Ecology

Samples of Colombia’s plant and animal species are housed at the Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute in Bogota. How to equitably share the benefits of digital genetic-sequence information relating to such samples remains unresolved.Credit: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty

Next week, national delegates, including scientists, will meet in Cali, Colombia, for the United Nations COP16 meeting on biodiversity. Boosting the low levels of finance available for biodiversity conservation is high on the agenda, as is trying to tie up some unfinished business that goes back more than three decades. The hope is that negotiators will finally reach an agreement on how lower-income countries can better share in the benefits that stem from their resources — including any monetary benefits deriving from non-human genetic data.Yet even at this eleventh hour, an agreement on the sharing of these data is some way from being ready. The principle of equitable benefit-sharing is not in question, but more time is needed to bridge gaps between different perspectives on how to implement it. Those gaps will, in turn, be bridged only if policymakers can commission a programme of research to help answer some crucial questions. Researchers globally fear that rushing to finalize the agreement risks putting barriers in the way of the current practice by which researchers are able to quickly share genetic-sequencing data, which are the lifeblood of many scientific fields and are crucial to public health, particularly during health emergencies.
Conservation policies must address an overlooked issue: how war affects the environment
The history of these efforts stretches back to the start of the biodiversity convention, which was signed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 (see go.nature.com/3y0xs7q). A pledge made at that time for more equitable sharing of biological resources eventually led to the Nagoya protocol, which became international law in 2014 (see go.nature.com/3ab4q9g). This obliges researchers at universities and corporations in countries that are party to the UN convention to ensure that they have obtained all the necessary permissions when using non-human genetic material from another country. For companies, there is an added requirement to share profits from any commercial products that arise from such work.But the Nagoya protocol applies only to physical samples. Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are rich in biodiversity and have been pushing since at least 2016 to expand the definition of non-human genetic material to include digital sequence information (DSI). This is the subject of the 11-page text that is due to be discussed at the Cali meeting (see go.nature.com/3nscyd4).The text’s authors — who include researchers representing governments from different world regions, Indigenous people and representatives of UN organizations — agree on several fundamental principles. These include the need for there to be an agreement on DSI data, as there is for physical samples; for the agreement to respect the rights of Indigenous peoples; and for the agreement to be consistent with the principles of open data and not hinder research and innovation. Moreover, anyone benefiting financially from DSI should contribute a fraction of the benefit to a fund to protect biodiversity.
The next 20 years of human genomics must be more equitable and more open
But the document also contains some 200 items in square brackets — meaning that there are around 200 things on which the authors still disagree. Among them are how to define DSI (there is no agreement on whether it covers one or all of DNA, RNA and proteins); whether this information should be deposited in existing or new databases; how to define a sequence’s country of origin, including whether this is even possible; where permission should be obtained from or how benefits should be apportioned if there is no single country of origin; whether payments should be mandatory; and whether all countries or only rich nations should be liable to pay.These are tricky questions, but they are not unanswerable. What is needed to resolve them is dedicated independent research. Such research is thin on the ground (A. H. Scholz et al. Nature Commun. 13, 1086; 2022), and policymakers need to commission it so that they can be better informed about the different options being proposed. A document as incomplete as that due to be discussed at Cali is not one on which good decisions can be made.COP16 delegates will also discuss the lack of progress countries have made in finalizing biodiversity action plans. One reason for this is a lack of finance. Researchers estimate that between US$700 billion and $1 trillion is needed annually. However, in 2022, only around $26 billion went into conserving species and ecosystems, according to a report published last month by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (see go.nature.com/3ub1mqg), a group of wealthy nations. Although some of what is available is in the form of grants, a lot of it comprises loans, which need to be repaid — with interest.
Global lessons from South Africa’s rooibos compensation agreement
Some of the DSI agreement’s proponents see it as at least part of the answer to boosting biodiversity financing in the countries that most need it. But it is likely to disappoint — as experience with the Nagoya protocol, a comparatively simpler device, shows. In the decade since it came into force, there are few recorded examples of corporations paying local communities for the use of their biological resources. Although in 2019, tea manufacturers compensated South Africa’s Khoi and San communities for using their knowledge on rooibos tea without acknowledgement, this agreement took years to realize and only happened because the South African government pushed the companies to pay.Next week’s meeting in Cali is important. For delegates from LMICs, such events are among a vanishingly small number of forums where their voices are equal to those of richer, more powerful nations. And the whole world has an interest in the project’s success.The case of the omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus offers a valuable reminder of why some form of benefit sharing from DSI is necessary (R. Viana et al. Nature 603, 679–686; 2022). Researchers in Botswana and South Africa who discovered it rapidly alerted the world and shared its sequence. This knowledge was used in the manufacture of vaccines — vaccines that could have saved many more lives had they not reached many African countries too late. And this example also raises yet another issue — that the discussion at Cali ought to include other international bodies, most notably the World Health Organization.Most importantly, before an agreement is reached on DSI, much more work needs to go into answering the questions contained in those 200-odd sets of square brackets. What no one needs is a rushed mechanism that risks the knowledge sharing on which research and public health depend. More

