Primary Topic
This episode explores a unique conservation strategy using genetically modified mosquitoes to combat avian malaria in Hawaii, aiming to protect the island's endangered honeycreepers.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Genetically modified mosquitoes are being used as a tool to control mosquito populations in Hawaii to combat avian malaria.
- Avian malaria has devastating effects on Hawaii's native honeycreepers, with no natural immunity in the local bird populations.
- Conservation efforts include breeding programs and habitat restoration, but are severely challenged by the rapid changes in climate.
- The use of modified mosquitoes raises ethical questions about human intervention in nature for conservation purposes.
- The episode underscores the urgency and complexity of saving endangered species in the face of environmental change and human impact.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction
Overview of the episode's topic on innovative conservation strategies to save Hawaii's endangered birds. Emily Kwong: "There is an extinction crisis underway on the planet we call home."
2: The Problem with Mosquitoes
Discussion on how non-native mosquitoes carrying avian malaria threaten Hawaii's native birds. Ryan Kellman: "Mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They were introduced by accident, probably, and they carry avian malaria."
3: Innovative Solutions
Exploration of using genetically modified mosquitoes to control the mosquito population. Lauren Sommer: "They're releasing special mosquitoes, ones that can't reproduce with the mosquitoes already on Maui."
4: Conservation Challenges
Insights into the challenges faced by conservationists, including climate change and habitat loss. Ryan Kellman: "But this is really the first time it's been used for wildlife conservation."
5: Ethical Considerations
Discussion on the ethics of using genetic technology for conservation. Emily Kwong: "And I guess I just am thinking a little bit about the ethics of it all."
Actionable Advice
- Support local and global conservation efforts by staying informed and participating in community activities.
- Advocate for policies that protect endangered species and their habitats.
- Educate others about the importance of biodiversity and the unique challenges faced by island ecosystems.
- Consider donating to organizations that focus on innovative conservation technologies.
- Stay informed about the impacts of climate change on local wildlife and support efforts to mitigate these effects.
About This Episode
To a lot of people, mosquito bites are annoying. But to the rare Hawaiian honeycreepers, they're deadly. Scientists in Maui are racing against time to save them ... and discovering some pretty crazy innovations along the way. Like, releasing-mosquitos-incapable-of-breeding level innovations.
People
Emily Kwong, Ryan Kellman, Lauren Sommer, Jennifer Pribble, Christa Seidel, Hannah Mountz, Chris Warren
Companies
NPR, Maui Bird Conservation Center, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
Emily Kwong
This message comes from NPR sponsor Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to save, spend wisely, and invest. Join millions of parents and kids building healthy financial habits on greenlight. Get your first month free@greenlight.com. nPR this message comes from NPR sponsor Shark Week, the podcast from Discovery Channel. A lot of what people think is shark fact is actually shark fiction. Learn the truth behind some of the weirdest shark myths. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lauren Sommer
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Emily Kwong
You're listening to short wave from NPR.
Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here. There is an extinction crisis underway on the planet we call home. Animals and plant species are rapidly disappearing, and people all over the world are going to increasing lengths to save them.
Ryan Kellman
Doing things like packing a helicopter full of 250,000 mosquitoes.
Emily Kwong
Not the conservation strategy I had in mind, but okay. LAureN Sommer, you and Ryan Kellman are here from the climate desk to talk about the practice.
What is up with this helicopter full of mosquitoes?
Lauren Sommer
Yeah, don't worry, Emily. They're not just flying around loose in the cockpit. They're packed away in little brown tubes that kind of look like toilet paper tubes.
Ryan Kellman
They're actually heading out to the high mountain forest of Haleakala National park, where they'll be released to ultimately help endangered birds.
Lauren Sommer
So that's an eevee. It's got a bright red body with a black tail and black wings and a pink beak that curves downward. It's a very cool bird. And lauren and I got to see these birds not too far from where the mosquitoes were dropped.
Emily Kwong
Yeah.
