Tag: Zoo/Wildlife

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* Lions in West and Central Africa apparently unique

Lions in West and Central Africa form a unique group, only distantly related to lions in East and Southern Africa. Biologists at Leiden University confirm this in an article published in Scientific Reports.

In this study, the researchers gathered a genetic dataset of lion populations covering a total of 22 countries. This included samples from each remaining lion population in West and Central Africa, a region where lions and other wildlife are rapidly declining as a consequence of the increasing human population. The researchers managed to gather all the information by teaming up with other people in the field and local conservationists.

Based on the genetic data, it was estimated that the split between the two major groups that can be identified in the lion must have occurred 300,000 years ago. To explain what happened in their evolution, the researchers made a reconstruction of African climatological history. It seems that periodic expansions of the rain forest and the desert drove lions into isolated pockets of suitable habitat, where the different genetic lineages originated that can still be observed today.

This influenced not only the patterns we observe in the lion, but also in other large mammals such as giraffe, buffalo, hartebeest, cheetah and spotted hyena. A general pattern is emerging that shows that many large African savannah mammals show very similar arrangements, with unique lineages in West and Central Africa.

The strong declines in wildlife populations in large parts of West and Central Africa are therefore a reason for major concern. The fact that this region seems to harbour a lot of unique genetic lineages makes conservation in the area extremely important. A delegation from Leiden University will participate in the IUCN World Conservation Congress in September 2016, and will lead a Side Event that aims to establish a Species Action Plan for West and Central Africa. The researchers hope that this will facilitate coordination and funding of projects in the region.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811120559.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* Warnings of imminent extinction crisis for largest wild animal species

A team of conservation biologists is calling for a worldwide strategy to prevent the unthinkable: the extinction of the world’s largest mammal species.

In a public declaration published in today’s edition of the journal BioScience, a group of more than 40 conservation scientists and other experts are calling for a coordinated global plan to prevent the world’s “megafauna” from sliding into oblivion.

Among the threats cited by the group as drivers of this mass extinction are illegal hunting, deforestation and habitat loss, the expansion of agriculture and livestock into wildlife areas, and the growth of human populations.

“The more I look at the trends facing the world’s largest terrestrial mammals, the more concerned I am we could lose these animals just as science is discovering how important they are to ecosystems and to the services they provide for people,” said Dr. William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University and lead author of the study.

Ripple worked with other authors on the study to examine population trends of many species, including many of the most well-known, charismatic species such as elephants, rhinos, gorillas, and big cats that are now threatened with extinction.

Approximately 59 percent of the world’s biggest mammalian carnivore species — including the tiger — and 60 percent of the largest herbivores are now listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species as threatened with extinction.

“Perhaps the biggest threat for many species is direct hunting driven by a demand for meat, pets, and body parts for traditional medicines and ornaments,” Dr. Elizabeth Bennett, WCS’s Vice President of Species Conservation and a co-author on the study. “Only a massive commitment from the international community will stop this rampant destruction of so many animal populations.”

All of these large species play critical roles in their ecosystems. Species at risk include elephants, that provide a suite of vital ecosystem services as ecological engineers, dispersing seeds and nutrients across vast areas. “The loss of elephants in the forests of Central Africa is increasingly damaging the function of the region’s most important ecosystems,” said WCS Conservation Scientist Dr. Fiona Maisels, one of the study’s co-authors. “We’re only beginning to understand how vital these keystone species are to the health of rainforests and other species that inhabit them.”

Human-wildlife conflict is a serious concurrent threat for many species. “With simultaneous loss of wildlife habitat and expansion of human populations and agriculture, negative interactions between people and wildlife are bound to rise,” said WCS India Scientist Dr. Varun R. Goswami, also a co-author on the study. “For wide-ranging megafauna like elephants and tigers, we need landscape-scale conservation strategies, taking into account the increasing interface between wildlife and people.”

Some megafauna face the threat of obscurity. The loss of elephants worldwide to poachers in pursuit of ivory is well-known and is the focus of extensive efforts to shut down this trade, but the study authors point out that many species are at risk from many similar threats but are so poorly known that effective conservation efforts to save them are difficult.

The paper includes a 13-part declaration that highlights the need to acknowledge the threatened status of many large mammals and the vital ecological roles they play. The declaration also cites the importance of integrating the efforts of scientists and funding agencies in developing countries where many species occur; the need for a new global framework to conserve megafauna; and the moral obligation of saving the world’s biggest mammal species.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160727172008.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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Should the gray wolf keep its endangered species protection?

Research by UCLA biologists published today in the journal Science Advances presents strong evidence that the scientific reason advanced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act is incorrect.

A key justification for protection of the gray wolf under the act was that its geographic range included the Great Lakes region and 29 Eastern states, as well as much of North America. The Fish and Wildlife Service published a document in 2014 which asserted that a newly recognized species called the eastern wolf occupied the Great Lakes region and eastern states, not the gray wolf. Therefore, the original listing under the act was invalid, and the service recommended that the species (except for the Mexican gray wolf, which is the most endangered gray wolf in North America) should be removed from protection under the act.

A decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act may be made as early as this fall.

In the new study, biologists analyzed the complete genomes of North American wolves — including the gray wolf, eastern wolf and red wolf — and coyotes. The researchers found that both the red wolf and eastern wolf are not distinct species, but instead are mixes of gray wolf and coyote.

“The recently defined eastern wolf is just a gray wolf and coyote mix, with about 75 percent of its genome assigned to the gray wolf,” said senior author Robert Wayne, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “We found no evidence for an eastern wolf that has a separate evolutionary legacy. The gray wolf should keep its endangered species status and be preserved because the reason for removing it is incorrect. The gray wolf did live in the Great Lakes area and in the 29 eastern states.”

Once common throughout North America and among the world’s most widespread mammals, the gray wolf is now extinct in much of the United States, Mexico and Western Europe, and lives mostly in wilderness and remote areas. Gray wolves still lives in the Great lakes area, but not in the eastern states.

Apparently, the two species first mixed hundreds of years ago in the American South, resulting in a population that has become more coyote-like as gray wolves were slaughtered, Wayne said. The same process occurred more recently in the Great Lakes area, as wolves became rare and coyotes entered the region in the 1920s.

The researchers analyzed the genomes of 12 pure gray wolves (from areas where there are no coyotes), three coyotes (from areas where there are no gray wolves), six eastern wolves (which the researchers call Great Lakes wolves) and three red wolves.

There has been a substantial controversy over whether red wolves and eastern wolves are genetically distinct species. In their study, the researchers did not find a unique ancestry in either that could not be explained by inter-breeding between gray wolves and coyotes.

“If you did this same experiment with humans — human genomes from Eurasia — you would find that one to four percent of the human genome has what looks like strange genomic elements from another species: Neanderthals,” Wayne said. “In red wolves and eastern wolves, we thought it might be at least 10 to 20 percent of the genome that could not be explained by ancestry from gray wolves and coyotes. However, we found just three to four percent, on average — similar to that found in individuals from the same species when compared to our small reference set.”

Pure eastern wolves were thought to reside in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. The researchers studied two samples from Algonquin Provincial Park and found they were about 50 percent gray wolf, 50 percent coyote.

Biologists mistakenly classified the offspring of gray wolves and coyotes as red wolves or eastern wolves, but the new genomic data suggest they are hybrids. “These gray wolf-coyote hybrids look distinct and were mistaken as a distinct species,” Wayne said.

Eventually, after the extinction of gray wolves in the American south, the red wolves could mate only with one another and coyotes, and became increasingly coyote-like.

Red wolves turn out to be about 25 percent gray wolf and 75 percent coyote, while the eastern wolf’s ancestry is approximately 75 percent gray wolf and 25 percent coyote, Wayne said. (Wayne’s research team published findings in the journal Nature in 1991 suggesting red wolves were a mixture of gray wolves and coyotes.)

Although the red wolf, listed as an endangered species in 1973, is not a distinct species, Wayne believes it is worth conserving; it is the only repository of the gray wolf genes that existed in the American South, he said.

The researchers analyzed SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) — tiny variations in a genetic sequence, and used sophisticated statistical approaches. In the more than two dozen genomes, they found 5.4 million differences in SNPs, a very large number.

Wayne said the Endangered Species Act has been extremely effective. He adds, however, that when it was formulated in the 1970s, biologists thought species tended not to inter-breed with other species, and that if there were hybrids, they were not as fit. The scientific view has changed substantially since then. Inter-breeding in the wild is common and may even be beneficial, he said. The researchers believe the Endangered Species Act should be applied with more flexibility to allow protection of hybrids in some cases (it currently does not), and scientists have made several suggestions about how this might be done without a change in the law, Wayne said.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160727150802.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Tooth wear sheds light on the feeding habits of ancient elephant relatives

How can we ever know what ancient animals ate? For the first time, the changing diets of elephants in the last two million years in China have been reconstructed, using a technique based on analysis of the surface textures of their teeth.

The work was carried out by a University of Bristol student, working with an international team of researchers. The research was published online in Quaternary International.

Today, elephants live only in remote, tropical parts of Africa and southern Asia, but before the Ice Ages they were widespread.

As his undergraduate research project, Zhang Hanwen, MSci Palaeontology and Evolution graduate and now PhD student at the University of Bristol, undertook cutting-edge analysis of fossilised elephant teeth from China.

In a collaboration with the University of Leicester, and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, where the fossilised teeth are curated, Hanwen sampled 27 teeth for tiny wear patterns called microwear.

“We are talking huge, brick-sized molars here — the largest of any animal,” said Hanwen, “but the signs of tooth wear are tiny, down to thousandths of a millimetre. However, these microscopic surface textures can tell us whether they were eating grass or leaves.”

Hanwen took peels of the fossilised teeth in China, using high-grade dental moulding materials, and captured the 3D surface textures under a digital microscope at the University of Leicester. The textures were quantified and analysed to identify what the elephants were eating in the days and weeks before they died.

By comparing the results with information from modern ruminants (deer, antelopes and oxen) of known diet, the study concluded two extinct elephants from Southern China — Sinomastodon and Stegodon — were primarily browsing on leaves. The third, Elephas, which includes the modern Asian elephants, shows much more catholic feeding habit, incorporating both grazing and browsing.

“It’s wonderful that we can identify diets of any fossil mammal with confidence now,” said Professor Christine Janis, from the University of Bristol, one of Hanwen’s PhD supervisors and a leading expert on the evolution of herbivorous mammals.

“This is based on the fact that the microwear textures produced by different kinds of plant material are comparable across unrelated animals.”

“This method for identifying diet relies on high-quality 3D surface data and analysis,” said Professor Mark Purnell, of the University of Leicester, another co-supervisor of Hanwen’s.

“It removes the subjectivity of trying to quantify microwear textures by identifying and counting scratches and pits in 2D microscopic images.”

Sinomastodon and Stegodon coexisted in Southern China between 2.6 and one million years ago, but Sinomastodon then became extinct and left Stegodon to become the dominant elephant of Southern China for the remainder of the Pleistocene, the time of the great Ice Ages.

“The fossil pollen record, and recently-excavated mammal fossil assemblages from various karst cave sites near the Chinese-Vietnamese border, suggest a prolonged, fluctuating period of environmental deterioration around this time,” Hanwen explained.

He added: “Forests were on the decline, alongside many of the more archaic mammal species that inhabited them. The highly evolved molars of Stegodon, with multiple enamel ridges, might have allowed it to browse on its preferred foliage in a more efficient way, thus outcompeting Sinomastodon, which preferred the same diet, but had less sophisticated molars consisting of large, blunt, conical cusps.”

On the other hand, the new study also suggests that Stegodon and Elephas subsequently coexisted for long periods in Southern China by eating different things. Stegodon remained a specialist foliage feeder whereas Elephas was more of a generalist, consuming a wider variety of vegetation.

Stegodon became extinct at around 11,000 years ago, at the end of the Pleistocene, coinciding with the worldwide disappearance of large mammal species at this time, including the iconic woolly mammoths, giant deers and sabretoothed cats. The Asian elephant survived in Southern China into historical times.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160728101924.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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What can a sea-lion teach us about musicality?

Ronan the sea lion can keep the beat better than any other animal, a study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience found out more.

Whether it is Mozart, Hendrix, Miles Davis, or tribal drumming, few activities feel as uniquely human as music. And, indeed, for a long time, most scientists believed that Homo sapiens was the only species capable of creating and responding to rhythm and melody.

This view, however, was challenged profoundly in 2009, when a cockatoo called Snowball was shown to be an able dancer.

Snowball bopping along to pop songs clearly demonstrated that non-human species had the neurobiological apparatus required to process rhythmic stimuli and move in time them.

And now — following investigations that have shown that chimps, bonobos, parrots and budgerigars have similar capabilities — a study of a head-bobbing Californian sea lion called Ronan has provided data that may aid scientists in their quest to understand the biological roots of musicality.

Ronan was placed in captivity when she was about a year old after failing to thrive in the wild. Her new team of keepers had previously explored the cognitive abilities of sea lions, and in what was originally a side-project explored at weekends, Peter Cook and Andrew Rouse decided to see if Ronan could keep a beat.

Rewarding her with fish treats every time she successfully nodded along to a click track, Cook and Rouse eventually found that Ronan could beat-keep better than any other non-human animal. Later, she learnt to dance to pop songs too; her favourite is Earth, Wind and Fire’s Boogie Wonderland.

They published an initial report in 2013 documenting this skill, which included numerous control experiments that confirmed that she was truly responding to the rhythmic input. And now in a paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience, Rouse and the team take their analysis a step further.

“A lot of the work that has been done on beat-keeping in general — to show whether a person or an animal is entrained — has used an observational approach, which looks at how close the animal is to each individual beat,” explains Rouse. But such studies “don’t reveal any underlying cause.”

To probe the brain mechanisms responsible for beat-keeping, Rouse says you must, “get a person or animal moving to the beat, then change the rhythm suddenly and look at how they adapt to the change, how they find the beat again.”

This is what they did. After shifting either the tempo or phase of the click track that Ronan was bobbing her head to, the researchers carefully charted how her movements were recalibrated. Something they also did by playing Boogie Wonderland at different speeds. And then they tested if a simple mathematical equation could account for the data.

The equation they used was from the physics of coupled oscillators — which can be as stripped down as two swinging pendulums. Applying this to the brain, the theory behind the experiment is that to move in time to music, the neural activity in auditory brain centres first oscillates in synchrony with the rhythmic input and then this oscillation entrains an oscillation in the neurons of the motor centres that drive movement.

This idea lies at the core of the neural resonance theory of music. And previous studies in people had shown that the equation describes well human beat-keeping. Rouse says that they asked, “Does Ronan’s behaviour fit this proposed model? And we found that it does.”

One thing that is important about Ronan is that sea lions are not “vocal mimics.” All the previous animals that had been shown to have beat-keeping abilities had been of species that have vocal flexibility.

This suggested that perhaps the skill was dependent on specialised neural circuits that are required for vocal flexibility. Ronan’s achievements and their accordance with an equation that simply describes two oscillating entities (in this case, oscillating populations of active neurons) suggest that the neural underpinnings of beat-keeping may be more ancient and widespread than previously thought.

Here, though, Rouse is cautious, he says the work doesn’t specifically distinguish between theories of musicality. He says we need to look further at all theories but that this opens up “a new avenue of exploration.”

Discussing why it took so long to appreciate the beat-keeping ability of non-human creatures, and the possibility that it is a skill lying dormant in many animals, Rouse discusses just how much practice humans get; how deeply and widely music is embedded in human culture. From a very early age babies are bounced on their mothers’ knees, they are exposed to nursery rhymes and music is all around them. “This coupling between auditory and motor regions, we have kind of beaten into us from day one,” he says, “Other animals don’t.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160802125610.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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* Desert elephants pass on knowledge — not mutations — to survive

Despite reported differences in appearance and behavior, DNA evidence finds that Namibian desert elephants share the same DNA as African savanna elephants. However, Namibian desert-dwelling elephants should be protected so they can continue to pass on their unique knowledge and survival skills to future generations.

“The ability of species such as elephants to learn and change their behavior means that genetic changes are not critical for them to adapt to a new environment,” said lead author Alfred Roca, a professor of animal sciences and member of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois. “The behavioral changes can allow species to expand their range to novel marginal habitats that differ sharply from the core habitat.”

Namibian desert-dwelling elephants have figured out how to prevent overheating in triple-digit temperatures by covering their bodies with sand wetted by their urine or regurgitated water from a specialized pouch beneath their tongue that holds many gallons of water. They also remember the location of scarce water and food resources across their home ranges, which are unusually large compared to those of other elephants. They play a critical role in this arid ecosystem by creating paths and digging watering holes.

Published in Ecology and Evolution, this study evaluated the nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of both desert-dwelling and non-desert-dwelling elephant populations throughout Namibia. Researchers found the desert-dwelling elephant DNA was not significantly different from the DNA of other savanna elephant populations in Namibia, except from those of the Caprivi Strip.

Female elephants live in tight-knit matrilineal family groups so mutations in mtDNA, which is passed from mothers to offspring, are closely tied to geographic populations. Not surprisingly, mitochondrial DNA from savanna elephants in Namibia’s Caprivi Strip — a small region analogous to Oklahoma’s panhandle — was more similar to mitochondrial DNA of elephants in Botswana and Zimbabwe, which border the Caprivi Strip.

“Our results and the historical record suggest that a high learning capacity and long distance migrations enabled Namibian elephants to shift their ranges to survive against high variability in climate and in hunting pressure,” said first author Yasuko Ishida, a research scientist in animal sciences at Illinois.

The lack of genetic differentiation (aside from the Caprivi Strip) is consistent with historical evidence of elephant movements during the Namibian War of Independence, which increased hunting pressures. Using mtDNA, the researchers identified other Namibian elephant migration patterns; for example, elephants from the Ugab River catchment shared mtDNA with elephants from the Huab River catchment, from where they are said to have migrated.

The lack of genetic differences in Namibian elephants could also be attributed to their long distance migrations; large home ranges; recent increases in population size and range; or gene flow provided by male elephants breeding with different groups of female elephants.

“Regardless, these elephants should be conserved,” said Roca. “Their knowledge of how to live in the desert is crucial to the survival of future generations of elephants in the arid habitat, and pressure from hunting and climate change may only increase in the coming decades.

“The desert elephants are also rumored to be larger, which may put them at greater risk for trophy game hunting,” he added. “Animals that live in these marginal environments are vulnerable, and their numbers do not bounce back very quickly. ”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160803161607.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* Can you teach koalas new tricks?

In a paper titled Using complementary remote detection methods for retrofitted eco-passages: a case study for monitoring individual koalas in south-east Queensland published by the CSIRO on Tuesday (July 26), the Environmental Futures Research Institute team verified 130 crossings by koalas involving a retrofitted structure or a road surface over a 30-month period.

Professor Darryl Jones said nobody knew whether the structures would actually keep koalas safe from being hit by cars or if they would work. “We expected the animals to take a while to get used to them,” he said.

“To our great surprise they were using them three weeks into it. Can you teach koalas new tricks? You can, that’s the point. I was the first sceptical person to say they’re not that smart.”

The team used a range of technologies that allowed them to not just generically monitor whether koalas passed through the crossing but pinpointed individual koalas and the exact time they entered and left the tunnel.

Using camera traps, audio radio transmitters and RFID tags that are similar to microchips in pets, they gathered more information than any researcher ever has or would be necessary to monitor koala movements and habits.

“This is all about trying to make absolutely sure that koalas are using some of the structures we’ve put out for them to get safely under roads,” Professor Jones said.

“Knowing how they do that is really difficult. You can get photos but you don’t know if it’s the same animal each time.

“The essence of this you can get really import information using a range of technologies at the same time. That’s a world first. Nobody has done that so comprehensively before.

“We really wanted to know what individual koalas were doing, whether they crossed at the same time each day. We wanted more information than most people ever need and we did that using this range of technologies.”

Professor Jones said most people living in suburban Brisbane or parts of the Gold Coast did not realise koalas lived all around them and that these structures were keeping them safe in their backyards and off the roads.

The research was supported by funding from the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads, which was responsible for the structures.

“The tunnels were an experiment,” Professor Jones said.

“Nobody knew whether they would work or not. We really wanted to know what the local koala was doing so we got ridiculous amount of details of these animals.

“We needed to be clear on whether they were successful because the structures were so innovative and risky that we tried really hard to prove it. That’s why it was worth it.

“Although we don’t want the koalas to be disturbed, all over the place on the Gold Coast and in Brisbane there are special koala specific tunnels and ledges that’s allowing them to cross. Those animals are not going to be hit anymore so that’s good news.

The crossings studied in Brisbane were within the jurisdictions of Brisbane City, Redland City and Moreton Bay Regional Council.

Traffic volumes for this region are predicted to increase by 19 per cent, or 2.8 million trips per day between 2006 and 2031.

