Philip Bethge

Tag: reintroduction

  • 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

  • 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

  • European Wildlife: Bringing the Sturgeon Back to Germany

    Biologists want to repopulate German rivers with sturgeon. A test batch of aquarium-raised fish has already been re-introduced and a school of fish will likely be released in the Oder River this autumn.

    By Philip Bethge

    Seen from above, the young sturgeon resemble little prehistoric sharks. They splay their rounded fins as if they were little wings and glide elegantly through the water using their pointed tails. The only things that don’t seem to fit into the picture are the yellow plastic bands attached to their angular dorsal fins.

    “We’ve marked the fish so we can identify them later,” says Frank Kirschbaum as he adeptly scoops one of the sturgeon from the water and runs his finger over its archaic-looking bone plates, which line the narrow, 30 centimeter (12 inch) body like an ornamental strip. The sturgeon gasping for oxygen in Kirschbaum’s hand is one year old. In a few weeks, it may be drawing oxygen from the Oder River.

    Kirschbaum is a fish specialist at Berlin’s Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). He’s pursuing an ambitious species-protection project along with his colleague Jörn Gessner and Polish researchers. “We’re planning Europe’s largest practical experiment in sturgeon re-population,” Gessner says. The scientists want to set some 6,000 young fish free in the Oder by 2008. That would herald the return of sturgeon to Germany’s rivers.

    “You could find sturgeon virtually anywhere in this country as recently as a century ago,” says Henning von Nordheim from Germany’s Federal Nature Conservation Agency, which has invested about €2 million ($2.6 million) in the sturgeon program. “The sturgeon is the product of 200 million years of natural history, (and) we want this charismatic animal to feel at home in our rivers again.”

    A primordial fish

    The sturgeon is one of those rare creatures that have survived virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. Most of the sleek, bony-sided fish spend the greater part of their lives in the sea, like salmon, and migrate upriver only to mate. They’re threatened with extinction worldwide, but 27 varieties of sturgeon still live in the world’s rivers, including the Hausen variety, which can weigh up to a ton and yields the best Russian caviar.

    The Elbe, the Weser, the Oder and other German rivers feeding the North Sea and the Baltic once belonged to the fish’s habitat. As recently as 1888 fishermen on the Elbe managed to catch about 3,500 sturgeon, including massive specimens weighing between 60 and 70 kilograms, or 132 and 154 pounds. (The fish can reach a length of up to six meters, or 20 feet.) But the 20th century thinned their population. Factories and sewage from the cities polluted the rivers; modern weirs prevented the fish from reaching their spawning grounds. The last German sturgeon was seen in the Eider, a small river in Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein region, in 1969. Since then, sturgeon has been considered extinct in Germany.

    Now researchers at Berlin’s IGB want the fish repatriated. This project looks promising, at least along the Oder, which feeds the Baltic Sea. The Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrhyncus) migrated to the Baltic about 1,000 years ago, displacing the European variety, and adopted the river between Germany and Poland as its natural home. This proved to be a stroke of luck for the biologists, because Atlantic sturgeon still live in the tens of thousands in North America.

    The young fish at the IGB in Berlin were imported from across the Atlantic. They travelled to Europe via Canada as fertilized eggs. In some cases the scientists even transported fully grown sturgeon: Twenty of the massive gilled creatures flew to Frankfurt airport on Air Canada last April. IGB researchers had caught them in St. John’s River in southern Canada, then transported them to Halifax airport across a distance of 600 kilometers (373 miles).

    Back from extinction

    These fish now swim in aquariums in the Regional Center for Agriculture and Fishery in the Baltic Sea town of Born. They’ve grown to a length of almost two meters (6.6 feet). “We hope they’ll soon be ready to spawn,” says Gessner. “Then we want to start breeding young sturgeon for the Oder ourselves.”

