Iberian rabbit: species hidden by Spain and Portugal for 2 million years

Copyright Daniel Burón - wildnatfilm.com

By Jesús Maturana

Published on 18/07/2026 - EURONEWS

A CSIC team and universities in Spain, Portugal and the UK say the European rabbit is in fact two species split 2 million years ago, one now in decline.

For more than a century, scientists took it for granted that only a single species of rabbit lived on the Iberian Peninsula, at most divided into two regional variants. A study published in 'Biological Conservation' now calls that into question.

According to its authors, from the Institute for Advanced Social Studies (IESA-CSIC) and research centres in Portugal and the United Kingdom, it is in fact a case of two species with separate evolutionary histories: two lineages, a single label.

The study 'When taxonomy lags behind evolution: Consevation implications of cryptic diversity in the Iberian rabbit' (PDF (source in Spanish)), coordinated by Rafael Villafuerte and Miguel Delibes-Mateos together with researchers from the TRAMAS group, distinguishes between the Iberian rabbit ("Oryctolagus algirus") and the European rabbit ("Oryctolagus cuniculus").

The former occurs naturally in Portugal and western Spain, while the latter dominates the eastern part of the peninsula and is the source of the populations introduced in Europe, Oceania and the Americas, where it often behaves as an invasive species.

https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/84/26/98/808x439_cmsv2_204c1c82-9c7b-5eea-94ef-83a2c7883421-9842698.jpg

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320726003137?via%3Dihub#f0010 

The two animals diverged roughly two million years ago, when they became isolated in different refuges during glacial periods: one in the Ebro valley, the other in the Gulf of Cádiz. Since then, the researchers explain, they have barely interbred to any significant extent, despite looking very similar at first glance.

What sets them apart

The differences are not confined to the genome. The Iberian rabbit is smaller, with darker fur, smaller litters and earlier sexual maturity than the European species.

They also differ in their gut microbiome, the composition of their meat and the parasite communities they harbour. In Villafuerte's words, "the two species have always been there; what has changed is our knowledge of them".

https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/84/26/98/808x1154_cmsv2_05aa4aa2-345d-5563-a380-b45a158da900-9842698.jpg

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320726003137?via%3Dihub#f0010 

The authors themselves point to precedents: something similar happened with giraffes, long grouped in a single species until genomics revealed that there were in fact four, or with African elephants, now divided into savannah and forest species.

Why does the discovery matter?

This is the aspect that most worries the researchers. While European rabbit populations remain stable or are even increasing across much of their range to the point of causing agricultural damage in some areas, the Iberian rabbit is in marked decline in Portugal and south-western Spain. Managing both as if they were the same species, they argue, has masked the severity of that fall.

The problem is not just statistical. Game restocking operations usually release European rabbits (source in Spanish), which are more abundant and prolific, into areas where only the Iberian rabbit previously lived. That can accelerate its replacement through competition and hybridisation, Delibes-Mateos warns: "We cannot go on managing as a single species two rabbits that have evolved separately for almost two million years".

The issue goes well beyond the animal itself. The rabbit is prey for up to 40 predator species, including the Iberian lynx and the Spanish imperial eagle, so its conservation status shapes that of much of Mediterranean wildlife.

Formally recognising the two species would, according to the authors, make it possible to design monitoring programmes, recovery plans and hunting regulations tailored to each lineage, instead of applying criteria devised for just one of them.

Precambrian rabbit - Wikipedia

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) said that the discovery of a fossil rabbit in Precambrian rocks would be enough to destroy his belief in evolution

 

Bone ‘fingerprints’ unlock hidden stories of underwater caves

Griffith University

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Griffith University PhD Candidate Meg Walker examines retrived megafauna fossils from Engelbrechts cave in Mount Gambier, South Australia.

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Credit: Steve Trewavas

Bones preserved in underwater caves offer a rare and powerful window into the past – but until now, researchers have had limited tools to understand how the remains of extinct megafauna and other animals came to be found in their underwater graveyards.  

New research led by Griffith University changes that.  

“By analysing animal bones from two underwater cave systems in South Australia, we have revealed how different cave environments leave distinct preservation ‘fingerprints’ on skeletal remains,” said Meg Walker, a PhD Candidate supervised by Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution Director Professor Julien Louys.  

“Backed by radiocarbon-dated bones, we tracked how skeletons accumulated and were modified over decades and centuries in underwater caves, then compared them to those buried in dry caves. 

“Using a range of methods, from the macro to the micro, we looked at features associated with wet and dry caves. 

“Things like spatial distributions of the bones and their surfaces, down to elemental compositions and proteins trapped in ancient cells.”  

The results were clear: underwater caves often preserved bones remarkably well, maintaining their structure and surfaces in exquisite detail.  

