Cyprus Bee Orchid (Ophrys kotschyi)

It’s called the Green Line, but despite the name, it is a completely accidental wildlife sanctuary. The narrow strip of land that zigzags across the island of Cyprus was imposed in 1974 to separate the parties to armed conflict. As humans moved out, abandoning farms and villages, nature moved in. Thirty five years on, this no man’s land has become a safe haven for some of the rarest endemic plants and animals in Europe and a place of special scientific importance.

In the ecological sense, the Green Line of Cyprus has become a time-capsule, preserving the landscape that is being overrun, demolished and built upon in the rest of the Mediterranean island country. While generally not made public, Environmental Impact studies preceding development throughout the island tell a similar story. For instance, in the Paphos village of Marathounta, developers are trying to build on land that currently supports one of only two or three sites on the island where Bonelli’s Eagle nests and is also the only known location where a rare species of orchid can be found.

Along the Green Line however, people are almost entirely kept out, and the consequence is revealing. As Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot biologists are finding out, some species that could otherwise be wiped out are thriving. Like the Cyprus Tulip or the Cyprus Bee Orchid, which are extremely rare endemics. Observations like this are highlighting the importance of habitats and the effects that we have upon them.

For more, check out the Cyprus Cultural Foundation’s Endemic Plants of Cyprus (English/Ελληνικά), which presents the a detailed description of the 128 recognized endemic plant species in Cyprus along with overviews of their natural habitats. The book is also available on AmazonUK.

Image Credit: Peter Llewellyn

Female Blackcap - Sylvia atricapilla

The split that the researchers observed followed the recent establishment of a migratory divide between southwest- and northwest-migrating blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla) populations in Central Europe after humans began offering food to them in the winter. The two groups began to follow distinct migratory routes — wintering in Spain and the United Kingdom — and faced distinct selective pressures. Under that pressure, the two groups have since become locally adapted ecotypes. (Ecotypes represent the initial step of differentiation among populations of the same species, the researchers explained. If ecotypes continue down that path, they can ultimately become separate species.)

“The new northwest migratory route is shorter, and those birds feed on food provided by humans instead of fruits as the birds that migrate southwest do,” Schaefer said. “As a consequence, birds migrating northwest have rounder wings, which provide better maneuverability but make them less suited for long-distance migration.” They also have longer, narrower bills that are less equipped for eating large fruits like olives during the winter.

Schaefer says it isn’t clear whether the ecotypes will ever become separate species; in fact, he doubts they will because the habits of humans will tend to change over time. Even so, the findings do speak to the long-standing debate about whether geographic separation is necessary for speciation to occur. In particular, it had been contentious whether selection could act strongly and consistently enough in sympatry to separate a united gene pool.

“In highly mobile organisms such as birds, the consensus is that sympatric speciation is extremely rare, mainly because it is difficult to envisage how gene pools could be kept separate until speciation has occurred,” Schaefer said. “Our results now show that the initial steps of speciation can occur very quickly in a highly mobile, migratory bird,” because divergent selection during the overwintering phase leads to the evolution of reproductive isolation.

“This is a nice example of the speed of evolution,” he added. “It is something that we can see with our own eyes if we only look closely enough. It doesn’t have to take millions of years.”

Ed Yong explains further on his blog Not Exactly Rocket Science:

If the prospect of spending winter in Britain rather than Spain seems odd to you, you’re not alone. Indeed, blackcaps were hardly ever ventured across these shores before the 1950s. But since then, the birds have taken advantage of the glut of food left out on bird tables by animal-loving Brits. These banquets, along with the luxury of not flying over the Alps, have made Britain an increasingly popular holiday destination for wintering blackcaps. And that has set them down the path towards becoming two separate species.

The mystery of Britain’s winter blackcaps was solved in a classic series of experiments by Peter Berthold (awesome beard) in 1992. Berthold found that chicks from the two populations (those that fly to Britain and those that fly to Spain) would always fly in the same direction as their parents even if they were raised in identical environments. This strongly suggested that their travel plans were genetically set, and Berthold proved that by breeding birds from the two groups. Amazingly, their offspring migrated in a west-northwest direction, about halfway between the routes of their parents.

Berthold went on to show that the blackcaps’ inherited itineraries were the result of a handful of genes at most. And these initial differences have become magnified over time. When spring returns, the blackcaps fly home, they select mates and they form bonds that will last until the next year. But those returning from Britain have less distance to cover so they reach Germany first and they pair up with each other. When the stragglers from Spain get there, they only have each other to mate with.

