A New Zealand Scientist Was Called Crazy for Saving These Birds — What He Did Doesn't Look Real

What does it take to save a species when the math already says it's over? Homemade guide: https://ecoharvest.gumroad.com/l/pvxfdq An old female black robin sits in a biologist's cupped hands on Mangere Island, Chatham Islands, in the summer of 1979. She weighs 22 grams. She is nine years old, more than twice the average lifespan of her species. She is one of five black robins left on Earth, and the only female that can still lay a fertile egg. The rule of thumb in 1980 said a species needed at least fifty breeding individuals to avoid collapse. Don Merton had one. What he did with her eggs over the next three years broke every model geneticists had for extinction. 🌿 In this video, we cover: By 1980, a 1964 rat invasion that had already erased three other species taught the Wildlife Service what waiting costs, and the black robin population on Mangere Island had crashed to five, with only one fertile female left Biologist Don Merton took Old Blue's eggs and fostered them under Chatham Island tomtits, tripling and sometimes quadrupling her reproductive output in a single season A genetic mutation spread through nearly half the recovering females, causing them to lay eggs on the rim of the nest instead of the cup, forcing the team to hand-push eggs back into place season after season When Old Blue died in December 1983 at age thirteen, Merton refused to have her preserved as a museum specimen and let her die a wild bird instead Genetic sequencing by Melanie Massaro's team at the University of Canterbury, published in the journal Evolution in 2013, found severe inbreeding in the population but no hatching collapse, and today more than 300 black robins, all descended from Old Blue, live on Mangere and South East Island Every claim is sourced from Melanie Massaro and colleagues (University of Canterbury, journal Evolution, 2013), Emily Weiser (University of Otago, 2016), and Forest & Bird's ongoing conservation records. This is not speculation. Subscribe to Treeline Journal for more stories about species declared finished, and the people who refused to believe it. #TreelineJournal #BlackRobin #DonMerton #ChathamIslands #OldBlue #EndangeredSpecies #NewZealandWildlife #ConservationSuccess #WildlifeRecovery #SpeciesRecovery #Rewilding #NatureDocumentary