Ryan Kellman
And the iwi is one of Hawaii's honey creepers. They're these small birds that are found nowhere else on the planet. There used to be more than 50 species of honey creepers, but now there are just 17, and several of those are very close to extinction in the wild.
Emily Kwong
I've heard of these birds, honey creepers. They're so important to Hawaii's ecosystem, to the people. But how are mosquitoes connected to these birds?
Ryan Kellman
Mosquitoes are not native to Hawaii. They were introduced by accident, probably, and they carry avian malaria. Honeycreepers have no immunity to it, so they can die after a single mosquito bite.
Lauren Sommer
And obviously, it would be incredibly hard to get rid of all the mosquitoes on Maui, but they're trying to at least control them, and that's where the helicopter comes in. They're releasing special mosquitoes, ones that can't reproduce with the mosquitoes already on Maui.
Emily Kwong
Okay, let me get this right. You're saying the plan is to stop mosquitoes from killing honey creepers by releasing more mosquitoes, right, exactly.
Ryan Kellman
It's a technique to suppress their population. Huh. And it's been used elsewhere in the world for human health reasons, you know, to stop diseases that we get from spreading.
Emily Kwong
Okay.
Ryan Kellman
But this is really the first time it's been used wildlife conservation. And the big question is whether it can make a difference in time to save these birds.
Emily Kwong
So today on the show, a race against time to try to save some of the rarest birds on earth. How scientists are innovating in the world of conservation to save species from extinction. You're listening to short wave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, so, Ryan Kelman, Lauren Sommer, you went to the island of Maui to report on these birds that are disappearing. How soon do we think honeycreepers are going to go extinct?
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, for some honey creepers, it could be a matter of years.
And so that's why they're bringing some of the birds into captivity as a way of protecting them.
Lauren Sommer
We got to see some of these birds at the Maui Bird Conservation center, which is a very cool place, particularly if you're a bird nerd with a whole bunch of bird enclosures.
Ryan Kellman
So that's the alala, the hawaiian crow.
It's totally extinct in the wild now.
Oh, he's got things to say.
Hannah Mountz
All right.
Lauren Sommer
Very chatty bird.
Ryan Kellman
Jennifer Pribble is the wildlife care supervisor at the center, and she showed us around.
Jennifer Pribble
If we do have a pair of birds, they'll get two compartments where they can kind of interact with each other, but they also have the option to get away from their mate if they need to.
Emily Kwong
How considerate. Okay, so these folks at the conservation center are taking care of these birds. Is the idea to like, safeguard the birds for now and just keep the population going.
Lauren Sommer
Yeah, it's definitely a last resort. Jennifer actually lives at the facility. And when those devastating wildfires hit Maui last August, 1 got really close.
Ryan Kellman
Yeah. At 03:00 a.m. she said it was right across the street, so she jumped into action.
Jennifer Pribble
I had fire extinguishers and garden hoses and put the fire out. So, yeah, that was a long night.
Emily Kwong
Wow. I mean, so while some people were, like, saving their homes or photo albums or keepsakes, Jennifer was trying to save this whole facility and really the species that were inside.
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I should say there is another facility where the birds are kept, too, just in case something like a fire happens. But each bird is valuable because there are just so few remaining, like in another enclosure. Oh, yeah, there he is. There was a tiny, pale gray bird called the akakiki.
Jennifer Pribble
15 years ago, the population was over a thousand. And today there's anywhere from two to five birds left in the wild.
Lauren Sommer
That bird species will probably go extinct in the wild sometime this year.
Emily Kwong
Wow.
Emily Kwong
These are very precious birds, you know?
Lauren Sommer
Yeah. It's why they have a breeding program at the center.
Jennifer Pribble
Yep. And we do have a nest right down here.
Ryan Kellman
She says maybe three to four akaki hatch a year. But even if they can grow the numbers of those birds, they can't release them into the wild because outside these walls are mosquitoes.
Emily Kwong
Okay, so because of this mosquito situation, are the birds kind of marooned in human care?
