The Iberian lynx doubles its population in just three years | Hacker News Reader

The Iberian lynx doubles its population in just three years

english.elpais.com

121 pointsgeox33 comments

After a sustained, serious, painfully slow effort fighting against all harsh critics since 80's and 90's. A long-life work that can be undone at any time by arsonists, furtive hunters and populist politicians. Iberian lynx conservative efforts only started really as a serious project after recruiting the woman that had been saving American polecats from imminent extinction by breeding them on captivity. All this projects are slow.

I any case is a typical 'warming hearts' pre-election message.

The goal is to mobilize the small part of the voters that still care for that in the next European elections. The worldwide trend goes in the opposite direction in rural Europe; even if we know about the environmental and economical services that the lynx brings [1]

[1] (There is a strong suspicion that European lynxes are critical for the survival of Eurasian Cappercaillie, as they effectively chase off and banish most of the smaller predators from entering their territories).

speaking of "warming" the Iberian peninsula is projected to be particularly volatile in the coming decades for temperatures.. maybe the wild animals can adapt but they need an assist where it is possible.

Is a problem, yes. Specially with the current stealing of water from the national park. Fortunately this animals are adapted to live in very hot and dry conditions.

This is awesome news.

And incidentally the opposite of what Sweden is doing:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/02/hundreds...

It is much easier and cheaper to endanger a especie than to recover it.

Once that you reach a point of small number of individuals the lack of genetic variability and the problems finding a matting companion makes it hard to recover

Can you breed them with other very similar cats in captivity to introduce genetic diversity, then keep breeding them with more Iberian lynxes so that they're mostly still Iberian lynxes?

Crossbreeding is necessary if you have too few specimens left to prevent inbreeding, but if you don’t, I think you’re better off using the entire population for a breeding program.

If you have sufficiently many “more Iberian lynxes” to get rid of the foreign DNA in the population after mixing that in, wouldn’t you also have sufficiently many for a breeding program that doesn’t introduce foreign DNA?

> Can you breed them with other very similar cats in captivity to introduce genetic diversity

Not.

Or at least not a thing to do without a lot of previous planning and backups. Lynx hybrids can carry a sterile gen.

Messing with biology is messing with millions of years of fine adjusted DNA technology. Would be like finding a marooned alien spaceship and starting to press buttons randomly. At this time we are just struggling to understand a small part of this natural technology.

Norway too. Due to a strong distortion field surrounding the rather dubious impact of large predators on the viability of livestock farming, there's a political consensus between the 3 largest parties(labour, conservatives and the agrarian party(officially the "centre party")) that the minimum viable population numbers agreed on in the Bern Convention are actually maximum limits. The resulting policy is that any population beyond that is culled every year. This is unironically referred to as "getting down to population targets".

This is of course not ideal for the ecosystem. Game populations are out of control, which has lots of harmful effects on forests, etc. And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.

> And though I'm not an ecologist, it seems likely to me that predator populations will eventually collapse from a lack of diversity as they're artificially kept at a bare minimum for extended periods of time.

It's a complicated topic of conservation, because the reproductive strategy, genetic makeup, and history all influence the species' minimum viable population, and thus its reaction and trajectory following new genetic bottlenecks. Some species can somewhat recover from very extremely little e.g. the black robin went as low as five individuals, including only one fertile female, today there are 300; or the mauritius kestrel which was down to 5~6 known birds of which a single fertile female, for mammals the northern elephant seal went down to ~30.

One of the massive risks for species surviving a genetic bottleneck is that the low genetic diversity will let diseases spread like wildfire, especially for the more social species.

Yeah it's amazing. The Swedish narrative includes the logical somersasult that the population must be slashed in half to reduce the risk of inbreeding. Like I don't even.

simple - predators don't like other predators .. humans in that environment are predators, feeding and guarding their own prey stocks.

It's kind of shortsighted though. If we kill all the other predators, we're left with rampant overpopulation of all their prey animals, even the ones that harm our own interests and are kind of a pain in the ass to deal with (like boars).

My bet is that the recent stupid culling of wolves and lynxes in Nordic countries is also directly linked with appeasing people in rural communities for the next European elections. It will be an expensive mistake, as people will discover soon, but politicians are extremely concerned by the raise of the populist parties.

I fail to see the tie to populist parties here.

I think the suggestion is that the rise of populist parties is making the otherwise “responsible” politicians take more populist decisions to win back votes, especially before an election.

Shameful. You would expect rich assholes to gradually move away from the least sustainable form of sport, but nope, it’s actually ramping up with explicit backing from politicians. Time to build a Westworld for these rich assholes.

The wolf cull has very little to do with hunting for sport. It's above all agricultural interests that are lobbying for this.

If anything the hunters are pushing back against it, especially with regards to moose. They're in some cases straight up refusing to shoot their allotments because they can tell the population is shrinking. (The forestry industry want them gone because they're feeding on younger trees.)

> If anything the hunters are pushing back against it, especially with regards to moose

I’m not sure how you jumped to the restraint some hunters are showing when deciding not to shoot moose (älg) in Sweden - it’s totally unconnected to the gratuitous and stupid shooting of wolves and especially the endangered lynx.

They’ve decided to hold back hunting moose because they’re worried about how the hunt will be in the future, not some enlightened ecological concern. I know this because it’s a common discussion topic amongst friends and relatives who hunt.

The connection was made to illustrate that the hunters aren't deciding the hunting quotas, but that the quotas are set to appease the farming and forestry industry.

Estimates of lynx in the Romanian Carpathians seems to be also around 1500-2000. Seems there are probably around 7,000+ in Europe altogether. As far as I can gather they don't seem to be threatened in this particular location. If you ever see one, count it your lucky day! Bears yes but lynx, highly unlikely.

'Eurasian lynx density and habitat use in one of Europe’s strongholds, the Romanian Carpathians'

https://academic.oup.com/jmammal/article/103/2/415/6500318

Iberian lynx live in open habitats are diurnal and can be spot in their favorite places to rest at day by the national park rangers. There are tours for lynx watching in Doñana park. Not a guaranteed sight, but lots of tourists still have luck each year. Eurasian, being forest and mountain inhabitants, are much more difficult to watch.

I’m happy that at least one thing is working. To go from 94 in the wild to 2000 is a good trajectory. Does anyone know how they manage the genetic diversity problems?

Evaluation of the genetic viability of metapopulation scenarios for the Iberian lynx (2023): https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thanks for sharing. that was a very interesting read.

Breeding then really carefully for decades. Those 94 in the wild were most probably underestimated. A few cryptic wild populations were rediscovered later.

Considering that lynxes are famous for population boom/bust cycles with order-of-magnitude swings (see e.g. https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Milliers_fourrures...), I have some doubts whether a tripling of population should be credited purely to conservation policy or seen as sustainable.

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