 ac rwy'n gwybod i'r mwyaf i Mike i ddau'r gwaith. Ddod. Ddod, ddod, ddod, Pat. Dydw i'r ddegwyddiad fath. Ddod, ddod i'n ddegwyddiad, ac mae'n ddod i'n bwysig i'r steriosteic. Fy gofio'r gweithio'r gwaith i'r bobl i'r ddegwyddiad, a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gwaith o ddegwyddiad ydw i'r gweithio'r gweithio. ac sy'n golyb i ddechrau a chael iechyd o'r cymryd o'r cymorthoedd y cyfroedb yn gwneud, ac rwy'n dechrau bys yn gwneud feel i ddefnyddio a lludio ddefnyddio roedd y dyma am fy mod i'r tu 어쨌든 i ddweud a'r cyhoeddion gyda'r cyfroedd o'i gilyddion yn ei hunain, ac mae mae'r gwnaeth am ymwyno'n gweithio ond y dyfeddau eich cwrdd, o'i ddod i'n cyffrousio a'r cyffrousio hefyd, i'r cybrannu gwahaniaeth fel y cyfryd hynny? Y hynny, y cyffrousio y gallwch chi'n ffreddwyd, dwi'n iawn i chi arwain i'ch tiesiol i'ch casu argell dros ffadafol, ond i chi'n gweld i chi i chi i chi arwain i chi, ac os nhw'n gweld i chi nhw'n gweld i chi'ch fflaenwyr o'r pwysig, Then I'll take you through a couple of examples of projects that I've been involved in. Fundamentally, what I'm going to do is talk to you a little bit about biodiversity in general and a little bit about genetic biodiversity and what we mean by that. Why it's being the hidden part of biodiversityJulie over the last several decades. I'm going to talk a little bit about policy and politics a'i ifaith poddwydau ar gyfer ar gyfer y cadwadau acadCarl. Rydym yn cael ei wneud hynny. Mae'r hoff waspwch wedi'u gwneud yn ôl ar gyfer fy ngyfaint. Mae'n gobeithio i'ch gyddo'r gyfer lleig y pwyliadau, ac yn ddim yn ddim wedi gweithio'n gofynig styg. USAID Mae'r hoff yw meddwl cyddiadol i gael gweld. Rwy'n dod yn cyflym o'r gyflosieis lleig, ac mae'n dweud yn gyflym i gwylliant i gened Maser, ac mae'n meddwl mewn hwer o'r gweithio'n gweithio, ac ydych chi'n chyfodd gyddiwch mewn gwirionedd yn digwydd i ddewch am cyfnod yn ddiddorg iawn. Dwi'n gweithio ffocos i'r cei Gwyfgeis Rhaenosor ac yn ystod yng nghymru Ameneis Gwyfgeis Rhaenosor, sydd yn y cyfnod ar dweud o'r gweithio. A ben i wneud y fyrdi, tartwm ni'n gweithio'r cyfnod a hynny fod yn llogafod ei多byn, yng nghydfodio'r parwyn i'r gyferwyr eich cyfnod. the Scottish Wildcat and I am starting to work on it again. And I wanted to give you a really very much from the perspective of engendering some debate about the situation with the Scottish Wildcat in this room later when I'm going to talk about what genetics really is telling us about what you have wandering round on the walls. And then finally, a little bit about how we are trying to get genetics ydy'r llewb yn ddysgol yn welfa ymhellan o'r osbig, oed yw'r ysgrifennad Oed Llyf yn y sefydlu a'r gweithio i ddod yn sgwrs, oed ymhellion, oed ymhellion a'r osbig a'r osbig a'r osbig yn ddydig yn g或r ac mae'r osbig yn y gallu'r gweithbeth yn ymhellan fel hyn gan gyda'r yr ysgol. Felly dyma o wneud ceisio yma yw'r llunio ar y maen nhw yma ddydig yn y bobl antibiotics. i fynd i'r cymdeithasol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol, o'r mynd i'r lleolol. Yn y gallu gwnaeth i mi, yma oherwydd yma, ychydigau'r kitul cyf �odol yma, oherwydd yma eich cyfheithio, fydd yn oed i'r cyfheithio. Yn ychydig, roeddwn i'n ddifelio arall, oherwydd, dyma'r cyfheithio arall, oherwydd yma mae'n gwybod fydd yn unedig. Mae'r genedlaeth gwahanol sydd wedi'iとio'r melyddol o'r sefyll, o'r holl ffordd hwn cyfionol sydd ar ymgyrch i ni'n gallu'n un bethau gyda arnod y blynyddoedd yn gorffodon yn gorffodol o ran blynyddol. Mae'n brywedodd ei wneud hynny i bob weithio a'r belynyddol yn ffordd yw meddwl ac mae ddaeth ei wneud yn iawn o'r gwaith o'r vrai o'r amser. Ond nid yw'n amlant o gyda'r biologiaid, mae'n unig amser ydi, mae'n mynd i yn.. Ond o'r cyffredin cyffredin cyffredin yn ei genesys, yn y 50s, yn 60s, sy'n mynd i'r cwm yn cyflawn i'r cyffredin erbyn bydden o Rachel Carson, yna, sy'n mynd i'r pethau sydd ymolwyd i'r hynny'n unig eu hunain ar y bydd. Ond o'r ydydd i'r pethau ymlaen arlo rheswm mae hynny'n gweithio'r ysgol yw'r fan o'r ysgol ymlaen paeddwg nôr yng Nghymru yn ieddydymu'r nôr 11. Debyg y cwylwyr hwn i'r nôr, er mwyn yw'r hwn ar dda yng nghymhyn beth sy'n geneddoedd y maen nhw'r cyffredig o'r Cyngor o'r tan yw Sir Peter Scott. Mae'n eisiau'r Afri ac yn ddad o'r ysgol yw ei fod yn gwahan yna yn myfyrdd ac yn ddigonol i'r ffordd rydyn ni. Mae'r gwahan ar unigrif sprwp ynghyddiad. Mae'r tan yw myfyrdd i'r pwyddoedd, ac mae'n ysgolwch yn fwyaf. am gyfnodau cyntaf sydd wedi'u gwneud o'r cyflwyno cyfnodau sydd gyfnodau ymgylcheddau eu cyflwyno a'r cyflwyno cymryd yn oed yn cael y sprwwf. Felly mae'r cyflwyno yn gweithio'r ddylau am y ddechrau ymddechydd. Felly mae'r genesydd yn y 1960. Fe maen nhw'n meddwl i'r gluawr yn y 80 ac y 90, a mae'r cwrdd yn y cyflwyno cyflwyno yn y dechrau, Why? It is an important discipline, there are now degrees in conservation biology. Many students want to study it and get involved in the fight that we are facing. It covers a whole variety of different things and I teach everything from animal behaviour, through demographics, modelling of populations, extinct species like the phylocein, o'r hwn ymgyrchio'r hwnnw, o'r canfodol o agri-nwylliant, i ddau'r hyn o'r hyn i'r hyn o'r hwnnw o bwyd. Felly, y bwyd, sy'n hollwch i'r byd, byddio'r byddol yn y bydd, oherwydd mae'r hyn o'r hwnnw yn brithun, mae'r hyn o'r hwnnw o brithun lleol, boeddol o'r bwyd o'r hwnnw o'r hwnnw o'r bwyd. Mae'r bwysig yng Nghymru yn ymddi'r Llywodraeth yma o'r 10,000 ysgol. Mae'r bwysig yn ymddi'r Llywodraeth i'r bwysig, mae'n cyfnod o'r pathyn sy'n gweithio. Ond y bwysig yn ymddi'r bwysig yn ymddi'r bwysig, ond mae'n ddweud yn y bwysig yn y bwysig yma. Ymddi'r bwysig yma yma ymddi'r bwysig yma. Mae'n gweithio'r bwysig, mae'n gweithio'r bwysig. Mae'n gweithio gyda'r cyfarwyddau? Mae'n gweithio'r bwysig sy'n cael ei wneud y jei hyn. Mae hi hem belongsio'r cyfnodiol sy'n gweithio'r cyfnodiol a'n gweithio'r blaen oes cyffwyl sydd. Mae hi yn ymddi'r bwysig. Mae hi hi er mwyn o feudofyn amser cyfnodiol. Mae'r bwysig yn ymddi sydd yma yw'r gweld gwag