Antarctic Zoology Loses Two Stalwarts: Dick Laws and Bernard Stonehouse

Closely following the news of the death of Dick Laws on 7 October, I saw the notice in The Times this week that Barnard Stonehouse had died on 12 November. Both started out with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey in the late 1940s and Dick later became Director of the successor body, the British Antarctic Survey. Both were born in 1926.

For followers of this blog, Bernard Stonehouse collected a series of Emperor Penguin embryos in 1949, as I described in In Search of a Penguin’s Egg. Why?...What happened to Nelson Norman's 1959 embryos? on 3 July this year.

FIDS and BAS, to my certain knowledge, exemplifies spirit of scientific collaboration that I hope continues. Workers in Antarctica could not have been more helpful in collecting, storing and bringing back material.

Dick told me that I must go to the Antarctic. I did. He was right.

Heading south to the Lemaire Channel. 30 January 2005

Salt Glands in Iguana iguana. Somebody got there first

After Knut Schmidt-Nielsen described his discovery of salt glands in marine birds in 1957, other scientists and naturalists realised that they had seen the phenomenon earlier but had no appreciated what they were seeing. In the early 1960s, salt glands were discovered in terrestrial lizards (the salt gland in the Galapagos Marine Iguana was described by Schmidt-Nielsen and his friend Ragnar Fänge in 1958).

In 1963 Knut, with Arieh Borut, Ping Lee and Eugene Crawford in a paper in Science (142, 1300) reported:

A specimen of the tropical lizard Iguana iguana which was kept in the laboratory was occasionally found with white incrustations around the nostrils. The material was water soluble and preliminary analysis showed large amounts of potassium as well as sodium. Closer observation of the lizard while kept in a glass-walled terrarium revealed that the animal had the habit of pushing its nose against the wall thereby leaving a salt deposit on the glass.

A few weeks ago I was looking for information on Mrs Kathleen Pickard Smith for my other blog on the history of keeping reptiles and amphibians. She wrote a popular book on her experiences during the 1950s, Living with Reptiles, which was published by Thomas Nelson & Sons of Edinburgh in 1961. I read the book in 1962 and eventually gave it to the Zoo library. On reading bits again while I was scanning it,  I find she noted the following about her iguana, 'Ig':

Never a fast or a hunger strike to alarm us—true, he sneezes quite a bit in cooler weather, which leaves a chalky deposit on his nostrils and on the glass of his cage, but this is quite natural.

So, again we have an observation of salt glands in action, this time in a terrestrial lizard, before the observer could appreciate what had been observed.

#180977731 / gettyimages.com

Chinchillas in Zoos, and early import

AJP Photograph

Long-tailed Chinchillas (Chinchilla laniger) appear to be in deep trouble in the wild. However, I have not been able to find any definitive evidence on their status that is not nearly 20 years old. There are, of course, lots of domesticated chinchillas which have their origins in this species (see my earlier post). The few zoos I have visited in recent years seem to show them as domesticated ‘educational’ animals rather than in a nocturnal house setting of naturalistic habitat or in the size of colony that might occur in the wild—in other words, an exhibit that would really play an ambassadorial role in drawing attention to the parlous state of this species in the wild. I thought I had read somewhere that a British Zoo once had such a colony of chinchillas. Then the Bartlett Society Journal dropped on my desk. Russell Tofts in his article on the history of Jersey Zoo (now called, euphemistically in what must be another example of political correctness and focus-group inspired marketing strategy, Wildlife Park) provided what I had been trying to remember, under the year heading 1966:

In Jersey, an airy block building measuring 10 feet by 12 feet, well-lit by natural light, was constructed for an initial colony of twenty-five animals. By the end of a successful breeding season, the colony had risen to thirty-one (including seven animals that had had to be removed).

I would not think the Jersey effort would have been successful as an exhibit. Chinchillas really do sleep all day and a reversed daylight system would be needed to see them on the move. Nor do I underestimate the difficulty of setting up a colony in the first place. Adult chinchillas take very unkindly to being introduced to new potential cagemates; very unkindly is an underestimate.

In the 1950s chinchilla bubble in UK, when gullible individuals thought they were would be able to make their fortunes by breeding chinchillas for fur, and prices of live chinchillas rocketed, pairs of chinchillas were advertised at from £50 in 1957, the equivalent of £875 today. I think these chinchillas were from imported stock that was probably derived from the Chapman collection which was taken to California in 1923.

Advertisement: Cage Birds 21 February 1957

However, Britain had seen chinchillas before then, both in zoos and private collections. I came across this mention in an article by HD Astley in the September 1913 issue of Avicultural Magazine

Mr Goodfellow [Walter Goodfellow, 1866-1953, the renowned collector] brought home from Chili [sic], landing in the first week of July, some birds which were a puzzle to those who had never before seen them. Mrs. Johnston very kindly invited me to go to Burrswood on the day after their arrival. Incidentally, the principal interest was not birds, but Chlnchillas; which I preferred infinitely to see in their skins, rather than the latter made into muffs and boas, etc. As however, they are not birds, I must refrain from studying them too closely, at any rate in the Magazine suffice it to say, they are most fascinating, and a pearly-grey coated Chinchilla, when tame, would make a charming pet. 

