(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) - The hellbender, the mudpuppy, the river cooter, and the swamp metalmark, no, they're not heavy metal bands that the kids these days listen to.

They're endangered or threatened animals in Illinois, and if you haven't heard of them, it's probably because there aren't too many left.

On this show, we're gonna be talking about why some animals and plants are scarce in the Land of Lincoln.

Joining us now is Dr. Mark Davis, a conservation biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Thanks for coming on, doctor.

We appreciate it.

- Morning, Mark.

It's my pleasure.

- Well, let's talk a little bit about the Illinois Natural History Survey.

Tell our viewers a little bit more about that organization.

- The Illinois Natural History Survey is an Illinois institution, and we've been around since 1858, and since that time, we have been the guardian and the recorder of the biological resources of Illinois.

And we are in fact the state's biological memory.

Our work for 166 years, believe it or not, has been monitoring our state's biodiversity, understanding what are the factors that have shaped that biodiversity over the long count of geological time, and also informing how we go about conserving that biodiversity so it's here for future generations.

And that's been our role for a very long time.

More contemporarily, we are on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

We are nested right within the university community, or part of the university, as part of the Prairie Research Institute, one of five research institutes at the University of Illinois.

I'm adjunct faculty in several departments, and I mentor graduate and undergraduate students, and we're really a part of the university.

- Would you consider the biodiversity in Illinois to be diverse?

- Yeah, Illinois is a really fascinating place.

So when you think about the state from north to south, it's really long, right?

And so it covers a lot of latitude as you go from the southern part of the state.

And it changes a lot as you traverse from the southern part of the state up north.

So if you spend any time in the southern part of Illinois, you're familiar with the Shawnee Forest, the beautiful lush green forests with a really remarkable amount of biodiversity.

And what I think often gets overlooked when you think about Southern Illinois, it's also kind of the northern extent of the southern cypress swamps.

And so we get kind of that southern diversity that comes up into the southern tip of Illinois.

And as you move further north, you move more into the prairie region, and we get those tallgrass prairie species.

And then you've got the big rivers along the western edge of the state.

And so all of this confluence across the length of Illinois promotes a lot of biodiversity as you traverse the state.

And so, you know, for someone that grew up in Iowa, Northwest Iowa, it was remarkable to me being able to see as I moved from north to south species that I wasn't familiar with because of these different kind of ecological regions that are present within the state.

So, really interesting and unique diversity throughout the state.

- Well, we wanna talk about some interesting species today.

In doing some research, I looked at the Illinois Endangered Species Protection Board report from 2020.

These reports are done every five years to talk about endangered and threatened animals in Illinois.

And according to their numbers, there's 106 endangered animals and 47 threatened animals, even more plants, 264 endangered and 66 threatened.

Before we get into some specifics, let's talk about the difference between endangered and threatened.

- That's right, and so in a very general sense, when we think about endangered species, those are those species that are really living on the razor's edge of persistence in this place.

And those are the species that we are the most concerned about going extinct in the relatively near future, and so heavily imperiled species with a high likelihood of extinction in our lifetime.

Threatened species are a bit of a grade below that.

These are species that it is possible that, you know, if conditions don't change or if their population numbers don't improve, they could trend towards extinction on longer timescales.

And so it's really a bit of a gradient of endangerment where, you know, those endangered species are the ones we're most concerned about with the highest risk of extinction.

And threatened would be that next level that things aren't looking great for them, and so without conscientious conservation, they may be at risk in the future as well.

- Before we get into some specific examples of endangered animals, is there any kind of common denominator when it comes to endangered plants or animals in the state?

Or is it kind of a case-by-case basis as to why there aren't many of them left?

- I think some of the beauty of biodiversity in Illinois is that it's also unique, and they all have their individual proclivities, their habits, their habitats they like to be in.

The traits that define their life, how long they live, how slow they reproduce, all of these things build in.

But in a general sense, I think it's fair to say that a lot of these endangered species in Illinois are tied to fairly specific habitats.

And I'll touch on this as we get into some of the species that we wanna talk about today, that they have some requirements that for various reasons are no longer being met, and they tend to be fairly specific requirements.

We see general species that can exist in a broad range of habitats.

They tend not to trend towards endangerment.

It's these unique species with, you know, kind of a very specific niche that they fit into in the world.

- And again, I'll ask you kind of a broad question if you can give us an estimate or your opinion.

As far as endangered or threatened animals and plants, how much of this is due to man?

How much is due to just the way things are in nature?

- That's a really tricky question to unpack because I feel like it's highly multidimensional.

