The People’s Parrot Inspires First Community-Sponsored Genome Project

Conservation genomics is a new discipline that is beginning to provide important information to scientists that could help us save endangered species and protect the global environment

by GrrlScientist for Forbes | @GrrlScientist

The critically endangered Puerto Rican Amazon parrot (Amazona vittata), known locally as the iguaca, is the only extant parrot endemic to the United States. Its closest relatives are thought to be the Cuban Amazon and the Hispaniolan Amazon.
(Credit: Pablo Torres-Baéz / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / public domain.)

An international team of 16 scientists recently published their conservation genomics study that had the primary goal of helping to prevent the extinction of three threatened parrot species (ref). The project’s secondary goal was to demonstrate the applicability of conservation genomics for conserving endangered species.

The researchers used cutting-edge technologies to sequence and assemble genome maps of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot, the Cuban parrot and the Hispanolian parrot, all of which (as their names suggest) are endemic to islands in the Caribbean Sea. These parrots are threatened by a variety of human activities, particularly logging and other forms of habitat destruction, the local pet trade, and growing pressures from expanding human populations occupying their island homes.

Amazon parrots were once abundant throughout the Caribbean Islands

Scientists have looked to islands as important model systems for research into speciation…