“Another pneumonia outbreak has killed bighorn sheep in the Skalkaho area, and a veterinarian thinks smoke from wildfires may be to blame,” says an article in the Montana newspaper the Ravalli Republic. “If it spreads, the outbreak would be the 7th major die-off of bighorn sheep in western Montana since 2009.”
Read the rest of the story in the Ravalli Republic here.
Photo: A healthy bighorn sheep in Montana. Ryan Hagerty photo courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Another pneumonia outbreak has killed bighorn sheep in the Skalkaho area, and a veterinarian thinks smoke from wildfires may be to blame,” says an article in the Montana newspaper the Ravalli Republic. “If it spreads, the outbreak would be the 7th major die-off of bighorn sheep in western Montana since 2009.”
Read the rest of the story in the Ravalli Republic here.
Photo: A healthy bighorn sheep in Montana. Ryan Hagerty photo courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Salt Lake City Tribune reported last week that the state health department has not posted signs at boat launches about the danger of eating fish with high levels of mercury because they do not have the money to pay for the $15 signs created in state prisons.
That actually sounds reasonable, a problem of our recessionary age, if you consider that there could be thousands of boat launches that need to be posted. But there are only 16 boat launches on waterways with high mercury levels that need the signs.
Does anybody have $240 for Utah. Anybody?
Some duck species in Utah are also under a consumption advisory for mercury. Read information from the Utah Department of Health here.
Photo: This sign is posted in Delaware. I’m not sure if having the warning in two languages makes it more expensive. Courtesy of the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.
Two white-tailed deer have been diagnosed with epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) in a southwestern county of Michigan. Last year 250 deer in that Michigan county died of the disease.
A Michigan Department of Natural Resources press release has the details of the finding, plus a history of EHD in the state. The release states: “More frequent outbreaks of EHD in Michigan could be a consequence of climate changes that favor the northward spread of the biting flies that spread the disease, said Russ Mason, chief of the DNR Wildlife Division.”
EHD is endemic to North America. The disease is most common in white-tailed deer, but can infect all ruminants. Humans are not known to catch the disease.
Few deer die from the disease in the southeastern U.S., which experiences a mild form of the disease. Outbreaks in the Midwest and Northeast can range from a small outbreak with few deaths to something more widespread. The severity of the outbreak depends on the weather (wet weather favors breeding midges), how many of the biting midges are around, herd immunity, and other factors.
There is a lot of media coverage out there about the dire situation of the endangered Houston toad since a wildfire swept through its last stronghold, Bastrop State Park, 30 miles southeast of Austin, Texas. However, an article in the San Antonio News-Express points out that in the heat of the summer the toads burrow a foot or more underground to escape the heat. There is a chance that the toads were far enough underground when the fire swept through that they were insulated from the heat of the fire.
The article explains that it’s not the fire as much as the fragmented landscape that may seal the toad’s doom. The Houston toad is listed as endangered both federally and in Texas.
Read the San Antonio News-Express article here.
Read info on the Houston toad from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department here.
(Yes, that’s two toad stories in a row. Sometimes it works out that way.)
Photo courtesy of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
Previous research has shown that higher levels of biodiversity leads to lower levels of infectious disease because of the “dilution effect,” where some species are poor hosts of the disease or may not be infected at all, slowing disease transmission.
The dilution effect has been studied in Lyme disease and West Nile.
A paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows the dilution effect at work in chytrid fungus infections in Western toads. Other news outlets have reprinted the press release from Oregon State University. (We have a OSU two-fer this week. Go Beavers.)
Read the original release via EurakAlert.
The press release does not make clear that this was a laboratory experiment, or that the experiment was conducted with tadpoles. The Western toad tadpoles were raised in aquaria with American bullfrogs and Cascades frogs. You can read the Ph.D. dissertation that is the basis for the paper here. (It’s a big PDF, but that shouldn’t be a surprise.)
The laboratory setting with just three species (well, four, if you count the fungus) makes the conclusion that much more striking. It would be interesting to see how these findings hold up in the field.
Read the PNAS paper here (fee or subscription required).
Read a conference summary of the research from the Ecological Society of America annual meeting here.
Photo: Western toad. Courtesy Oregon State University.
A paper in the current issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin says that when gray wolves are removed from an ecosystem, Canada lynx populations take a double blow. One blow comes when elk and deer populations explode and eat all the shrubs. That leaves the lynx’s prey, the snowshoe hare, with nothing to eat and no where to hide.
The other blow is that without wolves maintaining the “ecology of fear,” coyote populations also increase. And while coyotes will eat anything, they really like to eat rabbits, hares and other creatures of that size. In places where deep snow pack does not keep the coyotes away, lynx can find themselves with little to eat.
Yes, this is yet another example of mesopredator release, but as the pithy Science news article (subscription required) points out, in Canada they have both wolves and lynx. In the U.S. there are places without wolves where lynx have suffered a mysterious decline. It will be interesting to see what happens to lynx populations in places with growing wolf populations.
Read the Oregon State University press release here.
Read an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune here. And here’s a write-up from the East Oregonian.
Photo: Canada lynx, courtesy of Oregon State University
They work long hours for low pay, just for the privilege of working with wildlife, and they’ve had it. About one-third of the game wardens in Montana have retired or resigned in the last five years, according to an article in the Helena Independent Record.
The article details the difficulties being a game warden in Montana, from the pay ($17.62 an hour, for full-timers if they manage to work just 40 hours a week) to the fact that there is no such thing as a day off. If you are thinking that this sounds familiar, and at least they are not still paying off their graduate school loans, consider this: unlike wildlife biologists or even other law-enforcement officers, almost every human they deal with is carrying a loaded weapon. (Well, except for the anglers, but I guess they have knives.)
The article is worth reading for an inside look at the life of your enforcement co-workers. If the job sounds good to you, sorry, all those openings are meaningless. There’s a hiring freeze, so only a handful of those game wardens will be replaced.
Read the article in the Helena Independent Record.
Photo: A game warden’s horse patrol in Montana may look romantic, but it’s long hours for relatively low pay. Photo courtesy of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.
Winter tick infestations in moose can become so severe that the moose rub the hair right off their bodies. These have been called “ghost moose,” because of the whiteness of the mooses’ bare bodies. The tick infestation can lead to death from: anemia, distraction from grazing, or exposure to cold.
Estimating winter tick populations is an important component of moose management.
Research in New Hampshire found that counting winter ticks by any of three different methods turned up similar results. Winter tick populations were monitored by:
-dragging a white sheet over low vegetation in the spring,
-counting ticks on hunter-killed moose at check-in stations in the fall, and
-noting hair loss patterns on moose in the spring.
The three methods all revealed a similar pattern of lower winter tick numbers in 2008 and 2009, with a spike in 2010.
You can read about the New Hampshire research in an article written for a general audience in New Hampshire Fish & Game’s magazine, Wildlife Journal.
Alces Journal published a paper that reached a similar conclusion. The research there was in Maine, however. Read the paper here.
Photo: Alan Briere, courtesy NH Fish & Game
One captive deer in Erie County, in the northwestern corner of the state, has also died of EHD, according to a Pennsylvania Game Commission press release.Photo: A healthy white-tailed deer. Credit: Ryan Hagerty, courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service