The paper states: “The continuous clearing of koala habitat for development has placed a great deal of pressure on local koala populations and the risk of vehicle strike is recognised as a key threatening process for ongoing koala persistence in this region.

“The focus must shift from studies that simply assess how many species pass through an eco-passage (i.e. presence), to those that assess the utilisation level by individuals.

“Such information will represent a powerful step forward in providing road authorities with recommendations in relation to the design and placement of crossing structures, and ensuring that the costs equal the ecological benefit.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160804101628.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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* Black bear links real objects to computer images

American black bears may be able to recognize things they know in real life, such as pieces of food or humans, when looking at a photograph of the same thing. This is one of the findings of a study led by Zoe Johnson-Ulrich and Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University in the US, which involved a black bear called Migwan and a computer screen. The findings are published in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition.

The study forms part of a broader research project into the welfare of bears in captivity. It aims to find out how the animals themselves rate the environment in which they are held, and the facilities, food and features provided to them. The goal is to assess this by presenting bears with photographs of objects. To do so, the research team first had to assess whether bears are in fact able to recognize 2-D images of objects and people familiar to them when these are presented to them on a touch screen.

With this in mind, the researchers tested the responses of an American black bear named Migwan. The bear was born in the wild, but was rescued at a very young age and rehabilitated due to injuries. She had previously received several months of training on an unrelated task using photographs of food items from her normal diet. In this study, Migwan was first presented with two sets of objects new to her. Her ability to recognize these later, when presented with photographs including the items she had learned, was then assessed. In a reverse task, she was also trained on the photographs of two different sets of objects and tested on the transfer to real objects.

It was found that Migwan was able to recognize, on a photograph, the visual features of objects or natural stimuli she already knew. It is an ability that bears share with hens, rhesus monkeys, pigeons, tortoises and horses.

“Bears can transfer learning with real objects to photographs of those objects presented on computer screens,” says Johnson-Ulrich.

This means that photographs of items (food, objects, people or other bears) that are familiar to bears can be used to further test their discrimination ability. Johnson-Ulrich therefore believes that the findings have important implications for the use of photographs in computerized studies involving bears, and in ultimately ensuring the welfare of captive bears.

“Because a lot of research with photographic stimuli uses familiar images, for example food or conspecifics, this is useful in suggesting that bears’ responses to these photographs may reflect behaviors towards real items,” Vonk notes.

Johnson-Ulrich and Vonk however caution that the ability of bears to recognize features of real objects within 2D-images does not necessarily mean they understand the representational nature of photographs. It is also still uncertain how well bears are able to recognize tangible objects which they first saw on a photograph before being introduced to the real thing. Further research using other bears is therefore needed to verify if the animals can transfer information from pictures to objects, too.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160714110745.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* The snow leopard — world’s most mysterious big cat — may be more common than thought

The snow leopard has long been one of the least studied — and therefore poorly understood — of the large cats. No longer.

Scientists studying snow leopards now say the big cats may be more common than previously thought. New estimates focused on areas described as ‘Snow Leopard Conservation Units,’ covering only 44 percent of the snow leopard’s extensive range (which extends over roughly 3 million km2 or 1,158,306 square miles) suggests that there may be between 4,678 and 8,745 snow leopards just in these units. This is higher than previous estimates for the entire global population, which had previously been thought to be only between 3,920 and 7,500.

The new census information appears in Snow Leopards, published by Elsevier Press and edited by Dr. Tom McCarthy and Dr. David Mallon. The book is an astonishingly comprehensive work on the biology, behavior and conservation status of these previously mysterious and enigmatic large carnivores. The book brings together the most current scientific knowledge, documents the most pressing conservation issues, and shares success stories in alleviating the broad threats that now jeopardize the long-term survival of this species.

The snow leopard (Panthera uncia) lives across the great mountain ranges of Asia, occurring in the highland regions of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Nepal, and Russia. The snow leopard is perfectly adapted for these high mountains with its powerful legs for jumping, thick fur for warmth, grayish-white color pattern for camouflage, and long tail for balance.

However, because of their remote and difficult habitat, shy behavior, and cryptic coloration, studying snow leopards has been extremely difficult.

“Only in recent years have advances such as satellite telemetry and compact camera traps capable of taking high-quality night shots while surviving extreme low temperatures allowed scientists to begin to unravel the mysteries behind the snow leopard’s life,” said WCS scientist and veterinarian Dr. Stephane Ostrowski.

Said Peter Zahler, Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Snow Leopard Program: “This is an incredibly important book. It has collected virtually all the most recent research and information from all 12 range states, covering biology, behavior, threats, and conservation activities for this mysterious and elusive big cat and for the ‘mountain monarchs’ — Asia’s wild mountain goats and sheep — that are their main prey. This book will serve as the go-to reference work on snow leopards for decades to come.”

WCS affiliates and staff authored or co-authored nine chapters in the book, covering such topics as biogeography and status; community governance; transboundary initiatives; disease; resource extraction and linear infrastructure; rescue, rehabilitation, translocation, reintroduction, and captive rearing; the role of snow leopards as zoo ambassadors; status and conservation in Afghanistan; and global strategies for snow leopard conservation.

WCS authors included Peter Zahler, Richard Paley, Stephane Ostrowski, Dale Miquelle, Patrick Thomas, Eric Sanderson, Kim Fisher, Zalmai Moheb, Anthony Simms, and Martin Gilbert, as well as a forward by WCS Senior Conservationist George Schaller.

Despite the good news about snow leopard numbers, the species still faces multiple pressures.

Said Richard Paley, Director of the WCS Afghanistan Program: “Snow leopards are still regularly poached for their beautiful fur. They are also killed in retaliation for taking herder’s livestock. With the decline in their wild prey from overhunting, snow leopards may find themselves forced to take more livestock, which leads to a vicious cycle that snow leopards often lose.”

Said Dale Miquelle, WCS Big Cat expert: “We have lost over 90 percent of the world’s wild tigers in the last 100 years, and we have lost over 40 percent of African lions in the last 20 years. Big cats around the world are in danger of extinction. While it is great news to discover that there are more snow leopards than we thought, there is also a good chance that this situation might not last.”

“The protection of snow leopards, their prey, and their unique high-mountain landscapes must continue to be a priority for the global community,” said Zahler. “Because of the low human density in these mountains there is still extensive habitat for snow leopards. But with growing pressures — hunting, mining, roads, and even climate change — our window for ensuring long-term protection of these big cats will close fast.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160705160429.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Exploring ways to ‘coexist with wildlife’

Although protected areas such as national parks can play a crucial role in conserving wildlife, most species of large carnivores and large herbivores also depend on being able to occupy human-dominated landscapes. This sharing of space is often associated with conflicts between humans and wildlife, and between different groups of humans with divergent interests. In order to achieve a situation that can be described as “coexistence” there is a need to develop a more nuanced and realistic understanding of what this state looks like.

A paper written by Neil Carter, assistant professor in the Human-Environment Systems Research Center in the College of Innovation and Design at Boise State, and John Linnell, a senior research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, was recently published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Titled “Co-adaptation is key to coexisting with large carnivores,” the paper looks at ways to improve the ability of humans and carnivores to co-exist, which is crucial to carnivore conservation efforts around the world.

The study is based on research conducted by the authors in areas as diverse as North America, Europe and Asia on species such as wolves, tigers, leopards, lynx and bears. In the paper, the researchers note that large carnivores need larger ranges than many protected areas afford. This means that carnivores often come in contact with human populations that are sometimes less than welcoming.

Carter and Linnell wondered what actions could help mitigate the negative impacts of these contacts, allowing both humans and carnivores to more peacefully coexist in shared landscapes. They suggest that mutual adaptations are key to success, implying that not only do wild animals have to behaviourally adapt to the presence of humans, but humans also have to adapt their behavior to the presence of wild animals. Studies conducted by the authors and their colleagues have shown that many species of large carnivores show an incredible ability to occupy heavily modified human-dominated landscapes. Many human societies also show a wide range of adaptations to the proximity of large carnivores. This includes changes to the way they keep livestock and the adoption of cultural or religious practices to “negotiate” their relationship with their wild neighbours.

However, in many areas these adaptations have been lost, either due to a temporary absence of large carnivores or in the face of changing social-economic situations. The result is often severe conflicts of both an economic and social nature. Realising the necessity of adaptation by both humans and the carnivores is a key first step towards transforming conflict to coexistence. Conservation efforts that fail to focus on both halves of the equation are doomed to fail.

A factor for success has to do with realising that a state of coexistence does not involve an idealized absence of conflict. Rather than trying to eliminate all risk, which can mean eliminating a species, the authors explore ways to keep risks below tolerable levels. That involves understanding what factors influence tolerance. While some communities may not tolerate any risks from carnivores, others may tolerate high risks because they attribute carnivores with ecological and cultural benefits that exceed those risks. In many communities, the priorities of various stakeholder groups are still sometimes at odds, and there is a reduced trust in authorities. Interventions such as new policies must take into account local concerns, the authors say, such as the adoption of novel decision-making strategies that give voice to varying viewpoints.

Carter and Linnell believe that the challenges are surmountable through the help of community leaders, conservation organizations, and state or federal agencies. Insights from studies on coexistence “can help reconcile debates about carnivore conservation in shared landscapes and advance broader discourses in conservation,” they wrote, “such as those related to rewilding, novel ecosystems, and land-sharing vs. land-sparing.”

“In many ways large carnivores represent the ultimate test for human willingness to make space for wildlife on a shared planet. If it is possible to find ways to coexist with these species, it should be possible to coexist with any species,” says John Linnell, co-author on the study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160707083440.htm Original web page at Science Dail

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* Plan to fly rhinos to Australia comes under fire

An ambitious project to relocate rhinos from South Africa to Australia has been accused by some conservation researchers of being a waste of money.

The Australian Rhino Project charity, headquartered in Sydney, has attracted huge publicity for its plans to move 80 rhinos to Australia “to establish an insurance population and ensure the survival of the species”. It raised more than Aus$800,000 (US$600,000) in the year to September 2015, and hopes to start by flying out six rhinos later in 2016. The charity says that eventually, rhinos from the Australian herd could be sent back to Africa to re-establish wild populations there, when poaching — which is devastating rhino populations in Africa — becomes less of a threat.

But in a letter published in Nature this week, four researchers warn that the project “is diverting funds and public interest away from the actions necessary to conserve the animals”. The million-dollar cost of moving 80 animals would be better put towards poaching prevention, the researchers say.

