A Face Made for Radio

Three ugly, unloved, and unappetising creatures worth fighting for.

The exquisite naked mole rat. Photo from wikipedia.org

It’s a simple truth that we like our conservation cute and fluffy. The symbol of the WWF is the ultimate case in point: it’s a panda. In my experience, there is one easy question to ask if you want to tell an ecologist from a layperson: “what do you think about the panda?”

Let me be clear: I like a YouTube video of a sneezing baby panda as much as the next person. But the simple scientific fact is that pandas, ecologically speaking, are as useful as a bag of rocks. They are vegetarians, despite being bears, and only eat bamboo, a plant perhaps unique in the fact that it would probably grow exactly the same with or without anything to eat it. Evolution hasn’t caught up with this dietary decision; they struggle to digest their food, need masses of it to get enough energy to survive, and as recent news stories demonstrate, they cannot seem to bring themselves to breed. If they do, by some miracle, manage to produce a perfect little sneezing bundle of joy, they are truly terrible parents, often abandoning the infant or accidentally sitting on the poor thing. They have no predators to rely on them for survival. They do not produce any useful product, except for the one the public seems most interested in: adorableness.

Every year, millions of dollars’ of funds are pumped into protecting this singularly useless creature. I am not alone in believing that this energy is, at best, coincidentally helping actually useful organisms in the same environment, and at worst, distracting us from creatures that truly can be saved for the benefit of the planet. While the world focused on the bamboo forests, the Yangtze River Dolphin became the first large marine mammal extinction since the 50’s, declared functionally extinct in 2006. Both in China, both endangered, and yet only one was protected enough to keep it alive for future generations. And I would argue that the world made the wrong choice going for the fluffy option.

With this in mind, I’ve assembled a list of three fascinating animals we should be fighting harder to protect, and where you can travel to see them. Each distinctly unlovely, these are creatures that would be a truly monumental loss to our world’s biodiversity. So here they are, the endangered species that are so much less than a pretty face:

1.    Naked Mole Rat

I’m not ashamed to say it: I love naked mole rats. Possibly the ugliest creature you’re ever likely to see, they’re spectacularly weird because of their biology and behaviour as much as because they look like an inside-out mouse. Though not currently a threatened species, their usefulness to everything from cancer research to behavioural evolution means that if they were lost, they would take with them a potentially huge bank of knowledge.

The naked mole rat has a bizarre lack of any pain sensation in its skin, due to a missing mammal neurotransmitter, and can move backwards equally quickly as forwards. They are one of only two known eusocial mammals, meaning that there is a queen rat and a few males who breed with her, and all other members of the colony do not reproduce.

But the truly extraordinary thing about these rats is how long they live. They can last up to 28 years, have never been known to have cancer, and have very healthy hearts and circulation. It’s been suggested that their ability to reduce their metabolism prevents oxidative stress, stopping what we know as ‘ageing damage’. Their genome is currently being sequenced, but early work is promising information on how, exactly, they are ‘cancer-proof’. Maybe, in the future, a cure for cancer might be found in a warren under the Ethiopian desert, buried in the genes of a hairless rodent.

One of the churches of Lalibela. Photo from commons.wikimedia.org

I’ve personally always wanted to travel to Ethiopia to see Axum, home of famously enigmatic granite obelisks, and Lalibela, where ancient churches are carved from whole, enormous pieces of stone. Though both my zoological and Indiana-Jones-based fantasies of visiting Ethiopia are currently on hold due to political unrest in the region, with continued conservation efforts from archaeologists and biologists alike, I truly hope that both rats and monuments will be waiting for the world when the Ethiopian people finally achieved their long-awaited peace.

For more information and for an insight into the work being done on their genomes, visit the website of the Naked Mole-Rat Genome Resource http://naked-mole-rat.org

2.    Axolotl

A curious axolotl. Photo from flickr.com

Critically endangered, this Mexican salamander has the unusual ability to regenerate lost limbs. This has lead to it being the focus of research that, although it sounds a little like science fiction, may someday help us to fully understand cell differentiation and allow us to grow human body parts in the laboratory.

Axolotls have large embryos, which makes them an important laboratory organism for experiments in development, as they can be manipulated easily and observed clearly in laboratory conditions. They usually live their lives in a juvenile aquatic form, unless they ingest too much iodine, in which case they transform into bigger, terrestrial adults. The fact that they’re so susceptible to environmental pollution is simultaneously one of the fascinating things about and the great tragedy of the axolotl: they are only found in one lake, and it’s right next to Mexico City, a huge, polluted mess.

Normally, this would be the point at which I say how much I want to visit Mexico City and see this animal in the wild. Unfortunately, because of the state of the lake, diving there would not be a pleasant experience, and I would almost be guaranteed not to see an axolotl. And while I really would love to visit Mexico someday, I plan to mostly avoid the capital city. Mexico’s economy and industry are growing rapidly, and while that’s excellent news for Mexican humans, work needs to be done to ensure that it doesn’t spell defeat for Mexican biodiversity.

Without help, the axolotl looks set to go the way of the dinosaurs it so closely resembles. For a useful overview of the biology of the axolotl, and the conservation work being done to protect them, visit the website of EDGE (Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered) http://www.edgeofexistence.org/amphibians/species_info.php?id=552

Even if you’re not interested in the axolotl, take a look: EDGE does important work supporting ecologically important endangered species.

3.    Yangtze Giant Softshell Turtle

The Yangtze giant softshell turtle. Photo from wikipedia.org

I’ve saved the most endangered on the list for last. The Yangtze giant softshell turtle is the largest freshwater turtle in the world, and despite the fact that it looks to me like a slimy grey pig, its Western discoverer John Edward Grey described it in 1873 as, “the most beautiful species of Trionychidae that has yet occurred”.

There are four known examples of this beautiful Trionychidae left in the world. One in the wild in China, one in Vietnam, and the fate of the species rests with two individuals in Suzhou zoo in China. The captive male is, at best guess, 100 years old. His mate is 80 if she’s a day, and as of July 2013, the two of them have gone through 6 unsuccessful mating seasons. They produce eggs, but they aren’t viable, a combination of the age of the turtles making breeding difficult, the stress the female is under, and the species’ general dislike of human company. Considering they’re the last two viable individuals of their kind, I can’t really fault them for their lack of affection for Homo sapiens.

Everyone at the zoo is hopeful that soon, there will be viable eggs. The dream, obviously, would be to visit Suzhou in a few years’ time and watch the first baby soft-shell giants swim circles around their geriatric parents. What I really hope, though, is that governments, scientists, and industry all learn from the dual examples of the Yangtze River: the freshwater dolphin and turtle. In both cases, no one knew how close the species were to ruin before it was too late. The turtle was lucky: a female was miraculously discovered, and she might save her kind. The dolphin was not, and is gone forever.

So this has been a little rant, on behalf of the less photogenic creatures of this world, the rare animals who aren’t easily spotted, who live in murky waters or underground and possess strange and wonderful biology humanity could use to further medicine and science. Really, though, we shouldn’t need the lure of scientific advancement to encourage us to protect the endangered for future generations. Every loss in terms of biodiversity makes the Earth poorer, and more and more people are beginning to realise that an ethical commitment to conservation can mean economic benefits, from tourism, science, and natural products. We’d all be a little better off if we learned to love a naked mole rat.

Further reading:

• For a really fantastic overview of the arguments for and against captive panda breeding programmes: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/08/130827-giant-panda-national-zoo-baby-breeding-animals-science/
• An article from the Natural History Museum in 2010 on the extinction of the Yangtze River Dolphin: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2010/november/is-the-yangtze-river-dolphin-extinct86470.html
• For more information about the turtle breeding programme at Suzhou, read this review of the 6^th breeding season in National Geographic: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130703-china-yangtze-giant-softshell-turtle-animal-science/

Pictures, as always, from Creativecommons.org

Fantastic Books and Where to Read Them

The travel destinations that inspired great works of conservation literature

I can remember with perfect clarity the moment I decided I wanted to study animals. My father always read to my siblings and I, and his choice of books was a little random. It was difficult, growing up in Namibia, to find anything appropriate for children that was in English, and it was a good couple years before my favourite invention properly took off: online shopping. With that bit of background knowledge, it makes a little more sense that my father’s choice for bedtime reading for my brother and I was Gerald Durrell’s classic My Family and Other Animals.

For those of you who haven’t read it, My Family is the autobiographical account of how Durrell’s widowed mother moved her four children to the Greek island of Corfu. Durrell, the youngest child, tells the story of the various eccentric tutors his mother arranged, most of whom were perfectly happy to just let him run wild around the island, investigating and documenting in beautiful, hilarious detail the local wildlife. It is a genuinely funny book, and as I killed myself laughing with my brother over the image of two drunken pet magpies ruining a family dinner, I decided that I would model myself on the young Durrell. I would learn about animals, and I would write about what I found.

A birthday present a few years later was a massive stack of second-hand copies of Durrell’s other works. A personal favourite as a teenager was The Aye-Aye and I; it’s still a great ambition of mine to travel to Madagascar. What struck me most, though, reading all the books, was the combination of anecdotal accounts of collecting specimens for zoos and the poetry of Durrell’s descriptions of the countries he visited. In my mind, he was the father of science tourism, and so I’ve put together a list of three of my favourite zoology-based books, as well as the places I dream of reading them. They’re home to some truly spectacular and very rare animals, and the more people who support conservation efforts by visiting and contributing to people who work tirelessly to protect their homes, the less likely we are to lose biodiversity forever. In the words of Durrell himself, “In conservation, the motto should always be ‘never say die’.”