Yet these same environments also left unique chemical and biological traces, shaped by light levels and aquatic life.  

Different types of algae and plants grew in cave waters near bright entrances, often on bone surfaces where they left unique signatures.  

But in the midnight regions of the caves, where light never reaches and no plants grow, bones stayed pristine.  

Bones left in dry caves, by contrast, did not show these signatures, and were instead eaten by land-based bacteria, and marked by plant roots in the form of long grooves. 

Ms Walker and the team, including specialist cave divers from the Cave Divers Association of Australia, collected historical animal bones from two underwater caves, Green Waterhole and Gouldens Sinkhole, near Mount Gambier, South Australia. 

Native and non-native animals included cows, kangaroos, emus, sheep, pigs, dingoes, rabbits, possums, quolls and swamp rats – some of which may date to the very first European arrival and establishment of the city in the 1840s.  

By studying these bones, the researchers hoped to better understand how the fossil remains of extinct megafauna also ended up in these underwater caves, and under what sort of environmental conditions. 

“This study has delivered the first framework for interpreting how megafauna fossils formed, survived, and changed in underwater caves,” Miss Walker said. 

“It will provide archaeologists and palaeontologists worldwide with a powerful new tool for reconstructing past environments and histories in these challenging conditions.” 

The study ‘Neotaphonomic characteristics of vertebrate site formation in underwater caves’ has been published in PLOS One.

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Journal

PLOS One

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0343896 

Rabbits running rampant: Australia overrun by invasive species

Cover image: FOCUS © FRANCE 24
Issued on: 24/06/2026

05:55 min

In much of the world, rabbits are seen as harmless, fluffy pets. But in Australia, they’re an economic and environmental disaster. Introduced for sport hunting by British settlers in the mid-19th century, rabbits faced no natural predators. As a result, their population exploded across the continent within decades. Despite mass eradication campaigns, hundreds of millions of rabbits remain today, devastating the landscape and tormenting Australian farmers. FRANCE 24’s Grégory Plesse and Quentin Théron report

BY:
Gregory Plesse
Richelle HARRISON PLESSE

Animals in the Universe

Laurel Thompson

 June 24, 2026

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Image by Arnaud Mariat.

Fatal physics

Astrophysicists analyzed light and energy into their components, and figured out how they work together to form stars, black holes, supernovas. Observation of a red shift showed them that galaxies are moving away from us faster than previously thought. If all objects started from the same point, the universe is 13.58 billion years old and will probably exist for another 19 or 20 billion years when star formation will have ceased and galaxies will have burned out. It will continue expanding indefinitely, collapse into a hot nuclear state like the one that preceded the Big Bang, or else be torn apart by the mysterious gravitational force of dark energy. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, so it appeared relatively early in the universe’s life, and is now halfway through its expected existence. Multi-celled animals appeared 600 million years ago during the Cambrian explosion. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 800,000 years ago. Irrespective of global warming, the Sun will get hotter and brighter as it ages. It will evaporate the oceans, degrade the atmosphere and eventually engulf Earth. The last animals will die out as early as 500 million years from now.

Fatal abundance

Unless there is an emergency like an earthquake or a flood, it is the world of images and words that dominates peoples’ attention in a fast-moving powerhouse like the North American economy. An interesting and absorbing secondary reality replaces the one around us that we see and touch and depend upon to survive. This secondary reality is made of language and is built upon models controlled by people who own property. It portrays government as the dutiful partner to investors who must be kept happy so that so that they don’t leave the country, and working people can continue to have jobs so that they earn the wherewithal to buy more things. Fast talkers monitor the abundance of man-made objects that spill out of shops and fill peoples’ vision as far as the eyes can see. They tell stories that advertise the use of products, and manicure the boxes that greet your eyes when you open up on Google. After the Civil War, abolitionists were defenceless against aggrieved white landowners who persuaded Andrew Johnson to change the outcome of the battle they had fought so hard to win. Plantation owners re-asserted their right to determine the fate of former slaves. They had the President’s ear, and since not enough programs were put in place to help freedmen and freedwomen get on their feet and start a new life, white peoples’ hokum made people forget about the reality of whips and chains until the 1970s.

People can both sense and talk at the same time, you might argue, but talking uses linguistic representations, and they belong to a different form of knowledge from sense perception. Representations belong to language, and language is a tool for promoting self and getting control over the world. Perception, on the other hand, is not about control. It just receives what exists. Listens. Savours. Perception is sensing what is there. It registers the reality of what exists and picks up on patterns in it. What exists is the universe.

The two behaviours are very different, representing and receiving, yet representations tend to take precedence when you are surrounded by talkers, and live in a place where manufacturing and selling objects are key to survival. The whole project of North America is a race to manufacture things that can be sold on the market so that you earn enough money to keep a roof over your head. Except for Mennonites and Doukabours, there is no other vision except make a buck.