“Anyone associated with conservation in Africa is well aware of the massive poaching crisis going on,” says Matt Hayward, a conservation researcher at Bangor University, UK, and lead author of the letter. But he says that moving rhinos to Australia is a bad solution. “I don’t think it can do any harm, but the pot of money is limited. We’re better off focusing in situ.”

But the rhino project’s founder, Ray Dearlove, strongly defends the initiative. A “staggering amount of money” has been put towards anti-poaching initiatives and animals are still being poached, he says, adding that moving rhinos to Australia is “one possible strategy in the complex web of saving the rhino”. (He also criticizes the letter for stating that the rhino-relocation effort will cost US$3.5 million, when the costs are not yet precisely known, and for, before a correction, misstating that 16 rhinos — not 6 — were to be transported in 2016.)

Dearlove adds that he takes exception to the letter-writers’ suggestion that the project “has echoes of colonial times, when African resources were exploited”. “In terms of exploitation, it is completely opposite to that,” he says. “This is an attempt to try and save the species.”

Hayward says that he is not opposed to moving animals for conservation purposes. He himself works on projects to reintroduce European bison (Bison bonasus) to Poland and red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) to parts of Wales. And conservationists are increasingly looking to move animals around to establish new or more secure populations, as climate change and activities such as logging or poaching disrupt their habitats.

But Hayward argues that rhinos should not be removed from Africa. A rhino’s value lies not just in the animal itself, but also in its connection to the landscape and environment of its native ecosystem, he says. Hayward and others also criticize the project for moving white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum), which have a global population of 20,170, rather than the much more endangered black rhinos (Diceros bicornis), of which fewer than 4,880 are left.

Mark Stanley Price, a reintroduction specialist at the University of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, UK, notes that although black rhinos are more threatened, it is not clear whether these animals could be kept wild in Australia. They are browsing feeders — eating leaves, branches and fruit — which makes them less likely to adapt to the local vegetation than the more generalist, grazing white rhinos. “It would be much more difficult to manage black rhinos under those situations. And it is the blacks that need the help,” he says.

Stanley Price adds, “This is an interesting initiative. It’s going to have some particular difficulties. Is it really the right answer?”

But the debate may prove academic: Dearlove says that although not all the permissions required for the relocation effort are yet in place, he still intends to transport the first rhinos this year.

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2016.20141

http://www.nature.com/news/index.html  Nature

http://www.nature.com/news/plan-to-fly-rhinos-to-australia-comes-under-fire-1.20141  Original web page at Nature

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Deer make collision-free escapes thanks to inbuilt ‘compasses’

Why do deer in a group, when startled, suddenly bolt away together and never collide with each other? It’s because these deer have an inner compass that allows them to follow a certain direction in order to make their escape. Their getaway is almost always along a north-south axis, thanks to their ability to sense the magnetic field, says Petr Obleser of the Czech University of Life Sciences in the Czech Republic. He and Hynek Burda of the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany, are lead authors of a study in Springer’s journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Flight distance and flight trajectories relative to danger have been studied in different types of animal species. Little is known, however, about how animals living in groups synchronize their escape direction when frightened, in order to avoid collision and keep the group together. This study is the first on the escape behavior in animals to consider the role of the magnetic compass directions.

Obleser’s team turned to roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), a species of deer commonly found grazing in flat open agricultural land in Europe. The researchers conducted field studies in 60 separate areas in three hunting locations in the Czech Republic. This was done at different times of the day, for 46 days between April and August 2014. The animals were monitored by experienced wildlife biologists and rangers. They noted the direction in which the deer’s bodies were aligned while the animals were still undisturbed grazing or standing. Once the animals were startled, the observers noted the direction in which they escaped, and how this route correlated with the direction from the threat and to their next place of shelter.

It was found that roe deer tend to align their bodies along the north-south axis when grazing. When startled, the animals generally fled away from observers. They did not merely make their getaway in the direction directly opposite to the approaching threat, but consistently did so north- or southwards. In fact, they seemed to actively avoid escaping westwards and eastwards, says Obleser. Wind direction or the position of the sun had no influence on the direction of their escape route.

Such a north-south preference was more pronounced in groups than in single animals. “This suggests that an important function of this behavior is to coordinate the movement in the group, to keep the common course of escape when frightened and to maintain the cohesion of the group,” says Obleser.

The researchers believe that the tendency of deer to align their bodies with respect to a north-south magnetic field line confirm that they are magnetosensitive and magnetoreceptive. This assists the animals to “read” and comprehend the mental maps they hold of the landscapes they occupy.

They also speculate that escape in a known direction eases spatial orientation and helps the animals to return later to the same place from which they fled. This might for example be important for a lactating female roe deer that has been hiding her fawn in tall grass or crops nearby.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160607113005.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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Measuring impact of Kenya’s ivory burning ‘urgent’

Gathering evidence on the impact of Kenya’s record-breaking ivory burn on elephant conservation should be an urgent priority according to four University of Queensland scientists.

Dr Duan Biggs from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) said the ivory burns and stockpile destruction had increased by more than 600 per cent since 2011, with Kenya burning a record-breaking 105 tons of ivory on 30 April, valued at up to US$220 million on the black market.

“The historic Kenyan burn aims to send a powerful message against elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade, yet there is no evidence, so far, that these actions help reduce poaching,” Dr Biggs said.

“More disturbingly, we are unaware of any attempts to track and evaluate the impacts of these burns on the demand for and the price of illegal ivory.”

He said that destroying ivory stockpiles could create a perverse outcome.

“As ivory becomes rarer, the price increases, leading to greater incentives for elephant poachers and illegal stockpilers of ivory,” he said.

Each year more than 30,000 elephants are killed for their ivory by poachers in Africa to satisfy demand in Asia where raw tusks sell for up to $2100 per kilogram. Africa is home to about 500,000 elephants.

Former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi began incinerating stockpiles of ivory in 1989 at the same time as the ban on the international trade in ivory came into effect.

CEED Director and co-author Professor Hugh Possingham said it was crucial to track the effects of Kenya’s largest ever ivory burn with data on ivory price and demand.

“The way in which ivory burns affect the attitudes of potential buyers in the markets of East Asia should be assessed,” Professor Possingham said. “Time is short and the stakes are high.”

Track the Impact of Kenya’s Ivory Burn was published in Nature and was also authored by Dr Matthew Holden and Dr Alex Braczcowski.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160609115528.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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* Elephant calves more likely to survive in the care of their grandmothers

Among the Asian elephants, the grandmothers have a significant role. They ensure the survival of the calves and breeding success for their daughters.

Grandmothers often provide vital childcare in human communities across the world. In traditional societies such help even increases grandchildren’s survival prospects and leads to shorter birth intervals for the daughters. In a new study, a research group from the University of Turku in Finland has now discovered that a similar phenomenon exist among the elephants in Myanmar.

“We found that calves of young elephant mothers under 20 years of age had eight times lower mortality risk if the grandmother resided in the same location compared to calves whose grandmother was not present,” says Dr. Mirkka Lahdenperä, the lead author of the study.

Resident grandmothers also decreased their daughters’ inter-birth intervals by one year, so that altogether more grandcalves were born when the grandmothers were part of the family. Grandmothers with own recent calves were as beneficial to their daughter’s calves as grandmothers who had already stopped reproducing.

“Grandmothers may be particularly important for the reproductive success of their inexperienced adult daughters. Older daughters, on the other hand, would have already gained enough experience in calf rearing to succeed without the help of their mother,” says Academy Professor Virpi Lummaa.

The research group found that the more calves the grandmother had reared herself before the grandcalf was born, the better survival chances her grandcalf had. The results suggest that experience is important for the survival of the calves.

Elephants have a lifespan of up to 80 years and naturally live in highly social family groups containing many generations of females and their calves. The research group studied the unique records maintained for a century on Asian elephants used in timber extraction in Myanmar.

“Our results showing the essential role of the elephant grandmothers are significant for the conservation of this endangered species. In zoos, the typical multi-generational groups are rare and animals are often moved between zoos,” Dr Lahdenperä explains.

Calf mortality is very high in zoos, as up to 50% of the calves die during their first years. In addition, problems with reproduction are common.

“Experienced grandmothers might be in a pivotal role in increasing the survival prospects of calves as well as female birth rates in zoos. Conservationists and captive population managers could potentially boost the elephant population by simply starting to keep the grandmothers with their offspring, similarly as would be the case in the wild in elephant families,” Professor Lummaa suggests.

The results also highlight the need to prevent poaching, especially when it targets old, large females. Their presence is crucial for the younger generation and removal of these key individuals might have severe outcomes for this endangered species. During the last few generations, the number of Asian elephants has dropped by half and only 38,500-52,500 elephants currently remain in the wild.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/   Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160610095036.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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Climate change likely to turn up heat on koalas

A changing climate means that by 2070 koalas may no longer call large parts of inland Australia home, researchers have found.

Using a detailed ecological model, the University of Melbourne study shows hotter temperatures and altered rainfall patterns will make it much more difficult for koalas to get the water they need — making inland populations vulnerable to heat-stress.

The researchers mapped potential koala habitats in 2070 by using information about koala behaviour, physiology, body size, and fur to predict how much energy and water koalas need to survive under the climate at a particular location. They found that the climatically suitable area dramatically reduced by 2070, particularly in Queensland. The koala’s range across Australia was limited by water requirements for keeping cool, with the timing of rainfall and heat waves being crucial in limiting the koala in the warmer parts of its range.

Lead author of the study Dr Natalie Briscoe from the School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne says that the findings could help our ability to forecast future impacts of climate change on biodiversity.

“Studies of climate change impacts on wildlife have often focused on how changes in average temperature or rainfall will affect species, but our research highlights the importance of thinking about the extreme conditions that will be most stressful for the animals — such as hot, dry periods — and how these may change in the future.

“By developing a better understanding of what controls species distributions now, we are much better placed to forecast how these may shift in the future” says Dr Briscoe.

Dr Brendan Wintle, Deputy Director of the National Environmental Science Programme’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub, and a co-author of the study, says describing where koalas and other threatened species find refuge from changing climate and other threats such as cats and foxes allows efficient focus of conservation efforts and limited conservation funding. The study is published in the current issue of Global Change Biology .

To build the ecological model the team compiled data on how koalas behave under different weather conditions, measured characteristics such as fur depth and body size from across the koala’s range, and collated detailed data on koala physiology. They could then predict the koalas’ habitat from a climatic point of view based only on their water and energy requirements, assuming that eucalyptus trees were available everywhere.

The team also used models that correlate known koala locations with the climatic conditions of the recent past — the approach most commonly used to predict climate change impacts on wildlife, but one which could be misleading when projected to the future.

They found that both kinds of models made accurate predictions of the koala’s current range and agreed that koalas will disappear from much of the drier, hotter parts of their range.

“There is a lot of uncertainty when predicting the impacts of climate change on species, particularly when climate change leads to novel weather patterns. Comparing predictions from different models allows us to more confidently predict the location of havens where koalas could survive in the future” says Dr Briscoe.

The Threatened Species Recovery Hub brings together Australia’s leading conservation scientists to help develop better management and policy for conserving Australia’s threatened species.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608100136.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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* Reintroduction of lynx requires larger numbers to avoid genetic depletion

For successful reintroduction of lynx into the wild, the number of released animals is crucial. If only a few lynx are reintroduced to found a population, the genetic diversity is too low to ensure their long-term sustainability. An international research team has recently published these findings in the scientific journal Conservation Genetics. The researchers highlight the need to strengthen newly established European lynx populations by additional translocations of lynx as well as other conservation measures.

Scientists of the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), the Bavarian Forest National Park (Germany), the Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia) investigated the genetic status of two lynx populations in the Bohemian-Bavarian and Vosges-Palatinian forests in central Europe.

The Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) is the largest European cat species and has been protected in the EU since 1992. Originally spread throughout all of Europe, the species is now mainly limited to protected areas such as national parks. Current populations only exist because countries have invested a considerable effort to protect lynx in Europe or to reintroduced them to suitable habitat in its former range. Reintroduced populations face some specific challenges: “Our results show that these reintroduced populations usually consist of too few individuals to be self-sustaining. Small populations are highly vulnerable to loss of genetic variation because each individual represents a high percentage of the population’s gene pool,” explains Daniel Förster, geneticist at the IZW.

The population in the Bohemian-Bavarian forest was founded by introducing 5 to 10 lynxes in the 1970s and later supplementing them with 18 additional individuals. The population in the Vosges-Palatinian forest was founded by 21 lynxes released between 1983 and 1993. From this already limited number of founders, only some individuals actually produced offspring. “From a genetic point of view this means that the few founder animals represented little genetic variation,” says Jörns Fickel, coauthor of the study and also a geneticist at the IZW. To assess the effect of the reintroduction on the genetic status of these two lynx populations, the scientists compared their genetic diversity with those of naturally occurring lynx populations in Eastern Europe. For this purpose they analysed molecular markers in lynx DNA obtained from fecal, blood, and tissue samples.

The study showed that these two populations displayed very low genetic diversity in comparison with other European lynx populations, with far fewer genetic variants present in the new populations than in the naturally occurring populations. A previous study on a reintroduced lynx population in Slovenia and Croatia already indicated that small reintroduced populations suffer from low genetic diversity. The current study now confirms these findings and thus points towards a more general pattern: Small populations are unlikely to survive in the long term. According to the authors of the study, it is well justified to classify the Bohemian-Bavarian population as “endangered” and the Vosges-Palatinian population as “critically endangered” as is currently done by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN Red List). Thus, suitable measures for their ‘genetic reinforcement’ and conservation need to be taken.

Especially for small populations it is crucial that not a single individual dies before it has reproduced — be it of natural causes or poaching. “It is therefore really important to reduce the illegal killing of lynx to establish and maintain a long-term viable population” emphasizes Förster. He and his colleagues also advocate the reintroduction of more lynxes to directly strengthen the genetic variability of the populations. Indirect conservation measures such as setting up wildlife corridors can further facilitate the genetic exchange between neighbouring populations and thus contribute to the strengthening of the overall lynx population as well.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160519082104.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Wood toxin could harm zoo animals

When those cute animals gnaw on wood enclosures at a zoo, they may be risking their health by ingesting toxic levels of arsenic, so zoo managers need to pay attention to the potential risk of the wood on zoo animals, a new University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences study shows.

The wood in question is treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA), which can be toxic.

After visiting a zoo with her family, Julia Gress, a former post-doctoral researcher in the UF/IFAS soil and water sciences department, recognized that animals living in enclosures made from CCA-treated wood might face health risks.

Gress wanted to assess the impact of CCA-treated wood on arsenic exposures in zoo animals. She measured arsenic concentrations in soil from inside enclosures and on wipe samples of CCA-treated wood. Samples were taken from inside 17 wood enclosures, and also included crocodilian eggs, bird feathers, marmoset hair and porcupine quills.

Researchers found arsenic levels in soil that were higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s risk-based level for birds and mammals. As well, arsenic levels in some animal tissues were also higher than those in other studies. Those findings should encourage zoo managers to limit animal exposure to arsenic found on the wood surface and in nearby soil, Gress said.

“Zoos care about the animals, which are often worth a lot of money,” said Gress, who conducted her search under the guidance of UF/IFAS soil and water sciences professor Lena Ma. Gress now works at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control in the Safer Consumer Products program.

CCA-treated wood is used in many structures. CCA preserves wood and extends its life by 20 to 40 years, but it contains large amounts of arsenic. CCA was withdrawn from use in most residential applications in 2004 because of health concerns over arsenic. Still, CCA-treated poles, fencing and plywood are still commonly used in areas where animals are housed, including barns, feedlots and zoos, according to the study.

“CCA wood is marketed for us in all types of agricultural applications, and there are instances of animals being poisoned from chewing on CCA wood in their animal enclosures, which is normal animal behavior,” Gress said.

In zoo settings, animals can experience long-term, daily exposure to contaminants, which concerns scientists trying to conserve threatened and endangered species, Gress said. The study is published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160520102241.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Citizen scientists can help protect endangered species

Lay people can help scientists conserve the protected Florida fox squirrel and endangered species just by collecting data, a new University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences study shows.

So-called citizen scientists did a commendable job collecting information on the fox squirrel, according to the study. Until this study, the conservation and management of fox squirrels in Florida was constrained by a lack of reliable information on the factors influencing its distribution. But with this research, which combines sightings and photos of fox squirrels by everyday citizens and professional ecologists, scientists now know they can get help from citizen scientists in conserving the fox squirrel population.

“When citizens are used in research to find animals across large scales, such as the state of Florida, they provide lots of information that is generally useful for conservation efforts,” said Bob McCleery, a UF/IFAS associate professor of wildlife ecology and conservation. “We showed that data collected by citizens has a considerable amount of biases, but it is equal, if not better, than data collected by trained professionals. Additionally, regardless of its bias, citizen-collected data provided reliable predictions of fox squirrel occurrence and helped understand fox squirrel habitat relationships.”

McCleery supervised a thesis conducted by Courtney Tye, a now-deceased master’s student in the UF/IFAS wildlife ecology and conservation department. For the study, Tye and her colleagues put up a website, http://bit.ly/1SPcfs6, for citizen scientists and professional ecologists to post where they had spotted Sherman fox squirrels and to post photos of the animals.

They collected 4,222 sightings of fox squirrels from 66 of 67 counties in 194 days in 2011 to 2012. Of those locations, 73 percent came from citizens and 27 percent from natural resource professionals.

Researchers examined their findings in four data sets, including citizens only and professionals only, to check for bias. Citizen science is increasingly used in ecology and conservation, yet researchers remain concerned about the value of such data, the study says. The UF/IFAS researchers say their results illustrate that citizen science data do not show sample bias to lower the predictive ability of their models.

“It is these kinds of synergies between citizens and professionals that are going to be increasingly necessary to generate the information we need to develop conservation strategies for the planet’s growing biodiversity crisis,” the study said.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the fox squirrel may be found throughout Florida in open woods and mangrove swamps. Of the four subspecies in Florida, two are listed as protected: Sherman’s Fox Squirrel and the Big Cypress Fox Squirrel. The findings are published online in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160516091841.htm Original web page at Science Daily

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Seeking to rewind mammalian extinction: The effort to save the northern white rhino

In December 2015 an international group of scientists convened in Austria to discuss the imminent extinction of the northern white rhinoceros and the possibility of bringing the species back from brink of extinction. The discussions of this historic meeting appear in the international Journal Zoo Biology. The publication of this work is designed as part of the ongoing effort to raise awareness for the extinction crisis facing rhinos and many other species while also reaching out to the scientific community to share and gather information.

“The effort to save the northern white rhinoceros will need new technologies, new approaches and problem-solving in order to avert its imminent extinction”, said Joseph Saragusty, D.V.M., Ph.D., andrologist from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin, Germany. “The productive engagement of an international multidisciplinary team of experts will be essential to accomplish the ambitious goal of bringing back the northern white rhinoceros from its otherwise certain path to extinction.”

The discussion to save the northern white rhinoceros touches on genetics and cell biology, scientific ethics and the importance of long term strategic thinking and ongoing communications. A key element of these discussions was the need to maintain genetic banks of frozen tissue, spermatozoa and oocytes to use as materials in this fight against extinction.

“Cryobanked genetic resources from this unique form of rhinoceros have been saved in San Diego and in Europe”, said Oliver Ryder, Ph.D., geneticist for San Diego Zoo Global. “The genetic resources in the form of banked viable cell cultures, tissues and spermatozoa, together with the capability to establish induced pluripotent stem cells are the basis for hope that a viable population of northern white rhinoceros can be produced.”

With some genetic tissue from northern white rhinos available the group is looking at advanced reproductive technologies as the hope for the future of the species.

“It was a long way from the idea to the roadmap created in Vienna. I am glad that we found so many competent supporters in the scientific community who believe in the application of advanced cellular and reproductive technologies for the genetic rescue of the northern white rhinoceros. Now we have to demonstrate that this novel strategy can make a difference”, said Thomas Hildebrandt, Prof. Dr., head of the Reproduction Management department at IZW.

The last three northern white rhinoceroses reside in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya where they were transported from ZOO Dvůr Králové, Czech Republic. “Although we were able to breed the northern white rhinoceroses in our zoo, their health status does not allow them to breed naturally anymore. We are now optimistic that the cutting-edge research outlined in Vienna will give these very last specimens a chance to see an offspring of their own kind”, said Jan Stejskal, Director of International Projects of ZOO Dvůr Králové.

In addition to sharing information about reproductive technologies the group of experts discussed the ethics of spending resources to save one species. The paper voices the hope that the information gathered through this effort would be applied towards other species facing the threat of extinction in the future.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160503131656.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Evolution of the Javan leopard

An international team of researchers from Germany and Indonesia has discovered new insights into the evolutionary history of the Javan leopard. The results of the study confirm that Javan leopards are clearly distinct from Asian leopards and probably colonised Java around 600,000 years ago via a land bridge from mainland Asia. The study, published in the scientific journal Journal of Zoology, highlights the urgent need for concerted conservation efforts to preserve the Javan leopard from extinction.

