The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 (9 page)

Hugh Possingham believes that rather than assessing bats,
frogs and Tasmanian devils according to the odds of them vanishing from the planet, governments should manage biodiversity by weighing up the cost and chances of success against the unique nature, or taxonomic distinctiveness, of the animal. Echidnas and platypus score highly on this taxonomic scale, while a medium-sized wallaby would get a low score given the variety of members in its family tree.

It sounds drastic. But for Possingham, this is how
M*A*S*H
medics make their life-and-death decisions. ‘Biodiversity is being lost at roughly a hundred to a thousand times the natural rate,' he says, almost in exasperation. ‘If we are losing species at up to a thousand times the natural extinction rate, then we are effectively in a war zone.'

Opponents say it is not that simple, and that triage amounts to assisted, unnatural selection. The Australasian Bat Society argues that no one has the right to play God. The independent, non-profit Australian Wildlife Conservancy maintains that if funds are invested correctly, we should be able to save everything. Threatened-species scientists Deborah Ashworth and Todd Soderquist argue that applying triage to animals and plants risks placing the most feasible and affordable projects at the top of the list, while letting the more complicated, long-term or expensive slide to the bottom. ‘The simplicity of this approach is very seductive,' they warned in their senate submission.

But governments are coming around to Possingham's way of thinking. In 2005, Queensland was the first state to introduce a triage test, called Back on Track. The logic underpinning the plan was to recover the greatest number of threatened species. Similarly, Tasmania has focused on 171 threatened species it says can be saved over 50 years at a cost of $155 million. And across the Tasman, New Zealand has identified 700 species in decline and prioritised 300 of those most likely to benefit from intervention.

The Australian Fisheries Management Authority has made
its own list; starting with 2000 species, its focus over the past five years has narrowed to less than 70. And in NSW, where almost a third of native mammals, 28 per cent of birds, 18 per cent of reptiles and 13 per cent of plants are threatened, the state government has signed up to prioritise 967 threatened species.

* * * * *

Australia's first threatened-species commissioner, Gregory Andrews, took up his post in July 2014. Among his tasks is to draw up a list of threatened species most likely to benefit from intervention. ‘I trained as an economist, so I think about the opportunity cost of everything,' he says. ‘And there are some species that we are spending a lot more on.'

What, then, to make of the Tasmanian devil? An army of scientists is dedicated to saving the species. Captive breeding programs are well established on the mainland, and small islands off Tasmania have been quarantined for healthy devils. But will science deliver a cure in time? Or, more to the point, should we keep investing in the hope that it might? Granted, the devil's public appeal will keep the dollars dribbling in, even as its population dwindles. But are we taking finite finances away from another animal that will score higher on the triage test? Has the devil earned its place on the ark? For Jenny Gray, the answer is clear. ‘We won't walk away,' she says. ‘It may be a hopeless cause, but it's our hopeless cause.'

At the sanctuary, I bring the young devil's swaddled body closer to mine. I open my forearms a little and spread my fingers wide to support the folds of blanket so she can prop her chin on the edge and watch as keepers prepare her bottle. Her weight is satisfying. Not heavy enough to create strain, but not so light as to seem less than substantial. I know she is there. I can feel her move. Her head bobs like one of those toys on a car dashboard
as she sniffs the air with the matt-brown nose at the end of her whiskered snout.

So what say we? Does she get a berth?

Field guide to the future

Small mammals vanish in northern Australia

Lost in a floral desert

Job description

Alice Gorman

Job Description:
Senior Interplanetary Archaeologist, Space Heritage Unit, United Nations Committee for Space Environment Management (UNCSEM).

Date:
2050

Reports to
: Director-General, UNCSEM and International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Space Heritage Committee.

Responsible for:
Four field and administrative staff.

Qualifications:

Minimum:
Masters in Space Heritage.

Desired:
PhD in space archaeology, heritage or materials conservation.

Required:
Certificate V in Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) and Space Situational Awareness (SSA). Accreditation by the Institute for Archaeologists.

Experience:
Expertise in orbital debris modelling, telepresence
and planetary surface survey, significance assessment, experience working within international space regulatory regime, excellent knowledge of space law, expertise in the identification and analysis of at least one of the following: rockets, satellites, robotic surface craft, AI material culture, space stations, photovoltaics, nuclear power sources, microgravity weaponry, automated low-gravity machinery, microgravity materials, organic remains, planetary sediments and trace fossils.

Duties:

Review applications for off-Earth mission registration and assess impact on the heritage of Earth orbit, celestial bodies and interplanetary space, according to the provisions of the 2032 UN Convention on the Conservation of the Human and Robotic Cultural Heritage in Outer Space.

•  Provide advice to industrial operations, including lunar/asteroid mining and orbital manufactories, on how to mitigate impacts on historic spacecraft, landing sites and other heritage.

•  Work closely with the Space Heritage List Site Registrar, the archaeologists of each national or regional space agency and UN Committees as appropriate.

•  Review Cultural Heritage and Conservation Management Plans for celestial operations.

•  Conduct fieldwork as necessary within Earth orbit, on the Moon and Mars, and from the Kythera 5 Space Station in Venus orbit.

•  Coordinate interpretation of sites and raise awareness of space archaeology among the general public.

•  Coordinate research teams for missions on the research vessel Deadly Vorga.

