Blue-eyed ground dove: Three chicks hatch from one of the world's rarest bird species
Experts say the species, which is only found in Brazil, is quite a mysterious one.For more than 70 years there were no confirmed sightings, that is until 2015 when it was rediscovered.According to the IUCN Red List the species is critically endangered, its numbers are said to have declined due to habitat loss driven by farming and timber plantations.To try and help save the species, a team of Brazilian and international bird conservationists - including some from Chester Zoo in the UK - started to incubate a number of eggs that were laid in the wild to create a population in human care.
Conservationists say the arrival of the three chicks has boosted the survival odds of the species.They are currently being hand-reared by a team of experts at the sanctuary in Brazil.Andrew Owen, who is the head of birds at Chester Zoo, travelled to Brazil to help with the project.He says "the long term aim is to have a viable insurance population" that can help to reinforce numbers in the wild.Work is also taking place to maintain habitats in the Cerrado, which is an area of tropical savanna in Brazil, so that the birds in human care can eventually be released and boost the wild population.
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The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Earth's underground networks of fungi need urgent protection, say researchers
The underground networks of fungi that underpin the planet's ecosystems needs urgent conservation action by politicians, a research organisation has said. Scientists from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (Spun) have created the first high-resolution biodiversity maps of Earth's underground mycorrhizal fungal ecosystems. The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that 90% of the biodiverse hotspots of mycorrhizal fungi were in unprotected ecosystems. Loss of the ecosystems could lead to reductions in carbon drawdown, crop productivity and ecosystem resilience to climate extremes. Mycorrhizal fungi have 'remained in the dark, despite the extraordinary ways they sustain life on land', said Dr Toby Kiers, the executive director of Spun. 'They cycle nutrients, store carbon, support plant health, and make soil. When we disrupt these critical ecosystem engineers, forest regeneration slows, crops fail and biodiversity above ground begins to unravel … 450m years ago, there were no plants on Earth and it was because of these mycorrhizal fungal networks that plants colonised the planet and began supporting human life. 'If we have healthy fungal networks, then we will have greater agricultural productivity, bigger and beautiful flowers, and can protect plants against pathogens.' Mycorrhizal fungi are found on the roots of plants and help regulate Earth's climate and ecosystems. Its underground networks provide plants with essential nutrients, while drawing more than 13bn tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into soils – equivalent to roughly one-third of global emissions from fossil fuels. Spun launched the initiative in 2021 alongside organisations including GlobalFungi, Fungi Foundation, the Global Soil Mycobiome consortium and researchers from around the world to map out the under-researched networks of mycorrhizal fungal. Using machine-learning techniques on a dataset containing more than 2.8bn fungal samples from 130 countries, scientists were able to predict mycorrhizal diversity at a 1km2 scale across the planet. They discovered that only 9.5% of these fungal biodiversity hotspots fell within existing protected areas, revealing huge conservation gaps. The coast of Ghana was found to be a global hotspot for fungi, but with the country's coastline eroding at a rate of 2 metres a year, scientists fear this crucial biodiversity will be washed into the sea. This research marks the first large-scale scientific application of the global mapping initiative, which 'are more than scientific tools – they can help guide the future of conservation', said the study's lead author, Dr Michael Van Nuland. 'Given the impact of these fungal symbioses on the health and functioning of Earth's ecosystems, continuing to ignore them could be a hugely missed opportunity.' Nuland said the fungi respond negatively to human stressors, and without addressing the possible loss of these vital fungus, we could lose our ability to develop novel natural climate solutions. Land use is a significant cause of mycorrhizal fungal degradation, and it is 'frustrating that no action has been taken to prioritise conservation of it', said Kiers. 'The fungi are needed for agricultural productivity and human health.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion These fungal ecosystems were largely invisible in law and policy, said César Rodríguez-Garavito, a professor of law and the faculty director of the More-Than-Human Life (Moth) programme at NYU's School of Law. '[The data is] incredibly important in strengthening law and policy on climate change and biodiversity loss across all of Earth's underground ecosystems.' The findings are accessible through Spun's underground atlas interactive tool for conservation groups, researchers and policymakers to identify hotspots that require intervention. With more than 400 scientists and 96 underground explorers from 79 countries, Spun's international team is sampling the Earth's most hard-to-access, remote underground ecosystems including in Mongolia, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Ukraine. Spun is seeking new collaborators and funding to scale its mycorrhizal fungal maps, which cover only 0.001% of the Earth's surface. The expansion of its fungal maps would guide decision-makers to start leveraging mycorrhizal systems. The preservation and protection of mycorrhizal fungi could help to solve some of the world's greatest challenges – biodiversity decline, climate change, and declining food productivity, said Dr Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature, who added that it had a direct benefit to people.
The Independent
9 hours ago
- The Independent
World's smallest snake measuring four inches rediscovered under a rock
The world's smallest-known snake, the Barbados threadsnake, has been rediscovered after nearly two decades, sparking relief among scientists who feared it had become extinct. Its elusive nature, attributed to its minuscule size – capable of fitting comfortably on a coin – had kept it hidden for almost 20 years. The breakthrough came on a sunny morning when Connor Blades, a project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados, lifted a rock in a tiny forest on the eastern Caribbean island. "After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic," Mr Blades admitted, describing the painstaking effort to locate the creature. Due to its minute dimensions, the snake was too tiny to identify with the naked eye. Mr Blades carefully placed the specimen in a small glass jar with soil, substrate, and leaf litter. Hours later, under a microscope at the University of the West Indies, the wriggling snake in a petri dish proved incredibly difficult to identify. "It was a struggle," Mr Blades recalled, explaining he eventually shot a video of the snake and identified it from a still image. It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head. 'I tried to keep a level head,' Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbados threadsnake looks very much like a Brahminy blind snake, best known as the flower pot snake, which is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines. On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake. 'Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,' said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. 'It reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.' The Barbados threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 plant, animal and fungi species that Re:wild described as 'lost to science.' The snake is blind, burrows in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays one single, slender egg. Fully grown, it measures up to four inches (10 centimeters). 'They're very cryptic,' Blades said. 'You can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.' But on March 20 at around 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began measuring the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados. 'That's why the story is so exciting,' Springer said. 'It all happened around the same time.' S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of its center for biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threadsnake. Previously, it was mistakenly lumped in with another species. In 2008, Hedges' discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife. 'I spent days searching for them,' Hedges recalled. 'Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I turned over looking for this thing without success, I do think it is a rare species.' That was June 2006, and there were only three other such specimens known at the time: two at a London museum and a third at a museum collection in California that was wrongly identified as being from Antigua instead of Barbados, Hedges said. Hedges said that he didn't realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis. 'The aha moment was in the laboratory,' he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world's smallest-known snake. Hedges then became inundated for years with letters, photographs and emails from people thinking they had found more Barbados threadsnakes. Some of the pictures were of earthworms, he recalled. 'It was literally years of distraction,' he said. Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat. A lot of endemic species on the tiny island have gone extinct, including the Barbados racer, the Barbados skink and a particular species of cave shrimp. 'I hope they can get some interest in protecting it,' Hedges said. 'Barbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti.'
The Guardian
10 hours ago
- The Guardian
Earth's underground network of fungi needs urgent protection, say researchers
The underground network of fungi that underpins the planet's ecosystems needs urgent conservation action by politicians, a research organisation has said. Scientists from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (Spun) have created the first high-resolution biodiversity maps of Earth's underground mycorrhizal fungal ecosystems. The research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that 90% of the biodiverse hotspots of mycorrhizal fungi were in unprotected ecosystems. Loss of the ecosystems could lead to reductions in carbon drawdown, crop productivity and ecosystem resilience to climate extremes. Mycorrhizal fungi have 'remained in the dark, despite the extraordinary ways they sustain life on land', said Dr Toby Kiers, the executive director of Spun. 'They cycle nutrients, store carbon, support plant health, and make soil. When we disrupt these critical ecosystem engineers, forest regeneration slows, crops fail and biodiversity above ground begins to unravel … 450m years ago, there were no plants on Earth and it was because of the mycorrhizal fungal network that plants colonised the planet and began supporting human life. 'If we have a healthy fungal network, then we will have greater agricultural productivity, bigger and beautiful flowers, and can protect plants against pathogens.' Mycorrhizal fungi are found on the roots of plants and help regulate Earth's climate and ecosystems. Its underground networks provide plants with essential nutrients, while drawing more than 13bn tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into soils – equivalent to roughly one-third of global emissions from fossil fuels. Spun launched the initiative in 2021 alongside organisations including GlobalFungi, Fungi Foundation, the Global Soil Mycobiome consortium and researchers from around the world to map out the under-researched network of mycorrhizal fungal. Using machine-learning techniques on a dataset containing more than 2.8bn fungal samples from 130 countries, scientists were able to predict mycorrhizal diversity at a 1km2 scale across the planet. They discovered that only 9.5% of these fungal biodiversity hotspots fell within existing protected areas, revealing huge conservation gaps. The coast of Ghana was found to be a global hotspot for fungi, but with the country's coastline eroding at a rate of 2 metres a year, scientists fear this crucial biodiversity will be washed into the sea. This research marks the first large-scale scientific application of the global mapping initiative, which 'are more than scientific tools – they can help guide the future of conservation', said the study's lead author, Dr Michael Van Nuland. 'Given the impact of these fungal symbioses on the health and functioning of Earth's ecosystems, continuing to ignore them could be a hugely missed opportunity.' Nuland said the fungi respond negatively to human stressors, and without addressing the possible loss of these vital fungus, we could lose our ability to develop novel natural climate solutions. Land use is a significant cause of mycorrhizal fungal degradation, and it is 'frustrating that no action has been taken to prioritise conservation of it', said Kiers. 'The fungi is needed for agricultural productivity and human health.' Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion These fungal ecosystems were largely invisible in law and policy, said César Rodríguez-Garavito, a professor of law and the faculty director of the More-Than-Human Life (Moth) programme at NYU's School of Law. '[The data is] incredibly important in strengthening law and policy on climate change and biodiversity loss across all of Earth's underground ecosystems.' The findings are accessible through Spun's underground atlas interactive tool for conservation groups, researchers and policymakers to identify hotspots that require intervention. With more than 400 scientists and 96 underground explorers from 79 countries, Spun's international team is sampling the Earth's most hard-to-access, remote underground ecosystems including in Mongolia, Bhutan, Pakistan, and Ukraine. Spun is seeking new collaborators and funding to scale its mycorrhizal fungal maps, which cover only 0.001% of the Earth's surface. The expansion of its fungal maps would guide decision-makers to start leveraging mycorrhizal systems. The preservation and protection of mycorrhizal fungi could help to solve some of the world's greatest challenges – biodiversity decline, climate change, and declining food productivity, said Dr Rebecca Shaw, the chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature, who added that it had a direct benefit to people.
