Biologist Thayana Giao holds a Green Sea turtle during an intentional capture to monitor turtles’ health, weight and pollution level, by Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), in the Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil August 29, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Sea turtles in the Guanabara Bay of Rio de Janeiro are getting healthier after struggling for years with a tumour disease that hampers their movement, sight and feeding, and ultimately leads to their death.

Scientists said it came after authorities made an effort to clean up the water of the natural harbor that shapes the identity of the region.

Research has linked fibropapillomatosis, a benign tumour in sea turtles, to both a virus and environmental factors.

Kassia Coelho, a professor of veterinary pathological anatomy at the Federal Fluminense University, said samples taken from the animals and the water pointed to a much healthier environment.

“It’s about analysing health by collecting blood and tumours from these turtles, and also biometrics of the animals, seeing their growth over the years and monitoring these animals from one year to the next,” she said.

“Many of these turtles are recaptured and we can assess whether they’ve grown, whether they’re heavier, whether they’ve lost weight, whether they have more tumours or fewer tumours.”

Surrounded by a dense urban population, Guanabara Bay was once a nursery for marine life but has over the years suffered from sewage and other garbage being dumped there.

In 2022, scientists found that three quarters of sea turtles there were carrying the tumours.

While research is still ongoing, Gustavo Baila, an oceanographer and professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande, said sea turtles have been healthier since 2023.

“These are very important species for marine conservation,” he said. “We had observed a high incidence of sea turtles with tumours, with deformities that ended up being very serious for the development of these animals.”

Brazil is home to five of the seven species of sea turtles that exist worldwide. However, their natural habitat is sometimes severely impacted by humans. Conservationists have called for stricter measures to protect these animals.

Alexandre Bianchini, a vice president at Brazilian water and sewage treatment company Aegea, said some 2 billion reais ($356.42 million) had been invested into cleaning up the water in the area. “Now, nature responds,” he said.

In this undated photo, an African elephant family comforts a calf in Samburu National Reserve, Kenya. A new study in Nature Ecology & Evolution demonstrates that elephants respond to individual names, one of the few animal species known to do so.
| Photo Credit: AP

Over the years, researchers who study elephants have noticed an intriguing phenomenon. Sometimes when an elephant makes a vocalization to a group of other elephants, all of them respond. But sometimes when that same elephant makes a similar call to the group, only a single individual responds.

Could it be that elephants address each other by the equivalent of a name? A new study involving wild African savannah elephants in Kenya lends support to this idea.

The researchers analyzed vocalizations – mostly rumbles generated by elephants using their vocal cords, similar to how people speak – made by more than 100 elephants in Amboseli National Park and Samburu National Reserve.

Using a machine-learning model, the researchers identified what appeared to be a name-like component in these calls identifying a specific elephant as the intended addressee. The researchers then played audio for 17 elephants to test how they would respond to a call apparently addressed to them as well as to a call apparently addressed to some other elephant.

The elephants responded more strongly on average to calls apparently addressed to them. When they heard such a call, they tended to behave more enthusiastically, walk toward the audio source and make more vocalizations than when they heard one apparently meant for someone else.

The study’s findings indicate that elephants “address one another with something like a name,” according to behavioral ecologist Mickey Pardo of Cornell University and formerly of Colorado State University, lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

“Certainly, in order to address one another in this way, elephants must learn to associate particular sounds with particular individuals and then use those sounds to get the attention of the individual in question, which requires sophisticated learning ability and understanding of social relationships,” Pardo said.

“The fact that elephants address one another as individuals highlights the importance of social bonds – and specifically, maintaining many different social bonds – for these animals,” Pardo added.

Elephants, Earth’s largest land animals, are highly intelligent, known to have keen memory and problem-solving skills and sophisticated communication. Previous research has shown that they engage in complicated behavior – visual, acoustic and tactile gestures – when greeting each other.

Why would an elephant call to another elephant by “name”?

“We don’t know exhaustively, but from our analysis it appears commonly during contact calls where an elephant calls to another individual – often by name,” said Colorado State University conservation biologist and study co-author George Wittemyer, chair of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants.

“It was also common among a mother’s rumbles to her calves, often to calm them down or check in with them. We thought we would find it in greeting ceremonies, but it was less common in those types of vocalizations,” Wittemyer added.

