde, and Robert C. Fleischer appeared recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

-John Barrat

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Image left: A desert tortoise, Gopherus agassizii.  (Image by Mike Jones, courtesy Encyclopedia of Life)

“Roads are barriers to dispersal for lots of species and usually it takes many generations to show up in the genetic structure of an animal,” says one of the paper’s co-authors Emily Latch, a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, and now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Because tortoises have such a long life span, we didn’t think the roads would influence their genetic structure so quickly, but they did.”

The study shows for the first time that recent landscape features such as roads “can have rapid effects on the genetic structure of a localized population and are detectible almost immediately,” in as little as one generation, the scientists report. As a result, the scientists conclude, “Roads may become increasingly important in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of desert tortoise populations.”

For the study, DNA samples were taken from 859 tortoises living in an area of 23,969 acres. “A huge number of samples,” for such a small area, Latch says. Data also was taken on each animal’s sex, location, and location elevation and slope.

Image right: A tortoise in the Mojave Desert. (Image courtesy Wikipedia)

The tortoises were sampled as part of a tortoise relocation effort at Fort Irwin Army Training Center and the animals were located by having people walk map transects in the desert. They picked-up, labeled and took data and DNA samples for every tortoise encountered.

“The adult individuals were initially genotyped to develop a baseline genetic database of translocated and resident tortoises so that family groups hatched after the translocations could be identified to particular parents, and the reproductive success of translocated and resident tortoises compared,” says Smithsonian geneticist Rob Fleischer, head of the Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics and senior author on the paper. “This is important to determine if translocation is really an effective mitigation step. It was serendipity that led to our finding a surprising level of genetic structure.”

Roads may inhibit gene flow in desert tortoises by the reptiles being hit by cars, picked up by travelers, and predation and disease associated with pets released by the roadside. Eroded banks and increased vegetation along desert roads also may provide places for the tortoises to burrow and forage for food, causing them to move along a road rather than to cross it.

The article “Fine-Scale Analysis Reveals Cryptic Landscape Genetic Structure in Desert Tortoises,” by Emily K. Latch, William I. Boarman, Andrew Walde, and Robert C. Fleischer appeared recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

-John Barrat

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Image right: Smithsonian scientists Mary Hagedorn and Ginnie Carter freeze coral sperm in a lab on Oahu, Hawaii. (Photo by Mike Henley)

“It turns out we can produce significant numbers of developing larvae using the thawed sperm and that those larvae actually settle,” said Mary Hagedorn, a marine biologist at SCBI. Coral settling is the process in which a free-swimming, bowling pin-shaped coral larva metamorphoses into a single polyp baby coral. “This is a huge milestone for us because if the larvae couldn’t metamorphose and settle, we wouldn’t be able to successfully use the bank for conservation efforts, which is the driving force behind this important research.”

Image left: Larvae of the coral Acropora tenuis. (Photo courtesy A. Hayward and A. Negri, Australian Institute of Marine Science)

The new frozen bank includes two reef-building species of coral, Acropora tenuis and A. millepora, both of which now reside in long-term storage at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, Australia. Hagedorn has already successfully applied this technology to reefs in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Though they remain alive, the banked cells are in a stasis and researchers can thaw the frozen material in one, 50 or, in theory, even 1,000 years from now. Done properly over time, researchers can rear samples of frozen material and, if necessary, place them back into ecosystems to infuse new genes into natural populations, helping to enhance the health and viability of wild stocks. The work is the result of a partnership between SCBI, Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Australian Institute of Marine Science and Monash University.

Image right: The Great Barrier Reef coral Acropora tenuis spawning. (Photo courtesy A. Hayward and A. Negri, Australian Institute of Marine Science)

Coral reefs are living, dynamic ecosystems that provide invaluable services: they act as nursery grounds for marine fish and invertebrates, provide natural storm barriers for coastlines, store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and are potential sources for undiscovered pharmaceuticals. Yet coral reefs are disappearing rapidly because of pollution from industrial waste, sewage, chemicals, oil spills, fertilizers, runoff and sedimentation from land; climate change; acidification; and destructive fishing practices. Researchers believe that coral reefs and the marine creatures that rely on them may die off within the next 50 to 100 years, causing the first global extinction of a worldwide ecosystem since prehistoric times. According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, coral reefs generate up to $30 billion of the global economy each year, with more than $1 billion going to the Australian economy. The Great Barrier Reef, which stretches 1,800 miles along the Queensland coast of Australia, includes the world’s largest collection of corals.

