Hope for Animals and Their World

by Jane Goodall; Thane Maynard; Gail Hudson

  Almost at once they saw a second giant insect stretched out on the vegetation. Nicholas’s excitement, as he talked to me six years later, was palpable. “It felt like stepping back into the Jurassic age, when insects ruled the world,” he said. “It was one of those iconic moments that changed my life forever. We kept telling each other that no living person had ever seen one of these giant insects.” They also found a youngster, a nymph. Nicholas took three photos and then they had to try to calm down before embarking on the highly dangerous nighttime descent.

  When they got back to camp, the others were sleeping. “I crept up to Dave,” said Nicholas, “put my lips to his ear, and whispered, ‘We found a phasmid!’ Soon everyone was awake!”

  Early the next morning, the whole team climbed back up and made a thorough search. They found some more frass—apparently the proper terminology for insect poo!—and about thirty eggs in the soil. Then they had to leave as the boat was picking them up at 10 AM. The ocean swell had increased considerably by the time they left: The boat was rising and falling ten feet every few seconds. It meant split-second timing for the jump onto the deck—it gives me the wobblies just thinking about it!

  They were all convinced that the only population of Lord Howe Island’s giant phasmid in the world lived on that one shrub.

  How did the little colony get to that isolated pillar of rock? Perhaps a gravid female had made the fourteen-mile journey from Lord Howe’s Island clinging to the legs of some seabird, or to floating vegetation after a storm. And once there, how had she found the one and only suitable habitat on the entire pyramid? Perhaps, suggested Nicholas, a recently dead female containing eggs had been picked up as a “stick” on the main island and transported to a seabird’s nest near the phasmids’ bush. But however she got there, how on earth had her descendants survived for eighty years or so in that desolate environment? We shall never know.

  As soon as they got back, the biologists set to work to draw up a draft recovery plan for the phasmid. They faced many battles with bureaucracy, and two years elapsed before they had permission to return—and they were only allowed to catch four individuals. They found that there had been a big rockslide on Ball’s Pyramid. How easily the entire population could have been wiped out during those two frustrating years. However, on Valentine’s Day in 2003, they found the colony still thriving on its one bush. To transport the incredibly rare cargo—the four captured insects—a special container had been prepared, and this presented a problem when they arrived in Australia. It was not long after 9/11 and security was very tight, yet they had to convince the officials not to open the precious box!

  The team of discoverers approach the treacherous Ball’s Pyramid, fourteen miles off Lord Howe’s Island—a tiny population of phasmids mysteriously found its way here and lived unknown for eighty years. (Nicholas Carlile)

  One of the scientists on that second expedition was Patrick Honan, a member of the Invertebrate Conservation Breeding Group (among many other things), who subsequently played a key role in the future of the phasmids. One pair went to a private breeder in Sydney, and the other two (Adam and Eve) went with Patrick to the Melbourne Zoo. To everyone’s delight—and relief—Eve soon began laying pea-size eggs.

  The team assists one another across a shore-line traverse—in search of the elusive Lord Howe’s Island phasmid. The sea conditions had deteriorated overnight, and rising seas meant the team only had limited time on the Pyramid.(Nicholas Carlile)

  But within two weeks of captivity the pair in Sydney died, and Eve became very, very sick. Patrick worked every night for a month desperately trying to cure her. He scoured the Internet for help, but no one knew anything about the veterinary care of giant stick insects! Eventually, based on gut instinct, Patrick concocted a mixture that included calcium and nectar, and fed it to his patient, drop by drop as she lay curled up in his hand. To his joy she seemed to get better and laid eggs for a further eighteen months. But the only ones that hatched were the thirty or so that she’d laid before she fell sick. How fitting that the first of these hatched on International Threatened Species Day! I can well imagine the excitement and sheer delight of all those concerned when out crawled a bright green nymph—already almost an inch long.

  It was in 2008, when I visited the Melbourne Zoo, that I met Patrick and he introduced me to that friendly female stick insect I described at the start of this story. She was, he told me, one of the fifth generation of these phasmids in captivity. Patrick showed me the rows of incubating eggs—11,376 at the last count, he said. And there are about seven hundred adults in the captive population. They are very special insect beings. Patrick showed me a photo of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him.

  Then we went for a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Surrounded by the whole team, I wielded the scissors and declared that the zoo’s brand-new Lord Howe’s Island stick insect exhibit was now officially open. Later, Patrick told me he’d left academia, believing that the most important conservation is grassroots—that people will only try to save animals once they get to know them firsthand. He has just completed the final planning of a project to have these stick insects reared by a hundred primary and secondary schools—a fantastic opportunity for the students to become involved in an ongoing conservation program in their own classrooms.

  As a further insurance for the species’ survival, eggs are now being sent to other zoos and private breeders in Australia and overseas. The two hundred eggs that had been sent to the San Antionio Zoo in Texas have already begun to hatch, Patrick told me: “So the species has now gone international.”

  With so many of the giant insects thriving, there is an increasingly urgent need to release the species back into the wild on Lord Howe’s Island. And this is giving a significant push to the program to eradicate rodents there planned for the winter of 2010. Once they are gone, the first giant phasmids will be returned to the place of their ancestors.

