Category Archives: invasive species

Florida Announces Python Contest

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python challenge logoNon-native Burmese pythons are disrupting the south Florida ecosystem by devouring native wildlife. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) and its partners have used just about every tool in the box to try to control Burmese pythons in the state. Now it is trying one of the oldest wildlife control methods out there: competitive harvesting.

The FWC says, in a press release that the goal of the 2013 Python Challenge is to increase public awareness of this ecological threat. The contest will last a month, beginning January 12, 2013, and will award $1,500 dollars for the most Burmese pythons collected and $1,000 for the longest Burmese pythons in two categories of contestant, the general public and state python permit holders.

Contestants must complete on-line training to identify Burmese pythons and pay a $25 registration fee. The prize money, a Miami Herald article reports, will come from the entry fee and commission partners.

Now for a bit of editorializing: if it works, it will be the best $5,000 the commission never spent. But the risks are alarming. The on-line training appears insufficient (find it here). The better of the many possible poor outcomes is that the prize money won’t inspire enough people to scour south Florida’s public wetlands for what can be a dangerous snake. Part of the contest rules require that you own a GPS device or a smart phone to track your own movements during the python hunt, which is yet another barrier to participation.

At worst, greed and inexperience will mean people are hurt and native snakes slaughtered. Let’s hope FWC got it exactly right. If they did, it could provide a valuable model for other invasive species efforts.

Read the FWC press release here.
Read the Miami Herald article here.
Find the Python Challenge website here.

Hurricane Sandy and Wildlife

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Normally it takes a few weeks after a major natural disaster for the media to turn its attention to the impacts on wildlife. With Hurricane Sandy, some stories have popped up already.

This one is on the impact of hurricanes on shorebirds from National Geographic. (The impact is generally not significant, the article says.) Read the article here.

The survival and movement of one particular non-native species is getting a lot of attention: rats in New York City. The take-away? Many rats likely survived, migrating to the surface from their underground burrows, although young pups probably didn’t. Trash and debris on the streets will likely mean plenty of food, but an unprecedented event like Sandy in NYC means no one really knows what will happen.

Read the AFP story on Space Daily, of all places.

In other non-native species news, the Seattle PI reports that all 135 of the Chincoteague ponies, which live on barrier islands in Virginia, made it through the storm. Read the story here.

Nothing, yet, from the hardest hit areas in New Jersey and New York, but that is not a surprise.

Photo: NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a visible image Sandy’s massive circulation on Oct. 29 at 18:20 UTC (2:20 p.m. EDT). Sandy covers 1.8 million square miles, from the Mid-Atlantic to the Ohio Valley, into Canada and New England. Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team

American Midland Naturalist

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Here are some articles of interest in the current issue of American Midland Naturalist. (Fee or subscription required to read the full text.):

The Impact of Exotic Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) on Wetland Bird Abundances. Some wetland bird species do well when loosestrife increases, this study found. It urges land managers to take care when removing loosestrife so as not to harm those species.

Use of Camera Traps to Examine the Mesopredator Release Hypothesis in a Fragmented Midwestern Landscape. Coyotes don’t like deep forests and red foxes don’t like urban landscapes, this study found. The presence of coyotes only scared off other mesopredators a little.

Lots more on invasive species. Including papers on garlic mustard and the types of plants that grow in contaminated roadside soil.

 

Python Forecast: Cloudy

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In 2008 the US Geological Survey published a report that said that the entire southern third of the United States could provide habitat for the invasive Burmese python that has been roiling the Florida Everglades ecoystem.

A recent paper in the journal Integrative Zoology says that occasional hard freezes and widespread winter temperatures that are too low for too many months of the year to allow the snakes to digest food will keep the snakes in the Everglades.

Interestingly, one of the authors of that paper is a python breeder. Another two are with USDA Wildlife Services. The lead author, a professor at a veterinary school testified before Congress in 2009 against listing constrictors as an injurious animal. (The fifth author is an expert in Burmese python digestion.)

Read the article in Integrative Zoology

A previous paper in PLoS ONE reached a similar conclusion, but for a different reason. This paper reasoned that there wasn’t enough marshy habitat north of the Everglades for pythons to spread. One notable finding in that paper was that, given climate change, the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest might someday become warm enough to be suitable habitat for pythons.

The PLoS One paper is open access.

The question is, how big of a worry is pythons crawling their way out of the Everglades into the rest of the South compared to the worry pythons becoming established in some other warm, swampy place in the United States due to the release of unwanted pets?

I would say that pythons crawling north from the Everglades through Disney World to reach the Okefenokee Swamp is a minor concern. Having another area of the US become infested with released pythons is something worth keeping an eye on.

Map: From the original 2008 USGS report. Green shows areas of the continental United States with climate matching that of the pythons’ native range in Asia.

Non-native Species and Democracy

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If you have some time and are in the mood for some Big Thoughts, read “What’s a Monkey to Do in Tampa?” which ran in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. As a Sunday magazine, this is a publication for a general audience, so it is not interested in technical details as much as big ideas.

Writer Jon Mooallem goes way big in the piece, which is, after all about a macaque monkey, not native to North America, fitting it in to the American notion of freedom and a climate of political rancor lacking in a democratic ideal of compromise — that last theme perhaps a needed tie-in considering the monkey’s location and the location of this week’s Republican Convention.

Not mentioned in the article is that in Florida, the land of invasive (that is, harmful) non-native species like pythons, apple snails and melaleucas — monkeys (and there are whole troops of wild monkeys in the state) are relatively benign.