    Repopulating the Elbe and Weser Rivers will be more difficult. Both North Sea tributaries were once dominated by the European variety of sturgeon (Acipenser sturio). Unlike its Atlantic counterpart, the European variety is now extremely rare. The Gironde River, near Bordeaux, France, is the only place where an estimated 2,000 of the European variety still exist. “That’s the only variety suitable for repopulating the North Sea tributaries,” says Kirschbaum. “Anything else would mean falsifying the historical situation.”

    Kirschbaum imported some of these fish from France in 1996. Sixteen adult sturgeon born in the Gironde now populate the IGB aquariums. Taking care of these demanding creatures is no easy task, though; they refuse to touch regular food. Every day, Kirschbaum has to feed his primordial gourmets five kilograms (11 pounds) of imported French prawns.

    But it pays off. Kirschbaum discovered eggs in one of his female sturgeon early this year. The discovery was a sensation. It’s been 10 years since scientists last saw young sturgeon in the Gironde. “If we can breed them, that would be an enormous success,” says Kirschbaum. Repopulating the Elbe, at least in theory, would then be possible. The question is whether migrant fish can navigate the river. “There’s a weir near the town of Geesthacht on the Elbe,” Kirschbaum says. The weir blocks the route the sturgeon would follow to reach their spawning ground. The weir, in fact, was built to let salmon cross it. “But it won’t work for sturgeon,” says Kirschbaum.

    Not enough for caviar

    So the scientists, for now, have pinned their hopes on the Oder. They consider the river sufficiently unspoiled to attempt repopulation. “Since 1997, we’ve done research to find out whether there still are spawning grounds in the Oder or any of its tributaries,” says Gessner. The researchers found a number of gravelly sections of riverbed provided with a strong current, the kind sturgeon need to deposit their eggs — most of them in the Polish river Warta. Local fishermen have been informed, too: Proposals have been developed to change their net-pulling techniques in order to avoid trapping the sturgeon, which live mainly close to the river bottom.

    The researchers eventually want to attach ultrasonic devices to all these fish and follow them by boat. They’ve tested the method in the Peene, a little river in West Pomerania — since July they’ve observed the behavior of 15 young, ultrasonic-equipped sturgeon there.

    Now the IGB scientists are waiting for the right moment to release sturgeon into the Oder. They had been focused on a date in April, but the plan fell through at the last minute because of a political quarrel over expanding the river’s usefulness as a commercial waterway.

    Now, though, the signs are favorable again. Some sturgeon could be placed in the Oder as part of preliminary tests in late fall. The river itself would stand to benefit, say the biologists. “If we restore the sturgeon’s habitat, the whole ecosystem will improve,” says Kirschbaum. Typical river fish such as barbs and rock herring could follow the sturgeon back to the Oder.

    But it will take some time before the project’s success can be gauged. Sturgeon need 10 to 15 years to grow sexually mature. Only then can they return to their native rivers to spawn. “It would be a sensation if even a few of those fish survive that long and then find their way back to the Oder,” says Gessner.

    Anyone looking forward to buying Baltic Sea caviar, though, will be disappointed. Sturgeon roe from Europe used to be a gourmet specialty, Gessner admits — “but if some of our sturgeon come back and a fisher catches one of them, that will hardly be enough to give birth to a new industry.”

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Bearded Vultures Re-introduced to the Alps: The Return of the Bone Crusher

    In the 19th century, the Bearded Vulture had a bad press. It was accused of carrying off and devouring lambs and even small children. Alpine authorities declared open season on the bird and the last one was shot in 1913. But the vulture, which is capable of digesting large bones, is back thanks to a successful and costly 20-year program of introducing bred birds into the wild.

    By Philip Bethge

    Portobello and Tauernwand aren’t yet comfortable with their new-found freedom. The two bearded vultures, born and bred in captivity, seem wary as they slowly ascend to a height of 1,500 meters above the Seebachtal valley in the Austrian Alps.

    Half an hour earlier rangers had hauled the birds up the mountain in wooden crates to their new home in a prepared nest. The birds are part of Europe’s longest-running wildlife re-introduction scheme. Since 1986 zoologists in Austria, Italy, France and Switzerland have released 144 bearded vultures to the Alps.

