Biology

carnivorous-crocodile-like-monsters-used-to-terrorize-the-caribbean

Carnivorous crocodile-like monsters used to terrorize the Caribbean

Biology, crocodiles, evolution, migration, predators, Science / /

How did reptilian things that looked something like crocodiles get to the Caribbean islands from South America millions of years ago? They probably walked.

The existence of any prehistoric apex predators in the islands of the Caribbean used to be doubted. While their absence would have probably made it even more of a paradise for prey animals, fossils unearthed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic have revealed that these islands were crawling with monster crocodyliform species called sebecids, ancient relatives of crocodiles.

While sebecids first emerged during the Cretaceous, this is the first evidence of them lurking outside South America during the Cenozoic epoch, which began 66 million years ago. An international team of researchers has found that these creatures would stalk and hunt in the Caribbean islands millions of years after similar predators went extinct on the South American mainland. Lower sea levels back then could have exposed enough land to walk across.

“Adaptations to a terrestrial lifestyle documented for sebecids and the chronology of West Indian fossils strongly suggest that they reached the islands in the Eocene-Oligocene through transient land connections with South America or island hopping,” researchers said in a study recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Origin story

During the late Eocene to early Oligocene periods of the mid-Cenozoic, about 34 million years ago, many terrestrial carnivores already roamed South America. Along with crocodyliform sebecids, these included enormous snakes, terror birds, and metatherians, which were monster marsupials. At this time, the sea levels were low, and the islands of the Eastern Caribbean are thought to have been connected to South America via a land bridge called GAARlandia (Greater Antilles and Aves Ridge). This is not the first land bridge to potentially provide a migration opportunity.

Fragments of a single tooth unearthed in Seven Rivers, Jamaica, in 1999 are the oldest fossil evidence of a ziphodont crocodyliform (a group that includes sebecids) in the Caribbean. It was dated to about 47 million years ago, when Jamaica was connected to an extension of the North American continent known as the Nicaragua Rise. While the tooth from Seven Rivers is thought to have belonged to a ziphodont other than a sebacid, that and other vertebrate fossils found in Jamaica suggest parallels with ecosystems excavated from sites in the American South.

The fossils found in areas like the US South that the ocean would otherwise separate suggest more than just related life forms. It’s possible that the Nicaragua Rise provided a pathway for migration similar to the one sebecids probably used when they arrived in the Caribbean islands.

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Cyborg cicadas play Pachelbel’s Canon

biobots, Biology, cicadas, cyborg cicadas, entomology, insects, Science / /

The distinctive chirps of singing cicadas are a highlight of summer in regions where they proliferate; those chirps even featured prominently on Lorde’s 2021 album Solar Power. Now, Japanese scientists at the University of Tsukuba have figured out how to transform cicadas into cyborg insects capable of “playing” Pachelbel’s Canon. They described their work in a preprint published on the physics arXiv. You can listen to the sounds here.

Scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg insects since the 1990s, when researchers began implanting tiny electrodes into cockroach antennae and shocking them to direct their movements. The idea was to use them as hybrid robots for search-and-rescue applications.

For instance, in 2015, Texas A&M scientists found that implanting electrodes into a cockroach’s ganglion (the neuron cluster that controls its front legs) was remarkably effective at successfully steering the roaches 60 percent of the time. They outfitted the roaches with tiny backpacks synced with a remote controller and administered shocks to disrupt the insect’s balance, forcing it to move in the desired direction

And in 2021, scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore turned Madagascar hissing cockroaches into cyborgs, implanting electrodes in sensory organs known as cerci that were then connected to tiny computers. Applying electrical current enabled them to steer the cockroaches successfully 94 percent of the time in simulated disaster scenes in the lab.

The authors of this latest paper were inspired by that 2021 project and decided to apply the basic concept to singing cicadas, with the idea that cyborg cicadas might one day be used to transmit warning messages during emergencies. It’s usually the males who do the singing, and each species has a unique song. In most species, the production of sound occurs via a pair of membrane structures called tymbals, which are just below each side of the insect’s anterior abdominal region. The tymbal muscles contract and cause the plates to vibrate while the abdomen acts as a kind of resonating chamber to amplify the song.

