Team discovers invasive-native crayfish hybrids in Missouri

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, NEWS BUREAU

 

IMAGE: CHRISTOPHER TAYLOR, LEFT, ERIC LARSON AND THEIR COLLEAGUE ZACHARY ROZANSKY, NOT PICTURED, REPORT THAT AN INVASIVE CRAYFISH IS INTERBREEDING WITH A NATIVE SPECIES IN THE CURRENT RIVER IN MISSOURI. view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY L. BRIAN STAUFFER

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In a study of crayfish in the Current River in southeastern Missouri, researchers discovered – almost by chance – that the virile crayfish, Faxonius virilis, was interbreeding with a native crayfish, potentially altering the native’s genetics, life history and ecology. Reported in the journal Aquatic Invasions, the study highlights the difficulty of detecting some of the consequences of biological invasions, the researchers say.

“The virile crayfish is probably the widest-ranging native crayfish in North America,” said study co-author Christopher Taylor, a curator of crustaceans at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Even though it’s native to North America, F. virilis is considered invasive in many parts of the U.S. because it quickly dominates new habitats when introduced – for example, by fishermen moving crayfish from one stream to another in a bait bucket, he said.

Taylor conducted the research with Eric Larson, a professor of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Zachary Rozansky, a graduate student who led the research.

“The Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas are just a great place to be a crayfish,” Larson said. “The streambeds are rocky so you can hide from fish predators, the water chemistry is good, there’s lots of calcium in the stream and there are a lot of groundwater springs that feed into the main river. That’s why there are so many native crayfish there.”

CAPTION

Faxonius virilis

CREDIT

Photo by Zachary Rozansky

CAPTION

The spothanded crayfish, Faxonius punctimanus.

CREDIT

Photo by Zachary Rozansky

The virile crayfish was not native to the Current River watershed, however, and its presence could lead to declines in native crayfish species, he said.

Other invasive crayfish have disrupted the ecosystems they invade, Larson said. For example, the rusty crayfish is native to the Ohio River Basin but has invaded the waters of many other regions in the U.S. and Canada. It hybridizes with native crayfish, displacing them and reducing their reproductive output. It also consumes large quantities of aquatic plants and other invertebrates, undermining populations of some sport fish and crayfish species.

The virile crayfish was first detected in 1986 in the Current River, a pristine watershed, parts of which are administered by the U.S. National Park Service.

“The spread and impacts of an invasive species could cause substantial harm to this unique ecosystem,” Larson said.

CAPTION

The Current River, in southeast Missouri

CREDIT

Photo by Zachary Rozansky

The researchers hoped to determine the extent of the F. virilis invasion by collecting and identifying mitochondrial DNA from environmental samples, an emerging approach for invasive-species surveillance known as “environmental DNA,” or eDNA. However, as they started collecting crayfish for genetic analysis to develop their eDNA sampling method, they discovered a surprising problem.

“Initially, we were finding that some of the native spothanded crayfish, Faxonius punctimanus, had mitochondrial DNA sequences that were aligning with invasive virile crayfish,” Rozansky said. “We also discovered the inverse: Some virile crayfish had the mitochondrial DNA of spothanded crayfish.”

This meant that the two species were hybridizing with one another, he said.

“We did not observe any differences in colors or patterns indicating they were hybrids,“ Rozansky said. “They looked like one or the other.”

The discovery should come as a warning to those using environmental DNA to look for an invasive species in an area with closely related native species, said Larson, whose laboratory specializes in the use of eDNA.

“It was by chance that we found an invasive crayfish that had native spothanded crayfish mitochondrial DNA,” he said. “Currently, most eDNA detection markers use mitochondrial DNA, so the results of this research highlight the possibility of missed detections of invasive species if hybridization is occurring.”

“Although it is rarely documented, researchers working with invasive crayfishes should not discount the possibility that the invaders are hybridizing with native species,” Rozansky said.

The implications for the native crayfish in the Current River system in Missouri are still unknown, the researchers said.