ddiwybiwyr ar leolio, yn ymddiwyrau gennymol. Rwy'n cael digon, yn yw'r siw, rydych chi'n weithio eu gennym rhoi newydd gennym drwsiddor iawn. Dwy gweld y cyfrifio mawr yw'r awddiol yn dweud yn chi. Mae angen rhoi'n gweithio, ond mae dylwni'n gweithio'n ddweud yn cael ei wneud, a fe'n ddweud yr ysgolwch a'r dynnal chi'n dweud sy'n dweud yn ein washaf. Mae annes o'r wneud yn dweud yn hynny drwsiddor iawn. Um o'r cyfnod gennarell gyda'r ysgrifio'r problemau ymlaen. Ymwneud yn gallu ddim yn cyfnod dros gyfnod, gyfnod, ddyn amser, mae'n realise unigol, ond mae'n ddim yn ddiddordeb. Cyfnod gyfnod ymlaen o'r gyfnod ymlaen yw efo'r euffliw. Ond o'r cyfnod gyfnod ymlaen i gynnyddol, ...fynwys yn cael ei blaid. Yn y gallwch yn cael ein rydyn ni'n ffrindio... ...y yr ysgol sydd ymddangos... ...y'r hyffordd yn cymdeithiol yn ymdweithio... ...y'r hyffordd yn cael ei ddweud. Fy unrhyw sy'n eu rhai ymdweith. Fy ydych chi'n mynd i ddefnyddio... ...y cyffredin o gyfnoddau genesaf... ...y'r hyffordd yn gyfieithio'r hyffordd... ...y ffordd y gyrfa rhagion... ...hynny'n gofio'r cyffredin... Your dad. We're also looking at the population level. And we're looking at how that genetic diversity affects species ability to respond to environmental changes. The fundamental building blocks of inheritance and evolution. And so, over the last 40 or 50 years, genetic diversity has really been the poor cousin of ecosystem diversity and species diversity. Not only in science, in scientific terms, but also in policy terms as well. That is something that we've been trying to address and I've spent far too long on my career trying to address that as well. So that's what we're talking about, genetic diversity. Why is it relevant? Aside from the fact that I just mentioned that genetic diversity is the rule-building block of evolution, Roeddwn ni'n ddechrau'r populatio a范an mae'r digonhau arbennig arlawno'r hollog gan yr ocefnod. Felly ond whenyn popol yn bryd baith y drauc o'r afael o ffrifol. Roeddwn ni'n ddegos i addyn nhw, roeddwn ni'n ddegos arbennig yn ymddangos cael eu rai'r hollog wedi'i gherty i hollog yn ddechrau'r hollog yn ddechrau. gan y cyfnod o bobl y dyna bydd o'r iawn yn gweithio y maen nhw. Mae'r teithasol sydnos ymlaen. Efallai, mae'r rhaid i'n rhoi erbyn am argyrchu yn cyfrannu hyn – gwneud cyfryng ymddi sydd yn gyfmryd eich hunol a chyn cyfan, i gael lleol pref, a genny Godfair, yn ei chymysgol, llwyddiol llwyddiol i gyfrannu, mae'n mynd i'r llwyddiol sydd yn fath. we know species with high genetic diversity have got a better resilience, bang spack ability, okay. And that's because if we were all the same and it affected us all the same, then we'd have no options. There's no option value there. The more diversity you have, the more options you have within a species to respond in different ways, and some genetic types will come through. Mae wedi ei wneud ei wneud bryd i wneud o gyllidebach ddau o gyllidebach, a gallwn cyfebyddiaeth a ddau o boblau o bobliau a'r organismau ar gyfer eich cymryd, peirio i gael a'r clymau. Mae yma ydych chi'n amlwg, er amdiano yn gweithio gyda'r clymau mae ymhydd a chygoedd ei wneud o yn gwéidio y cyfryd yw hynny o ddweud y cyllidebach o'r cyflwytoful i casio. Felly, you know a species that prefers colder temperature and it gets warmer, you migrate northwards and that's what happened. And we know that's what happened after the last ice ages for example. But now we're in the way. We're stopping species from having that flexibility, that plasticity. So we need to build resilience into the populations they are because they won't be able to move. Onog hwn o sydd yn ymgraecau hyfforddiant, hwn o'n wahanol. A hwnnw i'n meddwl i gyfweld a'n gwybod yn ymgyrch ac onw o ran yw'r opeth yn yr ymgyrch. Yn gweithio gwiswyl genedlau ar gyfer mae'n gweithio'rron yn panerbyn, nad doedd chi'n bob ymgyrch arbennig a'r cyfliadau yn ei gilydd i chi'n ddiddordeb yn ddarfod ar y cyf analog. Roedd ei wneud bod nos ydych chi'n amlwn o'r dweud chi ar hwnnw ymgyrch an immersed in this is that populations of animals and plants are living in what we call disturbed environments. In other words, they're not living in pristine state because almost no pristine populations no pristine areas of the world still exist. The one thing we do know and there have been many studies that have shown this is that populations of animals and plants that live in disturbed environments o'r cyfrannu yma, ac rydym yn ddim yn ei bobl yn y cwmawr, ond y ceisio'r cyfrannu. Ychydig iawn o'r cyfrannu, mae'r syniadau yn cyfrannu cyfrannu, ac ym Mhwylwyddiadau mae'r cyfrannu yn trafod o'r cyfrannu lleoddiadau lleoddiadau lleoddiadau, ond mae'n gyfrannu cyfrannu lleoddiadau lleoddiadau lleoddiadau. We do have however now a set of very well defined obligations under international conventions, one of which is the Convention on Biological Diversity. In 2010 we were supposed to have halted the loss of biodiversity. But in fact we failed to do so. And what happened as a result of that was that the Convention on Biological Diversity set another round of targets for 2020, o phwng i gyda gwahaniaeth gynghau gyda gynhwys y ystyried gan gyrwgr wedi dweud o gyngor iawn a gwahaniaeth oedol. Mae ychynig телmarhau gyngor, bywydolion yn cael ei bwrdd ac argen falle o gwahaniaeth gwahaniaeth mynd. Felly, rydyn nhw'n gwybod yw gymryd yma yn gyngor, ond y'r gyngor yn gyll yn gyngor gyrwgr a'n gwybod gyngor cyngor. Felly we, as a signatory on the Convention on Biological Diversity, have an obligation to maintain genetic diversity in the species for which we have governance. And there are all sorts of strategies, Scottish Government has got a very nice biodiversity strategy for 2020 and it's pretty clear that there are lots of nice aspirational activities in place to maintain all levels of biodiversity. We need to be able to measure it and recently, a few years ago now, a number of us proposed what we call biodiversity variables or measurements that allow us to measure whether or not we're maintaining or losing diversity. A species level, community, ecosystem structure