There's a number of different things that are going into it.

But you know, it's very clear that habitat loss is one of the biggest drivers of endangerment in our biodiversity.

The tallgrass prairies that used to exist have been plowed for agriculture.

The forests that used to exist have been felled for lumber.

And so, you know, habitat loss and degradation is one of the biggest drivers, but there's other things that are impacting as well, some of which are because of human activities, and others aren't.

And a lot of the species that we talk about that are threatened or endangered I think are experiencing death by a thousand cuts.

There's all of these different factors that have compounding effects on one another that are driving the endangerment process.

And so it's really complicated to pin down, in most cases, to just one factor.

- Yeah, you mentioned some of those habitats.

We know that I think around 90% of wetlands in Illinois are gone.

- That's right.

- Which is not good for fish and amphibians.

Let's talk about a few specific examples that people may or may not be aware of.

Let's start with the Indiana bat.

Tell us about the Indiana bat story.

- Yeah, so the Indiana bat was one of the first species federally listed under the Endangered Species Act.

It is a species of bat that is native to the Midwestern United States that historically occurred in very large numbers.

And Illinois had the unique distinction, as we traverse along the western edge of the state into our karst region, where we have a lot of mines and caves, Illinois historically has harbored some of the largest overwintering colonies of Indiana bats in the world.

So these bats will all congregate together in mines, abandoned mines and caves to spend their winters in large groups.

They're very social animals, highly communicative.

And historically, bats have been a fairly maligned organism.

There is and has been a lot of fear about rabies transmission from bats.

And in the '40s, '50s, '60s, and '70s, that led to people going into these caves with millions of bats overwintering, and not necessarily in Illinois but in other parts of the range, and burning the bats to death, burning them alive, and eliminating entire colonies.

And this caused some fairly precipitous population declines.

You throw on top of that, certainly here in Illinois, we had for a long period of time lost a lot of forest habitat in converting into agriculture to support our agricultural economy.

And that's impacted the Indiana bat as well.

And then on top of it, in 2013 here in Illinois, a new fungal disease showed up called white-nose syndrome.

It's a disease that impacts bat species, including the Indiana bat, and that impacted their populations as well.

And so they remain endangered to this day.

- [Mark W.] What are some, and I'll probably ask you the same question as we go through these different examples.

What are the benefits of having a creature like the Indiana bat around?

- As a science nerd, the first thing to me that comes to mind is just how cool bats are in general.

These are the only mammals that have evolved powered flight.

They have a very intense form of communication.

They are vocalizing out on the landscape.

They're using it to procure resources, their food, their meals.

They are incredible animals just from kind of that evolutionary ecology standpoint.

They're simply remarkable.

But here in Illinois, bats in general, Indiana bats specifically, are vital to our agricultural economy.

These bats are out there hoovering up bugs in the landscape, and that includes agricultural pests.

That includes mosquitoes that are driving us nuts right now.

These things are voracious insect predators, and they provide a lot of value to the state for pest control.

And so having strong, healthy bat populations is a huge benefit to our agricultural economy but also for, you know, our general enjoyment of the outdoors as they're helping control our mosquito populations.

- So the Indiana bat is endangered, but the northern long-eared bat is on the threatened list.

Without going over too much of the same stuff, what can you tell us about the northern long-eared bat?

- Yeah, the northern long-ear is a very different story than the Indiana bat.

It is a recent addition to the endangered species list, and I can harken back to our previous parts of the conversation when you ask, "Can we point to one thing that is imperiling bad populations?"

And in the case of the northern long-eared bat, we kind of can.

This species has been absolutely decimated by white nose syndrome.

Sure, habitat loss has been problematic and other aspects, but in their hibernaculum here in Illinois, over the winter, they experience almost 99% mortality rates.

So 99% of the overwintering bats are perishing from white-nose syndrome, and so they have been absolutely devastated by this disease.

Prior to white-nose arriving in Illinois, biologists that are out across the landscape monitoring these bats, catching them in nets, you know, frequently encountered them.

But with the emergence of white-nose syndrome, they've been absolutely decimated, and it's a tragedy.

- Let's talk about the greater prairie-chicken.

I've had the privilege of seeing these up close, and their booming rituals.

- Isn't that amazing?

- Yeah, it's just awesome.

Tell us why they are on the list.

- Yeah, and these birds are near and dear to my heart.

When I was in grad school here at the University of Illinois before I transitioned to my current career, I had the opportunity to work with the Department of Natural Resources and go out and trap greater prairie-chickens in Kansas.

