Philip Bethge

Tag: animals

  • Vultures lured back to Germany

    Vultures are slowly returning to Germany, driven out long ago by an unwelcoming populace. At the behest of conservationists, loosened “carcass regulations” in Europe have made the search for food less daunting — but some still wonder if the birds will be able to survive.

    By Philip Bethge

    Griffon vulture number 259 is no longer able to fly. A bullet from a small-caliber rifle wielded by an unknown shooter shattered the ulna and radius of the bird’s wing in June. Veterinarians tried to rehabilitate the vulture, using physical therapy to strengthen its wing muscles and even applying leeches to improve circulation, but nothing worked.

    “It’s over for him,” says Wolfgang Rades, director of Herborn, a bird park in the central German state of Hesse. Rades casts a concerned glance toward the vulture, where it crouches on a pile of stones in a corner of its enclosure, looking a sad sight on this cold, damp morning. Yet for Rades, the bird is also a sign of hope. “He’s an ambassador for others of his kind living in the wild,” the biologist says. “Many more vultures will follow him, if we humans allow them to.”

    Griffon vulture 259 is among the vanguard of a new avian presence in Germany. Vultures are returning to the country, slipping stealthily into German airspace and often flying at heights of over 1,000 meters (3,300 feet). Ornithologists, glider pilots and hang gliders have all spotted these carrion-feeders above cities such as Hanover and Freiburg and regions such as the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura (see map).

    “At least 50 to 60 vultures have been sighted in Germany this year,” says Dieter Haas from the Vulture Conservation Initiative (GESI) based in Albstadt, southwestern Germany. “And many more are sure to follow.”

    Ornithologist counted 26 griffon vultures just in mid-June in the area outside the town of Tessin in northeastern Germany. And from April to August, a bearded vulture named Bernd delighted bird lovers by flying all the way from the Alps to the Baltic Sea. Even cinereous vultures, a rare species with a wingspan of nearly three meters, have been spotted in German skies.

    Others may revile these species as supposed harbingers of death, but bird lovers are thrilled. “Vultures provide the best disposal service nature has to offer. They perform an important ecological function,” says Haas, who has observed vultures feeding numerous times. They plunge from the sky “like stones” when they spot a carcass on the ground, he says of such spectacles, and set to work on their find. “They gobble everything up and then they’re gone again.” Haas considers these birds “a gift from the skies.”

    EU Takes Away Food Source

    All four European vulture species — the bearded, cinereous, griffon and Egyptian vultures — were once native to Germany, but humans were no fans of the birds.

    A century ago, when vultures still lived here, people in the Alps believed bearded vultures stole lambs, goats and even small children. They called the birds “bone crushers,” for the way they dropped their prey from great heights onto rocks, smashing the bones to get at the marrow, their favorite food. Local lords offered a bounty for hunting the birds. In 1913, a hail of birdshot tore apart what is presumed to have been the Alps’ last bearded vulture, in the Aosta Valley, Italy.

    Many griffon vultures, meanwhile, perished from poison bait that was meant for wolves and foxes. Pesticides, too, are harmful to vultures, since they accumulate in the bodies of the animals on which vultures feed.

    More than anything, though, vultures disappeared because their once plentiful source of food ran dry — and remains so to this day. A 2002 EU hygiene regulation, also called the “carcass regulation” by conservationists, stipulates that germs from animal carcasses must be prevented from making contact with drinking water, to keep animal-borne diseases in check. The law was primarily introduced to stem the spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, but it also applies when a sheep gets its skull split open by lightning or a deer meets its end at the bumper of a car. No dead livestock may be left lying in the open, and hunters must either take the carcasses with them or quickly bury them.

    The new regulation kept European woods tidy — but there was nothing left for vultures to eat.

    Farmers in Spain, for example, had to close down their “muladares,” traditional spots where for centuries they had tossed carcasses for vultures to feed on, a hygienic method of disposing of dead animals.

    ‘Vulture Alert’ in Germany

    With their food source now gone, hungry vultures began attacking even living livestock. And in 2006, Germany experienced its first influx of vultures, as the emaciated birds flocked in to look for food. Coming as it did in the middle of the summer news slump, the arrival of birds such as a griffon vulture nicknamed “Gonzo” made headlines. German mass-circulation daily Bild reported a “vulture alert in the north.”

    Three years later, lawmakers eased the “carcass regulation” in response to pressure from conservationists. Spain’s muladares are back and the country’s vulture population has grown again, to around 25,000 pairs. Biologists have succeeded in reintroducing vultures into the French Alps as well. “It’s fantastic, they’ve seen griffon vultures and steinbock on the same crags out there,” Haas says enthusiastically.

    It’s no surprise, then, that the carrion-feeders have struck out for Germany as well. Young vultures are true distance travelers, undertaking wide-ranging exploratory flights before they start to breed between four and six years of age.

    Such was the case with one early adopter, the bearded vulture Bernd — so nicknamed, although the bird later turned out to be female. In 2012, Bernd was fitted with a radio transmitter and released into the wild in Switzerland. This year, on May 17, Bernd began a journey northward.

    Bernd flew first over Bavaria and the Czech Republic, then as far as Poland’s Baltic Sea coast, before turning west. She continued on past the cities of Stade and Bremen, then headed south once again. But then, near the city of Bayreuth, Bernd’s radio signal suddenly cut out. Bird lovers feared the vulture had suffered a violent death, but those fears were soon allayed. “The female bearded vulture appears to have managed to get rid of her radio tag,” conservationists announced online on June 13. Then on June 19 came the news: “Bernd is alive!” The bird was found, weakened, in the German state of Saxony. She was rehabilitated and returned to the wild in the Alps.

    Can Vultures Be Fed?

    When caught, Bernd was near death, having found too little food in Germany. It’s a common scenario. In June, a griffon vulture was spotted at a landfill outside the city of Vechta in northern Germany. “It sat around there for days and grew visibly weaker,” recalls Ludger Frye from the local chapter of Germany’s Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU).

    Frye decided to feed the vulture. “But it was more difficult than I expected,” he says. Frye spoke with the landfill operator and with conservation and hunting authorities. He could give the bird game carrion, he was finally told. Frye found a couple pieces of venison “in a carcass bin” and threw them to the vulture. “Then the bird started doing better,” he says. Soon, it continued on its way.

    Frye is pleased with this success, but not precisely happy with the general situation. “If these animals don’t find anything to eat here, we’ll never get them back,” he says.

    It’s true that Germany is not yet a vulture paradise. “We’re overly concerned with hygiene,” says Rades at the bird park in Hesse. He points out, for example, that wildlife hit by cars in Germany still gets cleared away in next to no time. “Why don’t hunters just move carrion 100 meters or so into an open field and leave it for the vultures?” the biologist asks. And, he adds, why not re-establish specific locations for feeding these birds?

    Haas from the Vulture Conservation Initiative has set up one such spot already. In the Danube River valley outside the town of Sigmaringen, he regularly brings found carrion to a field belonging to a shepherd friend of his. Haas reports that he’s seen some vultures circling above the field, but so far none has landed. “They don’t quite dare,” he says. Next, he wants to try bringing in vultures from zoos — ones that have had accidents and are no longer able to fly, what Haas calls “crash vultures” — to provide a “trust-building measure” for the wild birds.