The INHS is a division of the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

CAPTION

The virile crayfish, Faxonius virilis, was first detected in the Current River in Missouri in 1986.

CREDIT

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

CAPTION

Eric Larson, left, and Christopher Taylor inspect a captured crayfish.

CREDIT

Photo by L. Brian Stauffer

Editor’s notes: 

To reach Zachary Rozansky, email z22roz@gmail.com.

To reach Christopher Taylor, email cataylor@illinois.edu.

To reach Eric Larson, email erlarson@illinois.edu.

The paper “Invasive virile crayfish (Faxonius virilis Hagen, 1870) hybridizes with native spothanded crayfish (Faxonius punctimanus Creaser, 1933) in the Current River watershed of Missouri, U.S.” is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau.

DOI: 10.3391/ai.2021.16.4.07

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JOURNAL

Aquatic Invasions

DOI

10.3391/ai.2021.16.4.07 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Invasive virile crayfish (Faxonius virilis Hagen, 1870) hybridizes with native spothanded crayfish (Faxonius punctimanus Creaser, 1933) in the Current River watershed of Missouri, U.S.

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Oct-2021

COI STATEMENT

NA

Social distancing: Not just for humans

New study shows sick gorillas transmit illnesses to others nearby

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DIAN FOSSEY GORILLA FUND INTERNATIONAL

 

IMAGE: A GROUP OF GORILLAS MONITORED BY THE FOSSEY FUND GATHERS FOR AN AFTERNOON REST IN RWANDA’S VOLCANOES NATIONAL PARK. view more 

CREDIT: DIAN FOSSEY GORILLA FUND

Coughs and colds spread quickly within wild mountain gorilla groups but appear less likely to spread between neighboring groups, a new study published in Scientific Reports shows.

Disease, in particular respiratory infection, is one of the biggest threats to ape conservation. Because humans and apes are so closely related, our ape cousins can catch many of the same diseases as us. However, respiratory infections that are relatively mild in humans can have major consequences in apes like gorillas and chimpanzees, where a case of the common cold or flu can be lethal.

Scientists from the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund studied 15 respiratory outbreaks across the last 17 years to understand how diseases transmitted through a population of mountain gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda. These findings will help shape future conservation strategies.

“If we can better understand how diseases have spread in the past, we can better prepare for and respond to outbreaks in the future,” said Dr. Robin Morrison, lead author on the study.

Study authors found that the close contact and strong social relationships within gorilla groups enabled respiratory diseases to spread rapidly between group members. Furthermore, the patterns of transmission couldn’t be predicted by a group’s social network. In one outbreak, it took only three days for 45 out of 46 group members to begin coughing.

These results differed from findings in an earlier study of chimpanzees, in which the more diffuse social organization of chimpanzee society resulted in slower transmission overall, and researchers were able to predict disease spread based on the chimpanzees’ social network. 

There was some good news for this endangered gorilla population. The researchers found that opportunities for infections to spread between neighboring groups were limited.

“The outbreaks we investigated all appeared to stay within a single group rather than spreading through the wider population,” said Yvonne Mushimiyimana, a co-author on the project. “Gorilla groups interact fairly infrequently, and when they do, they tend to keep their distance, rarely approaching to within that crucial 1-2 meter distance.”

This aloofness toward neighboring groups may actually help protect the wider population by limiting broader transmission of these infections.

But if gorilla groups weren’t infecting each other, where did these outbreaks come from? Other studies in wild apes have shown that respiratory outbreaks are almost exclusively caused by pathogens of human origin. In Uganda, two adjacent chimpanzee communities began showing signs of respiratory infection simultaneously, but genetic analyses found that these infections were caused by two entirely different human pathogens. These findings surprised scientists, who expected the infection had spread between the two chimpanzee communities. Instead the analyses showed that both infections had been independently transmitted from humans.

