Tag Archives: critically endangered species

Saving the Smiling Salamander

Leave a reply

A homely aquatic salamander with a cartoonish smile and the ability to regenerate lost body parts has become a global phenomenon, appearing as characters in Minecraft, Fortnite and Pokémon and inspiring a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy. Where the axolotl can barely be found: in its natural habitat in Mexico. 

The axolotl (pronounced ah-SHO-lohtl) is hurtling toward extinction, just as it becomes globally familiar with a cottage industry using its image to sell beer, T-shirts and videogames. Scientists estimate that no more than 1,000—and perhaps as few as 50—are left in the wild in their last natural habitat, a Venice-like system of canals and islands built by the Aztecs that still exists in the Mexico City borough of Xochimilco.

Excerpt from The Race to Save a Salamander That Spawned a Global Cottage Industry, WSJ, Mar. 29, 2025

Bickering is Easier than Acting: Saving Biodiversity

Leave a reply

At the COP15 biodiversity summit in Canada in December 2022, more than 190 countries agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a deal including targets such as nations protecting and restoring 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. To ensure that all countries — particularly low- and middle-income nations (LMICs) — can meet these targets, those that signed the deal agreed to establish a trust fund by the end of this year and that, by 2030, wealthy nations should collectively be contributing US$30 billion per year. Disputes have re-emerged, however, on whether the trust fund should be independent or should be established under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility. Because LMICs don’t have an adequate say in how the GEF funds are spent, LMICs want the trust fund to be established as an independent fund.

These tensions could delay the trust fund’s adoption, which was planned for a GEF assembly in August 2023, delaying biodiversity action even more … Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: researchers have estimated that one million species are under threat of habitat loss because of factors such as climate change and agriculture.

Excerpts from Battles over Funding Could Threaten Historic Effort to Save Species, Nature, June 20, 2023
 

Cryopreservation of Endangered Species

Leave a reply

In paper in 2018 in Nature Plants, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, detail for the first time the scale of threatened species that are unable to be conserved in seed banks. The paper reveals that when looking at threatened species, 36 per cent of ‘critically endangered species produce recalcitrant seeds . This means they can’t tolerate the drying process and therefore cannot be frozen, the key process they need to go through to be safely ‘banked’.

In the paper, Kew scientist Dr. John Dickie, former Kew scientist Dr. Sarah Wyse, and former Director of Science at Kew Prof. Kathy Willis, found that other threatened categories and global tree species list also contain high proportions of species that are unbankable including 35% of ‘vulnerable’ species, 27% of ‘endangered’ species and 33% of all tree species.

Among these species are important UK heritage trees such as oaks, horse chestnuts and sweet chestnuts, as well as worldwide food staples like avocado, cacao, and mango. This latest research reveals that the scale of plants unable to be conserved in seed banks is much higher for threatened species. The issue is particularly severe for tree species, especially those in tropical moist forests where a half of the canopy tree species can be unsuitable for banking…

Currently, seed banking is the most commonly practiced way of conserving plantsoutside of their natural habitats. Seed banking works as an ‘insurance policy’ against the extinction of plants in the world—especially for those that are rare, endemic and economically important—so that they can be protected and utilised for the future.

[The scientists proposed]cryopreservation—a form of preservation using liquid nitrogen which offers a potential long-term storage solution for recalcitrant seeds. In seed banks, seeds are dried and frozen at -20°C whereas cryopreservation involves removing the embryo from the seed and then using liquid nitrogen to freeze it at a much colder temperature of -196°C…As well as allowing ‘unbankable’ species to be stored, cryopreservation also helps to extend the lifespans of orthodox seeds that otherwise have storage lives that are too short at -20°C.

Excerpts from Seed banking not an option for over a third of threatened species
November 2, 2018, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew