Historic numbers of animals across the globe have become endangered or extinct. And according to the United Nations, the rate at which species are being pushed to extinction is accelerating.
But, some of these species sit in limbo. They’re not definitively extinct, yet they’re missing from the scientific record.
Species gain this “lost” status when there hasn’t been a trace of them in 10 years, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
“Species become lost quite often because they’re threatened by impacts caused by humans. So for example, climate change, pollution, habitat clearance,” says Thomas Evans, a conservation scientist at the Free University in Berlin. “Their populations are shrinking in size, and that’s why they can’t be found. It means they’re likely to be on the verge of extinction.”
These species raise a conundrum for scientists and local communities.
If a lost species is indeed still alive, they need protections to save them from the brink of extinction. But if there’s little or no evidence a species is around, the money needed to conserve land or to fund studies confirming their current existence can be difficult to muster.
To complicate matters, there is a disparity in which species are searched for and protected, as evidenced by a recent study in the journal Global Change Biology. For the study, Evans and his collaborators created a database all lost and rediscovered tetrapods in order to understand what factors contribute to the likelihood that a species is rediscovered.
“Charismatic” animals have better odds of being rediscovered and reaping the associated protective benefits of that rediscovery. They tend to be large, cute or furry. This has left some “uncharismatic” lost species to wither away outside of human view, when they might have been saved with measures like captive breeding or habitat conservation.
Historically, rodents have been one group of animals to bear the brunt of this discrepancy. Around a third of the mammals Evans studied were rodents, but they made up half of the lost mammal species. They are often small, live in remote areas, only come out at night and spend most of their time in burrows — all things that make it difficult for scientists to pin them down.
Evans says this is compounded by the fact that “rodents aren’t particularly charismatic. They’re not well loved, so people aren’t searching for them as much as they are for larger, more charismatic species.”
The long journey to rediscover a species
Rediscovering a lost species is not easy. It can require trips to remote areas and canvassing a large area in search of only a handful of animals. The difficulty has forced scientists to reach for the newest technology available to find evidence of animals on the fringes.
One example is in South Africa, where Samantha Mynhardt, a conservation biologist at Endangered Wildlife Trust, has spent years researching golden moles. After seeing a conservation organization list the De Winton’s golden mole as one of the most important species to rediscover, she began to talk to collaborators, with whom she would eventually rediscover the mole.
But even starting the project was an uphill battle.
De Winton’s mole hadn’t been seen in nearly a century, so many of her colleagues were skeptical that it was still around. The burrowing mole was known to elude many of the tools conservationists rely on to identify and track down animals weren’t enough to pin down the iridescent critters. For instance, no previous team had successfully trapped the mole. Trapping is a necessary step for traditional DNA collection.
So, her team ended up settling for a mix of scent detection dogs and collecting eDNA, or environmental DNA. As animals go through their lives, they leave small traces of their DNA – hair follicles, skin cells, excrement and other things – that scientists can test for in the lab. The researchers used the dogs to home in on areas where the moles had been and then collected soil samples to test the eDNA in the area.
On an expedition to the west coast of South Africa, Mynhardt and her crew were able to catch a mole. But it wasn’t until they later returned to their lab and analyzed eDNA from the soil that they could confirm it was the species of mole they were looking for.
“It was really a fantastic feeling. I mean, the anticipation that had built up to that moment,” says Mynhardt. “Once we confirmed it, we were just ecstatic.”
From rediscovery to stronger protections
An ocean away, University of Melbourne biologist Tyrone Lavery has a similar story. He spent 14 years researching the Vangunu giant rat that had been lost to western science but was still well known to the people of the Vangunu Islands as “vika,” a rodent they saw occasionally.
He struggled to do so — in part, because there are likely very few of them left.
“It’s just such a rare animal that few people have been able to see it,” Lavery says. Even he, in 14 years of searching for the Vangunu giant rat, has yet to come face-to-face with one.
Lavery’s earliest concrete sign that the rodent was alive came from an interaction between the vika and a logging company.