and genetic composition as well. So we do now have a set of measures in place by which we can actually ask the question, are we succeeding or are we failing? And I don't probably need to ask you the question as to whether we're succeeding or failing, we already know that yet again we are failing. This is a mid-term assessment of the 2020 targets on the Convention on Biological Diversity and we are failing in virtually all measures. And actually the Governments that are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity and that's nearly all Governments, one major exception, the United States, and basically we know that almost every level we're still failing to halt the loss of biodiversity. And it's already being talked about now, well we need to set a new set of targets for 2030. We need to ask ourselves the question, how much longer are we going to kick things down the road and say well you know we'll leave it for the next generation to sort this mess out and we'll postpone our responsibilities for another decade. But that is you know not a particularly unusual thing to do. So genetic diversity is important, we're losing it, we've got measurements in place to tell how well we're conserving it and we know that we are failing. So that's the sort of current situation that we're in and what I'm going to do is talk a little bit now about how that actually manifests itself. And I'm going to start off by talking about the rhinoceros, the African rhino. And I want to show you what looks like a rather strange diagram here, which is known as a phylogenetic tree. It's like a genealogy and I'll come back to explain it in a minute but it's basically a tree of inherited DNA sequences that exist in this case within the black rhinoceros. The black rhinoceros is a species that's undergone a huge amount of hunting since it was first discovered when Europeans went to southern Africa in the late 1700s. And if we look at the black rhinoceros today what we see is this level of genetic diversity and how it's partitioned across Africa. So you can see there are different regions of the genealogy that are found only in West Africa, only in North East Africa, only in East Africa and at the top there in the southern part of the continent as well. The thing that I want you to look at though, the only reason that I was showing you this is that if we look at the colour on the branches of the tree I want you to see that some of them are black and some of them are red. The red ones are all regions, all portions of the evolutionary history of the black rhinoceros that are now extinct. And these have been lost only since 1775 because that's how far back we can go with the DNA sequences that we've produced. So in little more really than somewhere in the region of 10 to 12 generations of black rhino we've managed to lose two thirds of the genetic diversity in that species. Why? The main reason is that almost all of these populations are now extinct. Whereas the black rhino was used to be present throughout sub-Saharan Africa, it's really only now present in five countries, in three southern African countries and two East African countries, all of the populations have been translocated and all of that genetic diversity that used to exist has gone. So that's what genetic erosion looks like, the mass extinction of genetic diversity within species. We all know that rhinos are facing a crisis and actually there has been a number of poaching episodes that have really affected rhinos across Africa. The last major one was happened in the 1980s which was really largely precipitated by demand for rhino horn in the Middle East. The current one has its genesis in the ever-expanding economies of South and Southeast Asia, China and Vietnam especially, and really people only started to notice this poaching epidemic beginning to start in 2009, and I'll tell my own story about this in a minute. But for the last five years, we have seen a situation where over a thousand rhinos have been poached in South Africa alone. With poaching happening across the continent, rhino horn, gram for gram is more valuable than gold, and the reason for that is that people who use and traffic this material for traditional Asian and Southeast Asian medicine think it's a cure for cancer. And of course there's no evidence for that, and it's a completely inert keratin substance. Nevertheless, the trend is very negative. I have worked on while black rhinos for quite a long time, I was participating back in 2008 in the census of the very last known understood black rhino population in Cunania, in Namibia, in this environment, and at that stage we didn't think that there was a problem, there was no evidence that there was a poaching epidemic about to start. Indeed, when we were censising these animals, there was no evidence that poaching happened. We actually found a dead female, and that dead female, although she'd been de-horned, it turned out that the horns were just in a strong box in the local village. Now, those guys are handling something that's probably worth 50,000, 60,000 US dollars there now, not then, but now. And now poaching has come to Namibia, finally come to Namibia, it's the most inaccessible region for poachers. And so it's caught everybody really by surprise, and in different parts of Africa they're having different levels of success. Most of the poaching actually was that it's most destructive in East Africa in the 1980s, it's much more destructive in Southern Africa at the moment. So, for a geneticist who wants to understand genetic biodiversity within a species, and in this case I'm going to talk about the white rhino, the sad fact is that I spend most of my time now in museums, all over the globe, because I can't any longer access the genetic material from most of the populations that have existed of these species because they're extinct. And so we spend a lot of our time digging around museums, looking for specimens of different species from different parts of the world. And so the only way to get genetic samples from the majority of African rhino