“Our best guess is that these infections in mountain gorillas are coming from humans,” said Morrison. “It really highlights the importance of ongoing efforts to minimize wild great ape exposure to human diseases during activities like research, tourism and protection.  Vaccination, mask wearing and maintaining adequate distance are all more important than ever in the midst of a global pandemic.”

Identifying strategies to limit disease transmission is a conservation priority. Different diseases can have very different transmission pathways, but this study helps us understand how future outbreaks with similar transmission dynamics might spread in gorilla populations.

“The findings from this study suggest that since respiratory diseases transmit quickly within gorilla groups and transmission between groups is much less common, strategies that prevent initial transmission into a group may be most effective,” said Dr. Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientific officer of the Fossey Fund. “For COVID-19 and other human respiratory pathogens, that means preventing that first introduction of a disease from a human to a gorilla.”

“Although the research was completed well before the appearance of COVID-19, the current pandemic highlights the fact that it is more vital than ever to minimize pathways of human-ape disease transmission, which pose a risk to wild great apes and humans alike,” said Stoinski.

After October 7 the paper will be available at: www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98969-8

 

For further information please contact:

Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund press contact: Donna Gorman dgorman@gorillafund.org

 

About the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund:

Established in 1967 by famed primatologist Dian Fossey, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund works to protect and study wild gorillas and their habitats and empower people who share the gorilla’s forest home. With a team of more than 200 staff working in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Fossey Fund is the world’s longest running and largest organization dedicated entirely to gorilla conservation. At the time Fossey began her groundbreaking work, it was predicted that mountain gorillas would be extinct by the year 2000. Instead, they are recognized as one of the world’s few conservation success stories, and recently were moved from ‘critically endangered’ to ‘endangered,’ one step further from extinction.

The Fossey Fund’s people-centered approach to conservation is focused on four pillars:

Protecting individual gorillas and their families;

Conducting critical science needed to develop conservation strategies;

Training future leaders to address the conservation challenges of the future;

Helping communities living near gorillas through livelihood, food security and education initiatives.

For more, visit: gorillafund.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @savinggorillas

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-021-98969-8 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Rapid transmission of respiratory infections within but not between mountain gorilla groups

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Oct-2021

Disclaimer: AAAS an

Surprising discovery in Arctic songbird may reveal how it survives challenging migrations

Snow buntings are equipped for winter even while migrating to their breeding grounds, with the specific cause of this drop unknown

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FRONTIERS

Snow buntings are equipped for winter even while migrating to their breeding grounds, shows a recent study in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. There have been major declines in biodiversity around the world and the snow bunting population has dropped 60% over the last 45 years.

The specific cause of this drop is unknown, and this study is among the first to look at the physiological changes that occur during the different life stages of this species (ie between winter and migration). This work provides clues into the future survival of snow buntings, as well as new insights into how species generally endure the harsh cold of the Arctic.

“With the rapid warming of the Arctic, it is likely that cold specialist species like snow buntings will be hit hard if they have a limited ability to live in an increasingly warm environment – which appears to be the case for this species,” said lead author Dr Audrey Le Pogam, of the University of Québec at Rimouski in Canada. “Our study establishes a baseline for future comparative studies and, in the long term, these results may help to elucidate the causes of their decline or to anticipate the adaptive capacity of populations.”

To better understand snow bunting adaptations, Le Pogam and her collaborators collected free-living snow buntings before and during their spring migration. The researchers studied birds from two locations: on their wintering grounds near Rimouski, in Canada, and on their breeding ground at Alert, in the Canadian High-Arctic. The team measured the birds’ weight, fat stores, the thickness of their flight muscles and metabolic parameters providing information on their physiological maintenance costs and cold endurance.

‘It’s amazing how little we know about snow buntings’

Past research from the last 50 years shows that maintaining winter characteristics may come at a physiological cost for migratory birds. It is well-established that other species change according to the conditions of their destinations. Based on this, Le Pogam and her collaborators initially hypothesized that snow buntings would reduce their winter specializations when they moved to their breeding grounds. But, surprisingly, the birds’ metabolic parameters and other physiological traits were similar between the two locations.