Mooallem is a deft writer, so you will have fun. And the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission plays a starring, although not heroic, role.

Read The NY Times “What’s a Monkey to Do in Tampa?” here.

Red Fox: Wanderer or Introduced?

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IUCN Species Survival Commission Invasive Species Specialist Group listed the red fox among its 100 worst invasive species.The question in North America has long been: Where has the red fox been introduced and where has it expanded its range naturally?

A recent paper in the Journal of Mammalogy attempts to winnow the wanderer from the introduced by comparing mitochondrial DNA. The study didn’t find any European haplotypes in wild red fox populations in North American.

(You’ll need to read the paper yourself to determine whether the methodology was sufficient to truly determine Eurasian lineage.)

In the southeastern US, the study found the foxes originated in eastern Canada and the northeastern US. Out West, the genetic picture was muddier, with evidence of translocations from across the continent as well as more local expansion of mountain populations.

Read the Journal of Mammalogy paper here. (Open access.)

Photo: Red fox by Jim Thiele, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

Red Fox: Wanderer or Introduced?

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IUCN Species Survival Commission Invasive Species Specialist Group listed the red fox among its 100 worst invasive species.The question in North America has long been: Where has the red fox been introduced and where has it expanded its range naturally?

A recent paper in the Journal of Mammalogy attempts to winnow the wanderer from the introduced by comparing mitochondrial DNA. The study didn’t find any European haplotypes in wild red fox populations in North American.

(You’ll need to read the paper yourself to determine whether the methodology was sufficient to truly determine Eurasian lineage.)

In the southeastern US, the study found the foxes originated in eastern Canada and the northeastern US. Out West, the genetic picture was muddier, with evidence of translocations from across the continent as well as more local expansion of mountain populations.

Read the Journal of Mammalogy paper here. (Open access.)

Photo: Red fox by Jim Thiele, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service

New England Bunny Hop

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New England cottontail in MaineLast autumn, nine New England cottontails bred in captivity at the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Rhode Island were released inside a predator-proof fence enclosing one acre of the Ninigret National Wildlife Refuge, also in Rhode Island.

You can read all about the New England cottontail captive breeding program in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums blog wildexplorer.org. Find the article here.

In Massachusetts, MassWildlife has been collecting roadkilled cottontails and cottontail skulls since 2010 to figure out how many and where the two species of cottontails are in the state. Out of the 500 specimens received, about 10 percent have been New England cottontails and several new populations have been uncovered.

MassWildlife would like to have more samples from the western part of the state, and hopes to reach sportsmen, highway department workers, animal control officers, and other interested citizens with their plea.

More info about the program is available in the April 2012 edition of MassWildlife News, which was not on line at press time. But do check for it here.(Info from the program from last year is available here.)

New England cottontails look an awful lot like Eastern cottontails. Sometimes even the experts need a DNA test to tell them apart for sure. But New England cottontails are the only one of the pair native to New England, although the Eastern cottontail is taking over its territory.

New England cottontail numbers have plummeted, earning the species an Endangered Species Act listing as “warranted but precluded.”

Earthworms Cause Ovenbird Decline

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A recent paper in Landscape Ecology confirms that ovenbirds are found in lower densities in sugar maple and basswood forests in Wisconsin where invasive earthworms are found.

Ovenbird numbers have been in decline for decades in the Northeast and Midwest. Habitat loss is typically named as the chief culprit, although non-native earthworms were known to be a contributing factor.

Ovenbirds are a ground-nesting, forest-interior species. They rely both on large tracts of forested land and plenty of leaf-litter from which to build their beehive-oven-shaped nests. Earthworms, which are not native to the northern parts of the United States, quickly chew up fallen leaves and other forest debris, leaving the ovenbirds with few places to hide and little to build with.

Read the paper in Landscape Ecology, here. (Fee or subscription required.)
Read the Smithsonian Institution blog post on the findings, here.

The Smithsonian information has been reprinted widely around the web. A quick survey showed only verbatim copies of the blog post, but the coverage does appear to be widespread.

Photo: Ovenbird, courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

Mountain Goats Threaten Bighorns in Tetons

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Mountain goats were introduced to the greater Yellowstone region decades ago, say articles in the Missoulian and the Jackson Hole News & Guide.

Since then, the goats have popped up in various locations around Jackson Hole, Wyoming Game and Fish wildlife biologist Doug Brimeyer said in an article in the Missoulian.

“In the Tetons, the bighorn sheep winter habitat is a relatively few isolated wind-swept slopes at high elevation, because they’ve lost their migration,” Wyoming Game and Fish habitat biologist Aly Courtemanch said in the Missoulian article. “They’re already surviving on this marginal winter habitat up there.

“It’s reasonable to expect that mountain goats, if they became established, would out-compete bighorn sheep for that very limited winter range.”

Researchers from Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are studying the situation, lead by Bob Garrott, of Montana State University’s Fish and Wildlife Ecology and Management Program.

The team will collar 12 goats with a GPS system that will send location data every six hours for two years. A second collar will activate when the GPS collar falls off and will provide less detailed information.

Read the Missoulian article here.
Read a shorter version of the story in the Billings Gazette, here.

There’s no link to the Jackson Hole News & Guide story that kicked off this flurry of coverage, because it doesn’t appear to be available on the newspaper’s website.

Photo: Bighorn in Montana. By Ryan Hagerty, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service