As he was working in the area, the local government greenlit logging in the forests that the rodent lived in. One day, as a tree was chopped down, a vika ran out of it – and one of Lavery’s collaborators was able to catch it. The injured rat died shortly after, but Lavery finally had proof that there were rats in this forest.
He redoubled his efforts to find clear evidence it was living in the forests of Vangunu. The work paid off after he planting camera traps around the forest for six months and finally got photographic evidence.
Since his research came out in the journal Ecology and Evolution several months ago, there haven’t been any official moves to protect the rat. In fact, before his work was published, the government had approved more logging around the vika’s habitat. But shortly after it was published, “all of a sudden, they’ve now removed their machines and pulled out. So officially, nothing’s happened. But unofficially, it seems like there’s been a little bit of a change.”
While both the De Winton’s golden mole and the Vangunu giant rat could be on their way to vital protections, the same may not be true for all “uncharismatic” animals.
“People are often keen to go and look for the primates or the large cats or other really charismatic animals, and many people have not even heard of a golden mole,” Mynhardt says. “It is sad, because all species on our planet are valuable and worth protecting.”
Have other scientific gray areas you want us to cover in a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org!
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This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and Rebecca Ramirez. It was also edited by Rebecca. Anil Oza checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.
Transcript:
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EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: You’re listening to SHORT WAVE…
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KWONG: …From NPR.
ANIL OZA, HOST:
Hey, SHORT WAVErs. Anil Oza temporarily in the host chair today, and I’m bringing you a story about critters, but not the completely lighthearted kind.
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OZA: Just a few months ago, the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that some 40,000 species are threatened with extinction, and about 7,000 of those are because of climate change.
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OZA: But last year, I started noticing a trend.
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JENN: Although it wasn’t seen for 87 years, it turns out this mole isn’t extinct. It’s just really shy.
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KRIS HELGEN: A new species.
GORDON BUCHANAN: OK.
HELGEN: This is something that doesn’t have a scientific name. This is one of the largest rats in the world, and here we are holding it.
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AARON SCOTT: Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna was rediscovered by scientists on an expedition this past summer.
OZA: In relatively remote areas across the globe, scientists were finding evidence of animals they hadn’t seen for years. They wanted to know if this was part of a bigger trend of us getting better at pinning down these species.
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OZA: So I called Tom.
TOM EVANS: My name is Tom Evans, and I’m a conservation scientist based at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. I’m interested in trying to protect those species from extinction, and to protect them from the threats that are caused by human activities such as climate change, habitat loss and pollution.
OZA: In January, he published a paper where he tried to catalog every four-legged animal that’s been, quote-unquote, “lost.”
EVANS: Lost species are those that haven’t been seen in the wild for at least 10 years.
OZA: Before I talked to Tom, I hadn’t heard this term lost before. I thought there was just endangered and extinct. But there is some grey area.
EVANS: These are species that are being searched for by scientists in the world that can’t be found.
OZA: Usually, species become lost when they’re endangered because there are so few animals left. Scientists can struggle to find them, and it can be hard to allocate money and time and land to protecting them if there’s no evidence that they’re even still around. Which is why Tom even took on this project.
EVANS: One of the aims of the project was to try and distinguish which lost species are likely to be extinct, and which are likely to actually be rediscovered.
OZA: And this point takes me to one of the reasons I was really excited to talk to Tom. I have a soft spot for rats and rodents in general. Tom found that rodents made up half of all of the mammals lost to science but they weren’t often being rediscovered by them. And he had a couple of theories as to why.
EVANS: The first group are those that are difficult to find. So they may be small species, or they may be species that occupy habitats that are really difficult to survey, or it may be due to their behavior, their life history traits. So perhaps they’re nocturnal or they’re burrowing.
OZA: So that’s part of it. But also…
EVANS: There’s a second group of species that are neglected by conservation scientists, and that’s where rodents come in. So species that are less charismatic.