    Habitat Restoration

    Will offering food to these birds of prey really work? Supplying the birds’ flight routes with enough meat would call for a fair number of carcasses. The demand would amount to “one cow per year for each vulture,” calculates Haas, who dreams of setting up observation platforms near such feeding sites as a draw for eco-tourists. He imagines an afternoon outing to watch vultures feed would present an almost irresistible attraction. “People could experience something really worthwhile,” Haas says.

    That idea, though, goes too far even for some bird experts. Lars Lachmann of NABU, the conservationist group, finds it a bit premature to be feeding vultures. “With the current low population numbers, at the moment that would just lead to carcasses lying around everywhere, which people would then blame on conservationists,” he says.

    Instead, Lachmann wants to restore the birds’ habitat. Vultures need rocky outcroppings and open pastures where a sheep might now and then fall dead without immediately being “disposed of according to regulation,” Lachmann says. “Then the vultures will come of their own volition.” He considers the foothills of the Alps, the Swabian Jura and the Harz Mountains in central Germany all to be “potential griffon vulture country.”

    What remains to be seen is whether or not the general public will give these strictly protected carrion-feeders a warm welcome. Cases such as that of griffon vulture 259, the bird felled by a rifle bullet, make it seem as though the writing may already be on the wall. Whoever shot the bird was most likely not a hunter, biologist Rades says, but a “gun nut with a small-caliber rifle.” It seems ignorance and prejudice may once again seal the fate of vultures in Germany.

    A different approach is possible, though. Haas tells the story of 23 griffon vultures that turned up one day in the Lorraine region of France and prepared to spend the night in the woods there. “Right away, someone jumped in and provided them with two dead sheep,” he says. The next morning, the same French man “took pictures of the vultures and put a great story up online.”

    Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

  • Flipper Fail: Dolphins May be Dumber Than We Think

    For decades, it’s been common knowledge that dolphins are among the world’s smartest species. Now some researchers — and a new book — argue the supposed underwater geniuses aren’t so special after all.

    By Philip Bethge

    Their social lives are complex, and they can congregate in large groups. Their heart rates increase when they notice a family member suffering. They sound the alarm when they discover food or a potential threat. And experiments have shown they even anticipate future events.

    Biologist Justin Gregg is talking about chickens.

    Chickens, says Gregg, “are not as dim-witted as popular opinion would have us believe.” He adds, “Some of these complex behaviors have also been observed in dolphins.”

    Really? Are chickens as smart as dolphins? Or, to put it differently: “Are dolphins really smart?” This is the question Gregg, a zoologist with the US-based Dolphin Communication Project, asks in his new book of the same name. And he isn’t the only one finding fault with Flipper’s brainpower.

    For more than 50 years, the dolphin has been viewed as an especially intelligent creature, grouped together with human beings and great apes. But now a dispute on the subject has erupted among scientists, and the smart aleck of the seas may end up being just an average mammal. “We put them on a pedestal for no reason and projected a lot of our desires and wishes on them,” says neuroethologist Paul Manger of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. According to the professor, the claims that dolphins have a particularly complex brain, use a sophisticated language, are self-aware and can use tools are nonsense.

    In some cases, says Manger, dolphins — which are small whales — are even outdone by goldfish. When goldfish are placed in a bowl, he explains, they at least try to escape by boldly jumping out, whereas dolphins that have been captured in nets won’t even think of jumping to freedom. “The idea of the exceptionally intelligent dolphin is a myth,” Manger concludes.

    Origins of the Dolphin Myth

    In the 1950s, physician and neuroscientist John Lilly played the crucial role in the elevation of dolphins from the status of stupid, fish-like creatures with excellent swimming skills to that of underwater know-it-all. In eerie-sounding experiments, Lilly attached electrodes to the brains of living dolphins to stimulate neurons. One day, a dolphin hooked up to his equipment began making loud noises as it approached its horrible death. When Lilly slowed down and played back the audio recordings, he concluded the dolphin was trying to communicate with its tormenters.

    After further experiments, Lilly became convinced dolphins had a human-like faculty of speech and attempted to establish contact with the marine mammals. His desire to communicate was so great he administered LSD to himself and the dolphins in the hopes of stimulating conversation.

    He soon moved to the American West Coast, where he became a spiritual leader of the hippy generation and wrote books in which he combined New Age ideology with half-baked dolphin research. The animals, Lilly gushed, were “more intelligent than any man or woman.” He even attributed them philosophy, ethics and an “ancient vocal history.”

    Lilly’s muddled legacy shapes our image of dolphins to this day. Artists paint watercolors of the animals swimming through outer space. In popular lore, dolphins serve as ambassadors of peace and unconditional love, and, the more out-there believe they possess miraculous healing powers and can teleport space-age settlers to Mars. Behavioral scientists, along with most reasonable people, agree this is all nonsense. Still, the size of dolphins’ intellect remains a matter of dispute.

    What’s a Big Brain Worth?

    One measure scientists use to determine a creature’s intelligence is brain size — given the theory that the more a brain weighs relative to the body, the smarter the animal. A human brain, which weighs about 1,300 grams (46 oz.), makes up about 2 percent of body weight. A chimpanzee’s brain comprises 0.9 percent of its weight, while the corresponding number in elephants, with their brains weighing in at more than 4.5 kilograms (9.9 lbs.), is 0.2 percent. Dolphins do well by comparison. The brain of a bottle-nosed dolphin, for example, weighs more than 1,800 grams, or 0.9 percent of its average body weight.

    It seems logical that dolphins deserve to be included in the animal Mensa Society. But does a large brain mean the same in marine mammals as it does in terrestrial animals? In 2006, Paul Manger noted that whales developed a large brain in order to keep the organ from becoming hypothermic, and thereby useless, in cold water.

    Manger described an unusually high density of so-called glial cells in the animals’ brain matter. He explained that these cells act like tiny ovens to keep the brain warm. Besides, he added, dolphins have a relatively simple brain structure, and noted: “The essential features of complex neural processing of information, as observed in other mammals, are missing or poorly developed.”

    No Better Than Mealworms?

    Manger has now upped the ante with a new paper in which he claims behavioral studies involving dolphins are flawed and therefore not very informative. For instance, while zoologists have observed that dolphins can distinguish between the concepts “many” and “few,” Manger notes: “This has also been demonstrated in yellow mealworms.”

    On the other hand, some bottle-nosed dolphins on Australia’s west coast have learned to hold sponges over their snouts while they root around on the ocean floor. Is this a case of tool-use, indicating a high level of intelligence? Manger is skeptical. “Exactly what the dolphins do with the sponges remains unknown,” he says, noting that the evidence they use them as tools is “flimsy.”

    Another example is dolphins’ alleged talent for language. In one experiment, researchers were able to teach bottle-nosed dolphins 40 symbols. The animals were even capable of correctly interpreting combinations of the symbols, Manger admits, but African grey parrots and California sea lions can also learn this type of symbol-based language.

    The scientific community is similarly divided over what zoologist Gregg calls “Dolphinese.” It is known that every dolphin can identify itself with its own “signature whistle.” The marine mammals use many other acoustic signals, he adds. But is this truly special? The tail-wagging dance of bees is also very complex, says Gregg. “It’s probably not the case that dolphins have their own language, which is as complex as human language,” says the expert in animal communication.

