The Passenger Pigeon: A Century of Extinction

An anonymous reader writes On September 1, 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon was found dead in her aviary at the Cincinnati Zoo. When the first European settlers arrived in North America at least one of every four birds on the continent was a passenger pigeon, making them the most numerous birds in North America, and perhaps in the world. From the article: "But extinction apparently doesn't ring with the finality it used to. Researchers are working to 'de-extinct' the bird. They got their hands on some of the 1,500 or so known passenger pigeon specimens and are hoping to resurrect the species through some Jurassic Park-like genetic engineering. Instead of using frog DNA to fill out the missing parts of a dinosaur's genetic code as in Michael Crichton's story, the real-life 'bring-back-the-passenger pigeon' researchers are using the bird's closest relative, the band-tailed pigeon.

Comments

Re:Talk about an old post...

[Chrisq]

This one is over a year old... and just reposted.

Not just Reposted, reconstructed from the DNA of the old one

Re:Talk about an old post...

[PhilHibbs]

It's worse than that, it's exactly 100 years old today.

I'm not understanding "missing DNA"...

[tlambert]

I'm not understanding "missing DNA"... if they think there is "missing DNA",and they have 1,500 specimens, all less than 2-300 years old, they need to talk to J. Craig Venter, because they're doing it wrong.

Ecosystem

[wjcofkc]

If the Passenger Pigeon has been extinct for this long, it's safe to say that ecosystems have adjusted to their demise. Let's not see what the consequences of re-introducing them are. There is no way to predict the effect. If they are planning and engineering these hybrids just to study their work in captivity, well, that is just as wrong.

Re:Ecosystem

[Anonymous Coward]

The consequences would be that the ecosystem would revert to a more natural state. We don't need to have sabre tooth cats running around killing these things to keep their population in check - domestic housecats would do the job very nicely. The simple fact is, these birds were here in enormous numbers, basically a big part of the definition of the North American ecosystem, and we screwed it up. If we can fix it, we should. Think of the additional tax revenue that could be gained from selling hunting licenses, the publicity for the environmental department, and if all they do is suck up some of the habitat that the pigeons have right now it's a great move and a good first step to bringing back more of God's creatures that man has dispatched during his infestation of the planet.

Re:Ecosystem

[Tx]

"If the Passenger Pigeon has been extinct for this long, it's safe to say that ecosystems have adjusted to their demise."
If the ecosystems can adjust to their demise, then surely they could equally well adjust to their return?

"Let's not see what the consequences of re-introducing them are."
Why not? I'm curious.

"There is no way to predict the effect."
There 's no way to predict the effect of any given action or inaction. For all you know, reintroducing passenger pigeons could be the best thing ever to happen to the North American environment.

"If they are planning and engineering these hybrids just to study their work in captivity, well, that is just as wrong."
Why is it just as wrong? Something isn't true just because you say it is; try to provide some rationale behind the statement. You've stated concerns about re-introducing the critters to the wild, so surely studying them in captivity is the perfect solution.

Re:Ecosystem

[towermac]

I've been reading about them with all the articles these past few days.

They would come in their billions. Let's not pretend any of us knows what that means, but an idea, is seeing a flock of thousands that disappear into the distance, and that keeps coming for 3 days. They would cover an area, thoroughly removing every single nut, acorn, bug, worm, seed; leaving inches of dung behind. Anywhere they roosted, thousands to single tree; it would take years for the ground plants to recover from the droppings. From what I've read, everywhere they had been, they left absolutely nothing behind, but broken branches and denuded ground.

Seems like any possible reintroduction is going to be a hard sell.

Re:Ecosystem

[FalcDot]

Have you ever read what happened in Yellowstone when the wolves were reintroduced?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Now, okay, the wolf is an apex predator who has a much bigger effect on the ecosystem than a pigeon. But I believe this is one of the best examples you can give that putting species back where they've gone extinct can have some very beneficial effects.

Re:Ecosystem

[Rei]

There were humans living alongside the passenger pigeon for thousands of years before European settlers arrived.

Anyway, this "readapting" of an ecosystem isn't necessarily a good thing. For example, the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet (the only parrot native to the eastern US) coincided with major spreading cockleburs in the US, as it was a major part of their diet. Are you a fan of cockleburs?