Scientists from the German Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), Tierpark Berlin (Germany), Taman Safari Indonesia, Potsdam University (Germany) and Conservation International Indonesia (Indonesia) worked in close collaboration to answer the question whether the Javan leopard is a separate subspecies of the leopard, as this would heighten the need for efforts to improve its viability through active conservation measures. The results show that Javan leopards diverged from mainland Asian leopards in the Middle Pleistocene approximately 600,000 years ago and have already reached a degree of genetic distinctiveness which clearly warrants the classification of Javan leopards as a subspecies (Panthera pardus melas) of the leopard (Panthera pardus).

Leopards likely migrated from mainland Asia to Java during a prolonged period of low sea levels via a Malaya-Java land bridge that by-passed the island of Sumatra. This might be one reason why leopards exist on mainland Asia and on Java today, but do not occur on Sumatra or Borneo. However, fossils show that leopards occurred at least in some parts of Sumatra during the Pleistocene. “We assume that leopards became extinct on this island after the massive eruption of the Toba volcano about 74,000 years ago. On Java, the impact of this eruption was minor, allowing leopards to survive there,” explains Andreas Wilting, scientist at the IZW and lead author of the study.

The scientists reconstructed the evolutionary history of the Javan leopard using mitochondrial DNA sequenced from museum specimens of leopards from Java and compared this genetic information to leopard sequences from Asian mainland and Africa. The potential historical distribution was reconstructed using species distribution models with environmental data from the Last Glacial Maximum and the Mid-Holocene.

The Javan leopard is the last big cat still roaming on Java after the Sunda clouded leopard (in the Holocene) and the Javan tiger (in the early 1980s) went extinct. Subjected to anthropogenic pressures such as deforestation, the subspecies has dwindled significantly and is now listed as critically endangered in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. With only a few hundred individuals still existing in the wild and 52 living in captivity, the Javan leopard is one of the most threatened subspecies of big cats.

“The data presented in our study highlight the urgent need for concerted conservation efforts for this unique and distinctive subspecies,” emphasizes Anton Ario from Conservation International Indonesia. Conservation measures need to combine numerous management activities guided by a One Plan Approach, such as protecting leopard habitats, raising awareness in communities and establishing a coordinated breeding programme for Javan leopards in captivity. A first step for such an integrated approach was established in 2014: an international studbook was established, coordinated by Taman Safari Indonesia and Tierpark Berlin. Now additional measures are required and further conservation actions for the remaining fragmented wild Javan leopard populations are needed to ensure that the last big cats on Java will continue to roam the island for the foreseeable future.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160504085111.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* Deadly animal prion disease appears in Europe

A highly contagious and deadly animal brain disorder has been detected in Europe for the first time. Scientists are now warning that the single case found in a wild reindeer might represent an unrecognized, widespread infection.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) was thought to be restricted to deer, elk (Cervus canadensis) and moose (Alces alces) in North America and South Korea, but on 4 April researchers announced that the disease had been discovered in a free-ranging reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) in Norway. This is both the first time that CWD has been found in Europe and the first time that it has been found in this species in the wild anywhere in the world.

“It’s worrying — of course, especially for animals. It’s a nasty disease,” says Sylvie Benestad, an animal-disease researcher at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute in Oslo who, along with colleague Turid Vikøren, diagnosed the diseased reindeer.

A key question now is whether this is a rare — even unique — case, or if the disease is widespread but so far undetected in Europe.

“If it’s similar to our prion disease in the United States and Canada, the disease is subtle and it would be easy to miss,” says Christina Sigurdson, a pathologist at the University of California, San Diego, who has shown that reindeer can contract CWD in a laboratory environment.

Like both bovine spongiform encephalopathy — also known as mad-cow disease — and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, CWD occurs when cellular proteins called prions bend into an abnormal shape, inducing neighbouring, healthy proteins to do the same. The misfolded proteins aggregate in the brain and sometimes in other tissue, causing weight loss, coordination problems and behaviour changes. There is no cure or vaccine; as far as scientists know, CWD is always fatal.

Although the disease is not known to be transmissible to humans, it is highly contagious among deer, elk and related animals, which can shed infectious misfolded prion proteins in their saliva, urine and faeces. Animals infected with CWD have been found in more than 20 states in the United States and 2 provinces in Canada. The disease has also been detected in captive animals in South Korea, which imported CWD with a shipment of live elk brought into the country for farming in the late 1990s.

The brain of an ill reindeer from Norway was found to contain misfolded proteins called prions. The infected reindeer ended up on Vikøren’s necropsy table thanks to scientists with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Trondheim. They found it as they used a helicopter to track a free-ranging herd from the Nordfjella population in the alpine regions of southern Norway. Their goal was to capture adult female reindeer and collar them for satellite tracking — but when the researchers landed, they discovered a sick animal that could not move and soon died.

During the necropsy, Benestad tested for the abnormally folded proteins as a matter of routine. Eventually, a total of three different antibody-based tests all confirmed the presence of prions.

“I was very afraid,” Benestad says. During her long career as a prion researcher she has heard scientists from the United States and Canada discuss CWD, how contagious it is and how hard it is to stamp out.

It is a mystery how this disease arrived on a mountaintop in Norway. Benestad and Vikøren think it unlikely that it was it imported. They suspect that it might have arisen spontaneously, or jumped the species barrier from a prion disease in sheep called scrapie, although such a jump has never been seen before.

“The $64,000 question is what is the origin of this case of CWD in Europe,” says Glenn Telling, a prion-disease researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. “What we do know is that once CWD is detected in new locations, it typically takes a foothold in that location, and is difficult to eradicate.”

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19759

http://www.nature.com/news/index.html  Nature

http://www.nature.com/news/deadly-animal-prion-disease-appears-in-europe-1.19759  Original web page at Nature

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30 years after Chernobyl, camera study reveals wildlife abundance in Chernobyl

Thirty years ago, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, became the site of the world’s largest nuclear accident. While humans are now scarce in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, continued studies–including a just-published camera study conducted by researchers from the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory–validate findings that wildlife populations are abundant at the site.

The camera study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment and led by UGA’s James Beasley, is the first remote-camera scent-station survey conducted within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, or CEZ. The study’s results document species prevalent in the zone and support earlier findings that animal distribution is not influenced by radiation levels.

The restricted CEZ encompasses the bordering lands of Ukraine and Belarus impacted by radiation fallout from the accident, which occurred April 26, 1986.

Within the southern portion of Belarus is the Polessye, or Polesie State Radiation Ecological Reserve, with over 834 square miles of diverse landscape including forests and deserted developed lands. The levels of radiation vary significantly across this landscape.

The previous study, published in fall 2015, determined populations were thriving in the CEZ by counting animal tracks. Beasley and his research team used a more contemporary research method–remote camera stations–to substantiate previous findings.

“The earlier study shed light on the status of wildlife populations in the CEZ, but we still needed to back that up,” said Beasley, an assistant professor with UGA’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory and the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and the senior author on the study. “For this study we deployed cameras in a systematic way across the entire Belarus section of the CEZ and captured photographic evidence–strong evidence–because these are pictures that everyone can see.”

The study was conducted over a five-week period at 94 sites using 30 cameras. A remote camera was set up on a tree or tree-like structure for seven days at each location. Each station was equipped with a fatty acid scent to attract the animals.

Sarah Webster, a graduate student at SREL and Warnell working with Beasley, set up the stations approximately 2 miles apart to prevent animals from visiting more than one station during a 24-hour period.

The team documented every species captured on the cameras and the frequency of their visits, specifically focusing on carnivores, Webster said, because of their hierarchy on the food chain.

At the top of the food chain, carnivores have an increased opportunity to receive contamination. In addition to ingesting it from prey that have foraged on the landscape, they receive it directly from the environment–through the soil, water and air.

“Carnivores are often in higher trophic levels of ecosystem food webs, so they are susceptible to bioaccumulation of contaminants,” Webster said. “Few studies in Chernobyl have investigated effects of contamination level on populations of species in high trophic levels.”

Beasley and his research team saw 14 species of mammals on the camera footage. The most frequently seen were the gray wolf, wild or Eurasian boar, red fox and raccoon dog, a canid species found in East Asia and Europe. Beasley said all of these species were sighted at stations close to or within the most highly contaminated areas.

“We didn’t find any evidence to support the idea that populations are suppressed in highly contaminated areas,” Beasley said. “What we did find was these animals were more likely to be found in areas of preferred habitat that have the things they need–food and water.”

Webster said locations were chosen to ensure habitat variance and to incorporate the diverse levels of radiation in the zone.

The study provides much needed verification, Beasley said, but further studies are needed “to determine the density of wildlife and provide quantitative survival rates.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160418161400.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Island foxes may be ‘least variable’ of all wild animals

In comparison to their relatives on the mainland, the Channel Island foxes living on six of California’s Channel Islands are dwarves, at two-thirds the size. The island foxes most likely evolved from gray foxes brought to the northern islands by humans over 7,000 years ago. Some think island foxes may have been partially domesticated by Native Americans. Like many island species, they have little fear of humans.

Now a new study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 21 finds that the foxes also show a surprising absence of genetic variation. The study offers the first complete genome sequences of an island species that is a model for long-term conservation of small, endangered populations, the researchers say.

“We find a dramatic reduction of genetic variation, far lower than most other animal species,” says Jacqueline Robinson of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

One population in particular living on San Nicolas Island has an order of magnitude lower variation than any other known species, including the severely endangered African cheetah, Mountain gorilla, and Tasmanian devil, she says. Such near absence of genetic variation doesn’t bode well for the foxes. But it also presents a puzzle as to how the foxes have managed as well as they have.

“The degree to which the San Nicolas foxes have lost genetic variation is remarkable, upholding a previous observation that they may be the least genetically variable population of wild animals known,” says Robert Wayne, also of UCLA. “It suggests that under some conditions, genetic variation is not absolutely essential for the persistence of endangered populations.”

The researchers sequenced DNA samples representing each of the Channel Island fox populations and one mainland gray fox from southern California. Researchers originally collected the island fox samples back in 1988, prior to subsequent population declines due to predation and disease in four of the island populations

Theory holds that small populations will not only lose variation, but will also accumulate deleterious variation as the normal process of natural selection fails. Indeed, the complete genomes of the island foxes show dramatic, 3- to 84-fold declines in heterozygosity. (Heterozygosity refers to places in the genome where an individual has inherited different variants of the same gene from their mother and father.) The foxes also show sharp increases in genes for which they carried two copies of a variant deemed to be harmful or deleterious in some way.

The San Nicolas Island population of foxes has a near absence of variation, the researchers report, demonstrating a unique “genetic flatlining.” The only variation found in those foxes occurs at “heterozygosity hotspots,” enriched for olfactory receptor genes and other genes with high levels of ancestral variation.

The researchers say the new findings need to be taken into careful consideration in plans for the foxes’ future, including the removal of their federal endangered species protection status.

“The island fox populations suffer from both a lack of genetic diversity and the accumulation of damaging genetic variants, which is likely to worsen over time,” Wayne says. Island foxes are also susceptible to population crashes from disease and non-native predators, such as golden eagles.

Additional research is needed to understand how the foxes may compensate for their decreased variation and the accumulation of deleterious variants. Wayne and Robinson say they’d like to explore gene expression and regulation in the foxes, to find out whether these factors may act to alleviate some of the effects of deleterious variants.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160421133636.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Global carnivore conservation at risk, new report shows

A new study confirms that the global conservation of carnivores is at risk. Published in Scientific Reports, the report models future global land conversion and estimates this will lead to significant range loss and conflict with local people in regions critical for the survival of already threatened carnivore species.

Organized by researchers from the University of Helsinki in collaboration with an international team of conservation and land use change scientists the study concludes that immediate action is needed to prevent habitat loss and conflict with humans in priority areas for carnivore conservation.

Lead author Dr. Enrico Di Minin of University of Helsinki explained, “We assessed how expected land use change will affect priority areas for carnivore conservation in the future. The analysis revealed that carnivores will suffer considerable range losses in the future. Worryingly, it seems that the most important areas for carnivore conservation are located in areas where human-carnivore conflicts are likely to be most severe.”

Di Minin continued, “Presently, South American, African, and South East Asian countries, as well as India, were found to contribute mostly to carnivore conservation. While some of the most charismatic species, such as the tiger and giant panda were found to be at high risk under future land use change, smaller, less charismatic species, with small ranges were found to be equally threatened by habitat loss.”

Carnivores include some of the most iconic species that help generate funding for biodiversity conservation and deliver important benefits to humans. Protecting carnivores will conserve many other bird, amphibian, reptile and mammal species that live in priority areas for carnivore conservation.

Dr. Luke Hunter, President and Chief Conservation Officer of Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, and a co-author of the paper shared, “Carnivores like big cats have been squeezed out of their ranges at alarming rates for decades now, and we can now see that habitat loss and its shock waves on wildlife are only on the rise. In order to protect our planet’s landscape guardians, a far greater financial investment from the international community is needed for range-wide conservation approaches, both within and outside of protected areas where carnivores roam.”

Professor Rob Slotow from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, another co-author in the paper, in South Africa emphasizes that reducing conflict with humans outside of protected areas is pivotal. “Most priorities for carnivore conservation are in areas in the global south where human populations are increasing in size, agriculture is intensifying, and human development needs are the highest. There is need to implement conservation strategies that promote tolerance for carnivores outside protected areas and focus on the benefits that people derive from these species.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160404090709.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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New assay offers improved detection of deadly prion diseases

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, are a family of rare progressive, neurodegenerative illnesses that affect both humans and animals. TSE surveillance is important for public health and food safety because TSEs have the potential of crossing from animals to humans, as seen with the spread of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). A study in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes an advanced assay that offers better sensitivity than currently available tests for detecting a prion disease affecting elk.

Timed amyloid seeding assay achieves or surpasses sensitivity of currently available tests for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, according to report in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.

Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), or prion diseases, are a family of rare progressive, neurodegenerative illnesses that affect both humans and animals. TSE surveillance is important for public health and food safety because TSEs have the potential of crossing from animals to humans, as seen with the spread of mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). A study in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics describes an advanced assay that offers better sensitivity than currently available tests for detecting a prion disease affecting elk.

“The significance of TSEs on human health was not entirely realized until cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in humans had been discovered in the years following the BSE outbreak in the United Kingdom. These vCJD cases were associated with consuming meat products contaminated with BSE prions,” explained lead investigator Stefanie Czub, DVM, PhD, of the Canadian BSE Reference Lab, Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Lethbridge Laboratory, Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada). “The result is that many countries have enacted TSE surveillance programs, aiming to eradicate livestock-related TSEs.”

Surveillance programs rely on highly sensitive diagnostic methods to detect infections early. Addressing the need to define steadfast analytical performance criteria for prion amyloid seeding assays (ASAs), researchers developed a method to measure prion protein conversion time (from normal cellular form to prion form) by a combination of statistical analyses to obtain a prion-detecting ASA with a known degree of confidence. They compared the sensitivity of the new assay technique, the timed prion seeding assay (tASA), to other currently available tests (two bioassays in laboratory rodents and three commercially available TSE rapid tests).

The test samples came from elk brains infected experimentally with chronic wasting disease (CWD), a prion disease that affects cervids (hoofed ruminant mammals in the deer family). The investigators were able to define clear cut-off criteria, allowing determination of TSE-positive and TSE-negative states. Unlike TSE rapid tests, ASAs also have the potential to detect and measure TSE infection in blood, saliva, or urine. This would offer clinical advantages, such as the ability to sample blood instead of relying on more invasive tissue biopsy and to screen blood donations for contamination.

“We found that the tASA was at least as sensitive as two rodent bioassays and up to 16 times more sensitive than three different TSE rapid tests,” noted lead author John G. Gray, MS, Canadian BSE Reference Lab, Canadian Food Inspection Agency. “This study should further advance ASAs as recognized prion detection systems. We believe this methodology represents the future for prion diagnostics, especially concerning human health, for example in screening blood donations.”

The tASA is an in vitro method that mimics the conjectured mechanism of prion propagation in vivo. It is a conversion assay that uses recombinant prion-related protein as a substrate and detects conversion via changes in fluorescence. The report describes time specifications for the assay to help avoid false-positive results (30 hours) or false-negative results in weakly-positive samples (48 hours), as well as the number of replications necessary for adequate sensitivity (2-12).

“This study represents an important first step for the tASA diagnostic protocol to gain regulatory approval for its use in TSE surveillance programs targeting CWD in cervids,” commented noted authority Holger Wille, PhD, of the University of Alberta Department of Biochemistry and Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). “Additional work will also be needed to fine-tune and test tASA for the detection of prions in peripheral organs and environmental samples, which represent a substantial unmet need to track the spread of CWD prions among North America cervids as well as in the environment.”

Prions are abnormal, transmissible pathogenic agents that induce abnormal folding of specific, normal cellular proteins. Because these proteins are concentrated in brain tissue, brain damage is characteristic of prion diseases. Prion diseases generally progress rapidly and are associated with high mortality. Prion disease occurs when the normal cellular form of prion-related protein converts or conformationally changes to the disease form. Once the disease form is introduced, it becomes self-perpetuating as it converts the normal form into more of the disease form. CWD is currently spreading throughout the U.S. and Canada, is also present in South Korea, and was just diagnosed in a first reindeer in Norway.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160408112336.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* Inbreeding impacts on mothering ability, red deer study shows

Inbred animals have fewer surviving offspring compared with others, a study of red deer in the wild has found. The insight could aid the conservation and management of endangered populations of animals in which inbreeding carries a high risk of extinction.

The findings from a long-term study on a Scottish island shows that hinds whose parents were first cousins raise far fewer offspring – about one-quarter as many – to adulthood over their lifetimes compared with others.

This is because inbred hinds are less likely to survive to breeding age, to have a calf in any given year and to rear any calves they do have to independence.

Similarly, male red deer born to first cousins sire only one-twentieth the number of offspring of average adult males.

Inbreeding is known to have adverse effects across many species, but examples of its impact on adult wild animals are rare.

Researchers used a DNA screening tool to gain a highly detailed measure of inbreeding for each individual deer living at the study site on the Isle of Rum in the Inner Hebrides.

They used this alongside long-term data on individuals from the 40-year study to determine the extent of inbreeding on the ability of each animal to reproduce and successfully raise offspring.

Red deer on Rum are occasionally inbred because some males return to the part of the island where they were born for the annual rut, where they encounter their sisters, aunts and cousins.

The herd is not endangered nor at risk from the inbreeding effects highlighted in the study, but the results are important for endangered populations, in which a lack of unrelated mating partners often increases inbreeding.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and carried out by scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge and the Australian National University, was supported by the European Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council.

The Isle of Rum National Nature Reserve is owned and managed by Scottish Natural Heritage.

Professor Josephine Pemberton of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences, who led the study, said: “Combining sophisticated genetic analysis techniques with long-term data on individual deer life histories has revealed surprising results about how damaging inbreeding is in adult life. Inbred mothers give birth to calves whose chances of survival are almost as bad as if the calves themselves were inbred.”

Chris Donald, SNH’s South Highland Operations Manager, said: “This cutting-edge research from our national nature reserve on Rum has produced some exceptional insights into the health and survival of red deer. This work will clearly have considerable implications on how we conserve and manage endangered deer populations where the risks of inbreeding are high.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science  Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160314161445.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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No snow, no hares: Climate change pushes emblematic species north

If there is an animal emblematic of the northern winter, it is the snowshoe hare. A forest dweller, the snowshoe hare is named for its big feet, which allow it to skitter over deep snow to escape lynx, coyotes and other predators. It changes color with the seasons, assuming a snow-white fur coat for winter camouflage.

But a changing climate and reduced snow cover across the north is squeezing the animal out of its historic range, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Writing in the current (March 30, 2016) Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Wisconsin researchers report that the range of the hare in Wisconsin is creeping north by about five and a half miles per decade, closely tracking the diminishing snow cover the animal requires to be successful.

“The snowshoe hare is perfectly modeled for life on snow,” explains Jonathan Pauli, a UW-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology and one of the co-authors of the new study. “They’re adapted to glide on top of the snow and to blend in with the historical colors of the landscape.”

As climate warms, northern winters have become shorter and milder. And the annual blanket of snow that many organisms have evolved to depend on is in steady retreat, becoming thinner and less dependable in regions that once experienced snow well into the spring months

The Wisconsin study is important because it helps illustrate the effects of climate change on a sentinel species for northern ecosystems, showing how the composition of plants and animals on the landscape is gradually shifting in a warming world. The findings also signal that climate change is beginning to eclipse land use as the dominant driver of ecological change.

“This is one of the first studies to really identify how changing climate factors influence a southern range boundary,” notes Ben Zuckerberg, a UW-Madison professor of forest and wildlife ecology and a co-author of the study.

In Wisconsin, a legacy of research on snowshoe hares dates to at least 1945, when famed ecologist Aldo Leopold published some of the first anecdotal data, recording their presence in an arcing trajectory covering roughly half of the state from the Mississippi north of St. Paul to Green Bay. Studies of the hare and its range were continued and expanded by UW-Madison wildlife ecologist Lloyd B. Keith beginning in the 1960s.

The new study, which was led by UW-Madison graduate student Sean M. Sultaire, drew on observations at 148 of 249 historic survey sites where snowshoe hares were documented in the past. Of 126 sites where hares were once reported, the animal was found at only 28. The researchers were unable to document hares at the remaining 98 sites, or 78 percent of the places where hares were once found.

Lack of snow, of course, can pose serious problems for an animal that depends on its coloring to blend into its environment and avoid predation. “Color mismatch — white fur on a brown background — will continue to occur and have a significant impact” on the species, says Pauli. “For a snowshoe hare, being cryptic is a fundamental requirement for making a living. It is a relatively fixed phenotype, so it is pretty clear that snow cover is one of the most important constraints in terms of where the animal can and can’t be.”

“Our winter climate has changed significantly over time,” says Zuckerberg, who, with Pauli, has set out to document how a warmer world is affecting the ecological underpinnings of winter landscapes that were once awash in snow.

According to Pauli, the snowshoe hare at the southern range of its boundary must cope not only with less snow, but also with a steady northward march of carnivores like coyotes. “They’re getting pinched at both ends.”

The ecological consequences of diminished abundance of snowshoe hare will be significant, having both ecological and economic consequences as the animal is both an important game species in Wisconsin and a menu item for many other species of animals and raptors.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160330174231.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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* Pandas hear more than we do

A study published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation may help field conservationists better understand the potential for human activities to disturb endangered giant pandas in native habitats. Using pandas located at the San Diego Zoo, conservation scientists worked with animal care specialists to determine pandas’ range of hearing sensitivity, discovering that they can detect sound into the ultrasonic range. Because giant pandas depend in large part on information transmitted through vocalizations for reproductive success, noise from human activities in or near forest areas could be disruptive.

“An understanding of a species’ hearing provides a foundation for developing estimates of noise disturbance,” said Megan Owen, associate director of giant panda conservation, San Diego Zoo Global. “For the giant panda, vocalizations are typically emitted in proximity to conspecifics (members of the same species), however the ability to discriminate between fine-scale differences in vocalizations is important for successful reproduction; and so, a thorough understanding of acoustic ecology is merited in order to estimate the potential for disturbance.

“In order to learn about panda hearing, researchers at the San Diego Zoo worked with giant pandas to teach them to respond, if they could hear sounds at a particular pitch and loudness, thus communicating their ability to hear across the acoustic spectrum,” Owen said.

“Through this study, the pandas at the San Diego Zoo have made a significant contribution to our understanding of what may be affecting panda reproduction in habitats in China,” said Ron Swaisgood, director of applied animal ecology, San Diego Zoo Global. “It is only because of the strong relationship that animal care staff have with the bears at the Zoo that we have been able to gather this information.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/  Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160322133822.htm  Original web page at Sc

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* Tracking deer by NASA satellite

Mule deer mothers are in sync with their environment, with reproduction patterns that closely match the cycles of plant growth in their habitat. And new research using NASA satellite data shows that tracking vegetation from space can help wildlife managers predict when does will give birth to fawns.

Mule deer mothers are in sync with their environment, with reproduction patterns that closely match the cycles of plant growth in their habitat. And new research using NASA satellite data shows that tracking vegetation from space can help wildlife managers predict when does will give birth to fawns.

Raising a fawn is no easy task — a doe needs a rich supply of vegetation for the late stages of pregnancy and for nursing. Mule deer birth rates peak shortly before the peak of annual plant growth, when food sources are increasing. Through a combination of satellite measurements and ground-based population counts, researchers can forecast the timing of fawning seasons based on vegetation.

“We had never tracked the deer population this way, and we had never been able to predict it with such precision,” said David Stoner of Utah State University, lead author of a recent study. “We can estimate the start and peak of the season using satellite imagery, and then we can map and predict when the deer are giving birth in any given region.”

Mule deer populations are closely monitored and counted by biologists and land managers, in part to determine population trends over time, which helps them set the proper number of hunting permits to issue. At the same time, remote sensing scientists have a space-based way to track when vegetation greens up and how productive it is compared to drought or wet years, the health of vegetation. The tool is called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which is a measure of the “greenness” of the landscape. It measures how plants absorb and reflect light — the more infrared light is reflected, the healthier the vegetation. So by measuring the greenness of the mule deer habitat, scientists were able to mark the beginning and peak of the plant growing season — and the fawning season.

To visualize the relationship between vegetation greenness and fawns, Stoner and his colleagues divided mule deer habitat that stretched from southern Idaho to central Arizona into three zones. They measured the NDVI for each day of the calendar year, using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites.

They found that vegetation greenness in the northern latitudes peaks earlier than in the southern latitudes, according to Stoner. Since nutrient-dense food sources were available earlier in the year, there was more food available for mule deer mothers and babies at the time when they needed it most. That greenness is partly a result of a consistent stream of snowmelt moisture feeding the deep roots of mountain plants.

In southern latitudes, on the other hand, the plants are more dependent on rain from late summer monsoonal showers. This means vegetation quality peaks later in the year, after a brief drought that comes before the summer monsoons. As a result, does give birth later in the south than in the north.

“This kind of applied research is very important for making remote sensing data relevant to wildlife management efforts,” said Jyoteshwar Nagol, a researcher at the University of Maryland. Deer have a huge economic impact in the United States, from hunting to crop damage to car accidents. As regional climates shift or droughts occur, deer distributions could change in response to changes in the timing of vegetation green-up.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/   Science Daily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160330184414.htm  Original web page at Science Daily

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Food limitation linked to record California sea lion pup strandings

Large numbers of California sea lion pups have flooded animal rescue centers in Southern California in the past few years. Now, as part of an ongoing investigation into the Unusual Mortality Event of California sea lions by a team of NOAA scientists and private partners, researchers may have an explanation.

Booming sea lion numbers combined with declines in the highest-calorie prey around the Channel Islands breeding rookeries have left nursing females struggling to support the nutritional needs of their pups, according to a new study published today in Royal Society Open Science.

The study by NOAA Fisheries scientists is the first to analyze changes in fish populations sea lions prey on for clues as to what is causing the record strandings. Scientists examined changes in the abundance of four of the main prey species: sardine, anchovy, rockfish and market squid over the 2004-2014 time period. They found that that high-calorie sardines and anchovies, both rich in fat that is vital to the growth of young sea lions, have declined since the mid-2000s in the areas around the Channel Islands where the females forage. That has forced the female sea lions to prey instead on market squid and rockfish, which contain far less fat and fewer calories.

“When you have hundreds of thousands of animals to feed and you have a fluctuating prey base that has trended downward, you are going to have starving animals,” said Sam McClatchie of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, Calif., and lead author of the new research. “Sardines and anchovies have both trended downward, and that compounds the problem for the sea lions.”

The scientists did not study how changes in fish species affect the composition and quality of milk that mother sea lions feed their pups, which affects the growth of the pups. However, the close correlation between the fish available and the weight of sea lion pups provides “compelling evidence of a food limitation effect on the weight of dependent pups,” the scientists wrote. The trends in the relative abundance of forage taxa highlight a decade-long decline in the availability and quality of forage for sea lions.

Nature, in effect, has put the sea lions on a low-calorie diet. Market squid, for instance, contain less than half the calories and about one-tenth the fat content by weight compared to sardines. While adult males and females without pups can survive on a low calorie diet, lactating females and their dependent pups seem to be sensitive to reductions in high calorie prey. The results build on earlier studies at San Miguel Island that showed pup weights decrease during El Niño events and when female diet, as determined from scat analysis, was predominantly squid and rockfish.

The long-term and widespread nature of the changes in prey suggest that environmental shifts are driving them, the researchers concluded. Although sardines have been subject to limited fishing pressure, anchovies were much more lightly fished prior to 2013; yet both populations have declined.

“The overall driver appears to be the natural fluctuations in fish populations,” McClatchie said. “They do fluctuate up and down over time, and since 2004, they’re doing it in phase.”

The changes in prey were documented by Southwest Fisheries Science Center surveys off the California Coast, which sample the composition of fish species. Changes in pup condition were collected by the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Marine Mammal Laboratory.

Sea lions are not endangered but are protected by the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. Their population has grown from about 50,000 to over 300,000 in the last 40 years, and is expected to ultimately fluctuate around a still-unknown carrying capacity, the researchers said. The carrying capacity would be expected to vary with climate and ocean conditions.”Given the likelihood that the California sea lion population is approaching carrying capacity, density-dependent effects such as food limitation (and stranding) of pups may be a long-term consequence of a rebuilt sea lion population during periods of low abundance of high-quality forage,” the scientists wrote.

Sea lions have faced similar declines in sardines and anchovies during previous El Niño conditions, but the shifts are not limited only to El Niño periods, the researchers found. The latest spike in sea lion strandings began before the current El Niño pattern took hold, and before the large expanse of warm water known as “the blob” began dominating West Coast Waters in 2014.

The results refocus the debate on the causes of sea lion pup weight loss from episodic stresses associated with El Niño years to a decadal-long trend of declining forage quality in the waters around the California Channel Island rookeries, the researchers wrote. The large areas where surveys documented declines in sardine and anchovy and increases in market squid and rockfish suggests that the drivers for this decadal trend is environmental. Both the warm blob and El Niño events may continue to disrupt historical spawning times and locations of sardine and anchovy populations. It is unknown how long low-quality forage abundance will persist. Recently completed NOAA Fisheries surveys suggest that while both sardine and anchovy populations have trended downward in recent years, the 2015 numbers of anchovy larvae appear to be stronger than in the past 10 years along portions of the U.S. West Coast. Sardines, which normally spawn off central California in spring, last year spawned off Oregon. However, there is uncertainty, whether the young anchovies and sardines that were observed will successfully mature into the adult populations.

NOAA Fisheries surveys and stock assessments continue to track the status of sardine, anchovy and other coastal pelagic species, while monitoring the health and abundance of sea lion populations, to provide data for the public and effective management of these species in changing ocean conditions.

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160303094054.htm  Original web page at Science Daily