Recovering One of America’s Most Endangered Frogs

August 24, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

The dusky gopher frog is one of the most critically endangered frog species in North America, living around only a handful of ponds in Mississippi.

But wildlife managers have been busy for most of the year in an effort to reintroduce the frogs to a pond in the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge.

“It’s considered one of the 100 most endangered species in the world,” said Angela Dedrickson, a wildlife biologist at the refuge, in reference to the dusky gopher frog (Rana sevosa) being listed on the most threatened species list published by the Zoological Society of London in 2012.

Dusky gopher frogs tend to live in burrows sometimes dug out by tortoises or small mammals. Females lay their eggs in temporary ponds that pop up during wet seasons, but they are picky — the ponds have to be around 18 inches deep, with no fish but with some kind of vegetation on which they can attach their eggs. There are only 100-200 adult frogs still in the wild, concentrated mostly in the Desoto National Forest in Mississippi.

Researcher Ross Ketron releases dusky gopher frogs into a pond in the Mississippi Sandhill Crane Wildlife Refuge. It will take around 2.5 years before the frogs will be able to reproduce. Image Credit: Angela Dedrickson

Researcher Ross Ketron releases dusky gopher frogs into a pond in the Mississippi Sandhill Crane Wildlife Refuge. It will take around 2.5 years before the frogs will be able to reproduce. Image Credit: Angela Dedrickson

But Dedrickson has been working with the Desoto National Forest, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, Western Carolina University and the Nature Conservancy to raise gopher frog eggs and reintroduce them to the Sandhill Crane refuge.

Earlier this year, researchers collected egg masses from a pond in the Desoto National Forest, hatched them and raised them in labs for several months as the tadpoles transformed into juvenile frogs. They started to release the juveniles into a pond surrounded by a drift fence that allowed researchers to monitor frogs going in and out as soon as they became large enough over the summer.

“We had a 79 percent success rate from the tadpoles that were delivered to what was meted out and delivered in the pond,” Dedrickson said. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how successful they are.”

It will take a couple years before they can tell if their strategy is working though. Frogs will leave the pond to find burrows, but many will return to mate. Males can reach sexual maturity in a year and a half, but it takes females an average of 2.5 years. “[The males] will be a little disappointed for now but they’ll be very happy in a couple of years,” Dedrickson said.

The goal is to have a self-sustaining population in the pond — at least 100 breeding adults — so the project will continue next year. If successful, researchers may expand the reintroduction to other ponds.

Video: Arizona Bald Eagles Have Productive Breeding Year

August 21, 2015 by The Wildlife Society

Wildlife managers sometimes have to rappel down cliffs while monitoring bald eagle recovery, as seen in this video from the Arizona Game and Fish Department. This year has been the most productive year for bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) recovery in Arizona since the species was listed in 1978. The raptors were taken off the federal endangered species list in 2007, but the birds are still protected by state and federal laws.

Wildlife Management as Alternative to S’mores and Campfires

August 21, 2015 by The Wildlife Society

Summer presents an ideal opportunity to introduce young people, especially city youth, to wildlife management and its career opportunities. Staff in Illinois participated in two residential camp options this summer. The Youth Conservation Conference (YCC) exposes underserved youth (high school students at the sophomore to senior level) to environmental stewardship through an immersive, weeklong residential “boot camp” at Chicago State University. Collaborating with other Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service programs, Wildlife Services also presented learning activities for the 2015 Ag Discovery Program at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign. This month-long outreach program exposes teens to careers in plant and animal science, wildlife management, and agribusiness during residency at the college.

Image Credit: USDA Wildlife Services

Image Credit: USDA Wildlife Services

Wildlife Services’ participation enabled the 15 YCC participants to learn about and practice wildlife management techniques, research principles, teamwork, and leadership skills. Presentations covered trapping as a crucial tool of wildlife damage management programs and an important technique in wildlife research. All participants became familiar with the parts, operation, and uses of several different types of traps. In a mock field exercise, students checked turtle funnel traps and identified multiple turtle species. WS also demonstrated radio telemetry and its application in research. Participants learned how researchers utilize telemetry to better understand the dynamics and interactions of various wildlife populations. Participants then used a handheld radio telemetry receiver and yagi antenna to locate a hidden radio transmitter.