The French overseas territory of New Caledonia is one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots, with more than 3,000 plant species, three-quarters of them endemic (N. Myers et al. Nature 403, 853–858; 2000), and 2% of the world’s threatened animal, plant and fungal species.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

A maneless lion from Kenya. Two maneless lions nicknamed the ‘Man-eaters of Tsavo’ preyed on railway workers in Kenya during the nineteenth century.Credit: Cavan Images/Alamy

Hair found wedged in the broken teeth of famous lions killed in the nineteenth century offers a glimpse of their diet — which included humans1.Few wild lions (Panthera leo) are as well-known as the ‘Man-eaters of Tsavo’, two large maneless males that terrorized workers constructing the Kenya–Uganda Railway until they were shot by a railway administrator, lieutenant-colonel John Henry Patterson, in 1898. The exact number of their victims is unknown, but they probably killed at least 31 people near the Tsavo River in Kenya2.The Tsavo lions ended up on display at Chicago’s Field Museum in Illinois, and by 2001, thousands of hairs had been extracted from a cavity in one of their teeth. At the time, the best scientists could do was look at the hairs under a microscope.Ancient-DNA advancesHowever, “ancient DNA has come a long way”, says co-author Ripan S. Malhi, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “You no longer need a follicle cell on a hair” to extract and read the DNA. “You can do it from the hair shaft itself.” Using these techniques, Malhi and his colleagues have identified hair from giraffe, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, zebra and human in the sample. Their report was published today in Current Biology.The wildebeests were the biggest surprise. There were no wildebeests near the site of the railway worker’s camp, says co-author Alida de Flamingh, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The closest herds were 90 kilometres away. So “either these lions were roaming across larger areas, or, historically, wildebeest did occur in the Tsavo region”, de Flamingh says.

Hair trapped in the broken tooth (pictured) of one of the Tsavo lions yielded DNA from the great cat’s prey.Credit: Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

Although the researchers could do further analyses to uncover more information about the human DNA, they included minimal detail about it in their published paper. The next step will be “working with the local community and the local institutions”, Malhi says. “There are potentially descendants, or a descendant community that may or may not want this type of analysis done, or maybe they do — we just don’t know yet.”Graham Kerley, an ecologist and lion specialist at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa, says that the list of species whose DNA is lingering in the predator’s teeth isn’t particularly surprising. For him, the real takeaway is the importance of preserving biological specimens so that they can be reanalysed as tools improve over time. “Patterson, when he shot these lions, he had no sense of the incredible information that would emerge a hundred odd years later,” Kerley says.That’s exactly the message that the researchers wanted to send, de Flamingh says. “We hope that other folks will try to apply the methodology that we developed here to study prey ecology or histories of other animals — even extending further back to extinct species.” More