Threw 'em on a plane, flew 'em back to be released at our two populations here in Illinois, and so I'm very much tied to these birds.

If you haven't seen them, to the viewers, please do so.

They are remarkable animals.

When they're on their leks booming in the spring, it is a display that you can't even fathom.

They're incredible creatures.

Now, why are they on the list?

The greater prairie-chicken is a big bird that requires a big landscape that we just don't have anymore.

These birds are tallgrass prairie specialists that used to thrive across almost the entirety of the state, at least the upper 2/3, in very large numbers.

But the conversion to industrial agriculture has restricted their habitat to just a couple small parcels of land.

And they're limited in that how much or how many birds those parcels of land can maintain, and it's fairly low.

And so we've got these fairly low numbers of populations.

And when that happens, they become really prone to kind of catastrophic losses through stochastic events.

I don't know about where everybody else is at in the state, but you know, last night, we had some pretty wild weather here in Champaign.

And you know, years back, the same sort of situation occurred when the prairie-chickens were on their nests with eggs and chicks.

A massive hailstorm passed through Central Illinois, and it absolutely decimated that year of nestlings.

And when you have a large, contiguous thriving population, they have the capacity to absorb those sorts of localized catastrophic events.

But our scenario right now, because of the loss of tallgrass prairies, we only have a few isolated habitats.

And so they no longer have that capacity to absorb those sorts of events.

And so, you know, the prairie-chicken in Illinois has been struggling, and it has required reintroductions of birds from other parts of the range where they're a little bit more stable.

- Two more animals I wanna talk to you about.

(chuckles) These ones I'm really gonna ask you why we need these around, the common striped scorpion, which may shock people.

I didn't know they were ever scorpions or are scorpions in Illinois, and then the eastern massasauga, which is a snake.

Tell us a little bit about those two.

- So I'll start with the scorpion, and I will say, "Why should we care about them?"

I think it holds true for both species.

The medicinal potential and the medical benefits of venomous animals is remarkable.

I assume many of us have family members or friends who struggle with heart disease.

It's one of the most common diseases we have as Americans.

And you might know people that are on ACE inhibitors.

Well, those are derived from venoms, and many of the life-saving therapeutics that we rely on every day are derived from venoms.

And the scorpion and the massasauga are both venomous species.

And so there's tremendous medical benefit to understanding what's happening with their venom and using that for our own benefit.

I'd say beyond that, you know, both species play important roles in rodent control, which again benefits human health.

Regulating those rodents on the landscape minimizes the opportunity for all of the different diseases that rodents and their ticks can transmit to us as humans.

And so both of these species have tremendous medicinal value.

With the scorpion, I think it's interesting because it gets back to Illinois's really interesting biodiversity legacy.

A lot of folks don't know that we do have these scorpions in Illinois.

They don't exist in a lot of places, but they're here in a very isolated patch.

Whereas, you know, other parts of their range, they're all over the place and highly abundant.

But as a quirk of circumstance, of geology, of glaciation, they're here, and they persist in this place.

And I think it's just cool that they're out there.

Massasaugas, on the other hand, these diminutive, calm, quiet, very cute little rattlesnake species, you know, again, historically, like the prairie-chicken, had been distributed across much of upper 2/3 of Illinois.

And so as again mentioning things that contribute to the endangerment process, these rattlesnakes are really interesting, and they're interesting because they're highly tied to our wet prairies.

And as you mentioned at the top, with 90% of our wetlands gone, those have been largely been removed from the landscape.

And so the available habitat is really restricted.

And at the same time, interestingly enough, to survive their winters, they rely on burrowing crayfish.

And so where they occur in the state, both contemporarily and historically, they spend their winters down in crayfish boroughs to survive the winter.

And so they have these interesting interactions with other really cool segments of Illinois biodiversity.

And again, kind of bringing things back around, the medicinal value, the medical potential, from their venom is really important.

But I also want to make sure that I note that I am in my job and in my career because I fell in love with fish and wildlife when I was a child.

And that informs my sense of place, makes me feel like home, that the species that occur there, all of these endangered species that we're talking about today are a huge part of Illinois' rich biodiversity legacy.

And I think we should all commit to making sure that they're around for future generations.

You know, we talked about bats.

We talked about snakes.

We talked about scorpions.

These are all things that historically have been persecuted by Western civilizations, particularly in North America.

But they are a part of our biodiversity legacy.

They do play an important role in our ecosystems and in our lives with the ecosystem services they provide, bats consuming agricultural pests, rattlesnake venom being used to develop lifesaving drugs.

