The New Jersey Conservation Foundation, a major environmental group working within the state, is pleading with wildlife officials not to remove bald eagles from the endangered species list as planned, saying a virus that’s killing peregrine falcons will inevitably prove lethal to eagles.

In June, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection said the bald eagle has made such a remarkable recovery that it was proposing to remove it from the state’s endangered species list. There was only one nesting pair in the state in 1970. As of last year, there were 267.

But Emile DeVito, who wrote Monday to the state’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, asked officials not adopt the change because of a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) that is striking peregrine falcons along the coast. DeVito is manager of science and stewardship for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation.

“The peregrine falcons are dying left and right,” DeVito told The Inquirer. “And they are dead within 24 hours of showing symptoms. What we know about it from Michigan and Wisconsin is that it’s going to be huge problem.”

DeVito wrote in his letter, which was sent as a formal comment on the endangered species list removal proposal, that the HPA is “already serious and ongoing” and removing the bald eagle from the list would weaken protections.

‘Actively discussing the issue’

Larry Hajna, a spokesperson for the DEP, said that Fish and Wildlife officials are aware of the spread and impact of HPAI on wildlife.

“It is premature for us to take a position regarding the potential impacts HPAI is having on our wildlife, including bald eagles, but we are actively discussing the issue and reviewing data,” Hajna wrote in an email.

DeVito said he had learned of the spreading flu to eagles at a briefing of New Jersey’s Endangered and Nongame Species Advisory Committee. HPAI is a highly contagious disease known as bird flu or avian flu, transmitted from bird to bird. It does not normally infect humans, but it has sporadically.

At the briefing, Fish and Wildlife officials said that 44 N.J. nesting peregrine falcons have been identified so far this year as falling ill with the disease and that 21 adults, or nearly half, had died. Losses were higher in coastal nests. The loss ratios are similar in Virginia and Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The New Jersey Conservation Foundation initially supported the state’s removal of the bald eagle from the endangered list, which the peregrine falcon remains on. DeVito was on the Endangered and Nongame Species Advisory Committee for 25 years but recently left it.

“We shouldn’t be delisting them now,” DeVito said. “This is highly transmittable.”

He said that the avian flu has already infected some eagles and that the birds get the disease while eating infected prey.

“It’s not widespread yet,” DeVito said. “But it’s just starting to impact them. Chances are next year, there’s going to be a big hit to the population.”

Seeking public comment

The delisting of bald eagles is part of a larger rule proposal currently open for public comment, Hajna said. The bald eagle is just one of many species being proposed for either listing or delisting for various categories in a process that the state takes on sporadically. The public can comment on the rule through Aug. 24.

If adopted, the rule would move the bald eagle from New Jersey’s endangered species list and categorize it as a species of special concern. The bald eagle would still remain listed as a non-game species, meaning it cannot be hunted.

DeVito believes it would be easier to remove the bald eagle from consideration for now. It could then be reintroduced separately for delisting later if the avian flu runs its course.

Bald eagles have made a remarkable comeback nationwide since DDT was banned in 1972. They were removed from the federal government’s endangered species list in 2007. Pennsylvania has also removed the raptor from its endangered or threatened list, but it is protected under the state’s Game and Wildlife Code.

It was not immediately clear of the strain of avian flu that is striking peregrine falcons and bald eagles.

But the Centers of Disease Control reports that the HF or H5N1 bird flu, forms of HPAI, has struck nearly 10,000 wild birds across the U.S. in wild birds, including bald eagles. It has struck at least 593 bald eagles since early 2022, according to an Inquirer analysis of the data. Two cases were logged in New Jersey this year in Mercer and Bergen Counties.

William Bowerman, a professor of wildlife ecology and environmental toxicology, wrote a letter “with urgency” to the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in June, stating that he’s studied bald eagles in Michigan and the Great Lakes for 40 years, and said his findings indicate the first regional population declines since the DDT era. Bowerman wrote that the decline is, “likely caused by” HPAI.

2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Mountain hikes are invigorating. Crisp air and clear views can refresh the soul, but thin air presents an additional challenge for high-altitude birds. “All else being equal, bird wings produce less lift in low density air,” says Jonathan Rader from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, U.S., making it more difficult to remain aloft.

Yet this doesn’t seem to put them off. Bar-headed geese, cranes and bar-tailed godwits have recorded altitude records of 6,000 m and more. So how do they manage to take to the air when thin air offers little lift? One possibility was that birds at high altitude simply fly faster, to compensate for the lower air density, but it wasn’t clear whether birds that naturally inhabit a wide range of altitudes, from sea level to the loftiest summits, might fine-tune their flight speed to compensate for thin air.

“Turkey vultures are common throughout North America and inhabit an elevation range of more than 3,000 m,” says Rader, so he and Ty Hedrick (UNC-Chapel Hill) decided to find out whether turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) residing at different elevations fly at different speeds depending on their altitude.

They publish the discovery in Journal of Experimental Biology that turkey vultures fly faster at altitude to compensate for the lack of lift caused by flying in thin air.