    Dolphin Defenders

    So is the dolphin actually the dummy of the seas? Most dolphin researchers are offended by such remarks. “To put it bluntly, most of that is bullshit,” says Karsten Brensing, a marine biologist with the organization Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC). Manger and Gregg are losing sight of the “total package” when they compare the marine mammals’ individual abilities with those of mealworms or bees, he says. “You can use similar arguments to prove that people aren’t intelligent.”

    Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, also has strong objections to Manger and Gregg’s conclusions. “We shouldn’t dismiss decades of peer-reviewed scientific work,” she says, noting there are overwhelming indications that dolphins possess a high degree of intelligence. For instance, scientists have observed how the animals work together to encircle schools of fish. To cultivate relationships, they spoil each other with their own form of “petting” behavior. And in a struggle for power, males will join together to form networks.

    Marino even believes that dolphins can recognize themselves. In a famous experiment, she and psychologist Diana Reiss drew markings on the bodies of two dolphins. Then they held up a mirror to the animals. They were fascinated to observe the animals turning around like divas in front of the mirror, presumably to examine their new body decorations.

    For Marino, this is evidence of self-recognition, similar to what has been observed among great apes. She and other scientists even want to see the animals given the legal status of persons and granted “some fundamental rights,” such as the right to bodily integrity.

    None of this convinces Manger, who has a low opinion of Marino’s mirror experiment. “The visual acuity of dolphins is actually not good enough to be able to readily perceive such marks,” he says, and is critical of what he calls “serious deficiencies” in the design of the experiment.

    Stop Calling Them ‘Special’

    Manger is accustomed to his theories being rebuffed. When he questioned the special features of the whale brain in 2006, dolphin fans called upon Manger’s university to suspend him. But he merely wants to prevent the marine mammals from being anthropomorphized. Interpretations of behavior based on “personal bias” are not helpful, says Manger. “Conservation strategies should not be based on unrealistic expectations.”

    Gregg’s primary objective is also to debunk the myth. “We have to stop describing them as ‘special’,” says Gregg.

    It is becoming increasingly apparent that the marine mammals’ intellectual abilities are by no means unique in the animal kingdom. “Many other species-from sharks to earwigs to rats-lead equally wondrous and worthy lives,” he writes.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

  • The Second Cooing: Raising Passenger Pigeons from the Dead

    The Second Cooing: Raising Passenger Pigeons from the Dead

    The world has been without passenger pigeons since 1914. Now, scientists want to bring them back. Geneticist Ben Novak has embarked on the project and has begun collecting passenger pigeon DNA from natural history museums. His “de-extinction” efforts are not without critics.

    By Philip Bethge

    The eye sockets of the slender pigeon are filled with light-colored cotton. Its neck feathers shimmer in iridescent colors, and it has a russet chest and a slate-blue head. The yellowed paper tag attached to its left leg reads: “Coll. by Capt. Frank Goss, Neosho Falls, Kansas, July 4, 1875.”

    Ben Novak lifts up the stuffed bird to study the tag more closely. Then he returns the pigeon to a group of 11 other specimens of the same species, which are resting on their backs in a wooden drawer. “It’s easy to see just dead birds,” he says. “But imagine them alive, billions of birds. What would they look like in the sky?”

    Novak has an audacious plan. He wants to resurrect the passenger pigeon. Vast numbers of the birds once filled the skies over North America. But in 1914 Martha, the last of her species, died in a zoo in Cincinnati, Ohio.

    Novak, a researcher with the Long Now Foundation, a California think tank, wants to give the species a second chance. At the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley, Novak used a scalpel to slice small tissue samples from the red-painted toes of the passenger pigeons kept there. He hopes to isolate tiny bits of DNA from the samples and use them to assemble an entire genotype. His ultimate goal is the resurrection of the passenger pigeon.

    “It should be possible to reconstruct the entire genome of the passenger pigeon,” says Novak. “The species is one of the most promising candidates for reintroducing an extinct species.”

    The art of breathing new life into long-extinct species is in vogue among biologists. The Tasmanian devil, the wooly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the dodo and the gastric-breeding frog are all on the list of candidates for revival. To recover the genetic makeup of species, experts cut pieces of tissue from stuffed zoological rarities, pulverize pieces of bone or search in the freezers of their institutions for samples of extinct animals.

    The Dream of “De-Extinction”

    The laboratory techniques to create new life with bits of genetic material were pure fantasy in the past. But now scientists believe that the vision could become reality, step by step. Experts in bioengineering, zoologists, ethicists and conservationists recently met in Washington, DC for a public forum on “de-extinction.”

    “Extinct animals are the most endangered species of them all” because “there is hardly anything left but the DNA,” says Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, which co-hosted the meeting with the National Geographic Society. The current showpiece project in bioengineering is the rebirth of the passenger pigeon.

    The story of Ectopistes migratorius is a striking example of human hubris. When the Europeans arrived, the passenger pigeon was probably the most common bird on the American continent. The birds travelled in giant flocks, sometimes several hundred kilometers long. “The air was literally filled with pigeons,” naturalist John Audubon wrote in 1831, after observing the spectacle. “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse.”

    During their long migrations, the pigeons devastated entire forests. They descended upon their breeding grounds in eastern North America by the millions. There are historical accounts, for example, of a breeding ground in Wisconsin the size of Tokyo, where an estimated 136 million passenger pigeons came to breed. The noise was deafening.

    Living in a flock guaranteed the pigeons safety from predators. But the behavior also sealed their fate. When hunters discovered passenger pigeons as game birds, they were able to kill them with brutal efficiency, either by catching them in nets or shooting them with birdshot. They also placed pots of burning sulfur under trees until the birds, anesthetized by the vapors, dropped to the ground like overripe fruit.

    In some breeding areas, hunters slaughtered up to 50,000 passenger pigeons a day. The birds were shipped by the ton in freight cars and sold to be grilled at a few cents a dozen.

    Sequencing the Pigeon DNA

    By the time the establishment of a closed season for the birds was proposed in the US state of Minnesota in 1897, it was already too late. The last wild passenger pigeon was shot to death in 1900. Then, Pigeon Martha — named after Martha Washington, the country’s first First Lady — finally met her end at around noon on Sept. 1, 1914. She was the last surviving specimen in an unsuccessful program to breed the birds in captivity.

    Novak’s goal is to bring back the species, and he seems perfect for the job. In elementary school, he completed a project on the dodo, the extinct bird species from Mauritius. The passenger pigeon has fascinated him for years. “We caused the extinction of the species,” says the 26-year-old. “Now we have a moral obligation to bring them back.” To that end, the genetic detective is visiting natural history museums to take tissue samples from as many of the roughly 1,500 remaining samples of the skin and bones of the bird as possible.

    The passenger pigeon’s DNA has about 1.3 billion base pairs. Their sequence describes what the bird looks like, what its call sounds like and how it behaves. However, the animal’s genetic material in the museums is shredded into miniscule pieces, degraded by bacteria and contaminated with foreign DNA. But that doesn’t deter Novak. He and Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz, have begun to decode the bird’s DNA.

    The biologists have an ambitious plan. Bit by bit, they intend to match the DNA sequence of the passenger pigeon with that of its close relative, the band-tailed pigeon. Then they will essentially stamp out the divergent sequences from the band-tailed pigeon genome and replace them with synthesized passenger pigeon genetic material.

    With the help of the genome created in this fashion, the scientists will create primordial germ cells for the passenger pigeon, which will then be implanted into young embryos of an easy-to-breed pigeon species. The scientists hope that once they have grown and mated, the pigeons will lay eggs that will hatch into passenger pigeons.

    Chickens in a Duck’s Egg

    The procedure is not only complicated, but also largely untested. But, says Novak, “all the necessary steps are being studied intensively right now.” For instance, he explains, biologists have already managed to insert primordial germ cells from chickens into duck eggs. The drakes that emerged a short time later actually carried the sperm cells of chickens.

    Novak is already thinking beyond the hatching of the first passenger pigeon. Once a flock of the birds has been created, he plans to release them into the wild. “The passenger pigeon was a keystone species in the forest ecosystems,” says Novak, explaining that the destructive force of the flocks led to a radical rejuvenation of forests. Thick layers of pigeon droppings fertilized the soil, which soon led to new growth. “Passenger pigeons are the dance partners of the forest,” the scientist raves. And the “ballroom” still exists.

    But even if scientists can pull off this feat, does it really make sense to bring a long-extinct species back into the world? “Conservation biology’s priority must remain that of ensuring a future for species (currently) existing on the planet,” retired Professor Stanley Temple of the University of Wisconsin-Madison says critically. He fears that species extinction could be trivialized in the future. “People might say: ‘Can’t we let them go extinct and bring them back later?’”

    Zoologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University also criticizes the species resurrection projects, saying that they are “extremely expensive” and, in light of a global species crisis, downright absurd. “At this very moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect dwindling groups of existing African forest elephants from heavily armed poachers, and here we are talking about bringing back the wooly mammoth,” he says.

    Ehrenfeld also doesn’t believe that revived species would stand much of a chance of survival. “Who will care for the passenger pigeon chicks?” he asks, noting that parental care is “critical” for the development of young birds.

    Darkened Skies

    But Novak rejects the criticism. “Passenger pigeon parents were never incredibly involved in raising their young,” he says. He also plans to teach the chicks the basics of passenger pigeon life by dyeing carrier pigeons and essentially using them as flight controllers for the returning species.

    “We’ll ferry them with homing pigeons down to wintering grounds and back to the breeding area,” he says. “After a few years, we have passenger pigeons that fly the same (routes) as their forefathers.”

    When that happens, clouds of passenger pigeons will darken the skies once again, and another dream could be fulfilled for Novak. “Part of me would really love a passenger pigeon as a pet,” says the scientist. And perhaps, he adds, the pigeon zoo could even be expanded.

    There are 50 extinct pigeon species worldwide, says Novak. He has already earmarked three of them for resurrection: the Japanese silver-banded pigeon, the Choiseul crested pigeon and the thick-billed ground dove.

    “I am a pigeon nut,” says Novak.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

  • Preservation in a Petri Dish: Scientists Hope Cloning Will Save Endangered Animals

    Biotechnicians want to use cloning to save endangered species, but they are having only limited success. Critics say that the push toward a new era of wildlife conservation trivializes extinction and funding would be better spent on preserving animal habitats.

    By Philip Bethge

    A number of times each week, Martha Gómez creates new life. Today, she has set out to produce a South African black-footed cat. Using a razor-thin hollow needle under a microscope, the veterinarian injects a body cell from the endangered species into an enucleated egg cell taken from a house cat. Then she applies an electric current.

    “Nine volts of alternating current for five microseconds, then 21 volts of direct current for 35 microseconds,” says Gómez. Zap! The egg cell rapidly flexes from the electric surges. It bubbles inside the cell. Then everything is calm.

    “I will check in half an hour if the cells have fused properly,” says the researcher from the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans. The very next day, the cloned embryos will be implanted into the uterus of a common domestic house cat, which will serve as a surrogate mother for a foreign species.

    Biotechnicians like Gómez are hoping for a new era of wildlife conservation. In a bid to save endangered species, they tear down biological barriers and create embryos that contain cell material from two different species of mammals. Iberian lynxes, tigers, Ethiopian wolves and panda bears could all soon be carried to term by related surrogate mothers, and thus saved for future generations.

    “Interspecies cloning is an amazing tool to ensure that an endangered species carries on,” says Gómez. “We can’t wait until those species have disappeared.”

    High Mortality Rate

    The world’s first surrogate mother of a cloned animal from another species had udders and was named Bessie. In early 2001, the cow delivered a gaur via cesarean section in the United States. The endangered wild ox calf, native to Southeast Asia, had been cloned by the US company Advanced Cell Technology. But the gaur lived only briefly, dying of common dysentery within 48 hours of birth.

    Since then, researchers have made dozens of attempts at interspecies cloning — but with limited success. Whenever animals were brought into the world alive, they usually died shortly thereafter.

    In 2009, for instance, biotechnicians managed to clone a Pyrenean ibex. The egg was donated by a common domesticated goat. After the birth, the kid desperately gasped for air. Seven minutes later, it was dead.

    Many cloning experiments end this way. Geneticists have so far only been able to speculate on the reasons, but the string of failures actually tends to spur researchers to continue. Gómez, for instance, has specialized in cloning wildcats — and has been quite successful. Cloned African wildcats Ditteaux, Miles and Otis are living in enclosures at the Audubon Center animal facility, and snarl at anyone who approaches them. “They are doing perfectly fine,” says Gómez.

    In addition to African wildcats, the researcher has created embryos for sand cats, black-footed cats and rusty-spotted cats. The surrogate mothers and egg cell donors are domestic house cats, which are both easy to keep and have a reproductive biology that has been thoroughly studied. The animals in Gómez’s research department come under the knife a number of times each week.

    –> Read original article at DER SPIEGEL International

    Saving Genetic Material for the Future

    Today, for example, Olivia the cat is lying on her back on the operating table with her legs spread out. Using a scalpel, research assistant Michal Soosaar makes small incisions in the anesthetized cat’s smoothly shaved abdomen, inserting operating instruments and a miniature camera.

    A monitor immediately provides a view of Olivia’s insides. Soosaar uses tiny forceps to take hold of one of her ovaries. Surgeon Earle Pope then uses a needle to puncture one of the mature follicles. A bloody liquid flows from the cat’s body through a plastic hose and into a test tube.

    The liquid contains mature egg cells from Olivia. In an adjoining room, these circular cells are fished out of the liquid. Now, cell researcher Gómez takes over. Gazing through a microscope, she draws the genetic material from the egg cell and inserts a skin cell from a wildcat. As soon as the cells have merged and embryos have started to grow, they are implanted into the uterus of a surrogate mother.

    “This technology is a viable way to preserve genetic material for the future,” says Gómez. It’s very difficult to collect egg cells and sperm from rare wildcats, she explains, but much easier to obtain skin samples. She goes on to explain that embryos cloned in this manner could be stored for decades in liquid nitrogen and reactivated when needed.

    “By bringing cloning into the set of public policy instruments, we can protect more species, reduce economic costs of protection, or both,” writes US economist Casey Mulligan in a commentary in the New York Times. Mulligan argues that it’s now necessary to freeze the cell material of endangered species and develop technologies that will make it possible to bring the animals back to life after they have become extinct. “In some cases, it may be cheaper to save some DNA, and let a future, richer and perhaps more enthusiastic generation make its own copy of the species,” Mulligan writes.

