Are We Naïve to Think We Can Save Rare Plants from Extinction?

In places such as the Hawaiian Islands, where over half the native flora may be at risk of extinction in coming decades, the criticism is sometimes raised that the situation is so hopeless that the talents, energy and money of botanical gardens and other plant conservation organizations is largely wasted in trying to save these plants. Although stories of failure abound, it is important to recognize that considerable progress is being made. Organizations such as the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) have led the way in this eleventh-hour effort, not by naïvely pursuing failed strategies, nor by pulling back and only pursuing very limited goals, but by approaching the huge challenges with an energetic pioneering spirit. By taking an innovative comprehensive approach, dealing with the crisis at the level of ecosystems and plant communities rather than merely individual species, NTBG and other organizations are making progress on a broad front that integrates a range of scales and techniques and adapts to the shifting circumstances through careful monitoring and a spirit of optimism that is coupled with scientific scepticism

Rodrigues Island: Hope thrives at the François Leguat Giant Tortoise and Cave Reserve

From this hilltop porch at sunrise, above the limestone landscape of Plaine Corail on the southwestern corner of Rodrigues Island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, I am looking out over a patchwork of small subsistence farms, awakening livestock, a sleepy airport, and a vast reef-bounded lagoon, bigger than the island itself – and something else. Something that warms the cockles of my heart. Something I have been writing and dreaming about for decades, a kind of project that gives me hope for conservation in an otherwise dark hour. Nestled in the midst of all these human landscapes is a truly prehistoric scene, the Francois Leguat Giant Tortoise and Cave Reserve. On this remarkable 19 hectares, Reserve Manager Aurele Anquetil André and his dedicated staff of young Rodriguans have planted over 130,000 native trees and shrubs, some virtually extinct in the wild and many quite rare otherwise, in just five years. Nearly all have survived, and with only limited maintenance despite the huge challenges posed by invasive weeds on all remote Indo - Pacific islands. Giant tortoises, over 1,000 of them, lumber about doing the work. Fenced in and well - fed on the invasive plants that compete with the natives, introduced Aldabra Tortoises (Aldabrachelys gigantea) weighing up to 200 kg crop the invasive plants, and smaller Radiated Tortoises of Madagascar (Geochelone radiata) pull up the weed seedlings. Remarkably – and I had to see this for myself – they don’t touch the native plants, which co - evolved with the extinct tortoise fauna (Cylindraspis spp.) that disappeared in the late eighteenth century after French colonists shipped over 280,000 of them to Reunion and other places for butchery. These plants have defenses against tortoises and browsing birds. Notable in the latter category was the extinct Solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria) a giant pigeon endemic to Rodrigues that was even larger than the Dodo, the famous extinct denizen of Mauritius, Rodrigues’ big neighbor 650 km to the west. Through heterophylly, the adaptation of having tough, finely dissected and presumably less edible leaves near the ground where animals can reach, as well as in some cases certain plant chemicals that the tortoises apparently don’t like, and long flexible stems that tortoises seem not to trample down or chew, these plants are thriving in the midst of a high density of these hungry lumbering reptiles. A tall secure fence keeps them inside the Reserve, and keeps out the free - ranging goats, sheep, and cattle which have converted so much of the rest of this island to Lantana and other unpalatable invasives. Those ungulates, with their advanced teeth, love to eat the native plants, and have nearly driven them to extinction. I have been an advocate for this approach – reintroducing the “megafauna” back to lands where they are extinct, or their closest living relatives or even an ecological surrogate – for several decades. The scientific underpinnings for restoring ecological functions this way are quite sound, and there are plenty of examples of this “rewilding” already working around the world, from Siberia’s “Pleistocene Park” with reintroduced musk oxen, wild horses, and so forth, to American media mogul Ted Turner’s vast ranches in the western US with herds of many thousands of bison, elk, and yes – even a giant tortoise (Bolson’s) reintroduced