Even though all of these birds spend most of the year in each others’ company, they are actually two populations separated by barriers of time that prevent genes from flowing from one group to another. Gregor Rolshausen from the University of Freiburg has found that their genetic separation is already well underway.

The one thing that is not explained but I would love to know, is how the slight change in beak morphology is correlated with a slight change in diet. Blackcaps don’t only eat fruits, they also eat insects. In these Blackcaps, what are the Brits feeding them (small fruits, I presume), has birdfeeder-related opportunism resulted in their eating insects less frequently?

The story was also discussed on NPR Science Friday.

And for more of my posts on speciation in birds:
Speciation caused by a single mutation
Birth of a new species
Creationists and birding

• Image credit: Sergey Yeliseev, taken in Russia, Moscow region, Nagornoe, 07/15/2006. Flickr.
• Contemporary evolution of reproductive isolation and phenotypic divergence in sympatry along a migratory divide. Rolshausen, G., G. Segelbacher, K. A. Hobson, and H. M. Schaefer. 2009. Current Biology 19:1-5. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.061

5 'asks' for COP15

Some want mitigation measures to do more than cut global carbon emissions, such as 350.org, which proposes that we aim to roll back the clock, by taking some already burned-off carbon back. Others argue that this is impractical or even impossible, and that life will go on in a warming world albeit with consequences. Largely because I’m cynical about the chances of forming a political coalition capable of addressing climate change in any meaningful way, I am content with a conservationist strategy that seeks to limit the extent and impacts of climate change. This way even when hardships associated with a changing world come, we will have done what was reasonably achievable to safeguard as many species and their habitats as possible.

So I applaud the stance that BirdLife International and its partners are taking as an advocacy group going into COP15. What do you think?

Global warning: BirdLife’s 5 asks for Copenhagen:

1. Cut global emissions by the amount needed to limit global average temperature rises to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
2. Recognise the vital importance of safeguarding biodiversity, ecosystems and the essential services they provide in climate change mitigation, in particular, reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).
3. Recognise the vital importance of safeguarding biodiversity, ecosystems and the essential services they provide in climate change adaptation.
4. Provide funding for developing countries to reduce emissions from deforestation, enable adaptation to climate change, and support low-carbon development.
5. Ensure that when developed countries account for their land-use sectors they account fully for carbon emissions to, and removals from, the atmosphere.

The latest update from the field from BirdLife Cyprus:

The situation on the ground in the Autumn of 2009 looks very bad, first results from the ongoing BirdLife monitoring project show. The Spring 09 migration season seemed to provide some grounds for hope – with a reduction in mist netting activity compared to the spring of 08. But now that the main, Autumn trapping season has arrived, the trappers are back in force, particularly with limesticks.

Levels of limestick use detected in the main trapping areas during the four-week period August 31st to September 25th were almost double (83% increase) those detected in the Autumn of 08. BirdLife also found greatly increased evidence of limestick manufacture in September 09, often on a big scale. In mid-September, following a BirdLife tip-off, a Larnaca area villager was arrested with almost 1,000 limesticks in his garden “workshop”. The day after his arrest, the man was back making limesticks in his garden – indicating a strong market for his illegal produce. This points to a growing tolerance of limestick use, which, though illegal and highly damaging, is still perceived as “traditional” by a large sector of Cyprus society.

Mist netting levels in the first part of the Autumn 09 season were slightly higher than in the Autumns of 08 and 07. It should be noted here that netting levels in the Autumns of 07 and 08 were the highest recorded for five years – representing a serious reverse in the enforcement effort. Mist net use is taking place on a massive scale in the Pyla Range area, within the British Sovereign Base area (SBA). Up to three years ago, trapping had been minimised within the SBAs, but now seems to be making an unwelcome comeback. In the Republic areas, detection of trapping activity (with nets or limesticks) is increasingly hampered by the fact that trappers are now mostly active within enclosures (which BirdLife observers do not enter). This could be leading to an underestimation of trapping levels in some areas.

Enforcement efforts by the Cyprus Game Fund, the new Cyprus Police anti-poaching unit and the SBA Police continue, often in the face of violent reactions from the trappers. The SBA Police distributed anti-trapping information leaflets (prepared by BirdLife Cyprus and the Game Fund) to communities in the Eastern SBA this September. But limited resources mean all three authorities are seriously stretched. Political decisions are urgently needed both within the UK and Cyprus governments to throw more manpower into anti-trapping enforcement. UK government plans to use British Army personnel (under SBA Police supervision) to clear trapping paraphernalia (poles, pole bases, carpeting, etc) from the Pyla Range area in early October are a very welcome decisive action.