Image left: Smithsonian staff member Mike Henley working with frozen coral. (Photo courtesy Mike Henley)

“The wildlife on the Great Barrier Reef is so fascinating, and the size and beauty of that reef is legendary,” said Mike Henley, an animal keeper in the Zoo’s Invertebrate Exhibit. Henley helped collect and freeze the Australian samples. (Read Henley’s update from the field on the Zoo’s website.) “Our colleagues at the Australian Institute of Marine Science were so very wonderful to work with, and their facility is state-of-the-art, making research and larval care easier than at any location I have ever worked before.”

While scientists have successfully used frozen sperm from coral to fertilize fresh coral eggs, their next focus is on developing techniques to use frozen coral embryonic cells to help restore coral populations. In January, Hagedorn and her collaborators will focus on culturing frozen embryonic cells to see how long they can live.

“Right now there are no tools to help address some of the diseases most devastating to the reef,” Hagedorn said. “If we can grow embryonic cells and keep them alive, this technology could be important in battling those coral diseases.”

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Image right: Northern cardinal (Click to enlarge. All photos by Gerhard Hofmann, Hofmann & Scheffer Photography)

“Animal vocalizations are specifically adapted to both the structural and acoustic characteristics of their local environment,” said Peter Marra, a co-author of the study and an SCBI ecologist. Marra oversaw and helped design the research. “In order to survive and reproduce, it is imperative for birds to be able to transmit their signals to each other. Now it seems they may be having trouble doing so in urban areas.”

Ambient city noise masks certain lower sound frequencies, making it more difficult for birds to hear one another’s calls over long distances. In addition, hard surfaces—such as buildings—can reflect and distort higher frequency sounds by scattering sound waves and creating multiple reverberations. This can confuse birds and make it difficult for them to pinpoint the source of the call.

Image left: Gray catbird

The results of the researchers’ analysis showed that although there was some variation by species, the birds tended to sing higher notes in areas where there was general noise. The birds tended to sing lower and deeper notes, however, in areas where there were many buildings and hard surfaces. But when the two conditions combined, the birds had trouble altering their songs to accommodate both factors.

“At this point we don’t know exactly how birds adjust their songs,” said Jenélle Dowling, an SCBI intern at the time the research was conducted and lead author of the study. “We expect different species, which differ in their capacity to adjust frequency and type, to respond differently to reverberation and noise.”

By vocalizing, birds are able to identify and locate other members of their species, attract mates and defend their territory. So their ability to adapt to urban living could affect their survival. As urban areas develop rapidly, researchers will continue to investigate how sound from these busy areas affects birds and the effects of development on sound transmission.

Image right: House wren

“This is just another example of how humans continue to impact wildlife,” Marra said. “We now need studies to determine if these changes in song translate into differences in reproductive success,” he added.

This research was carried out in conjunction with the Smithsonian’s Neighborhood Nestwatch citizen science project, where participating citizens allow the researchers to use their property as study sites, as well as volunteer their time to assist with data collection.

Dowling, is currently a doctoral candidate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in New York. Marra is a conservation scientist at SCBI and advised Dowling. They worked in collaboration with researcher David Luther, who is a term assistant professor in the biology department of George Mason University in Virginia.

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“This gives us another important tool to help maintain genetic diversity among Eld’s deer populations under human care,” said Pierre Comizzoli, a reproductive physiologist at SCBI’s Center for Species Survival. Comizzoli oversaw the surgical procedures (laparoscopy) that resulted in the fawn and has helped train researchers in Thailand to perform in vitro fertilization. “Maintaining the genetic diversity of the population under human care is important to build up a healthy and sustainable population of animals that can be released into the wild.”