I do not know whether any of the chinchillas imported into Britain survived until after the Second World War. It is possible that they did because the super-rich of the day kept extensive collections, particularly of birds, and it is doubtful if records of what many of them had and bred were kept or preserved.

Worst scientific article title of the year?

It used to be an unwritten rule that the title of a scientific paper should inform the reader what the work described and the species or group of animals from which data had been obtained. For some journals, the editorial policy was to insist on the latter. But in these smart-arse title days, I am left wondering what a paper is about. Looking through the contents of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, as I do with each issue, I often find the title actually obscures rather than informs the reader of the content. But this one really takes the biscuit: Parental risk management in relation to offspring defence: bad news for kids. No, it is not about young goats; it is not even about young children. It is about a study of nest defence behaviour in Blue Tits.

I presume the authors, judging by the last sentence of their abstract, are trying to draw attention to possible extrapolation of their findings to ‘living beings, including humans’  but for that claim to form the title through a slang word for human children is a travesty. The work is about the behavioural strategies employed by Blue Tits against threats by predators to them and their offspring. So why not say so? It makes the work no less and no more important.

Bryde's Whale

We have seen Bryde’s Whale in several parts of the world. When one is seen, the Brits shout ‘brides’ across the deck while the hispanophones (in the Galapagos, for example) shout ‘bridies’, pronounced as the Scottish pasty. I now find we are all wrong.

Bryde’s whale is named after the Norwegian, Johan Bryde (1858-1925) who founded the whaling industry in South Africa. The pronunciation is something like ‘brude’s’ or 'brudess' (I can never get my tongue round Scandinavian pronunciation or its rules, despite being born in the old Danelaw part of England where streets are still ‘gates’. So next time you are whale-watching you can smugly shout ‘Brude’s’ across the deck, while the rest of the crowd wonder what on earth you are talking about.

I also had not know, until I started looking it up, how much uncertainty there is on the taxonomy of Bryde’s Whale and how much more needs to be known before more definitive pronouncements can be made. The IUCN Red List has the details of the various forms that go under the heading of Bryde’s.

Balaenoptera edeni (Anderson, 1879) is the scientific name in use because Bryde’s Whale, described from specimens killed off South Africa by Olsen in 1913 and named B. brydei, was considered to be synonymous with the form described by Anderson which was collected just off the shore of Burma. The original edeni (Eden’s Whale) is thought to be smaller at maturity than ‘ordinary’ Bryde’s whale and has been called the ‘pygmy’ version; some have now separated the two into the original two species; some consider them subspecies.

Bryde's Whales off Mirissa, Sri Lanka, 26 November 2013                                                           AJP Photograph

There have been other findings of similar whales that further confuse the issue but the point of mentioning the two forms in the current context is that in the northern Indian Ocean, off the southern tip of Sri Lanka, we saw Bryde’s Whales on both days we were there in November 2013, along with the Blue Whales, Orcas and Spinner Dolphins. I now see that there is a claim, with a video on Youtube and articles in the Sri Lankan press, of a possible sighting of Eden’s Whale, the dwarf or pygmy form or separate species, off Sri Lanka. I saw a number of critical comments as to this identification but they seem to have disappeared when I looked for them again. But this observation illustrates how much there is still to find out about marine mammals and how difficult research is in this field.

But a better week for this newt

Number one son, who lives in England, was walking to his garage last week and nearly trod on this beast on the gravel drive used by a number of residents.

It is, of course, the Great-crested or Warty Newt (Triturus cristatus), a protected species in Britain with habitat loss the major, perhaps sole, cause of its decline in the middle decades of the 20th Century. Ponds were filled in for housing developments and agricultural 'improvements'.

This one was moved from the drive to the adjacent countryside and told to be more careful in future.

A bad week for newts—and the amphibian trade. Time to panic—or not?

Science last week had the latest on the new chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans. This fungus was discovered after it wiped out Fire Salamanders (Salamandra salamandra) on a Dutch nature reserve in 2010. It is distinct from B. dendrobatidis, the species that is devastating frogs and toad populations throughout the world. A multinational team reported in Science the results of their exposing specimens of 35 captive-bred or wild caught amphibian species to the new fungus. The results were clear. The anurans, or, if you prefer, salientians, in other words the frogs and toads, were not affected nor was the one gymnophionan or caecilian tested. But nearly all the urodeles, or caudates, were, and died rapidly after infection. These results were confirmed by looking for the organism’s DNA in the skin of 5391 wild amphibians. It was found only in urodeles and only in ‘East’ Asia (Thailand, Vietnam and Japan) and in those European countries (Netherlands and Belgium) where the severe disease outbreaks were observed.

Salamandra salamandra - this one is in Hungary

The infection experiments indicated that three Asian urodeles tested could act as reservoirs of the disease: Cynops pyrrhogaster, Cynops cyanurus and Paramesotriton deloustali. Seven specimens either limited the effect of the clinical disease or completely eliminated the infection. The authors calculate that the two chytrids diverged about 67 (mean) million years ago and that the potential of the ancestors of modern Asian newts to be a disease reservoir evolved between 55 and 34 million years ago. B. salamandrivorans was also found in a museum specimen of Cynops ensicauda at least 150 years old, supporting the view that the Asian species have greater tolerance to infection and constitute a reservoir through which species in other parts of the world could be fatally infected.

In a survey of wild amphibians, the organism was found only in East Asian urodeles—4% of the specimens of the latter species.

Because of the organisms apparent presence only in Asia, movement of amphibians in trade or for research appears to be responsible for the outbreaks in Europe. However, surveys done of urodeles at exporters, going through Heathrow airport or in pet shops found no infected individuals in the 542 tested. Another survey, this time of individuals established in captivity, found 3 specimens out of 408 infected; all were Tylotriton vietnamensis while 15 of the same species were uninfected. 

These figures suggest to me that the importation of infected animals into Europe or the USA has been relatively uncommon. If the number of infected animals arriving had been greater then might we not have seen an outbreak in Europe earlier than the 21st Century? Vast numbers of East Asian urodeles have entered Europe from at least the early decades of the 20th Century, particularly Cynops pyrrhogaster and, more recently, Cynops orientalis. One out of 116 wild C. pyrrhogaster was found to be infected. Unfortunately no wild specimens of Cynops orientalis, probably the commonest urodele now in the aquarium trade, were tested. Of those in sampled at exporters, at Heathrow or in pet shops (including 11 C. pyrrhogaster and 145 C. orientalis) no infected individuals were found.

In the 1920s to the 1970s at least, C. pyrrhogaster was often kept by amateur herpetologists with native newts in indoor and outdoor vivaria. The opportunities for an infection of B. salamandrivorans to escape into wild newt and salamander populations must have been very great especially since surplus native species were often released into the wild. The authors of the paper in Science state that 2.3 million Cynops orientalis were imported into the USA between 2001 and 2009. Is it not likely that if this species were a common reservoir for B. salamandrivorans that the odds are that there would already have been an outbreak of the disease in the USA? But, however common or uncommon the infective agent is in the wild, in trade, or in specimens established in captivity, it is the fact that it is there at all, with its potential to devastate urodele populations in other parts of the world, that has given rise to great concern.

Given that the Netherlands has always been an epicentre of the amphibian and reptile trade and of expertise in keeping and breeding these animals, could it perhaps be the case that some of the species that became more common in captivity since the 1980s have a higher proportion of carriers than C. pyrrhogaster, for example? The detected occurrence in a species of Tylotriton would support this argument. Therefore, we may have the scenario in which a Dutch urodele enthusiast, passed infection to his or her captive European salamanders, which he then released into the wild. Or, he may have handled his infected individuals and then handled salamanders in the wild. Whatever the scenario, herpetologists, or somebody keeping urodeles as pets, have again unwittingly caused devastation to a wild population that could lead to extinction. Nobody anywhere predicted the presence of pathogenic chytrids.

It is not surprising, given the devastating effects of infection on non-Asian urodeles, that there have been calls to ban the movement of urodeles (as well as anurans because of the effects of mixing strains of B. dendrobatidis) between continents, although it has to be said that the movement of herpetologists and tourists between continents is also hazardous. The authors of the papers in Science conclude:

Our study demonstrates that the process of globalization with its associated human and animal traffic can rapidly erode ancient barriers to pathogen transmission, allowing the infection of hosts that have not had the opportunity to establish resistance. Thus, pathogens, such as those we describe here, have the potential to rapidly pose a threat of extinction.

In a separate commentary in Science this point is stressed in relation to a potential outbreak in the susceptible species of the USA where there is a war of words between the conservation lobby which evokes the precautionary principle to advocate a complete ban on imports and the pet trade (Cynops orientalis is very much part of the aquarium novelty trade). It is also pointed out that the US has no mechanism to control the import or sale of infected amphibians.

Will we continue to see amphibians included in the fancy aquarium fish trade? Will pre-shipment testing, quarantine and prophylactic treatment be sufficient? Eventually, I suspect, the trade in wild, ranched or captive-bred amphibians will be further restricted and very tightly controlled; the risk of doing nothing will be deemed too high. Time will tell if eventually is too late, or if the horse has already bolted.

Here is a very short video of Salamandra salamandra in the wild in Hungary in 2010: