Short Wave - The Shy Rodents Lost To Science

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Historic numbers of animals across the globe have become endangered or pushed to extinction. But some of these species sit in limbo — not definitively extinct yet missing from the scientific record. Rediscovering a "lost" species is not easy. It can require trips to remote areas and canvassing a large area in search of only a handful of animals. But new technology and stronger partnerships with local communities have helped these hidden, "uncharismatic" creatures come to light. Have other scientific gray areas you want us to cover in a future episode? Email us at [e-mail]!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Anil Oza, temporarily in the host chair today. And I'm bringing you a story about critters, but not the completely lighthearted kind. Just a few months ago, the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that some 40,000 species are threatened with extinction. And about 7,000 of those are because of climate change. But last year, I started noticing a trend. wasn't seen for 87 years. It turns out this mole isn't extinct. It's just really shy. This is something that doesn't have a sign to have a name. This is one of the largest

rats in the world and here we are pulling. One Attenborough's long beat echidna was rediscovered by scientists on an expedition this past summer. In relatively remote areas across the globe, scientists were finding evidence of animals they hadn't seen for years. They wanted to know if this was part of a bigger trend of us getting better at pinning down these species. So I call Tom. My name is Tom Evans, and I'm a conservation scientist based at the Free University of Berlin in Germany. I'm interested in trying to protect those species from extinction and to protect them from the threats that are caused by human activities, such as climate change, habitat loss,

pollution. In January, he published a paper where he tried to catalog every four-legged animal that's been quote-unquote lost. Lost species are those that haven't been seen in the world for at least 10 years. Before I talked to Tom, I hadn't heard this term loss before. I thought that was just endangered and extinct, but there is some gray area. These are species that are being searched for by scientists in the world that can't be found. Usually, species become lost when they're endangered, because there are so few animals left, scientists can struggle to find them. And it can be hard to allocate money and time and land to protecting them if there's no evidence that they're even still around, which is why Tom even took on this project. One of the aims of the project was to

try and distinguish which lost species are likely to be extinct and which are likely to actually be rediscovered. And this point takes me to one of the reasons I was really excited to talk to Tom. I have a saucepot for rats and rodents in general. Tom found that rodents made up half of all of the mammals lost to science. But they weren't often being rediscovered by them. And he had a couple of theories as to why. The first group of those that are difficult to find. So there may be small species, or they may be species that occupy habitats that are really difficult to survey.

Or it may be due to their behavior, their life history traits. So perhaps they're nocturnal. or they're borrowing. So that's part of it, but also... There's a second group of species that are neglected by conservation scientists, and that's where rodents come in. So species that are less charismatic.

But the fact that scientists are digging up these animals, despite these long-standing barriers and biases, could be a good sign. So today on the show, the was losing species at a historic rate. But are we getting better at finding them? And what does it take to rediscus diverse species exactly. I'm Anil-Oza, and this is Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

To really understand what it means to be searching for a lost species, I call up researchers to hear about a couple of case studies, specifically of endangered animals that aren't the charismatic kind, that aren't large, fluffy, or cute, like polar bears or koalas or pandas. No. I wanted to focus on two uncharismatic animals, like the De Winton's Golden Mole in South Africa, Scientists had thought it was extinct for almost a century. They don't have any visible eyes. So they're quite strange looking, actually, completely blind. They have these modified foreclores that they use for digging their underground tunnels.

And those are super cool. Samantha Meinhardt had been searching for it since grad school. She's at the Endangered Wildlife Trust and Stelanbos University. She says the search for this rare animal was worth it, because even getting to hold one of these adorable critters is an honor. It was just the cutest little nugget. They would just sort of fit snugly into the palm of your hand. But what's really cool is the reason for their name.

What's really striking and beautiful about them is they have this erodescent sheen to their fur. And that's why they're called golden moles, because their fur literally glistens. You know, if you ever see them in the sun, you'll see rainbow colors in their shiny fur. Samantha was able to find these moles last year. but before then, most of her colleagues weren't convinced De Winton's mole was still around. I had asked around other colleagues and experts working on golden mulls who all believed that DeWinton's golden mole was extinct. But the Endangered Wildlife Trust approached me saying they really want to see. They want to go there and survey and see if they can find this mole.

And so she led a group of local scientists and colleagues from the Endangered Wildlife Trust on this expedition to see if they could find it. One of the things that made this tricky was that there were a couple of other species of golden moles in this area. So finding evidence of a mole didn't necessarily mean that they found the right mole. And they knew from the start they couldn't rely on traditional methods of collecting DNA proof. The traditional method of getting their DNA is you'd have to go find where they are, set some traps, try and trap them. And there had been efforts to trap the species in the past unsuccessfully. So, yeah, we knew that trapping them was. not going to be the right approach.