Using individual-specific vocal labels – names – is rare, but not unprecedented, in the animal kingdom. Dolphins and parrots have been shown to do this, too. But when they do it, they just imitate vocalizations made by the other animal. In elephants, the vocal labels are not simply imitating the sounds made by the addressee.

“Instead, their names seem to be arbitrary, like human names,” Pardo said. “Addressing individuals with arbitrary names likely requires a capacity for some degree of abstract thought.”

“I think this work highlights how intelligent and interesting elephants are, and I hope that engenders greater interest in their conservation and protection,” Wittemyer added.

Might people one day be able to “talk” with elephants?

“That would be fantastic, but we are a long way off from that,” Wittemyer said. “We still don’t know the syntax or basic elements by which elephant vocalizations encode information. We need to figure that out before we can make deeper progress on understanding them.”

A bumblebee flies between poppy flowers near the buildings of the banking district in Frankfurt, Germany, Friday, May 24, 2024. The Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU, invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter radius (33-foot) radius and report what they see to NABU. The Citizen-Science-Projekts named “ insect summer” is set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2 to Aug. 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

In a strip of greenery between Berlin’s Natural History Museum and a busy street, bumble bees move swiftly between flowers while a ladybug makes its way along a leaf full of aphids and bugs crawl about.

Gardens, balconies, verges, fields, woods and patches of wilderness across Germany will be the scene of this year’s “insect summer,” now in its seventh year, organized by the country’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union, or NABU. The environmental group has invited people to spend an hour counting the insects they see in a 10-meter (33-foot) radius.

“We have seen that a few insects that normally occur only in the south might be spreading further north,” including the violet carpenter bee, says Laura Breitkreuz, an expert on biodiversity and entomology at NABU, describing that as a sign of advancing climate change and warmer temperatures.

Over time, people appear to recognize more insects — a key goal of the citizen science project, which doesn’t aim to deliver precise scientific monitoring but can give researchers information on trends and unexpected insights.

Insects are an essential building block of ecosystems, crucial to pollination, food chains and to keeping the soil productive. But from bees to butterflies, insect populations have been in decline in recent decades — a drop often blamed on human causes such as the use of damaging chemicals, destruction of natural habitats and climate change.

Breitkreuz points to people’s lack of knowledge of “what is crawling around outside their door” as one contributing factor. “It’s very important for us to show people how important, great and interesting insects are,” she says.

Organizers have prepared a form and a mobile app to help people identify and report their firebug and lacewing sightings during this year’s two insect-counting events. Those are set from May 31 to June 9 and Aug. 2-11, giving insect-counters a chance to see what’s flying and crawling in different seasons. No equipment is needed to join in.

Silkworm are seen at a farm in Matanzas, Cuba, May 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Cuban biochemist Dayron Martin, dressed in a white lab coat and jeans, looks over a table swarming with silkworms with the admiration of a proud father.

Hundreds of the cream-coloured caterpillars squiggle across a bed of dark green mulberry leaves – the worm’s preferred food – freshly plucked from bushes just outside his laboratory.

This is the payoff, he says: The worms – native to Asia but happily transplanted to Cuba – are spinning a fine, lustrous white fiber that he hopes will be used by Cuban artisans to create products ranging from dresses, blouses, shirts and even cosmetics.

Martin, who heads the ArteSeda project at the “Indio Hatuey Experimental Station” in western Cuba, oversees the process start to finish, from rearing the caterpillars to producing their preferred food and then harvesting their silk.

“It’s an ancestral process more than 5,000 years old,” Martin says of the traditional Chinese practice, though he notes that it has only recently been adopted in Cuba.

“(The worms) need very specific conditions,” he said.

Cuba fits the bill. Balmy temperatures, airy trade winds and a year-round growing season assure a happy home and plenty of feed for the worms, which have made the transition to their new home.

Silkworms are the larva of a moth (Bombyx mori) native to Asia. They spin a cocoon of silk fiber that has long been used as the source of commercial silk.

The Cuban project, which began with funding from the European Union, the Cuban government and more recently from the French government, aims to teach artisans the process and allow them to raise their own worms from scratch.

