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opinionatedpartridge · 1 year

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Conservation Triage: are vaquita dead yet?

Over the last 5 or so years, I've gotten into the worrying habit of occasionally googling whether vaquitas have been declared extinct yet. It's not come to pass so far, but I know with near 100% certainty that it will within my lifetime, definitely this decade, likely within the next few years. If you will indulge me, dear reader, I would like to make the most pessimistic of arguments here that can be made: that we should let the vaquita die.

(Amber Marine; 'Keep Swimming, Little Vaquita!')

Vaquita (Phocoena sinus), if you don't know, are the smallest and also the most endangered whale species in the world. They occur only in the Sea of Cortez in the Upper Gulf of California in Mexico, which is a very small stretch of sea for an increasingly smaller population. The species was only named in 1958 and has been steadily approaching its inevitable extinction for the last 40 or so years. Because of the difficulty that counting them naturally presents, estimates of their number vary quite a bit. According to a 2012 study¹, they saw a total population decline of 57% from around 1997 to 2008. Towards the end of the 2010s, we were left with fewer than 30 vaquitas, and around ten or less in 2022.

These last 30 years of conservation attempts are an inscrutable mess of fishing and export bans, ineffective government regulation of fishing practices, local conflict, and awareness campaigns with a dramatically failed breeding program to top it all off.

But let's not get into that, if you really want to make your day worse you can read about all that on wikipedia. Rather, let's talk about what has these porpoises dropping like flies in the first place.

The cause of the vaquita's impending demise, quite straightforwardly, is poaching - although what's being poached is not actually the porpoise itself. Local fishermen are after another endangered species, the totoaba. Totoaba macdonaldi is a large species of fish also endemic to the Upper Gulf of Mexico, which is sought after for its swim bladders. These can be sold for their use in traditional chinese medicine (TCM), where they're considered an alternative to another endangered fish. Fishing totoaba for sport has been prohibited in Mexico since 1975 following a stark population decline, and fishing of the species using gillnets was banned in 1992, but with continued demand (thus, supply) fishing went on and there are now breeding programs attempting to save the totoaba population.

Fishermen use gillnets to catch totoaba because they are very effective, comparatively cheap, and do not require large boats to deploy. Vaquita, like marine vertebrates often do, end up as by catch in these, getting tangled and drowning. Of course they are also affected by evergreens of extinction threats like habitat loss and pollution, but their influence pales in comparison to casualties sustained because of gillnet fishing.

According to a 2020 study², vaquita actually show remarkable genetic resilience in the face of their diminishing numbers, which means theoretically they could recover from a pretty small population size, as opposed to getting caught in the downwards spiral of losing genetic diversity and resilience against stochastic events (misfortune befalling individuals having an impact on the population as a whole) called inbreeding depression, which often spells the end for endangered species. This is scientifically noteworthy, but will not keep them alive forever, and we may well have already passed the point of no return even given this natural advantage of theirs.

In 2021 a study³ estimated that the population could have recovered from as few as 13 individual porpoises, had we eliminated gillnet fishing in their habitat completely at that point.

But that is wishful thinking, so let's focus on reality. We know what's killing them, that it's happening quickly, and I will tell you now that nothing people have tried (and they've tried) has worked so far. This presents a question - why has no policy to date even made a significant dent in this problem?

Well, listen, we'll get there. Let's learn from this situation. And let's get a little bit theoretical about it, so we can apply our observations elsewhere, too.

🌐 IN SITU: The failures of conservation

Fundamentally, the problem boils down to this: the root cause of the vaquitas' misfortune lies in the surrounding areas' misfortune, and that is not a problem our modern ideas of conservation nor government are able to remedy, because they are part of the issue. The mechanism does not exist that can prevent the harm it itself causes; the master's tools will not dismantle his house and so on.

The totoaba and the vaquita's habitats are bordered by multiple local human communities, which have one thing in common: they rely almost entirely on fishery to support themselves.

This is not a question that a lot of popular media likes to engage with, but have you ever asked yourself why people poach, dear reader?

I would argue that there are two groups of poachers. There are trophy hunters, and then there are people who are just desperate. The first group you may find represented in children's cartoons - rich white men looking for an adventure and a pretty pelt. I won't tell you these people aren't 'evil' or what have you, but the fact is, the amount of wildlife they take is quite manageable, as well as monetizable. It sounds almost like a betrayal to say, but in many cases, the income gained from hunting permits sold to them can even offset the harm they do; it is a direct way for money to go where it's needed. Furthermore, they have access to resources that don't inflict a lot of unintentional additional harm. Group two does not.

