Is a Bad Diet Killing Manatees?

Posted on March 25, 2013 by MadelineBodin

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

Posted on March 22, 2013 by MadelineBodin

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

Posted on March 21, 2013 by MadelineBodin

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

More on Minnesota Moose

Posted on March 20, 2013 by MadelineBodin

Loss of early successional habitat, more wolves, and increased exposure to brainworm — those are the early theories on why the Minnesota moose population is plummeting. And that’s a whole lot of inference from just two dead moose.

The Duluth News Tribune has an update on the moose study begun by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in January. The DNR tagged 111 moose and planned to follow them for five years — deploying a team to investigate whenever one of the moose died. (We covered it here.)

So far six moose have died, the article says. Four of those deaths have been pinned on capture-related mortality. The percentage is about average for moose captures, the article says.

The two other moose were killed by wolves. The article reports on another researcher in conducting a separate study who found that one of his wolf-killed moose had pneumonia.

There are many more details about the early days of the study in the article. Read the Duluth News Tribune article here.

Photo: A moose being collared, but not necessarily for this project. Courtesy of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

Chagas Disease in South Texas Wildlife

Posted on March 19, 2013 by MadelineBodin

chagas bug Chagas disease, spread by kissing bugs or reduviid bugs is a scourge in South America, has the potential to cause heart failure. The symptoms can be chronic and go on for years.

Until recently, the disease and the insects that carry it were rare even in northern Mexico, but recently, says a report on the KABB Fox News TV station in San Antonio, Texas, the number of the kissing bugs found in south Texas has increased sharply.

More to the point, the piece says, a recent survey by Texas A&M researchers found that 60 to 80 percent of the mammals trapped on public land have been found to be infected by the disease. The animals trapped include feral hogs, white-tailed deer, wood rats, rabbits and raccoons.

Watch or read the piece on the KABB website, here.

More on Chagas disease at PubMed Health, and
probably more than you want to know, unless you have it, from the Centers for Disease Control

Photo: A kissing bug of the type that carries the parasite that causes Chagas disease, courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control

Lots o’ Legislation

Posted on March 18, 2013 by MadelineBodin

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

Posted on March 15, 2013 by MadelineBodin

Monarch_butterfly 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

Posted on March 14, 2013 by MadelineBodin

ovenbird 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.

Read the ovenbird paper here.

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

Posted on March 13, 2013 by MadelineBodin

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

Posted on March 12, 2013 by MadelineBodin

cumberland gap wns bat 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

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