The hoiho\/yellow eyed penguin could be extinct in less than a decade as a respiratory disease continues to wipe out a significant proportion of the chick population on the mainland.<\/p>\n
The hunt is on for a vaccine for the disease, and with fewer than 115 hoiho breeding pairs on mainland New Zealand and Rakiura\/Stewart Island, it is a race against time to save the birds.<\/p>\n
Scientists have recently discovered there are three “deeply distinct” subspecies of the penguin, and that could have major implications for conservation efforts.<\/p>\n
Evolutionary virologist professor Jemma Geoghan told Checkpoint that every year for the past three years, about a quarter or a third of the chicks that hatch on the mainland have died from respiratory distress syndrome (RDS).<\/p>\n
“And this is really compounded by everything else that they are dealing with, other factors such as fisheries and climate change and predation and things like that, so it’s had a really significant impact on the population.”<\/p>\n
After studying the disease for a number of years and trying to understand its origins, Geoghan and her team discovered a virus that might be responsible for causing the disease.<\/p>\n
“Now what is puzzling about this virus is that sometimes chicks can be infected with this virus without disease and sometimes they can be infected with the virus and it causes this really severe disease and death… If they develop symptoms or clinical signs that they have this respiratory disease then most of the time they end up dying within a really short timeframe – 24 hours of showing symptoms.<\/p>\n
“So it’s a puzzle, that’s why we’ve taken the past couple of years to better understand whether or not this virus is causing the disease.”<\/p>\n
The scientists also discovered something interesting about the birds themselves.<\/p>\n
They found the different populations – the northern ones found around Banks Peninsula and down to Rakiura, and the two southern populations living on sub-Antarctic islands – have actually been not breeding or mixing for thousands of years, with this divergence between their genome suggesting that they were actually sub-species.<\/p>\n
“They have the virus in the sub-Antarctic, but don’t seem to have the disease, so we’re really interested in whether or not the northern population was somehow predisposed to this disease genetically,” Geoghan said.<\/p>\n
They need to be thought of as sub-species with different lineages that are genetically diverse, Geoghan said.<\/p>\n
Understanding more about the northern population and its critical decline in numbers is important so the focus can be on its conservation, she said.<\/p>\n
After sequencing the genome of the hoiho from the north and south, they found some genetic markers on the northern birds that were predisposing these hoiho to contract the disease.<\/p>\n
Geoghan said they were hopeful this would lead to a vaccine, but time was running out.<\/p>\n
“It has been estimated that within the next decade they would be extinct, so it would be a lot sooner than that, considering that there are very few breeding pairs that we have left in the north.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The hoiho\/yellow eyed penguin could be extinct in less than a decade as a respiratory disease continues to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-623077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}