The Cyprus government needs to seriously and decisively tackle the problem of restaurants serving trapped birds as expensive ambelopoulia delicacies. This illegal practice – which has become more widespread and open over the last 3 years – provides the financial incentive for trappers.

I’ll post more on the hard data when it becomes available, but it is readily apparent that for this problem the Cypriot and British authorities are not willing to provide anything more than token enforcement of the law. The SBA Police, the Cyprus Game Fund, the Cyprus Police and BirdLife Cyprus are themselves doing their best it seems, but again they are too few with too little resources to match the level of criminal activity.

Not to mention, the last time restaurants serving ambelopoulia were fined was 2002 and 2003, which resulted in a lot of press coverage by the Cypriot media. The fines were described as “heavy-handed” and roundly criticized. It was horrible of the Cypriot press — criticizing law enforcement for handing out fines against criminal activities, fines which themselves where mild.

And now the politicians are afraid to have laws enforced, and these laws in particular — because any restriction of criminal activities would likely result in their failure to get re-elected, or so goes the conventional wisdom of the island.

This excerpt comes from the Preface to Scott Weidensaul’s exceptional book Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds (Amazon US/UK). It sets the stage for the rest of the book while reflecting the wonder, the science, and the concerns of migratory birds.

The footnotes towards the end are mine.

Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds

At whatever moment you read these words, day or night, there are birds aloft in the skies of the Western Hemisphere, migrating.

If it is spring or fall, the great pivot points of the year, then the continents are swarming with billions of traveling birds — a flood so great that even the most ignorant and unobservant notice, if nothing else, the skeins of geese and flocks of robins.

But the migration’s breadth goes far beyond those obvious watersheds, shifting endlessly across distance and season. In the middle of July, Hudsonian godwits lift off from the iceberg-choked shorts of the Beaufort Sea, heading southeast along the northern rim of Canada to Labrador, then vaulting south in a nonstop flight to Venezuela. In the snow squalls of December, goshawks and golden eagles fly south along the ridges of the Appalachians, over oak trees that rattle their last stiff, dead leaves at the wind. Even within the tropics, a land where migration would seem unnecessary, birds move with the seasonal rains and droughts across hundreds of miles, following the blossoming of flowers or the ripening of fruit.

More below the fold…

They don’t all follow the expected course, nor do they always travel by wing. With the fist winter snows, blue grouse leave the more temperate foothills of the Western mountains and migrate — on foot, no less — into the bitter, wind-drifted high country, searching for conifer needles to eat.

A very few travel even beyond the bounds of the hemisphere. Tiny songbirds from Alaska leap west across the Bering Sea to the Philippines, and others from eastern Canada cross the North Atlantic to Europe and Central Africa. Short-tailed albatrosses from Japan glide down the coast of Washington in summer on wings as fragile as a whisper; in those waters the albatrosses pass shearwaters from New Zealand and storm-petrels from Antarctica and the Galapagos.

Even the darkness moves with the passage of birds. On soft spring midnights, the air is alive with the flight notes of unseen warblers and vireos, thrushes and orioles, sparrows and tanagers, filtering down through the moonlight like the voices of stars.

Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world, stitching the continents together in a way that even the great weather systems, which roar out from the poles but fizzle at the equator, fail to do. It is an enormously complex subject, perhaps the most compelling drama in all of natural history.

That such delicate creatures undertake these epic journeys defies belief. Only recently have scientists discovered that some shorebirds apparently fly nonstop from the southern tip of South America to the coast of New Jersey, a journey of ten days — 240 hours of uninterrupted flight. Even more remarkable are the four-ounce Arctic terns that leave the northern fringe of the continent each autumn, flying east across the Atlantic to Europe. They push south along the bulge of Africa, recross the Atlantic to the edge of South America, and spend the winter months moving east off Antarctica. In spring they reverse course, moving up southern Africa and lancing back to Canada — a figure eight inscribed on half the globe, a track that returns them, often as not, to precisely the same sheltered nook where they nested the summer before.

Even scientists have little grasp of the numbers of birds involved in this seasonal ebb and flow. In spring, hordes of warblers, tanagers, vireos, and other tropical migrants cross the Gulf of Mexico each night, arriving on the U.S. coast at a rate that may exceed a hundred thousand songbirds per mile of shoreline, with tens of millions making landfall each day. On a single autumn night several years ago, radar on Cape Cod indicated that 12 million songbirds passed overhead. And on the narrow coastal plain of Veracruz, Mexico, biologists discovered only recently one of the greatest raptor migrations in the world, where nearly a million hawks have been counted in a single day. In all, scientists guess, more than 5 billion birds annually weave this incredible tapestry across the hemisphere.