Zoologist Yolarnie Amepou heard whispers about the fish frenzy when she made her first trip to the Kikori River Delta in the remote reaches of southern Papua New Guinea.It was January 2012, and Amepou was travelling down the delta by dinghy, from village to village, as part of a research project on the vulnerable pig-nosed turtle (Carettochelys insculpta). Amepou heard talk of outsiders appearing across the region offering staggering amounts of cash for swim bladders — an organ cut from some of the delta’s large fish species that helps them to control buoyancy. Consumers in Asia, particularly southern China, know this commodity as fish maw and covet it as a culinary delicacy, a traditional medicine and a symbol of prosperity.The global maw trade has been growing rapidly over the past 25 years1, and market prices now far exceed those of similar dried seafood luxuries such as shark fin and sea cucumber, which are also prized in China. In some low- and middle-income countries where demand for maw is very high, it is sometimes called the cocaine of the seas because it is so lucrative and attracts organized crime interests.Papua New Guinea has become the source of some of the most sought-after maw. In the years since Amepou’s first visit, she’s watched the fish-maw industry in the Kikori delta explode, “like a fisheries gold rush”. Fishers replaced their paddle canoes, lines and hooks with outboard-powered dinghies and commercial nets. The price being offered to delta fishers for dried maw from one prized species — the scaly croaker (Nibea squamosa) — has been recorded at up to US$15,615 per kilogram — potentially the highest price offered to fishers for maw in the world, according to a study by Amepou and her colleagues published earlier this year2.

The Kikori river delta is the source of some of the most highly prized maw in the world.Credit: Minden Pictures/Alamy

Revenue from the maw industry is a lifesaver for many delta communities, with some people using it to move away from the coast to escape rapidly rising seas. “Fish maw has alleviated some quite severe poverty issues,” says Michael Grant, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, who researches Papua New Guinea’s sharks and rays in the Kikori delta, one of their last strongholds. Its waterways and mangroves are recognized as a sanctuary of biodiversity and have been nominated for inclusion as a World Heritage Site on the list maintained by the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO.Grant and others fear that the sharp increase in fishing pressure in the Kikori delta and the use of gillnets — which indiscriminately capture many types of fish, dolphin and turtle — could recreate problems that have plagued Mexico, China and parts of Africa, where the maw trade has fished some species into near oblivion. That threat risks damaging the delta’s ecosystems and leaving people worse off, says Grant.The information coming out of Papua New Guinea “is worrying, because it does seem to fit what we’ve seen in other places wherelittle-known species are targeted for the value of their maw”, says Yvonne Sadovy, a Hong Kong fisheries specialist now based in the United Kingdom. Along with Grant and other members of a species-survival commission that is part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), she contributed to a paper sounding the alarm on the increasing maw trade that was submitted by the United States to a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in July.“There are very few controls and there is very little knowledge, I think, by the government fishery departments about the value, importance and potential threats of this,” says Sadovy. The consequence is “a sort of cowboy frontier”, whereby high prices push fishers to target species that “we hardly know anything about in terms of the science”.Turtle troublesAmepou wasn’t too concerned when she first heard about the fish-maw trade. In her early years in the Kikori region, she was focused on how hunting and habitat changes were threatening the pig-nosed turtle. The work took her to far-flung villages to monitor nesting sites, survey the consumption of turtle meat and eggs, and build community awareness about the vulnerability of the creatures known as piku.By 2019 she was known locally as mama piku, and was the director of a small conservation organization, the Piku Biodiversity Network, which she still runs. Amid the other changes in the region, the fish-maw trade had become yet another threat to the turtle’s survival because the animals were getting tangled in commercial gillnets that seafood companies were supplying to local fishers.