1.        ‘Zealandia’ Sanctuary, New Zealand. From Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine’s Last Chance to See

Above: the extremely photogenic kakapo. Image: wikipedia.org

If you’ve never typed ‘shagged by a rare parrot’ into YouTube, you probably won’t understand my desire to travel to New Zealand just to make the acquaintance of a large, flightless green bird named Sirocco. Sirocco is one of only 124 kakapo left in the world; a fact not particularly surprising as kakapo are large, delicious flightless birds with a general inability to successfully breed. Despite their general lack of any Darwinian skills, kakapos have an active and affectionate team of dedicated conservationists supporting them, and the future is looking relatively rosy for them as a species. New Zealand is so biologically diverse that the efforts to save the kakapo, however uninvolved the bird itself might be in its fight against extinction, are protecting a myriad of other plants and animals in the same ecosystem.

My real reason for wanting to visit Zealandia – the best place to see and support conservation of some of New Zealand’s rarest species – is a book I read during my teenage obsession with Douglas Adams. Adams is best known for his spectacularly funny books in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, but he was also a science junkie, and in the 80’s he undertook a tour of the world with his friend and colleague, zoologist Mark Carwardine. The result was Last Chance to See: an amusing and very poignant journey to see species whose future, at the time of writing, seemed grim. Since its publication, two of the species Adams and Carwardine wrote about – the Western black rhino and the Yang Tse river dolphin – have gone extinct. More recently, Stephen Fry joined Carwardine for a television series re-visiting the species twenty years on, and it was on that trip that Carwardine was, as the video clip suggests, shagged by a rare parrot.

Until a few years ago, I dreamt of visiting China and photographing a Yang Tse river dolphin. The species’ loss is tragic, and it only serves to remind us that if it weren’t for the teams working in New Zealand, the kakapo would have gone the same way. Stupid they might be, but thanks to places like Zealandia, I might someday be able to see the spectacular green feathers of a living kakapo. I truly wish I could say the same for all the species in Last Chance to See.

2.        Elsamere, Kenya. From Joy Adamson’s Born Free

Above: Joy Adamson. Image: wikipedia.org

It is one of the nerdier things about me: I own first editions of not just Born Free, but also its two sequels. The story, of how the Adamson family adopted three orphaned lion cubs and raised them to adulthood, is only partly about its star, the famous Elsa the Lion after whom the estate was later named. Mostly, Born Free is a story of love, animal behaviour, and the co-existence of humans and wildlife. Elsa was never a pet. She was never held captive, and she even bred successfully with a wild male, and raised her cubs to adulthood – something most hand-reared animals would be incapable of doing. From being cared for as a tiny cub by Joy Adamson to her death, with her head resting in George Adamson’s lap, Elsa had an astoundingly normal life, despite her interactions with humans.

Elsamere is on the shore of Lake Naivasha in the Kenyan Rift Valley. While visitors are not very likely to see lions there, it is a great place for bird watching, and there are the typical Kenyan complement of hippo, eland and zebra. My desire to visit isn’t from any great longing to see a distant relative of Elsa’s, but more to pay tribute to Joy Adamson, who wrote books I love and cherish, and to see the place she raised her unconventional family. She writes about Elsamere with such passion, and her legacy is being carried on by conservation work being done on site.

3.        Corfu, Greece. From Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals 

Above: Kalami Bay, Corfu. Image: astronautilus’ Picasa web album, through creativecommons.org

Finally, it probably won’t come as a surprise that I plan to travel to Corfu some day. Kalami Bay, where the White Villa that Durrell wrote about is situated, is my dream destination: olive oil, sunshine, and a really over-eager interest in the insects buzzing around my head. That’s the plan. The botany and zoology of Corfu is spectacular, as is the marine biology for anyone with their scuba qualification or a decent snorkel. I’m not certain if the pre-WW2 law that Durrell mentioned in the book, whereby those who dynamite fish get worse prison sentences than murderers, is still enforced, but certainly the island is famous for excellent seafood.

I won’t bore you with my dream of mapping out Durrell’s Corfu from the book and following in his footsteps, but I will suggest that everyone visit http://www.durrell.org to find out about the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. The work they’re doing is vast and brilliant, and they’re doing everything possible to ensure that the global biodiversity their founder documented is maintained for future generations. It’s easy to support the Trust, and they offer some brilliant experiences, such as luxury camping in Jersey and the superbly named ‘lemur liaison’ day at the Durrell Wildlife Park.

Science tourism is an important source of income for many different conservation NGOs and organisations fighting all odds to save biodiversity and individual species from extinction. But even if you never get a chance to go to Corfu, I can’t recommend these books highly enough. Great men and women of science changed my world view for the better, and I hope they do the same for many generations to come.

Further information:

For details on the opening times, events, and work of Zealandia, visit http://www.visitzealandia.com. Do it even if you don’t plan on going – there are some really adorable pictures of kiwis.

For more information about Elsamere and how to visit, go to http://www.elsatrust.org/pages/Elsamere_Conservation_Centre.vrt

Pictures, as always, from creativecommons.org