Samantha and others tried a bunch of different things to try and find the moles, like thermal drones to see heat signatures of animals underneath the soil, which sort of helped to find the moles, but wasn't a way to actually catch them. So Samantha turns this up-and-coming technique called e-DNA or environmental DNA. I started really getting interested in using environmental DNA as a source of DNA to study species that are really difficult to find in their environment. So species that are either rare, threatened or really elusive. And golden moles fall into all of those categories because they live underground,

so they're really difficult to find and threatened with extinction. The idea is that as animals go about their lives, they're leaving traces of DNA in their environment, from skin cells to hair follicles to excrement and more. And this is great because they don't actually have to physically catch a mole to know that it's in the soil. Once we've collected the soil, taken it back to the lab and sequencer. that then we can say what species it is. Though, one fateful day, when they were staking out a local beach, they did finally spot one. My colleague, J.P., you know, snatched up the mole and we managed to get some pictures of it.

But even as they were holding this little mole, they had no idea what species it was, until the eDNA tests, the moment of truth when they would know if they found evidence of the DeWinton's mole. I mean, the anticipation that had built up to that moment, you can only imagine, We were excited in the first place to have come across it in the field, and then having to conduct the lab work and wait for the sequencing results. And even once we had the sequencing results, we couldn't at first confirm the species identity. So they did a more specific test that would tell them for sure what they had found.

And this was really exciting because of how long Samantha had been working on this. But it could also be really important for putting up some protections for these shiny little guys. Our mission really is when we find threatened species in a habitat to use that as an incentive to say that some part of that habitat needs to be protected in order for that species to survive. So it's a conservation strategy at the end of the day. The power of the strategy of scientists and local communities using these rediscovered species to better protect land is really evident in the case of another quote-unquote uncharismatic species. the giant rats of Vangano.

They live deep in the jungle of just a single island in the Solomon Islands, which is northeast of Australia. It's breathtaking forest, really. It's everything you could imagine of a tropical rainforest, huge big trees,

palms everywhere, really clear streams that run through there. And it's just a really beautiful landscape. This is Tyrone Lavery. He's a biologist at the University of Melbourne. He spent years looking for this rat. So I started my PhD in 2010 and went to the community of Zyra on southern Vanganu. And it was my first field trip in Solomon Islands, and we went right into the interior of the island with some really senior men.

And we just were chatting about what lived in their forests, mammal-wise, and they told me about this giant rat that lived in the trees. While the species was completely mysterious to Western scientists, it was well known to the local community. I was pretty certain that if there was a big vicar out there that it would be a new species because this islander Fangunu is fairly isolated from the rest of the archipelago. Tyrone set out to try and find evidence of Vika. At first, because it could be an interesting discovery of an entirely new species, but over time it took an even more important role. That's because companies were trying to tear down these forests.

And our big goal was just to show that this rodent, did occur there because that would kind of increase its credibility and hopefully attract support for helping them to conserve their forest. And they eventually did find evidence of Vicar, but not the way they quite hoped. So it was a really bittersweet moment. It actually came from a logging operation that was next to Zira happening really close. The logging company fell to tree and some of the guys that I worked with at Zira were working with that logging company at the time and they found the rat come out of one of the trees.

that was felled. Unfortunately, it was really bad to the injured and killed. But they had the evidence they needed to at least prove that Vicka existed. And we went through a series of comparing the skull and teeth and all these characters, DNA, to other rodents from the Pacific in Australia and New Guinea, and found that it was definitely a new species, which we called Yerami's Vika in honor of the existing language name. Knowing that Vika was actually there, Taron doubled his efforts. efforts to get more solid evidence that it was living in the trees on the island, just like the

local people were telling him. So he set up a ton of camera traps around the forest, hoping that it could pick up traces of them. And eventually, they were able to get pictures of Vika. There haven't been any official moves by the local government towards that new goal Tyrone had mentioned of protecting Vika. But there are still some changes happening. For example, the government issued development consent for a company to log the Zyra community against its wishes. And the company was there ready to go. But shortly after this research came out, all of a sudden they've now removed their machines and pulled out.

So officially nothing's happened, but unofficially it seems like there's been a little bit of a change somehow. And hearing about what these photos meant to the Zira community, I was brought back to this question about rodents. Scientists are historically bad at keeping track of rodents. But are we getting any better? The scientist I spoke to said yes. A big part is that we're recognizing those partnerships more, and I see it as being immensely important,

and it always has been. I think it's just that it never has had the credit that it deserved. So, after doing all of this reporting, I found myself meditating on a few things. One, by both improving the tools we have to find animals and partnering with local communities, scientists help more communities like the Zira people conserve the land and the local ecosystems. And two, what it means to be charismatic and what animals deserve to live.

After learning the stories of these animals, what it took to find them, how important they are to researchers and locals, I'm convinced they're charismatic. But what about all the other endangered animals that are even less charismatic? Will the same time and money be given to them? This episode was produced by Margaret Serino, and our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. It was also edited by Rebecca. I checked the facts.

The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. I'm Anil Oza. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.