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Some flies go insomniac to ward off parasites

Biology, circadian rhythm, Drosophila, evolution, fruit flies, parasites, Science / /

Those genes associated with metabolism were upregulated, meaning they showed an increase in activity. An observed loss of body fat and protein reserves was evidently a trade-off for resistance to mites. This suggests there was increased lipolysis, or the breakdown of fats, and proteolysis, the breakdown of proteins, in resistant lines of flies.

Parasite paranoia

The depletion of nutrients could make fruit flies less likely to survive even without mites feeding off them, but their tenaciousness when it comes to staying up through the night suggests that being parasitized by mites is still the greater risk. Because mite-resistant flies did not sleep, their oxygen consumption and activity also increased during the night to levels no different from those of control group flies during the day.

Keeping mites away involves moving around so the fly can buzz off if mites crawl too close. Knowing this, Benoit wanted to see what would happen if the resistant flies’ movement was restricted. It was doom. When the flies were restrained, the mite-resistant flies were as susceptible to mites as the controls. Activity alone was important for resisting mites.

Since mites are ectoparasites, or external parasites (as opposed to internal parasites like tapeworms), potential hosts like flies can benefit from hypervigilance. Sleep is typically beneficial to a host invaded by an internal parasite because it increases the immune response. Unfortunately for the flies, sleeping would only make them an easy meal for mites. Keeping both stereoscopic eyes out for an external parasite means there is no time left for sleep.

“The pattern of reduced sleep likely allows the flies to be more responsive during encounters with mites during the night,” the researchers said in their study, which was recently published in Biological Timing and Sleep. “There could be differences in sleep occurring during the day, but these differences may be less important as D. melanogaster sleeps much less during the day.”

Fruit flies aren’t the only creatures with sleep patterns that parasites disrupt. Evidence of shifts in sleep and rest in birds and bats has been shown to happen when there is a risk of parasitism after dark. For the flies, exhaustion has the upside of better fertility if they manage to avoid bites, so a mate must be worth all those sleepless nights.

Biological Timing and Sleep, 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s44323-025-00031-7

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dna-links-modern-pueblo-dwellers-to-chaco-canyon-people

DNA links modern pueblo dwellers to Chaco Canyon people

ancient DNA, Archeology, Biology, Genetics, Genomics, human biology, Science / /

A thousand years ago, the people living in Chaco Canyon were building massive structures of intricate masonry and trading with locations as far away as Mexico. Within a century, however, the area would be largely abandoned, with little indication that the same culture was re-established elsewhere. If the people of Chaco Canyon migrated to new homes, it’s unclear where they ended up.

Around the same time that construction expanded in Chaco Canyon, far smaller pueblos began appearing in the northern Rio Grande Valley hundreds of kilometers away. These have remained occupied to the present day in New Mexico; although their populations shrank dramatically after European contact, their relationship to the Chaco culture has remained ambiguous. Until now, that is. People from one of these communities, Picuris Pueblo, worked with specialistsancient DNA to show that they are the closest relatives of the Chaco people yet discovered, confirming aspects of the pueblo’s oral traditions.

A pueblo-driven study

The list of authors of the new paper describing this genetic connection includes members of the Pueblo government, including its present governor. That’s because the study was initiated by the members of the Pueblo, who worked with archeologists to get in contact with DNA specialists at the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. In a press conference, members of the Pueblo said they’d been aware of the power of DNA studies via their use in criminal cases and ancestry services. The leaders of Picuris Pueblo felt that it could help them understand their origin and the nature of some of their oral history, which linked them to the wider Pueblo-building peoples.

After two years of discussions, the collaboration settled on a plan of research, and the ancient DNA specialists were given access to both ancient skeletons at Picuris Pueblo, as well as samples from present-day residents. These were used to generate complete genome sequences.

The first clear result is that there is a strong continuity in the population living at Picuris. The ancient skeletons range from 500 to 700 years old, and thus date back to roughly the time of European contact, with some predating it. They also share strong genetic connections to the people of Chaco Canyon, where DNA has also been obtained from remains. “No other sampled population, ancient or present-day, is more closely related to Ancestral Puebloans from Pueblo Bonito [in Chaco Canyon] than the Picuris individuals are,” the paper concludes.

