Tag Archives: rescued

This Timeless Blue Sea Creature Has Rescued Countless Lives

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Long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, peculiar creatures abandoned their journeys across the ocean floor. They resembled beings adorned with spiked helmets and had eyes positioned on top, along with sharp tails extending behind them.

Today, horseshoe crabs still exist and belong to the animal order known as Xiphosura, derived from ancient Greek, meaning “sword” and “tail.” Despite their name, they are more closely related to spiders than to crustaceans.

Fossils of horseshoe crabs date back to the Upper Ordovician period, approximately 450 million years ago. Their descendants—four existing species—have undergone significant changes in appearance, earning them the title of “living fossils.”

Despite their ancient lineage, horseshoe crabs are crucial in today’s world. Most people eventually come into contact with life-saving doses of bright blue blood derived from these creatures.

The blue hue comes from Hemocyanin, a pigment responsible for oxygen transport, which is analogous to red hemoglobin found in vertebrate blood.

Importantly, it also harbors their blood. Amebocytes, a powerful immune cell are exceptionally sensitive to harmful toxins produced by bacteria. Endotoxins, prevalent in the environment, are resistant to standard sterilization methods.

Should a vaccine contain endotoxins, it could trigger a dangerous reaction historically known as “injection fever.”

Previously, tests were conducted by injecting a vaccine batch into a living rabbit; if any exhibited a fever, it signified contamination.

In the 1960s, American marine biologists observed that the blue blood of horseshoe crabs coagulated instantly upon contact with fever-inducing endotoxin. This mechanism allows horseshoe crabs to encapsulate bacteria by forming clots around them, proving beneficial for human applications.

Now, rather than injecting rabbits, hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are harvested from the ocean each year, with a third of their blood extracted to test for endotoxins in intravenous medications and medical implants.

Many people eventually encounter the vibrant blue blood of a life-saving horseshoe crab – Image credit: Jurgen Freund/Naturepl.com

The demand for blue blood has surged, especially with the competition surrounding the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Not all horseshoe crabs survive the blood collection process; approximately 15-30% do not. Conservationists are advocating for synthetic alternatives to blood tests.

In the 1990s, researchers in Singapore developed a method to create synthetic endotoxin detection using a compound based on horseshoe crab DNA. Currently, various alternative compounds mimic this reaction without utilizing horseshoe crab blood.

Although regulatory processes have been sluggish, these new compounds received approval for use in Europe in 2016 and 2024. Nowadays, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly opting for synthetic methods.

This development bodes well not just for horseshoe crabs but also for other species reliant on them. Each year, thousands of horseshoe crabs come ashore on sandy beaches along North America’s East Coast, particularly in Delaware Bay, where eggs are laid near Philadelphia.

A single female lays around 4,000 eggs, many of which become vital sustenance for migratory birds like the red knot, which journey between South America and the Canadian Arctic.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com

Stingrays Rescued from Extinction through Successful Captive Hatching

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Newly hatched stingray

Jason Semmens/University of Tasmania

One of the world's most endangered marine fish has been saved from extinction thanks to researchers who caught specimens in the wild and helped breed them in captivity.

Stingray (Zearajah Mageana) is found only in Port Macquarie, on the extremely isolated and rugged southwest coast of the Australian island of Tasmania, a region that is naturally low in oxygen, making it difficult for fish to thrive, but this is exacerbated by human impacts, particularly the alteration of river flows by salmon farming and hydroelectric dams.

Jason Semmens A researcher from the University of Tasmania said that while no one knows the exact population of these rays, there has been a dramatic decline, with their numbers halving between 2014 and 2021. He said the population may now be just over 1,000, and what's most worrying is that the majority of the rays are adults, meaning the young have not yet reached maturity.

As a marine heatwave raged in this area off the southeast coast of Australia last year, Semmens and his colleagues decided to make a bold intervention to save the rays from extinction.

In December 2023, the team collected 50 eggs, more than half of which hatched in captivity. They also collected four adult insects, two of which died within two weeks. The two surviving females were kept separately, so the team was shocked when the remaining female laid eggs.

That's because rays can store sperm and fertilize the eggs, Semmens says. “On average, rays lay two eggs every four days,” he says. “We've seen over 100 eggs laid by rays, and the majority of them appear to be viable.”

To maximise the genetic diversity of the captive-raised young, the team is considering capturing other, already-fertilised females to obtain eggs and then releasing them back into the wild.

But the team members David MorenoResearchers from the University of Tasmania said captive breeding was not a complete solution and they were also working to solve environmental issues at Port Macquarie, including experimenting with pumping oxygen into the water.

There is no quick fix, and even if captive-bred individuals could be released straight away, it would take four to five years for them to mature and be able to contribute to the population.

If recovery efforts fail, the cost will be huge: “This would be the first extinction of a ray or shark species in modern history,” Moreno says, “so this is a really big red line.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Rescued Vultures Saved from Poisoning and Electrocution

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Egyptian vultures have been in rapid decline since the 1980s

Blickwinkel / Alamy

A large-scale international effort has successfully addressed the vulture threat and protected endangered vultures along migration routes between Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Egyptian vulture (Neophron Percnopterus) can be shot, poisoned or electrocuted by livestock farmers as they travel through 14 countries each year.

The combination of these threats has reduced the number of breeding pairs in Eastern Europe from 600 in the 1980s to just 50 today.

Since 2012, conservationists working along bird migration routes have been gradually eliminating these threats. In the Balkans, the number of poisoning incidents was halved between 2018 and 2022 by working with farmers to reduce the use of poisonous livestock predator baits eaten by vultures.

The project will also insulate live parts near the perches of more than 10,000 utility poles in countries ranging from Bulgaria to Ethiopia, and the use of vulture body parts substitutes in traditional medicine in Niger and Nigeria. promoted.

In addition, 30 captive-bred vultures were released in Bulgaria, an important breeding area, between 2016 and 2022.

Over the past 10 years, conservation efforts have reduced adult mortality by 2% and juvenile mortality by 9%, and the population has increased by 0.5% annually, according to Steffen Oppel of the Swiss Institute of Ornithology and colleagues.

“Currently, the population is stable with a very small increase,” Oppel says.

The research also benefited other migratory birds that follow the same route as the vultures, including buzzards, eagles and storks.

Oppel and his colleagues sighted thousands of storks (ciconia) Arriving in southern Turkey, many were electrocuted when their wings touched live cables when they landed on utility poles. To avoid this, plastic or rubber covers were used to insulate power cables in areas where conservation teams found large numbers of dead birds.

People are also benefiting, he says. “We have had great success with companies in Bulgaria, for example, and now in Turkey, who have realized that it is in their interests that there will be far fewer interruptions in service if they insulate power lines. It is.”

Any intervention to save vultures is important and the Balkans project has a good chance of success. kelly walter of valpro, a conservation organization in South Africa. “This is an all-out war, and every in-situ and ex-situ conservation intervention and strategy is important to do everything within our means.” [to save the species],” she says.

Southern Africa once had its own breeding population of Egyptian vultures, but they are now extinct.

Flyway funded by the European Union project Egyptian vultures became extinct in the Balkans at the end of 2022, but Oppel says work needs to continue to prevent mortality rates from rising again.

“On the one hand, we want to say, ‘Yes, we have achieved something great because we have successfully avoided the demographic trend of declining immigration,’ but on the other hand, we want to make sure that politicians understand this. You have to let it happen. It’s not fixed forever.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com