Because they travel such extraordinary distances, often with differing requirements for food and shelter along the way, migratory birds pose one of the stickiest conservation challenges in the world. In the past, preservation programs focused on saving breeding areas, but experts now realize they must also save wintering grounds and migratory stopovers if this global web isn’t to unravel.

There are serious signs of fraying. Birders have warned for years that songbird numbers were dropping, and now scientists have hard evidence that some beloved species, like wood thrushes and cerulean warblers(1), have declined by more than 75 percent in the past quarter century. Entire communities of birds, like those that nest in open grassland, are in freefall. In the past, the dangers to birds were mostly direct persecution, and the remedy was legal. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act(2), passed in 1918 and amended several times since, is the cornerstone of federal protection, levying harsh fines and jail time for killing all but a relatively few game birds. The law grew out of a time when songbirds and shorebirds were still routinely shot for the dinner table and terns and egrets were slaughtered so their feathers could decorate hats.

Today, however, the biggest threats to migratory birds do not come from the barrel of a gun, nor are they easily cured by passing laws(3). They arise from habitat loss and the wholesale environmental changes we have imposed on the natural world. Laws like the federal Endangered Species Act provide last-ditch support for almost-extinct birds, but conservationists now realize the smartest approach is to recognize the trouble early and try to stabilize populations while they are still relatively common. This recognition, coupled with an impending sense of crisis, has sparked an unprecedented international conservation effort, probably the largest and most ambitious in history, involving virtually every country in North, Central, and South America in research, education, and habitat protection. By way of example, one such multinational approach is the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network, which has identified (and in some cases prompted the preservation of) 4 million acres of wetlands between Argentina and Alaska, upon which more than 30 million migratory shorebirds depend.

Notes:

1. Weidensaul and his books are very focused on birds of the Western Hemisphere, which is of course what he knows best. For readers in the Eastern Hemisphere, you may want to replace Wood Thrush and Cerulean Warbler as common species experiencing drastic declines in the past quarter century with Grey Partridge, Meadow Pipit, Eurasian Linnet, Rustic Bunting, and Woodchat Shrike (Pan-European Common Bird Monitoring Scheme Report, 2008). These five species are among those that have declined between 49% to 72% in Europe since 1980.

2. For Europe, the directive most closely corresponding to the Endangered Species Act is the European Community’s Directive 79/409/EEC on the conservation of wild birds.

3. While this is still true in Europe and even southern Europe where existing laws are widely disregarded even by law enforcement, there are still a great many birds slaughtered in Cyprus, Malta, and other countries.

In a simply titled book, the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation has just released a new book — by Jane Stylianou: The Birds of Cyprus (English/Ελληνικά).

The Birds of Cyprus, by Jane Stylianou

In keeping with Jane’s (now former – she recently retired) position as development officer for BirdLife Cyprus, where she did a lot of outreach education and communication work with the Cypriot community, this book looks to be directed towards a novice when it comes to birds in Cyprus. And for that purpose it is an outstanding book, introducing important and basic concepts about birds: what they are, why they are important, and a general overview of breeding, habitats, flight, migration. It contains excellent descriptions and photographs of endangered and endemic birds, as well as the same for common resident, breeding, and migratory birds.

Migration and Cyprus

Perhaps the description of migratory flyways could have been emphasized more extensively, but that it’s introduced as a concept to the public is of vital importance. Everything about bird conservation in Cyprus revolves around it’s role as a stop-over for passage Afro-Palearctic passage migrants, a fact that is underscored by observations that two-thirds of the species on the Cyprus list are migrants, and the relatively (very) low abundance of breeding and winter visitor species.

So… congrats Jane on putting together an excellent book!

The Birds of Cyprus
Author: Jane Stylianou
Supervision: Lefki Michaelidou
Design: Akis Ioannides
Printing/binding: Nicolaou printers
2009 / 18×27 / 131 pp
ISBN:978 9963 428731
List Price: 20.00€
English/Ελληνικά

Via Alex at Transcription and Translation, I see that Olympus has announced the winners to its 2009 BioScapes competition. Check them out… here’s my favorite:

By Dr. Alexis Lomakin

This blog post is in recognition of tomorrow’s 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

I’ve linked to a collection of interesting articles below the fold in honor of Darwin Day:

15 Evolutionary Gems — A resource from Nature for those wishing to spread awareness of evidence for evolution by natural selection.