    Critics Prefer Habitat Conservation

    Other researchers remain unconvinced, though. “The idea of cloning endangered species trivializes what extinction really is,” says zoologist Robert DeSalle from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He argues that the suggestion is a sign of today’s “Western throwaway society,” and says that “technology can’t solve the problem of large-scale extinction.”

    The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) also opposes cloning as a quick-fix solution. “Habitats cannot be cloned,” says WWF wildlife expert Sybille Klenzendorf. She says that a species is more than just the sum of its genes. “What use is a cloned animal if we have no more space where the species can live?” asks Klenzendorf. She also argues that cloning is far too expensive. “The money would be better invested on direct aid to maintain habitats,” she says.

    The poor success rate of less than seven percent is also an indication that the Petri dish is not about to become Noah’s ark, though. It takes hundreds of egg cells and dozens of surrogate mothers to create a single viable clone.

    Gómez admits that there are problems. Fusing cells from two different species often leads to huge mix-ups. Genes are activated or deactivated at the wrong time, and developmental stages become delayed.

    In the case of the black-footed cat, for instance, Gómez has so far had no success. “We were able to insert embryos into the uterus of a house cat,” she says. “But unfortunately, they didn’t develop.”

    No Limits

    But the researcher remains optimistic. She hopes that she will soon be able to transform body cells from her wildcats into pluripotent stem cells. Cells of this type could considerably simplify the cloning process because they can be used to create any type of body cell and can be easily multiplied. Other researchers have already succeeded in producing such stem cells from snow leopards and northern white rhinoceroses, which are both endangered species.

    There are in fact virtually no limits to the creative experimentation of today’s biotechnicians. Chinese researchers have fused body cells from panda bears with eggs cells taken from rabbits. But the resulting embryos died shortly thereafter — in the uteruses of house cats. Meanwhile, Japanese researchers have implanted skin cells from an unborn baby sei whale in enucleated egg cells taken from cattle and pigs.

    Other Japanese scientists are even trying to clone the woolly mammoth. Three years ago, cell nuclei from these hairy, tusked ice-age beasts were discovered in mammoth legs that have been frozen in the permafrost of Northeast Siberia for the past 15,000 years.

    In the laboratory, a team led by geneticist Akira Iritani injected cell nuclei from the prehistoric animal into enucleated egg cells from mice. The cell constructs only survived for a few hours, but Iritani remains optimistic that an elephant surrogate mother will soon bring to term the first mammoth clone.

    “From a scientific point of view it is possible,” says geneticist Gómez. But is there any point in doing it?

    The 51-year-old professor hesitates briefly. “I wouldn’t do it,” she admits. “I would prefer spending all the money on those species that haven’t completely vanished from the earth.”

    Translated from the German by Paul Cohen

    –> Read original article at DER SPIEGEL International

  • Papua New Guinea’s Royal Trophy: Are Collectors Key to Saving Giant Butterfly?

    Papua New Guinea is home to the world’s largest butterfly, but oil palm plantations are threatening the rare species’ habitat. Conservationists and local residents alike would like to save the species by lifting a ban on trade in the butterfly and selling it for thousands of dollars to collectors.

    By Philip Bethge

    The butterfly’s silhouette is sharply outlined against the morning sky. It flies high up into the air, beating its wings slowly, more like a bird than a butterfly. Its long, narrow wings are reminiscent of a swallow’s wings, as they shimmer in the sunlight like iridescent sequins.

    The insect makes a wide circle around Grace Juo’s small stilt house and lands on a bright red hibiscus blossom. In Jimun, the language of the indigenous people, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly is called a dadakul. It’s the world’s largest butterfly, with females attaining wingspans in excess of 25 centimeters (10 inches). “We are proud of our butterfly, and we take good care of it,” says Juo, glancing at the insect, which has now inserted its long proboscis into the flower.

    Juo, a Melanesian, lives in Kawowoki, a small village of huts on the Managalas Plateau in eastern Papua New Guinea. The volcanic soil here is dark and heavy, and the rainforest is an exuberant shade of green. The plateau is the last remaining habitat of any significant size of the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly, one of the world’s rarest insects. Some butterfly collectors would pay thousands of dollars for a single specimen. Local residents like Juo hope that they will soon benefit from the appetites of trophy-hungry collectors.

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    But multinational corporations believe that oil and natural gas deposits lie beneath the tropical paradise and the rainforest is threatened. Prospectors have also found copper and gold, and oil palm plantations are proliferating in the region.

    The temptations of the modern age are reaching Papua New Guinea, a country divided into hundreds of ethnic groups. It has a disastrous infrastructure, is wracked by tribal feuds and is at a high risk for disease epidemics. The history of the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing butterfly isn’t just the tale of a rare species. It also revolves around the question of how to go about protecting species in a developing country that is undergoing rapid change.

    The search for answers begins behind a barbed-wire fence in Port Moresby, the capital city. Armed guards provide security against the city’s criminal gangs, known as “rascals.” A rattling air-conditioner helps to stave off the heat and humidity in the office of the organization Partners with Melanesians.

    A Conservation Plan

    Kenn Mondiai and Rufus Mahuru are sitting at a dark table, explaining their rescue plan. “For the last seven years, we’ve been discussing ways to save the Managalas Plateau together with the local people,” says Mondiai, a heavy man with a round face and a moustache. The activist wants to transform the habitat of the giant butterflies into one of the largest conservation areas in Oceania. “The butterfly helps us convince the people to support this cause,” he says. “It symbolizes the diversity and value of our nature.”

    British naturalist Albert Meek was the first European to spot the giant butterfly in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea. Hired by the zoologist Lord Walter Rothschild, Meek explored the region in 1906 to find fresh trophies for Rothschild’s private zoological museum in the English town of Tring.

    One day, Meek discovered a butterfly flying at a high altitude, and promptly brought it down with a shotgun. The adventurer dissected the butterfly and sent it to England. Rothschild named the animal “Ornithoptera alexandrae,” in honor of Queen Alexandra, the wife of King Edward VII.

    Meek’s first specimen was a female. A year later, he captured a male near Popondetta in Papua New Guinea’s Oro Province. Today the town can be reached by taking a half-hour flight from the capital. This is followed by an exhausting trip by Land Cruiser on muddy trails.

    Several bridges were washed away in a recent flood, and the SUV struggles through hip-high water, even getting stuck in the sandy riverbed for a while. After a grueling, three-hour drive, we reach the Managalas Plateau, 36,000 hectares (about 140 square miles) of privately owned rainforest, populated by about 20,000 people from 10 different cultures, each with its own dialect.

    Tall trees, covered with vines and orchids, stand next to wild banana trees, coconut palms and breadfruit trees. The indigenous people grow plantains, yams, ginger, tomato and sweet potatoes on small plots of land.

    This is the realm of the giant butterfly. The male looks as if it were wearing a magnificent cloak of turquoise and green, covered with a layer of gold dust. In contrast, the wings of the larger female are a velvety black, interspersed with a few yellow and cream-colored patterns here and there.

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

    Unusual Reproductive Biology

    The threatened butterfly is vulnerable because of its unusual reproductive biology. The female lays its eggs exclusively on a poisonous vine called Aristolochia. Once the caterpillars have hatched, they ingest the plant’s toxic leaves, making them unpalatable for potential predators.