More research is needed to confirm whether this is unique to snow buntings, or whether it is shared by other Arctic migratory species such as Lapland longspurs, Arctic redpolls and horned larks. Nevertheless, this research shows that keeping winter adaptations provides advantages to snow buntings in terms of coping with harsh weather during migration. These traits also help bunting males reach breeding grounds earlier and secure the best breeding spots.

“It is amazing how little we know about highly specialized Arctic species like snow buntings,” said Le Pogam. “By studying species like this, we quickly realized that some of the accepted patterns and mechanisms we thought were generalizable are likely not fully applicable to Arctic songbirds migrating through cold environments. Understanding these species is even more important given that high latitudes are warming up twice as fast as the rest of the world.”

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JOURNAL

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.3389/fevo.2021.724876 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Snow Buntings Maintain Winter-Level Cold Endurance While Migrating to the High Arctic

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

23-Sep-2021

COI STATEMENT

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Scientists partner with Indigenous communities to study effects of climate change and human development on Arctic caribou

Project will help train the next generation of Arctic scientists in wildlife ecology, environmental informatics, natural resource management and social science

Grant and Award Announcement

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: NAU ASSISTANT PROFESSOR LOGAN BERNER (RIGHT) IS LEADING A PROJECT FUNDED BY AN NSF GRANT TO STUDY THE EFFECTS OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT AND CLIMATE CHANGE ON CARIBOU HERDS IN THE ARCTIC. PHD STUDENT KATIE ORNDAHL (LEFT) IS ON THE SCIENCE TEAM. view more 

CREDIT: NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

Wild caribou are the single most important land-based species for both human communities and ecosystems in the Arctic. Abundant across the polar region, these animals play an essential role both as herbivores that impact tundra vegetation and as an important source of food to Indigenous hunters. In many cultures, the caribou also have incalculable spiritual value.

Caribou herds of North America, which collectively include more than one million animals in Canada and another 750,000 in Alaska, represent the largest terrestrial mammal migrations on Earth, traveling thousands of kilometers from the northern edges of the boreal forests to the Arctic barrens of the coastal tundra. However, most herds have been in decline in recent years because of the consequences of climate change and increased human development. Scientists believe that caribou have declined by about 56 percent in North America over the last 20 years, largely due to habitat loss and degradation.

Despite the importance of caribou in the region and the intense research efforts devoted to them, measuring the effects of accelerating oil and gas exploration, pipelines, mining operations, Arctic seaports and associated road construction across the region’s vast population of animals remains elusive because most studies are specific to one or two caribou populations, and results are difficult to generalize.

Assistant research professor Logan Berner of Northern Arizona University’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) was recently awarded $718,000 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for “Fate of the Caribou: from local knowledge to range‐wide dynamics in the changing Arctic,” a three-year study of how increased human development affects caribou herds against the backdrop of a dynamic and changing physical environment. The project was funded through the NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic program, one of 10 “Big Ideas” unveiled in 2016 and presented as bold, long-term research and process ideas that identify areas for future investment at the frontiers of science and engineering. The Big Ideas represent unique opportunities to position the U.S. at the cutting edge of global science and engineering leadership by bringing together diverse disciplinary perspectives to support convergence research.

By partnering with Indigenous conservation managers and agencies in Alaska and northern Canada that monitor caribou populations, Berner hopes to contribute in several important ways to the science of the changing Arctic through the lens of caribou ecology, land-use change and impacts on local communities.

Explained Berner, “Our interdisciplinary research team will collaborate with members of local Indigenous and rural communities to conduct large-scale ecological analyses across multiple caribou herds in North America using novel ecological modeling, decades of satellite observations, and extensive field data.”