And manufactured objects are attention traps. They are interesting to look at. They take attention to get working. They require attention if they do not work. They require energy to keep on functioning. They heat up the atmosphere. Their demands steal time away from sensing where you are. The yawning freezer on the other side of the horizon, and the endless kilometres you must travel before you meet a dust particle or a chunk of rock? Hidden by the abundance of things floating around in your field of vision, or else waiting to be put away in the front living room. North Americans have so much stuff, they don’t need reality anymore.

Fatalistic thinking

Capitalist formation occurred early in Europe’s history because the habit of extraction and exploitation created a strong push towards upward wealth redistribution. Persuaded by punishments like the rack, and property-owners’ voices, peasants found it hard to resist co-optation into a system of hierarchical control. Industrialization simply reinforced deeply structural and historical relations. Colonized by the British and the Normans during the 12th century, Ireland was under Catholic rule when Oliver Cromwell chopped off the head of Charles I and used his New Model Army to confiscate large amounts of Royalists’ land, much of which he gave to Protestant settlers in the form of plantations. Thousands of Catholic peasants were shipped to the Caribbean and North America as indentured servants.

Karl Marx read William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity (1838) at the British Museum, and later on, Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877) gave him a lively account of Iroquois culture in North America. Maybe nations didn’t have to go through the stage of capital formation first if they could find a way to resurrect indigenous communalism? By 1880, several colonial revolts e.g. Haiti, Algeria, Taiping, Sepu, Ireland, Africa, told him that peasant populations were capable of figuring things out on their own. In the Russian mir he found a form of communalism that was still viable.

Marx and Engels analyzed the American Civil War for the New York Tribune, but they never actually visited the United States. Despite its not having a feudal past to pave the way for capitalist development the way Europe did, North Americans would not be where the first socialist revolution would occur, in any case. Cheap land gave workers an outlet for their frustration. Slavery undermined solidarity across racial lines. White supremacy emerged victorious after the Civil War. Capital accumulation was on a fast track where work was key to wealth, and wealth was the only object of work. Indigenous people had been severely reduced in number. Given the fast turnover in products, inventors could reach a high standard of living simply by pinching pennies and working hard. After 1776, American capitalists would go to war at least 400 times in search of new markets i.e. the Mexican War.

Socialism didn’t stand a chance. Fake diamonds. Fake croissants. Fake penicillin. Anything to make a buck. No sales tax on financial asset exchanges means that stocks can be sold easily at no cost. When private equity firms purchase companies that went bankrupt there is no requirement that they take responsibility for the purchased company’s liabilities. Patent monopolies protect inventions from being copied by competitors. Lax laws hand enormous wealth to a tiny group of mostly white Europeans.

A legitimate question

So why did the universe encourage fish, elephants and whales to evolve on Earth if American settlers were going to duplicate Europe’s class system, steal resources from the Global South, and change the climate with their manufactured products? Why did it even bother to invent horses and giraffes in the first place if they were going to get asphyxiated in half a billion years when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gets too low for photosynthesis to occur so all the plants will die. Is the universe some kind of fiend?

This question becomes pertinent as European nations convince themselves that a sick ethno-state is worth protecting from international law, and that re-armament is necessary to thwart an attack by Putin who has the nerve to dislike seeing Russian schools punctured by Ukrainian drones. What virus infects Merz’s brain to make him so paranoid he wants to start a war with the most nuclear-armed country on the planet, that lost 27 million people fighting the Nazis during World War Two, and for whom any attacks on its soil are existential? Does he want to kill all animals prematurely?

Fatal physics, fatal abundance, and fatalistic thinking have led Northern Europeans to a place with no exit. Long before frogs and rabbits will have a chance to croak their last croak and hop their last hop, they submitted themselves to vision of racial and intellectual superiority that reduced the universe to a machine, that destroyed the climate, and made citizens subservient to fascists, Zionists and tech bros. Meanwhile, the universe just watches. It is looking for evidence of awareness of its ominous presence, but all it hears are more speeches, and more bombs. 500 million years is a long time, long enough to wake up and get control over the insidious ideology that made white people think they are the smartest folks in the room. Would the universe have liked them better if instead of words and images, they’d followed the Moon the way indigenous people do? The universe doesn’t do likes. You have to like it.

This is part one of two.

Republicans Want Cyanide Bombs on Public Lands

Robert Hunziker

 June 5, 2026

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Image by Brittani Burns.

Trump’s bombing of Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Yemen, Caribbean boats, and Somalia (Council on Foreign Relations info) has torn to shreds his “political brand” opposing foreign military adventures, promising “no wars” in campaign speech after campaign speech after campaign speech.