    The Aristolochia winds its way up into the crowns of jungle trees, which can grow to heights of up to 40 meters (131 feet). The butterfly would be lost without the vine, so propagating the Aristolochia is one of the main goals of conservationists.

    Conwel Nukara, 31, is the local head of the butterfly project and an expert in Aristolochia cultivation. His teeth are stained red from chewing betel nut, a stimulant commonly used by the indigenous peoples of the region. The Melanesian, walking barefoot, leads us into the garden behind his house, where he has set up a greenhouse made of green gauze.

    Aristolochia cuttings are planted in neat rows inside the greenhouse, and a number of the butterfly’s pitch-black caterpillars are already nibbling away at some of the leaves. Bright red appendages protrude from the animal’s body like poisonous barbs, while a yellow band runs around the middle of its body. “We want the animals to reproduce quickly,” says Nukara. “The larvae can develop and pupate in peace here. I release the butterflies once they’ve emerged.”

    A Threatened Habitat

    Nukara is trying to convince his entire community to raise butterflies and, as part of his campaign, he makes regular visits to schools in the area.

    A villager brings him a transparent plastic jar. Nukara carefully opens the lid, revealing a dead female butterfly.

    “We show these butterflies to our children,” he explains, spreading the insect’s wings, which have become frayed after being touched by many small hands. “We want them to discover at an early age what a treasure we have in this area.”

    He means it literally. One of the reasons local residents pay such conscientious attention to the giant butterfly is that they hope to make money with the creatures in the future. But that could prove to be difficult.

    The Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is on the red list of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and its international trade is banned. From the perspective of species conservationists, the butterfly satisfies all of the criteria to make it a critically endangered species: It lives in only one area, Oro Province, its numbers are unknown, and its habitat is increasingly disappearing.

    Farming Threatens Butterflies

    The problem is already obvious in the flatlands around the provincial capital Popondetta, which is surrounded by plantations of tightly packed oil palms. Local farmers also grow coffee and cocoa. Hardly any of the rainforest, together with the vines that the butterfly urgently needs, is still left.

    Eddie Malaisa is a wildlife officer with the Oro provincial government. He has been concerned with the giant butterfly for the last 25 years. “The butterfly population continues to drop,” he warns. “We only find two or three per month on the lowland plains.”

    On this particular day, Malaisa has an appointment with Paul Maliou, a manager with New Britain Palm Oil Limited (NBPOL). Large trucks are parked on the grounds in front of Maliou’s office, fully loaded with the red fruits of the oil palm. Across the street are long rows of the trees. When sunlight strikes the long palm fronds, they create shimmering patterns on the ground.

    NBPOL signs contracts directly with the farmers and sells their crops for them. Maliou’s job is to ensure that this is done in a sustainable way. “We assure that our operations don’t go into areas that affect the butterfly,” he asserts. But wildlife officer Malaisa begs to differ. There were once 27 butterfly reserves planned for the region, he says, and now “twenty of the areas went to palm oil.” Malaisa is left to manage only seven small reserves.

    The government employee seems helpless. His budget doesn’t even include money for a car, which he needs to patrol the reserves. Ironically, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is depicted on the flag of Oro Province.

    “The butterfly is an important part of our culture,” says Malaisa. But he too recognizes that farmers will only protect the insect if they can make some money with it.

    To address the problem, Malaisa has proposed compensating all landowners who preserve the insect’s habitat by leaving some areas unfarmed. He also favors lifting the ban on trade with the butterfly. “If the landowners don’t get anything out of protecting the butterfly, they will change the butterfly habitat to oil palm, cocoa or coffee and the butterfly will become extinct,” the wildlife officer warns.

    Could Lifting Ban on Trade Help Save Butterflies?

    A softening of the trade ban could indeed be the butterfly’s last chance. Buyers on the black market would pay up to $10,000 a specimen. If the trade were legalized, Malaisa argues, the farmers could charge several thousand dollars per insect. “What is worse?” he asks, “To legally trade a few butterflies or to watch the animal go extinct?”

    Do conservationists have to revise their thinking and accept that species like the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing can only be saved if they have a market value? Activist Kenn Mondiai of Partners with Melanesians also favors adopting a new strategy. “If we want to preserve the forest on the Managalas Plateau, and if no oil palms are to be grown there, then we have to propose alternative sources of income to local residents,” he says.

    It’s afternoon in Kawowoki by now, and half the village has gathered in front of Grace Juo’s house to look for a butterfly. The animal that was fluttering around her hut in the morning was a male. Now everyone hopes to be able to show the visitor from faraway Germany a female specimen of the royal butterfly.

    While the women roast bananas and sweet potatoes in the embers of a fire, the men dispense advice on how to stalk a butterfly. The insects are usually seen high above the treetops, but only when the sun shines. Otherwise the moisture from the forest would make their wings too heavy.

    But the weather is favorable today. Suddenly they all jump up and stare at the tops of nearby large trees. A female Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing is gliding through the warm air at a surprisingly fast pace. Grace Juo excitedly lifts her arms up to the sky.

    “The world has to know about our butterfly,” she says, and with shining eyes she follows the flight of the dadakul, “and then people will come here with bundles of dollars in their hands!”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • A Passion for Bigfoot: Hiking the Redwoods with California’s ‘Squatchers’

    Amateur researchers in the United States continue to eagerly search for the mysterious creature known as Bigfoot, staking out California’s redwood forests at night in their hunt for the elusive beast. Despite many claimed sightings, the existence of Sasquatch has never been proven. Yet that hasn’t stopped the obsessed from pursuing his giant footprints.

    The plaintive howl echoes through the forest sounding like a muffled “whoop, whoop, whoop.” Brandon Kiel pauses to listen in the dark, holding his breath for a moment before drawing air into his lungs.

    Once again, Kiel cups his hands in front of his mouth and imitates the call: “whoop, whoop, whoop.” The sound echoes back through the night, but all else is silence. Bigfoot isn’t answering.

    “The season is favorable,” Kiel says, with a touch of disappointment. “But it’s always possible that the animals are not in the area.” The blueberries are ripe, and the calves of the Roosevelt elk, one of Bigfoot’s favorite foods, haven’t matured yet.

    Kiel, 41, is a field researcher with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), a group based in the United States. The creature he is looking for is said to be clever, shy and stealthy — an expert at camouflaging itself. But here in the redwood forests of northern California, Kiel is hoping he’ll be blessed with hunter’s luck. He and 20 fellow field researchers are on an expedition to track down Bigfoot.

    The Believers

    Kiel calls the ominous creature “Squatch,” short for “Sasquatch,” a word in a Native American language that means “wild man of the woods”. The shaggy, mythical creature — half ape, half human — is believed to be powerfully built, reach heights of up to 2.5 meters (over 8 feet) and weigh up to 230 kilograms (500 pounds), and it allegedly spends its time skulking through the forests of North America. So far, there is no real evidence of the existence of this alleged primate species. Indeed, human beings have never actually gotten their hands on a Sasquatch, either dead or alive.

