Ecology

“The Alhambra palace, overlooking Granada in southern Spain, is one of the finest preserved examples of Moorish architecture, dating back to the thirteenth century. I’m employed by the palace’s management body to study the biodiversity in this vast complex — which has more than 2.5 million visitors per year. We manage the water features and gardens, not only to enhance their aesthetic appeal but also to protect their wildlife, with a focus on amphibians.In this photograph, taken just after sunset, when amphibians are active, I’m checking the number of Iberian ribbed newts (Pleurodeles waltl) in the pool and assessing their life stages. When I began working here, only two amphibian species remained; the others had disappeared owing to water pollution. These pools are common in the Alhambra, but much of the wildlife has been lost in recent centuries. Now, thanks to reintroduction efforts and careful management, four species are thriving. The individuals I’m observing today are the direct descendants of those I released years ago.It is valuable that so many people can see these animals in an urban environment. This raises awareness about the importance of biodiversity and how engaging with it can enhance our well-being. We now maintain the pools so that they remain transparent without the use of any chemical products, which enables invertebrates to thrive and, in turn, attracts birds that prey on them. Visitors can thus enjoy a more holistic experience, appreciating not only the cultural heritage but also the richness of its wildlife.

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Iguanas colonized Fiji after surviving an 8,000-kilometre sea voyage — the longest known oceanic migration by any land-dwelling vertebrate1.

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A company that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to ‘de-extinct’ woolly mammoths and other animals has claimed a breakthrough in its quest: the creation of hairier mice.The gene-edited ‘woolly mice’ harbour a mix of mutations modelled on those of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), as well as changes known to alter hair growth in mice, Colossal Biosciences announced in a 4 March press release and accompanying preprint.Colossal, which is based in Dallas, Texas, and worth more than US$10 billion according to its latest valuation, says the woolly mouse represents an important step towards its goal of engineering Asian elephants — the mammoth’s closest living relative — with genetic changes for key mammoth traits. “The Colossal Woolly Mouse marks a watershed moment in our de-extinction mission,” said Ben Lamm, Colossal’s co-founder and chief executive, in the press release.But some experts in mammoth genetics and genome editing question whether the mice represent a significant advance in either area, let alone a milestone on the way to bringing back woolly mammoths, which last roamed Earth some 4,000 years ago.“It’s far away from making a mammoth or a ‘mammoth mouse’,” says Stephan Riesenberg, a genome engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “It’s just a mouse that has some special genes.”Shaggy-hair geneAs part of its effort to engineer mammoth-like elephants, Colossal and its collaborators are working to find gene variants that contributed to key mammoth traits, such as shaggy hair, cold tolerance and extra fat stores. To do this, they compare genomes extracted from the remains of dozens of mammoths and from other living and extinct relatives of the creatures, in search of protein-altering changes that evolved on the mammoth lineage.Credit: Colossal BiosciencesTo test the accuracy of these comparisons, a team led by Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, used gene editing to create mice with mutations similar — but in most cases not identical — to those found in mammoths. Shapiro says the group also tested several gene mutations known to affect the hair of mice but not found in mammoths.The researchers used different gene-editing tools to create mice with up to eight genetic alterations spread across seven different genes. These mice tended to have long, shaggy hair that, owing to a mutation known to affect hair colour in mice, humans and mammoths, was tawny-toned instead of the usual dark grey. “Adorability was one of the unintended consequences that we did not expect,” Lamm says. Mice with a mammoth-inspired change to a gene involved in fat metabolism were no heavier than were mice with unedited genes.The mice are only a few months old, and the researchers have not had much time to investigate how the mutations might affect their long-term health, including their fertility and propensity to develop cancers. The researchers plan to test whether the mice are any better at handling the cold than other mice, and to study their hair development.Lamm says the company has no plans to breed or sell the mice commercially. But for about $3,500, scientists can purchase a shaggy-haired mouse strain known as ‘wooly’ from the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, which first bred the mice more than two decades ago. Researchers later showed that the strain carries a mutation in a gene called Fam83g — one of the genes inactivated in Colossal’s woolly mice. The woolly mammoth’s closest living relative is the Asian elephant.Credit: Darryl Brooks/AlamyShowing that changes found in mammoth genomes can affect mouse biology is a useful proof of principle, says Alfred Roca, a population geneticist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who sees the experiments as a step towards engineering elephants with mammoth traits. “It’s a very nice visualization of where you want to end up in the mammoth.”Mammoth genomics

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“In this photo, I’m monitoring gulls near Sandgerði, a small fishing village in southwest Iceland. This area is a volcanic peninsula, and although there’s a lot of precipitation, most of the water passes through the rocks and flows underground to the sea. So the places where fresh water is available, such as the lake in Sandgerði, attract a lot of birds.Our project is to screen for strains of avian influenza (bird flu) to study how they spread. We focus on certain species of gull with migration paths that overlap here.Lesser black-backed gulls (Larus fuscus) breed in Iceland during the summertime, and in the winter they migrate to Europe or West Africa. By contrast, the Iceland gull (Larus glaucoides) breeds farther north, in Greenland or Canada, but returns to Iceland for winter. Then there are the local ones, such as the great black-backed gull (Larus marinus) and the glaucous gull (Larus hyperboreus), that are here all year round.All of that mixing means that Iceland is a key location for avian influenza viruses from Europe to move into North America, and vice versa.

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“In this photograph, I am using radio tracking to monitor European wildcats (Felis silvestris) with my daughter, Sabana. I love this image, because it brings together my two worlds: science and motherhood. It is important to me to inspire her love for nature, and my life as a field biologist allows me to do this almost every day. We are in the Sierra Harana, southern Spain, where wildcats have been monitored with radio tracking and camera traps for the past eight years. So far, we have fitted radio collars on 18 individuals and are now tracking 4 females and 3 males.These cats are elusive and understudied, especially in the Mediterranean region. There’s more research on the reproductive ecology of cheetahs, say, in remote areas, than on wildcats in Europe.Wildcat populations are in sharp decline and the animals are now absent from much of their former range in the Iberian Peninsula, owing to legal predator control and illegal killings, as well as road accidents, habitat fragmentation and hybridization with domestic cats. In Mediterranean areas, a decline in their main prey — rabbits — due to viral diseases seems to be the key factor. Understanding the balance of all of these factors is crucial to identify potential threats, reassess the need for greater protection and urge governments to take conservation action.

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