Now, his administration is taking “bombing” one step further into the wilderness, over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) right here on U.S. soil. Cyanide bombs are back in style after being banned by the Biden administration.

“The Bureau of Land Management last month quietly lifted its total ban on the use of so-called cyanide bombs on public land and said deployment of the spring-loaded devices used to kill coyotes and other predators will now be considered on a “case-by-case” basis.” (BLM, USDA Agree to Renew Use of ‘Cyanide Bombs’, E&E News by Politico, May 8, 2026)

Cyanide bombs or “M-44s have been and are used on certain state and private lands in Texas, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Nevada, and West Virginia. In Colorado, M-44s are used only on private land. Oregon, Washington, and California have banned M-44s everywhere, including on BLM lands within their borders.” (Trump Administration Resurrects Archaic Poison Bombs No One Wants, Animal Wellness Action, May 22, 2026)

Cyanide bombs are designed to kill coyotes, red foxes, gray foxes, and feral dogs that prey on sheep, poultry and newborn cattle.

“But coyotes, foxes and feral dogs are not all that M-44s kill. According to Wildlife Services’ own records, they also kill at least 150 nontarget species including cattle, sheep, goats, guard dogs, bird dogs, pet dogs, grizzly bears, black bears, endangered Mexican wolves, northwestern gray wolves, bald eagles, golden eagles, falcons, other hawks, vultures, including endangered California condors, owls, ravens, crows, raccoons, opossums, skunks, sundry species of rabbits and kangaroo rats, badgers, threatened wolverines, threatened lynx, fishers and, in at least one case, humans — Dennis Slaugh of Vernal, Utah,” Ibid.

And what of campers, hikers, and dune buggies that fill public lands every day? Are they exposed and what safeguards prevent children from playing with every strange device they come across? According to Predator Defense.org, since 1990 the organization has worked with victims of M-44s, which, when set in the wild, are loaded with scented bait to attract animals.

According to Friends of Animals, M-44s are one of the most vicious devices known to randomly kill anything that breathes, for example, a tragic 2017 incident involved a 14-year-old boy named Canyon Mansfield walking his dog, Kasey, just 350 feet away from his family’s home, near Pocatello, Idaho. Canyon recognized what he thought was a sprinkler’s head sticking out of the ground but as the M-44 triggered, it sent a plume of cyanide powder five feet into the air. He was hospitalized for treatment, fortunately, brisk winds swept the poison away from him or he would have died. Kasey was not so lucky.

According to Friends of Animals countless numbers of dogs have been killed by M-44s. This heartless device defines outrageous inhumane activity to a tee, placing scented bait in the wild to kill anything that breathes that happens to pass by and boom! Dead on the spot! Do people honestly think this is a proper humane decent thing to do?

Meanwhile, the EPA claims at least 50% of all animals killed are non-targeted animals.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to identify individual names of people who initiated or those responsible for handling M-44s in the wild as everything is buried deep within the bureaucratic mumble jumble of governmental agencies, for example, the USDA Wildlife Services within the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that reports to the Department of Interior appears to be the primary source often working in concert with private ranchers to “manage predators.” But state agriculture departments are in charge of all operations in some of the states.

Maybe Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum has the answers.

Regardless of who is in charge, the concept of placing baited killing scented devices in the wild to kill anything that breathes, that happens to wander through the area, is so far out of touch with the sanctity of life that it’s difficult to image how it’s possible to find people willing to administer such an idiotic scheme. Who are these people willing to take innocent lives as if life itself is meaningless?

In May 2026, Republicans included language in the Fiscal Year 2027 USDA appropriations bill instructing federal agencies to “fully integrate” the poison devices back into routine use.

There are many alternatives to M-44. According to the Center for Biological Diversity: “Numerous effective, alternative tools to address livestock conflicts exist, eliminating the need for M-44s altogether. For example, guard animals can be deployed, herders and range riders can be employed, and livestock operators can change animal husbandry practices to lessen the risk of predation. Deterrents, such as sound- and light-emitting frightening devices, can also be used to scare away potential predators.”

But of course, when comparing the bombing of countries like Iran, where civilians are randomly killed when in the line of fire, or soft, easy targets like small, totally unidentified boats in the seas, it makes it much easier to accept and boast of cyanide bombing of defenseless animals in the wild. Indeed, these are signals of a weak personal constitution, spinelessness and lack of imagination, as easy pickings bring shame, not praise.

According to Coyote Project.org, “The toll of M-44s on wildlife has been staggering. Between 2014 and 2022, these devices intentionally killed over 88,000 animals—and these are only the known deaths.” There are anecdotal stories claiming millions killed, whether intentional or unintentional, M-44 does not discriminate; if it is breathing, it’s dead.

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.