Along with co-principal investigator, Regents’ professor Scott Goetz, the interdisciplinary research team consists of ecological modelers, Earth scientists, remote sensing and computing experts and caribou biologists with strong links to the Indigenous agencies that manage and conserve the caribou herds. In addition to NAU researchers, the team includes scientists from three other universities, including Elie Gurarie of the State University of New York, William Fagan and Anne Gunn of the University of Maryland and Mark Hebblewhite of Montana State University, supported by NSF grants totaling nearly $2.2 million. There are also several unfunded collaborators from groups including the Wek’èezhìı Renewable Resources Board, the U.S. National Park Service and Environment Yukon.

“This is an exciting project because it brings together people I’ve been working with for some time, but it’s the first time we’re unifying the various components that each of our groups contribute to the broader effort. NSF’s Navigating the New Arctic program was big enough to allow each of the groups to have the resources necessary to bring us all together on one big, coordinated project,” Goetz said.

“Our research will help advance understanding and management of caribou as we partner with the Indigenous-led caribou and natural resource management boards that are central to Arctic governance. We will work with them to produce actionable science that can inform the policies and co-management of caribou herds stretching from Hudson’s Bay to western Alaska. By studying multiple populations across a near-continental level under a unified analytical framework,” explained a research team member, “and by developing field, remote sensing and community-derived environmental datasets, we will be able to identify both general principles and herd-specific processes that influence the dynamics and distribution of caribou populations.”

Project designed to train next generation of Arctic scientists

The project is also designed to help train the next generation of Arctic scientists by supporting three postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students and undergraduate technicians in fields including wildlife ecology, environmental informatics, natural resource management and social science.

PhD student Katie Orndahl, who studies with Berner and Goetz in NAU’s Global Earth Observation and Dynamics of Ecosystems (GEODE) lab, is part of the research team. During the summers of 2018 and 2019, Orndahl led a small team that conducted research at 60 sites along the Alaskan Canadian border, across interior Alaska, central Yukon and the Yukon North Slope, linking field data with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to scale up to satellite imagery. She is familiar with the Alaska tundra environment from her work even prior to joining the GEODE lab for her graduate research.

The research team will build on the data she collected by collecting new field data from a much broader geographic area, including the Western Arctic Herd range and the Porcupine, Cape Bathurst and Bathurst caribou herd ranges in the Northwest Territories. The team will engage local communities and agency collaborators in the field campaigns, which will target 20-25 sites each summer, and expects to assemble field data from approximately 100 additional sites across northern North America.

“During our work,” Orndahl said, “we followed the migratory route of the Porcupine herd across ever-changing landscapes and met many smart and enthusiastic folks along the way. Above all it was clear just how important caribou are to the Arctic, both ecologically and culturally. The field work we’ve conducted so far would not have been possible without a fantastic group of collaborators, and I’m excited this project will build on what we’ve done so we can better understand and protect the caribou.”

Berner, who specializes in ecological and environmental informatics research, is part of Goetz’s GEODE lab, which uses a wide array of remote sensing methods—from UAVs to satellite imagery—to study ecosystem structure and function. The lab team’s work focuses on understanding ecosystem responses to environmental change, and modeling interactions between forests, tundra, climate, land use change, disturbance and biodiversity, exploring how vulnerable or resilient ecosystems are in a time of global environmental change.

Berner was also recently awarded a $372,581 grant by NASA for a three-year project, “Mapping plant biomass distribution and change across the rapidly warming Arctic tundra biome.” The project’s goal is to advance understanding of the amount, distribution, composition and recent changes in plant aboveground biomass across the rapidly warming Arctic tundra biome using field, satellite and geospatial data. This project, along with Goetz’s NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) projects, will help ensure the success of the ambitious multi-disciplinary effort to understand the fate of caribou within the context of the New Arctic.

About Northern Arizona University

Northern Arizona University is a higher-research institution providing exceptional educational opportunities in Arizona and beyond. NAU delivers a student-centered experience to its nearly 30,000 students in Flagstaff, statewide and online through rigorous academic programs in a supportive, inclusive and diverse environment. Dedicated, world-renowned faculty help ensure students achieve academic excellence, experience personal growth, have meaningful research opportunities and are positioned for personal and professional success. 

Study reveals impact of wild meat consumption on greenhouse gas emissions

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA

 

IMAGE: BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA, IN THE RIOZINHO DA LIBERDADE EXTRACTIVE RESERVE, IN THE STATE OF ACRE. view more 

CREDIT: ANDRÉ NUNES

Consuming sustainably sourced wild meat instead of domesticated livestock reduces greenhouse gas emissions and retains precious tropical forest systems, which in turn mitigates the effects of climate change.

That’s according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Brazil’s Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul, published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

The research team also estimated the carbon credit value of emissions from tropical forest communities who consume wild meat instead of domesticated livestock.

André Nunes from the Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso do Sul and Carlos Peres, Professor of Conservation Science at UEA, working with Brazilian and Danish colleagues, looked at people living in both Afrotropical and Neotropical countries, including Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.

The team estimated potential revenues from the sale of associated carbon credits and how this could generate financial incentives for forest conservation and sustainable wildlife management through PES and REDD+ projects.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are a range of schemes through which the beneficiaries, or users, of ecosystem services provide payment to the stewards, or providers, of those services. Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) is a multilateral carbon credit trading mechanism enabling polluters in usually high-income countries to pay low-income countries for reducing deforestation and forest degradation.

Based on 150,000 residents in the Amazonian and African forests, the researchers found that an annual per capita consumption of 41.7kg of wild meat would spare 71 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2-eq) under a bovine beef substitution scenario, and 3 MtCO2-eq if replaced by poultry.

For these tropical forest dwellers alone, this could generate US $3M or US $185K per year in carbon credit revenues under full compliance with the Paris Agreement. Under a more conservative, lower-carbon price, the wild meat substitution could generate US $1M or US $77K per year in carbon credits.

Prof Peres, a co-author in the study, said the calculations “represent considerable incentives for forest wildlife conservation, as well as potential revenues for local communities.

“Our results clearly illustrate the potential value and importance of considering sustainable game hunting within the REDD+ political process at both national and international scales.”

Tropical forest populations that harvest wild meat instead of beef, poultry or other domesticated meat generate a much lower carbon footprint because of the emissions associated with livestock production.

Beef production from ruminant livestock involves deforestation, with strikingly detrimental repercussions for both biodiversity conservation and carbon emissions.

Land-use conversion to croplands and cattle pastures are the principal driver of deforestation worldwide. Cattle ranching is, for instance, directly responsible for 71 per cent of all Latin American deforestation, and pasture expansion has been the single-largest driver of deforestation across the region since the 1970s.

The livestock sector also disproportionally contributes to the environmental cost of agriculture through high resource misuse, including water, land, and soils.

Intact tropical forests act as carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon from the atmosphere than they release. Tropical forests fulfil an essential service by storing an estimated 460 billion tons of carbon, more than half the total atmospheric content.

Across the vast Amazon basin, for example, intact forest areas are concentrated mainly within indigenous territories and protected areas, which collectively store some 42 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC).

CAPTION

Brazilian Amazonia, in the Riozinho da Liberdade Extractive Reserve, in the state of Acre.

CREDIT

André Nunes

Prof Peres said: “Tropical grazeland expansion for ruminant livestock production to feed domestic meat consumption and exports is a double-jeopardy because we both lose the carbon stocks from formerly pristine old-growth forests and woody savannahs and generate a powerful perennial methane pump.

“Subsistence hunting of game animals by local communities, which is pervasive in tropical forests, needs to become a sustainable mechanism of both helping justify and add economic value to otherwise undisturbed forests in terms of low-carbon animal protein production.”

Wild meat provides nutritional and symbolic value for communities living in tropical forests. But, the researchers say, traditional hunting must be done sustainably, both to maintain intact forests and support the food chain.

Dr Nunes, lead author of the study, said: “Securing the sustainable consumption of wild meat for populations that are socially vulnerable is very important, not just in terms of food security and well-being, but also to serve the interests of climate change mitigation efforts in REDD+ accords through avoided greenhouse gas emissions.