populations that we know have existed over the last several hundred years is in museums. And that changes things somewhat, but it allows us to understand the history of these populations. Now genetic tools have developed hugely over the years. Many, many years ago, before we understood the gene, before we understood DNA, before really the early 1950s and 1960s, we used to use what we call visible polymorphisms. And so if you look at the picture of those snow geese there, you see one white geese goose, you see one dark goose and you see one intermediate. That's actually an example of a single gene, a single variation that's what we call segregating in the population. The two parents are homozygous, two copies of the white for the white bird, two copies of the dark for the dark bird, and then the offspring is heterozygous. But unfortunately, there are very few genetic characteristics where it's so easy. Because oftentimes these genes are not so easily, you get many different intermediate forms, they may not have a simple relationship like this. And there may be many, many genes. Darwin figured out, even though Darwin didn't understand anything about genetics, that was Mendel doing that work, and they were working in isolation, Darwin figured out that evolution happens mostly by many genes of small effect changing over time. And so these kinds of genes that we're talking about here, which result in very obvious physical differences between individuals in the population, are very rare. As a result of that, we started to look at other kinds of variation, including at the chromosomes, variation in ultra structure of the chromosomes, whether or not you have long arms of the chromosomes or whether they're absent, the banding pattern of different kinds of DNA on those chromosomes, and then looking at different kinds of DNA molecules directly at the sequence. So DNA, for example, in the mitochondria in our cell resides a small genome, which is the legacy of a time when mitochondria are actually separate prokaryotic organisms that joined with other similar organisms to produce eventually eukaryotic cells. And the legacy of that is that we have small bits of DNA in mitochondria in the cells, which tell us about the mitochondrial history. Now we all inherit our mitochondria from our mum, and the reason for that is because when the egg gets fertilised, all the mitochondria from the dad are in the tail because the mitochondria provide the energy for the tail to beat. And when fertilisation happens, the tail drops off. So you just inherit your mother's mitochondria. So that's a way of understanding the maternal history. But we can also sequence the whole genome and we're doing that routinely now for many species and look at all of the variation in the genome, and then there are millions of segments of the genome that vary between us. And we can use that information to understand the differences between populations, how they're adapted to their environments, and how much genetic diversity they have for evolution to act upon. And then what we do largely is we reconstruct the genealogies that we were just talking about. So basically we use that information, we take everybody's genotype, as we call it, the assembly of all of your genetic variation, and then we can use that to calculate backwards how related every individual is to every other individual. And that will give you not only an idea of how much genetic variation there is in a population, but it will also tell you how that population evolved. And us, as humans, we've undergone a massive expansion, and we can see that expansion in numbers through the shape of the genealogy, who's related to whom. So by reconstructing genealogies from genetic data, we can tell a lot about the history of populations. And most endangered species have a very different genealogy to humans. They have a genealogy that has large gaps in it where whole families or whole populations have gone extinct, just like I showed you with the rhino, where if you imagine the picture, without the red lineages in it, you'll see a very gappy genealogy indeed, and that's because those populations are extinct. So we were just looking at the existing populations, we'd see a very strange genealogical structure indeed. And that's what we see with endangered species, and that's what we can use to measure the demographic history. So why are we applying the genetics to the rhinos? For a whole number of reasons. So the first thing is that there's been a huge amount of confusion as to what we actually have. How many species are there? How many subspecies are there? Where are the limits? Where are the lines between those species and subspecies? And that's because it's based on incomplete data. Africa's a vast continent and many, many populations go unstudied. And on top of that, most of the populations have now gone extinct. Now this would be a simple, just a very simple academic exercise. So why am I talking about it? And it's the bottom point that I want you to read, which is that effectively we've got to the state now with rhinos in Africa that we have to start amalgamating populations. And the reason for that is if we don't do that, they're just going to be picked off. And that's what's happening. So unconnected populations across Africa are not very well protected in many cases and the poachers are having a field day, which is why there's so many individuals being put together. And so in the future these populations are going to have to be consolidated so they can be more effectively protected and managed to maintain a good number of individuals and maintain their genetic diversity. The problem then is that which populations do you put together? Because if you put the wrong ones together, they may mate, but they may not produce offspring because they are genetically too distinct. Or the offspring they do produce will not be very well suited to the environment they live in. So what we're trying to do is draw a genetic map of rhinos across Africa to allow this kind of emergency management to happen so that we can start