Image Credit: USDA Wildlife Services

Image Credit: USDA Wildlife Services

As part of Ag Discovery, Wildlife Services staff presented learning activities and hands-on activities in sessions on zoonotic diseases, management of invasive feral swine, managing piscivorous bird damage to aquaculture at the Jake Wolf State Fish Hatchery, managing starling damage at a dairy, and an introduction to the basics of using telemetry and methods used to capture wildlife. Students marveled at an up-close introduction to raptors during a session on wildlife hazard management at MidAmerica Airport. (Ag Discovery, offered at 17 colleges and universities, many historically black institutions, is open to students aged 12-17 depending on the site. Applications traditionally are due in April.)

Wildlife Services is a Strategic Partner of TWS.

Federal Court Overturns FWS’s 30-year Eagle Take Rule

August 21, 2015 by Zachary Sheldon

A U.S. district court in California ruled this month that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) failed to comply with the National Environment Policy Act (NEPA) for their revised regulations regarding permitted takes of bald and golden eagles in 2013. Prior to this ruling, the revision increased the maximum duration of programmatic permits allowing for the incidental take of the eagles during otherwise lawful activities from five years to thirty years.

Background

FWS issued regulations authorizing the limited take of bald and golden eagles in 2009. The Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (BGEPA) prohibits the take of eagles without a permit. The act defines take as “to pursue, shoot, shoot at, poison, wound, kill, capture, trap, collect, destroy, molest, or disturb.” The 2009 rule allowed FWS to issue permits for the incidental programmatic, or recurring, take of eagles. The permits included safeguards to ensure that any permitted activities were consistent with the preservation of eagle populations.

Permits were granted for a period of five years, at which point permittees could submit a request for renewal. FWS published an environmental assessment of the rule that acknowledged these programmatic permits would “indirectly result in impacts to habitat from loss, fragmentation, and reduced suitability for eagles and other wildlife” but that by issuing a conservative number of these permits they would have “no significant, direct impacts to the biological and physical environment”.

Wind development projects have increased substantially since the 2009 rule was issued. In response to this increase, FWS developed the Eagle Conservation Plan Guidance (ECPG), a voluntary program designed to help wind projects comply with regulatory requirements and avoid unintentional takes of eagles. Many in the wind industry, however, felt that the ECPG failed to address a major issue with the 2009 rule – the five year limit on permits was too restrictive. The uncertainty surrounding renewal of permits every five years made it difficult for wind projects to obtain financing for projects when the life of most wind turbines is 20 to 30 years.

The 30-Year Take Rule

FWS revised the 2009 rule in 2013, increasing the maximum term for programmatic permits from five years to thirty. According to court records, FWS stated the revision was to “facilitate the development of renewable energy and other projects that are designed to be in operation for many decades” and “provide more certainty to project proponents and their funding sources, while continuing to protect eagles consistent with statutory mandates.”

These 30-year permits would not be guaranteed for the entire duration. Provisions in the new rule mandated a review of the permit every five years to evaluate the current eagle morality at the site and determine if a threshold had been reached. If so, implementation of more conservation or mitigation practices would be required and if necessary FWS could suspend or revoke the permit.

FWS determined the 2013 revisions were categorically excluded from further NEPA review, telling the court that the revisions were “strictly administrative”. They further justified the decision by arguing that any environmental effects from the 30 year permits would be too vague to meaningfully analyze. Additionally, project development actions taken by the permittee process would likely be subject to the NEPA process.

The American Bird Conservancy disagreed with FWS’s “categorical exclusion” decision. They filed suit in federal court arguing that the new rule undermined the purpose of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act (BGEPA) and lacked important safeguards to protect eagle populations.

Court Decision

The court ruled FWS had indeed failed to show a basis for the categorical exclusion of further NEPA review, saying in their decision that FWS “has not adequately explained why the environmental effects of the Final 30-Year Rule are ‘too broad, speculative, or conjectural to lend themselves to meaningful analysis.” The court also pointed to internal dissent in FWS, with some staff having strongly recommended performing an environmental impact statement for the new rule. These factors convinced the court that substantial questions exist on the revised rule’s effects on eagle populations. The court ordered the Final 30-Year Rule be remanded to the FWS for further consideration.

The American Wind Energy Association, who intervened in defense of the 30-year take rule, disagreed with the court’s ruling. They were quoted by E&E News saying, “[t]here is already precedent for life-of-project permits available under the Endangered Species Act, for species that are by their very nature more imperiled than eagles, so we view the 30-year permit duration as being both consistent with existing permit programs and fully protective of eagles and their habitats, while providing legal certainty to the wind industry and other applicants.”

George Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservancy, said in a press release after the ruling “We hope that this court decision shines a light on the need for the [Fish and Wildlife] Service to be fully empowered to do the job it is mandated to do. Our nation’s wildlife – and the agency appointed to protect it – deserve nothing less.”

Sources: E&E News, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Website, United States District Court of Northern California

Being a Lazy Lawnmower Improves Bee Habitat: TWS Member

August 21, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

Putting off your lawn mowing chores could be a great way to improve bee diversity, according to ongoing research.

“There’s an incredible amount of diversity in these lawns when we look down and start to see what’s in these areas,” said Susannah Lerman, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and the University of Massachusetts. Lerman, also a member of The Wildlife Society, recently presented her research at the Ecological Society of America annual conference in Baltimore.

“I used to be one of these ecologists that was like ‘We have to get rid of our lawns, lawns are evil,’” she said, citing the chemicals people add to them and the frequent cutting as some of the problems they pose. But getting rid of the estimated 63,243 square miles of lawn space in the United States — around 40-55 percent of urban land in the country — would be a daunting effort.

In taking a closer look, Lerman found there was a quite a lot of diversity in lawns, particularly when it came to bees and the flowers they feed on. She wanted to know whether altering a simple thing like your household lawn mowing schedule could improve habitat for bees.

Lerman and a team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation set out on a mission to track bee diversity on lawns that were mowed every week, every two weeks and every three weeks over two summers in Springfield, Mass.

The team agreed to mow the lawns of people who volunteered to be part of the study, and Lerman estimated that they mowed the mileage equivalent of pushing their way from Springfield to Philadelphia and back over the two summers.

“We mowed a lot of lawns,” she said.

To track bee diversity and the flowers they feed on, they put out traps near areas where flowers grew and found an average of 35 species per yard — the majority of these native species.

They also found that besides dandelions, clovers and violets, there were more than 60 different flower species that grew spontaneously in the lawns.

So far their research shows that less means more when it comes to the relationship between lawn-mowing and flower abundance. Lawns mowed every two weeks had 70 percent more flowers than those mowed every week, and lawns mowed every three weeks had 300 percent more than the weekly yards.

But this schedule didn’t necessarily translate to bee abundance. The yards mowed every two weeks had more diverse bee populations than those mowed every three weeks, though Lerman isn’t exactly sure why. “One explanation is that the grass might have been too tall and made it less optimal for the bees foraging on the small lawn flowers,” she said. “Another idea is that since the flowers were so numerous, the bees spent so much time foraging on them rather than visiting the traps.”

The whole experiment demonstrates the control humans can have over biodiversity in urban areas. But in this case, the news is good, as she said “lazy landscapers” do bees a favor.

“Here’s what you can get for doing less. For me that resonates.”

Black-Footed Ferrets Inseminated with Frozen Sperm

August 20, 2015 by Dana Kobilinsky

One of the rarest mammals in North America is slowly recovering because of scientists’ successful efforts to inseminate females with frozen sperm.

Scientists with Lincoln Park Zoo along with partners from various organizations such as the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others, used semen frozen with liquid nitrogen that was 10 to 20 years old to inseminate female black-footed ferrets (Mustela nigripes), a critically endangered species.

