i'm really delighted to be here today and to have the opportunity to share with you some experiences and perspectives that i have had throughout my career on species conservation and what i really want to focus on today are some examples of species conservation projects that i've at least been loosely involved with that have made use of some really innovative emerging technology so the field of conservation biology itself as it was defined by michael soulet in 1985 is really quite broad and it's made up of these vastly different disciplines so where do i fit in on this figure well i'm a geneticist so i'm somewhere up in the range of genetics and population biology i use dna and molecular methods to try to better understand and manage wildlife populations so i was hired as a as a conservation geneticist many years ago and the things that i think about and that i'm worried about and that i study are things like gene flow how connected our populations what kind of things impede gene flow what kind of things facilitate it and i'm also very interested in trying to preserve genetic diversity because obviously as populations get small we worry about things like inbreeding depression and if we want to make sure that our species have the best shot at being able to survive and face future challenges we want to make sure they have enough genetic variation so that they have the ability to adapt to future changes now the reason that i'm showing you this figure is i want you to understand my perspective i'm a geneticist i study you know genetics and i worry about gene flow but there are many different perspectives out there and they're equally important but i am going to talk today a lot about genetics but again all of our perspectives are really important i think it's important to remember that so to try to get you to understand my perspective i'm going to walk you through this hypothetical example so let's pretend that we have this fox species of fox that we're interested in and this fox exists in four big populations they're pretty well connected there's good movement among these populations and there's high genetic diversity which i'm depicting by these different colors but like many species today our fox faces threats to its persistence these threats might include things like habitat loss and fragmentation due to anthropogenic change it could be over exploitation could be invasive species could be disease or pollution or even climate change and the impact that some of these threats have on our species is that it changes the distribution of our fox and we might end up with something that looks like this where we have smaller populations now that are much more disconnected there's lower movement among these populations and importantly to me we have lower genetic diversity and if things continue to get bad for our fox we might even end up in a situation like this where we have just three little tiny populations they're completely disconnected we might have local extinction in one of those populations but importantly there's very low genetic diversity and when we get to this point things are really really bad and so people often you know come to the rescue so to speak and they bring the remaining individuals into captivity in order to protect them and also sometimes in order to try to you know breed them again so that we can put them back out into the wild and if we're successful at doing that we might be able to actually reintroduce them into the wild which is a really good thing except we have to remember now that these populations are very small and they have really low genetic diversity and so we have to whoops we have to continually augment these populations continually move animals into these populations to prevent inbreeding and ultimately extinction so this is very labor intensive but it's very important from a genetics perspective so it's not fun to go from a great nice healthy fox population to the situation that we have on the right and sometimes this can make us feel very overwhelmed and very devastated and you know to make matters worse many of the causes of these things that happen to our species of conservation concern are human induced but i guess i would argue that every cloud has its silver lining and that you know humans can be very innovative and they can come up with some really uh important and interesting solutions to conservation problems and i would argue that we can use technology that humans come up with alongside strong conservation priorities to help preserve our species so we've heard a lot about some of these really cool technologies that are out there today kathy talked about some of them yesterday but what i really want to focus on are emerging technologies now there was a study that was published last year by some folks at csu who highlighted three emerging technologies that they thought were going to transform conservation and those three emerging technologies were artificial intelligence so essentially machine learning to analyze data whether it's from camera traps or audio recordings and essentially what this is doing is letting the computer do the hard work so that it's reducing the time that people have to be involved the second topic they mentioned was network sensors and i think the virtual fencing presentation that we just heard is right along these lines where you're essentially connecting data collection devices and this allows us to have a more comprehensive view of movement and behavior finally they highlighted the topic of e-dna and genomics and e-dna is a very powerful technique i'm not going to talk about e-dna today i could spend another hour talking just about edna but what i want to focus on is the power of genomics and how we can use that with biotechnology so essentially we can use genomic methods to identify important genetic variation and then use that information in management and intervention and sometimes we use biotechnology to get to that state so again i'm really excited and interested to learn about all these other emergence emerging technologies but today i'm just going to focus on genomics and the use of biotechnology so i want to walk you through a little bit of the history of you know where we got to where we are now when i started working for usgs when i was hired as a conservation geneticist we didn't have nearly as many tools in our toolbox as we do now essentially what we did was we did what we call genetics which is we would go into the genome which at that time was really difficult to do and we would look at just a few markers a few stretches of dna within the whole genome and these markers tend to be what we call non-coding so they don't code for proteins so because they don't code for proteins and because they're not under selection they tend to accumulate a lot of mutations and variation without having any impact on an individual so they're really highly variable and they're actually really good for you know learning something about gene flow or genetic diversity and the types of markers we used in our early genetic studies and people still use them today are things like microsatellites and mitochondrial dna but about 10 years ago there was a big shift in the field of conservation genetics from genetics into genomics and this was really brought on by the fact that it now became very easy and fast and cheap to sequence dna so whereas before it was hard to get in there and even look at dna now it was really easy to get in and look at whole genomes so now we can you know look at many many markers tens of thousands of markers instead of just a handful four or five but importantly now we can look at coding dna so these are uh stretches of dna that code for proteins that are under selection and this is the type of genetic variation that underlies adaptation and is really important for people like me because i think this is the kind of genetic variation that we need to protect and preserve in our species at risk so using genomics we can also look at non-coding dna we can still look at gene flow and genetic diversity but now we can do it at a much larger scale so our estimates are much more precise but importantly again we can look at gene function and we can look at adaptation and i think that is a really big advance uh and a big bonus for genomics and the type of marker that we use in genomic studies are things called single nucleotide polymorphisms or snips so this kind of gives you the history of where we've been with conservation genetics but i really want to talk today about how we can use this information and and use it to inform biotechnology that is emerging things that you know that i would never even have thought about when i started my career so the technologies that i want to talk about today are bio banking so essentially taking something that we have today and storing it away for future use now this could be things like blood or tissue or dna but it could also be products that could be used to make future individuals that could be inserted into a population in the future these are things like cell lines sperm embryonic gonads the second thing i want to talk about is assisted reproductive technologies this is things like captive breeding and then the use of artificial insemination in vitro fertilization and cloning and finally i want to touch on a very new field called synthetic biology and this is the use of gene editing using the crispr cas9 technology that you may have read about or heard about in the news so what i thought i would do today is walk you through two examples of these projects that i've again been loosely involved with and talk about how we've used genetics and genomics and how we've made use of some of these emerging biotechnologies and then i want to end by talking about guinness and sage grouse of course and i want to you know give you a high level overview of what we've done up to to now in terms of genetics and genomics but then discuss you know where do these bio emerging biotechnologies fit into gunnison sage-grouse conservation so the first example that i want to walk you through is the north american plains bison so plains bison once numbered in the tens of millions and they were distributed almost all the way across north america which is evident when you look at the dark brown color on this map by about 1870 their range had been contracted dramatically and by about 1890 there were only about a thousand individuals left as shown in these red dots here and this was all due to over hunting and kind of the magnitude of this can be seen when we look at historical pictures of bison decimation luckily in the late 1800s a handful of private citizens who loved bison decided to go out and capture the remaining bison and bring them into captivity and make captive herds and so in order to do this they actually would go out and try to capture the calves and they brought them back to their you know to their land it was harder to capture a bull um bison at that point so they brought the calves back and many of these people were also cattle ranchers so they would bring the bison back and they would put it in with a mama cow and she would kind of adopt it and it turns out that you know these bison actually did really well in captivity but because there was this co-mingling of bison and cattle there were actually breeding experiments that where they were trying to breed a more hearty bison and so or produce a better commercial animal so so we have to keep keep in mind that there was this co-mingling between bison and cattle but again bison did really well in captivity as soon as you took kind of the hunting pressure off them herds began to grow and they grew so fast that the private herd owners really couldn't afford to keep this many bison on their land anymore and so there were efforts to to find places across the landscape where they could put bison back in that would be protected and managed by the federal government so fast forward to today now we have more than 11 000 planes bison that exist in 19 wild herds that are managed by the federal government and these bison are really managed separately from the over 300 000 that are privately owned and managed as livestock so those are separate and we're just focusing on the ones that are in the federal herds but importantly from a genetics perspective all the planes bison today descended from 30 to 50 bison that were brought into captivity and we think there were also about 25 bison that remained in yellowstone that weren't brought into captivity and didn't have this co-mingling with cattle that remained in yellowstone so what does this mean from a genetics perspective well obviously when you go down when you go from tens of millions down to a small number you're going to go through what we call a genetic bottleneck and when you come out the other side you've obviously lost genetic diversity importantly another thing that's important to think about here is that these herds are now being managed separately um there is no way for bison to move naturally between any of these herds so we have low genetic diversity and we have no ability to move among these herds so what does this look like across the landscape well we actually have three different agencies that are managing our bison the blm the fish and wildlife service and national park service and and these agencies obviously have different missions and they're managing their bison in different ways i also want to point out that the bison herds themselves are widely different sizes our biggest herd is yellowstone where you have 5000 bison and then we have some herds that have 10 bison so we really need to worry about if we want to maximize the remaining amount of genetic variation when you have herds that only have 10 individuals you know you need to start thinking about you know how are we going to deal with that because we lose genetic diversity when we have small numbers so there was a desire for common management practices and treating these doi herds as a meta population to try to minimize future loss of genetic variation so several years ago the department of the interior developed the bison conservation initiative and their overarching goals are shown here on the bottom of the slide but importantly at least for me one of these goals was genetic conservation and so one of the action items for the bison conservation initiative was to develop and implement a doi meta population strategy for bison so this is where i kind of came into the picture i obviously work for usgs and we don't manage anything we just do science and try to help our partners um but i was brought in to try to help these other the scientists the herd managers these people from the different agencies develop a meta-population strategy and so um the crux of the meta-population strategy is obviously that we don't have a ton of genetic diversity left within the bison and we want to make sure we don't lose any more of it obviously these herds are isolated they can't interact naturally and what that means is that you physically have to move bison put them on a truck drive them to another herd and let them go if you want to have gene flow so the crux of our meta population strategy is essentially when where how often and how many bison are we actually going to move so that's that's kind of a fun question and we've been grappling with that but to make matters a little bit more complicated we find we come to find that the co-mingling between bison and cattle has resulted in cattle genes now existing in the bison genome so now we have cattle in aggression into the bison genome and we don't really know if this is a really horrible thing um but it's something that all of the people involved in this project would like to have pure bison without cattle genes in them and so this is something that we're keeping in the back of our mind and obviously we're interested as well in trying to manage bison health so um in developing this strategy we had a lot of genetic data already so each herd manager goes out occasionally and collects genetic samples from each herd they genotype samples using microsatellites and mitochondrial dna so again these are those genetic techniques um they're estimating levels of genetic diversity in the herds and they're also estimating genetic differentiation between these herds the problem with the markers that they have been using for the last 20 years is that they're not all that precise which is okay but the ability to get at this question of integration is very limited with this type of marker but we went ahead and started working on our meta population strategy and uh we had lots of ideas about you know how simple or complex we might want to be our first thought was let's just develop a table and in that table you'll have information about a herd how how much genetic diversity is this is in the herd and how different it might be from all these other herds and then we can give a herd manager you know some ideas okay if you're going to move animals here are three options of herds that you might consider moving animals from um so very basic and giving general guidelines we you know we liked this because it was simple but we also felt like it was also kind of clunky um and we kind of thought about it in terms of you know an old-timey car where you could get in and you might be able to get to where you're going but it's not necessarily all that fast and it's not very comfortable so we thought we could do better so our second attempt at this was we said well if we're continually collecting genetic data it doesn't really make sense to have a static table let's convert that table into a database that we can continually update we thought that would be helpful and in addition this group had just gone through a population viability analysis exercise where they were trying to determine how many bison do you have to move in order to increase your genetic diversity and how often do you have to do it and the folks in this you know in this who were working with me on this felt like that was a really important component to include as well and so that was kind of our our second option where we're using a database and we're making use of this information from the pva and we saw this as more like a vw bug where you can go a lot faster but you know maybe it's not the most comfortable or flashy ride out there and we still felt like there were remaining obstacles in our way to be getting to where we wanted to really go and the biggest obstacle here was we all we've been collecting genetic data for 20 years and it works but we know there's a better way to do it now and we didn't want to develop a strategy that you know five years down the line would be completely obsolete we really wanted to make the shift into genomics so we knew that the genomic tools were actually already being developed so that was really great news we knew if we used these markers we could actually have more precise estimates of diversity and differentiation which was really important for us and we could also use we could use these markers to much better quantify catalan aggression and to better understand the impacts of cattle and aggression maybe it doesn't matter and if that's the case that's great but if it does matter you know should we be trying to minimize it or eradicate it so these were all things we were thinking about so our last strategy was again to develop this meta-population strategy switching to genomic techniques and trying to incorporate the idea of cattle and aggression and you know again this was kind of our cadillac model man we wanted to be in this fancy car going down the road with the best tools that we possibly could be doing um so you know this is a great idea there are still obstacles to getting to the cadillac model um we don't have any genomic data yet we have a bunch of data for the last 20 years that we've used to genotype with you know or we have genotyped with old markers so we don't want to throw that data away so essentially what we need to do now is to take a set of samples genotype them with both types of markers so we kind of have a frame of reference in doing that moving forward and that's not cheap so we had to be creative about finding funding but again we felt like these obstacles were really important to overcome so we're moving forward now with our cadillac model and we're feeling good we're starting to talk about you know which animals we want to move and it all came back to the yellowstone bison right so the yellowstone bison is the biggest most diverse herd out there and we think it has the lowest level of cattle integration so this is kind of our gold standard we want to go to yellowstone and we want to use those bison to move but the problem with the yellowstone bison is that many of the bison there carry brucellosis and brucellosis has been eradicated from everywhere except yellowstone and the last thing we want to do is start moving brucellosis around so we can't move any animals from yellowstone and use them in our meta population strategy and so our question then was how do we integrate yellowstone genetic diversity into our meta population and the answer to this came in the form of making use of some emerging biotechnologies in the form of assisted reproduction and so we um talked to a woman who's a reproductive uh biologist at csu her name is jennifer barfield and she's been very uh involved in trying to come up with some of these assisted reproductive techniques and she actually came up with a way to collect an embryo from an infected female in yellowstone and transfer it to a healthy female outside of yellowstone and that female gave birth to a healthy baby that has completely yellowstone genetics in addition she was able to collect sperm from yellowstone males and go through some kind of washing process to eliminate the um the possibility of brucellosis infection and she's been able to use that sperm in artificial insemination and has used that successfully as well so this biotechnology has been used to develop a new herd of bison it's called the soapstone herd it's just north of fort collins and all the individuals all the bison in that herd have yellowstone genetics but don't have brucellosis so now we can use those individuals in our meta population strategy okay now i want to switch gears and talk a little bit about another project that i was loosely involved with the black-footed ferret black-footed ferrets historically ranged from canada to mexico across the great plains they rely on prairie dogs for food in the early 1900s prairie dog numbers declined dramatically due to agricultural conversion poisoning and infection with plague declines in black-footed ferrets followed and they were thought to be extinct in the late 1970s but in 1981 a colony was actually found in wyoming and all of those black-footed ferrets were then taken into captivity and used as founders for a captive breeding program so importantly all of the over 600 individuals that were reintroduced into the landscape are the descendants of just 11 black-footed ferrets so again getting back to my genetic bottleneck example much like the bison the black-footed ferrets have gone through a genetic bottleneck and much like the bison we now have these kind of isolated uh colonies of black-footed ferrets out on the landscape samantha wisely who was very involved in this work from the beginning actually documented the bot genetic bottleneck that black-footed ferrets went through and then she later studied uh the colonies the reintroduced colonies and she was able to show that if populations weren't continually augmented they lost more genetic diversity and potentially even faced problems with inbreeding depression in addition to having low genetic diversity both black-footed ferrets and prairie dogs suffer from plague so black-footed ferrets can be vaccinated against plague and in fact all of the ones in captivity are vaccinated against plague but it's a it's a much harder situation with prairie dogs obviously and there has been a lot of research that has gone on trying to deal with uh vaccinating or dealing with plague in prairie dogs and this is very expensive and labor intensive so several years ago the fish and wildlife service was approached by a group called revive and restore and they wanted to set up a meeting with fish and wildlife service because they were interested in trying to apply some of these new biotechnologies to help save black-footed ferrets and i was kind of brought into this meeting because i was a geneticist and they thought maybe i knew something or could at least help the fish and wildlife service understand what it was that these people from revive and restore were talking about and so we had a meeting up at the blackfooted ferret center and this meeting involved people from usgs and fish and wildlife service the people from revive and restore and also oliver ryder who