OZA: But the fact that scientists are digging up these animals, despite these long-standing barriers and biases, could be a good sign. So, today on the show, the world is losing species at a historic rate, but are we getting better at finding them, and what does it take to rediscover a species, exactly? I’m Anil Oza, and this is SHORT WAVE, the science podcast from NPR.
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OZA: To really understand what it means to be searching for a lost species, I called up researchers to hear about a couple of case studies, specifically of endangered animals that aren’t the charismatic kind, that aren’t large, fluffy or cute, like polar bears or koalas or pandas. No. I wanted to focus on two uncharismatic animals, like the De Winton’s golden mole in South Africa. Scientists had thought it was extinct for almost a century.
SAMANTHA MYNHARDT: They don’t have any visible eyes, so they’re quite strange-looking, actually – completely blind. They have these modified four claws that they use for digging their underground tunnels, and those are super cool.
OZA: Samantha Mynhardt had been searching for it since grad school. She’s at the Endangered Wildlife Trust and Stellenbosch University. She says the search for this rare animal was worth it, because even getting to hold one of these adorable critters is an honor.
MYNHARDT: It was just the cutest little nugget (laughter). They would just sort of fit snugly into the palm of your hand.
OZA: But what’s really cool is the reason for their name.
MYNHARDT: What’s really striking and beautiful about them is they have this iridescent sheen to their fur, and that’s why they’re called golden moles, because their fur literally glistens. You know, if you ever see them in the sun, you’ll see rainbow colors in their shiny fur.
OZA: Samantha was able to find these moles last year, but before then, most of her colleagues weren’t convinced De Winton’s mole was still around.
MYNHARDT: I had asked around other colleagues and experts working on golden moles, who all believed that De Winton’s golden mole was extinct. But the Endangered Wildlife Trust approached me saying they really want to see. They want to go there and survey and see if they can find this mole.
OZA: And so she led a group of local scientists and colleagues from the Endangered Wildlife Trust on this expedition to see if they could find it. One of the things that made this tricky was that there were a couple of other species of golden moles in this area, so finding evidence of a mole didn’t necessarily mean that they found the right mole. And they knew from the start they couldn’t rely on traditional methods of collecting DNA proof.
MYNHARDT: The traditional method of getting their DNA is you would have to go find where they are, set some traps, try and trap them. And there had been efforts to trap the species in the past, unsuccessfully. So, yeah, we knew that trapping them was not going to be the right approach.
OZA: Samantha and others tried a bunch of different things to try and find the moles, like thermal drones to see heat signatures of animals underneath the soil, which sort of helped find the moles, but wasn’t a way to actually catch them. So Samantha turned to this up-and-coming technique called eDNA, or environmental DNA.
MYNHARDT: I started really getting interested in using environmental DNA as a source of DNA to study species that are really difficult to find in the environment, so species that are either rare, threatened or really elusive. And golden moles fall into all of those categories because they live underground, so they’re really difficult to find – and threatened with extinction.
OZA: The idea is that as animals go about their lives, they’re leaving traces of DNA in their environment, from skin cells to hair follicles to excrement and more. And this is great because they don’t actually have to physically catch a mole to know that it’s in the soil.
MYNHARDT: Once we’ve collected the soil, taken it back to the lab and sequenced it, then we can say what species it is.
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OZA: Though one fateful day when they were staking out a local beach, they did finally spot one.
MYNHARDT: My colleague JP, you know, snatched up the mole and we managed to get some pictures of it.
OZA: But even as they were holding this little mole, they had no idea what species it was until the eDNA tests, the moment of truth when they would know if they found evidence of the De Winton’s mole.
MYNHARDT: I mean, the anticipation that had built up to that moment, you can only imagine. We were excited in the first place to have come across it in the field and then, you know, having to conduct the lab work and wait for the sequencing results. And even once we had the sequencing results, we couldn’t at first confirm the species’ identity.
OZA: So they did a more specific test that would tell them for sure what they had found. And this was really exciting because of how long Samantha had been working on this. But it could also be really important for putting up some protections for these shiny little guys.