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Are these chimps having a fruity booze-up in the wild?

animal behavior, Biology, chimpanzees, primates, Science / /

Is there anything more human than gathering in groups to share food and partake in a fermented beverage or two (or three, or….)? Researchers have caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be similar activity: sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, the observational data is the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild.

The fruit in question is seasonal and comes from Treculia africana trees common across the home environment of the wild chimps in Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau. Once mature, the fruits drop from the tree to the ground and slowly ripen from a hard, deep green exterior to a yellow, spongier texture. Because the chimps are unhabituated, the authors deployed camera traps at three separate locations to record their feeding and sharing behavior.

They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).

That’s comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps’ diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It’s highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn’t confer any evolutionary advantage, and per the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that increases the ability to metabolize alcohol.

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lichens-can-survive-almost-anything,-and-some-might-survive-mars

Lichens can survive almost anything, and some might survive Mars

Biology, lichens, Mars, radiation resistance, Science / /

Whether anything ever lived on Mars is unknown. And the present environment, with harsh temperatures, intense radiation, and a sparse atmosphere, isn’t exactly propitious for life. Despite the red planet’s brutality, lichens that inhabit some of the harshest environments on Earth could possibly survive there.

Lichens are symbionts, or two organisms that are in a cooperative relationship. There is a fungal component (most are about 90 percent fungus) and a photosynthetic component (algae or cyanobacteria). To see if some species of lichen had what it takes to survive on Mars, a team of researchers led by botanist Kaja Skubała used the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences to expose the lichen species Diploschistes muscorum and Cetrarea aculeata to simulate Mars conditions.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate that the metabolism of the fungal partner in lichen symbiosis was active while being in a Mars-like environment,” the researchers said in a study recently published in IMA Fungus. “X-rays associated with solar flares and SEPs reaching Mars should not affect the potential habitability of lichens on this planet.”

Martian ionizing radiation is threatening to most forms of life because it can cause damage at the cellular level. It can also get in the way of physical, genetic, morphological, and biochemical processes, depending on the organism and radiation level.

Going to extremes

Lichens have an edge when it comes to survival. They share characteristics with other organisms that can handle high levels of stress, including a low metabolism, not needing much in the way of nutrition, and longevity. Much like tardigrades, lichens can stay in a desiccated state for extended periods until they are rehydrated. Other lichen adaptations to extreme conditions include metabolites that screen out UV rays and melanin pigments that also defend against radiation.

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To regenerate a head, you first have to know where your tail is

Biology, planaria, regeneration, Science / /

Before a critical point in development, the animals failed to close the wound made by the cut, causing the two embryo halves to simply spew cells out into the environment. Somewhat later, however, there was excellent survival, and the head portion of the embryo could regenerate a tail segment. This tells us that the normal signaling pathways present in the embryo are sufficient to drive the process forward.

But the tail of the embryo at this stage doesn’t appear to be capable of rebuilding its head. But the researchers found that they could inhibit wnt signaling in these posterior fragments, and that was enough to allow the head to develop.

Lacking muscle

One possibility here is that wnt signaling is widely active in the posterior of the embryo at this point, blocking formation of anterior structures. Alternatively, the researchers hypothesize that the problem is with the muscle cells that normally help organize the formation of a stem-cell-filled blastema, which is needed to kick off the regeneration process. Since the anterior end of the embryo develops earlier, they suggest there may simply not be enough muscle cells in the tail to kick off this process at early stages of development.

To test their hypothesis, they performed a somewhat unusual experiment. They started by cutting off the tails of embryos and saving them for 24 hours. At that point, they cut the front end off tails, creating a new wound to heal. At this point, regeneration proceeded as normal, and the tails grew a new head. This isn’t definitive evidence that muscle cells are what’s missing at early stages, but it does indicate that some key developmental step happens in the tail within the 24-hour window after the first cut.

The results reinforce the idea that regeneration of major body parts requires the re-establishment of the signals that lay out organization of the embryo in development—something that gets complicated if those signals are currently acting to organize the embryo. And it clearly shows that the cells needed to do this reorganization aren’t simply set aside early on in development but instead take some time to appear. All of that information will help clarify the bigger-picture question of how these animals manage such a complex regeneration process.

Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.065  (About DOIs).