to its former range from Mexico. You can read about these and others in my recent book1. Some years ago I even proposed something like this for Madagascar – starting with tortoises but under the right circumstances perhaps including living ratite birds, hippos, and crocodiles, in some fenced reserve lands. I doubt that most readers took me seriously then (perhaps even now). Here at the Leguat Reserve, though, rewilding is not a hypothetical proposal, it is a way of life, a major tourist attraction, and a very interesting scientific experiment. Rewilding is working here, and working wonderfully. Tortoises pull the weeds, apply the fertilizer, and germinate the seeds. Regarding the latter, recently published experiments2 show that passing through the slow digestive system of a giant tortoise is just what some of these hard - to - germinate seeds of rare native plants have been waiting for. The authors show conclusively that the highly endangered, large - seeded native ebony tree (Diospyros egrettarum) is germinating and thriving on the remarkable 25-hectare Ile aux Aigrettes Reserve, a small island off Mahebourg, Mauritius, thanks to the Aldabra tortoises reintroduced there by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. At the Leguat Reserve on Rodrigues, guides lead thousands of visitors per year through huge spectacular limestone caves that have yielded the fossils of giant tortoises, Solitaires, and the other extinct biota of Rodrigues. Their tour, and the excellent museum on the Reserve, make that wonderful connection between the fossils of a remarkable extinct fauna, and the rare plants and surviving fauna of large handsome fruit bats, rare land snails, nesting White - tailed Tropicbirds, and the surviving cousins of the native giant tortoises now roaming the canyons and plateaus of the Reserve. What am I doing here? To begin with, my wife Lida Pigott Burney and I have in recent years started our own similar rewilding project on the island of Kaua`i, in the Hawaiian Islands. We likewise have a cave system, full of fossils of the extinct animals, as a centerpiece for restorations on worn - out farmland that feature thousands of native plants, some quite rare. Our big fossil herbivores, giant flightless ducks and geese, are all extinct, and alas, tortoises never reached Hawaii. So we laboriously pull the weeds, tons of them, with the help of the school children of Kaua`i and hundreds of volunteers. The current question I and my colleagues are asking is, could giant tortoises give us a hand, serving as ecological surrogates for the lost birds? In any case, the National Geographic Society funded our team, including paleontologists Julian Hume and Lorna Steel from UK, paleo - entomologist Nick Porch and speleologist Greg Middleton from Australia, and Lida and myself as the paleoecologists, to work on the excellent fossil deposits on Rodrigues and compare them to our results from elsewhere. That work is going well, we’re finding plenty. But thanks to these lumbering living reptiles, I’m thinking all over again about the potential to use tortoises, and perhaps substitutes for other extinct megafauna, to try some rewilding at an appropriate place – such as a securely fenced, private reserve in western Madagascar – and such a place exists. Owen Griffiths, the biologist/entrepreneur who created the La Vanille Crocodile Park and Tortoise Reserve on Mauritius (inspiration for Ile aux Aigrettes) and the Leguat Reserve on Rodrigues, is hard at work in Madagascar on his private reserve lands, where he hopes to start rewilding with Aldabra tortoises and other appropriate creatures. Before you dismiss this idea as crazy, you might consider that it was Charles Darwin himself who set all this in motion. He visited Mauritius on the return voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle in 1836, where he heard about the extinct giant tortoises of that island. Many years later, he suggested that the best way to see that the thousands of giant tortoises then living on uninhabited Aldabra Island (their last stand in the Indian Ocean region) didn’t go the way of the extinct giant tortoises of Madagascar, the Mascarenes, and the Seychelles, was to move some to these other islands and establish populations, and that was done on Mauritius. People took him seriously, and the tortoises’ future looks bright. Many of Darwin’s ideas were controversial then, and some still are in some quarters. Rewilding proposals like this are still being argued, but they have the potential to “jump start” evolution when it seems to have gone hopelessly off the track. After visiting the Leguat Reserve, I’m more hopeful than ever that evolution might have a second chance