“There was already a genetic bottleneck from this population. There are also problems maintaining the genetic health of the species,” said Rachel Santymire, the director of the Davee Center for Endocrinology and Epidemiology at the Lincoln Park Zoo, a member of The Wildlife Society and co-author of a paper recently published in Animal Conservation.

Santymire said a genetic bottleneck can make it difficult for the species to survive. There would also be a risk for inbreeding depression if there are no new genes introduced, so it was necessary to avoid this constant loss of genetic diversity over time by introducing this older, frozen sperm.

Black-footed ferrets were saved from extinction in the mid-1980s when scientists trapped the 24 ferrets that were left in the wild. The species faced the threat of loss of prairie dogs — their primary prey — to agriculture, livestock and the construction of cities as well as the plague, which was brought to the United States from China by rats that were transported on ships in the early 1900s. Of the 24 ferrets, eventually six of them died from either canine distemper or the plague, according to Santymire. The animals, which exist in the Great Plains and are found only in the U.S., were left with a global population of 18.

An enlarged image of previously frozen black-footed ferret sperm. Researchers used older frozen sperm to help maintain genetic diversity of the endangered species. Image Courtesy: Rachel Santymire

An enlarged image of previously frozen black-footed ferret sperm. Researchers used older frozen sperm to help maintain genetic diversity of the endangered species.
Image Courtesy: Rachel Santymire

These 18 ferrets produced only seven surviving offspring. These became the population’s founders. One particular founder was recognizable due to a large scar across his face that he likely received from battling a prairie dog. Although this particular founder has been dead for about 20 years, the researchers froze his sperm and used it in this study to inseminate members of the population.

While 135 kits have been born through artificial insemination, this is the first time researchers used frozen semen. Eight kits were born from the frozen sperm. “This is the first time we can show long-term storage is still successful,” Santymire said.

However, the insemination had its share of challenges. Freezing and then thawing semen causes the quality to decline over time. But it’s still a method that can be successful and even applied to other species. “You can routinely use this method instead of moving individuals between facilities,” she said.

Santymire and her team continue to bank sperm samples for the black-footed ferret population since males are not well-represented and their genes are valuable. The goal of their program is to maintain the ferrets’ genetic health and to produce enough of them to release them into the wild. “There are 300 to 400 in the wild currently,” Santymire said, adding that there are 24 reintroduction sites including active and new ones.

Santymire hopes her team’s work with black-footed ferrets will be a model species to help bring back other endangered carnivores. “I like how the zoo is in this for the long haul with this species,” Santymire said. “They are one of our native species, and we have put in so much effort to save them.”

Field Notes: A Tool for Making Digital Species Drawings

August 20, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

The identification of species with new digital illustration techniques could help taxonomists reluctant to go back to the drawing board, according to a new study.

“Species illustration for me is one of the most important parts of taxonomic work,” said Giuseppe Montesanto, an informatics technician in the biology department at the University of Pisa in Italy. Montesanto is the lead author in a new paper published in ZooKeys that illustrates the method in several steps.

Complete image from above. Image Credit: Giuseppe Montesanto

Complete image from above. Image Credit: Giuseppe Montesanto

Faced with funding problems for new research in his area of expertise in Italy —the taxonomy of species of terrestrial isopods, or so-called pillbugs or woodlice — Montesanto wanted to develop something that would help other researchers on a limited budget.

“I cannot imagine my future without these animals,” he said of the isopods, “even if my wife is not so happy because my house is full of specimens.”

While it may seem strange to turn to drawings of any kind in the age of digital photography, sometimes drawings can provide better detail, particularly when it comes to defining species aspects that a taxonomist is attempting to highlight.

But Montesanto makes use of bitmap graphics in the GNU Image Manipulation Program to produce accurate, highly detailed lines that are visible at very high resolutions on free or inexpensive software. He said that while he’s terrible at drawing with pencils, it’s easier to use a mouse. To darken the ink lines, he uses the shift key and the whole process ends up being quite fast, and visible at high resolution.

“This method could be invented by anyone,” he said. “Really, I didn’t invent something — it’s my personal method.”