putting populations in environments where they can be protected properly and rationally. Because in 1980s when the original poaching epidemic happened, that was done mainly on foot by people employed through intermediates to do fairly limited poaching episodes. Now these groups are funded and they have a helicopter and they are able to come in and come out very quickly. And the poaching is very, very sophisticated. So to have a chance in this battle we need to be able to put everything we can together to protect these remaining populations. So let's go get to the nitty gritty then and I'm going to talk about first of all the northern white rhino and some of you may know about this. But this picture I just wanted to show you is really a special photo. It's one of only very few photos that have been taken and only ever done once where you have two individuals of northern white on the left and southern white on the right in the same photo. So this is a northern white rhino on the left. This is a southern white rhino on the right. And these have been regarded as separate species for a very long time and have been managed separately. And there's a very sparse fossil record of these animals across the continent where the red stars are on the map. That's where the fossils have been discovered. And so we know that in the last two million years since they evolved they have been all over the African continent and don't forget at some periods during the last two million years the Sahara was a savanna. It was green during very, very wet and hot periods. So these animals which live in grasslands at different times over the last two million years would have been very different places in Africa according to the distribution of the grassland at that period of time. So they were all over the continent. And so now they are separated into the areas. The northern white rhino is found in the area covered in orange or used to be found in that area covered in orange and the southern white rhino is in the area covered in purple. The southern white rhino almost went extinct. It was hunted almost to extinction. It went out to a few hundred individuals. But the South Africans and the Namibians and Zimbabwans understood that that population was about to go extinct and have recovered it to the point at which now the southern white rhino is the most numerous rhinoceros on the planet with about 20,000 individuals. Still being posed at a thousand a year just to remind you in South Africa. So it's not by any means safe. But 20,000 individuals. The northern white rhino is in a different situation entirely. Population size of three. No, sorry, two. And the reason it's down to two is because probably as you know on March the 20th last year the last male northern white rhinoceros died. And normally that would be an obvious trigger to say that species, subspecies, whatever you want to call it is functionally extinct. Actually over the last 20, 30 years when the animals were brought into captivity they were able to collect hundreds of millilitres of sperm. So there is quite a lot of male genetic material available from the northern white rhino not only from one individual either. But nevertheless, there are no male northern white rhinos. And the two female northern white rhinos are relatives and as far as we can tell they're post reproductive. So it's a pretty difficult situation to say the least. And so the history from 1895 is very different from these two subspecies and this is important. I just want to emphasise it. So the southern white rhino was recovered from almost going extinct by actual conservation measures in South Africa and to the point that it's in the tens of thousands. Whereas the northern white rhinoceros actually had a higher population size in 1960 than the southern white rhino. But it has absolutely plummeted down to the situation that we're in today. Why is that important? Well, people think that the northern white rhino is a separate species. The sixth rhino, a taxonomic reassessment of the critically endangered northern white rhinoceros. So people have been thinking that this is a one-way street for a separate species that's on its way path to extinction. And so what have we wanted to do was ask the question with using what we call the museum DNA specimens, the ancient DNA specimens, was that really always the case? Were they genetically distinct? And if so, at what level? Are they subspecies? Are they species? Could they ever be similar to each other enough to be able to rescue for the southern white rhino to potentially rescue the northern white rhino or to rescue it? So what we did is we did DNA sequencing and I'm not going to talk about the details too much, except to say that this big, broad blue line, you can see a few small areas of red in each. Each of these lines represents the genetics of an individual. There's one I just want to point out to you, which you may be able to see, called NASI, which is SWR NWR hybrid. I think that that individual, the line, is half red and half blue. So each individual here in the southern region is nearly all blue. Each individual in the north, with the exception of that hybrid, is nearly all red. So they are genetically distinct. Their mitochondrial DNA that they've inherited from their mother is also genetically distinct. So there's no question that these are two separate, long-separated populations that are genetically distinct. And when we apply what we call a molecular clock, if we understand the rate at which the DNA was analysing evolves over time, and we multiply that by the generation time, we could estimate how long in the past they diverged from a common ancestor. And in the case of the southern and the northern white rhino, that turns out to be very close to one million years. So they've been separated from each other for about a million years. And they have been separated from the black rhino for about 10 million years. So this is the time scale we're looking at. So yes, this is a distinct population. Can they interbreed? Have they ever interbred since they