There are many types of disturbance that could affect wildlife for example, camera traps have captured images of hunters in the reserve with illegal homemade rifles, their faces concealed by balaclavas. It's not clear whether livestock are the problem, or whether something else is driving wild animals to the middle of the park, noted Douglas Yu, an ecologist at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China and one of the leaders of the project. Wildlife's preference for the most remote parts of the reserve suggests that human activity does indeed reduce biodiversity near the periphery. But the new study revealed that wildlife followed the opposite pattern, with most species concentrated at higher elevations in the middle of the reserve. This wasn't surprising, since humans often bring livestock into the park to graze. In the lowland areas around the edges of the reserve, many leeches had been feeding on domestic animals such as cows and goats. Nine of those species are listed as vulnerable or endangered, including the Asiatic black bear, the stump-tailed macaque, a large goat-like creature called the mainland serow, and several types of frogs. When the team extracted and analyzed the DNA from the leeches' bodies, they were able to identify 86 vertebrate species. The researchers enlisted these rangers as leech collectors, receiving a total of 30,468 leeches over 3 months. The reserve is divided into 172 sections that are regularly patrolled by rangers from surrounding villages. "In the monsoon season … the ground can kind of can move toward you." A hungry Haemadipsa leech is generally thinner than a pencil, "but what they lack in size compared to some of the other leeches, they make up for in abundance in certain areas," said Tessler. Like many parts of Southeast Asia, Ailaoshan reserve is home to a group of land-dwelling leeches in the genus Haemadipsa. The new study demonstrates that it can give a big-picture view of vertebrate diversity across an entire park - specifically, Ailaoshan Nature Reserve, which stretches for nearly 80 miles along a mountain ridge in Southern China, covering an area roughly the size of Singapore. Of course, most of that DNA belongs to the leech itself, but researchers get around that problem by looking for DNA sequences present only in vertebrates.īut until now, the method had only been tried on small scales. Past studies have shown that it's possible to identify what a leech last ate by analyzing the DNA in its body. "If what you actually are interested in is animals wandering around in the park, you're kind of taking a bit of a leap of faith that hectares of forest or numbers of park rangers actually correlate with the thing that you care about," said Baker. But those metrics can't really show what effect conservation efforts or human disturbance are having on wildlife and ecosystems. Researchers often estimate a park’s value in preserving biodiversity based on measures such as the amount of funding or the number of staff members it has, or the levels of human disturbance within its boundaries. Army ERDC Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, who helped conduct the study while he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. One of the hardest parts of meeting that target has been figuring out whether protected areas are achieving their biodiversity goals, said Christopher Baker, a molecular ecologist at the U.S. The researchers were inspired by the Convention on Biological Diversity's 2010 goal for countries to set aside at least 17% of land and inland water habitats as protected areas that are "ecologically representative" and "effectively and equitably managed" by the year 2020. "That this method is capable of finding those things I think is very powerful, and I think they showed some really important patterns."Ī paper describing the findings is available online, although it is not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal. Francis College and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who has collaborated with the research team in the past but was not involved in the new study. "From a conservation angle, the number of endangered, near-threatened threatened things that they found with this was just awesome," said Michael Tessler, a biologist and leech expert at St. The findings demonstrate the value of the park and help establish leeches as a conservation surveillance tool. In the largest study of its kind, researchers used the blood-sucking worms to reveal a marvelous variety of mammals, birds and frogs in China's Ailaoshan Nature Reserve. (Inside Science) - You can't argue with 30,000 leeches.
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