The paperback edition of A Message from Martha is published today.
At less than a tenner (£10) it’s ridiculously cheap!
‘This absorbing book is an engaging and wistful, yet measured, chronicle about the tragic loss of one very special, iconic, species‘ – Guardian
‘An entertaining book … told with humour and disarming self deprecation‘ – Country Life
‘Riveting … a dark but fascinating chronicle of how human greed can have incalculable consequences in the natural world‘ – Independent
‘This hear-wrenching saga of extinctions old and new is as much about us as of disappearing doves‘ – Chris Packham
‘In his often jaw-dropping book he sets out to tell the story of this remarkable animal, and discover the reasons for its seemingly inexplicable demise. Piecing together the evidence, extrapolating from hazy first-hand accounts and taking his cue from other birds that are still with us, his book reads at times like the most arresting of mystery stories.’ – Sunday Times
‘An unusual combination of history, travelogue, horror story of wanton slaughter, analysis of ecological disaster and intense passion — for Avery leaves us in no doubt what Martha’s moral message to the modern world must be.’ – Daily Mail
‘A compelling read … written by one of the most passionate conservationists of his generation‘ – BTO News
‘The annihalation of the passenger pigeon should be seen as one of the greatest crimes committed by mankind on nature‘ – Sunday Express
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FYI and indeed ICYMI: a summary of a presentation on sequencing the passenger pigeon genome from the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference:
“Beth Shapiro (@bonesandbugs) talked about “the rise and fall of passenger pigeons”, which went extinct in 1914, prior to this rapid decline there were lots of them, described as “an infite number of them” in 1534, but “massive flocks” were efficiently trapped/shot and the species rapidly declined to zero.
Beth posed the question “How did that happen?” seems to be the same answer for other recent extinctions or near-misses – massive over hunting by us.
Passenger pigeon genomics turns out to be difficult, it is being done on passenger pigeon remains in museums, but very intersting. Due to the DNA fragmentation de novo genome assembly is not possible so they are using the band-tailed pigeon genome as a reference. This was sequenced with Dovetail Genomics, generating an N50 of 20Mb using Chicago library, see the recent paper Chromosome-scale shotgun assembly using an in vitro method for long-range linkage, from Beth’s husband.
They saw almost no mitochondrial diversity in individuals, but the nuclear genomes of passenger pigeon have more diversity than almost any other species at 1 in 100bp! Why does passenger pigeon have such high nuclear genome diversity? Analysis of the distribution of diversity was anything but normal, Beth reported a bimodal distribution with most bins having no/little diversity, and a few with very high diversity and these bins were all at the ends of the chromosmes. Weird stuff going on in passenger pigeon genome.”
Source: http://core-genomics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/agbt-day-2-afternoon.html