Animals at the Edge of existence

Long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus bruijni)

Today marks the third annual Endangered Species Day in the US, declared so by the Senate to raise awareness about the world’s dwindling biodiversity. In keeping with the effort, we’re highlighting a new project that has had great success in exposing the public, conservation organizations, and politicians to little-known, highly distinct, and extremely endangered species.

Edge, a consortium of scientists at the Zoological Society of London, focuses its conservation efforts on evolutionarily distinct species, some of which are so unique they represent an entire family within taxonomy (Quick refresher: the top-down organization of living things starts with kingdom, then phylum, class, order, family, genus, species). Species such as the pygmy hippo, long-eared jerboa, and Chinese giant salamander look as whacky as they sound and live even stranger lives.

We caught up with biologist Jonathan Baillie, the leader of Edge, to learn more about the group’s efforts to save these unique creatures.

Tell us about the genesis of Edge.

I’d been working on Red Lists of threatened species at IUCN for many years, and knew that there was a large number of species on the edge of extinction that were extremely different, but that no one was doing anything about. When I came to work at the Zoological Society of London there were a number of other people with very similar interests and a lot of expertise working with the IUCN categories and criteria.

This community was into understanding extinction risk of species and the relationship between individuals, and also interested in identifying species that represent a disproportionate amount of evolutionary history―basically one of a kind species.

How does Edge rank evolutionarily unique species?

To start with we developed a super tree for all mammals, which told us how they’re all related. Then we developed scores both for species that have few close relatives and for species that were really threatened. We combined those and it really gave us quite an objective list in terms of which our priority species are.

Until now people have said, ‘well, I’m interested in this species, or the panda’s interesting or the lions are interesting’, but its been kind of charismatic value that’s drawn them to them. There’s subjectivity in everything we do, but this is a more objective way of identifying species that represent the cornerstones of biodiversity. If we’re trying to conserve the maximum amount of biodiversity, we want to make sure these really special lineages, these species that represent an entire family, don’t just disappear.

There are lots of approaches to conservation—focusing on charismatic species, or the range of an ecosystem’s top predator. Where does Edge’s approach fit in?

There are so many different approaches to conservation. I personally would argue we should use whatever approach is most relevant to a specific context. If people understand species in a certain environment, we should talk about species. If they understand ecosystems, we should refer to conservation in ecosystem terms.

I don’t view the Edge project as the end-all and be-all for conservation. We developed this program to ensure that these species don’t fall through the gaps because there was no project set up to specifically focus on evolutionarily distinct species on a global scale. There was no project focusing on those species receiving little or no conservation attention. We thought ‘we can’t have these species just silently disappear.'

After Edge has identified a unique and vulnerable species and raised public awareness about it, then what?

Ultimately if you’re focusing on a species, you have to focus on its habitat and ecosystem. We’ve committed to trying to get some sort of conservation in place for the top 100 mammals on our list over the next four years. It’s quite an ambitious target. We’ve started to work on ten species and we’ve also started a conservation community, which encourages others to get involved and take on other species. We’ve developed an Edge-o-meter, which tells you how much conservation a species is receiving, so that people can focus on those being neglected.

We appoint an Edge Fellow, an in-country scientist, who we support to first collect existing information on a species. They then conduct some novel research, develop an action plan, get training from Edge, and then hold a workshop in country with government, industry, local representatives, and international community to get everyone to sign up to the action plan and agree to implement conservation activities for that species. Each Edge Fellow also has to blog about their species. When people make an Internet donation, they can see the direct impact of their donation supporting these in-country scientists. All the money that’s given over the Internet goes to supporting the species conservation, which is mainly funded through these donations.

Are there any species far along in this process?

We just started in January 2007. We have ten Edge Fellows and after two years we’ll have additional fellows. We’re encouraging others to pick up other species, too.

You recently added a list of 100 amphibians. Why them?

We did mammals first simply because we had the phylogeny [the evolutionary connections between the animals], but amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate group. They’re such a priority because thirty-two percent of them are threatened, and most recent extinctions have been from amphibians. But some of these problems are quite solvable. A lot of amphibians don’t have very large distributions, so you can actually go in and conserve the area if the problem is habitat destruction.

What are some of the success stories or tragedies worth highlighting?

The top species on the list was the Yangtze River dolphin, so we joined an expedition to look at their historic range and none were found. That highlighted the fact that we’ve probably lost a large, really quite charismatic mammal. It’s the first extinction of this type in many years and represents the extinction of not just a species but an entire family.

That was really a low for us, but it highlighted the importance of focusing on these other species. If we’d started this program ten years earlier, perhaps we could have done something.

The next species we focused on was Attenborough’s echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi). It was possibly extinct in the Cyclops Mountains of Irian Jaya [the western part of New Guinea Island now officially called Papua]. Echidna’s are egg-laying mammals and their taxonomy is very poorly understood. They have very distinctive feeding in that they poke their head in the ground and make a print of their head, so you can tell that it’s them. They’re nocturnal and actually quite smart. We met with the local tribes and found areas where the echidna had been feeding and also found that people had recently eaten them. Now that we know that they still exist, we’re trying to develop a program to ensure that people are aware that this species is restricted to this mountain range. We’re also doing some DNA analysis to determine if it’s as distinct as people think it is because it’s only known from one specimen collected in the 1960s. Since then it hasn’t been seen by scientists.

If you’d Googled Attenborough’s echidna before we went on this expedition you might get four references and now there are thousands. So part of this process is putting these species on the map and getting conservation organizations aware that they’re even there. It’s just amazing the power of the Internet, the influence that it can have when people are made aware of these issues globally.

SLIDE SHOW SPECIES

Excerpts and links from the Edge website, which features some of the world’s most unusual and endangered mammals and amphibians.

[2-M] Long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus bruijni)

“Long-beaked echidnas belong to an ancient clade of egg-laying mammals that includes the platypus of Australia.”

[81-M] Long-eared jerboa (Euchoreutes naso)

“Jerboas are small jumping rodents that resemble mice with long tufted tails and very long hindlegs. The long-eared jerboa can be distinguished from other jerboas by its enormous ears, which are about a third larger than its head.”

[55-A] Betic midwife toad (Alytes dickhilleni)

“The Betic midwife toad is found in a number of isolated and fragmented populations around the mountains of southeastern Spain. Females lay a string of eggs that the male wraps around his hind legs, carries until they are ready to hatch, and finally deposits in a pool of water where the tadpoles remain for up to a year.”

[49-M] Bumblebee bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai)

“The smallest mammal in the world, this tiny bat weighs less than 2 grams. Its body is about the size of a large bumblebee, hence the common name ‘bumblebee bat.’”

[2-A] Chinese giant Salamander (Andrias davidianus)

“The Chinese giant salamander is the largest living species of amphibian, reaching a maximum length of 1.8 meters.”

[46-M] Golden-rumped elephant-shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus)

“The head and body measure 280 mm. Elephant-shrews are so-named because they have extraordinarily long, flexible trunks. Recent studies indicate that they are in fact distantly related to elephants.”

[21-M] Pygmy hippopotamus (Hexaprotodon liberiensis)

“The head and body measure 1,500-1,750 mm and stands 750-1,000 mm at shoulder height. They are similar to large hippos in many respects, but are more solitary and spend more time in the water.”

[18-A] Olm (Proteus anguinus)

“The olm is Europe’s only cave-adapted vertebrate, and has numerous adaptations for an underground life. They are an entirely aquatic species that can survive without food for up to 10 years and live to an age of 58 or more.”

[69-A] Gardiner's Seychelles frog (Sooglossus gardineri)