    They recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of the project. “Progress so far has been very pleasing,” said Hans Frey of Vienna’s Veterinary University who is coordinating the program. “The project proves that with persistence the re-introduction of wild animals can actually work.”

    The bird doesn’t look like a typical vulture and is often mistaken for a Golden Eagle. It has a conspicuous red circle around the eyes and a wingspan of around 2.7 meters. A black strip over the eyes and the bristles at the base of the beak form the distinctive appearance of a beard.

    Character assassination wiped out the Bearded Vulture in the Alps in the 19th century. The local population blamed the scavenger for the loss of lambs, goats and even small children. Hunters were offered rewards for shooting them and the last vulture living in the alps is believed to have been shot in 1913 in the Italian Aosta valley.

    “The Bearded Vulture unfortunately never had a very good image,” said Frey, adding that it didn’t reserve its reputation because the birds aren’t dangerous to living animals.

    Bone Crusher

    The bird feeds mainly on the bleached bones of dead goats and sheep. If the bones are too big, it drops them 50 to 80 meters onto plates of rock to shatter them, and eats the splinters. No other animal is capable of digesting bone which means that the Bearded Vulture has no competitors for its food. Its powerful stomach acids can dissolve even large bones.

    By the beginning of the 20th century the “Bone Crusher” was virtually extinct in the wild in Europe. Then in the 1970s zoologists decided to try to re-introduce the bird to the Alps. “We managed to breed the birds again,” said Frey, who manages Europe’s largest vulture breeding station at Haringsee near Vienna.

    In 1986 the first four Bearded Vultures were released in the Hohe Tauern national park. Since then birds have also been released in Switzerland’s Engadin region, Italy’s Stilfser Joch national park, and in the French Haute Savoie region, as well as the Maritime Alps. In 1997 the first of these birds bred and 33 chicks have been born in the wild so far.

    “Conditions for Bearded Vultures are better now than 100 years ago,” said Wolfgang Fremuth of Frankfurt’s Zoological Society which co-financed the project. Less hunting takes place in the Alps, which means that there is more wildlife. And another problem appears to have been solved. “We were surprised, but the population has embraced the Bearded Vulture to an incredible extent.”

    Some 200 guests braved rainy weather to witness the release of Portobello and Tauernwind, which marked the 20th anniversary of the re-introduction program. Even local hunter Ferdinand Gorton praised the project. He said there had initially been some resistance to it. “But if one explains it well it becomes understandable even to the most simple hunter,” he said.

    Natural garbage collectors

    “The return of the vulture means farmers won’t have to remove dead animals,” said Frey. In addition, many local hoteliers have discovered the bird as a tourist attraction. Biologists see other advantages. “Bearded Vultures together with other types of vultures are a natural form of waste disposal and are important for the ecosystem of the mountains,” said Fremuth. Humans alone were to blame for their disappearance. “We have a duty to bring them back.”

    The plan could work. Around 100 of the released birds are known to have remained in the Alps. Almost 5,000 unpaid helpers regularly document their whereabouts.

    Newcomers Portobello and Tauernwind are constantly monitored. They will soon leave the Seebachtal valley. Biologists hope that in four to six years they will return to the Hohen Tauern range to breed.

    At that point the time may have come to stop the program and leave the Bearded Vulture population alone. “We hope we will be able to stop releasing animals from 2010 because the population is regenerating itself,” said Frey. The project will have spent around €100,000 on each new vulture.

    Frey recommends that future generations show more foresight. “Rendering a species extinct only to re-introduce it later is incredibly expensive. Wildlife protection pays off — it’s always cheaper in the end.”

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Brown Bears in the Alps: The Great Bear Comeback

    The brown bear is returning to the mountains of Central Europe, thanks to resettlement projects in Italy, Austria and France. Biologists celebrate the animals’ return as a success in endangered species protection. But the general population has mixed feelings about welcoming back the predator.

