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Saving Honeycreepers from Avian Malaria
A new solution could finally eradicate the disease
© Robin Gwen Argarwal
Avian malaria has devastated native Hawaiian birds called honeycreepers. And now, climate change is allowing the mosquitoes that carry the disease to spread into the last mountain refuges of highly endangered honeycreepers on the island of Kauai. However, there’s hope that a new tool could eradicate the disease. Researchers are raising mosquitoes in the lab infected with Wolbachia, a bacterium that makes them infertile. When these males mate with wild female mosquitos, they fail to reproduce. While they wait for the mosquito solution to become available, biologists are carrying out last-ditch efforts to keep the species alive in captivity.
BirdNote®
Saving Honeycreepers from Avian Malaria
Adapted from the Threatened podcast
This is BirdNote.
[‘Akeke’e song, ML156093531, 0:07-0:09]
Avian malaria has devastated native Hawaiian birds called honeycreepers. And now, climate change is allowing the mosquitoes that carry the disease to spread into the last mountain refuges of highly endangered honeycreepers on the island of Kauai, says ecologist Lisa “Cali” Crampton.
Lisa “Cali” Crampton: They are naive to this disease, just the way we were naive to COVID. And it has had dramatic consequences for the honeycreeper species the way COVID has had dramatic consequences for human populations.
However, there’s hope that a new tool could eradicate the disease. Researchers are raising mosquitoes in the lab infected with Wolbachia, a bacterium that makes them infertile. When these males mate with wild female mosquitos, they fail to reproduce, says research ecologist Dennis LaPointe.
Dennis LaPointe: If you do this successively over time, you can suppress the population.
But the infertile mosquitoes aren’t ready just yet. And getting them in place won’t be easy—
Dennis LaPointe: So we are either going to be hiking these mosquitoes in by the hundreds of thousands and releasing them in the field, or we’re going to have to develop aerial techniques for that release.
In the meantime, Cali and her colleagues are making a last-ditch effort to keep these species alive in captivity…
Lisa “Cali” Crampton: And then once malaria’s under control with the Wolbachia, we can release birds back into the wild.
Learn more about efforts to save Kauai’s honeycreepers on the Threatened podcast. Listen in your podcast app or at BirdNote.org. I’m Ari Daniel.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. ‘Akeke’e ML 156093531 recorded by D. Kuhn.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote August 2022
Narrator: Ari Daniel
ID# honeycreeper-03-2022-08-16 honeycreeper-03