CLIMATE CELANGE AND FIRE ECOLQGY AS FACTORS IN THE QUATERNARY BIQGEOGRAPHY OF MADAGASCAR

ABSTRACT.-Palynological studies throughout Madagascar have demonstrated the importance of Quaternary climate variation and fire ecology in determining the character of prehwan vegetation in Madagascar. Although rain forest may have persisted dong the eastern escarpment throughout the Cenozoic, dynamic shifts have occurred in other areas, forcing the biota of dry woodland, grassland, montane, and semi-desert regions to accommodate changes in temperature, precipitation, and seasonality. Some highland and western regions were influenced by drought and fire long before any known human inputs, and this is reflected in plant and animal adaptations and ranges. The probable effect of burning by humans has been to increase fire frequency and to spread pyrogenic communities into areas previously too wet or too dry to ordinarily support a natural fire regime. The emerging synthesis regarding presettlement vegetation and subsequent human-caused changes helps cl-some of the formerly puzzling aspects of species distributions

Community structure of Pleistocene coral reefs of Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles

The Quaternary fossil record of living coral reefs is fundamental for understanding modern ecological patterns. Living reefs generally accumulate in place, so fossil reefs record a history of their former biological inhabitants and physical environments. Reef corals record their ecological history especially well because they form large, resistant skeletons, which can be identified to species. Thus, presence-absence and relative abundance data can be obtained with a high degree of confidence. Moreover, potential effects of humans on reef ecology were absent or insignificant on most reefs until the last few hundred years, so that it is possible to analyze "natural" distribution patterns before intense human disturbance began. We characterized Pleistocene reef coral assemblages from Curacao, Netherlands Antilles, Caribbean Sea, focusing on predictability in species abundance patterns from different reef environments over broad spatial scales. Our data set is composed of >2 km of surveyed Quaternary reef. Taxonomic composition showed consistent differences between environments and along secondary environmental gradients within environments. Within environments, taxonomic composition of communities was markedly similar indicating nonrandom species associations and communities composed of species occurring in characteristic abundances. This community similarity was maintained with little change over a 40-km distance. The nonrandom patterns in species abundances were similar to those found in the Caribbean before the effects of extensive anthropogenic degradation of reefs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The high degree of order observed in species abundance patterns of fossil reef coral communities on a scale of tens of kilometers contrasts markedly with patterns observed in previous small-scale studies of modern reefs. Dominance of Acropora palmata in the reef crest zone and patterns of overlap and nonoverlap of species in the Montastraea ''annularis'' sibling species complex highlight the tendency for distribution and abundance patterns of Pleistocene corals to reflect environmental preferences at multiple spatial scales. Wave energy is probably the most important physical environmental variable structuring these coral communities. The strong similarity between ancient and pre-1980s Caribbean reefs and the nonrandom distribution of coral species in space and time indicate that recent variability noted at much smaller time scales may be due to either unprecedented anthropogenic influences on reefs or fundamentally different patterns at varying spatio-temporal scales

New Findings at Andrahomana Cave, Southeastern Madagascar

A remote eolianite cave and sinkhole complex on the southeast coast of Madagascar has played a major role in the history of paleontology in Madagascar. Andrahomana Cave has yielded a rich fossil record of the extinct megafauna. Expeditions in 2000 and 2003 produced a wealth of new material and provided the first systematic information concerning the genesis, stratigraphy, and taphonomy of the site. Recovered bones of one of the most poorly understood extinct large lemurs, Hadropithecus stenognathus, include many skeletal elements previously unknown. Radiocarbon dates show that the site has sampled this disappeared fauna in the midto- late Holocene, but that bone-bearing layers are stratigraphically mixed, probably owing to the effects of reworking of the sediments by extreme marine events. The diverse biota recovered contains elements of both eastern rain forest and southwestern arid bushland, reflecting the cave’s position in the zone of transition between wet and dry biomes. Bones of two unusual small mammals add to the previously long faunal list for the site: 1) the first fossil evidence for Macrotarsomys petteri, a large-bodied endemic nesomyid rodent previously known only from a single modern specimen; and 2) the type specimen and additional material of a newly described extinct shrew-tenrec (Microgale macpheei). Evidence for prehistoric and colonial-era humans includes artifacts, hearth deposits, and remains of human domesticates and other introduced species. Although previously protected by its extreme isolation, the unique site is vulnerable to exploitation. An incipient tourist industry is likely to bring more people to the cave, and there is currently no form of protection afforded to the site