Check out the video below to see Montesanto highlight the method. Click here to watch the whole series.


Video Credit: Gipo Montesanto

“When you describe a new species for scientific literature, the illustrations are not an addition to your description. They are an integral part of it. You may not be a great artist (although many biologists are talented artists), but with this method you can learn to do adequate drawings,” Montesanto said in a release.

Hot Off the Wire: Conference News ‘n Notes

August 20, 2015 by The Wildlife Society

Every week through early October, we’ll be bringing you the hottest news about this year’s conference, keeping you up-to-date and prepared as we approach Oct. 17-21 in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Here’s the latest news:

Sold out!
Three workshops and one of our field trips are completely full:

  • An Introduction to Bayesian Statistics
  • Analyses of Wildlife Telemetry Data with the rhr Package for R
  • Known-fate Survival Modeling and Assessments of Competing Risk
  • International Polar Bear Research and Conservation Centre Experience

Regulated Trapping: Essential for wildlife professionals to understand.
This year, we are offering 12 diverse workshops Saturday, Oct. 17, including a The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies Trapping Matters Workshop. This workshop will help participants understand and better communicate benefits of regulated trapping and the many ways trapping contributes to wildlife management. Primary tools and techniques of trapping will be presented with specific emphasis on trapping Best Management Practices. Attendees will gain knowledge of public opinion data, focus group and human dimensions studies, effective communication measures to use when discussing this topic among varied audiences…and much more! Click here for more details.

FAST FACT:

To date, 49% of the total registered attendees are students. If you’re a professional or retired, come to the conference to share your knowledge and connections with them. Give back to the profession and help our next generation of wildlife professionals. Click here to learn more about this year’s conference.

Support women in wildlife!
Join fellow wildlifers, women and men alike, for this year’s Women of Wildlife (WOW) at Work panel discussion to address past, present, and future challenges and opportunities the panelists experienced or expect to experience that affect career development. Gain the perspectives of how these four diverse women navigated a career in wildlife, and learn about the ideas they have to benefit wildlife conservation and the wildlife profession overall, followed by an audience Q&A. Click here to see our complete list of this year’s panel discussions.

15 of our Working Groups are holding meetings at the conference…at least!
To find out which Working Groups are holding meeting this year, and when and where they will be convening, go to our Detailed Schedule and “filter” your search by hovering your cursor over “Filter by Track”, located at the top right corner, and click on “Working Group.” This will pull up a complete list of Working Group meetings.

Students, don’t forget to pack a copy of your resume for this year’s Resume Review!
Swing by the TWS Members Activity Center (RBC CC, 2EFGH) with a copy of your resume for our Resume Review sessions, being held Monday – Wednesday from 10:00 am – 3:00 pm, where students can have their resumes critiqued on the spot by a wildlife professional on a first-come, first-served basis. Gain valuable input from experienced wildlifers that can help you in your future job search.

Emerging Topics in Aquatic Animal Health and Management is one of the many great symposia sessions available this year.
Organized by Katie Haman (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Austen Thomas, University of British Columbia), this session will explore emerging topics in aquatic animal health, management, and conservation, such as the importance of disease and health in these communities and ecosystems, the correlation of disease status and environmental conditions, the connection between human health and well-being to the health of fish and wildlife species…and much more! Get the details on this session here.

Council Meetings are open to all members!
Join us for one of our Council Meetings, held on the Friday, Saturday and Wednesday of this year’s conference. Click here to learn more.

Don’t Wait! If you haven’t registered yet, visit our registration page today! Hotels and flights are filling up fast as well.

See you in Winnipeg!

Comment Period Extended for Draft Polar Bear Plan

August 19, 2015 by The Wildlife Society

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced last Friday an extension of the comment period on a draft Polar Bear Conservation Management Plan. This plan, which was posted to the Federal Register on July 6 with an initial comment period ending on August 20, includes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the protection of denning habitat, and the minimization of human-polar bear conflicts. Due to high public interest, the comment period has now been extended to September 19.

