With numbers falling a staggering 96 per cent since 1970, turtledoves are the UK’s fastest
declining migratory bird species. The race is on to identify the causes of this decline so that
conservation efforts can be put in place to potentially save the birds from extinction.
Satellite tracking technology being trialled by the RSPB may provide the answer. While
regular tags need to be recovered before the data they record can be downloaded, satellite
tags allow researchers to follow the birds’ migrations
in real time.
In 2014, the RSPB fitted a tag weighing
just 4.7g to a turtledove they named
Titan, allowing them to track the bird
on its 5,600km migration route from
Suffolk to Mali. “We know there
are issues on their breeding
grounds here in the UK but we
suspect there are also prob-
lems on their migration route,
as large numbers from Europe
and West Africa are hunted in
the Mediterranean,” explains
the RSPB’s principal research
manager Guy Anderson.The fantastically named ‘hellbender’ is a
giant salamander found in North America.
Once abundant, it is now estimated that only
1,100 survive in the wild. With so few animals
left, tracking them down can be particularly
difficult. Now, a team from the Smithsonian
Institute is using DNA-gathering techniques
to keep tabs on them. The method, dubbed
Environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring, is so
sensitive that it can identify specific molecu-lar markers belonging to the animals in as
little as one cup of river water.
The team hopes it will help them identify
causes for the salamanders’ dramatic decline
and then develop a conservation plan. With
the hellbender facing a predicted 96 per cent
chance of extinction in the next 75 years,
eDNA could be a vital tool to help save a
creature that has been around since the time
of the dinosaurs.Rare hellbender salamanders once stalked the
waters of North America in great numbers – so
where have they all gone?Satellite trackers could
reveal why turtledove
numbers are decliningConventional methods of
tracking, such as GPS, rely on
radio waves to transmit signals.
This works well above the ground
but as radio waves are absorbed
by soil and moisture they cannot
be used to monitor animals that
live in burrows.
A team from Oxford University’s
Wildlife Conservation Research
Unit has created a magneto-
inductive (MI) tracking system that
takes advantage of low frequency
magnetic fields’ ability to travel
through dense materials such as
soil. They positioned an array of
transmitting magnetic coils above
a badgers’ sett in Oxfordshire and
fitted the animals with lightweight
magnetic tracking collars.
The system was able to
pinpoint the badgers’ positions in
three dimensions to a resolution
of 30cm. Also, by monitoring the
badgers’ movements over three
months they were able to piece
together an accurate 3D map of
the sett’s structure.GOING
UNDERGROUND
TITANIC MIGRATION
SOMETHING IN
THE WATER
48 Vol. 8 Issue 5NATURE
48 Vol. 8 Issue 5