First the duo needed to select locations over several thousand meters’ altitude, so they started filming the vultures flying at the local Orange County refuse site (80 m above sea level). “Vultures on a landfill… who would have guessed?”, chuckles Rader.

Then they relocated to Rader’s home state of Wyoming, visiting Alcova (1600 m) before ending up at the University of Wyoming campus in Laramie (2200 m).

At each location, the duo set up three synchronized cameras with a clear view of a tree that was home to a roosting colony of turkey vultures, ready to film the vultures’ flights in 3D as they flew home at the end of the day.

“Wyoming is a famously windy place and prone to afternoon thunderstorms,” Rader explains, recalling being chased off the roof of the University of Wyoming Biological Sciences Building by storms and the wind blurring movies of the flying birds as it rattled the cameras.

Back in North Carolina, Rader reconstructed 2,458 bird flights from the movies, calculating their flight speed before converting to airspeed, which ranged from 8.7 to 13.24m/s. He also calculated the air density at each location, based on local air pressure readings, recording a 27% change from 0.89kg/m³ at Laramie to 1.227 kg/m³ at Chapel Hill.

After plotting the air densities at the time of flight against the birds’ airspeeds on a graph, Rader and Hedrick could see that the birds flying at 2,200m in Laramie were generally flying ~1m/s faster than the birds in Chapel Hill. Turkey vultures fly faster at higher altitudes to remain aloft. But how do they achieve these higher airspeeds?

Rader returned to the flight movies, looking for the tell-tale up-and-down motion that would indicate when they were flapping. However, when he compared how much each bird was flapping with the different air densities, the high-altitude vultures were flapping no more than the birds nearer to sea level, so they weren’t changing their wingbeats to counteract the effects of low air density.

Instead, it is likely that the 2,200 m high birds were flying faster simply because there is less drag in thin air to slow them down, allowing the Laramie vultures to fly faster than the Chapel Hill birds to compensate for generating less lift in lower air density.

A team of researchers, including colleagues from the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, have transferred into common fruit flies genes from simple organisms capable of regenerating their bodies. Fruit flies are more complex animals that cannot regenerate their bodies. The team found that the transferred gene suppressed an age-related intestinal issue in the flies. Their results suggest that studying genes specific to animals with high regenerative capability may uncover new mechanisms for rejuvenating stem cell function and extending the healthy lifespan of unrelated organisms.

The work appears in BMC Biology.

Do you want to live forever? Some do, some don’t. But we all want to live healthily for however long we have, and a big part of medical research is about this aspect of longevity. One idea, which might sound a little like science fiction, is to upgrade the human body in such a way that it can regenerate itself when injured, diseased, or when aging starts taking its toll, a bit like the superhero character Wolverine from the popular comic book and film series “X-Men.” Of course, we’re nowhere near that stage yet, but progress is being made in the world of regenerative medicine, albeit the test subjects are just flies for now.

“In animals capable of whole-body regeneration, such as flatworms and jellyfish, specific genes may help allow regeneration and maintain long-term stem cell functions. Conversely, mammals and insects, which have limited regenerative abilities, may have lost these genes during evolution,” said Associate Professor Yuichiro Nakajima.

“It is unclear whether reintroducing these regeneration-associated genes in low regenerative animals could affect their regeneration and aging processes. In our recent study, we focused on the group of genes unique to animals with high regenerative capacity, named highly regenerative species-specific JmjC domain-encoding genes (HRJDs), and transferred them into the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, to test their effects.”

Nakajima’s team hoped upgraded fruit flies would regenerate tissue if injured, which didn’t happen. However, Hiroki Nagai, an expert in fruit fly intestines, noticed something else.

“Nagai discovered some novel phenotypes, characteristics that manifest from genes in a given set of conditions,” said Nakajima. “HRJDs promoted greater intestinal stem cell division, while also suppressing intestinal cells that were mis-differentiating, or going wrong in aged flies. This is in contrast to the use of antibiotics, for example, which might suppress mis-differentiated intestinal cells, but also suppress intestinal stem cell division. For this reason, HRJDs had a measurable effect on the lifespans of fruit flies, which opens the door, or at least provides clues, for the development of new anti-aging strategies. After all, human and insect intestines have surprisingly much in common on a cellular level.”

Learning this was not without difficulties, however. Though fruit flies are famous test subjects for biological research, given their relatively short lives and fast rates of reproduction and maturation, their aging process still takes around two months, which affected the experimental schedules for Nakajima’s team, who were also busy with other things. Now that they have reached a striking conclusion, though, there is still much work to be done.

“Details of the molecular workings of HRJDs are still unresolved. And it’s unclear whether they work alone or in combination with some other component,” said Nakajima. “Therefore, this is just the start of the journey, but we know now that our modified fruit flies can serve as a valuable resource to uncover unprecedented mechanisms of stem cell rejuvenation in the future. In humans, intestinal stem cells decrease in activity with age, so this research is a promising avenue for stem cell-based therapies.”