Intensive agriculture, done secretly in forests, has a big impact on wildlife such as fishers.
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Tag Archives: conservation
Is a Bad Diet Killing Manatees?
First it was the manatees in southwestern Florida. A red tide is killing them. Then manatees started dying on Florida’s east coast too, although there the cause is a mystery.
An article in the Tampa Bay Times says that the manatees’ bellies are full of algae, and since manatees usually munch on sea grass, that may be the problem. With the sea grass killed off by previous toxic algae events, perhaps the manatees are eating algae, which is not giving them the nutrition they need.
Read the Tampa Bay Times article here.
Mother Jones also covered the manatee insanity, here.
The Florida Today report includes video.
And it’s not just manatees that are dropping dead in Florida. According to Florida Today, over 100 pelicans have been found dead in Brevard County in the past two months.
“The pelicans are emaciated and have heavy parasite counts, and, to our knowledge, other bird species have not been affected,” said Dan Wolf, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission researcher in a commission press release.
Read the Florida Today pelican article,here.
Read the FWC press release, here.
Photo: courtesy Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
Butterfly Heads and Tails
Recently published research from the Florida Museum of Natural History’s McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity provides experimental confirmation that the thing that looks like a second head on the back wings of some hairstreak butterflies does indeed protect the butterflies from predators, as has long been guessed.
The surprise was what predator it provided protection from. The conventional wisdom has said that adaptive coloration protects butterflies from birds, the researcher, Andrei Sourakov, says in a University of Florida press release. But this research showed that the fake heads were very successful at deterring jumping spiders — which easily took down other butterflies without fake heads on their hind-wings.
This may not be much help in day-to-day wildlife management, but it is a cool piece of research, and with several hairstreaks endangered or threatened at the state level, you never know when you’ll be writing up a hairstreak management plan.
The University of Florida press release.
The open access Journal of Natural History paper.
Photo: Great purple hairstreak by Dr. Thomas G. Barnes/University of Kentucky, used courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service
Guns, Money and Wildlife
Talk of gun control after the Newtown, Connecticut school shootings in December has lead to panic gun buying across the nation. The surge in sales has the potential to benefit wildlife. (A number of articles on the subject also mention the improving economy and the popularity of the movie The Hunger Games, which lead to interest in archery, for some of the increase.)
The federal Pittman-Robertson Act has collected an 11 percent excise tax on hunting gear (including shotguns and archery bows) since the Depression and distributed that money to the states. Along with hunting licenses, it is how most wildlife conservation on the state level is funded.
Most articles report a windfall. PressConnect.com of Binghampton, NY predicts a windfall, even though Congress will siphon off more than eight percent of the funds under the sequester legislation.
This doesn’t mean that spending the extra money will be easy. In an article in the Charleston (WV) Gazette, Curtis Taylor, wildlife chief for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources points out the state’s need to match the federal funds, 25 cents on the dollar.
Plus, with other funding plummeting, and the panic sales not expected to last forever, states such as West Virginia must invest in things that won’t require a lot of overhead in the future. And, oh yeah, that means adding more staff is probably out of the question.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel takes the time to report that the fisheries side of things won’t be getting a windfall. A separate federal law taxes fishing equipment to protect fisheries, and well, sales of fishing equipment just haven’t sky-rocketed.
The Charleston Gazette article is the most nuanced, but here is some other coverage of the gun sale windfall:
Tribune-Review (Pittsburgh region)
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
PressConnects.Com (Binghamption, NY)
Spokane Spokesman-Review
Lots o’ Legislation
I know, you are trying to focus on science and have no interest in the political scene. And I know that lots of bills get passed, but few of them become laws. Every once in a while, it is worth mentioning the gears of law, though. In this case it is worth mentioning because both the Idaho and Utah legislatures were very busy in late February creating new laws about endangered species.
The Associated Press reported that a bill that passed the Idaho Senate “would make it against state policy for federal officials to introduce or reintroduce any threatened or endangered species in Idaho without state approval.”
But there’s not much more than that on the bill. Read it the brief piece on The Oregonian website, here.
Utah was extra busy. They’ve got three bills in the works. One House bill would, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune, “allow county assessors to reduce a property’s tax burden if its value is impacted by designation as critical habitat for threatened or endangered species.”
Another House bill, “asks the federal government to not designate any private land in San Juan County as sage grouse habitat,” says the Salt Lake City Tribune. And a Senate bill which, “endorses Iron County taking over recovery of the Utah prairie dog” from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Utah legislature also put $300,000 in its budget to prevent the federal government from reintroducing the gray wolf into the state, another Salt Lake City Tribune article says. The article says that federal officials deny that any such reintroduction is planned.
Read the Salt Lake City Tribune article on the wolf payment here.
And props to Brian Maffly, the Salt Lake City Tribune reporter on both of those stories for making dull legislative news lively and easy to understand.
Photo: gray wolf by Gary Kramer, used courtesy USFWS
Monarch Pops Plummet
The Washington Post reports that the monarch butterfly population wintering in Mexico has shown a drop in six of the last seven years. “…There are now only one-fifteenth as many butterflies as there were in 1997,” the article says.
Journey North reports that this year’s population is lowest since record-keeping began.
Drought and herbicides that have killed off milkweed, which the monarchs require as host plants — particularly in the Midwest, are thought to be the main contributors to the decline. While populations have rebounded after drops, the overall trend is down, down, down.
Read the Washington Post article here.
Read an Associated Press article here.
The Journey North Facebook page is here.
Photo: Monarch butterfly by Mark Musselman, used courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Department.
The Word on Birds
The recent issue of The Auk (subscription or fee required to read full articles) has several articles of interest to state wildlife biologists:
It has long been assumed that early successional forests are important habitat for young ovenbirds. A paper by Andrew Vitz, now with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, tested that hypothesis experimentally. He found that the density of understory vegetation was a factor in the birds’ survival, but that the birds could do well in smaller patches of early successional habitat, such as microhabitats within mature forests.
A paper on California spotted owls found that two is the magic number for a number of offspring. Owls that were part of a pair of nestlings had higher survival rates that onlies or triplets. The research also found that the number of young produced is a good indicator of habitat quality.
Read the spotted owl paper here.
Piping plovers hatched earlier in the season in the Great Lakes region had a higher survival rate than those born later in the season, another paper reported. Nest sites that were closer to trees also had lower survival rates. The older the plover chicks were, the more likely they were to live another day. Because the Great Lakes population of piping plovers is federally endangered (with other populations being threatened), these factors can help inform management strategies.
Read the piping plover paper here.
Photo: ovenbird, courtesy Wisconsin Division of Natural Resources
Water Users v. Cranes in Texas
In 2009, 23 federally endangered whooping cranes died because of a drought. A recent court ruling says that this is an illegal take of a federally-endangered species, and that the federal law has precedence over Texas state law, which says that water is doled out on a first come, first served basis, says an article in Bloomberg.
The Texas state agencies will appeal the ruling, the article says.
The whooping crane flock in question is the world’s only self-sustaining wild flock, the article says, migrating from Canada to Texas. The article also implies that what was once “an isolated stretch of Texas coastal marsh,” where a tiny flock of whooping cranes survived unnoticed at a time when the species was thought to be extinct, is now home to the “world’s largest concentration of refineries and petrochemical plants.”
Read the Bloomberg article here.
Photo: Whooping cranes at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, by Steve Hillebrand, courtesy US Fish and Wildlife Service.
White Nose Syndrome in Georgia
According to a Georgia Department of Natural Resources press release:
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that bats with white-nose syndrome were found recently at two caves in Dade County.
A National Park Service biologist and volunteers discovered about 15 tri-colored bats with visible white-nose symptoms in a Lookout Mountain Cave at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in late February. On March 5, a group led by a Georgia DNR biologist also found tri-colored bats with visible symptoms in Sittons Cave at Cloudland Canyon State Park.
This news follows quickly on the announcement just yesterday that white nose syndrome had been found in South Carolina. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources release says, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s WNS map confirms, that Dade County, Georgia is contiguous with counties in Alabama and Tennessee that confirmed WNS last year.
I’ll sometimes say that “it’s white nose season,” but what that means may not be clear if you haven’t been following WNS closely. This is a cold-loving fungus that requires low temperatures to become symptomatic in bats. WNS is typically detected at the end of winter, particularly in southern locations or in places where the infection is in its early stages. Add in time for a laboratory to analyze the bat to confirm WNS, and you are usually looking at a window of March through June for announcements of new WNS sites.
Read the Georgia DNR release here.
Find the USFWS map here. (Look carefully at the northwest corner of Georgia.)
If you want traditional media, there is a short piece in USA Today, here.
Photo: An eastern pipistrelle bat — aka tri-colored bat — found at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park (in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia) shows visible signs of white-nose syndrome. Courtesy of the National Park Service
White Nose Syndrome in South Carolina
A tri-colored bat, found dead in Table Rock State Park in the northwestern corner of South Carolina, has been confirmed to have white nose syndrome (WNS), the Charlotte Observer and S.C. Department of Natural Resources report.
The SC DNR press release says:
The bat was collected on Feb. 21, transported on ice, and submitted to the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in Athens, Ga. The Wildlife Disease Study confirmed the presence of Geomyces destructans fungus, which causes WNS.
It further says:
“We have been expecting WNS in South Carolina,” said Mary Bunch, wildlife biologist with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources (DNR) based in Clemson. “We have watched the roll call of states and counties and Canadian provinces grow each year since the first bat deaths were noted in New York in 2007.”
South Carolina is the 21st state to report a case of WNS. The roll cal includes five Canadian provinces. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s WNS map shows this newest WNS site as being located in the Appalachian Mountains, not far from many other Southern mountain sites in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Virginia.
Read the Charlotte Observer article here.
Read the SC DNR press release here.
Illustration: The USFWS March 11, 2013 WNS map, showing a new site in Pickens County, South Carolina confirmed. Map by Carl Butchkoski, PA Game Commission