•  Sit on the UNSCEM Working Group on Space Taphonomy.

•  Contribute to the policy objectives of UNCSEM.

Salary:
Three million Euros plus superannuation.

Benefits:
Personalised space and surface suits; four weeks annual leave; employees discount for accommodation in the Hotel Crillon Low Earth Orbit.

All dressed up for Mars and nowhere to go

Uncharted waters

The past may not make you feel better

Christine Kenneally

When Jeff Carroll was 16 he dropped out of high school. At 20 he joined the US army and was posted to Europe. He served in Germany for a year, and on his first trip home for Christmas, his father told him that his mother was showing signs of Huntington's disease, a condition that Jeff had never heard of. Huntington's is the cruellest diagnosis. Patients slowly lose control of their bodies, as well as their memories and their ability to think. They may undergo personality changes too, often becoming aggressive toward their loved ones. The degeneration is slow and relentless, unfolding over the course of years. Although Cindy Carroll was in her mid-forties when her body started to jerk without warning and she forgot one of her best friends' names, she lived for many years afterward.

After his father told him about the diagnosis, Jeff went back to his life in the service and later enrolled in an army biology course. When he returned to civilian life, he completed an undergraduate degree in biology and began working towards a PhD in a lab studying Huntington's. During this period he got married, and in the last year of his mother's life he and his wife had twins.

By that stage Cindy Carroll's body was so constantly overcome with the uncontrolled jerking and writhing, called chorea,
that is typical of the disease that all her nursing home could do was place her on floor mats and hope she wouldn't hurt herself. The night she died, Jeff brought his baby son to her, carefully placing him in the crook of his mother's neck. It had been years since Cindy had shown any sign that she recognised her son, but when the baby nestled in to her, she was briefly still and seemed at peace. Her respite probably lasted only a minute, Jeff said, but to him it felt like hours.

After his mother's death Carroll told a reporter that the worst thing about the disease was not the fact that it is fatal but that it ‘destroys your personality and turns you into an object of horror for your family'. Yet that is not the end of it. Huntington's disease is hereditary, and when people talk about things like destiny and genetics and whether it is wise or not to know how you will die, Huntington's is often what they have in mind. Cindy Carroll died in 2006, six years after her own mother, who was also a Huntington's sufferer. When Cindy was first diagnosed, Jeff and his siblings learned that because of the way the Huntington's mutation works, they had a 50 per cent chance of developing the disease themselves.

In 1993 researchers identified the genetic mutation that causes the disease. The discovery made an enormous difference to the likelihood that a cure would be found, and it led to the development of a test that can determine if someone will develop the disease. Before the test existed, the children of Huntington's patients could only watch the suffering of their family members and wait anxiously to see if they developed symptoms, asking themselves whenever they dropped something if it was clumsiness or Huntington's. Now the test brings grim certainty: if candidates have the mutation, they will develop the disease. Yet more than 80 per cent of the people who could take the test do not.

Jeff always knew he wanted to be tested, but it wasn't until 2003 that he started the process. On July 31, 2003, he and his
wife met with a physician to get the results. The physician told Carroll that he was positive for the mutation.

* * * * *

Descriptions of a disease that sounds like Huntington's can be found in writings that date from the Middle Ages. The uncontrolled twitches and swooping, circular, constant motion of the Huntington's sufferer were first described as a dance in the 1500s. Later observers drew closer to understanding the condition and in the 19th century finally connected the affliction in one person to a similar condition in one of his parents. In 1872 the young physician George Huntington was the first person to clearly describe the illness as hereditary and degenerative, with an onset typically taking place in the afflicted in their thirties. ‘Those who pass their fortieth year without symptoms,' he wrote, ‘are seldom attacked.'

Almost two hundred years later the science of Huntington's was forever changed by Nancy Wexler, a then 33-year-old New York-based neuropsychologist whose mother was diagnosed with the disease in 1968. ‘It was as if some mad puppeteer was in control of her body,' Wexler wrote. In 1979 Wexler travelled to a small town on Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela to visit the largest Huntington's family in the world. Since the 1950s the people who dwelled in the town by the vast and ancient lake had been known in the medical literature for their extraordinary one-in-ten chance of developing Huntington's, which they called el mal or ‘the bad'.

Wexler founded the US–Venezuela Collaborative Research Project and for several decades travelled to the region every year, studying pedigrees and sampling blood. She worked out that the villagers of Lake Maracaibo had seen more than 18 000 cases of Huntington's in the span of ten generations. There are a few stories about when, and with whom, Huntington's began in Lake
Maracaibo. Some say the first cases were children of a woman called Maria Concepcion who lived in the early 1800s. Concepcion had ten children, and it's thought that their father may have passed on the mutation. Genealogical work has traced tens of thousands of cases of Huntington's to Concepcion's pedigree. Another story, probably apocryphal, is attributed to a physician who diagnosed the villagers' condition as Huntington's in the 1950s and wrote that the locals told him that sometime between 1862 and 1877 a ship's priest named Antonio Justo Doria left his ship and decided to live by the lake. He married and had children, and later in his life he was seen ‘walking with some strange movements, like dancing'. Currently 1000 locals have the disease, and around 5000 are known to carry the mutation for it. On a 2010 visit Wexler encountered a single large family in which both parents and ten of their 14 children had Huntington's.