diverged? Can we tell that? What we can do is take the genetic data that we've got and simulate in the computer the genealogies that best explain the genetic data that we have now. So you simulate lots of different things that could have happened in the past. So we know that the populations declined. We know when they declined, because that's recorded. So we can look at the rate of expansion or decline. So here's an expansion. This is the southern white rhino we know has expanded over the last 100 years from almost nothing to tens of thousands. And here is the northern white rhino that we know has declined over that period of time. So we can start modelling different ways in which that can happen. We can also model whether or not they have been exchanging genes over that time, because if that is the case, then we can maybe understand how genetically distinct they've become and whether or not they can potentially produce fertile offspring between them. So I don't want you to worry about the numbers too much. There are two things I want to point out. The first thing is N1 is the past population, the ancestral population size, how big the population was in the past. And we've got numbers for both northern and southern that correspond to about between 60 and 100,000. Now, this isn't the number of individuals, this is the number of genomes. So it's probably the case that it was quite a number of times greater than that, but you can get the impression that in the past the population size must have been vast. But when the population crashed for the southern white rhino, we can date that to about 250 years ago. And that is a very nice result for us, because that's when we know that the hunting started when Europeans first settled in the southern part of Africa and started hunting the southern white rhino. The thing that surprised us is the date at which the decline of the northern white rhino started, which is over 1,000 years ago. And that indicates that the best explanation that we have for that is not a colonialism effect, but actually the Bantu migration that happened between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago, where Bantu-speaking people migrated out of the Central African rainforest and into the northern savannas and started colonising that area, may have hunted them directly, but there was also the Arab slave trade starting at that time as well when trophies would have been taken as well. So it looks like there's a colonial origin for the most recent bottleneck of the southern white rhino, but a Bantu origin for the beginning of the bottleneck of the northern white rhino. And so that's the key-take-home message from this unnecessarily complicated slide. We then looked at the different potential scenarios of mixture. So we know that 20,000 years ago, the habitat in yellow is the sort of savanna habitat area, grassland habitat, its distribution across Africa. We know that distribution from pollen core data. So we know that 20,000 years ago, there was a connection, there was a bridge, there was a link between the northern range and the southern range. So we tested a whole bunch of different scenarios to see whether or not they were always isolated, whether the south migrated to the north, whether the north migrated to the south or whether there was bidirectional migration between those populations. And we found a very strong signal for bidirectional migration. And the thing that really knocked the sideways from the data was the timing of that, because it could have been as recent as 14,000 years ago, a very limit of our estimates. And if that's the case, there's been genetic exchange between the northern white rhino and the southern white rhino, which diverged a million years ago, but there's been the current genetic exchange between them really up until a very recent time in the past. One of the implications of that finding. Well, here they are. We're at the last chance saloon for the northern white rhino. I'm going to pose several questions to you as we go through, and this is going to be one of them. What would you do in this situation? And actually, the different sides of the debate can be read in the media. You can go online and you can read all sorts of things. Things like, Sudan, the rhino, is dead, but his sperm could help save the species. And so there's lots of ideas that we can perhaps use. Gene editing, stem cell science, and IDF to resurrect the northern white rhino. Alternatively, Africa's northern white rhino shouldn't be resurrected Jurassic Park style. So just let nature take its course and let it go extinct. There's a third way. There is a third way, and our data imply that southern white rhino individuals could potentially, as a means of last resort, be crossed with northern white rhino individuals, and they may produce fertile offspring. And if that's the case, there may be a future for a rhino population of some sort to live in the region that the northern white rhino lives in now, where we would allow hybrid individuals to go into that region and then let natural selection select those individuals with the fetish genotypes. This is a highly controversial opinion, and most of the conservation efforts are going desperately towards the cloning end of the argument to maintain the northern white rhino. So I'm just going to leave it there, and I'll talk about it later on. I hope to get your opinions on this. I'm going to talk about this handsome fella for a little while. And this is, of course, emblematic species for Scottish biodiversity, but I'm sure you know that it's in trouble and has been in trouble for a very considerable amount of time. So the question that we've been asking, and we've been asking this question now for several decades, I have to say, is whether or not there are any true Scottish wildcats left. It has its own taxonomic status, subspecies status, phyllus, sylvestris, grampia. You probably know that it went extinct in England and Wales by about the 1880s. It was only found in a small refuge in northwest of Scotland, reached its lowest level by probably 