No one in these communities hunts for totoaba swim bladders because they like causing the deaths of vaquitas, or probably even because they especially enjoy gutting large fish. Nor would I wager do they particularly care about supplying ingredients for TCM to black markets overseas. However, people will do what it takes to feed their families, and that is true everywhere, whether you have the luxury to look away from it or not. No animal can be faulted for wanting to live, and that includes people.

A good 50% of the population in these local communities rely directly on fishery, and that means that simply banning it, (or specific parts of it) making areas of the sea off-limits and similar restrictions handed down from the top will only cause more suffering and leave people with fewer options. Hence… poaching. A lot of people there do not have access to alternatives, and further, would require training and financial support to switch gears after decades of things being as they are for a wide reaching shift to stick.

So that is how we can solve it then, no? We just give the local communities other, less harmful ways to earn a living. And theoretically - yes. It would be as easy as that, if only this were at all an easy thing to do. Stay with me here, dear reader, because we're about to take a dip into political theory. I posit this: it is nigh impossible for a modern capitalist country to tackle a problem like this. The logistical effort aside, the sheer monetary investment needed would never be approved. We know that, because the Mexican government has been trying to tackle this issue for almost two decades now to less than no success. I'll provide you a graphic from a 2021 paper⁴, comparing some of the more serious measures taken against the population decline. They tried bans, they tried protected areas, and they tried compensating fishermen. As it turns out, voluntary programs that barely address people's actual problems, buy-outs and lacklustre monetary compensation do not make a difference.

None of them ran long enough, were consistently implemented or operated on a large enough scale to begin with. On top of that, a lot of programs were pulled in 2018, under the newly elected administration.

(Sanjurjo-Rivera et al (2021) discusses this really well if you want to read about the details of how all this went down.)

To succeed, conservation generally needs a few things that are practically unattainable as things stand. These are sustained effort, a lack of monetary pressure, and a huge deal of cooperation.

Both capitalism and all electoral systems fundamentally prioritise short term projects, which will guarantee a presentable bottom line or a politician's re-election. Effective conservation is inherently, diametrically opposed to this. You will not save a species beset upon by hunting if you can forbid it only until the next administration lifts your ban a year later.

Any public body's primary goal, be that an NGO, a company or a state run organisation, is to make money, or otherwise to not lose too much money. Those who don't heed this shut down. Such an environment does not facilitate actually objective decision making, rather it encourages cutting corners wherever possible to best use what limited resources are available in a system where everything has become a market, no matter how ineffective that actually is.

Another flaw of conservation is its limited scope: any snapshot of an ecosystem you can take is incomplete, and so focussing on only one part of a connected habitat will always be comically ineffective.

Humans are the only animals who care about political borders; truly protecting endangered species requires large amounts of international cooperation and the coordination of local policy, which are often neglected or not hashed out in the first place. You will not save a species threatened by water pollution by not dumping sewage in your stretch of river if your neighbour just keeps doing it a mile downstream.

You might see where I'm going with this, dear reader. We follow the biological problem only to find an even more complex political one at its root. I do believe the relevant local communities are not 'beyond hope' or what have you, but even if there were a wider effort from the Mexican government, fixing the actual underlying issue would still take much, much longer than the vaquita can afford. And so we arrive at my point: triage.

🌐 EX SITU: What is worth saving

If you're still here, thank you for hearing me out. I know it's a bummer. Please, before we wrap up, allow me one more seeming non sequitur - I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

How many endangered species do you think you can name on the spot?

Probably a few - more every year. Now, how many can you name that aren't mammals? That aren't birds? How about amphibians or reptiles, can you come up with a few? Bony fish? Invertebrates?

My point, dear reader: in modern conservation there exists an overwhelming bias towards what's called 'charismatic megafauna'. These are large animals, typically mammals at the top of their respective food chains, which are comparatively easy to drum up support for.

This is a direct result of financial pressures on conservation. Often you will hear these animals be called umbrella species; the hope is that protecting them will help the rest of their ecosystem as well: unspecific like a protective umbrella. It is significantly easier to raise funds to save the tiger, the elephant, the panda, than it is to make people care about arachnids, or fungi, or even their local salamanders.

