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Science Quickly

Hawaiian Crows Ready for the Call of the Wild

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2017

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The critically endangered birds have done well in captive breeding, meaning they may be ready once more for wild living, and the repertoire of calls associated with it. Jason G. Goldman reports.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:33.5

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

0:39.4

Once upon a time, on the Big Island of Hawaii, it would not have been unusual to hear...

0:44.9

That's the call of the Hawaiian crow.

0:50.1

It's a critically endangered species, now extinct in the wild, after decades of habitat loss, persecution by farmers, and invasive diseases.

0:59.2

In the mid-1990s, wildlife biologists rounded up the few surviving crows and put them into a captive breeding program.

1:07.2

Today, Hawaiians can once again hear the calls of more than 100 Hawaiian crows, or

1:12.5

Al-A as they are called there, but only in aviaries.

1:21.8

Researchers once focused their efforts primarily on breeding and husbandry, but now they

1:27.1

need to know more.

1:27.9

And now that, you know, they're doing so well and it's at the point where, you know,

1:32.9

that they could be in the wild again, that now we can look at, you know, their vocalizations

1:39.3

and their behaviors and things like that.

1:42.2

University of Hawaii bioacoustics researcher and Tanamoto.

1:46.0

Those other aspects, culture, if you will, are critical for a species as socially complex as the Al-Lala.

1:53.0

Tanamoto and her team made recordings of captive-bred al-a-la-pairs at the Keahoe

1:59.0

Hohohobird Conservation Center in volcano Hawaii,

2:02.6

and compared them to recordings made in the early 1990s by fish and wildlife service biologists of

...

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