Putting Evolution to Use in the Everyday World — “Understanding of evolution is fostering powerful technologies for health care, law enforcement, ecology, and all manner of optimization and design problems.”

The Evolutionary Origins of Hiccups and Hernias — “How biological hand-me-downs inherited from fish and tadpoles evolved into human maladies.”

Diversity Revealed: From Atoms to Traits — “Charles Darwin saw that random variations in organisms provide fodder for evolution. Modern scientists are revealing how that diversity arises from changes to DNA and can add up to complex creatures or even cultures.”

Evolution and Tinkering — “If one wanted to play with a comparison, one would have to say that natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer — a tinkerer that does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him.”

The Mason’s Apprentice — “Our closest single-celled relatives reveal the origins of the stuff that holds us together.”

Evolution: Converging Lines of Evidence — “As mentioned in the subject refresher article on evolution, Evolution v. Creation, the strength of a theory comes not from a single measurement or a single confirmed prediction, but from the theory’s many predictions being confirmed by many independent tests, samples, and methods.”

Basic Consepts: Allopatry and Sympatry — What is speciation? And how does it occur?

Species, Speciation and the Environment — A historical overview of scientists’ thinking on the process of speciation, along with modern perspectives on speciation.

Observed Instances of Speciation — Description of research into the basis for macroevolution and the origin of biological diversity.

The Origin of Whales and the Power of Independent Evidence — A case-study of evolution with a well-studied example.

What Use is Half a Wing – Evolution of Flight — An article from yours truly piecing together the understanding to-date of the origins of flight.

It’s pretty rare that biologists find an instance where speciation appears to have occurred right in front of their very eyes, but it appears that Peter and Rosemary Grant have looked closely enough over the course of a few decades to have seen it. As Allen writes on The EvolutionList, A New Species of Finch may have Evolved in the Galapagos:

Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying the finches of Daphne Major, a small island in the Galapagos archipelago since 1973. In PNAS, they have proposed that a population of finches on Daphne Major may be on the verge of becoming a new species of finch. Here’s how their proposal was reported at Nature.com News:

“It was in 1981, that the Grants spotted an unusually heavy medium ground-finch (Geospiza fortis). At 29.7 grams, the male was more than 5 grams heavier than any they had seen on Daphne Major before. Genetic analysis showed that it probably came from the neighbouring island of Santa Cruz.

The Grants numbered the bird 5110 and followed it and all its known descendants over seven generations. Many of its descendants stuck out from the other G. fortis on Daphne Major: they had unusually shaped beaks and their songs differed from those of the other finches.

…

In the fourth generation, a severe drought hit the island and 5110’s descendants were reduced to one male and one female — a brother and sister. From then on the immigrant lineage isolated itself, breeding with no other G. fortis on the island….

Go check out the rest of Allen’s post for his analysis, and check out the article in PNAS as well. The Grants present the take-home message there in the final part of the abstract: “The study reveals additional stochastic elements of speciation, in which divergence is initiated in allopatry; immigration to a new area of a single male hybrid and initial breeding with a rare hybrid female.”

• The secondary contact phase of allopatric speciation in Darwin’s finches. Grant P.R. & Grant B.R. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA, advance online publication (2009).

A little more than a week ago, BirdLife Cyprus’s field trip officer Stavros Christodoulides was put into contact with a Larnaca-area taxidermist who reportedly had been given three Little Bustards Tetrax tetrax to stuff over the last two years. Why is that interesting, you ask? Because the presence of Little Bustards in Cyprus is news to just about anyone who studies or tracks birds. They were never common here, but none has been reported since 1998. Stavros visited the taxidermist to see the specimens for himself, and they’re the real thing. He took a few pictures and I’m sure will write-up a report for either the monthly newsletter or the quarterly magazine for BirdLife Cyprus. I will of course post that when it comes out.

Unfortunately it was the hunters who found the birds, as seems to be the case too frequently – hunters outnumber birders by at least 500:1 in Cyprus, and many hunters will specifically target rare and protected birds when they notice them.

Are there regularly Little Bustards here that go unseen though? Maybe. They prefer open grassland and fallow farmland for habitat, which is plentiful enough and remote enough to not get checked by those few individuals on the island interested in sighting and recording uncommon birds. Geographically, Cyprus is the right area however, smack-dab in the middle of its range from southern Europe and northwest Africa to central Asia.

More information to come when I see it in print or online.

• IUCN 2009. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2009.2. Little Bustard Tetrax tetrax. Downloaded on 13 November 2009.