    By Philip Bethge

    It was Christina Kröll’s dog which showed the first signs of agitation. Only minutes later did she herself catch a glimpse of the massive creature that had frightened her pet.

    Kröll, the wife of a butcher from the town of Nauders near Italy’s Resia Pass, says that she saw the bear standing on a forest path less than 30 meters (about 100 feet) away as she walked her collie early one summer evening. The bear followed the 53-year-old woman and her pet for about 15 minutes, until Kröll reached the vehicle that she believes saved her. “I was afraid — to the point of panic,” says Kröll. “The only thing between me and the bear was the glass windshield in my car.”

    Kröll spotted the brown bear in August, and news of the encounter quickly spread throughout the town. But Nauders, it turns out, was merely a stop-over for this shaggy troublemaker. The young bear Kröll saw on the forest path, since named “Lumpaz,” has been making his way through a region bounded by three countries, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, for the past three months, and an excited local population has been following his every move.

    In late July, the animal became the first bear to step onto Swiss soil in a hundred years when he strolled into the Münstertal, greeted by dozens of curious bystanders. A few of the tourists were even foolish enough to move within a few meters of this large predator. The Zürich tabloid Blick ran a cover story entitled “Yes, the bear is back!” But, on a more cautionary note, the paper asked “Just how dangerous is our brown bear?”

    Friend or foe?

    The story of Lumpaz is symbolic of the dilemma facing Central Europe’s biggest predator. The animal, which can weigh up to 300 kilograms (662 pounds), causes equal measures of euphoria and horror the minute it is spotted — not surprising given that in these areas human beings were the ones to drive it out in the first place.

    Outside of Russia, there are still about 14,000 bears in Europe, mostly in Romania and the Balkans. But “ursus arctos arctos,” the European brown bear, is making a comeback elsewhere in Central Europe too, aided by resettlement projects in Austria, Italy and France. In particular, the creature is making his way back into the forests of some of the continent’s hot spots for mountain tourism – such as Austria’s Northern Limestone Alps, Italy’s Dolomites and the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain.

    While biologists see the brown bear’s return as a success story, it has also revived the age-old conflict between man and beast. What happens when the first hiker is killed by a bear? How will shepherds, beekeepers and hunters react to the bears? And why should today’s Europeans make room for a predator that, only a hundred years ago, frequently met a horrible death in steel traps?

    Bear experts from all over the world recently came together at the 16th International Bear Conference on Italy’s Lake Garda to discuss these issues. (Meanwhile, an Austrian research center has just completed a long study on European brown bears sexual habits.) Appropriately clad in multifunctional trousers and outdoor shirts, the delegates, sipping Bardolino and snacking on Pizza Romano, discussed such topics as the infanticide common among male bears and the use of barbed wire to obtain hair samples. But the issue at the top of everyone’s agenda was the “human dimension.” “Some people see bears as sexy and charismatic,” says Alistair Bath of the Large Carnivore Initiative of Europe, “but for others they are evil, blood-thirsty predators.” For Bath, the central issue is this: “Just how much of the wild are people willing to accept?”

    Just knowing that this powerful animal has been sighted somewhere in the area can turn a mountain hike into a completely different out-of-doors experience. The Italian nature park Adamello Brenta is less than 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) north of Lake Garda. From the Dolomite village Madonna di Campiglio, a funicular takes you up to the Grosté Pass, at an altitude of 2,450 meters (8,038 feet), from where you hike down into the Tovel Valley — to a spot surrounded by the jagged walls of the Brenta Massif. “We released the animals down there,” says Claudio Groff, pointing into the valley. “And now they walk across this pass at night.”

    Groff is the bear expert for Trento’s regional government. Since 1999, the Italian has been leading a team with only one goal: to resettle the brown bear in the Italian Alps. In 1950, there were still about 70 of the creatures living in Trentino. By the 1990s, that number had dwindled to three older males. “That meant, of course, that offspring were out of the question,” says Groff. The scientists decided to address the problem with resettlement. They released “Masun” and “Kirka” in 1999, “Daniza,” “Jose” and “Irma” a year later and, finally, “Gasper,” “Brenta,” “Maya,” “Jurka” and “Vida.”

