Not all urban parks are beneficial to wildlife. For example, playgrounds or sports fields may benefit people but not do much for wildlife. In a study published in Urban Forest and Urban Greening, a team of researchers looked at over 600 urban green spaces in Florida’s Broward County to see how they benefited people and wildlife. Homing in on factors like tree canopy and presence of athletic facilities and playgrounds, they found that the amount of green space mattered the most for both human use and biodiversity. “Importantly, our findings highlight that green spaces need to be carefully designed to support biodiversity, but also a mix of green spaces with different goals is important,” said Corey Callaghan, senior author of the study and an assistant professor at the University of Florida, in a press release. However, they also found that places like sports fields and playgrounds that had more human use reduced habitat quality for wildlife. “On the other hand, dense vegetation and limited lighting support biodiversity but may be underused by people. It’s all about finding that middle ground,” said Nataly Miguez, a lead author of the study who conducted the research as an undergraduate at the University of Florida.
Marine radar technology can accurately detect vessel speed, which could potentially help lower the number of boats hitting whales. In places like the San Francisco Bay, small recreational or commercial boats can strike whales and affect their populations. While an Automatic Identification System often monitors larger commercial vessels, smaller boats sometimes go undetected. As a result, speed limits aren’t enforced for smaller vehicles in areas where whales are feeding or migrating. In a study published in Sensors, researchers tested if radar could detect smaller boat speed violations and found that it was accurate 95% of the time. “Radar is a widely available tool that is accessible to a large audience, such as enforcement agencies, marine resource managers and researchers,” said the study’s lead author, Samantha King, senior scientist for ProtectedSeas Marine Monitor (M2), in a press release. The accuracy values from our study can be used to confidently enforce speed limits using radar.”
The Alabama House of Representatives has passed a bill making it harder for scientists to detect chronic wasting disease on deer farms in the state.
Passed on April 15, House Bill 509 prohibits any state agency from killing, testing or stopping the transfer of captive cervids due to disease from farm to farm, with few exceptions. The bill also designates cervids, including white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), as the personal property of the breeder.
Over 200 breeders in Alabama provide white-tailed deer to high-fence hunting operations, which breed deer selectively for large antlers and body mass. Hunters pay a premium to enter fenced-in areas to hunt the animals.
A major concern for both captive and wild cervids across the country is chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal neurological disease that has been circulating in the U.S. since the 1960s and was first detected in Alabama’s free-ranging deer population from a sample collected from the northwest part of the state in 2022.
Republican bill sponsor Jeff Sorrells said that the legislation was in response to an emergency rule filed by the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (ADCNR) that came at the end of 2024, putting restrictions on deer breeders within CWD management zones.
“This bill has nothing to do with hunting. It is more about government overreach of a valuable resource for the state of Alabama,” he said in an interview with ABC 33/40.
Concerns over spreading disease
The bill prohibits testing of individual cervids unless CWD has been detected within a farm or an animal has been transferred from a farm where CWD was detected. An amendment to the bill further restricts the state’s regulatory power, adding that the state can’t prohibit transfer of a deer if it’s tested negative for CWD from a live test, been genomically bred to be resistant to the disease, or is from a double-fenced facility.
While promising, live animal tests for CWD aren’t approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture due to their lack of reliability. Deer with a CWD-resistant genotype contract the disease at slower rates, but scientists are concerned that deer could still be infected at lower rates and shed prions into the environment while appearing healthy.
ADCNR Conservation Commissioner Chris Blankenship issued a statement asking legislators to vote no on the bill “This bill should be disturbing to all ethical sportsmen, hunters and citizens in Alabama,” he said in the statement.
The Alabama Chapter of TWS wrote its own letter opposing the bill. “This legislation threatens our state’s $2.0 billion hunting industry, which is vital to most of Alabama’s rural economies and ADCNR’s conservation funding,” the chapter wrote.
