Tiny ants are having a big impact on the lives of lions.
In a study published in Science, researchers found that invasive ants are changing the tree cover in Ol Pejeta Nature Conservancy in Kenya, making it harder for lions to hunt zebras—their preferred prey.
Combining remote cameras, tracking collars and other data, the three-decade-long study explored a web of interactions in the ecosystem. As part of that, researchers discovered that the big-headed ant (Pheidole megacephala) has set off a chain of events that has shifted the lions’ predatory behavior.
The invasive insects have destroyed colonies of native ants that nest in acacias and protect them from leaf-eating animals. Lions (Panthera leo) use the trees as cover for ambushing zebras (Equus quagga). With fewer acacias, the lions are turning their attention to buffaloes (Syncerus caffer), but they are a more challenging prey.
“These tiny invaders are cryptically pulling on the ties that bind an African ecosystem together, determining who is eaten and where,” said Todd Palmer, an ecologist and professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida and an author on the study.
As the wolf turns to face the camera, it lets out an iconic howl. It’s part of the footage captured by trail camera of California’s newest known pack of gray wolves (Canis lupus), known as the Yowlumni Pack.
The pack appeared last summer in the Sequoia National Forest near the Tule River Tribe of California’s reservation and ancestral land. The Tribe partnered with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to name the pack, which comes from the Yowlumni band of the Tule River Yokuts.
“This was described by my mother, Agnes Vera, who was born on the Tule River Indian Reservation in 1926,” said Vernon Vera, a Tule River Tribal Elder. “She was the last fluent speaker of Yowlumni until her passing in 2010. She taught that the Yowlumni were speakers of the ‘Wolf Tongue.’”
Biologists believe the pack consists of a breeding pair and six pups.
I was born and raised in Marietta, Georgia; home of “The Big Chicken” and the political intersection between pro- and anti-hunting individuals. As a child, I was receptive to the idea of hunting and enjoyed the wild game my uncle brought over for the holidays; however, the idea of harvesting my own meal made me anything but hungry. In fact, the first time I held a firearm with intention to shoot at an inanimate object shaped like a deer, I sobbed and solidified my fear of firearms and hunting as I reached for the tissue box.
As fate would have it, I started taking wildlife-focused classes at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources and fell in love with my now fiancé, Calvin Ellis. Around this same time, Calvin had just accepted a student coordinator position with a program that teaches college students within the natural resources field to hunt, called Academics Afield, and was planning an upcoming dove hunt.
With all firearms a safe distance away, I volunteered to take photographs of the new hunters as Calvin taught them shotgun safety, best hunting-practices, and led them around the dove field. We all left that night covered in dust, with two harvested doves, and smiles that grinned from ear to ear. I loved every second of it.
Halseth holds a coyote pup and listens to its heartbeat. This was taken in Chicago, Illinois and all coyotes were handled for research purposes as a part of the Cook County Coyote Project, where Halseth is obtaining her master’s of science. Credit: Jeff Nelson
Two more Academics Afield hunts rolled by where I caught myself learning in between taking photographs: how the Pittman-Robertson Act helped to rebuild wildlife populations after substantial declines and continues to fund important wildlife research projects. I learned how to sustain your family with free-range and additive-free meat, and how to respect a firearm instead of fearing it. I witnessed a range of emotional responses as my classmates harvested their first animals. Smiles, stoicism and tears were all responses exhibited by individuals in our group, and I found myself crying right alongside some of them. This time, my tears were not out of fear or sadness, but out of respect for the animal, the practice and the community I found in the woods. Later that year, I harvested my first deer and have continued to hunt as my wildlife career moved me from state to state.
Halseth and her fiancé, Calvin Ellis, at an Academics Afield clay-shooting event following Halseth introduction into hunting. Academics Afield is an organization that teaches hunting and shooting sports to college students. Credit: Miranda Hopper
My love for wildlife was always present in my life and was in no way a direct byproduct of my newfound passion for hunting. However, I believe that becoming a hunter during my early professional career has significantly altered my career path. As I continue my formal education in graduate school studying disease transmission amongst wildlife populations, I am constantly reminded of how hunting has become interwoven into everything I do now: I see the animals I research in novel ways, I’ve made deeper connections with professionals in the field that share this passion, and I have become a part of a group of stakeholders that are some of the most ardent supporters of wildlife historically and present day.
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Researchers have trained computer programs to help them count manatees and improve conservation efforts.
In the winter, the Indian River Lagoon is an important area for Florida manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostris), which seek out its warmer waters, created by power plant outflows. But in recent years, the marine mammals began dying off when algae choked off the sea grasses they rely on, causing some to starve.
State and federal wildlife managers responded to monitor the manatees and provided supplemental feeding, but Xingquan Zhu, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, and his colleagues wondered if there was a better way to keep track of them. Since they typically gather in clusters, it can be hard to distinguish individuals and count them.
“This motivated us to provide a better way to track them, because our current approaches rely on manual counting or using drones, which are not only costly but also heavily depend on weather and cannot deliver real time results,” said Zhu, senior author of a study published in Scientific Reports that used artificial intelligence to help count manatees.
Researchers used lines to label manatees for artificial intelligence. Credit: Florida Atlantic University
Using camera images from the nonprofit organization Save the Manatee, which collects surveillance videos from Blue Spring State Park and Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park, Zhu’s team trained computer programs to recognize manatees.
Rather than using dots to label individuals, which many AI programmers use, they used line segments and special filters, which they found better captured manatees’ unique oval shapes. The result was a density map that researchers believe can offer a lower-cost solution to count manatees in real time.
That opens lots of research opportunities, Zhu said. For example, using real time, on-site surveillance cameras, biologists can get a better snapshot of how many manatees are present and if they need to take action, like providing supplemental food. Underwater cameras could provide even more information to advance the study.
Zhu and his colleagues made their methods—including source code and data—public to share with other researchers.
“We are publishing those materials online for public access and hope more researchers can jump in—not only for the manatee,” he said. “Together, we can make advancements to the science.”
TWS member Roel Lopez, CWB, has received the Conservation Trailblazer Award from the Dallas Safari Club. The award recognizes three decades of contributions to wildlife conservation by Lopez, who heads the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Rangeland, Wildlife and Fisheries Management and directs the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute.
“For decades, Dr. Lopez has been a nationally recognized leader in wildlife conservation,” said Corey Mason, chief executive officer of the Dallas Safari Club and Dallas Safari Club Foundation. “He has led many state and national conservation organizations and has a unique ability to bring people together to advance wildlife conservation.”
Much of Lopez’s work has focused on endangered and fragmented wildlife populations, military land sustainability, and rural land trends and demographics.
“Dr. Lopez has dedicated his career to advancing wildlife conservation not only through research and educational outreach, but through the development of the next generation of conservation leaders,” said Jeffrey W. Savell, vice chancellor and dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M. “His actions in and outside of the classroom seamlessly integrate research, leadership and service, enabling our college to produce tomorrow’s leaders and advance natural resource stewardship.”
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 Wildlife Society is an organization with global reach, with members in dozens of countries around the world. In the January/February issue of The Wildlife Professional, we introduce you to a few of our international members working in their backyards—from the Alps to the Andes to Africa’s Albertine Rift.
Our special focus examines the work being conducted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and how wildlife biologists can play a role.
Other articles look at how biologists are responding to wildlife amid the war in Ukraine and explore the legacy of John F. Lacey, the force behind the first wildlife protection laws in the U.S.
Watch for the issue in your mailbox, or log in and check it out online.
As much of Canada and the United States experienced a blast of Arctic temperatures, wildlife species been feeling the cold, too. “Sometimes when I am sitting in my warm house on a cold night I feel sorry for the animals stuck outside in the cold,” said TWS member Roland Kays, a research associate professor of forestry and environmental resources at North Carolina State University. “But evolution has equipped them with the fur, fat and foresight to survive this kind of thing.” But some species struggle more in the cold than others, Kays said. Species like the Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) and the nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) wandered to North America from warmer climes and never adapted well to cold weather. Some others struggle in heavy snow. “It’s an environmental factor that some animals are good at dealing with and some animals aren’t,” Kays said.
As California’s sea otter population rebounded from the brink of extinction, the state’s kelp forests increased alongside them.
In a study published in PLOS Climate, researchers documented a significant increase in kelp forest canopy along California’s Central Coast over the past century. That was the only region where southern sea otters (Enhydra nereis) survived after being hunted nearly to extinction for their fur. Researchers found that the species’ impact on these kelp forests nearly compensated for kelp losses elsewhere in the state.
“Our study showed that kelp forests are more extensive and resilient to climate change where sea otters have reoccupied the California coastline during the last century,” said lead author Teri Nicholson, senior research biologist with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Sea Otter Program.
Northeastern cities may not be the worst places to live for reptiles and amphibians in North America, according to a new citizen science analysis.
“Overall, [these findings] suggest that you can look at cities just as you look at other ecosystems,” said David Marsh, a biology professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia.
Marsh led a study published in Global Ecology and Conservation where he and his colleagues gathered data from iNaturalist—an app where users report organism sightings in their areas—in cities like Montreal and Toronto down to Nashville, and to St. Louis and Minneapolis in the West. They focused on the Northeast, where cities are traditionally organized with denser urban centers and more greenery in the suburbs.
They gathered data as far back as it was recorded on the app through June 2022 when they began to analyze their data. They then compared the GPS data points to maps containing information on landscape cover type in the cities.
Spotted salamanders were not as common in cities due to habitat requirements. Credit: David Marsh
Decent species richness
For the most part, other than a couple of outlier cities like Nashville, the researchers found that the species present were quite similar in most of the cities they examined. The amount of data present also varied by place. “Apparently, Canadians love iNaturalist, because those cities had by far the most complete data sets we found,” Marsh said. They also found that the cities farthest to the north had many reptile and amphibian sightings.
Overall, the level of urbanity didn’t affect reptiles and amphibians as much as the researchers expected. There was only about 10-20% less species richness in cities compared to the surrounding suburban areas. “The species richness of amphibians and reptiles was fairly high in cities,” Marsh said.
Some species that seemed to tolerate urban areas pretty well included red-backed salamanders (Plethodon cinereus) and DeKay’s brownsnakes (Storeria dekayi). The former may tolerate cities well because they don’t require water to lay their eggs—their young hatch fully formed under rocks or logs without passing through a larval stage, Marsh said.
A young snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina). Credit: David Marsh
City-sensitive species
The team also found which species didn’t tolerate cities well based on which ones had fewer or no detections there. Species like wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus) and spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum), for example, have very specific requirements. They need seasonal pools surrounded by forests—a type of ecosystem that doesn’t always appear much in urban areas. Species that prefer streams surrounded by forests like pickerel frogs (L. palustris), two-lined salamanders (Eurycea bislineata) and, to some extent, common watersnakes (Nerodia sipedon) also didn’t appear often in cities.
They did find that nonnative species diversity is often richer in cities than in the surrounding areas. “We can’t really tell whether it’s something about cities that support nonnative species, or if that’s just where they get released,” Marsh said.
Some cities supported reptile and amphibian diversity better than others, though. Cities like Indianapolis, Nashville and Columbus, Ohio had a similar species richness as their surrounding rural areas. Marsh said this is likely due to the fact that these cities have more green space downtown—the urbanization wasn’t as dense, either.
These findings suggest that temperate reptiles and amphibians don’t necessarily fit the common theory that cities have a kind of homogenization effect on diversity, the researchers said. Other researchers have pointed out this trend in birds—where cities seem to favor only generalist species like pigeons (Columba livia), European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) or house sparrows (Passer domesticus).
With reptiles and amphibians, this trend doesn’t seem to be the case, Marsh said.
One Sunday morning, Dave Duffy’s kids told him they had just seen a bobcat through the window of their home near the University of Florida’s Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience outside St. Augustine, Florida. They knew their dad— a professor at the Whitney Lab—would want to know, because they had helped him countless times take samples of animal tracks in hopes of studying the creatures that left them.
Initially skeptical—bobcats (Lynx rufus) are rarely spotted during the day out in the open—Duffy eventually went to check and there they were: six clear bobcat prints in the sandy soil. With his kids’ help, he scooped up small soil samples from the footprints and tucked them away for later.
In their latest research published in the journal Biological Conservation, Duffy and his team showed that they could recover bobcat DNA from the tracks. In collaboration with the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, they also showed that DNA recovered from bobcat pawprints can be used to determine the animal’s ancestral background and even identify its unique microbial community. All from the errant environmental DNA left behind long after the animal has left.
This kind of information can help scientists better understand species that are usually difficult to track.
“Bobcats, like many other species, are experiencing changes in their ranges, mostly due to humans,” said Duffy. “Being able to track where they are, what habitats they’re using, and what areas they’re in can help inform better management.”