    The ten animals were lured into baited traps in Slovenia, which has a thriving bear population, and were then trucked to the Adamello Brenta Park. The bear museum in nearby Spormaggiore documented their arrival on video. Like drunken sailors on shore leave, the brown bears stagger from their shipping crate into their new environment. After briefly scenting the weather, they head into the underbrush. “The resettlement has been a great success,” says Groff. “At least twelve cubs have been born already.”

    The excitement of the wild

    Hiking through bear territory is an incredible feeling. It’s a five-hour walk from the Grosté Pass down to shimmering Lago di Tovel. Pulses quicken as the forest becomes more dense closer to the lake. After all, a bear could emerge from the underbrush at any time. What then? “Don’t run away,” as experts advise? And if attacked, “lie on the ground, stomach-down” and “play dead?”

    “Fear is a completely normal reaction,” says Groff, “the bear is bigger, faster and stronger than we are.” But human beings are not part of this predator’s normal fare. “There hasn’t been a single known death in Italy, Spain or Austria in the last 100 years,” Groff adds. Besides, the animal’s diet is 75% vegetarian. But is that enough to calm jittery nerves?

    Trentino Alto Adige is in the heart of ancient bear country. “Orso bruno,” the brown bear, appears 49 times in the local place names. But reference to the bear is far from flattery, and indeed was once the expression of a bitter enmity. Historically documented bounties for the bear and faded photos of celebrated teams of hunters, the bear’s skin at their feet, are witness to the South Tyroleans’ proud victory over this powerful animal. And now, once again, the furry animals are managing to reignite old grudges.

    According to the Trento provincial government, there have been more than 250 reported incidents of bears attacking livestock, raiding beehives or scaring humans since 1999. “The problems were especially serious this year, when a few bears went into towns,” says Groff. “Jurka,” a female, has particularly worried scientists. She has developed a taste for chickens and tasty garbage, both available mainly near towns and villages. “Many people want us to get rid of this animal,” says Groff, “but Jurka is one of the few females who produces cubs regularly. Within the space of only one year, she’s already been seen with two new cubs.”

    A 21-member bear management team is on hand to prevent the conflict from escalating. Employees of Italy’s forest police shoot at overly aggressive bears with rubber bullets to “frighten” them. The provincial government pays for mobile electric fences to protect sheep herds in their Alpine meadows at night. Shepherds and beekeepers already receive financial reimbursement. The Italians have paid almost €160,000 in compensation since 1999.

    “Resettling bears is very expensive and has been causing problems for decades,” says Piero Genovesi of the Italian wildlife conservation organization, Istituto Nazionale per la Fauna Selvatica. According to Genovesi, a population is only considered stable once it reaches about 50 animals. For this reason, Genovesi fears, the Trentino bears would have to be managed intensively for up to 80 years, and even then success is not a guarantee. The delicate balance between bears and humans could swing back at any time.

    Take Austria, for example. For the past 15 years, Austrian biologists have been trying to bring back the brown bear. But they remain “miles away” from a “stable situation,” reports Georg Rauer of the Austrian World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Rauer was there when, 16 years ago, the Austrian bear saga began on a hopeful note when scientists brought in a female bear, “Mira.” Two years later, she gave birth to two cubs, fathered by the legendary “Ötscher bear,” which had entered Austria from Slovenia back in the summer of 1972. Two more bears were soon resettled in Austria, and the project seemed to be heading in the right direction. Just five years ago, the Austrians were able to proudly count a brown bear population of 25 to 30 animals.