TWS and the Southeastern Section of TWS signed on to another letter to oppose the bill in collaboration with the National Deer Association, Boone and Crockett, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and the National Wildlife Federation. This letter pointed out the bill’s threats to wildlife professionals’ ability to do their jobs. “This bill compromises the public trust, as well as professional wildlife management in the state,” the letter said.
Removing wildlife from the public trust
Scientific dissent on the bill falls into two main areas of concern: potential for unfettered spread of CWD within Alabama and the privatization of public wildlife resources.
Daniel Greene, a Certified Wildlife Biologist® and president of the Southeastern Section of TWS, is a wildlife research biologist working in the private sector worried about the implications of HB509. “It really goes against the heart of the Public Trust Doctrine,” he said. “In our system of wildlife management, individuals or corporations can’t own wildlife.”
The public trust doctrine means that the state manages wildlife—like deer, migratory birds or game species—for the benefit of all citizens, he said. By classifying wildlife as personal property, Greene fears there will be “severe implications” for the state’s ability to control wildlife diseases such as CWD. “The privatization and ownership of deer could increase the overall CWD risk to wildlife at very broad spatial scales,” he said.
Greene is also wary of the efficacy of fences to keep bred deer separate from wild populations. “A fence isn’t a permanent barrier to prevent that disease from spreading,” Greene said. Animals can shed prions into the environment for months before testing positive, including through urine, which is bottled and sold to deer hunters as a lure. Soil can remain infectious for years. Trees can also take down fences during severe storms, and deer inside a fence can touch noses with a deer outside.
Scientists’ fears go beyond CWD transmission among deer, though. “Even though this bill is heavily focused on cervids, it includes game birds and fur-bearers as well,” Greene said. “We haven’t entirely figured out what that means because it’s fairly vague as written.”
Greene said that separating the business part of the operations from the wildlife policy in future bills will help safeguard the health of wildlife going forward.
Prevention is the only strategy
Angie Larsen-Gray, a Certified Wildlife Biologist® and graduate of TWS’ Leadership Institute, is a forest wildlife ecologist with a research organization that works with the forest product sector and the Conservation Affairs Committee Chair for the Southeastern Section of TWS. Originally from Wisconsin, she has seen the massive economic toll that CWD has taken on her home state. “There are some steps you can take for prevention,” she said. “It is nearly impossible to get rid of it once it’s there.”
Regardless of whether the state senate passes the bill and it’s ultimately signed into law, Larsen-Gray thinks the advocacy work of wildlife professionals is important. “Having a record that TWS was against this is valuable,” she said.
TWS’ Conservation Policy Manager Kelly O’Connor said that this bill is among several attempts to limit state wildlife management agencies from managing white-tailed deer and, in turn, CWD outbreaks. After a CWD outbreak in Texas breeding facilities in 2021, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) halted the transfer of white-tailed deer between breeding facilities. After industry pushback, a few bills were introduced to the state legislature aiming to reduce the authority of TPWD on deer breeding but ultimately did not pass.
SB323, the companion bill in the Senate, is now in the Senate Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee for review.
It’s easy to blame the alligator when a human gets bitten, but a new study recently found risky human behavior is likely the cause. “I wondered if crocodilians had an unwarranted reputation for attacks the same way snakes do,” said Mark Teshera, lead author of the study and a biology professor at Centre College in Kentucky. “It was important to create a ranking system for risky human behaviors because it showed that the overwhelming majority of bites stemmed from some level of humans engaging in risky behavior in places where alligators live. Therefore, we should not call these encounters ‘attacks.’” Teshera and his colleagues published a study in Human-Wildlife Interactions, where they documented and categorized human actions directly before an American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) encounter. They found that in 96% of recorded instances, humans were either taking risks like purposefully entering alligator-inhabited waters or simply not paying attention. The team said these findings suggest that alligator bites are preventable. “The takeaway lesson from this study is that many bites can be prevented if humans are aware of their surroundings and minimize risky behaviors such as walking small pets near bodies of water or swimming where alligators are known to be present,” said Frank Mazzotti, a professor of wildlife ecology at UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center and an author on the study
Invasive Spanish cedar on the Galapagos Islands could be impeding the seasonal migration of the islands’ biggest herbivores.
If Galapagos tortoises can’t access the most nutritious vegetation available in a given season, there could be impacts on the critically endangered species.
“If you take an energy hit, you just have less energy to live and to reproduce,” said Stephen Blake, an assistant professor in biology at Saint Louis University.
People brought Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata) from mainland Latin America to Santa Cruz—the most populous island on the Galapagos Archipelago—in the 1940s to provide a source of timber. “It’s relatively fast-growing—it’s nice, easy-to-work wood,” Blake said.
An invasive Spanish cedar forest. Credit: Stephen Blake
Farmers still have plantations where they grow and harvest the trees today. But because its seeds are wind-dispersed, the plant also took off in humid and semi-humid areas on the island. The problem is the cedar has toxic compounds, which it uses to poison competitor plants around it—this resistance to pests in part makes it popular for products like cigar boxes. “It’s quite toxic, and it’s relatively insect-proof,” Blake said. “Native and endemic species tend not to do well in Cedrela forest.”
Tortoise migration
Western Santa Cruz tortoises (Chelonoidis porteri), a species of Galapagos tortoise considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, are partial seasonal migrants. They spend the rainy season in lowland areas, when a burst of precipitation stimulates fast-growing, nutritious vegetation. Once the dry season begins, many adult tortoises migrate up to the highlands, where year-round rain offers reliable food that is less nutritious than the lowlands during the rainy season but better than the sparse pickings of the now arid lowlands. Tortoises travel an average of about 20 kilometers to complete these annual treks, Blake said.
Anecdotally, researchers noticed that tortoises tended to avoid forests made up of Spanish cedars. In research presented at the 2024 TWS Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, Blake and his colleagues tracked tortoises on Santa Cruz to see how they were reacting to cedar forests during migration. The study was published in Ecology and Evolution in 2024.
Stephen Blake fixes a GPS tracking device on a western Santa Cruz tortoise in the island’s highlands. Credit: Stephen Blake
The team used plumber’s epoxy to glue GPS tracking devices onto the shells of 25 tortoises since 2009, when Blake initiated the Galapagos Tortoise Movement Ecology Programme. In previous work, Blake and his colleagues combined this with maps of cedar forests made by Gonzalo Rivas Torres—a coauthor of Blake’s on the recent work—and his collaborators. Most of the cedar forests that sit in the migration path of the tortoises straddle the border of Galapagos National Park and the agricultural zone in the highlands of Santa Cruz.
Toxic obstacles
The analysis revealed that when the tortoises moved between the lowlands and the highlands on their migration, they chose to navigate through small areas of native forest and vegetation that sit between large expanses of Spanish cedar forest in all but a few cases. “A few tortoises bludgeon their way through it,” Blake said. But they typically prefer to move through the native forest. “They almost invariably migrate through these little gaps through the Cedrela—these little corridors.”
A patch of Spanish cedar abuts an agricultural zone in Santa Cruz. Credit: Stephen Blake
Blake isn’t sure why tortoises avoid these areas—whether it’s the understory of invasive blackberry sometimes associated with cedar, the shading effect of dense canopy or the toxicity of the plants that they shy away from.
Researchers also aren’t sure why the Spanish cedar hasn’t colonized certain areas—more research is needed to better understand this. But wildlife managers interested in conserving tortoises should pay attention to maintaining currently uninvaded habitat that offers passage for migrating tortoises and to the expansion dynamics of cedar forests, Blake said.
A tortoise moves through a patch of Spanish cedar forest. Credit: Stephen Blake
Tricky solutions
Effective ways to remove Spanish cedar have not yet been found. Removal can create ideal conditions for invasive blackberry, which can grow in extensive, dense stands, taking over and providing an effective barrier against tortoise migration.
“Some methods of harvesting Cedrela can make the situation even worse,” Blake said.
