How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 120: La Plata Dolphin Population Structure Helps Manage the Endangered Species
On Monday, we talked about the the species of dolphin where an individual got stranded; picked up by a beachgoer and pet by about 30-50 people before it died. It was tragic to say the least, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about some research on the La Plate Dolphin to give you context of how the species is managed.
Talk a listen and find out what the research says about this tiny marine mammal.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session120
Welcome to the speaker for Blue Podcast, session 120. What's up everybody? Today is Research Thursday's, I almost forgot there for a sec. Today's Research Thursday's, and like I promised at the beginning of the week, we're going to talk about La Plata dolphin, which is also known as Francescanidolphin. It is the dolphin, or the species of dolphin, that was actually taken out of the water on Monday. It was a story that I talked about on Monday where beachgoers took an individual out of the water out of a beach resort in Argentina, and patted it, and passed it around, and it ended up dying of dehydration. I said I was going to find out more about this, and today we are going to talk about a research paper that defines its population structure, and that has implications for management, which we're going to talk about on today's episode, speaking for Blue Podcasts, so stay tuned. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, can't get the song bad blood out of his head, Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody, welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of Speak Up for Blue dot com, marine ecologist, and self-proclaimed ocean paner. That's right, I'm an entrepreneur, I like business, I like to run a business, but a business that protects the ocean, and Speak Up for Blue is part of my business. So welcome, guys, today, it's research Thursdays, always exciting on research Thursdays, and like I said at the beginning of the week, we are going to find out a little bit more about La Plata dolphin, which is also known as the Francescanidolphin, which is how I'm going to refer to it from now on. This Latin name is Ponteporia, Ponteporia Belene Ville. That's what it's name, I'm not going to refer to it that because I can't pronounce that all the time quickly, I have to really focus on that. But we're going to do a research paper that looks at its population structure of the endangered dolphin, and we're going to talk about why it's important to know the population structure to manage it. And we've covered something similar in the past, and I'm going to mention that in this story in today's episode. Before we do, I just wanted to thank the people who are supporting this podcast through our Patreon campaign. That is Chris and Claire Jeffer, Dr. Judith Weiss, and Ron and Judy, thank you very much for your support. If you want to support conserving the ocean and explaining to people why we need to conserve the ocean, making them aware of ocean issues, and how to implement the solutions that reduce or and/or eliminate the ocean issues, you can do so at speakingforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N. But let's get into the episode for now. So like I said before, we're going to talk about the population structure of the endangered Francescanid dolphin. It's a reassessing management unit. So this was a paper that was done by a number of authors. And they're all from Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, all from Sao Paulo, Brazil. You have a laboratory of molecular biodiversity, and these are all in Portuguese, of course, we're Brazilian, I guess, is a different way of saying it. But it's really kind of a cool piece, because of course, as we all know, from if you've been listening to the podcast this week on Tuesday and even on Monday, we know that this dolphin is a river dolphin, and it is found in the southwest Atlantic along the coast of Brazil, Argentina, in parts of Uruguay. And it stays in coastal areas, so close to the coast in the ocean, as well as rivers in Argentina. It's actually the La Plata River is where it's normally found, hence the other name that it has. It's been there, found historically, however, there are less than 30,000 of these individuals, and it is on the IUCN Red List, which means it's a species at risk, internationally recognized. So to find out more about this, the authors decided, let's look at its population structure. And when you look at its population structure, these authors looked at the genetic makeup of this population to find out if there are clusters of genetically different individuals of the species and if they're grouped. So that means over time, sometimes, and a lot of times, actually, over time, if there are some species that are found geographically spread out, or spatially spread out, then, and they say they go into rivers a lot, or they stay isolated from another population, they don't mix their genes as they mutate, or as the natural selection occurs, can be different than the same population, or what is thought to be the same population. Hence, they have two populations of the same species, which makes the species more diverse, which makes it more resistant to extinction. Now when you're looking at a species that is under 30,000 individuals, and all of a sudden you have some genetically, you find out you have some genetically different species of this population, or the species genetically different, or parts of it is, where it's still part of the same population, but it's genetically different. That means it's a little more stable, because if one of those genes in that population, or one of those populations becomes extirpated, or extinct, or not found in that area, the gene of the other species that makes it different may allow that part of the population to continue on. So it makes it more stable, the more diversity you have, the more stable you have. So currently, the Francis Gana has four Francis Gana management units, so it's managed in four units. So it's specifically managed in four units, and they're geographically dispersed based on probably ways of regionally spaced, based on some differentiation in population, or even just how people can research them. They don't really go into the, oh here we go, the Francis, the proposed Francis Gana management areas, or FMA's, are based on biology, demography, morphology, and genetic data. So they're incorporated into management planning and in the delineation of research efforts. So the whole, this study re-evaluated that proposal through the analysis of control region sequences from Francis Ganas throughout the distribution range. So that means 162 different Francis Ganas were sampled, genetically analyzed, and then they figured out based on that how many more management units they could find. In the study, I'm not going to break down how they did everything, but in the study, you can read it. There's going to be a link on the show notes, which is speakupforblue.com/session120, I can't believe we're already at 120 episodes, that's awesome. So what they noticed from these, from this genetic analysis is that there are genetically diverse, genetically diverse genes. So the population can be separated into more management units, okay, based on these different populations, or actually the same population, but genetically different individuals or groupings of this population. So they said that, let's see here, a deep evolutionary break was observed between the Francis Ganas from the northern and southern portions of the species distribution, indicating that they must be managed as two evolutionary significant units, or ESUs. Furthermore, additional FMA should be recognized to accommodate the genetic differentiation