Old poems help track out extinction -threatened button history

A research team in China has innovated in their efforts to save a critically threatened kind by resorting to old poems. Scientists have analyzed over 700 old Chinese poems from Tang dynasties to Qing, which mention the Yangtze butt to find out where and when the poets described to have seen the animal, as little is known about its population history. The team published the findings in Current Biology magazine on May 5.

The world button-the only freshwater button in the world-has faced extreme declines in its population over the past four decades. With less than 1,300 remaining individuals in nature, scientists in eastern China have made huge efforts to better understand the historical habitat of the animal and thus guide future conservation initiatives.

To the discoveries They were impressive: the data suggest that the historical distribution area of ​​the button has decreased 65% in the last 1,200 years, with the most extreme reduction occurring in the last century.

“Some older fishermen told me that they often saw porpoises in areas where they now disappeared completely,” says study co -author Zhigang Mei to CNN by email. “This really aroused my curiosity: where did these porpoises live historically?”

Yangtze boots live only in the middle-baked Yangtze Basin in eastern China. From the early 1980s to the 2010s, the population dramatically decreased about 60%, according to a 2014 STUDYdue to a combination of illegal fishing practices, industrial pollution on navigable roads, dams and sand mining in adjacent lakes.

As concrete scientific data on the button only exist in recent decades, scientists have a very limited understanding of their spatial distribution. This creates a problem known as a change line syndrome, explained Mei, professor at the Chinese Academy Hydrobiology Institute of Science in Wuhan.

“(This research) answers important questions about what a healthy population constitutes,” he says, which will help to set realistic management goals. “Without historical lines, there is a risk of reducing expectations throughout generations, accepting an increasingly declining status as ‘normal’.”

Playing with poems

When Mei and his colleagues started looking for the files for answers, they were surprised. Official records such as local and chronic gazette of the county had no information about the porpoint – only on terrestrial megafauna such as tigers and elephants, species that have frequent conflict with humans. Botos, in contrast, are less likely to have close meetings with humans.

Porpoints, on the other hand, are less likely to have close encounters with humans. Instead, sightings were typically made by less educated local fishermen or rich travelers – who glimpsed the dodging dodging as they traveled along the Yangtze River by boat – and were not formally recorded, according to MEI.

Faced with this dead end, scientists realized that old poems could be helpful.

“We are impressed,” says Mei about the researchers’ efforts to explore written documentation through literature.

The authors analyzed hundreds of 830 AD poems that referred to the porpoises. For each poem, scientists sought evidence of locations, such as descriptions of unique geographical characteristics of the Yangtze River Basin. Then the team researched the poem’s period and the personal history of each poet to ensure their accuracy. About half of the poems contained precise location information, allowing the team to map sightings for each dynasty.

Ancient Chinese poetry is often nonfictional, including first-person reports of everyday life and nature observations, the authors explained. This is why the poems served as a reasonable metric for seaming-bobatan podding throughout the watershed.

“The emerald seals the jade green tiles as idle clouds of dawn float / porpoint spots disappear between the rapid erect of the waves,” reads in a poem of the Qing Dynasty of Gu Silì 顾嗣立 Called “crossing the river in the rain, looking at Jinshan”, as translated by the main study author Yaoyao Zhang, an ecologist of the Institute of Hydrobiology of Hydrobiology Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“It’s beautiful, in fact,” says Paulo Corte, a conservation ecologist at the Austral University of Chile, who did not participate in the research. “They did something great with very simple information.”

The use of historical materials for science is not uncommon – especially in paleontology or archeology – but is less used for survey on wildlife, according to Corte.

“It is a very useful tool, especially when you refine the analysis, transforming qualitative data into quantitative,” he said.

Using literature as data

Poetic data offer only one estimate. However, it is the best source of the study authors to formulate as the distribution of the population of Boto-Sem-Nademira-do-of-Yangtze has changed before modern times.

Such studies need to be conducted carefully, adds Corte, who wrote scientific articles About the responsible use of historical records for wildlife studies after noticing that some scientists were using this data inappropriately.

One of the main limitations of cultural records is human error, he explained. A fisherman or hunter, for example, is a more reliable observer than a foreign explorer prone to erroneously identify similar animals. Therefore, the authors of the study researched the history of each poet, as where they lived and traveled, to check their observations.

Boto-sem-the-the-nalmstore has a distinct appearance, with short muzzle, dark gray color and characteristic absence of dorsal fin, which differentiates it from its dolphin relatives.

Like mammals, porpoises need to surface to breathe, making them visible to humans, according to study co-author Jiajia Liu, professor of biodiversity science at Fudan University in Shanghai. And since the botes without fin had no historically cultural importance, it was less likely that poets would write about them without a literal observation.

For these reasons, the researchers trusted the poems to obtain data.

That said, the authors recognize that some historical references of the river button can be confused with the now extinct Baiji, a freshwater dolphin that lived on Yangtze. But this species was much larger, of the lighter color and bears a long muzzle – its most distinctive feature, says Mei.

Conservation objectives

In fact, Baiji serves as an alert for butt-sem-naltheira. The freshwater dolphin was already functionally extinguished in 2006 due to many of the same threats.

The extinction of the button-and-button would unbalance the ecosystem, explained Liu. As a top predator, the button eats fish that feed on aquatic grasses. The rare mammal is also an ecosystem engineer, facilitating a process called nutrient cycling. When migrating long distances, the button-down drum carries nitrogen and phosphorus from the bottom of the river to its surface, and downstream to upstream.

Now that there is evidence that Boto-Sem-Nadeira lived not only in the main river, but also in tributaries and lakes, scientists have a better idea where the button has historically prospered-and could thrive in these places again.

With captivity reproduction – a process in which threatened species are created in captivity and returned to nature – in progress since 1996, the authors hope that their new findings can help inform future conservation efforts, such as identifying areas where they can be released.

But it is important not to draw hasty conclusions, warned Corte. The use of such information for modern wildlife management requires a profound understanding of behavior, morphology, diet and other factors of species, according to the ecologist. “You can make many mistakes” extrapolating historical observational data to inform future management decisions.

“If you are trying to see what happened to the species in the past, you need to know what is happening now,” says Corte.

Important, MEI, this study created a link between threatened species and culture, which could attract public attention. If Boto-Sem-Gype-the-Hangtze can be an emblematic species, such as Panda, it will help improve its conservation.

In recent years, the porpoint population has increased for the first time, thanks in part to conservation policies as fishing prohibitions.

“Conservation is not just (for) scientists,” says Mei. “It’s about everyone, it’s about our culture.”

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This content was originally published in old poems help track out extinction button history on CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil