Precipitation has an even bigger effect on sea turtle hatchling development than changes in air temperature, researchers have uncovered. Scientists already knew that air temperature plays a crucial role in sea turtle development—cooler temperatures produce more heavy turtles that are males, and warm temperatures cause hatching to speed up, offering predator protection. Scientists wondered about the effects of rainfall on loggerhead (Caretta caretta) and green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas). In the study published in BMC Ecology and Evolution, the team studied the two species on 37 beaches and found that for loggerhead turtles, heavier rainfall means smaller shelled, but heavier hatchlings. For green turtles, more rain meant turtles with smaller carapaces and no change in body mass. The researchers said these effects are important to consider as climate change shifts rainfall patterns. “Analyzing local data from various nesting sites is crucial for understanding sea turtle nesting patterns,” said Jeanette Wyneken, a coauthor of the study and professor at Florida Atlantic University. “These local databases should be made more accessible and widely shared to improve our knowledge and support local conservation efforts.”
Scientists are asking birders and the public at large to help track down birds that they haven’t documented in decades. The team compiled a list of lost birds using published studies and citizen science apps like iNaturalist and eBird. The list includes species like the Jamaican pauraque (Siphonorhis americana), which hasn’t been seen in 163 years, and the Ghana cuckooshrike (Lobotos lobatus), last seen 13 years ago. Some of these birds may be extinct, but others may still be out there but just haven’t been documented. Since the researchers published the list as part of a study in June—which was based on research conducted two years earlier—the public has rediscovered some of the species on this list, such as the Santa Marta sabrewing (Campylopterus phainopeplus) of Colombia, missing for 12 years, and the black-naped pheasant-pigeon (Otidiphaps insularis) of Papua New Guinea, undocumented for more than 120 years. Some 126 lost birds remain on the list.
Mark McCollough, a longtime biologist and artist, has earned the Jay N. “Ding” Darling Memorial Award for Wildlife Stewardship through Art. His artistic abilities have been raising awareness for wildlife conservation in Maine for over 35 years.
Whether working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in the Endangered Species Program at the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW), or even during his graduate research at the University of Maine, McCollough’s artwork has brought colorful imagery to wildlife science.
“I’ll never forget my first encounter with Mark’s artistry while we were both still in the wildlife conservation program at the University of Maine,” wrote Maine TWS Chapter member Charlie Todd in an award nomination letter. “Our eagle research budget was inadequate, and he calmly created and distributed a sketch of an adult bald eagle perched in a white pine during a snowstorm. The signed, numbered prints were offered to those making donations to the research budget.”
McCollough has fundraised this way throughout his career, most recently creating a piece for the Maine Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation showing a blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata) picking nuts from an American chestnut tree. The birds play an important role in the trees’ restoration. They cache fertile chestnuts, which germinate and help repopulate the trees—a keystone species in Maine’s forests.
A 2023 painting by McCollough captures blue jays picking nuts from an American chestnut tree. Courtesy of Mark McCollough
His writing and illustrations have been displayed in multiple books, journals and even on Maine conservation license plates, the proceeds of which are dedicated to the MDIFW nongame project. Colleagues say that McCollough’s artwork inspires hope for the future of threatened and endangered species while also educating the public about their importance.
“Mark has offered a poster of all threatened or endangered species listed in Maine in each of the first four state listings: in 1987, 1997, 2007 and 2015,” Todd wrote. “The imagery gives meaning to species like the ringed boghaunter, Tidewater mucket, New England cottontail, mystery vertigo and more, for which many are unfamiliar compared to more charismatic species.”
McCollough’s artwork has been featured on Maine conservation license plates. Courtesy of Mark McCollough
In addition to directly benefiting Maine wildlife, McCoullough has displayed his artwork at the Eastern Maine Sportman’s Show for 15 years. Each year, he speaks to attendees about wildlife conservation and helps sell raffle tickets for his prints. The raffle proceeds are donated to the Penobscot County Conservation Association, whose projects introduce the outdoors to a younger generation.
McCollough will receive the Jay N. “Ding” Darling Memorial Award for Wildlife Stewardship through Art at TWS’ 2024 Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland in October.
Working as a wildlife biologist within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has multiple use objectives and often does not consider wildlife a priority, is challenging.
Throughout my 30 years with the agency, I’ve learned many life lessons from these challenges, and three have especially been significant.
I have found it helpful to maintain good relationships with coworkers and external partners, even if I have different opinions, objectives and priorities than they do. I have not always been successful in this area, and the failures have taught me the value of maintaining good relationships in accomplishing my objectives.
Garwood monitors the range in a cattle grazing allotment in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. Credit: Tim Seeley
A second one has been to embrace new techniques, technology and information, all with a healthy skepticism. I have found that learning new things has kept me engaged and kept burnout at bay.
The third lesson I’ve learned is to find joy in the work I do wherever I can. I try to be mindful of the amazing life and processes that are occurring around me and remind myself that I’m lucky to have a career in this field that I love.
Cultivating positive relationships, learning new things and finding joy are lessons learned during my career, but I consider them lessons important in all aspects of my life.
Garwood releases a sharp-shinned hawk (Accipiter striatus) during raptor banding and processing at the Lucky Peak Station Intermountain Bird Observatory in Idaho. Credit: Ed Cutter
Wildlife Vocalizations is a collection of short personal perspectives from people in the field of wildlife sciences.
Submit your story for Wildlife Vocalizations or nominate your peers and colleagues to encourage them to share their story. For questions, please contact tws@wildlife.org.
Frogs fighting the looming death from chytrid fungus are finding some success at recovery spas.
These so-called “saunas”—stacked bricks inside a greenhouse placed by the sides of ponds—help frogs boost their temperature above the lower level where chytrid thrives. Evidence also shows that these simple structures help boost frog immunity to the deadly disease.
“You can think of these structures as little engines that crank out resistant frogs,” said Anthony Waddle, a postdoctoral scholar in conservation biology at Macquarie University in Australia.
The fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytridiomycosis, or chytrid disease, has led to widespread extinctions and extirpations in amphibian species in the past few decades. The fungus is thought to have originated on the Korean peninsula but has spread to almost every continent in the world, other than Antarctica. Bd spores break down frogs’ natural defenses and spread all over their bodies. The effect is devastating, disrupting the way amphibians breathe through their skin. Most amphibians outside of the Korean Peninsula have not had generations to develop natural resistance to the fungus.
In Australia, Waddle said that six amphibian species have already gone extinct, while a few others are “on their way out.” The green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea), seen calling in the video above, has declined by 90% in Australia. Many of these frogs die off in the winter, when their immune systems are weaker, but the chytrid fungus thrives.
“The pathogen likes cold weather, and the frogs do poorly against it in cold weather,” Waddle said.
He and his colleagues wondered how they could stymie these winter losses. They thought they might be able to help the frogs survive by boosting their temperature in the cold months, when they are most vulnerable. So they opened a frog sauna.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
Greenhouse saunas
As described in a study published recently in Nature, Waddle and his colleagues built the sauna using a kind of greenhouse setup with masonry brick walls inside. Instead of placing the bricks the way they are usually stacked, they laid them on their sides so that the holes inside faced outward, as seen above. These small holes in this type of brick were the perfect size for adult green and golden bell frogs.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
Inside 12 greenhouses, the researchers built identical mini-habitats with plants and water. They stacked bricks inside, 10-high, and painted them black, so they would absorb more heat from the sun. They put healthy frogs in four habitats as a control. They placed a mixture of infected and non-infected ones in the next eight habitats.
This setup creates a sauna-like condition inside. “It’s hot but humid, so they aren’t losing a ton of water,” Waddle said about the frogs.
The researchers put shade over half the habitats to create a lower temperature as a control. These were about 4.5 degrees Celsius cooler, on average, they found.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
The team found that the warmer habitats were much better for fighting infection. “Frogs that had access to higher temperatures in unshaded structures reduced and cleared infections more rapidly than frogs in cooler, shaded structures,” Waddle said.
Credit: Yorick Lambreghts
The researchers also investigated what happens to frogs that survive infections. In the laboratory, frogs that cleared an infection thanks to warmer temperatures were more resistant to future infections than frogs that had never been infected—even when subsequently exposed to chytrid in colder temperatures. In this way, the structures may provide a long-term benefit, since frogs that recover from chytrid typically develop resistance to the fungal disease, Waddle said.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
Into the wild—and your backyard
Waddle’s team is now putting these setups near ponds around Sydney, where green and golden bell frogs are found. A gap under the sides of the greenhouses a few centimeters off the ground allows frogs to enter and leave. While this research is ongoing, Waddle said that they’ve seen four other species using them: two species of marsh frogs, the common eastern froglet (Crinia signifera), and Peron’s tree frog (L. peronii). There is also something of a hierarchy, with Peron’s tree frogs and green and golden bell frogs using the top bricks, while the marsh frogs occupy the lower ones on the brick wall, likely reflecting the different species’ relative abilities as climbers.
Waddle said that with some fine tuning, this system could likely be modified to favor other species. The Relict leopard frog (Lithobates onca) around Las Vegas, for example, has trouble with chytrid over winter and might benefit from a similar setup, while other species of leopard frogs like the federally threatened Chiricahua leopard frog (Rana chiricahuensis) may also benefit.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
The setup is pretty inexpensive—you can buy the bricks from a hardware store. In fact, the manufacturers of the particular type that Waddle and his colleagues used in this study are now even marketing their bricks as frog saunas on their website.
These frogs do well in urban settings, so Waddle said that people who want to help can even put up these relatively cheap setups in their own yards. He’s even set up a how-to guide online.
Credit: Anthony Waddle
This photo essay is part of an occasional series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps and other equipment. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project or one that has a series of good photos you’d like to share, email Josh at jlearn@wildlife.org.
A common species of salamander is even more abundant in eastern North America than researchers expected. In a study published in Biology Letters, scientists looked at densities and biomass of the red-backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) across their range. The salamanders are small and spend most of their time underground, making them hard to spot. But the researchers estimated an average of 5,300 salamanders in every football-sized patch of forest they studied in the Northeast. The research team said this suggests red-backed salamanders—and amphibians in general—play an important role in terrestrial temperate ecosystems. “The very large biomass of red-backed salamanders tells us that they are likely ‘small but mighty’ in terms of their role in the ecological health of northeastern forests,” said Evan Grant, a research wildlife biologist at the USGS and lead author on the paper, in a press release. “If red-backed salamanders disappeared, there would probably be some pretty large ecosystem-level consequences.” Researchers are concerned that the fungal disease Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, or Bsal, could potentially enter North America and threaten species like the red-backed salamander.
The Wildlife Professional is an exclusive benefit of membership in The Wildlife Society. Published six times annually, the magazine presents timely research news and analysis of trends in the wildlife profession.
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The Chesapeake Bay watershed, a vast estuary that covers nearly 4,500 square miles, historically provided rich resources for plants and wildlife. Now, the bay and its connected waterbodies and the wildlife they support face threats of excess nutrients, sea level rise, climate change and other challenges. In the Sept/Oct issue of The Wildlife Professional, we explore how wildlife biologists are working to combat these changes and provide healthy ecosystems for species from black rails to northern diamondback terrapins.
Other articles dive into the legacy of Aldo Leopold’s “The Sand County Almanac” on its 75th anniversary, how one wildlifer developed her own wildlife biology major, how being a part of a working group can support you in your career path, and more.
Watch for the issue in your mailbox, or log in and check it out online.
The overlap between humans and wildlife will increase on more than 50% of land globally by 2070. In new research published in the journal Science Advances, scientists created an index that included predictions of where humans will occupy land. They compared these projections to the distributions of more than 22,000 vertebrate species. The research revealed that human-wildlife overlap will increase in most lands. But it also found that human-wildlife overlap will decrease in 12% of lands—especially in agricultural and forested areas. Species richness is also predicted to decrease in many cases, the research found. “We care a lot about which areas can support populations of endangered species, like tigers, and how human communities interact with these species,” said Neil Carter, an author of the study and associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, in a press release. “In some places it’s going to be really hard to do everything at once: to grow crops and have urban areas and protect these species and their habitats. But if we can start planning now, we have a lot of tools to help us promote sustainable coexistence.”
The Journal of Wildlife Management is a benefit of membership in The Wildlife Society. Published eight times annually, it is one of the world’s leading scientific journals covering wildlife science, management and conservation, focusing on aspects of wildlife that can assist management and conservation.
Join todayfor access to The Journal of Wildlife Management and all the other great benefits of TWS membership.
Researchers often conduct aerial counts in combination with ground counts to survey ungulate species. But since this approach is sometimes impractical, one team wondered if remote cameras would provide similar results. In the featured article of the September issue of The Journal of Wildlife Management, researchers compared the two approaches for estimating bighorn sheep and mule deer numbers on Wild Horse Island in western Montana.
Other articles look at the ethics of using samples from trophy hunting for conservation, the effects of lethal wolf removal on moose, an evaluation of inbreeding depression in Mexican wolves and much more!
Coyotes, wild pigs and other wildlife may be keying in on wildlife feeders, posing a potential problem for people usually looking to attract deer for viewing or hunting.
“South Carolina is fairly new to coyotes. It’s fairly new to pigs,” said TWS member David Jachowski, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University. “So the old mindset of, ‘it’s as simple as putting out corn to draw deer in’ is more complicated with these other species on the landscape.”
Wildlife feeders may have unintended consequences by increasing competition and the risk of disease in deer, and putting the ungulates at a higher risk of predation. In fact, wild pigs may even deter them altogether.
Jachowski and his colleagues were researching the effects coyotes (Canis latrans) had on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations when they began to wonder whether deer feeders might be playing a role in the dynamics of the two species.
Feeding research
In a recent study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, Jachowski and his colleagues created an experiment to find out more about the species using these feeders.
From March through July of 2021, researchers placed 15 feeders on private land spanning more than 6,000 hectares. After allowing wildlife to become acclimated to the feeders’ presence and keeping them inactive during the spring turkey hunting season, the researchers programmed the feeders to release three pounds of corn at 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. each day for two months. The team placed 15 trail cameras near feeders, and 30 elsewhere.
A white-tailed deer watches over her fawn standing underneath a deer feeder. Courtesy of Elizabeth Grunwald
The team collected almost 100,000 photos just from the cameras at the feeders. With the help of Clemson undergraduate students, the team combed through the photos to determine which species were using the feeders and at what times and frequencies.
Predator problems
During the study, the team captured 15 coyotes and fitted them with GPS collars, allowing the researchers to see the animal’s normal home ranges. They determined that 10 coyotes had at least one feeder on their home turf. While the team predicted coyotes would shift their home range to be closer to an active feeder, the evidence of this was marginal.
However, Elizabeth Grunwald, the lead author of the study and research associate at the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, said that although she and her colleagues couldn’t prove that coyotes were learning that the sound from feeders meant prey was nearby, she suggests that had the study gone on longer, the canids would have likely picked up on this correlation.
Cameras also revealed that many does were bringing their fawns to feeders in the late evenings and at night. This type of behavior makes the fawn most vulnerable to coyote predation, as they’re also most active during these hours.
“What we don’t know, however, is how far the fawns had to travel with their mothers,” Grunwald explained. “They could have traveled a long distance, or they could have been bedded nearby.”
She said that the farther they had to travel, the more risk they faced.
A large sounder of wild pigs congregates at a deer feeder. Courtesy of Elizabeth Grunwald
Pig invasion
Even though white-tailed deer can become habituated to a feeder’s schedule, the sound of corn being mechanically thrown across the ground is also often too good to ignore for wild pigs (Sus scrofa).
Like coyotes, wild pigs are relatively new to the area. For most landowners, pigs are unwelcome guests because of their destructive tendencies. Instead of helping the property’s deer herd, feeders could be exacerbating a pig problem.
The team observed that when sounders of wild pigs were surrounding a feeder, deer were noticeably absent. Grunwald suggested that this is likely the result of the typical aggression shown by pigs and their erratic behavior.
“From a deer’s perspective, why put yourself in an uncomfortable situation?” she said. “Pigs make a lot of strange, loud noises, and deer can sense that and want to avoid that area, especially because there were other things for them to eat at the time like grass and forbs.”
Because the study took place during a time when the deer had plenty of plants to browse, the pigs acting as feeder deterrents were likely not very impactful to their overall health. However, this could change in seasons or areas where resources aren’t as plentiful.
Photos also revealed another animal may be assisting pigs.
“We noticed that raccoons and pigs were somewhat working together,” Grunwald laughed—especially with large groups of pigs. “The raccoons learned how to twist off the bottom of the feeder so then all the corn would spill out for the pigs.”
Feeding disease
Deer feeders may act as disease hot spots as well. While managers haven’t yet detected chronic wasting disease in South Carolina, Grunwald mentioned that in places where it is an issue, feeders could contribute to a growing problem if infected deer are congregating at feeders. Other diseases could also jump between pigs and deer.
Overall, Grunwald and Jachowski would recommend private landowners use feeders less and that the research gathered from South Carolina should be applied to other locales, especially those with wild pigs.