MYNHARDT: Our mission really is when we find a threatened species in a habitat, to use that as an incentive to say that some part of that habitat needs to be protected in order for that species to survive. So it’s a conservation strategy at the end of the day.
OZA: The power of the strategy of scientists and local communities using these rediscovered species to better protect lands is really evident in the case of another, quote-unquote, “uncharismatic” species – the giant rats of Vangunu. They live deep in the jungle of just a single island in the Solomon Islands, which is northeast of Australia.
TYRONE LAVERY: It’s breathtaking forest, really. It’s everything you could imagine of a tropical rainforest – huge, big trees, palms everywhere, really clear streams that run through there. And it’s just a really beautiful landscape.
OZA: This is Tyrone Lavery. He’s a biologist at the University of Melbourne. He spent years looking for this rat.
LAVERY: So I started my Ph.D. in 2010 and went to the community of Zaira on southern Vangunu. And it was my first field trip in Solomon Islands. And we went right into the interior of the island with some really senior men. And we just were chatting about what lived in their forests mammal-wise, and they told me about this giant rat that lived in the trees.
OZA: While the species was completely mysterious to Western scientists, it was well known to the local community.
LAVERY: So I was pretty certain that if there was big vika rat there, that it would be a new species because this island of Vangunu is fairly isolated from the rest of the archipelago.
OZA: Tyrone set out to try and find evidence of vika – at first, because it could be an interesting discovery of an entirely new species, but over time it took an even more important role. That’s because companies were trying to tear down these forests.
LAVERY: And our big goal was just to show that this rodent did occur there because that would kind of increase its credibility and hopefully attract support for helping them to conserve their forest.
OZA: And they eventually did find evidence of vika, but not the way they quite hoped.
LAVERY: So it was a really bittersweet moment. It actually came from a logging operation that was next to Zaira, happening really close. The logging company felled a tree, and some of the guys that I worked with at Zaira were working with that logging company at the time, and they found the rat come out of one of the trees that was felled. Unfortunately, it was really badly injured and killed.
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OZA: But they had the evidence they needed to at least prove that vika existed.
LAVERY: And we went through a series of comparing the skull and teeth and all these characters DNA to other rodents from the Pacific and Australia and New Guinea and found that it was a new – definitely a new species, which we called Uromys vika in honor of the existing language name.
OZA: Knowing that vika was actually there, Tyrone doubled his efforts to get more solid evidence that it was living in the trees on the island, just like the local people were telling him. So he set up a ton of camera traps around the forest, hoping that it could pick up traces of them. And eventually, they were able to get pictures of vika. There haven’t been any official moves by the local government towards that new goal Tyrone had mentioned of protecting vika, but there are still some changes happening. For example, the government issued development consent for a company to log the Zaira community against its wishes.
LAVERY: And the company was there ready to go.
OZA: But shortly after this research came out…
LAVERY: All of a sudden they’ve now removed their machines and pulled out. So officially, nothing’s happened, but unofficially, it seems like there’s been a little bit of a change somehow.
OZA: And hearing about what these photos meant to the Zaira community, I was brought back to this question about rodents. Scientists are historically bad at keeping track of rodents, but are we getting any better? The scientists I spoke to said yes.
LAVERY: A big part is that we’re recognizing those partnerships more, and I see it as being immensely important, and it always has been. I think it’s just that it never has had the credit that it deserved.
OZA: So after doing all of this reporting, I found myself meditating on a few things.
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OZA: One, by both improving the tools we have to find animals and partnering with local communities, scientists can help more communities, like the Zaira people, conserve the land and the local ecosystems. And, two, what it means to be charismatic and what animals deserve to live. After learning the stories of these animals, what it took to find them, how important they are to researchers and locals, I’m convinced they’re charismatic. But what about all the other endangered animals that are even less charismatic? Will the same time and money be given to them?
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OZA: This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was also edited by Rebecca. I checked the facts. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. I’m Anil Oza. Thank you for listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR.
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