All of these things enrich our lives, and I think make the state better for it.

- Well, I'm glad you mentioned that about the venom.

That makes me feel a little bit better about those creatures, but I'm still hightailing it the other way if I run into one out in the wild.

- So I do wanna note, it's okay.

I think snakes and public speaking are the two biggest fears of North Americans.

My mom likes to joke that I must be a giant ball of mutations because I'm not afraid of either of those things.

But the fear of snakes is ingrained in our genome.

It's genetic.

It's been passed down over evolutionary time, and so you're not alone.

It's very common.

- Yeah, well, the story of Adam and Eve doesn't help that for snakes either.

Tell us a little bit about, why don't we hear more about endangered and threatened animals?

I mean, it seems like a big deal, but we really don't hear that much about it in the media.

- I think there's a number of reasons that play into that.

And I think first off is that because they're threatened, because they're endangered, because there's so few of them on the landscape, they're just not something that people encounter on a regular basis.

You know, we all know the names of the birds that come to our bird feeder and that we see in the neighborhood.

We can spot white-tailed deer and bald eagle, which is a species that used to be federally endangered but was brought off the list because of recovery efforts.

And so I think part of it is a situation where, you know, we just don't see them, and there's no opportunity to talk about them because they're just not as visible.

And I think that's a big part of it.

You know, the second aspect and from a very practical standpoint to the work that I do, it's not something that we can talk about oftentimes in a very specific way.

We have to protect these organisms, and so I can't be taking people out and showing them these animals on the ground and showing people where they're at because that could lead to more human-animal conflict.

You know, surprisingly, and this will come as I think a shock and a terror to you, some of these species are on the list because of a history of poaching.

Certainly that's the case with a lot of our turtle species, but believe it or not, venomous snakes, rattlesnakes in North America, have a long tradition of being poached for the pet trade, believe it or not.

And so we've gotta be careful as practitioners that we are not creating opportunities to put these organisms further at risk.

And so I think those two factors are really big drivers into, you know, why we don't talk about them enough.

And I think that the final challenge is an accessibility issue.

You know, a lot of these things are in somewhat remote places, and it can be tough to take people out to see them because I think that's a huge step in it.

You know, for me, seeing these organisms out in the landscape doing the things that they do is why I fell in love with biology, with ecology, with conservation, as a kid and have made it my career.

And so I think it's hard to fathom and be fascinated by these things when it's difficult to see them.

And so finding opportunities, entry points where we can talk about these things, you know, I think that there's a lot of value to that.

And to that end, the Illinois Natural History Survey, we do a lot of work to that end.

And so we frequently have a lot of booths at the state fair talking about these things.

I'm the lead investigator on the Illinois Bat Conservation Program, and we do outreach across the state where we talk about bats.

We talk about how important they are to our agriculture economy, to enriching our lives through pest control, and all of these other things.

And so, you know, the Natural History Survey here, this is a big part of what we do, is communicating the importance of these species, and we're always looking for opportunities to do that.

- We've only got a few minutes left, but is there anything that people watching this who are concerned about endangered or threatened animals, anything they can do to help out?

- Yeah, there's so many things that you can do to help out.

I of course am aware that this is an election year, and one of the most important things to do is speak with your vote.

Get to know your candidates and get their stance on threatened and endangered species protections, and vote for those candidates who are champions for our biodiversity and our natural heritage.

Get out and be a part of the natural world.

In a lot of our wild areas in the state that are maintained by park districts, by forest preserve districts, by the State Department of Natural Resources, there's interpretive signage and other information up about the biodiversity, so you can learn about in your backyard what's there.

And so get out and enjoy nature and be an active participant in it.

And you know, there's a lot of great organizations that are doing remarkable work to conserve, and you can donate to those groups.

You know, you can, of course, participate in outreach events if you're curious about these sorts of things and be engaged in that.

And you know, continue to support conservation with your wallet.

There's a number of very interesting pieces of legislation that were passed decades ago, well before I was born, where fishing, hunting, outdoor gear has taxes applied to it.

As you purchase those items, that tax money comes back to the state for the protection of fish and wildlife.

And so, you know, speak with your wallet.

Be actively engaged in outdoor activities, hiking, birdwatching, fishing, hunting.

- Yeah, those are- - All of those things contribute to conservation.

- Those are good for people.

Yeah, well, Dr. Mark Davis, conservation biologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey, very fascinating conversation.

We appreciate your time.

- Thanks, Mark.

I appreciate being here.

- All right, thank you.

And thank you for joining us.

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