Nonprofit moves forward with lawsuit to protect Hawaiian honeycreeper

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By Nina Wu –

The Center for Biological Diversity today filed suit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for failing to designate critical habitat and develop a recovery plan for the iiwi, a cherished forest bird in Hawaii.

The move comes five months after the national nonprofit filed a formal notice of intent to sue due to lack of progress. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for Hawaii.

“The beautiful iiwi needs our help and it needs it now,” said Maxx Phillips, the center’s Hawaii director and staff attorney, in a news release. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s foot-dragging is unacceptable. Without the protections provided by critical habitat and a valid recovery plan, iiwi will continue down a heartbreaking path towards extinction.”

Iiwi, or Drepani coccinea, are medium-sized honeycreepers with bright, red plumage, black wings and distinctive, curved bills used to drink nectar.

The iiwi was listed in 2017 as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to extensive threats from mosquito-borne diseases such as avian malaria, as well as loss of habitat due to rapid ohia death and climate change.

Once abundant across the state — from the coastal lowlands where they foraged for food to the high mountain forests where they nested — the iiwi today can only be found in a narrow band of forest on East Maui, and elevated windward slopes of Hawaii island, and on Kauai.

They are now gone from the islands of Lanai, Oahu, Molokai and West Maui, the center said, and the Kauai population is likely to go extinct within 30 years.

Under the act, the agency is required to designate critical habitat with its listing determination and develop a recovery plan for the bird — but has failed to do so, according to the suit.

Phillips said there are measures the USFWS could take right now — including the restoration of upland forests at higher elevations, fencing off of potential breeding areas, and eradication of ungulates such as pigs, which create breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

The USFWS, in a December letter to Phillips after receiving the notice of intent to sue, said development of a recovery plan for iiwi is underway under the leadership of its Pacific Islands Fish and Wildlife Office, and that a draft should be available for public review in the Federal Register by October.

The USFWS said, however, that it could not offer a timeframe for designating a critical habitat for iiwi due to its “national workload within the limited budget Congress has set.” The agency already has a 5-year National Listing Workplan for 12-month petition findings and status reviews, and will need to prioritize its workload.

Among those priorities, the agency said, are the designation of critical habitat for 14 Hawaiian species, including the picture-wing fly, by Feb. 28, 2023 as a result of a settlement with the center following an earlier lawsuit.

The center says Hawaiian forest birds are in crisis, with 68% of Hawaii’s known endemic bird species have already gone extinct because of habitat loss, disease and invasive predators.

“The longer that the service drags their feet, the closer these species come to a tipping point of going extinct,” said Phillips. “Time is of the essence. Any delay is really inexcusable.”

Researchers trace evolution of diversity in Hawaiian Honeycreepers

Science Daily

An international team of scientists has determined the evolutionary family tree for one of the most strikingly diverse and endangered bird families in the world, the Hawaiian honeycreepers.

Using one of the largest DNA datasets for a group of birds and employing next-generation sequencing methods, the team which included Professor Michi Hofreiter, of the University of York, determined the types of finches from which the honeycreeper family originally evolved, and linked the timing of that rapid evolution to the formation of the four main Hawaiian Islands.

The research, which will be published in the latest edition of Current Biology on 8 November, also involved scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and Earlham College in the USA and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

There were once more than 50 species of these colourful songbirds that were so diverse that historically it was unclear that they were all part of the same group.

Professor Hofreiter, of the Department of Biology at the University of York, said: “Honeycreepers probably represent the most impressive example of an adaptive radiation in vertebrates that has led to a number of beak shapes unique among birds. In our study we are, for the first time, able to resolve the relationships of the species within this group and thereby understand their evolution.”

Heather Lerner, an assistant professor of biology at Earlham College, added: “Some eat seeds, some eat fruit, some eat snails, some eat nectar. Some have the bills of parrots, others of warblers, while some are finch-like and others have straight, thin bills. So the question that we started with was how did this incredible diversity evolve over time?”

The answer is unique to the Hawaiian Islands, which are part of a conveyor belt of island formation due to volcanic activity, with new islands popping up as the conveyor belt moves northwest. Each island that forms represents a blank slate for evolution, so as one honeycreeper species moves from one island to a new island, those birds encounter new habitat and ecological niches that may cause them to adapt and branch off into distinct species. The researchers examined the evolution of the Hawaiian honeycreepers after the formation of Kauai-Niihau, Oahu, Maui-Nui and Hawaii. The largest burst of evolution into new species, called a radiation, occurred between 4 million and 2.5 million years ago, after Kauaii-Niihua Oahu formed but before the remaining two large islands existed, and resulted in the evolution of six of 10 distinct types of species.

Co-author Helen James, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History “This radiation is one of the natural scientific treasures that the archipelago offers out in the middle of the Pacific. It was fascinating to be able to tie a biological system to geological formation and allowed us to become the first to offer a full picture of these birds’ adaptive history.”

Using genetic data from 28 bird species that seemed similar to the honeycreepers morphologically, genetically or that shared geographic proximity, the researchers determined that the various honeycreeper species evolved from Eurasian rosefinches. Unlike most other ancestral bird species that came from North America and colonized the Hawaiian Islands, the rosefinch likely came from Asia, the scientists found.

Rob Fleischer, head of Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics said: “There is a perception that there are no species remaining that are actually native to Hawaii, but these are truly native birds that are scientifically valuable and play an important and unique ecological function. I’m thrilled that we finally had enough DNA sequence and the necessary technology to become the first to produce this accurate and reliable evolutionary tree.”

The diversity of Hawaiian honeycreepers has taken a huge hit, with more than half of the known 56 species already extinct. The researchers focused on the 18 surviving honeycreeper species but of those, six are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, four are considered endangered and five are vulnerable.

Professor Hofreiter said: “It is a tragedy that most species from this unique group of birds, one of the best examples of the power of natural selection we have on earth, are extinct or on the brink of extinction. We still have time to take actions to conserve the diversity that is left.”

The next, step in the research is to use museum specimens and subfossil bones to determine where the extinct species fit into the evolutionary family tree, or phylogeny, to see if the new lineages fit into the overall pattern found in the current study. DNA analysis for the current study used specialized protocols developed by Professor Hofreiter and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute

Honeycreeper an Asian immigrant

Scientists from the Smithsonian using DNA data sets to outline the evolutionary family tree of the Hawaiian honeycreeper have determined that the 56 species of the native bird evolved from the Eurasian rosefinch.

In another important finding, the researchers linked the timing of the evolution of the honeycreeper to the formation of the four main Hawaiian Islands.

“It was fascinating to be able to tie a biological system to geological formation and allowed us to become the first to offer a full picture of these birds’ adaptive history,” said Helen James, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and an author of a paper on the study.

Fern Duvall, state Forestry and Wildlife Division wildlife biologist, who was not involved with this study but is working with two of the authors of the paper, James and Rob Fleischer, on a similar project with shorebirds, called the findings “dynamic” and “unique.”

Putting the research in context, Duvall noted that many bird experts believed the honeycreepers to be descendants of the house finch of North America. Instead, the researchers say the Eurasian rosefinch from Asia is the mother bird of the species.

As for the evolutionary discoveries, Duvall said it had been theorized that there was a link between the biologic and geologic development of the birds to the islands. The scientific connection made in the study is new, he said.

“For them to show that that is the case is dynamic,” he said Wednesday. “I think it’s an excellent example that birds’ forms are tied to diverse habitat types.”