Fungi that aren't edible are historically left out of conservation efforts, despite being incredibly integral parts of the ecosystems they are a part of. Fungicides are a large and largely under-researched threat.

Spiders, too, are overwhelmingly not even assessed, despite the key link that they are to many food chains. Invertebrates (all of them) make up only 31% of assessed species on the IUCN Red List.

Ecosystems are highly complex, dynamic things, which we know we can barely grasp in their entirety after years of study. This biased distribution of attention results in a very pronounced bias in support. In most cases, the species which receive the most care are not the ones which are most crucial to an ecosystem. Due to usually being larger mammals, efforts put into umbrella species more often than not do not 'trickle down' to much of their ecosystem, since the focus is on meeting the very specific needs of one species and those don't tend to overlap with those of animals of lower trophic levels as much as people think. How much do you think global zoo run panda breeding programs help local insects in their ecosystems of origin?

The way we treat what we do consider worth the money suffers from plenty of bias, as well. If you're an avid watcher of nature documentaries, you might be labouring under the assumption that the planet is overflowing with wonderful, untouched wilderness. Dear reader, I am sorry, it is not. In an effort to present a pure and untainted natural world, documentaries often take great pains to quite literally cut humans out of the picture; film from an angle where the village is just out of sight, ignore centuries of indigenous land management, things like that. It's common. The truth is, there is no spot on this planet that is untouched by us. From microplastic in deep sea organisms' stomachs, to birds collecting colourful bottle caps for courtship rituals. The great barrier reef is in danger not because people are trying to specifically destroy it, but because every single body of water on the planet is facing pollution and global warming.

This skewed, incomplete perspective is the cultural concept of 'nature' at work, which pits it against the artificial evil of humanity and puts this idea in our heads that the two are opposites, completely separate. This is not only harmful, but also just plainly untrue.

It is arrogant to think of humans as completely separate from the ecosystems they live in, and it leads to an unhelpful, almost anti-human attitude in popular discussions of conservation (as above: the intense and largely uncritical hatred of poachers). The ones most harmed by this are typically indigenous people, whose influence on land that they've lived on for generations is seen as inherently harmful as well. Dear reader, if you will excuse me making direct reference to the Americas for just a second, conceiving of all indigenous people as inherently, mystically in touch with nature is also pretty racist, it has to be said. The point is that in current discourse the only roles local people(s) are allowed to play are either disney's Pocahontas or those pesky egoists who won't leave their homes so a protected nature park can be built overtop their communities.

'Fortress Conservation' describes the (pretty colonial) idea that for ideal results ecosystems should be left to function in isolation as complete as can be achieved, and it ties in directly with the common glorification of 'untouched wilderness'. It's the scientific equivalent of turning your back and hoping the gods will handle it, and it also, just by the way, leads to human rights violations on a massive scale by encouraging aggression against local populations, displacing people and cutting off their access to resources and cultural sites.

A lot of indigenous land management is beneficial even by our current flawed standards - if you want to get deeper into this I suggest looking into controlled burns and forest gardens. Looking at modern conservation efforts, we're barely working on preserving ecosystems or even individual species here, we're trying to restore a tenuous balance that may as well be fictional. The best way to save the environment, dear reader, is sweeping political change and prioritizing human rights.

Had we effectively grappled with all these issues before the decade began, I believe the vaquita's fate would not have been sealed. Fundamentally, this is a problem that has to be negotiated at a local level as well as requiring an adjustment in popular attitudes about conservation. Neither of that is meaningfully happening, currently.

Undeniably, conservation has seen great successes. I don't believe, however, that the field as it is currently is truly equipped to tackle the increasing pace at which species are becoming endangered in this and future decades.

The vaquita, dear reader, would require not only immediate, but impossibly well coordinated and steadfastly implemented measures to save, and to rebuild a healthy population would take decades of sustained effort. This is likely possible, to be clear. But it is not in any way plausible.

And so here we are: money and time spent trying to save the vaquita now is money and time wasted. It would be better spent on a million other things - social development, programs to better monitor the populations of still less endangered species, even measures to save the totoaba - because unlike vaquita, they've been shown to survive breeding programs.

