A new species of giant tortoise has been identified in the Galapagos, taking the tally in the archipelago to 11.

For more than a century, taxonomists have lumped together all the giant tortoises on the central island of Santa Cruz. In , geneticists revealed that the island might be home to more than a single species. After a decade-long investigation, researchers have now formalised this distinction.

“People knew they were a little bit different but they didn’t know how different,” says , a geneticist at Yale University.

The two species inhabit different parts of the island. They might be just 20 kilometres apart, but they are as different from each other as any other tortoises in the archipelago, says Caccone.

Based on genetic evidence, it appears that tortoises reached Santa Cruz not once but twice. The first species probably arrived from neighbouring San Cristobal or Espanola around 1.7 million years ago, to the relatively large population of more than 2000 individuals that now live at “La Reserva” on the south-western slopes of Santa Cruz.

A second wave of tortoises, these almost certainly from San Cristobal, washed up some 1.3 million years later, says Caccone. These inhabit the much more arid eastern slopes at a site known as “Cerro Fatal”.

Caccone’s team found some evidence of historic migration and interbreeding between the populations. But these events are rare, she says, and haven’t blurred the lines between the two lineages.

“This is a very good indication that gene flow has been restricted for a long time,” says , professor of genetics and evolution at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Revealing this kind of hidden biodiversity is important for two reasons, says Milinkovitch. “It can inform management decisions, but it also draws more attention towards a population and its ecosystem.”

The Reserva tortoises retain the original name given to the Santa Cruz tortoises, Chelonoidis porteri.

As of today, the Cerro Fatal population will go by the name Chelonoidis donfaustoi, a tribute to the work of Galapagos National Park ranger Fausto Llerana. “Don Fausto”, who retired last year after 43 years of service, is widely admired for his commitment to tortoise conservation.

“We have enough species named after old, white and mostly British men,” says Caccone. “I just wanted to pay tribute to the work of the people in Galapagos that have devoted their lives to the conservation of these animals.”

Journal reference: PLoS One,

Image credits (top to bottom): Tui De Roy/Roving Tortoise Photos/Minden Pictures; Washington Tapia

What do you get if you cross a Belgian chicken and a French chicken? A work of art, according to conceptual artist . The judges of this year’s at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, obviously agree.

Last weekend, the Belgian artist received a much-coveted Golden Nica award for his long-running . At its heart is an ambitious breeding programme that aims to distil the genetic diversity of the world’s chicken breeds into a single “cosmopolitan” animal.

Every time his chicken-related artwork goes on show in a museum or cultural space, it raises a big debate about globalisation, multiculturalism, art and science, says Vanmechelen. “The whole project stands for bio- and cultural diversity.”

Vanmechelen conceived the project in the late 1990s. Since then, his chickens have inspired an extraordinary diversity of artistic outputs including paintings, photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, lectures and taxidermy. But for Venmechelen, the real works of art are the novel breeds of chicken that he has created on a 10-acre site near Meeuwen on the border of Belgium and France.

Fancy fowl

In keeping with this location, he began by crossing a classically Belgian variety, the cuckoo coloured (link in Dutch), with a typically French bird, the chic chick . For his next cross, he paired one of the resulting birds – his Mechelse Bresse – with a representative bird from the UK, the . Since then, Vanmechelen has continued this iterative, assimilative process, coming ever-closer to the so-called “cosmopolitan chicken”.

So far, he has introduced genes from 17 different “national” breeds from around the world. His latest creation, its newest addition of genes from a Slovenian chicken, appeared in a cage-based installation at the Ars Electronica Festival. It also joined him on stage to receive his award for “Hybrid Art”, a category that emphasises “the process of fusing different media and genres into new forms of artistic expression”.

The rooster was surrounded by the winning entries from other categories – robots, computers, 3D printers – but according to Vanmechelen, it more than held its own. “There was a very high focus on it,” he says. “You saw all these technical and digital and very advanced things and then in between you saw a living chicken.”

The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project has an analytical component too. Jean-Jacques Cassiman, a human geneticist at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium, has sequenced DNA from several of the national breeds that Vanmechelen has used. Based on an analysis of 70,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – regions of the genome that are known to vary between individuals – there are clear differences between national breeds, he says. “We have an assay with these SNPs where you can determine whether the chicken you buy is indeed a Poulet de Bresse or something that looks like a Poulet de Bresse but isn’t,” Cassiman says.

De-domestication

Cassiman has also studied the genetic variation of Vanmechelen’s hybrid creations. “We see an increasing diversity as we move through the generations,” he says.

This makes sense of Vanmechelen’s anecdotal observations of his avian accomplishments. “In the 7th generation, I saw all these colours, shapes and details were coming back from all the different breeds I had used to that point.” In addition, as the lineage becomes ever more diverse, so the chickens seem to be becoming healthier. “I saw that the chickens were living longer and the fertility was really going up,” he says. “Slowly I see that I am de-domesticating the chicken.”

