According to foreign media reports, the tragic history of the Pyrenaica pyrenaica is a powerful example of how the increasing number of species is being lost globally due to human activities. This may be the first extinction event in Europe at the beginning of this century. Yet it can give us valuable information about what we should do or avoid to stop this extinction spiral.
The distribution of this Iberian Ibex subspecies is limited to the French and Spanish Pyrenees. As early as 1767, in an official written document, the species had been identified as extremely rare. Like many other goats, they were almost hunted to extinction before the ban on hunting in 1913. Neither the National Park Agency (Ordesa & Monte Perdido) nor conservation projects funded by the European LIFE Project could prevent the Pyrenees wild goat from finally becoming officially extinct on January 6, 2000.
But the story of the charismatic animal didn't end there — a controversial cloning program with no scientific agreements and no support from regional environmental NGOs was immediately launched. The project says that even without further DNA studies, an anti-extinction is possible.
To learn more about the causes of its extinction, an international team of seven countries built a database of known museum specimens and reconstructed the statistical history of the population of the Pyrenees goat based on DNA evidence. Their study has been published in Zoosystematics and Evolution.
The study found that after population expansion between 14,000 and 29,000 years ago (which is quite recent from a genetic point of view), there was a significant loss of genetic diversity between about 15,000 and 7,500 years and continues to this day. At that time, the Pyrenees wild goat also lived outside the Pyrenees, but gradually its distribution was reduced to a valley in the Odessa National Park in the Spanish Pyrenees.
Written sources confirm that as early as the 14th century, people began to hunt the Pyrenees wild goat, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, it became a common target for hunting prey. There is no doubt that hunting has played an important role in reducing the number and range of distribution, but based on the information currently available, it is not yet certain that it was the last straw that crushed the camels. Infectious diseases derived from livestock can also kill other subspecies of this Iberian Ibex in a very short time.
While the relative role of various factors remains largely unclear, hunting and other animal-borne diseases over the past two centuries appear to have effectively drastically reduced the number of Perian wild goats because they play a role in genetically debilitated populations. This low genetic diversity coupled with the decline of inbreeding and declining fertility has allowed populations to exceed the minimum viable size – and since then, extinction has become inevitable.
This case study shows the importance of historical biological collections for genetic analysis of extinct species. As part of the study, a 140-year-old private trophy preserved in Poland, France, was genotyped, suggesting that private individuals may have material of high value. Because little is known about such resources, the authors called for the establishment of an online public database of privately collected biological material to promote biodiversity research.