Lauren Sommer
Yeah, exactly. It's a real, like, island within the island situation, but there's some really dedicated people trying to change that to get the birds back into the wild.
One of those people is Christa Seidel. She works with the Maui Forest bird recovery project, and we met up with her in a forest where she kept on trying to find birds for us.
Christa Seidel
I just heard a Hawaii amakihi.
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, it was actually really quiet.
Christa Seidel
I'll listen for it again.
Ryan Kellman
And that forest really showed how Maui has changed. You know, much of the native forest was cut down for farming and ranching. And where we were, it was kind of full of these invasive plants, like ginger, which was really choking everything else out. And the native birds have mostly disappeared.
Christa Seidel
So before mosquitoes and before disease, this forest would be a cacophony of birdsong, and there would be huge flocks of eevee and applepane.
Ryan Kellman
But there are places on Maui where you can still find that.
Emily Kwong
Oh, that's gorgeous. It's amazing to hear that difference. So, okay, where was this recorded? And what's different about this forest?
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, so that's a forest at higher elevation on Maui, because above four to 5000ft, it's actually been too cold for mosquitoes to live there. So the birds have survived, but, yeah, there's a butt here. Then came climate change.
Christa Seidel
It's increasing in temperature and that's allowing mosquitoes to creep increasingly upslope, and now invade habitats that were once the last remaining refugia for a lot of our native birds.
Emily Kwong
Okay.
Spots that were once safe for birds are now home to, like, creeping mosquitoes. And of course, all this is being accelerated by the way humans are heating up the planet.
Lauren Sommer
Right, exactly. And Krista and her colleagues have had to actually watch this happen in real time.
For example, they've been trying to save another honeycreeper that's on the brink of extinction called the kiwi koo. And it's a cute little yellow and olive green bird with sort of parrot like beak.
Emily Kwong
Nice.
Lauren Sommer
One problem was that there wasn't enough habitat for them, so they started restoring a forest.
Ryan Kellman
They planted tens of thousands of trees at higher elevation to create a safe place for the kiwi. Q it took a decade, and Hannah Mountz, who also works with the Maui forest bird recovery project, told us that, you know, after all that preparation, they finally released some birds in 2019.
Hannah Mountz
But tragically, the landscape had basically shifted under our feet. And the birds that we translocated, all but one died within a few weeks.
Ryan Kellman
Weeks.
Hannah Mountz
Oh, it was bad. It was really bad.
Emily Kwong
That's so sad, what happened.
Lauren Sommer
Yeah. So the problem was it had been really hot and that warm weather allowed the mosquitoes to move in. So almost all of the birds were lost to avian malaria that they got from those mosquitoes.
Hannah Mountz
I mean, when failure is extinction, and we want to know that we've done every single thing that we possibly can. Even if we don't, if we do end up losing some of these species, it's still incredibly difficult.
Emily Kwong
I mean, how do you even bounce back from something like that? Like, after all that work, when the stakes are so high?
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we definitely asked her that because it's a lot to have the fate of an entire species in your hands. And she said it felt really hopeless until this idea of releasing mosquitoes came up.
Emily Kwong
Okay, this surprises me. Cause so far in this story, like, I'm not feeling these mosquitoes, they sound quite villainous. But, like, how is adding mosquitoes a form of population control? How in the world does that work?
Lauren Sommer
Here's the thing. The mosquitoes being released are all males, and the males don't bite humans or birds. It's actually only the females that drink blood anyway. Theyve been altered in a way where they cant reproduce successfully with the female mosquitoes. The eggs arent viable, and those female mosquitoes only mate once. So youve effectively taken them out of the game.
Emily Kwong
So how do scientists get the males to be non viable anyway?
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, its actually interesting. So you and I, we both have bacteria living inside us, right?
Mosquitoes are like us too. They have bacteria. One of them is called wolbachia, and it can actually modify the reproductive cells in mosquitoes. So if a male and female have the same strain of this bacteria, they can make babies. If they have different strains, no babies.
Emily Kwong
That is some really powerful bacteria.