Catalysts for long-life closed-cycle CO2 lasers

Long-life, closed-cycle operation of pulsed CO2 lasers requires catalytic CO-O2 recombination both to remove O2, which is formed by discharge-induced CO2 decomposition, and to regenerate CO2. Platinum metal on a tin (IV) oxide substrate (Pt/SnO2) has been found to be an effective catalyst for such recombination in the desired temperature range of 25 to 100 C. This paper presents a description of ongoing research at NASA-LaRC on Pt/SnO2 catalyzed CO-O2 recombination. Included are studies with rare-isotope gases since rare-isotope CO2 is desirable as a laser gas for enhanced atmospheric transmission. Results presented include: (1) achievement of 98% to 100% conversion of a stoichiometric mixture of CO and O2 to CO2 for 318 hours (greater than 1 x 10 to the 6th power seconds), continuous, at a catalyst temperature of 60 C, and (2) development of a technique verified in a 30-hour test, to prevent isotopic scrambling when CO-18 and O-18(2) are reacted in the presence of a common-isotope Pt/Sn O-16(2) catalyst

Worldwide patterns of bronchodilator responsiveness: results from the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease study.

To access publisher's full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field.Criteria for a clinically significant bronchodilator response (BDR) are mainly based on studies in patients with obstructive lung diseases. Little is known about the BDR in healthy general populations, and even less about the worldwide patterns. 10 360 adults aged 40 years and older from 14 countries in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia participated in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease study. Spirometry was used before and after an inhaled bronchodilator to determine the distribution of the BDR in population-based samples of healthy non-smokers and individuals with airflow obstruction. In 3922 healthy never smokers, the weighted pooled estimate of the 95th percentiles (95% CI) for bronchodilator response were 284 ml (263 to 305) absolute change in forced expiratory volume in 1 s from baseline (ΔFEV(1)); 12.0% (11.2% to 12.8%) change relative to initial value (%ΔFEV(1i)); and 10.0% (9.5% to 10.5%) change relative to predicted value (%ΔFEV(1p)). The corresponding mean changes in forced vital capacity (FVC) were 322 ml (271 to 373) absolute change from baseline (ΔFVC); 10.5% (8.9% to 12.0%) change relative to initial value (ΔFVC(i)); and 9.2% (7.9% to 10.5%) change relative to predicted value (ΔFVC(p)). The proportion who exceeded the above threshold values in the subgroup with spirometrically defined Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) stage 2 and higher (FEV(1)/FVC <0.7 and FEV(1)% predicted <80%) were 11.1%, 30.8% and 12.9% respectively for the FEV(1)-based thresholds and 22.6%, 28.6% and 22.1% respectively for the FVC-based thresholds. The results provide reference values for bronchodilator responses worldwide that confirm guideline estimates for a clinically significant level of BDR in bronchodilator testing.ALTANA Aventis AstraZeneca Boehringer-Ingelheim Chiesi GlaxoSmithKline Merck Novartis Pfizer Schering-Plough Sepracor University of Kentucky Boehringer Ingelheim Schering Ploug

Adamantane-Resistant Influenza Infection During the 2004–05 Season

Adamantane-resistant influenza A is an emerging problem, but infections caused by resistant and susceptible viruses have not been compared. We identified adamantane resistance in 47% of 152 influenza A virus (H3N2) isolates collected during 2005. Resistant and susceptible viruses caused similar symptoms and illness duration. The prevalence of resistance was highest in children