How the kakapo beat the genetic odds

ISLAND-DWELLING flightless birds suffer when they meet humans. After arriving on New Zealand around 700 years ago, the Maori quickly discovered that the kakapo—a type of flightless parrot—was delicious and easy to catch. Things got worse once Europeans came. By 1995 there was just one kakapo left on the mainland, and 50 on Stewart Island, off New Zealand’s South Island.But things may be looking up. Conservation efforts have seen numbers rise to 204. And a paper in , by a team led by Nicolas Dussex at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, suggests the kakapo may have dodged a “mutational meltdown”, a genetic phenomenon that can doom species with small populations.