Lauren Sommer
It is very powerful. And Krista says this method was developed to suppress mosquitoes that spread human diseases like dengue.
Christa Seidel
So this technique has been used all over the world to reduce mosquito populations. They've used it successfully in China, in Mexico. There's programs ongoing in California, Florida.
Emily Kwong
Okay. And now they're trying it out in Hawaii. That's cool. So if enough mosquito couples do not have offspring, the population goes down. But what does it take, Lauren, to, like, keep it that way and make that a permanent reality?
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, you have to keep releasing these male mosquitoes to keep the population down.
Emily Kwong
Gotcha.
Ryan Kellman
And I talked to Chris Warren about this. He works on this project at Haleakala National park.
Chris Warren
What the previous studies have really shown is that this tool works. But the biggest issues with this is, can we apply the tool effectively enough to reduce the mosquito population?
Ryan Kellman
And so far they have released 10 million of those male mosquitoes. And they're watching to see if the overall mosquito numbers start to fall soon.
Emily Kwong
But given, like, the challenges they've had before with conservation efforts, how hopeful are they that this will work?
Ryan Kellman
You know, honestly, I think for people like Chris who work on this and have worked on it so long, the only choice is to be hopeful.
Chris Warren
If you're in the conservation business, you are an optimist. You know, the only thing more tragic than these things going extinct would be them going extinct. And we didn't try to stop it.
Ryan Kellman
And, you know, it really shows that the old way of saving species just may not be enough anymore. You know, that was where you kind of restore their habitat and release animals and help their population grow.
Now it's really taking this new technology and new ways of intervening just to keep up with how fast wildlife is disappearing with climate change.
Emily Kwong
Yeah, this really does subvert, like, all my ideas about how conservation happens.
And I guess I just am thinking a little bit about the ethics of it all. How far should we as humans go to save species?
Lauren Sommer
Yeah.
And Lauren and I, we've talked to a lot of people about this, and we ask that question all the time as we do our reporting. Like, what is the value of a single species?
And, of course, there's a biodiversity argument. These birds help pollinate native trees and support a whole forest ecosystem. And those forests help filter the rainfall that gives Maui residents their water supply. So super important.
Emily Kwong
I hear that.
Lauren Sommer
But for Krista, it was even more than that.
Christa Seidel
Our world will just become less colorful, less diverse as we continue to let species go extinct.
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, and we heard the same thing from Chris, too.
Chris Warren
Knowing that these things exist on the planet, knowing that they add that diversity, that little bit of interesting to the planet. You know, if we lose kiwi Q, for instance, we are all poorer for it, whether we know it or not.
Ryan Kellman
You know, just to kind of have a hopeful note here. Remember the kiwi Q that were released and, you know, all of them died, but one made it.
Emily Kwong
Yeah.
Ryan Kellman
So Hannah told me he turned up again totally unexpectedly on the other side of Maui.
Hannah Mountz
I don't know how he did that, but he, he not only survived malaria, he made it all the way back over the windward side of the island. And he's had, he had a successful hatchier, fledged a chick last year, and he has a female this year. He's doing great.
Ryan Kellman
And, you know, that's a big deal.
Not only just as kind of a moment of hope that keeps people going, but it's that that bird survived malaria. And the hope is that all these honey creepers will develop a resistance to it eventually, as birds have done in other places. So it's really just a matter of buying them enough time to let that happen.
Emily Kwong
Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, thank you for taking us on this journey.
Lauren Sommer
Thanks, Emily.
Ryan Kellman
Yeah, thanks.
Emily Kwong
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact check by Lauren and Ryan. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Emily Kwong
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Ryan Kellman
Today, David Lynch's films explore dark themes. But in a rare interview on wild card this week, he says he's remarkably content. And you can be, too.
Lauren Sommer
We're supposed to be like little dogs where our tail is wagging and being happy, little smiles on our face all day long. This is the way it's supposed to be.
Ryan Kellman
I'm Rachel Martin. Join us on NPR's Wild Card podcast, the game where cards control the conversation.