  It has been an incredible story. Nicholas told me that when he joined David on that first expedition to Ball’s Pyramid, they both believed it was doomed to failure. How could a creature, last seen eighty years before, possibly be alive on a piece of barren rock way out in the ocean?

  “So,” said Nicholas, “we went with the purpose of proving the phasmids not to be there, to refute, once and for all, on good scientific evidence, the rumors about their existence. Which just goes to show!”

  The Mallorcan Midwife Toad (Alytes muletensis)

  My childhood natural history bible, The Miracle of Life, described the fascinating life history of midwife toads. The female lays the eggs, but the male carries and protects them until they hatch. It was one more of those stories that left me increasingly fascinated by “the miracle of life.”

  There are five species of midwife toads, widespread across Europe and northwest Africa, but the existence of the toad on Mallorca, an island off the east coast of Spain, was not known until 1977 when fossilized remains were discovered there. At that time, it was thought that it had been extinct on the island for about two thousand years. And then, just three years later in 1980, one single individual was found in a deep canyon in a remote mountainous region in the north. This led to the discovery of a small population living there.

  They are golden brown to olive green in color, with patterns of darker brown or black, and large eyes. Like most toads they are nocturnal, hiding under rocks during the day. The females produce strings of eggs, which the father fertilizes externally then wraps around his ankles. He then carries his cumbersome load of between seven to twelve eggs, making sure to keep them moist, until they are ready to hatch. At that point, he enters shallow water until all the—exceptionally large—tadpoles have emerged and swum away.

  I learned about the program to save the remaining Mallorcan midwife toads firsthand from Quentin Bloxam, a scientist with the Jersey Wildlife Conservation Trust, who happened to be in Mallorca at the time of the discovery in 1980. “
There was a student there at that time studying tortoises,” Quentin told me over the phone, “and he came to discuss his project with me and ask my advice.” At the end of this meeting, the student asked him: “By the way, have you heard about this toad that has just been discovered?” This was news—and exciting news—to Quentin, and he set off with the student down a small street to meet Dr. J. A. Alcover, the biologist who had made the fantastic discovery. “We went into his office,” said Quentin, “and he pulled a shoe box from under his desk and there inside were a few of the toads! I was amazed to see a species that had been believed extinct.” Quentin told me that Dr. Alcover was equally amazed. The two biologists stood enthralled, looking down at the elusive toads nestled there in the shoe box.

  Quentin then met Dr. Joan Mayol and other Mallorcan scientists, who took him to see the place that they had earmarked as a site for a captive breeding program. “It did not seem to offer appropriate accommodations,” Quentin told me, “and I suggested they might like to send a few individuals to the Jersey Wildlife Conservation Trust [now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust], which had a good record for breeding endangered species.” Dr. Mayol readily agreed—but it was five years before the documentation was ready, since the appropriate authorities in Spain as well as Mallorca had to be approached. During this time, three other small populations of the toads had been found in the area.

  Finally the conservation trust was able to send Simon Tong from the Herpetology Department to collect tadpoles for breeding in Jersey. They got their legs and lost their tails and all seemed to be going well—until they began to croak. “Every single one was a male!” said Quentin, laughing. The male has a ringing call to attract the females—apparently it sounds a little like a hammer hitting an anvil. For this reason, this toad is sometimes known as the ferreret, a Spanish word meaning “little blacksmith.” And so those poor little ironworkers in Jersey croaked away in a futile attempt to summon nonexistent females! Fortunately the next consignment of toads soon arrived from Mallorca, this time with some adults—including females! After this, things went well and the toads prospered in their captive environment.

  Since 1988, Quentin told me, several thousand have been successfully returned to Mallorca, both as adults and tadpoles, into areas known to be within the historical range of the species. Some 20 percent of the current population in the wild is derived from captive-bred stock that have been distributed in seventeen sites.

  Of course, it is not all plain sailing. There are still threats posed by habitat loss and introduced species that prey on the toads and tadpoles (such as the viperine snake) or compete with them for food (like the green frog—which also eats them). More serious, perhaps, is a shrinking of water as a result of the numbers of tourists who visit the island. To address this there are plans to dam some of the toad’s rivers to create suitable habitats. In fact, it was discovered by those working on the project that the toads love the granite water troughs made by the shepherds in the old days, placed in the deep shade so that they would not dry out.

  In 2005, the dreaded chytrid fungus that has killed millions of amphibians worldwide was reported for the first time in Mallorca. It has so far only been found in two populations of the midwife toads. Fortunately, because they always live near torrents and only move up and down the stream where they are born, not from one stream to another, the virus was contained.

  In 2002, it was decided that no more captive-bred toads or tadpoles should be sent back to Mallorca since there is little need and the potential cost—the risk of introducing disease—is huge. There is an educational program on the island, helping to raise awareness and instill pride in their unique, endemic toad. Already, as Quentin told me, “this toad has been the subject of a good many master’s and a few PhD degrees.”

