California has strengthened a new Beaver Restoration Program which is dedicated to supporting the species and their habitats.

With the passing of Assembly Bill 2196, the program has partnered with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The initiative works with California tribal nations, private landowners and non-government organizations on implementing coexistence and beaver-assisted restoration projects to the state’s wildlife habitats. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB2196 into law in September.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Damon Connolly, D-San Rafael, said the law will now codify the program’s efforts.

“Beavers are an instrumental keystone species to our ecosystems, and they play a vital role in maintaining the habitats around them for the benefit of other species,” said Connolly in a news release. “The initiative to restore beavers back into their original wildlife habitats is beneficial to species recovery, improving habitat complexity, and enhancing watershed restoration through dam complexes.”

Brock Dolman, the co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, has been working on beaver restoration since the late 2000s, he said. The Occidental Arts and Ecology Center has been at the forefront of the beaver restoration program, to center a co-existence mindset with the species.

Beavers have sometimes been seen as a nuisance or pest, Dolman said. In reality, beavers are beneficial to the environment. They help keep up maintenance of California rivers, wetlands and mountain meadows, and slow down water from spreading and sinking in their dams and canals. As a result, their presence helps address issues with flooding and droughts.

“What’s equally important is the recognition of the types of benefits that beavers (provide) and what beavers do in rivers and in wetlands, mountain meadows, salmon streams and urban riparian corridors,” Dolman said.

For example, a paper from the California State University, Channel Islands, found that beavers play a part in wildfire prevention. When analyzing five wildfires in the American West, those that had beaver dams burned three times less than those without.

Collaboration with California tribal nations

The state’s beaver restoration program has also made an effort to reintroduce families of beavers to various California tribal lands. In an initiative nicknamed: “Beaver Back,” (in reference to the Land Back movement), two Native American communities, the Maidu Summit Consortium and the Tule River Tribe, have welcomed back beavers.

In 2023, the Maidu Summit Consortium was reunited with beavers on tribal lands for the first time in 75 years.

“It’s good to have them back home again,” said Ben Cunningham, chairman of the Maidu Summit Consortium. “The beavers are back where they belong.”

Similarly to the Maidu Summit Consortium,Tule River has been without beavers on tribal lands for decades, according to a news release. Beavers are Indigenous to Tule River lands, with pictographs dating from between 500 to 1,000 years old, documenting their existence.

Around 10 years ago, Tule River tribal leaders began their initiative to bring beavers back. These efforts became a reality this year. In June, a family of seven beavers were reintroduced to Tule River tribal lands in the southern Sierra Nevada.

“I’m very happy to see (the beavers) come home and it’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing,” said Kenneth McDarment, a member of the Tule River Tribe, in a news release. “People will be educated even more by seeing the work that they do and the benefits they bring to the environment. My hope is to have the beaver throughout the reservation and all the watershed that we have.”

2024 The Sacramento Bee. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Bacteria are a valuable source for the discovery of natural products that can be used for the development of new drugs. A HIPS research team has now identified two new classes of active substances with antimicrobial properties from bacteria that live in symbiosis with a toxic bird.

This strategy and the substances discovered offer promising avenues toward the development of new anti-infectives, particularly against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

The New Guinea-based regent whistler, or Pachycephala schlegelii in Latin, is a strange bird. It carries batrachotoxin in its black and yellow plumage: a potent neurotoxin, also used by poison dart frogs to effectively protect themselves from predators. This toxin is not produced by the birds themselves, but is acquired from insects in their diet.

Together with international partners, researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), which is the site of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) in collaboration with Saarland University, have now discovered that the plumage of the regent whistler contains other substances that protect it from infestation by unwanted microorganisms.

Unlike batrachotoxin, however, these substances are not ingested with food, but are produced by bacteria that live in symbiosis with the bird.