works for the san diego frozen zoo and in this meeting we identified two key needs for black-footed ferret recovery that we could potentially at least discuss some of these technologies on and that was number one trying to increase genetic variation in black-footed ferrets and number two trying to do something with plague whether it was in black-footed parrots or prairie dogs or both so the solution that well not the solution but the discussions that we had uh in terms of increasing genetic diversity so it turns out that ollie ryder had a cell line that he had developed from a black from one of the original black-footed ferrets that was brought into captivity but that had died before she was able to reproduce and he put that he developed that cell line and it had been in his frozen zoo for the past 20 or 30 years and we discussed this idea that if you could get a new individual with that genetic makeup and insert it into the population we could increase genetic variation and then we also talked about a solution for plague which involved gene editing resistance to plague now i have to say that this was probably one of the most uncomfortable and eye-opening meetings that i've ever been in it really pushed us way outside of our comfort zone but i have to give uh the folks at fish and wildlife credit i mean they they had very open mind um and they were willing to come and have these discussions and i guess my takeaway from these meetings or this meeting was that it really led to a lot of additional questions there was a big fear of unintended consequences so if they moved forward with some of these crazy ideas that these folks were talking about you know what if they messed up what they had spent you know the last 20 or 30 years working on and money and resources the last thing they wanted to do was mess that up um we also found that there was a real need for ethical guidelines some of these things you know just really made you say are we should we be doing this right and there really were not there were not ethical guidelines at all there's not people who are you know um who have that expertise to help guide us through that process we also uh talked about the fact that we really needed to have clear goals if we were gonna you know move down this path and we thought it was really important to weigh both the risks and the benefits of both action and inaction so if we do nothing you know what are the risks and benefits of that and if we actually go down some of these crazy roads you know what are the risks and benefits of that but at the end of the day there was a real desire for bold action you know these folks had spent you know hours and days and years you know they really are passionate about black-footed ferrets and they felt like if there's something we can do to help the ferrets you know let's continue to continue this discussion so the fish and wildlife service went ahead with genetic rescue using artificial reproductive technologies so this cell line from the ferret name willa who was brought into captivity and was never able to breed she died before she was able to breed and her cell line had been you know preserved at the san diego frozen zoo it was this cell line that was used to create elizabeth ann who's shown over here on the right and she is alive and well just north of fort collins and if she successfully breeds she will add a significant amount of genetic diversity to the species so the second part of this was this whole idea about plague genetic engineering disease resistance this is essentially using that crispr cas9 technology to cut out part of the genome that's susceptible to disease and replace it with genetic code for disease resistance and so far there has been little movement on this from the fish and wildlife service or revive and restore but my advice or my if i had to guess this technology isn't going to go away and this is going to be continue to be brought up when you have situations like plague with black-footed ferret so i want to end by talking about gunnison sage grouse because it's one of my favorite species so even before i was hired as a geneticist with usgs i was a phd student at csu and i was tanking around with genetic methods and trying to understand connectivity among populations and at the same time jess and clay braun and jerry hupp had been doing all this amazing research and they were like hey we think we have a new species but we want to know is there any evidence of gene flow like genetic information might be the last piece of evidence that would make the decision that would help us get over that hump and you know accept it as a new species but so they brought me in and they asked me to kind of try to determine whether or not there was gene flow at least between northern colorado and southern colorado and again at the time i was you know using these really primitive genetic techniques and this shows data from just one piece one micro satellite locus so just one piece of dna in the genome but even with one little piece of dna it was really evident that there was no gene flow between northern and southern colorado that they were quite differentiated and that the birds down here in gunnison had low genetic diversity so once it was accepted as a new species we started to think about connectivity within this species we did a study again using microsatellites and mitochondrial dna to figure out how connected our populations were and it turns out that most of the populations were very isolated and that some of them had very low genetic diversity in particular the pineal mesa population and the dove creek monticello population so as tony talked about yesterday colorado parks and wildlife translocated birds from the gunnison basin into these satellite populations and they did this to augment the numbers and also with the goal of increasing genetic diversity so um we did some work after the translocation and this is work that was led by shauna zimmerman who's here today and she was able to show that genetic differentiation reduced and genetic diversity increased after these translocations additional work that shauna did she just presented today so i'm not going to talk about that but that's kind of where we've been in terms of