SCBI has a long history of training reproductive researchers and veterinarians working with Eld’s deer and developing scientific innovations to help conserve the species, which is considered endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. There are less than 1,500 animals left in the wild as the result of habitat loss and hunting. Thailand’s Zoological Park Organization, which announced the news of the Eld’s deer fawn in a ceremony at Khao Kheow Open Zoo today, maintains a successful Eld’s deer captive breeding and reintroduction program. ZPO has worked with SCBI and AgResearch of New Zealand on in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer techniques for several years. Two Eld’s deer fawns were born through this method in 2010, but both died within 24 hours of their birth. This year’s successful birth was the result of one of eight embryo transfers performed in February 2011.

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Image right: The Red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas) is one of the species the team will be examining in Panama. (Photo by Brian Gratwicke)

Belden is leading a team of researchers who will study the microbial communities living on the skins of frogs that are surviving the fungal scourge. The effort is one of 11 new Dimensions of Biodiversity projects funded by the National Science Foundation with the aim of transforming, by 2020, how scientists describe and understand the scope and role of life on earth. Additional members of the $2 million research project are Virginia Tech’s Leanna House, assistant professor of statistics, and Roderick Jensen, professor of biological sciences; Brian Gratwicke, a research biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and Roberto Ibáñez, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama; Reid Harris, professor of biology at James Madison University; and Kevin Minbiole, assistant professor of organic and natural products chemistry at Villanova University;

The goals of the research team will be achieved through hands on work in Panama, where the spread of chytrid fungus has been extensively documented. Researchers will swab the skin of frogs in areas with and without chytrid to collect samples of the microbes that live there. They will then release the frogs and assess the microbial community, both in terms of what microbes are there and what they are doing functionally on the frogs’ skin. To see what microbes are there, researchers will examine the microbe DNA. To see what the microbes are doing, researchers will examine how well they inhibit the growth of the chytrid fungus, and also assess what chemical metabolites are being produced by the microbes.

As leaders of the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project the Smithsonian’s Brian Gratwicke and Roberto Ibáñez are maintaining captive colonies of endangered Panamanian frogs that are highly susceptible to the chytrid fungus. The hope is that the use of probiotics will someday allow release some of these species back into nature.

The research team is interested in whether microbial communities on the skin of frogs have a role in disease resistance, in particular to the devastating chytrid fungus. And if there is such immunity, does it rely on the same mechanism from one frog to another, on different species of frogs, and in different locations?

“Our long-term goal is to try to develop probiotics” – to share the biochemistry employed by beneficial microbes with frogs who need it,” Belden said.–Source: Virginia Tech

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Image left: Coyote (Rebecca Richardson)

According to the study, coyotes migrated eastward via two main routes—one that went through the northern United States, and one that went through the south. Using DNA samples, the researchers found that Virginian coyotes were most closely related to coyote populations in western New York and Pennsylvania. It appears the northern trekkers eventually encountered the Great Lakes wolves and interbred before converging again on the East Coast. They then gradually headed south along the Appalachian Mountains toward what is considered the Mid-Atlantic region, to an area centered around Virginia.

“The Mid-Atlantic region is a particularly interesting place because it appears to mark a convergence in northern and southern waves of coyote expansion,” said Christine Bozarth, an SCBI research fellow and lead author on the paper. “I like to call it the Mid-Atlantic melting pot.”

Bozarth and her colleagues collected scat samples in Northern Virginia from local coyote populations. They were then able to extract DNA from the intestinal cells in the scat and compare it to the DNA from preserved historic wolf specimens that had lived in the Great Lakes region before coyotes colonized the area. They shared some of the same genes, supporting the hybridization theory. Hybridization between canid species usually occurs when one species is rare. Those individuals may have trouble finding mates and therefore breed instead with closely related species.

“This does not mean that we have massive, wolf-like coyotes roaming around here in Virginia,” Bozarth said. “Coyotes with wolf ancestry have differently shaped jaws, which may allow them to fill different ecological niches. They tend to hunt small prey and scavenge large game, so hybrid coyotes might be helpful in controlling the overly abundant deer population.”

Image right: Camera trap photo of a coyote taken Feb. 15, 2008 at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. (Courtesy of Quantico Fish and Wildlife Office)

While coyote populations have been expanding, wolf populations have become endangered. Hybridization with coyotes is now a major threat to the recovery of wolves.