Re:Ecosystem

[careysub]

The consequences would be that the ecosystem would revert to a more natural state. We don't need to have sabre tooth cats running around killing these things to keep their population in check - domestic housecats would do the job very nicely. The simple fact is, these birds were here in enormous numbers, basically a big part of the definition of the North American ecosystem, and we screwed it up....

The enormous numbers of the Passenger Pigeon actually suggest that they were the beneficiaries of an extreme environmental disruption that occurred a few centuries earlier: the sudden and dramatic disappearance on the large scale agricultural and horticultural societies of Native Americans when ~90% of the population died from successive onslaughts of pandemic disease brought by the arrival of populations from the Old World (Europeans and Africans).

European observers only ever got a look at pre-pandemic North America along the east coast, and the evidence there is of stunning change in the ecology.

Genetic studies of Passenger Pigeons have shown that the subabundance was a transient, new phenomenon. In the last million years the breeding population only averaged about 1/3 of a million, and sometimes as few as 50,000, and began a population upsurge 6,000 years ago. The enormous explosion to billions was much more recent than that.

The ecosystem for the PP were forests of nut-bearing trees, which the super-population of PPs could be seen to be damaging in their locust-like swarming and foraging, an unsustainable situation. These forests were not "natural" though, they were managed for thousands of years by Native America horticulturists who encouraged the development of large dense stands of edible nut trees.

When the Native American populations suddenly disappeared that left large stands of unexploited nut-food that allowed the PPs to break-out into the vast populations that were observed. Their habit of long distance migration in large groups was well suited for such an explosion, exploiting all of the nut-tree resources on North America.

Re:Ecosystem

[russotto]

Their habit of long distance migration in large groups was well suited for such an explosion, exploiting all of the nut-tree resources on North America.

Unfortunately for the passenger pigeon, their favorite American Chestnut is no longer a nut-bearing species for most of its former range, thanks to the chestnut blight. So before you can re-introduce the passenger pigeon, you need to restore the chestnut -- which horticulturists have been trying, with limited success, for decades.

Re:Ecosystem

[careysub]

Their habit of long distance migration in large groups was well suited for such an explosion, exploiting all of the nut-tree resources on North America.

Unfortunately for the passenger pigeon, their favorite American Chestnut is no longer a nut-bearing species for most of its former range, thanks to the chestnut blight. So before you can re-introduce the passenger pigeon, you need to restore the chestnut -- which horticulturists have been trying, with limited success, for decades.

You are correct that restoring the species successfully (assuming we can make viable breeding PPs) is a long shot. One of the problems is their colony-style breeding behavior. The aren't solitary nesters, but live and breed in large groups. Attempts to breed them in captivity failed.

The collapse of the population to zero seems to have proceeded in phases (3, I count): loss of forest food sources from cutting, extermination efforts (hunting and simple pest-control killing) which capitalized on the dense groups that made easy pickings, but then after PP extermination was circumscribed, the population continued to collapse since they were below the natural breeding population size. In its last couple of decades efforts to save them were being made, but they were unsuccessful. The genetically documented population "bottleneck", when the breeding population dropped to 50,000, might have been a single colony.

A similar situation occurred with the cheetah, which once dropped to fewer than a dozen individuals within the last 10,000 years. There is also evidence of humans bottlenecking with populations in the low thousands within the last 100,000 years.

Re:Ecosystem

[towermac]

If you really needed a citation, there's a recent article on BBC and Wikipedia.

But the historical accounts detail them breaking branches of trees, they would roost so thickly. Piling on each other's backs even. You don't have to be an expert in poop to realize that inches piled up overnight, or even days, will take a very long time to become a beautiful field of flowers again.

Now, as this thread has filled out, I have learned some things, and maybe it's unlikely they would reach those numbers again if they were reintroduced. But they were at those numbers for well over a hundred years, and possibly much longer.

In principle, I am always for the restoration of nature as much as possible.

It's just that I was looking at the little finches and humming birds and squirrels that love my yard when I wrote my previous post, and thinking of how they would all have to die, if a flock of passenger pigeons were to come here.

Re:Ecosystem

[towermac]

"First, pigeons don't eat nuts."

Yes, they did. The acorn of the white oak was their main diet. (Acorns are nuts, right?) Anyway;

"Which will help some of the forests that are being denuded by various moth larvae that don't have much in the way of predators..."

That is a really good one. I said it would be a hard sell before; that could be the closer...