  The recovery program, supported by the Mallorcan government in collaboration with the Marineland Mallorca and Govern de les Illes Balears, is acclaimed as the model for amphibian recovery. It is the first amphibian species to have its original “critically endangered” status changed to “vulnerable.” And when I visited Mallorca as part of a JGI-Spain lecture tour, I was able to congratulate government officials on this success. There is a new wave of concern for the environment and animal welfare in Spain as a whole, and this bodes well for the future of not only this endemic toad but other endangered wildlife as well.

  Zino’s Petrel (Pterodroma madeira)

  This is a fascinating story in which a new species of petrel, believed to be extinct before it was even described, was rediscovered by Dr. Paul Alexander “Alec” Zino, a passionate amateur ornothologist. But for the determined efforts of Alec and his son Frank, Zino’s petrels would indeed have slid into extinction.

  These petrels are slender birds, with a body length of just over one foot and a three-foot wingspan. Like all petrels they spend months at sea, picking up food from the ocean surface with their short sturdy beaks. They breed on Madeira, a Portuguese island off the northern coast of Africa, arriving during the darkness of night, and flying up the steep valleys of the high mountains to their nesting sites among the sheer rock pinnacles. If there is no nest burrow available, the younger birds will dig new ones in which to lay their single eggs. About two and a half months after hatching, the fledglings launch themselves into the darkness; they will not return to Madeira for up to five years.

  The rediscovery and ongoing protection of Madeira’s elusive petrel will forever be linked to the Zino family. Shown here is a historic photo of father Alec (left) and son Frank (right) working to find and protect the petrels on the Selvagem Islands in the 1980s. (Elizabeth Zino and René Pop)

  Our story begins in 1903, when a few dead birds were found and taken to Father Ernesto Schitz, a priest with a keen interest in natural history. He identified them—wrongly, it turns out—as Fea’s petrels. Thirty years later those “Fea” skins were reexamined by petrel expert Gregory Matthews, who realized, to his excitement, that he was looking at the remains of a completely different species, one unknown to science. He named it Pterodroma madeira. Since there had been no reports of live birds since 1903, he assumed the species was extinct.

  Eventually, the third generation of Zinos picked up the work of monitoring and safeguarding the Zino’s petrels. Shown here is grandson Alexander Zino, with chick. (F. Zino of Freira Conservation Project)

  And then in 1940, a single dead petrel was found and taken, for identification, to Alec Zino. He immediately recognized that this bird was one of the new species described by Matthews: Clearly, it was not extinct after all! After this he and his son Frank made repeated trips to Madeira’s high mountains where the birds were most likely to breed, listening for the calls of petrels. But they heard nothing and saw no signs.

  Then Alec had an idea. Because this new species was so similar to the Fea’s petrel in appearance, perhaps its call was similar too. He played recordings of Fea calls to shepherds in the high mountains—and one of them, Lucus, recognized the calls at once. He said they were “souls of shepherds who had died in the mountains.” Lucus told Alec and Frank that they could hear those calls near Pico Cidrao, in the central massif.

  And so in 1969, Alec, Frank, and Gunther “Jerry” Maul, a friend who had stimulated their fascination with petrels in the first place, drove to Pico Arcero, high in the mountains, then climbed down to a “stone table” where they huddled, waiting. Thinking back to that night Frank wrote: “It was bitterly cold and very dark; ideal for listening.

  “Suddenly,” Frank continued, “my father nudged me and said, ‘Did you hear it?’ We both listened all the more intently and heard this noise above that of the wind. ‘Yes!’ we both called in delight—waking Jerry, whose snoring we had been registering!!!” The “calls” stopped!! Soon, though (with Jerry wide awake from laughing), they heard the real calls and listened, entranced to the sounds that have been described (by ornithologist Malcolm Smith) as “ghostly nocturnal wailing.”

  Later that year a very small colony of t
he live birds was found, nesting on a rocky ledge. Apart from the local shepherds, Alec, Frank, and Jerry were probably the first people ever to see these petrels alive. For the next few years father and son returned during the breeding season to observe the birds. “It was not encouraging,” Frank told me. “The breeding success at the known nesting burrows was terribly low.”

  During the season of 1986 they began systematic monitoring of the colony; at the one known nest ledge there were only six nests with eggs in them. And not one of the young birds survived the summer—almost certainly due to predation on eggs and chicks by rats. This finding was shocking, and it led to the launching of the first serious conservation organization, Freira Conservation Project (FCP), for predator control and systematic monitoring of the Zinos’ colony.

  “On September 12, 1987,” Frank told me, “we pulled a ball of down out of a nest—the first chick we had ever handled!” They ringed it, returned it to its nest, and eventually it fledged. It was the only one that survived that year. However, as they persisted in their efforts to control the rats, things began to look brighter. And then, in 1992, just as they thought that they were winning the battle against rats, they lost ten birds to cats: “almost twenty-five percent of the known breeding population,” said Frank.

  In addition to baiting and killing rats, the new conservation group, FCP, then began trapping cats (since then about ten cats per year had been caught in the breeding grounds). As a result the breeding success of the petrels improved during following seasons. Nevertheless it would take years before numbers in the breeding colony increased, since each female lays only one egg, and each chick, after fledging, spends the next five years at sea.