Artisans then use their silk to create home-grown products to sell to tourists and locals alike, said Dalgi Chaviano, who owns a small shop in Havana that produces cosmetics, crafts, soaps, fabrics and prints.

Chaviano said she recently received authorization from the local government to raise mulberry plants and silk worms in Havana, allowing her to produce her own raw material.

“Every day I discover something new to do with the silk,” Chaviano said as she put the finishing touches on a pair of red silk earrings.

An undated handout image shows a southern sea otter using a rock anvil to break open shells of prey, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, U.S.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Humans are not alone in the use of tools. Chimpanzees, for instance, crack nuts with stones and use sticks to get at tasty termites. Dolphins are known to employ sponges to protect their beaks while foraging. And a Galapagos Islands finch uses cactus spines to dig grubs out of holes.

Sea otters also are members of the animal kingdom’s tool-wielding club. And a new study offers a fuller understanding of the tool use – utilizing rocks and other objects to break open hard prey – by these marine mammals. It lets the otters eat certain larger prey and reduces their tooth damage by cutting down on their chomping down on hard shells, with females using tools more than males, perhaps to compensate for their smaller body size and weaker bite force, researchers found.

The researchers observed 196 southern sea otters along the central California coastline – Big Sur, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Piedras Blancas and Elkhorn Slough.

When not crushing prey with their teeth, the otters float on their backs when feeding and use rocks, shells and discarded bottles as hammers or anvils to smash open hard-shelled prey, also sometimes bashing prey onto the surfaces of docks and boats.

Among the prey were sea urchins, abalone, crabs, mussels, clams, snails and fat innkeeper worms. The shells of certain larger prey would be too tough, without tools, to break to gain access to the edible soft parts inside. For instance, mussels, clams and snails would otherwise be unavailable.

“Tool use allows individuals to maintain energetic requirements through the processing of alternative hard prey that are typically inaccessible with biting alone, suggesting that this behavior is a necessity for the survival of some otters in environments with limited resources,” said evolutionary biologist Chris Law of the University of Texas and University of Washington, lead author of the study published on Thursday in the journal Science.

The frequency of tool-use behavior varies, with some otters doing it more than 90% of the time when feeding and others rarely or never, according to study co-author Rita Mehta, a University of California, Santa Cruz functional and comparative biologist.

Tool use was particularly important for the female otters.

“Females need the calories. They are smaller than males, and pregnant or nursing females have elevated caloric demands. Tool-using females were shown to consume a greater proportion of very large prey to help them meet their caloric needs,” Mehta said.

The southern sea otters, a subspecies also called the California sea otter, can reach up to four feet (1.2 meters) long. Males weigh up to about 70 pounds (32 kg) and females up to about 50 pounds (23 kg).

Eating hard-shelled prey, as the otters do, can lead to broken teeth.

“Without their teeth, otters can’t eat and will die. Females show slightly less damage to their teeth overall, probably because of their increased tool use,” Law said.

Sea otters, the largest member of the weasel family, generally eat food equal to about a quarter of their body weight daily as they prowl kelp forests and seagrass beds. The population of southern sea otters along California’s coastline numbers only about 3,000.

The otters were opportunistic in terms of their tools.

“Otters are intelligent mammals, and they are very strong. People who live along the bay commonly observe otters using a variety of human-discarded material as tools, from glass bottles to pieces of plastic, so otters seem flexible in what they may try to use to break open prey,” Mehta said.

The male savannah elephant Doma and the male savannah elephant Mainos engage in greeting behaviour at Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe, in this undated handout picture.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

People greet each other in a variety of ways. They might say “hello,” “guten tag,” “hola,” “konnichiwa” or “g’day.” They might shake hands, bump fists, make a fist-and-palm gesture or press their hands together with a gentle head bow. They might kiss on the cheek or hand. And they might give a nice big hug.

For elephants, greetings appear to be a similarly complex affair. A study based on observations of African savannah elephants in the Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe provides new insight into the visual, acoustic and tactile gestures they employ in greetings, including how greetings differ depending on factors such as their sex and whether they are looking at each other.

“Elephants live in a so-called ‘fission-fusion’ society, where they often separate and reunite, meeting after hours, days or months apart,” said cognitive and behavioural biologist Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna in Austria, lead author of the study published this month in the journal Communications Biology.

Elephants, Earth’s largest land animals, are highly intelligent, with keen memory and problem-solving skills and sophisticated communication.

Female elephants of different family groups might have strong social bonds with each other, forming “bond groups.” Previous studies in the wild reported that when these groups meet, the elephants engage in elaborate greeting ceremonies to advertise and strengthen their social bond, Eleuteri said.

Male elephants have weaker social bonds, and their greetings may function more to ease possible “risky reunions” – a hostile interaction. They greet mainly by smelling each other, reaching with their trunks, Eleuteri added.

The study detailed around 20 gesture types displayed during greetings, showing that elephants combine these in specific ways with call types such as rumbles, roars and trumpets. It also revealed how smell plays an important role in greetings, often involving urination, defecation and secretions from a unique elephant gland.

Elephants may greet by making gestures intended to be seen, like spreading the ears or showing their rump, or with gestures producing distinct sounds like flapping the ears forward, or with tactile gestures involving touching the other elephant.

“We found that they select these visual, acoustic and tactile gestures by taking into account whether their greeting partner was looking at them or not, suggesting they’re aware of others’ visual perspectives. They preferred using visual gestures when their partner was looking at them, while tactile ones when they were not,” Eleuteri said.

Greeting behaviour has been studied in various animals.

“Many other species greet, including different primates, hyenas and dogs,” Eleuteri said. “Animal greetings help mediate social interactions by, for example, reducing tension and avoiding conflict, by reaffirming existing social bonds, and by establishing dominance status using different behaviors.”

The new research built on previous studies of elephant greeting behavior. The nine observed elephants – four females and five males – were “semi-captive,” freely roaming their natural environment during daytime and kept in stables at night.

Greetings used by the female elephants closely matched the behavior of wild elephants. The greeting behavior of the male elephants appeared to differ from their wild counterparts. Wild male elephants tend to be solitary, forming loose associations with other elephants.

The temporal gland, midway between the eye and the ear, secretes a substance called temporin containing chemical information about an elephant’s identity or emotional and sexual state. Elephants often use their trunks to check out the temporal glands of others.

“The urine and feces of elephants also contain chemical information important for elephants, like the identity of the individual, their reproductive state or even their emotional state,” Eleuteri said.

“Elephants might defecate or urinate during greetings to release this important information. Another option is that they do this due to the excitement of seeing each other. But the fact that the elephants often moved their tails to the side or waggled their tails when urinating and defecating suggests they may be inviting the recipients to smell them. Maybe they don’t need to tell each other how they’re doing, as they can smell it,” Eleuteri added.

A male Sumatran orangutan named Rakus, with a facial wound below the right eye, is seen in the Suaq Balimbing research site, a protected rainforest area in Indonesia, two days before the orangutan administered wound self-treatment using a medicinal plant, in this handout picture taken June 23, 2022.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

An orangutan appeared to treat a wound with medicine from a tropical plant— the latest example of how some animals attempt to soothe their own ills with remedies found in the wild, scientists reported Thursday.

Scientists observed Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male orangutan then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterward, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage, according to a new study in Scientific Reports.

Previous research has documented several species of great apes foraging for medicines in forests to heal themselves, but scientists hadn’t yet seen an animal treat itself in this way.

“This is the first time that we have observed a wild animal applying a quite potent medicinal plant directly to a wound,” said co-author Isabelle Laumer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany.

The orangutan’s intriguing behavior was recorded in 2022 by Ulil Azhari, a co-author and field researcher at the Suaq Project in Medan, Indonesia. Photographs show the animal’s wound closed within a month without any problems.

Scientists have been observing orangutans in Indonesia’s Gunung Leuser National Park since 1994, but they hadn’t previously seen this behavior.

“It’s a single observation,” said Emory University biologist Jacobus de Roode, who was not involved in the study. “But often we learn about new behaviors by starting with a single observation.”

“Very likely it’s self-medication,” said de Roode, adding that the orangutan applied the plant only to the wound and no other body part.

It’s possible Rakus learned the technique from other orangutans living outside the park and away from scientists’ daily scrutiny, said co-author Caroline Schuppli at Max Planck.