I believe that it is ultimately better to focus on what we can feasibly save as things stand instead of dwelling forever on lost causes, sad as it may be. Phocoena sinus will join the baiji as the second whale species made extinct by human hands, and we should move on to saving what we can in the face of what has rightfully been called our planet's sixth mass extinction.

So what can you do? I don't know. Stay informed, inform others, support realistic policy and indigenous efforts if there are any where you live. Be wary of eco-fascism. Maybe plant some native plants to help your local pollinators. Maybe donate. Maybe participate in revolutionary action or ecoterrorism.

Sources (separate for seo lol) https://www.tumblr.com/opinionatedpartridge/723926301806903296/links-are-vaquita-dead-yet

#vaquita #conservation #sixth mass extinction #whales #mammals #parblog #opinionatedpartridge

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opinionatedpartridge · 3 years

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what do we know about what enantiornithine eggs would have looked like?

Enantiornithes are an extinct group of small bird like dinosaurs. Their name is often translated to 'opposite birds', owing to the fact they are extremely closely related to modern birds (aves) and likely looked extremely similar. Most noticeably, they had teeth, which of course most 'real' birds do not.

(by Franz Anthony, on tumblr)

We're reconstructing from a very spotty fossil record here, and most likely more enantiornithine eggs have been collected than we even know.

When fossil eggs or eggshells are described, they are given an oogenus - essentially a normal binomial name, but for a specific type of egg instead of animal. To associate this oogenus with a genus of animal with reasonable certainty then takes evidence like this:

The most straight forward way is to find an egg with an embryo inside which can be matched to a species present in the ecosystem. This requires both a decent fossil and sufficient knowledge of subadult forms of a species, of course. Secondly, an animals remains can be found directly associated with its eggs in a way that makes their relatedness obvious, like an oviraptor preserved in a brooding position over a nest.

Furthermore, an oogenus can be matched to a species essentially by process of elimination. This hinges on the completeness of the fossil record of course, and is thus the least reliable. Say you've got a clutch of eggs that look like they would belong to a mid-size theropod, and you know of only one those in the region (those are rare, btw. See Schroeder et al. 2021: “The influence of juvenile dinosaurs on community structure and diversity”). Then you can make an educated guess the eggs might belong to that mid-size theropod.

To summarize: it is hard to actually know who fossil eggs would have belonged to, so our pool of evidence is limited both by the rarity of eggs and the mystery of their identity.

━━━━━━━━━ ⸙ ━━━━━━━━━

The basis of this blog is mostly a 2012 paper by the title "A drowned Mesozoic bird breeding colony from the Late Cretaceous of Transylvania" and a 2013 paper titled "A Large Accumulation of Avian Eggs from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia (Argentina) Reveals a Novel Nesting Strategy in Mesozoic Birds". The amount of confidently identified enantiornithine egg finds can be counted on one hand.

Here's what I'm taking from them: Enantiornithines a) had hard shelled eggs, b) they built half-open nests, c) they had nesting colonies and d) their eggs are roughly oval shaped.

Cool, cool, but what colour would the eggs have been?

Here's where it's all speculation: we know that many other theropods had coloured egg shells, and still do today. And you can still find the pigments modern birds use, protoporphyrin and biliverdin, in mesozoic egg shells. That way we know that oviraptor eggs were likely blue green (Wiemann et al. 2017 “Dinosaur origin of egg color: oviraptors laid blue-green eggs”).

[by saint-nevermore on tumblr]

There's pretty good support for the idea that the first real bird already used these pigments, and modern birds with not noticeably coloured egg shells still have trace amounts of it.

So parsimony suggests enantiornithines would also have already had these pigments.

But would they have used them to full effect?

To answer that, let's look at modern birds. While not all potential functions of pigmented eggs are known, there are some documented correlations. While egg colour is definitely helpful in hiding eggs from predators, pigment might also provide added protection against solar radiation or brood parasites or even be used as an intraspecies signal - we just don't know.

Birds that show parental care in the form of brooding typically do not have strongly coloured eggs, the same goes for birds that bury their eggs (like many other dinosaurs did and plenty of other reptiles still do).

We can conclude: Enantiornithine eggs likely contained small amounts of pigment, but would have been cream coloured as an ostrich egg.

#enantiornithes #enantiornithine #dinosaurs #fossil eggs #palaeontology #parblog #opinionatedpartridge

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