Rising sea levels have damaged the remote village of Veraibari.Credit: Jo Chandler

The remoteness and logistical difficulties of working in the Kikori delta — a region with little electrical power, few roads, fragmentary communications and 4–8 metres of rainfall a year — mean that Amepou, Grant and their collaborators are among just a handful of researchers who are active in the area. With support from the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), a multinational organization focused on the region’s natural resources, they collected data on targeted maw species, as well as by-catch. A survey of landings in gillnets reported by fishers from five delta communities over six months to April 2022 found that the hunt for fish maw pulls up huge numbers of non-target fish and mammals3.Elasmobranchs — a subclass of fish that includes sharks and rays — accounted for almost half the catch, whereas target species made up just 22%. Among the other casualties were several species listed as endangered or critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, including three species of hammerhead shark, the giant guitarfish (Glaucostegus typus) and the bottlenose wedgefish (Rhynchobatus australiae), alongside various vulnerable river sharks and critically endangered Indo-Pacific sawfishes (Pristidae)2.Other reports, some unpublished, document declines in two endemic dolphin species that have small local populations and are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. On one occasion, fishers reported that ten dolphins drowned in a single net, says Amepou. “You’re looking at the very real possibility of a local extinction if nothing is done about the gillnets in the water,” she says.But discussions with local people about curtailing fishing practices for conservation purposes are acutely sensitive given the money flowing into the economically disadvantaged region. “While local fishers acknowledge sustainability concerns, the overarching feeling is everyone is pretty happy for now,” says Grant. “Whether fish-maw money is going back into community and development remains to be seen, and this is our next research focus.”In 2022, the researchers submitted a report to SPREP on the Kikori maw fishery, urging the development of a management plan3. Sources have told Nature that work on a plan has commenced, but Papua New Guinea’s authorities did not respond to questions from Nature on its progress. In 2021, the National Fisheries Authority stopped issuing new fish-maw licences in Gulf Province, where the Kikori delta is located, and in the neighbouring Western Province, owing to increasing illegal, unregulated and unreported activities in the two fisheries.Villages at riskAfter storm surges destroyed many houses in the delta village of Veraibari in 2020, the people formed a relocation committee. They plan to use the windfall maw money to build around 200 homes, a school, a market and churches a short distance inland from the beach where they currently live. The committee estimates that this plan will cost 1,689,000 Papua New Guinean kina (US$431,000). In recent years, waves have damaged and closed the schoolhouse, knocked down freshwater tanks and submerged burial grounds. Abandoned homes decay on their stilts in the shallows alongside the stumps of drowned palm trees.“The land is disappearing, the high land is going down, and then it is very easy for water to enter into the village,” says community and church leader Ara Kouwo. When the big tides come, his family wades into the sea to push away debris that might tip their home off its legs.Kouwo is also the local agent buying maw for one of the six seafood companies, all Asian-led, with licences in Gulf Province. He conducts business at his family table, weighing and trading fish maw, offering 5,000 to 6,000 kina per 100 grams for the finest specimens. He kicked off the relocation fund with his own earnings, urging his neighbours and relatives to provide cash or other contributions. They are lobbying for more government support, but have so far received only sandbags to build a seawall, which soon failed, and some iron roofing, nails and a sawmill to help with the relocation. Money earned from fishing is the only way to save the village, he says, although he recognizes the risks.If there was any other help coming to pay for the new village, “then we would stop these fishing activities”, he says. “We are in fear,” he adds. “When we kill all mothers of the fish, we are in trouble.”

Maw drying outside in a delta community.Credit: Yolarnie Amepou/Piku Biodiversity Network