Rakus was born and lived as a juvenile outside the study area. Researchers believe the orangutan got hurt in a fight with another animal. It’s not known whether Rakus earlier treated other injuries.

Scientists have previously recorded other primates using plants to treat themselves.

Bornean orangutans rubbed themselves with juices from a medicinal plant, possibly to reduce body pains or chase away parasites.

Chimpanzees in multiple locations have been observed chewing on the shoots of bitter-tasting plants to soothe their stomachs. Gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos swallow certain rough leaves whole to get rid of stomach parasites.

“If this behavior exists in some of our closest living relatives, what could that tell us about how medicine first evolved?” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientific officer of the nonprofit Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, who had no role in the study.

Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink.

But over the last four years, even as the hole has shrunk it has persisted for an unusually long time. Our new research found that instead of closing up during November it has stayed open well into December. This is early summer – the crucial period of new plant growth in coastal Antarctica and the peak breeding season for penguins and seals.

That’s a worry. When the ozone hole forms, more ultraviolet rays get through the atmosphere. And while penguins and seals have protective covering, their young may be more vulnerable.

Why does ozone matter?

Over the past half century, we damaged the earth’s protective ozone layer by using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and related chemicals. Thanks to coordinated global action these chemicals are now banned.

Because CFCs have long lifetimes, it will be decades before they are completely removed from the atmosphere. As a result, we still see the ozone hole forming each year.

The lion’s share of ozone damage happens over Antarctica. When the hole forms, the UV index doubles, reaching extreme levels. We might expect to see UV days over 14 in summers in Australia or California, but not in polar regions.

Luckily, on land most species are dormant and protected under snow when the ozone hole opens in early spring (September to November). Marine life is protected by sea ice cover and Antarctica’s moss forests are under snow. These protective icy covers have helped to protect most life in Antarctica from ozone depletion – until now.

Unusually long-lived ozone holes

A series of unusual events between 2020 and 2023 saw the ozone hole persist into December. The record-breaking 2019–2020 Australian bushfires, the huge underwater volcanic eruption off Tonga, and three consecutive years of La Niña. Volcanoes and bushfires can inject ash and smoke into the stratosphere. Chemical reactions occurring on the surface of these tiny particulates can destroy ozone.

These longer-lasting ozone holes coincided with significant loss of sea ice, which meant many animals and plants would have had fewer places to hide.

What does stronger UV radiation do to ecosystems?

If ozone holes last longer, summer-breeding animals around Antarctica’s vast coastline will be exposed to high levels of reflected UV radiation. More UV can get through, and ice and snow is highly reflective, bouncing these rays around.

In humans, high UV exposure increases our risk of skin cancer and cataracts. But we don’t have fur or feathers. While penguins and seals have skin protection, their eyes aren’t protected.

Is it doing damage? We don’t know for sure. Very few studies report on what UV radiation does to animals in Antarctica. Most are done in zoos, where researchers study what happens when animals are kept under artificial light.

Even so, it is a concern. More UV radiation in early summer could be particularly damaging to young animals, such as penguin chicks and seal pups who hatch or are born in late spring.

As plants such as Antarctic hairgrass, Deschampsia antarctica, the cushion plant, Colobanthus quitensis and lots of mosses emerge from under snow in late spring, they will be exposed to maximum UV levels.

Antarctic mosses actually produce their own sunscreen to protect themselves from UV radiation, but this comes at the cost of reduced growth.

Trillions of tiny phytoplankton live under the sea ice. These microscopic floating algae also make sunscreen compounds, called microsporine amino acids.

What about marine creatures? Krill will dive deeper into the water column if the UV radiation is too high, while fish eggs usually have melanin, the same protective compound as humans, though not all fish life stages are as well protected.

Four of the past five years have seen sea ice extent reduce, a direct consequence of climate change.

Less sea ice means more UV light can penetrate the ocean, where it makes it harder for Antarctic phytoplankton and krill to survive. Much relies on these tiny creatures, who form the base of the food web. If they find it harder to survive, hunger will ripple up the food chain. Antarctica’s waters are also getting warmer and more acidic due to climate change.

An uncertain outlook for Antarctica

We should, by rights, be celebrating the success of banning CFCS – a rare example of fixing an environmental problem. But that might be premature. Climate change may be delaying the recovery of our ozone layer by, for example, making bushfires more common and more severe.

Ozone could also suffer from geoengineering proposals such as spraying sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, as well as more frequent rocket launches.

If the recent trend continues, and the ozone hole lingers into the summer, we can expect to see more damage done to plants and animals – compounded by other threats.

We don’t know if the longer-lasting ozone hole will continue. But we do know climate change is causing the atmosphere to behave in unprecedented ways. To keep ozone recovery on track, we need to take immediate action to reduce the carbon we emit into the atmosphere.

A turkey stands in a barn, Aug. 10, 2015, on a turkey farm near Manson, Iowa. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that avian influenza (bird flu), which is deadly to commercial poultry, was confirmed in a flock of 47,300 turkeys in Jerauld County of South Dakota last Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023, and at a farm with 141,800 birds in Sanpete County of Utah last Friday, Oct. 6.
| Photo Credit: AP

Scientists in Britain have found they can partially protect chickens from bird flu infections by editing their genes, signalling a new potential strategy to reduce the spread of the deadly virus.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, known as bird flu, has spread to new corners of the globe since 2022, wiping out millions of poultry birds and sending egg and turkey prices soaring.

Experts warn that mutations could potentially threaten a human pandemic, though the current strain has not caused significant disease in people.

Researchers said they used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to make specific changes to a gene called ANP32 that is essential to support flu viruses inside chickens’ cells. CRISPR is a type of molecular “scissor” technology that scientists can use to edit DNA.

Also Read | Mammalian spread of H5N1 and its pandemic potential 

Flu viruses hijack proteins like ANP32 inside cells to help themselves replicate, and the edits in chickens were designed to stop the growth of bird flu.

Upticks in cases tend to occur during the spring and autumn migration of wild birds that transmit the virus, and the U.S. last week reported its first case in a commercial flock since April.

Experiments showed that almost all of the gene-edited chickens showed resistance to lower doses of a less lethal form of bird flu than the H5N1 strain that has circulated the globe recently, said Wendy Barclay, a flu expert and professor at the Imperial College of London.

When birds were exposed to much higher levels of the virus, though, about half of the gene-edited chickens had breakthrough infections, she said.

Also Read | Most avian flu outbreaks in India reported from post-monsoon to pre-summer season: study

“We can move toward making chickens resistant to the virus but we’re not there yet,” Barclay said. “We would need more edits – more robust edits – to really shut down the virus replication.”

The findings were published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.

Researchers now think that making three specific genetic changes to chickens’ cells will better protect birds. However, they have not bred chickens with three edits yet, said Helen Sang, who previously studied genetically modifying chickens against bird flu at the University of Edinburgh.

Sang said scientists found that genetic modification would not work well enough.

Unlike genetic modification, which introduces foreign genes, gene editing alters existing genes. The technology is considered to be less controversial than genetic modification and is more lightly regulated in some countries.

“The way forwards here is not to rely on single edits but to use a combination of them,” Barclay said.

France this month became the first country in the European Union to vaccinate poultry against the virus.

However, that strategy led the U.S. to impose trade restrictions on French poultry imports, citing a risk of introducing the virus into the country because vaccinated birds may not show signs of infection.

Gertie, an endangered Bolson tortoise, is shown to a group of state and federal wildlife officials during a trip to Ted Turner’s Armendaris Ranch in Engle, N.M., on Friday, Sept. 22, 2023. The Turner Endangered Species Fund has been working to build a population of the tortoises for more than two decades in hopes of one day releasing them into the wild as part of a recovery effort.
| Photo Credit: AP

While the average lifespan of North America’s largest and most rare tortoise species is unknown, biologists have said it could span upward of a century.

So saving the endangered species is a long game — one that got another nudge forward Friday as U.S. wildlife officials finalized an agreement with Ted Turner’s Endangered Species Fund that clears the way for the release of more Bolson tortoises on the media mogul’s ranch in central New Mexico.

The “safe harbor agreement” will facilitate the release of captive tortoises on the Armendaris Ranch to establish a free-ranging population. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Martha Williams said the agreement, which offers private landowners protections from regulations, can serve as a model as officials look for more innovative ways to work within the Endangered Species Act.

Also Read | For the love of a tortoise 

Dozens of people gathered for the release Friday of 20 more adult tortoises on the property, which is already home to 23 of them as well as dozens of juvenile ones. With the sun high in the sky and temperatures nearing 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius), the release was held off until the evening to ensure their well-being.

The tortoises usually spend about 85% of the time in their earthen burrows, which in some cases can be about 21 yards (20 meters) long.

Shawn Sartorius, a field supervisor with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the results of the breeding and restoration efforts for the slow-reproducing and long-lived animals will not be known in his lifetime.

“What we’re doing here is establishing a population here that can be handed off to the next generation,” Sartorius said.

Also Read | The battle to bring freshwater turtles back from the brink 

It’s a step toward one day releasing the tortoise more broadly in the Southwest as conservationists push the federal government to consider crafting a recovery plan for the species. The tortoise is just the latest example of a growing effort to find new homes for endangered species as climate change and other threats push them from their historic habitats.

Now found only in the grasslands of north-central Mexico, the tortoise once had a much larger range that included the southwestern United States. Fossil records also show it was once present it the southern Great Plains, including parts of Texas and Oklahoma.

The wild population in Mexico is thought to consist of fewer than 2,500 tortoises, and experts say threats to the animals are mounting as they are hunted for food and collected as pets. Their habitat also is shrinking as more desert grasslands are converted to farmland.

While it’s been eons since the tortoises roamed wild in what is now New Mexico, Mike Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, said it’s time for biologists to reconsider what ecological reference points should matter most when talking about the recovery of an imperiled species.

Also Read | In Varanasi, turtles help clean the Ganga

Climate change is reshuffling the ecological deck and changing the importance of historical conditions in the recovery equation, Phillips said. He pointed to the case of the tortoise, noting that suitable habitat is moving north again as conditions in the Southwestern U.S. become drier and warmer.

Absent a willingness by wildlife managers to think more broadly, he said, species like the Bolson tortoise could have a bleak future.

“It would seem in a recovery context, historical range should be considered. Prehistoric range sometimes matters too,” he said in an interview. “But most importantly, future range — because recovery is all about righting a wrong, it’s about improving conditions. The future is what is of great relevance to recovery.”

Sartorius, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, agreed, saying managers can’t look narrowly at historic range and still keep animals like the tortoise on the planet.

Also Read | Where tortoise conservation is devotion

The question that biologists have been trying to answer is whether the Armendaris Ranch makes for a good home.

So far the ranch, spanning more than 560 square miles (1,450 square kilometers) is proving to be an ideal spot. The landscape is similar to that where the tortoises are found in Mexico, and work done on the ranch and at the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Carlsbad has resulted in more than 400 tortoises being hatched since 2006.

In all, the Turner Endangered Species Fund and its partners have been able to grow the population from 30 tortoises to about 800, said Chris Wiese, who leads the project at the Armendaris Ranch.

“The releases are the essential step to getting them back on the ground and letting them be wild tortoises,” she said. “To us, this is the pinnacle of what we do.”

The tortoises will be able to roam freely in the 16.5-acre (6.6-hectare) pen like they would in the wild. Wildlife officials will look in on them once a year.

Depending on weather conditions and forage availability, it can take a few years or more for a hatchling to reach just over 4 inches (110 millimeters) long. They can eventually grow to about 14.5 inches (370 millimeters).

Also Read | Asian Giant Tortoise re-wilded in Nagaland to bring species back from the brink

The species was unknown to science until the late 1950s and has never been extensively studied.

“Each and every day we’re learning more and more about the Bolson tortoise’s natural history,” Phillips said.

The goal is to build a robust captive population that can be used as a source for future releases into the wild. That work will include getting state and federal permits to release tortoises outside of the enclosures on Turner lands.

Tortoises in the pen are outfitted with transponders so they can be tracked. Those released Friday hit the ground crawling, wandering through clumps of grass and around desert scrub as the Fra Cristobal mountain range loomed in the distance.

It made for a perfect scene as one of the tortoises headed off toward the western edge of the pen, its shadow trailing behind. It was a moment that Wiese and her team have been working toward for years.

“We are not in the business of making pets,” she said. “We’re in the business of making wild animals and that means you have to let them go.”