1914, and it's a terrible thing to say, but may owe its survival to the First World War. And the reason for that is that most of the people that were responsible for its persecution went off the fight in the trenches and didn't come back. It's also coincident with the establishment of the Forestry Commission that it started to expand, but the big but is it's expanded what we call the Scottish Wildcats, expanded at a rate that seems unfeasible given its population size in the beginning part of the 20th century, and a lot of people have speculated that part of the reason it might have expanded more quickly than expected was through hybridisation with domestic cats living on farms or around farms or wild domestic cats in different parts of its range. Under the assumption that it is a pure species or a pure subspecies, it has been fully protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the EC Habitats Directive since 1988. But if it is a hybrid taxon, it falls outwith the legislation, so it's not formally protected. So, to what extent, what do we know? What does the genetics tell us about this animal and how it looks and how does that link to its diversity? Now, you may know that there are some really good what we call phenotypic physical characteristics that you can use to describe the classic Scottish Wildcat phenotype, although I have to say that that's all based on type specimens in museums that were deposited after the arrival of domestic cats, so they could have already been hybrid. The colour of the paws, pale paws, broad skull, broad tail, lack of a continuous dorsal stripe down the back of the animal and those are things which set the animal apart. Not just physical size, but confirmation. So, what we did is we did DNA profiling, the first big study, and we worked with a very well-known person involved in this field called Andrew Kitchener who works at the National Museum of Scotland who studied these animals, measured their skins for decades. And then we used DNA profiling and then we compared the DNA results with the morphological phenotypic results and asked the question, do we get a good correlation with the genotypes of the animals and their phenotypes? How well does that work? Now, this is a complicated slide, but I just want you to imagine that what we've done is we've taken the genotypes and we've mapped them in space according to how similar they are. So it's like a spatial way of mapping the genotypes. So, if we look on the right-hand side of the space, each dot is an animal and the closer two dots are together, the more similar their genotypes are. So on the right-hand side of this space, we've essentially got house cats. Regardless of where they are, whether they're in Scotland or whether they're in England, they're very similar. Two reasons for that that we expect to see that and that is firstly, they're domesticated, so they're genetically similar anyway. But secondly, they're actually domesticated from a different species, Felislibica, which is the wild cat that lived in North Africa that was probably domesticated in and around Egypt and that region. And then we've got this big cloud of other dots, which is to the left of the zero mark on the spatial map, and that is those cats are wild living cats. I use that term advisedly. Wild living cats, okay? And they comprise animals which we know are phenotypically, morphologically pure wild cats, and they comprise hybrids as well. So effectively, if we compress these dots into one line and look at the density of those dots, we can see the house cats has one curve, one peak, which comprises all of the genetic diversity for house cats. Wild living cats, wild caught cats have two peaks that have one peak which is domestic cats, these are fherol moggies, and the other one, which is a big cloud of hybrids, okay? And then when we look at whether or not the most wild cat type animals are found in one place, or one elevation, or north of the Great Glen, or in remnant Caledonian rainforest, or any of those things, and we ask that question. Unfortunately, with our work, there was no real pattern that we could discern as to whether or not a true wild cat genotype had a particular geographic affinity, okay? So they appear to be scattered in our dataset anyway. The only thing that we could do is we could do the same genetics profiling that I've described previously with Rhinos, we could do it on the museum cats. And we found that what had been brought in as a wild cat into the museums before the 1950s tended to be purer in its genotype, and that what seems to have been happening is that the animals that we're calling wild cats are having more hybridisation as we go into the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the present day. So hybridisation is continuing and accelerating. So wild living cats are diverse. There's definitely a signal of an indigenous wild cat population. No question about that. In stark contrast to the house cats, they're highly heterogeneous. And actually the morphological data, the pelage, the patterns on the back correlate pretty well with the genetics. But we could find very little effect of latitude, longitude and elevation. And SNAs, Scottish Natural Heritage, weren't very happy with that result as we could say, right. If you just conserve this population here, let's say, you know, Northern Cairngorn, Abernethi, whatever, that's where you're going to be preserving the biggest amount of wild catness. In our data set, at least, that doesn't seem to be the case. They're spread out. And we can see in the recent museum skins that there's a lot of recent hybridisation. So the legal status of this animal is very tenuous. And which means, you know, what are the management options. And I'll come back to that now, because I want to bring you up to 2018. Because where can we go from here? Well, most recently, and this was just published a few weeks ago, a much more extensive analysis was carried out looking at different genomic regions in the chromosomes of these animals. And we were hoping that they would find a magic bullet