An international team led by Christine Beemelmanns, HIPS Department Head and Professor of Medical-Pharmaceutical Microbiota Research at Saarland University, isolated these bacteria of the genus Amycolatopsis from the secretions of the so-called brush gland, a skin gland of the bird. The researchers were able to discover previously unknown bioactive substances in these bacteria, including two new classes of natural products: pachycephalamides and demiguisines.

“The discovery of these previously unknown molecules from the microbiome of a bird illustrates the enormous potential that symbiotic relationships offer for the identification of new natural products,” explains Elena Seibel, first author of the study. “Where different organisms live together, there are always interactions. In the case of microorganisms, this communication takes place with the help of chemical signals.”

Natural products discovered in this way not only help to better understand the interaction between two organisms, but can also contribute to the development of new anti-infectives.

This innovative approach, in which microbial communities (also known as microbiota) serve as a source of new active substances, is at the core of Christine Beemelmann’s research. Together with her team, she is working on the discovery and functional analysis of new anti-infective natural products from microbiota.

Using co-cultivation studies and cell-based assays, the researchers were able to show that the substances produced by the bacteria in the brush gland have an antimicrobial effect. In particular, the new compounds act against keratinolytic bacteria and fungi that attack the skin and feathers of birds.

“Our work impressively demonstrates that the identification of new bioactive natural products from microbial communities is a promising source for the discovery of innovative anti-infectives,” explains Beemelmanns. “The newly discovered natural products, especially the lipopeptides and hexapeptides that we found in avian microbiomes, offer great potential for combating infectious diseases.”

Through a combination of genetic and structural analyses, the team was able to decipher the genetic blueprints responsible for the production of these natural products and thus confirm their origin in the symbiotic relationship between bird and bacterium. The identification of such natural products has far-reaching significance, particularly in view of the increasing spread of antimicrobial resistance, which poses a serious challenge to modern medicine.

“By unlocking the potential of microorganisms in symbiotic communities, we can develop new therapeutic approaches to fight infections and counter the global resistance problem,” says Beemelmanns.

The black widow spider is one of the most feared spider species. Its venom is a cocktail of seven different toxins that attack the nervous system. These so-called latrotoxins specifically paralyze insects and crustaceans, but one of them, the α-latrotoxin, targets vertebrates and is also poisonous to humans. It interferes with the transmission of signals in the nervous system.

As soon as α-latrotoxin binds to specific receptors of the synapses—the contacts between nerve cells or between nerve cells and muscles—calcium ions flow uncontrollably into the presynaptic membranes of the signaling cells. This induces release of neurotransmitters, triggering strong muscle contractions and spasms.

Despite the apparent simplicity of this process, there is a highly complex mechanism behind it. Scientists at the University of Münster have now deciphered the structure of α-latrotoxin before and after membrane insertion at near atomic resolution. The findings are published in the journal Nature Communications.

In order to better understand the mechanism of calcium influx into the presynaptic membrane, experts from the Center for Soft Nanoscience at the University of Münster, headed by Prof Christos Gatsogiannis (Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics) and Prof Andreas Heuer (Institute of Physical Chemistry), used high-performance cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and molecular dynamics (MD) computer simulations.

They showed that the toxin undergoes a remarkable transformation when it binds to the receptor. Part of the toxic molecule forms a stalk that penetrates the cell membrane like a syringe. As a special feature, this stalk forms a small pore in the membrane that functions as a calcium channel. MD simulations revealed that calcium ions can flow into the cell through a selective gate located on the side directly above the pore.

Thanks to these results, researchers now better understand how α-latrotoxin works. “The toxin mimics the function of the calcium channels of the presynaptic membrane in a highly complex way,” explains Gatsogiannis. “It therefore differs in every respect from all previously known toxins.”

The new findings open up a wide range of potential applications; latrotoxins have considerable biotechnological potential, including the development of improved antidotes, treatments for paralysis and new biopesticides.

In previous work, the research group led by Gatsogiannis had already deciphered the structure of insect-specific latrotoxins in the venom of the black widow spider before inserting into the membrane.