“Tropical forest biodiversity conservation, and how forest dwellers use forest resources, need urgent financial investments.”
Unsustainable hunting can have cascading effects that suppress the long-term carbon storage capacity of natural forests by depleting large-bodied bird and mammal species serving essential ecosystem functions, such as dispersal of large-seeded carbon-dense tree species. Unsustainable hunting, therefore, can lead to shifts in the species composition of tropical tree assemblages that ultimately reduce the forest carbon storage capacity.

On the other hand, hunting can provide a sustainable source of protein and essential micronutrients if appropriately monitored and managed. Forecasts predict widespread protein deficiency in a range of tropical countries, and case studies suggest increased risk of anaemia in children if wild meat is insufficient to the point where the prevalence of child growth stunting can be negatively related to game abundance.

Dr Nunes said: “These challenges should be confronted in collaboration with local communities through community-based wildlife management projects to safeguard relatively intact forests, carbon storage, and long-term hunting yields.

“Enabling resource co-management by marginalized tropical forest communities will require transparency and devolution of tangible benefits from carbon credit revenues.”

‘Wild meat consumption in tropical forests spares a significant carbon footprint from the livestock production sector’ is published in Scientific Reports on October 7, 2021.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-021-98282-4 

ARTICLE TITLE

Wild meat consumption in tropical forests spares a significant carbon footprint from the livestock production sector

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Oct-2021

CAPTION

Brazilian Amazonia, in the Riozinho da Liberdade Extractive Reserve, in the state of Acre.

CREDIT

André Nunes

Climate: Consumption of sustainably hunted meat from wildlife rather than eating livestock may spare considerable greenhouse gas emissions

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SCIENTIFIC REPORTS

Consumption of meat from wild animals by Amazonian and Afrotropical communities can result in lower greenhouse gas emissions than if wild meat was replaced with beef or poultry, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. However, hunting practices in these communities should be carefully managed to be of any potential benefit in the management of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the authors.

André Valle Nunes and colleagues reviewed 49 studies conducted between 1973 and 2019 and involving around 150,000 residents from Amazonian and Afrotropical forest sites. The authors estimated each site's annual wild meat consumption, its equivalent if wild meat were replaced with meat from livestock and how much carbon emissions raising that livestock would produce. They found that communities consuming wild meat may spare the equivalent of 71 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to if wild meat was replaced with beef, or three metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year if replaced with poultry. 

The authors also estimated the value of carbon credits that could be generated by supporting continued wild meat consumption. Carbon credits are measurable carbon savings generated when countries or companies invest in projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions to compensate for their own emissions. The authors calculated that if all 49 Amazonian and Afrotropical forest sites continued their current consumption of wild meat rather than convert to livestock for beef or poultry, this could generate the equivalent of one to three million US dollars and $77,000 to $185,000 in carbon credit sales, respectively.

The authors argue that sustainable wild meat hunting and the potential benefits of carbon credit schemes must be weighed up against other factors, such as the risk of illegal hunting and disease spread. Overhunting can create more carbon emissions than it saves by destroying ecosystems and should be monitored, according to the authors. They suggest that the funds generated from carbon credit schemes could be used to incentivise the conservation of tropical forest resources, educate hunters to monitor animal health and ensure that hunting is sustainable and that the wild meat trade is hygienic. 

The authors further highlight that in the communities that consumed wild meat in the study, 43% of individuals consumed below the annual minimum rate of protein required to prevent human malnutrition. Improved wildlife management may be necessary to ensure food security and adequate nutrition.

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Article details

Wild meat consumption in tropical forests spares a significant carbon footprint from the livestock production sector

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-98282-4

Corresponding Authors:

• André Valle Nunes

  Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil

  Email: tataupas@gmail.com

Please link to the article in online versions of your report (the URL will go live after the embargo ends):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98282-4

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-021-98282-4