To read more about the extension and learn how to comment, visit the Federal Register.

Habitat Fragmentation Causes a Hot Problem for Wildlife

August 19, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

The negative effect some species feel from habitat fragmentations may have more to do with temperature changes than anything else, according to ongoing studies.

In fact, temperature could explain why some species go extinct with fragmentation or deforestation in general, according to Kika Tuff, a graduate student in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Tuff recently presented her research at the Ecological Society of America annual conference in Baltimore.

Tuff is involved with ongoing studies in the Wog Wog Habitat Fragmentation Experiment in Australia — a large area of eucalyptus trees that was intentionally fragmented in the 1980s, leaving different sized squares of native forest patches broken up by clear-cut areas. Since 2010 Tuff has been studying how common garden skinks (Lampropholis guichenoti ) responded to fragmentation, and more recently to pine plantations grown in the clear-cut patches for logging. She also had data on skinks that dated back to when the Wog Wog area was first cleared of sections of eucalyptus several decades ago.

The Wog Wog Habitat Fragmentation Experiment in Australia as it looked shortly after areas were first cleared in the 1980s. The experimental area allowed researchers to track the effects of fragmentation on different species. Image Credit: Kika Tuff

The Wog Wog Habitat Fragmentation Experiment in Australia as it looked shortly after areas were first cleared in the 1980s. The experimental area allowed researchers to track the effects of fragmentation on different species. Image Credit: Kika Tuff

As part of her research, Tuff collected the lizards through pitfall traps set in different habitat types. The traps were equipped with thermometers to tell researchers what the temperatures were around the areas. Lizards, like many other cold-blooded animals, are very sensitive to temperature and can only operate in a certain climate window. If it gets too hot, they can die.

Tuff discovered that though fragmentation could play a role in habitat preference, the best indicator for whether the species persisted in an area was temperature. In other words, areas that were highly fragmented could still sustain a lot of lizards if they didn’t get too hot — which could occur closer to water sources, or deeper in valleys.

Tuff said that while she only looked at a certain variety of skinks, the principle could likely be applied to other species, especially cold-blooded animals in the tropics.

In fact, the reason why deforestation in places like the Amazon could have such a huge effect is that it changes the temperature for species so quickly.

“This is the biggest risk for species in the tropics — they’re so used to [thermal] stability,” she said. “Climate change is happening over a hundred years; this happens in a day.”

Aside from the species dropping in numbers, Tuff has also found that the ecology of skinks changes with the heat. In the years immediately following fragmentation, skinks in deforested areas shrunk in size, taking several years before they grew back to previous averages. Skinks also shrank in some of the smaller fragments — the smaller the patch of trees, the smaller the lizards. This could affect populations of the species overall because the smaller sizes bring competitive disadvantages for the animals.

The Climate Change Factor

While fragmentation changes the effects of temperature much more quickly than climate change, the latter could cause additional problems in the long-term in fragmented areas. Now, as the climate warms up, another study released yesterday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows that extremely hot temperatures may stop some lizards from even coming out of their eggs.

A new study finds that high temperatures kill lizard embryos. Currently, three percent of land in the US is inhospitable to lizards (orange areas). In the next century, the scientists say the areas where lizards may not thrive could grow to 48 percent (purple area). Image Credit: Ofir Levy

A research team led by biologists from Arizona State University found that two plateau fence lizard species (Sceloporus undulates and Sceloporus tristichus ) embryos commonly found across the U.S. die if the temperature hits 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even for a few minutes.

“Lizards put all of their eggs in one basket, so a single heat wave can kill an entire group of eggs,” said Ofir Levy, lead investigator of the study and postdoctoral fellow with ASU School of Life Sciences. “If mothers don’t dig deeper nests to lay their eggs, we expect this species to decline throughout the United States.”

Previous studies estimated less of a problem for lizards compared to other species, but failed to take into account the fact that lizards in eggs can’t move around to find shade or escape heat.

“Because lizards are prey for animals such as birds, snakes and mammals, the harmful effects of climate change on embryonic lizards could also negatively affect other species,” Levy said.