Environmental lawyer Watna Mori at Blue Ocean Law, a firm based in Hagåtña, Guam, is part of a team assisting the people of Veraibari to argue a case for funding from the UN for loss and damages due to climate change. She says that the tension between the slow process of structural, systemic change and the community’s urgent need was heartbreakingly stark when she visited Veraibari in 2022.“You see the contrast of these two activities — trying to adapt to climate change, and then you see this act of fishing for this product that causes so much harm to their biodiversity,” says Mori. “What else can they do?”The maw trade generates a boom-and-bust cycle that fisheries researchers and activists have seen before. The most infamous case is that of the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), which is found only in Mexico’s Gulf of California and was hunted for its maw for much of the twentieth century.Although Mexico banned fishing for totoaba in 1975, the species continues to be fished illegally, with trading of totoaba maw increasing on Facebook and the Chinese social media platform WeChat, according to a report released in February by the Environmental Investigation Agency UK, a non-governmental organization in London (see go.nature.com/4ghoiwr). The gillnets used to catch totoaba also entangle the endemic vaquita (Phocoena sinus), the world’s smallest porpoise. It’s estimated that as few as ten individuals remain.The hunt for maw has left a trail of ecological damage elsewhere, too, including in Africa’s Lake Victoria, where there are concerns that the Nile perch (Lates niloticus) might disappear.Hidden dangerFor years, the global scale of fish-maw operations remained mainly under the radar because the volume of the catch was hidden in a broad commodities category of “dried fish”, says Sadovy. She and others urged authorities in Hong Kong, the global trade hub for maw, to introduce a specific code for fish maw separate from other dried fish, which they did in 2015. Data collected using this new code revealed that between 2015 and 2018, 3,144–3,882 tonnes of dried maw, worth $264 million to $394 million, were imported to Hong Kong every year4. These were shockingly high numbers, Sadovy says, “because you might have 3,000 tonnes of maw, but maw is only 5% of the weight of the animal. So that’s tonnes and tonnes of animal, so you begin to think about the scale of those fisheries”.Her team tracked the maw to 110 source countries and territories, but found that, in most of those nations, hardly anything is known about the trade. “A lot of even local scientists had no idea this trade was going on, it’s quite secretive,” she says.

Turtles, marine mammals and non-target fish often get caught in nets used by people fishing for species that supply maw.Credit: Amos Ivei/Piku Biodiversity Network

Her work also exposed the previously unrecognized loss of another species coveted for its maw, the Chinese bahaba (Bahaba taipingensis)5, which can reach 2 metres in length and weigh more than 100 kilograms. Records from the 1930s found specimens in its habitat off the coast of China. Today it is so rare that “it is possible it will become the first marine commercial species to go extinct in recent times in the wild”, Sadovy says.The cycles that have played out with the bahaba, totoaba and Nile perch “illustrate the consequences of escalating prices and lack of management”, including the implications for biodiversity, Sadovy and her colleagues warned in 20194. Concern over the trade has grown in the years since then. In 2021, in response to the high prices being paid for maw in Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, India and French Guiana, the IUCN adopted a motion urging nations to control and monitor trade in the swim bladders of a group of ray-finned fishes known as big croakers to both protect the target species and reduce by-catch of threatened marine megafauna.“A lot of people are beginning to realize — biologists, fisheries people — that maw is an issue,” says Sadovy. However, she adds that there are also a lot of places where the maw trade operates out of sight. Concerns about the trade are what motivated the drafting of the document submitted by the United States to CITES in July, she says. “It was a first initiative to highlight international maw trade as an issue threatening some species.”
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Sadovy hopes escalating concern will persuade international organizations — in particular, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN — to become more active in documenting the trade. She wants to see the FAO follow Hong Kong’s lead and introduce a commodity code specifically for maw. “There are opportunities to actually seek better benefits for the fishermen themselves,” says Sadovy. “I see a win–win before some species are really pushed too far down.” But it needs to happen soon.Without action at national and international levels, researchers warn that the risks for both vulnerable marine populations and the people who rely on them for income and food are dire. In the dozen years she has been working in the Kikori delta, Amepou has observed how precarious life is in the villages and how much the people there are exposed to the rapidly changing environment. She hears their stories and tries to answer questions about rising seas, changing weather and vanishing species.Amepou likes to take the conversation back to the creature that drew her to the region: the turtle with the snout of a pig, remarkable enough to etch its way into local lore. When she first arrived, the people of the delta told her they had no concerns for its future, because the pig-nosed turtle was like their mother. It would always provide for them.“And I say ‘your mother will provide for you to a certain point. There’s a time in life when you have to take care of your mother’,” Amepou says. “‘And it’s come to that point, where your mother kind of needs your help.’” More

