Category Archives: techniques

Seeing Is Believing At NETWC

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Richard TT FormanThe Northeastern Transportation and Wildlife Conference is taking place in Burlington, Vermont this week (Sept. 21 – 24). The technology of the hour is the game camera. It’s cheap, it’s non-invasive, and it’s cheap. One presenter confessed that there were probably better tools for his project — radio collaring, for example — but that it was better to have some data for his project now than waiting around for funding for better technology.

The next step is to become more adept at using game cameras. In that same presentation, there was a problem with smaller animals not being picked up by the cameras. At least one of the conversations after the session was about how to better place and aim the cameras to pick up all the species included in the study (which can be difficult if it includes both weasels and moose).

Another aspect touched on by a poster from the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife, is processing all those photos. This poster suggested using software that lets analysts pick descriptions from a pull-down menus to standardize the interpretations for better data crunching.

Photo: You never know who you will meet at a conference. Harvard researcher Richard T.T. Forman, known as the “father of road ecology,” was one of the NETWC attendees. Here, he adds his thoughts on a documentary that he appeared in as an expert.

Acoustic Method Best for Sampling Bats

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State Wildlife Biologists Wanted for Bat SurveyFrom a US Geological Survey press release:

Recording bats’ echolocation “calls” is the most efficient and least intrusive way of identifying different species of bats in a given area, providing insight into some populations that have been decimated by white-nose syndrome.This new research by scientists from Virginia Tech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army is published in the Journal of Ecology and the Natural Environment.

White-nose syndrome, an unprecedented disease of cave hibernating bats caused by a cold-loving fungus, has caused the deaths of more than six million bats. It has spread from central New York to at least 22 states and five Canadian provinces since 2006. In addition to the endangered Indiana bat, populations of the formerly abundant little brown bat and northern long-eared bat have experienced severe disease-related declines, particularly in the Northeast and central Appalachians.

“Acoustic sampling is a noninvasive sampling technique for bats, and its use often allows for the detection of a greater number of bat species in less time than traditional sampling methods such as netting,” said study co-author W. Mark Ford, a USGS scientist at the Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Virginia Tech. “Low population numbers make netting both time and cost prohibitive. Netting also has low capture rates for WNS affected species. Moreover, acoustic sampling minimizes the handling of bats, which lessens the chance of unintended cross-contamination and exposure to the white-nose fungus from one bat to another or from equipment and personnel to uninfected bats.”

Read the rest of the USGS press release here.
Read the paper (open access;PDF) here.

Photo: An acoustic bat detector in a roof-top car mount. Courtesy New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the bat survey coalition

Stable Isotopes for Mammal Studies

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Journal of Mammalogy April coverStable isotope analysis can used to determine migration, diet, niche, parasite–host interactions, or condition of mammalian species. You’ve just got to know the tricks of the trade. (A mass spectrometer comes in handy, too.)

The April issue of the Journal of Mammalogy offers a primer on using stable isotope analysis in mammals. The 10 papers are based on a symposium at the 90th annual meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists in Laramie, Wyoming, in June 2010. One of the papers in the section aims to be a beginner’s guide, explaining the concepts and the techniques.

Best of all, the papers in this special section are open access. Read the April issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, here.

March Roundup of New Research

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Spring is here and a bunch of wildlife surveys are underway around the country.

In Delaware:
-It’s the fifth and final year of the Delaware Breeding Bird Atlas.
-A special effort is being made in 2012 to tally owls as part of the atlas.
–Horseshoe crabs are being tallied again, and volunteers are being trained.
-The annual osprey count is offering a volunteer training for the first time since 2007.

Maryland is two years in to four years of surveys for an amphibian and reptile atlas and is looking for volunteers.

In Kansas, they are searching for lesser prairie chicken breeding areas, or leks, from the air with helicopters. Field crews will train on March 29-31 and conduct official survey work across all of western Kansas until the middle of May. The Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism is also asking people to report leks. The survey is part of a five-state effort, and the survey technique will be evaluated.

In North Dakota, the Game and Fish Department has launched a two-year study of white-tailed deer in intensely farmed agricultural areas.

In Maine, biologists at the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife have visited up to 100 dens each winter for 37 years, making the survey in the nation’s oldest radio-collar monitoring program for bears. This year the Maine Sunday Telegram wrote a story about it, with lots of pics. Read it here.

And in Washington, commuters have been reporting wildlife sightings for over a year on the I-90 corridor in anticipation of road improvements. The project’s first annual report was released recently, generating articles in the Everett Herald  and The Seattle Times, and coverage other media.

Photo of I-90 Wildlife Watch billboard by Paula MacKay/Western Transportation Institute, used by permission.

DNA Helps Find Rare Aquatic Species

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You may be able to hang up your snorkel and flippers. Dutch researchers have found that even rare and endangered animals leave enough DNA in their freshwater ecosystems to be detected in even small amounts of water from that ecosystem. (As little as 15 milliliters, or about a tablespoon.)

This makes DNA analysis much quicker and more thorough than electrofishing, or the ever-popular snorkel survey.

The study tested six different species, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. The team found that an animal’s DNA only persisted in the environment for about two weeks, so when the animal was removed, the DNA was soon gone too.

The catch: high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques are required.

The paper will be published in the journal Molecular Ecology. The entire article is available with a subscription, or for a fee, here.

Or you can read the ScienceDaily report on the paper, here.

Coincidentally, a French team seems to have come to a similar conclusion. Their paper is in PLoS ONE and is open access. Read it here.

Photo: Federally endangered clubshell mussel, photo by Craig Stihler, courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service

Need to Prove That Mist Nets Are Safe?

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Her pain is your gain. When Erica Spotswood of the University of California at Berkeley applied to use a mist net in French Polynesia, officials asked for proof that the technique is safe. Despite the fact that the technique has been the research standard in ornithology for decades, Spotswood couldn’t find much data. So, she collected her own.

She found that mist netting is indeed safe, with injuries or deaths occurring in only a fraction of a percent of the birds captured. Best of all, the paper, in Methods of in Ecology and Evolution is open access. You can’t ask for more than that.

Read the paper here.

Some background on the study from ScienceDaily.

Photo: Not a bird in exotic French Polynesia, but a yellow warbler in the good old US of A. Photo Credit: Kristine Sowle, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

Need to Prove That Mist Nets Are Safe?

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Her pain is your gain. When Erica Spotswood of the University of California at Berkeley applied to use a mist net in French Polynesia, officials asked for proof that the technique is safe. Despite the fact that the technique has been the research standard in ornithology for decades, Spotswood couldn’t find much data. So, she collected her own.

She found that mist netting is indeed safe, with injuries or deaths occurring in only a fraction of a percent of the birds captured. Best of all, the paper, in Methods of in Ecology and Evolution is open access. You can’t ask for more than that.

Read the paper here.

Some background on the study from ScienceDaily.

Photo: Not a bird in exotic French Polynesia, but a yellow warbler in the good old US of A. Photo Credit: Kristine Sowle, courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service

Make plasticine eggs

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Your plasticine eggs could look like this.

Researchers at the Virginia Museum of Natural History needed a thousand eggs for a study. They decided to make them out of plasticine clay, because the plasticine eggs would show predators’ tooth and claw marks, plus, they wouldn’t rot. It took them 30 hours and they spent $250 on materials.

They published their exact method for making the eggs in The Southwestern Naturalist. You can find an open access version of the paper on this site.