“For the past decade, our lab has developed and used noninvasive techniques to monitor and survey rare and endangered species in various regions of the world and in this study, we were able to show that noninvasive techniques can also be an effective tool for tracking the origins and movement patterns of this elusive canid,” Jesús Maldonado, SCBI research geneticist and paper co-author. “The admixed coyotes have also been found further south, into North Carolina, which brings the hybridized coyote into the range of the critically endangered red wolf, further complicating the issue.”

The study’s authors from SCBI are Bozarth, Maldonado and Frank Hailer (now a postdoctoral researcher at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany). Bozarth is currently an assistant professor in the science, technology and business division at Northern Virginia Community College. The additional authors are Larry Rockwood and Cody Edwards from the department of environmental science and policy at George Mason University.

The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute plays a key role in the Smithsonian’s global efforts to understand and conserve species and train future generations of conservationists. Headquartered in Front Royal, Va., SCBI facilitates and promotes research programs based at Front Royal, the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and at field research stations and training sites worldwide.

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Image left: Akiapolaau, a Hawaiian honeycreeper (All photos by Jack Jeffrey)

“There were once more than 55 species of these colorful songbirds, and they are so diverse that historically it wasn’t even entirely clear that they were all part of the same group,” said Heather Lerner, who was a former postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics when she conducted this research and is currently an assistant professor of biology at Earlham College and Joseph Moore Museum director.

“Some eat seeds, some eat fruit, some eat snails, some eat nectar. Some have the bills of parrots, others of warblers, while some are finch-like and others have straight, thin bills. So the question that we started with was how did this incredible diversity evolve over time.”

The answer is unique to the Hawaiian Islands, which are part of a conveyor belt of island formation, with new islands popping up as the conveyor belt moves northwest. Each island that forms represents a blank slate for evolution, so as one honeycreeper species moves from one island to a new island, those birds encounter new habitat and ecological niches that may force them to adapt and branch off into distinct species. The researchers looked at the evolution of the Hawaiian honeycreepers after the formation of Kauai-Niihau, Oahu, Maui-Nui and Hawaii. The largest burst of evolution into new species, called a radiation, occurred between 4 million and 2.5 million years ago, after
Kauai-Niihau and Oahu formed but before the remaining two large islands existed, and resulted in the evolution of six of 10 distinct groups of species characterized by different sizes, shapes and colors. These findings will be published in the hard-copy version of Current Biology Nov. 8, with Lerner as lead author. (A PDF version of the paper is available online on Current Biology’s media pages.)

Image left: The Hawaiian honeycreeper Iiwi

“This radiation is one of the natural scientific treasures that the archipelago offers out in the middle of the Pacific,” said Helen James, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the paper. “It was fascinating to be able to tie a biological system to geological formation and allowed us to become the first to offer a full picture of these birds’ adaptive history.”

James’ previous work on Hawaiian bird morphology, the branch of biology that deals with form and structure of organisms, played a pivotal role in determining which avian species to survey to determine the closest living relatives of the Hawaiian honeycreepers. Using genetic data from 28 bird species that seemed similar to the honeycreepers morphologically, genetically or that shared geographic proximity, the paper’s authors determined that the various honeycreeper species evolved from Eurasian rosefinches. Unlike most other ancestral bird species that came from North America and colonized the Hawaiian Islands, the rosefinch likely came from Asia, the scientists found.

“There is a perception that there are no species remaining that are actually native to Hawaii, but these are truly native birds that are scientifically valuable and play an important and unique ecological function,” said Rob Fleischer, head of SCBI’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics and a co-author of the paper. Fleischer has been studying the genetics, evolution and conservation of these birds for more than 25 years.

Image right: The Hawaiian honeycreeper Akepa

More than half of the known 56 species of honeycreeper are already extinct. The paper’s researchers focused on the 19—now 18—species that have not gone extinct, but of those, six are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, four are considered endangered and five are vulnerable.

The next, ongoing step in the research is to use museum specimens and subfossil bones to determine where the extinct species fit into the evolutionary family tree, or phylogeny, to see if the new lineages fit into the overall pattern found in this study.

The study’s authors from SCBI are Lerner and Fleischer. The additional authors are James from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Hofreiter from the University of York and Matthias Meyer from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.–Lindsay Renick Mayer.

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