However, if the cedars are not controlled, western Santa Cruz tortoises could stand to lose their migration routes. Large reptiles with low metabolic rates may be better able to adapt to changes in their nutrition compared to mammals, Blake said. But long-term loss of the migration route tortoises have adapted to find the most nutritious food could negatively impact their energy budgets, with species-level impacts.
“If you live in a suboptimal environment, you’re going to get suboptimal reproduction,” Blake said. While the problem isn’t as bad on other Galapagos Islands as it is in Santa Cruz, it could also become a bigger problem in these areas if cedar invasion takes off.
“Tortoises are but one biodiversity problem that Cedrela creates,” Blake said.
Tortoises can barrel their way through vegetation, but they choose to avoid Spanish cedar areas. Credit: Stephen Blake
As soon as a 5.2-magnitude earthquake began to rumble in Southern California, elephants in the zoo rallied together into a protective huddle. A video capture of an enclosure at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park showed five African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) before, during and after the quake that shook the ground April 14. At first, the elephants were somewhat dispersed in the enclosure, then they ran toward a more open area just as the ground began to rock, forming a circle with the younger animals in the middle. “This video demonstrates the strong social family structure in elephant herds,” a spokesperson from the zoo said in a statement. “The herd, consisting of Ndlula, Umngani, Khosi and youngsters Zuli and Mkhaya, went back to normal after about four minutes, though they did stay close to one another.”
An Anchorage Superior Court judge recently ruled that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s program to kill nearly 200 brown and black bears to boost a caribou herd was unconstitutional. The agency originally developed the program to kill wolves (Canis lupus) and increase their prey species. The department expanded the program in 2022 to include brown bears (Ursus arctos), which prey on the Mulchatna caribou (Rangifer tarandus) herd, which has been struggling and sits at about 13,000 individuals. Judge Andrew Guidi’s recent ruling, citing a lack of due process and adequate public notice of the program, means, at least temporarily, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game must end the brown bear control program.
Utah is living up to its nickname as the “Beehive State,” after researchers found high bee diversity there. Researchers set out to document Utah’s bee species to determine the best way to conserve them. To do so, the team used online records from the Symbiota Collection of Arthropods Network as well as specimen records from the USDA-ARS Pollinating Insect Research Unit. In total, the researchers documented 1,167 bee species in the state. “Our checklist helps scientists and managers understand bee distributions, which are essential to protecting these vital pollinators,” said Anthony Hunsaker, an undergraduate researcher and author of the study. “The information can help managers limit adverse impacts if a new invasive species is introduced.”
The best way to attract weasels to understand more about their populations may be to use red meat as bait. Weasels in North Carolina, particularly the least weasel (Mustela nivalis), often evade camera traps, making it hard for scientists to monitor their populations. “We’re a little worried about the weasels,” said TWS member Roland Kays, a research professor at North Carolina State University and scientist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, in a press release. “We don’t see them very often, but it’s difficult to tell if they’re actually gone or if they’re just so sneaky that we can’t find them. We decided that we needed to better understand the best method to detect them. There wasn’t a great consensus on that.” In a recent study, Kays and his colleagues baited 486 camera traps across the central and eastern U.S. where weasels live. Using seven types of lures, they found that red meat worked the best, particularly when supplemented with salmon oil. The challenge is that red meat also attracts other predators, so researchers may have to take extra precautions to make it harder for larger animals to reach the bait. “Now that we have an understanding of the best ways to lure the weasels, we can be more confident in the findings of our surveys,” Kays said. “When we have sites where we don’t detect them, we can be much more assured that they aren’t just in hiding, they’re really just not there at all.”
Cuts to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees could threaten waterfowl surveys that help wildlife managers to maintain sustainable harvest limits for hunting seasons across the country. Retired bird bosses and lawmakers have expressed concern that the ongoing cuts made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency may impact the annual waterfowl survey that helps agencies determine appropriate bag limits and quotas. “If there’s a decrease somewhere in the Fish and Wildlife Service, particularly at refuges and the Division of Migratory Bird Management, it will affect the staffing for the surveys,” Brad Bortner, a retired biologist who served as the Chief of Migratory Bird Management, told Field & Stream.