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De-extinction company announces that the dire wolf is back

Biology, colossal, de-extinction, dire wolf, Science, wolves / /

On Monday, biotech company Colossal announced what it views as its first successful de-extinction: the dire wolf. These large predators were lost during the Late Pleistocene extinctions that eliminated many large land mammals from the Americas near the end of the most recent glaciation. Now, in a coordinated PR blitz, the company is claiming that clones of gray wolves with lightly edited genomes have essentially brought the dire wolf back. (Both Time and The New Yorker were given exclusive access to the animals ahead of the announcement.)

The dire wolf is a relative of the now-common gray wolf, with clear differences apparent between the two species’ skeletons. Based on the sequence of two new dire wolf genomes, the researchers at Colossal conclude that dire wolves formed a distinct branch within the canids over 2.5 million years ago. For context, that’s over twice as long as brown and polar bears are estimated to have been distinct species. Dire wolves are also large, typically the size of the largest gray wolf populations. Comparisons between the new genomes and those of other canids show that the dire wolf also had a light-colored coat.

That large of an evolutionary separation means there are likely a lot of genetic differences between the gray and dire wolves. Colossal’s internal and unpublished analysis suggested that key differences could be made by editing 14 different areas of the genome, with 20 total edits required. The new animals are reported to have had 15 variants engineered in. It’s unclear what accounts for the difference, and a Colossal spokesperson told Ars: “We are not revealing all of the edits that we made at this point.”

Nevertheless, the information that the company has released indicates that it was focused on recapitulating the appearance of a dire wolf, with an emphasis on large size and a white coat. For example, the researchers edited in a gene variant that’s found in gray wolf populations that are physically large, rather than the variant found in the dire wolf genome. A similar thing was done to achieve the light coat color. This is a cautious approach, as these changes are already known to be compatible with the rest of the gray wolf’s genome.

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we-have-the-first-video-of-a-plant-cell-wall-being-built

We have the first video of a plant cell wall being built

Biology, cell wall, imaging, microscopy, plants, Science / /

Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Camera-shy builders

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

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Newly hatched hummingbird looks, acts like a toxic caterpillar

Biology, evolution, hummingbirds, mimicry, Science / /

Further observation of the nest revealed that the female hummingbird had added to its hatchling’s caterpillar camouflage by lining the nest with hairy-looking material from the seeds of balsa trees. The researchers also noticed that, whenever they approached the nest to film, the chick would move its head upward and start shaking it sideways while its feathers stood on end. It was trying to make itself look threatening.

When the research team backed off, the hummingbird chick went back to laying low in its nest. They wondered whether it behaved this way with actual predators, but eventually saw a wasp known to prey on young hummingbirds creep close to the nest. The chick displayed the same behavior it had with humans, which succeeded in scaring the wasp off.

Falk determined that the feathers, color, and head-shaking were eerily similar to the larvae of moths in the Megalopygidae and Saturniidae families, which are also endemic to the region. They might not be the mirror image of a particular species, but they appear close enough that predators would consider themselves warned.

“The behavior of the white-necked jacobin, when approached by humans and a predatory wasp, resembles the sudden ‘thrashing’ or ‘jerking’ behavior exhibited by many caterpillars in response to disturbance, including in the habitat where this bird was found,” he said regarding the same study.

…now you don’t

Could there be an alternate explanation for this hummingbird cosplaying as a caterpillar? Maybe. The researchers think it’s possible that the long feathers that appear to mimic spines may have evolved as a form of crypsis, or camouflage that helps an organism blend in with its background. The balsa tree material that’s similar to the feathers obviously helped with this.

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Editorial: Mammoth de-extinction is bad conservation

Biology, colossal, conservation, elephants, mammoths, Science / /

Anti-extinction vs. de-extinction

Ecosystems are inconveniently complex, and elephants won’t make good surrogates.

Are we ready for mammoths when we can’t handle existing human-pachyderm conflicts? Credit: chuchart duangdaw

The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

Shaky evidence

The Colossal website explains how they believe resurrected mammoths could help fight climate change: “cold-tolerant elephant mammoth hybrids grazing the grasslands… [will] scrape away layers of snow, so that the cold air can reach the soil.” This will reportedly help prevent permafrost from melting, blocking the release of greenhouse gasses currently trapped in the soil. Furthermore, by knocking down trees and maintaining grasslands, Colossal says, mammoths will help slow snowmelt, ensuring Arctic ecosystems absorb less sunlight.

Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.

But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.” Similar ecological claims about tigers and sharks as apex predators also fail to withstand scientific scrutiny.

Elephants—widely described as “keystone species”—are also stars of a host of similar ecological stories. Many are featured on the Colossal website, including one of the most common claims about the role elephants play in seed dispersal. “Across all environments,” reads the website, “elephant dung filled with seeds serve to spread plants […] boosting the overall health of the ecosystem.” But would the disappearance of elephants really result in major changes in plant life? After all, some of the world’s grandest forests (like the Amazon) have survived for millennia after the disappearance of mammoth-sized megafauna.

For my PhD research in northeast India, I tried to systematically measure how important Asian elephants were for seed dispersal compared to other animals in the ecosystem; our team’s work, published in five peer-reviewed ecological journals (reviewed here), does find that elephants are uniquely good at dispersing the seeds of a few large-fruited species. But we also found that domestic cattle and macaques disperse some species’ seeds quite well, and that 80 percent of seeds dispersed in elephant dung end up eaten by ants. After several years of study, I cannot say with confidence that the forests where I worked would be drastically different in the absence of elephants.

The evidence for how living elephants affect carbon sequestration is also quite mixed. On the one hand, one paper finds that African forest elephants knock down softwood trees, making way for hardwood trees that sequester more carbon. But on the other hand, many more researchers looking at African savannas have found that elephants knock down lots of trees, converting forests into savannas and reducing carbon sequestration.

Colossal’s website offers links to peer-reviewed research that support their suppositions on the ecological role of woolly mammoths. A key study offers intriguing evidence that keeping large herbivores—reindeer, Yakutian horses, moose, musk ox, European bison, yaks, and cold-adapted sheep—at artificially high levels in a tussock grassland helped achieve colder ground temperatures, ostensibly protecting permafrost. But the study raises lots of questions: is it possible to boost these herbivores’ populations across the whole northern latitudes? If so, why do we need mammoths at all—why not just use species that already exist, which would surely be cheaper?

Plus, as ecologist Michelle Mack noted, as the winters warm due to climate change, too much trampling or sweeping away of snow could have the opposite effect, helping warm the soils underneath more quickly—if so, mammoths could be worse for the climate, not better.

All this is to say that ecosystems are diverse and messy, and those of us working in functional ecology don’t always discover consistent patterns. Researchers in the field often struggle to find robust evidence for how a living species affects modern-day ecosystems—surely it is far harder to understand how a creature extinct for around 10,000 years shaped its environment? And harder still to predict how it would shape tomorrow’s ecosystems? In effect, Colossal’s ecological narrative relies on that difficulty. But just because claims about the distant past are harder to fact-check doesn’t mean they are more likely to be true.

Ethical blind spots

Colossal’s website spells out 10 steps for mammoth resurrection. Steps nine and 10 are: “implant the early embryo into the healthy Asian or African elephant surrogates,” and “care for the surrogates in a world-class conservation facility for the duration of the gestation and afterward.”

Colossal’s cavalier plans to use captive elephants as surrogates for mammoth calves illustrate an old problem in modern wildlife conservation: indifference towards individual animal suffering. Leading international conservation NGOs lack animal welfare policies that would push conservationists to ask whether the costs of interventions in terms of animal welfare outweigh the biodiversity benefits. Over the years, that absence has resulted in a range of questionable decisions.

Colossal’s efforts take this apathy towards individual animals into hyperdrive. Despite society’s thousands of years of experience with Asian elephants, conservationists struggle to breed them in captivity. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities suffer from infertility and lose their calves to stillbirth and infanticides almost twice as often as elephants in semi-wild conditions. Such problems will almost certainly be compounded when scientists try to have elephants deliver babies created in the lab, with a hodge podge of features from Asian elephants and mammoths.

Even in the best-case scenario, there would likely be many, many failed efforts to produce a viable organism before Colossal gets to a herd that can survive. This necessarily trial-and-error process could lead to incredible suffering for both elephant mothers and mammoth calves along the way. Elephants in the wild have been observed experiencing heartbreaking grief when their calves die, sometimes carrying their babies’ corpses for days—a grief the mother elephants might very well be subjected to as they are separated from their calves or find themselves unable to keep their chimeric offspring alive.