genetic data and now we i want to switch gears and talk just for a second about some applications we've done with genomic data so several years ago we knew we wanted to make this switch from genetics to genomics so cam and i brought in a postdoc whose name is kevin oh who's shown here on this slide and it was really his job to try to pull us from the genetics world into the genomics world and so he actually sequenced the genome of the gunnison sage-grouse and he developed genomic resources that we need to do genomic studies and so he his his studies were really kind of looking at gunnison and greater sage grouse and trying to understand and conserve local adaptation and later shauna zimmerman who's again here did some work just focused on the gunnison uh popular the gunnison species so again with genomics you can start to understand local adaptation and there are lots of different ways that greater sage grouse and gunnison sage grouse might be local locally adapted could be to climate could be do a lot of different things but kevin was really interested in this idea of local dietary adaptation so we know that sage grouse rely on sagebrush for food and we know that sage brush produced these toxic compounds to avoid herbivory and the range of sagebrush you know basically ranges all over uh western north america so there are a whole lot of different varieties and species of sagebrush and so and we know that the different sagebrush varieties have distinctly different combinations and concentrations of these toxins and so a sage grouse living in montana eating the sagebrush there is facing very different combinations and concentrations of toxins than a sage grouse living in gunnison right so we were wanted to ask the question do sage grouse have dietary adaptation that allows them to eat the local sagebrush that they co-evolved with and the short answer to this is yes we think that they do kevin was able to show that sage grouse are locally adapted to the sagebrush that they co-evolved with and he did this study again across the range of both species shauna showed that the same is true for within the gunnison sage grouse which it occurs at a much smaller range and the implications of this are that when we're doing restoration we want to make sure that we're putting the right sagebrush in so that it matches with the sage grouse that are going to eat it and if we're going to be moving birds around we want to try to make sure that we match the source population with the recipient population so we're not putting birds at a disadvantage okay so that's kind of the whirlwind tour of genetics and genomics for gunnison sage grouse what about some of these emerging biotechnologies well the first thing i want to talk about is bio banking so storing things away for future use well certainly there's a lot of dna and blood and maybe a little bit of tissue from guinness and sage grouse that i've used over the years that are archived in a -80 freezer that will be available for future use so that's good news i guess but what i really want to talk about today is the use of these products again that we would use to make new grouse and insert into the population in the future to try to increase genetic diversity and these are things like cell lines uh sperm and embryonic gonads and i've had some conversations with ollie ryder at the san diego zoo and basically what he suggested in terms of cell lines was if you wanted to develop a cell line for a bird you needed to collect a blood feather or a pin feather and use the pulp to to culture fibroblasts and that could be used to develop a cell line and stored in the san diego zoo or the smithsonian or another facility such as that we also know that sperm can be cryo preserved for future use and that you could potentially collect embryonic gonads which are taken from eggs at approximately seven days of incubation so um if you were gonna consider that as an option uh it's really important to think about well what are the goals of this and what are the risks and the benefits so the goals might be to preserve genetic variation that could be lost if our you know our populations are cycling and they're kind of going down so we're obviously losing some amount of genetic diversity if we bio-bank material now and we lose genetic diversity you could potentially insert it back into the population in the future so that's the idea anyway so the risks of this um and this is just kind of off the top of my head are you know anytime you handle an individual there's stress or potential loss of individuals in a species that already has low numbers the potential benefits of this are there is the potential to increase future genetic diversity if you continue to lose genetic diversity going into the future so essentially getting it back to what it is now okay the second thing i want to touch on is the use of assisted reproductive technologies both kathy and tony mentioned the elephant in the room yesterday this idea about um captive breeding do we want to revisit captive breeding for dennis and sage grouse and just to highlight what was learned by the work that tony apa and leif wickman did they were able to develop methods for egg collection incubation hatch and captive rearing initially they had problems with bacteria and fungus but um in in conversations with leaf it sounds like they were able to overcome at least some of that um their captive flock actually bred successfully and produced fertile eggs and they argued that you know progeny could be reintroduced out into the wild but you had to make sure you were using appropriate translocation methods and one of the important things that they mention in their paper is that if you're going to do captive breeding it's best to start early and not wait until this is the only option left in order to maintain gunnison sage grouse so the goals of this if we were to consider captive rearing again would be to provide or preserve current genetic variation that could be lost and also to augment numbers assuming that habitat issues are fixed right so you don't want to be you know churning out all these birds in captivity and then putting them back out into habitat that can't support them so they're doomed to die right that's