found in each ESU, okay, these results have immediate consequences for the conservation and management of this endangered species. So what they found is that they found the northern portion and the southern portion were evolutionarily different, okay, so those groupings were significantly different genetically. So there's a genetic differentiation, within each the northern and southern units, there had to be more FMA's, so more Francis Gana management areas to signify more differentiation in genetics, okay, so that means there's more diversity within the population. So each unit represented a different genetic group, okay, so not genetically different, so much as to name them a different species, but they're just genetically different within the same species, which I said before, makes them more stable, because if one grouping gets extirpated, or goes extinct, or extirpated means they're not found there anymore, another group will still be there, so that same species will be there, and that differentiation in genes could mean the difference between, you know, presence or absence, right, it could be the reason why they survive. This is how animals have survived for millions of years, okay, so this dolphin has this population structure is actually quite diverse, and they found that there should be more FMA's, instead of just having four FMA's, you have two evolutionary significant units, within those two evolutionary significant units, you have more of a breakdown, and the breakdown turned out to be, let's just see here, I think it was, I think it was a total of six FMA's in this study, and I'm gonna have to get, I'm gonna have to get confirmation, because it looks like it's six, hold on a second here, yeah, I believe it's six, yeah, so there are six FMA's in total, so that means the two on top turned into be four, that were found in the earlier sections, and the two on the bottom stayed the same, so they're total of six, okay, now what does that mean for management? Well now, we're gonna see researchers study all the different groupings of this population, find out how each group genetic grouping is doing, how the population is doing, so they're gonna measure these populations, they're gonna take samples, they're gonna make sure that the population is healthy, means that it's growing, or if it's getting, if it's getting, if it's reducing, they're gonna find out why it's reducing, some of the reasons that I've already found to be where the animals are reducing is, are the fact that they are so close to the coast and to humans, they are highly, they are more likely to be impacted by humans, so we're looking at water quality, because they're found in rivers, they're directly affected by water quality, if riverine waters and coastal waters have high nutrients or high pollutants, high what we call PCBs or PCHs, which are basically chemicals in the water, basically hydrocarbons, polycyclic hydrocarbons I believe, is the PCH, you know, that affects them, that can negatively affect them, those are very, those are very, basically it's like a poison, a toxin for those animals, okay, so you see a lot of pollution in the water and degradation of habitat because of that pollution, you're gonna see a lot of, you can see a lot less of these animals, which reduces their population, so water, coastal water quality, you have habitat loss from development, these, these dolphins are found in highly urbanized areas, so that means that they're gonna, the rivers and streams are gonna be altered where they're found, the rivers where they're found, so if they get altered, the habitat might change and of course the dolphins might disappear, again, reducing the number of places it can inhabit, meaning reducing the number of, the number of individuals of each grouping, so you have, you know, loss of habitat, you have water quality, you have overfishing, so you're fishing along the coast, these dolphins can get cotton nets, you know, what happens to the vaquita as well, these dolphins are small, they're not big, they can get cotton nets very, very easily, right, they're about 90 pounds, they're probably above five feet, if, if that, three to five feet, so they're not very big for, especially for dolphins, so, and of course if they get cotton nets and they get stuck under water, they can't breathe above water, they need air to breathe, they can't breathe, then they eventually drown and that's not a good way to go, so you have overfishing, you have habitat loss and you have water quality, bad water quality, now all take a role in these areas, now these FMAs, or these FMUs, oh no, FMAs, Francesca, Francescanna management area, sorry, they are not necessarily protected areas, they're just research areas, right, it would be great to get these areas protected, so that we can manage each of these areas, right, we can manage each of these areas properly, we can manage the species properly, it'd be great to see a network of marine protected areas within this, that really manage the diversity of this, of this, of the species, right, it's an endangered species, it needs to be protected, it needs to have more protection than just research areas, or these management areas, it doesn't really say in this article what these management areas do, or the protection involved in them, all it says is that it allows them to, allows each unit allow, each area allows the species to be researched more carefully, but it doesn't really allow more than that, so let's hope that eventually as these species are found, more of these genetic differentiates are found within the population, we're going to find more protection, more reason to protect these species, so yeah, that's it for today, if you guys have any questions or any comments, you can do that on our, on our show notes, which is speakupforblue.com/session120, or 120, you can also find any, all the links to the actual paper, and on the, which is no, I found this on PLOS1, which is great because you can actually access this paper for free, you can download the PDF, or you can just look it on your browser, and you can look at all the different figures up and up closely, you don't have to zoom in or anything like that, it does it all for you, so it's a great way to get everything going, or just to take a look at some of this study, and it's not, you know, not very complex, I would, I stayed, I just looked at the introduction and the conclusion, the discussion, but the materials and methods and results are pretty short, it's a pretty short article, but it has, it packs a big punch people, it packs a big punch, but it's a great article, I think you guys should take a read, so you can look at that on the, on the show notes, which is speakupforblue.com/session120, and of course, if you want to contribute to our campaign of what we're trying to do, spread the ocean message on the podcast platform, so that people can be more aware of what's happening in the ocean, more aware of what's happening from ocean, from an ocean issue standpoint, and implement ocean solutions that we suggest, you can do so at our Patreon campaign, by going to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you can put in a monthly support, financial support, we really appreciate it, we're trying to not only spread the awareness on the podcast platform, but other platforms as well, such as digital magazines and videos, so to do that, we need your help, and your help is very much appreciated, so go to speakupforblue.com/patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N, and you will be able to contribute to our overall mission. So thank you very much for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show, you've been listening to Speakup for Blue podcast, I am your host, Anthony Zoan, happy Thursday, and happy conservation. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)