No, no, no

[hooiberg]

You got it all wrong. They are lizards! There is proof: http://www.thewire.com/nationa... 12 million Americans cannot all be wrong.

Ecosystem

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously a shill for big airlines and don't want the re-introduction of free flights via passenger pigeon because it will eat into your lucrative flight slot monopoly revenue.

Firefox 1.0 is largely Netscape 8. Mozilla == Moz

[raymorris]

You may recall Netscape's user-agent string was Mozilla. Within the company called Netscape, the browser was called Mozilla. The full name of Firefox is Mozilla Firefox.

Netscape was rebranded Mozilla Seamonkey. As Mozilla Seamonkey gained more and more features, some of the Mozilla (aka Netscape browser) people decided to make a version with some of the features removed to make it more streamlined, a lightweight version of the Mozilla browser, previously known as Netscape. They called this lightweight version of Netscape Firefox. *

*First they tried calling it Phoenix, which is an animal which is resurrected from it's own ashes. Somebody already had that name. A Phoenix is also known as a Firebird, but somebody already had that name, so they ended up with Firefox.

cultural knowledge irrevocably lost

[cmdr_tofu]

I think it would make more sense to simply create a more bird-friendly environment (ie more sustainable development, no hunting, allow for return of wild forested spaces) and if there is a role for a passenger pigeon-like bird it will eventually be occupied by an existing bird species and those with passenger pigeon-like traits will be the most successful.

The passenger pigeon was killed by
1) overhunting - presumably, we can stop that, but we are doing the same thing to fish right now - what reason do we have to believe we would not immediate overhunt pigeons back to extinction?
2) habitat loss - we haven't done anything to address this. If anything in the past 100 years we've made the problem worse. Development is both good and bad, but for preserving natural habitats, we have not really solved all problems (or arguably even prioritized) allowing development in a way which is sustainable in terms of natural resources and does not threaten wildlife habitats.

Could passenger pigeons start over "from ground zero"? If they could be in a lab, I am very skeptical that such populations would survive.

I imagine if Kang and Kodoss ate all the humans and reduced all human works to rubble and poisone, then genetically engineered a bunch of humans and left them on the planet and said "go repopulate". It just would not work.

Birds are intelligent animals, require long developmental periods (with care of their already-able parents) and form complex social networks that allow them to thrive in adverse conditions. http://rstb.royalsocietypublis... Passenger pigeons would migrate 1000s of miles depending on weather patterns, and used decision-making processes we have yet to understand.

One reason they are extinct

[joneil]

One thing almost always missing whenever the Passenger Pidgeon is talked about is how our pioneer ancestors considered them a major pest and threat.

    Old wood cuts and descriptions from a couple of centuries ago describe how a large flock of these birds would decend on a farm and inside a few hours completely eat all the food (grain), leaving a family to face certian starvation. Remember , back then, there are no food stamps, no food banks, no state welfare, etc. Starvation was very real and people did die of it.

    I am NOT excusing or apologizing or in any way, shape or form trying to justify what happened, but I am trying to point out that events in history, both good and bad, usually happens for a reason. Rightly or wrongly, our pioneer ancestors often looked upon the passenger pidgeon in almost the same way we look at the cockroach today. That is the major reason they were wiped out. The problem, as I see it, is history today portrays the extinction of the passenger pidgeon as the result of a bunch of people just killing for fun or no reason at all. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

    Along the same lines, wolves were wiped out because they were seen as a threat to livestock in many areas. Groundhogs and gophers killed because thier holes were dangerous for horses who stepped into them and broke legs. Buffalo where killed because they were a major food source for native americans during the Indian Wars. The list goes on and on. Again, not saying it was a good or just reason, it might of been a terrrible reason, a horrible reason, but there was still a reason these things happened.

Not stored under archival conditions

[davidwr]

Organic matter decays over time, especially when it's not stored under "ideal conditions."

If you dug up 1500 people that had been dead and buried for 100 years, I bet you would have to work hard to get a sample of every stretch of the human DNA map. The only saving grace might be if the bodies were in a sealed casket or which were otherwise very well-preserved in a way that protected the DNA from decay.

On the other hand, if you stored 1500 freshly-dead people or birds today in a way to minimize DNA degradation and kept them that way for 100 years from now, our descendants in 2014 would have a much easier time with it, and that's not counting whatever technological advances come along over the next 100 years.