and say, no, we found a region and we found a particular kind of genotype that is definitely Scottish Wildcat. Unfortunately, and I'm just quoting from the paper, we discovered that despite increased genetic resolution provided by these methods, wild living cats in Scotland show a complete genetic continuum or hybrid swarm structure when judged against reference data. The situation, I'm afraid, hasn't changed. The results that we produced back in 2001 have been recapitulated now in 2018. So now, where do we go from here? Well, on a scientific level, the hunt is on to find the wildcat gene. The only way we can do that is by sequencing the genomes as many wildcats as we can, comparing those with domestic cats, and that's actually ongoing at this moment. In fact, I'm co-supervising the students and we're awaiting this whole genome sequences of these wildcats that should be delivered within the next week or so. So, pretty soon, we'll be able to say whether or not there's any magic bullet within the, you know, three billion DNA sequences that there are within the genome of these animals. But I want to... I don't want to let you off the hook. I want to pose these questions again. I want to reiterate the question. You know, it should be noted that very few of these animals have met the pellar criteria. I commend that the conservation community in Scotland must now define clearly what measures are to be used to define a wildcat living in the wild in Scotland if future active actions are to be affected. So, if you want to keep wildcats in Scotland, they need to be protected. I think everybody agrees with that. How do you want to define them? Hybridisation is accelerating. We've shown you that with the data. And it's probably too late to stop it. I mean, I've spoken to people in SNH and, for example, said, what if we got all of the farmers in Scotland to neuter and spay their cats? And they've always said, come back to me until you can't do that. That's mass medication. That's not a possibility. But here's an interesting thought, which is that the habitat in which the original Scottish wildcat lived doesn't exist anymore. It hasn't existed for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's living in a highly modified habitat. It doesn't live in Caledonian forest anymore. Maybe a little bit of domestic cat genome helps it to adapt to a modified landscape, which it's living in now. Could that be the case? Could a little bit of hybridisation actually be beneficial to the wildcat? And are we agonising over something that we can't change anyway? And should that, in fact, affect or prevent conservation measures being applied? And if so, how do we do it? I want you to think about that because that's something I'd like to discuss with you when we have the questions. The biggest problem we've got with all of this is policy and politics, just like in all of these things right now. So what I've been spending a lot of my time doing is working with policymakers across the European Union. We had a big EU project a few years ago where we basically got all of the policymakers from all of the countries in the EU and we taught them genetics because many of them don't have no idea. They come from very different backgrounds. Most of them are not even scientists. But actually getting to understand the data that I've showed you today is very, very difficult. And then for them to make decisions on the policy level is even harder. So we've been working with policymakers across the EU producing knowledge packs, getting to understand and communicate with the scientists. Us scientists are also very bad at this. We don't communicate clearly, consistently, and in ways in which policymakers can understand. So it's very important that we up our game in doing this. And that's one of the things that we're trying to do. And recently, as Pat mentioned, we've been allowed to form a specialist group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, which we've been doing. We've been working all over the world. And actually I was in South Africa just before Christmas. The South Africans have got this peculiar habit at the moment of deliberately breeding weird coloured versions of their game. That's a black impala. That's a golden canoe. These animals are fetching ridiculous amounts of money, but they are also potentially altering a gene pool of the populations. Cos everything's fenced off. If you've got a high value animal, this animal may be worth four million rand. Then what you do is you apply herbicides across your entire land so you can take out the predators if they try to steal your very valuable animal. So we've been working with that. We've been providing advice to governments and we continue to do that. And in fact, one of the people that's in the picture here on the bottom right, Helen Sen, is the first author of that Wildcat paper. And so she works at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland in Edinburgh Zoo. We are working really hard to get the message across to policymakers because in the case, for example, of the Scottish Wildcat, there needs to be a really mature debate on what is possible and what we should be doing in the future to make sure that that animal doesn't disappear. So it just remains for me to thank my colleagues who have produced a lot of the data that I just talked about today. At the top of the two pictures at the top, Mark Beaumont and Joe Howard McHugh, they're working with me on the Wildcat project and the genomics data. Yoshan Moodley is a professor at the University of Wendah. Isa Rijiruso is a postdoc in my group. Shadrach Moyer is an associate dean at Kenyatyn University in Kenya. These guys work with me along with many others listed here on the genetics of the rhinos. Collecting this material takes years. That study that I described took us a decade because it's so hard to do. But they were very, very helpful in making this come to fruition in the end and we just hope that it's going to have a long-term effect on the conservation of the species. So I thank you for your attention.