    Nevertheless, experienced “Squatchers” like Kiel are convinced that the animal exists. Even the Native Americans in the region had songs praising this mysterious miniature version of King Kong. Dozens of huge footprints have been found. Hundreds of eyewitnesses from the Canadian province of British Columbia all the way down to Florida — including police officers, park rangers and professors — claim to have laid eyes on the creature. The literature even mentions tufts of hair and a Bigfoot toenail found near the Grand Canyon.

    “I am convinced that the Sasquatch exists,” says British Columbia wildlife biologist John Bindernagel. For years, Bindernagel has put his academic reputation on the line by not only believing in Sasquatch, but also studying it. “I estimate the population of the animal to be several thousand at least,” says Bindernagel, who has already written several books on Bigfoot.

    Bindernagel also has a theory on how Bigfoot reached the American wilderness. He speculates that Gigantopithecus, an extinct genus of giant ape, once migrated from Asia across the same land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait that the first humans are believed to have crossed to reach North America.

    The Squatchers

    Bigfoot is believed to be particularly prevalent in the area around the town of Klamath, in northern California, where a group of adventurous souls has gathered on this October day. Camouflage clothing is de rigueur, and the mood is euphoric. The most avid members of the group have studied the BFRO’s expedition handbook, which informs readers to expect “type 1” inspections: a visit by “one or more” Bigfoots to the tent camp while everyone is sleeping, “most often between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.”

    No one in the group questions whether the creature exists. Instead, they discuss its biology. The Squatch is “mainly nocturnal,” Kiel says. It lives in groups and is “stinky, musky.” Its diet includes “roots, slugs, frogs, deer, elk, fish, onions and berries.” It literally licks its fingers after eating a meal of skunk cabbage.

    Kiel has a round face with a vandyke beard, and he keeps his hair cropped short. When asked whether he has ever encountered the creature, he says: “Sure, just a couple of weeks ago.”

    In late July, he explains, the Squatchers gathered at Bluff Creek, less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) east across the mountains. “We had walked about a mile and a half, when someone suddenly said: ‘There’s a Sasquatch sitting by the side of the road,’” Kiel recounts. “I didn’t believe him, so I asked: ‘Is it a bear?’ But he was adamant.”

    Kiel grabbed an infrared camera and peered through the viewfinder. “And, sure enough,” he says, “there was the heat signature of a very large animal with its back to us, without a neck, with massively broad shoulders and a pointy head. You could see it from the waist up. I was totally flabbergasted.” Kiel claims that the creature then turned around and looked at him twice. The intimate exchange of glances lasted about 15 minutes. Then Kiel, the expedition leader, decided to pull out. “I wanted to be respectful,” he says.

    The area around Bluff Creek is well known among Bigfoot aficionados. It was where, on Oct. 20, 1967, a legendary amateur film was shot depicting a massive, hairy beast strolling through a riverbed for a few seconds.

    Film experts — and even special-effects artists working for the Disney corporation — have repeatedly scrutinized the blurred, grainy footage. But the evidence remains unclear. Is the creature a person in an ape suit or a world sensation of cryptozoology, the search for animals whose existence has yet to be proven? The man who shot the video, a rodeo rider named Roger Patterson, continued to insist that the film was authentic up until his death in 1972.

    At the BFRO camp in California, at any rate, no one questions the authenticity of the Patterson video. In fact, almost everyone in the group claims to have already seen a Bigfoot at least once. “I was elk hunting”, says Rey Lopez, a government employee who lives near Sacramento. “At first I thought it was another hunter, but then I realized that it was a Sasquatch with whitish hair.”

    Alleged Proof

    We pile into Lopez’s large pickup truck and drive out into the night. After a few miles, he stops the truck on a parking lot in the middle of the woods. The group uses headlamps with red lenses to avoid startling the beast. After a brief walkie-talkie test, everyone is ready to go out “Squatching,” the nightly foray into Bigfoot territory.

    We spend the next few hours whispering and stumbling through the same woods in which parts of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” were filmed. The undergrowth is wet, and the red light is barely strong enough to illuminate annoying roots poking out of the ground. Kiel, the expedition’s leader, stops every once in a while and sends his “whoop” calls out into the night. Sometimes he also blows on a high-pitched whistle or hits trees with a large “Squatch knocker” — in layman’s terms, a branch — hoping the hollow sound might attract Bigfoot.

    Meanwhile, Robert Collier, who lives near Los Angeles, continues to observe everything with his night-vision goggles, which he proudly points out are “military grade.” His eyes look green in the device’s light.

    The whole production has only one purpose: to somehow convince the woodland beast to communicate with the group. “Bigfoots have been known to answer us,” says Kiel. “We experience time and again that rocks are thrown at us.” He also points out that “wood-knocks,” “whoops” and “screams” are regularly heard echoing from the undergrowth.

    In fact, noisy audio recordings bear witness to the creature’s supposed vocabulary, including sounds like blood-curdling screams and obscure-sounding jibberish. Particularly avid Squatchers say they’ve managed to make out bits of Russian and ancient Chinese in the audio soup.

    Even some of the creature’s genetic material is allegedly in circulation. Kiel claims that Melba Ketchum, a veterinarian based in Timpson, Texas, has analyzed dozens of hair samples, but that the results of her research have yet to be published. Nevertheless, there are rumors in the community that tissue from two dead Bigfoots is in refrigerated storage at Ketchum’s laboratory.

    Ketchum declines to comment, though, and the Squatchers have waited in vain for her to make an appearance at their annual Bigfoot conferences, which regularly attract several hundred attendees.

    ‘A Good Excuse to Go Camping’

    Does all of this sound crazy? Sure it does. And, yet, there are some questions that remain unanswered. For example, the 1992 discovery of a new bovine species, the Saola, in the jungles of Southeast Asia has given the Squatchers hope. The Saola lives in an area that is no less densely populated than many of the forested areas in the United States.

    Couldn’t it be possible that a shrewd giant ape has been hiding undiscovered in the forests of North America for centuries?

    “It’s a good excuse to go camping,” says Bill Brewer, who harbors a healthy degree of skepticism despite being a BFRO member. Squatching, he says, also happens to be a lot of fun.

    Perhaps this explains why these hikers in the northern California night seem undaunted in their enthusiasm, even though the woods remain stubbornly silent until the early morning hours. But at least that gives them a good reason to come back soon.

    And it might also be that the Squatchers don’t even want to find the mysterious, broad-shouldered creature after all.

    “I like the romantic notion of our search, this wonderful gray area,” Kiel says. If Bigfoot is actually discovered one day, he notes: “Then all of this will be over.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (->read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

     

  • Help for the Disabled: Trained Monkeys Proving Trusty Companions for Those in Need

    Specially-trained Capuchin monkeys in the US are helping physically disabled people with the housework by performing tasks such as removing garbage, fetching the telephone or switching on the microwave. The furry companions are also helping paraplegics cope with loneliness.

    It’s her small hands that make Minnie especially useful. Hairy and slender, with slim fingers and black nails, the Capuchin monkey’s hands are just right for twisting open a bottle of juice or fetching the telephone. And when Craig Cook’s head itches, Minnie comes and scratches it until he feels better.

    “She is more human than you would think,” Cook says. The 44-year-old American, who has been paraplegic for more than 14 years, runs his stiff fingers lovingly through Minnie’s fur as she cuddles on his lap, observing his guest curiously with her large, brown eyes. Then the monkey jumps up and crosses the kitchen of Cook’s bungalow at a wild run, screeching and leaping, a bundle of energy wrapped up in dark brown fur.