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Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares and colleagues document thoroughly how the much-cited claim that 80% of the world’s biodiversity occurs on Indigenous people’s lands is based on a misinterpretation that has cascaded through the scientific literature (Á. Fernández-Llamazares et al. Nature 633, 32–35; 2024). On the basis of their evidence, we agree that the claim should be abandoned, and will encourage our organization to do so.
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests. More

NEWS AND VIEWS
08 October 2024

Lynx numbers ebb and flow as these predators hunt hares across Alaska, but analysis suggests that this population wave is mediated by survival rather than by how lynx disperse. More

Scientists have started swabbing short-tailed Shearwater (Ardenna tenuirostris) for evidence of bird flu. The birds are migrating from the northern hemisphere to Australia.Credit: John Holmes/Alamy

Australia and the rest of Oceania are the last regions free of the highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that has caused mass mortality in birds across the world and a massive outbreak in dairy cattle in the United States. Why animals in the southern region have so far escaped infection is a mystery, but scientists have several theories.For one, Australia is geographically isolated and doesn’t import live poultry, says Frank Wong, a virologist at the CSIRO Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness in Geelong. Many of the countries’ birds are endemic and do not migrate to regions where the virus is spreading.But the virus’s arrival in Australia is “a matter of when, not if”, says Michelle Wille, a virologist at the Centre for Pathogen Genomics at the University of Melbourne, Australia.Bird surveyWille thinks that long-distance migratory shorebirds and seabirds that come from Siberia and Alaska through southeast Asia to Australia are most likely to carry the virus into the country.This week, Australian scientists, including Wille, started swabbing the first of nearly 1,000 migratory birds for the virus. Over the coming weeks, the team will capture wedge-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna pacifica) and short-tailed shearwaters (Ardenna tenuirostris) as they migrate from the northern autumn to the southern spring. At night, shearwaters sleep in burrows and are relatively easy to grab. The researchers will swab the birds for the virus, and take blood to test for antibodies that will reveal previous exposure. They will be testing for the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b in particular, which has caused mass mortality in birds and some mammals.To swab the birds, the researchers will travel to seven locations across Australia, as far apart as Broome in the northwest, Lord Howe Island in the east and Phillip Island in the south.Deadly ducks?Wille says another possible route for the virus is through ducks. Scientists think migrating ducks and geese in other parts of the world can spread the disease without succumbing to it.That’s because ducks’ epithelial cells have a sensor, known as RIG-I, that detects an invading influenza virus and triggers an immune response that usually fends it off. Kirsty Short, a virologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, says ducks might have evolved such defences in Asia from repeated infections with many less-pathogenic forms of the virus, giving them pre-existing immunity. Although they don’t get sick from H5N1, they can still pass it on, and ducks congregate in lakes and ponds with other birds, increasing the chances of disease spread.Isolated ecosystemsAnother reason that Oceania is currently free of the virus is that the region’s ducks are endemic and they don’t tend to migrate overseas.This isolation is partly explained by a biogeographical division called the Wallace Line, first described by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, which runs through Indonesia. Many animal species tend to stay on one side of the line or the other, and because of this isolation, the fauna on each side are distinct. Michael Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque describes this phenomenon as “one of the great mysteries” of the world.The sharp division might also mean that the virus is not adapted to animals east of the Wallace Line, says Wong. “Avian influenza viruses, including this high-pathogenicity avian influenza virus, are particularly well-adapted to certain species,” he says. Birds in Australia could have a genetic make-up that circumvents the usual infection route for the virus, but no one has yet tested this hypothesis.Although many duck species are short-distance migratory birds and tend not to cross the Wallace Line, some species — including Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa) and spotted whistling duck (Dendrocygna guttata) — do, and Wille thinks they could introduce H5N1 to the region.If the virus is detected, government veterinarians will immediately move in to cull the affected population, which happened when H7N3 and H7N9 strains of the flu were detected in Victoria in May.Short says that, when it happens, the effect on Australia’s birds, mammals and ecosystems is unknown, but many species are probably susceptible. “It’s a big research gap,” she says. More