    An attorney for bears

    But their elation has since been tempered. “We haven’t seen any signs of young animals in two years,” says Rauer, who has devoted his efforts to bears since 1995. Indeed, the bearded biologist terms himself a “bear attorney,” an arbitrator of sorts between human and beast. Whenever a bear causes trouble, Rauer quickly arrives at the scene to assess the damage. “The animals here have become especially fond of rapeseed oil, which is used in chain saws and large machinery.” Rauer recently dealt with a case involving a steam roller that a bear had dismantled to reach the oil in the hydraulic system — the most costly damage he has ever seen, says the biologist.

    According to Rauer, bears cause less than €7,000 in damage each year in Austria. He has never had any reports of direct conflicts between bears and humans. But the Austrian bear population is shrinking again, suggesting that public sentiment is once again beginning to turn against this funny, reclusive creature.

    “27 animals have been born here since 1991,” says Rauer. However, current genetic analyses of hair samples show that there are only about ten animals living in the state of Lower Austria and five to six in Carinthia (Kärnten) today. The situation speaks for itself, as far as Rauer is concerned: “The remaining bears were most likely shot illegally.”

    So it seems that biologists’ dreams of a peaceful coexistence between predators and humans are constantly being thwarted by both our primal fear of the beast and the stupid pride of a new breed of bear hunters. There isn’t much room for the brown bear in Western Europe to begin with. At the Lake Garda conference, Spanish researchers Carlos Nores and Juan Herrero reported that the population of Cantabrian bears has declined to 100. Nowadays, only about 50 bears travel along the mountain passes in Italy’s Abruzzi region. And despite resettlement programs, the population in the Pyrenees is also suffering. Last November, the death of female Pyrenees bear “Cannelle” (the French for cinnamon) stirred the emotions of the French. The animal, accompanied by her cub, came into a hunter’s crossfire in the village of Urdos.

    To protect her cub, Cannelle attacked the hunter’s dog, and the hunter shot the bear. The incident prompted hundreds of bear supporters to stage protests, both in the Pyrenees and at the Panthéon in Paris. Even French President Jacques Chirac called it “a tremendous loss for biological diversity.”

    “One could do all kinds of exciting research and still end up with a pile of dead bears,” researcher Bath soberly concludes. Nevertheless, he is convinced that the brown bear deserves a permanent home in the mountains of Central Europe. According to opinion polls, a solid 75 percent majority favors the animals’ return. “Especially the local people are often intensely proud of the fact that specimens of this great carnivore still live in their region,” says Bath.

    Locals should grin and bear it

    In the case of the troublemaker making his rounds at Resia Pass, biologists can only hope that local residents will continue to tolerate the animal’s escapades with patience. Young bear Lumpaz, since identified as an offspring of Dolomite female Jurka, is doing exactly what researchers want him to do: He is migrating, bringing the biologists closer to their goal of making the brown bear indigenous to the entire Alps region.

    At the same time, however, the animal’s youthful curiosity makes him what Rauer calls a “problem bear.” On the one hand, the region’s tourist industry appreciates Lumpaz as “free advertising,” and vacationers in Switzerland’s Münster Valley are already getting a taste of the latest local specialties, “bear pizza” and “bear beer.” But officials are also concerned about the safety of visitors.

    To deter bear tourists, they keep the animal’s exact whereabouts a secret. Lumpaz, they believe, has become too comfortable with humans, and Christine Kröll isn’t the only one who has been frightened by the bear. The animal came within five meters of a tourist, also near Nauders, and a hunter near Ramosch “practically had a heart attack” when he looked up to see the bear standing in front of him.

    “The bear is a large, defensive animal, and the consequences can be serious if it feels threatened,” warns Rauer. He insists that Lumpaz has not been aggressive yet, but that the real problem is that he spends too much time near villages. “We should quickly cure him of his trusting nature.” But now the bear’s education will have to wait until next year, since Lumpaz has migrated south to spend the winter in South Tyrol, where he will soon curl up in a cave. When that happens, things will quiet down for a while for the bear and his champions. Lumpaz, like most bears, will be hibernating until next March.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> read original story at SPIEGEL Online International