    “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Cook says, his eyes shining. He has shared his bungalow here in La Habra, near Los Angeles, with the 30-year-old Capuchin monkey for the past six years. They watch Los Angeles Angels baseball games on TV together, or enjoy the California sun from the patio. And when Cook has “one of those bad days,” it’s Minnie who manages to make him laugh.

    “It’s wonderful to have an animal like that at home,” Cook says. A former engineer and American football quarterback, he broke his spine in a car accident. He’s very lucky to have Minnie — there are only 45 Capuchin monkeys like her in the entire US, and Minnie is one of the best.

    Monkey School

    Minnie spent several years in training at the Monkey College, a facility run by a Boston-based aid organization called Helping Hands. This unusual school trains monkeys as household assistants and life partners for paralyzed people — with great success. “The Capuchin monkeys provide independence and the gift of joy and companionship to the recipients, says Helping Hands employee Andrea Rothfelder. “These animals are very affectionate and loving; a lot of recipients call it a little miracle when their monkey moves in with them.”

    Director of training Alison Payne describes the Monkey College as a “mixture of pre-school and zoo.” Helping Hands has a total of 180 monkeys, 50 of them currently being trained in Boston. Here in the three-story center, the monkeys practice using light switches, drawers, bottles and CD players. They learn the actions first in a room with only Spartan furnishings; later they practice in a “teaching apartment” outfitted with a wheelchair, bed, bookshelf and kitchenette.

    Trainers drill the monkeys on around 30 commands, including “fetch,” for retrieving an object, and “trash,” for taking something to the garbage can. “Push” might mean the monkey should shut the refrigerator door, while “open” would achieve the opposite. Motivation for learning tasks is provided with peanut butter and spray can whipped cream.

    “The monkeys are naturally curious,” Payne says. “We try to expand their attention space.” Still, the monkeys are also allowed some time off. Today Chichi and Jessica are romping around the playroom, chasing bubbles. For their classmate Tricia, it’s bath day. Trainer Jennifer Evans has filled the kitchen sink with a lukewarm bubble bath, where Tricia is splashing about, poking her soaking wet head over the edge. A few minutes later, the trainer comes over to rub her dry.

    “They’re very much like two-year-olds,” Payne says. Actually, the monkeys are between eight and 10, the ideal age range for drilling and training, when they start at the Monkey College. First, they get used to people by living in foster families. Next come two to four years of training. Once they’re housetrained, they can move in with a disabled person.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    When Cook began his life together with Minnie, the evening that ruined his life was already several years behind him. On January 12, 1996, the engineer met a colleague for dinner in Los Angeles. The two left the restaurant shortly before midnight. “It was a mild evening, and Tyler wanted to take a drive in my convertible,” Cook recalls. As they sped down the highway, Cook’s colleague lost control of the 300-horsepower car. The vehicle flipped over and slid down an embankment. Cook’s spine snapped instantly; his colleague was barely hurt.

    Cook lost everything that day — his job; his girlfriend, who soon moved out; but above all control over his own body. Unable to adjust to his new life, he found himself sliding into depression. But when a friend heard of Helping Hands, Cook contacted the organization and sent an application video. A couple of months later, Minnie entered his life.

    “When the trainers came out here, they stayed for about a week,” he recalls. “It was only then that she accepted me as the new king.” That’s the way of Capuchin monkeys — they live in groups and choose their leaders with care.

    Today, Cook and Minnie are inseparable. “Spoon,” Cook says and the monkey fetches one from the silverware drawer. “Sun” — Minnie turns on the light. “Can you do hand?” — Minnie hoists her master’s arm, which has slipped down from the armrest. He uses that hand to operate his wheelchair.

    “Minnie can be lifesaving for me,” Cook says. One time, his wheelchair got stuck on the patio as the sun was going down. Cook knew he was facing an entire night sitting in the dark, freezing and getting wet, until his caregiver arrived in the morning. He called Minnie, who brought his telephone. An hour later, help was there. “I had tears in my eyes,” Cook says.

    “The monkeys can be a lifeline; however, the most important thing of all is the companionship that they bring and this unconditional love,” says director of training Payne. “Suddenly you have this little monkey person at home who just thinks that you are the coolest thing ever.”

    ‘They Alleviate the Pain and the Loneliness’

    Helping Hands employees tell the story of a veteran who lost both his legs in Iraq. “He says that the monkey is the only one who takes him the way he is and who doesn’t notice that he hasn’t any legs,” Rothfelder says. The monkeys could never take the place of a full-time caregiver, “but they allieviate both the pain and the loneliness of being home alone and also provide some tasks in the house.”

    It’s hardly surprising that the clever Capuchin monkeys are in hot demand, but Helping Hands is only able to provide between six and eight of the monkeys to paralyzed individuals each year. It costs the organization around $40,000 (€30,500) to train a single monkey, all of which must come from donations. The service is free for the patients.

    Craig Cook can count himself lucky — his Minnie has granted him a new life. He remembers clearly the moment when the monkey jumped onto his shoulder for the first time, after five months together. “Suddenly she rubbed her fingers through the back of my hair,” he says. “That’s the ultimate sign of affection.”

    Cook estimates Minnie could live another 15 years, but he’s loath to think beyond that point. The monkey won a place in his heart long ago.

    “Minnie, are you OK?” — these are the words he’ll use to call the monkey tonight, after the caregiver has helped him into bed. And Minnie will answer him, from her cage in the living room, where she rolls herself up beneath a small, light blue blanket.

    “And she will go toot toot toot,” Cook says. Then he gives a small smile and explains: “That means, ‘Everything is all right.’”

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • The Twilight Saga: Duck-billed Platypuses are Shift Workers

    The Twilight Saga: Duck-billed Platypuses are Shift Workers

    If you are a male duck-billed platypus, all that matters is what the other guys do. Strategies to handle the competition are far more variable then previously thought.

    In a new paper in the Journal of Mammalogy, Philip Bethge and colleagues from the University of Tasmanias’ Department of Zoology report, that duck-billed platypuses use a variety of measures to avoid encounters with their peers, including the complex behavior of temporarily following the lunar cycle. This is even more true in the mating season when males try to bully their fellows in order to monopolize females.

    Bethge and fellow Zoologists Sarah Munks, Helen Otley and Stewart Nicol observed platypuses at Lake Lea, a subalpine lake in the remote Tasmanian Highlands. They equipped the animals with data-loggers recording their foraging activity for up to six weeks.

    Results show that platypuses are continuously foraging for up to 30 hour. Previous research shows that they constantly dive during this time with each dive lasting for approximately 30 seconds. Although most animals including dominant males were – as expected – active at nights, at least a third of them foraged during the day or in a very irregular manner. This was observed in particular in young male individuals.

    “It seems that inferior males try to avoid encounters with their dominant conspecifics at all costs”, reports Bethge. “This is a wonderful example of time sharing in the animal kingdom: platypuses, and in particular male platypuses, seem to work in shifts – mainly to be on their own while hunting for prey.”

    Bethge P, Munks S, Otley H, Nicol S (2009) Activity Patterns and Sharing Of Time and Space of Platypuses, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, in a Subalpine Tasmanian Lake. Journal of Mammalogy, 90(6): 1350-1356 (PDF)