Cassiman senses a great scientific opportunity to study the effect of this diversity on fertility, egg production, meat quality, immunity, survival and domesticity. “One of the reasons I got involved is that chickens are fantastic models for ovarian cancer,” he says.

The artistic premise, however, can make it difficult to get funding. “I am not taken too seriously about this,” Cassiman admits. “But now we have this resource, surely scientists and funding agencies should be grown up enough to explore this diversity and its phenotypic significance.”

WHEN I heard the sad news of Lonesome George‘s death, my first thought was for his fibroblasts. In 2006, I wrote a book on this singular giant tortoise, the last of his kind from the Galapagos island of Pinta. “There are, as yet, no cells from Lonesome George in a freezer,” I wrote as I explored the technical and ethical hurdles to cloning this one-of-a-kind animal. I thought – naively, I now realise – that my observation might nudge someone to pop a sliver of his skin into liquid nitrogen. At the time of his death last month this had not happened.

Since the late 1970s, the Institute for Conservation Research at San Diego Zoo in California has been doing exactly this for other animals. Its contains cell cultures from more than 800 species. This, in turn, has spawned the , an international consortium of like-minded institutions with a further 100 or so species.

The fact that cells from a tortoise widely known as the world’s rarest animal are not in any of them should be a wake-up call. For the most critically endangered species there should, I believe, be far more effort to preserve viable cell cultures from as many different individuals as possible. Starting now.

This is not because I have given up on the more traditional methods of conservation, but because putting cells on ice is technically straightforward, relatively cheap and preserves so much more than an inert specimen of DNA.

At its most basic, this can mean freezing sperm cells for artificial insemination. Egg cells can also be preserved in their hundreds of thousands by collecting ovarian tissue from reproductively active females that die in captivity and dunking it in liquid nitrogen. Combine the two and, for mammals at least, you get embryos that can be implanted into surrogate mothers, perhaps even from a different species.

Another option is to take a skin sample, culture cells called fibroblasts and freeze them. This is just as easy and, in many ways, more valuable.

The most obvious application is reproductive cloning. A nucleus extracted from such cells could be transferred to an egg cell emptied of its own DNA to create an embryo and ultimately to bring new life into the world.

For Lonesome George’s subspecies, artificial insemination and cloning would have been complicated by a lack of females to supply eggs. But banking skin from endangered species is about far more than reproductive cloning.

Once thawed and given the right nutrients, fibroblasts will readily divide. With a bit of persuasion they can be transformed into pluripotent stem cells capable of developing into all manner of tissues, from bone to blood to brain. In a future where stem cells are routinely used to treat disease, this could help to prolong or improve the quality of life of endangered species in captivity. Before too long it will probably be possible to use stem cells to generate sperm and eggs, with obvious benefits for assisted reproduction – even for a lone survivor like Lonesome George.

That is not to say we should clone endangered animals. For many people – myself included – cloning raises all manner of very real cultural and ethical concerns. But none of these legitimate reservations should stop us from banking as many cells as possible as a matter of urgency, just in case.

One of the oft-heard arguments against reproductive cloning is that humans should not be interfering with nature or “playing god”. When it comes to endangered species, I am not persuaded. For the past few millennia, and particularly the past century, humans have been the driving force behind the overwhelming majority of species’ extinctions. In other words, we have already been very busy playing god.

In view of the ongoing destruction caused by rampant deforestation, the introduction of alien species and climate change – to name but a few of the forces we are unleashing on the planet – the idea that we might deny future generations the opportunity to perform a small act of creation through cloning seems woefully short-sighted.

There is another reason why ethical concerns over cloning should not get in the way of banking cells from endangered species: the no end of biological and technical challenges to overcome before reproductive cloning can ever become commonplace. Mercifully, this means the decision to clone or not to clone is not one that needs to be taken right now. It would be arrogant in the extreme to anticipate how future generations will view this technology. The option to clone is, quite frankly, the very least we can give them.

Sad though it is to admit, it probably won’t be long before we have to use reproductive cloning to save some of the world’s most endangered species from extinction. For those surviving only in captivity, continued existence may depend on using banked cell lines to introduce some long-lost and much-needed genetic diversity into the mix.

“It probably won’t be long before we have to use cloning to save the most endangered species”

None of this, of course, should ever replace good, old-fashioned habitat protection and other tried and tested conservation measures. In Galapagos, one of the most pristine tropical archipelagos left on Earth, these are hugely important. Faced with urban development, mass tourism and invasive species, the staff of the have a lot to do if they are to maintain the archipelago’s aloofness from globalisation’s homogenising glare.

I believe we also need to use the technology that is at our disposal. Lonesome George’s longevity – he was probably more than 100 when he died – and his slow pace of life gave the impression that there was time to play with. There wasn’t, and there isn’t.