not a good use of resources so the risks of this obviously are loss of birds and eggs when you're moving them into captivity so the ones that you're going to use as sources for your captive flock and sometimes in captive breeding situations you get artificial selection which can be a problem and there sometimes is adaptation to captivity which could also potentially be a problem um the benefit here obviously would be the ability to protect birds and genetic diversity from loss to make more uh gunnison sage grouse so that we could you know hopefully get them back out onto the landscape and augment populations one of the biggest issues with this is it takes a lot of money and it takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of manpower this is not uh something that's easily done and i think you know if you talk to tony and leaf they would tell you the same thing talking to the folks who do it with the black-footed ferrets it's a it's a very big production um but for sure something worth at least thinking about okay the next topic that i want to talk about is uh artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization and cloning well obviously at least in my knowledge this has not been attempted with gunnison sage grouse there have been some artificial insemination work done in colombian sharptail grouse associated with methods to successfully translocate them this could potentially be used in the future to bolster genetic diversity within a species or locally and it might also help with some of these trans locations um i would uh at least when i was putting this together i felt like it was too early to really pin down what the goals of this would be and try to weigh the benefits and risks and finally we get to this synthetic biology and again this is the gene editing this is really powerful technology but it has not been widely implemented in wildlife species yet it's beginning to be explored for control of invasive species also disease resistance and there is even discussion of trying to engineer local adaptation and the example that i've heard um that has to do with this has to do with uh coral there are some coral that are locally adapted to warmer water temperatures and they were saying well if we could get in and figure out what genes code for that and then genetically engineer all these other corals then you know maybe that would help our our coral species i i don't really see at this moment and a clear role for gene editing and gunnison sage grouse conservation certainly not in the realm of trying to edit local adaptation because i don't feel like we really even understand that very comprehensively yet and i think it's way too early to assess this but this technology's out there and it's going to you will come across it in your lifetime i bet so um i want to wrap up and just say uh in terms of biobanking and assisted rep reproduction and synthetic biology i'm not here to advocate for any of those things i just wanted you as the community that is involved with gunnison sage grouse conservation to be aware of them and if you ever consider any of these technologies i hope that you set clear goals that you put all options on the table that you weigh the risks and the benefits that you think about what your obstacles are and try to overcome them sometimes obstacles are just funding and you know there are a lot of people out there who have a lot of money so if you find the right people who want to fund your project i'd say go for it go for that cadillac model if it makes sense to if you're just within reach of it and you have to overcome some obstacles i say go for that and finally be hopeful and act boldly when you can and now i just want to end with just a couple of words about collaborating for conservation obviously we've all talked about bringing all of us come to the conservation table with really different perspectives and skills and experiences and this is much like different instruments that people might play i would argue that sometimes we even need to go out of our normal circles of collaboration and find people who do really different things and bring them into your conversations each of these instruments can make music on their own but i think we can all agree that the sound of a jazz band playing together and improvising is more powerful than the sound of any of those you know instruments on their own so when you're doing collaborations search for collaborators with diverse experiences and perspectives keep an open mind be uninhibited and creative there are no stupid ideas think outside the box respect everybody who's in your collaboration be willing to compromise and finally keep your eye on the prize collaborations can be really hard sometimes you know egos are big and people are sometimes you know fighting for common resources and it can be really hard but if we remember what we're all we're all on the same team and at the end of the day we really just want to make sure that our species like gunnison sage grouse are around for generations to come and with that i just want to circle back to michael soulet who said there are no hopeless cases just expensive cases and people without hope and with that i want to acknowledge people that i have worked with through the years and people who help me with this presentation and i'd be happy to take any questions that anybody might have i have a question online yes how important is it to bring the birds that remain in monticello to gunnison in order to preserve the genetic diversity [Music] uh so are you asking if you want to move them to gunnison or move them into captivity i'm not sure okay um but okay well so the important thing is that we do have different genetic diversity in dove creek and monticello i would not advocate bringing them to the gunnison basin per se but we could do things like trying to biobank maybe the genetic diversity that's in monticello that we could you know make sure that we preserve it and protect it for future use [Music] um yeah this question is related to the bison herds um but are they on tribal lands and does the intertribal buffalo council partner with the genetic information and analysis so the the meta population strategy that i'm involved with is only managing or this strategy only applies to the doi bison herds themselves but our herds are are produce surplus animals and so we're always looking for ways to offload bison and we work with uh itbc to take those extra bison and give them uh to tribes so that they can put them on tribal land thank you thank you so much really really amazing presentation i learned so much i was hoping you could tell us a bit more about some of the sources of ethical discomfort you referred to you mentioned one meeting in particular and you spoke about stress or loss of individuals what other kind of examples were you referring to um so i think the the ethics was really mostly involved with the fact that you know when you hear the word cloning that can be scary right and certainly when you talk about gene editing and creating something that didn't necessarily exist before that poses ethical challenges i think there was a real fear of unintended consequences like you know humans have done a lot of um maybe not so smart things in their lifetime and have had really negative impacts on the ecosystem when they thought they were doing something positive and i think you know when you're dealing with something like the blackfoot ferret and you feel strongly that you want to do something but you don't want to do something that's going to destroy your whole effort um you know and from a human perspective like you know should we be going in and messing around with the genomes of animals and you know those were kind of some of the ethical things and and we didn't feel qualified to answer those questions and we felt like we really need somebody who has that expertise to help us navigate some of those questions hey sarah yes um great talk very thought provoking and uh interesting so i guess it posed a question to you uh if since we know we have diversity across the satellites and in these populations unique genetic diversity how do we think about translocations and how do we think about uh with declining populations what numbers low enough that we should be creating cell lines for the species or for the varieties within the species and if you had those conversations with those at the san diego frozen zoo which is a great name yeah yeah um so so this whole idea of of genetic variation um a lot of the work that we did and that shawna did you know we did using microsatellites and so that type of genetic information is basically just telling you something about history and connectivity but it's not necessarily telling you what is the important genetic variation that you know that the species needs to survive um sean has done some work that has allowed us to begin to look at some of the adaptive or the local adaptation in these satellites um i think it would be important to do some more of that work um you know she used a set of snips to look at that which is a subset of the genome we have samples where we could do whole genome sequencing of all of the individuals from all of the satellite populations that would really give us a great idea of you know really what's out there and would give me a better feel would make me feel more comfortable about making recommendations about moving versus not moving i don't have a great answer for how many you would want to bank away um but it might be you know i could envision like doing this big or doing this study where you looked at you know the most diverse individuals in each of these populations or which populations you know had important diversity and then going in if you decided you you know the community wanted to do that going in and trying to develop cell lines from those but you know just off the cuff it might be good to get one from each satellite population and one from the gunnison basin yeah thanks very much sarah um i think part of cam's question and it's a question i get a lot with the translocations is what's more important maintaining genetic diversity in a satellite population or actually having birds there right so at what point do you how do you weigh those two things yeah so that's a really good question and i i think the answer to that question is that if your population is tanking so say we have really unique genetic diversity in pinyon mesa but or maybe dove creek and it's tanking and there's like three birds there then if you then i don't think you should worry about moving birds in and swamping out the unique genetic diversity because those birds aren't going to be you know the population will go extinct anyway right so when you have really small numbers it's kind of this you know trade-off right like you know that there may be something that's important for local adaptation but if those birds go extinct anyway then you've lost it right so sometimes infusing a little bit of genetic diversity from the gunnison basin into those satellite populations uh allows for the population the satellite itself to be able to survive and you know if there is important uh so if there are important genetics in those satellites that are under selection then if any birds remain there they're going to be subject to that selection and they could then you know have end up generations down the line with that important genetic variation that you need to be able to survive in that particular satellite but yeah it's a hard question for sure you know because you don't want to swap things out but you also if you don't do anything you might lose the whole thing so does a gene editing technology allow for it or have the potential you think to restore diversity or unique characteristics to some of these sub-populations in the future you know um when we had that meeting at the with the blackfooted at the blackfooted parrot center and we talked uh to the revive and restore people one of their suggestions was well we have museum specimens we know what the genetic diversity looked like now we don't have um cell lines from those individuals but we know what their genomes look like so they were talking about this idea of well if we know what it looks like we can build it now now i don't know much about how hard or easy that would be but these people are very um optimistic so you know um it's out there so we'll see see if that's a possibility down the line you
2022-05-10