For the calves that do survive, their edited genomes could lead to chronic conditions, and the ancient mammoth gut microbiome might be impossible to resurrect, leading to digestive dysfunction. Then there will likely be social problems. Research finds that Asian elephants in Western zoos don’t live as long as wild elephants, and elephant researchers often bemoan the limited space, stimulation, and companionship available to elephants in captivity. These problems will surely also plague surviving animals.

Introduction to the wild will probably result in even more suffering: elephant experts recommend against introducing captive animals “that have had no natural foraging experience at all” to the wild as they are likely to experience “significant hardship.” Modern elephants survive not just through instinct, but through culture—matriarch-led herds teach calves what to eat and how to survive, providing a nurturing environment. We have good reason to believe mammoths also needed cultural instruction to survive. How many elephant/mammoth chimeras will suffer false starts and tragic deaths in the punishing Arctic without the social conditions that allowed them to thrive millennia ago?

Opportunity costs

If Colossal (or Colossal’s investors) really wish to foster Asian elephant conservation or combat climate change, they have many better options. The opportunity costs are especially striking for Asian elephant conservation: while over a trillion dollars is spent combatting climate change annually, the funds available to address the myriad of problems facing wild Asian elephants are far smaller. Take the example of India, the country with the largest population of wild Asian elephants in the world (estimated at 27,000) in a sea of 1.4 billion human beings.

Indians generally revere elephants and tolerate a great deal of hardship to enable coexistence—about 500 humans are killed due to human-elephant conflict annually there. But as a middle-income country continuing to struggle with widespread poverty, the federal government typically budgets less than $4M for Project Elephant, its flagship elephant conservation program. That’s less than $200 per wild elephant and 1/2000th as much as Colossal has raised so far. India’s conservation NGOs generally have even smaller budgets for their elephant work. The result is that conservationists are a decade behindwhere they expected to be in mapping where elephants range.

With Colossal’s budget, Asian elephant conservation NGOs could tackle the real threats to the survival of elephants: human-elephant conflict, loss of habitat and connectivity, poaching, and the spread of invasive plants unpalatable to elephants. Some conservationists are exploring creative schemes to help keep people and elephants safe from each other. There are also community-based efforts toremove invasive species like Lantana camara and restore native vegetation. Funds could enable development of an AI-powered system that allows the automated identification and monitoring of individual elephants. There is also a need for improved compensation schemes to ensure those who lose crops or property to wild elephants are made whole again.

As a US-based synthetic biology company, Colossal could also use its employees’ skills much more effectively to fight climate change. Perhaps they could genetically engineer trees and shrubs to sequester more carbon. Or Colossal could help us learn to produce meat from modified microbes or cultivated lines of cow, pig, and chicken cells, developing alternative proteins that could more efficiently feed the planet, protecting wildlife habitat and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The question is whether Colossal’s leaders and supporters are willing to pivot from a project that grabs news headlines to ones that would likely make positive differences. By tempting us with the resurrection of a long-dead creature, Colossal forces us to ask: do we want conservation to be primarily about feeding an unreflective imagination? Or do we want evidence, logic, and ethics to be central to our relationships with other species? For anyone who really cares about the climate, elephants, or animals in general, de-extincting the mammoth represents a huge waste and a colossal mistake.

Nitin Sekar served as the national lead for elephant conservation at WWF India for five years and is now a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission The views presented here are his own.

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bonobos’-calls-may-be-the-closest-thing-to-animal-language-we’ve-seen

Bonobos’ calls may be the closest thing to animal language we’ve seen

animal intelligence, Biology, bonobos, communication, language, Science / /

Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human.

To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild.

Context is everything

The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute.

“We worked at a camp in the forest, got up super early at 3: 30 in the morning, walked one or two hours to get to the bonobos’ nest. At [the] time they would wake up, I would switch my microphone on for the whole day to collect as many vocalizations as I could,” Berthet says. Each recorded call then had to be annotated with a horribly long list of contextual parameters. Berthet had a questionnaire filled with queries like: is there a neighboring group around; are there predators around; is the caller feeding, resting, or grooming; is another individual approaching the caller, etc. There were 300 questions that had to be answered for each of the 700 recorded calls.

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