Not only has the avian flu evolved into a separate virus for elephant seals, but it has also caused declines in populations of the marine mammals on their breeding grounds in South America. Following the initial outbreak of H5N1 in 2023, more than 17,000 elephant seals (Mirounga leonina) have died. That includes about 97% of pups, scientists estimate. Researchers recently published a study in Nature Communications that found the virus mutates to adapt and spread between marine mammal species. “We were totally appalled by the dramatic impact of the epidemic of avian influenza on this population,” said co-author of the study Valeria Falabella, Wildlife Conservation Society Argentina director of coastal and marine conservation. “It is likely that more than half of the reproductive population died due to the virus. It will take decades before the numbers are back to the 2022 population size.” So far, no elephant seals have tested positive this breeding season.
Every year, undergraduates and graduate students present their research during the Annual TWS Conference. But at this year’s event in Baltimore, Maryland, two high school students joined them.
Seniors from Albuquerque, New Mexico’s Bosque School, Ada Kieweg and Lelia Yane, showcased their multi-year study of hispid cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus) diet changes before and after wildlife and flooding events. Bosque School alumni Eliot Patton also presented her project on engaging youth in bilingual wildlife science at the conference.
Bosque School’s field science coordinator, Dan Shaw, and field and community science teacher, Kim Fike, who guided the students in their research accompanied the students at the conference. This was the first TWS conference for the young wildlifers.
“It’s a bit intimidating because everyone around us is so much older than we are, but I’m really taking it as a time to talk to people and to learn from them,” Kieweg said.
Yane and Kieweg discuss their research during the conference poster session. Credit: Katie Perkins (The Wildlife Society)
Yane felt a sense of belonging at the conference.
“I love being here,” she said. “I think it’s so cool seeing what people are interested in. I’m really surprised at what a friendly and welcoming community this was. Everyone seems so happy to teach students and wants to get to know the younger generation coming into the field.”
The independent college preparatory school serves students in grades 6-12. Older students within the school have an opportunity to mentor younger students while conducting their research. During summer camps and the school year, Yane, Kiewe and Patton have accompanied students into the field to teach them about their research. They each hope that their enthusiasm for wildlife science will be contagious to an even younger generation.
“Coming into this, the imposter syndrome was real,” Patton said. “Sometimes science feels like another language, but everyone is just here to learn from each other, no matter your age or your level of study.”
Yane and Kieweg later attended the Wild Words workshop to learn how to better communicate science through written stories and social media as they continue to advance in their burgeoning careers.
Over one-third of Vietnam’s 329 mammal species are at risk of extinction. Though most are found in at least one protected area, a recent study published in the journal Nature Conservation conducted by Hanna Höffner of the University of Cologne and the Cologne Zoo suggests that some 112 species are at risk. Approximately 40% of those species lack a zoo conservation breeding program, which increases their extinction risk. Some iconic Vietnamese species like the saola (Pseudoryx vuquangensis), the silver-backed chevrotain (Tragulus versicolor), and the large-antlered muntjac (Muntiacus vuquangensis) are among the “critically endangered” taxa at risk. The study calls for the International Union of Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) “One Plan Approach.” This type of approach would establish mammal colonies in zoos and increase connectivity between isolated protected areas to help safeguard Vietnam’s unique mammal diversity.
Ahead of likely budget shortfalls, U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced that almost 2,400 jobs outside of wildfire-related positions will go unfilled in the coming year. The seasonal positions most impacted will be those roles that maintain national forest campgrounds, roads and trails, along with biologist jobs that manage forest wildlife, fisheries and flora. The primary reason for the hiring freeze comes as a result of a conservative budget projection that gives the federal agency $500 million less than requested. Lawmakers in many impacted western states are already pushing back in response to the hiring freeze.
Hunting coyotes doesn’t necessarily lower their population numbers, which could have implications in areas where managers are hoping to reduce populations.
Coyote (Canis latrans) populations have grown and colonized areas throughout the U.S., changing ecosystem dynamics and resulting in human-wildlife interaction and sometimes conflicts. Researchers wondered how these relationships were changing on a broad scale across the country.
“There’s been a lot of studies on coyotes, but they’re such a generalist, adaptive, successful species that there was really still a research gap in understanding what influences their abundance across their range,” said Remington Moll, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire. “Many local or regional studies often fail to find strong relationships with habitat, with hunting, with other predators, with food, partly because they’re everywhere, and they do so well in so many different contexts.”
Moll led a study published in Ecography using a camera trap project called Snapshot USA to bring more clarity to the relationships between coyotes, people and other wildlife.
Researchers found that human hunting did not reduce coyote populations but instead led to an increase in coyote numbers, perhaps due to reproduction and immigration rates. Credit: Snapshot USA
Snapshot USA is a large effort to sample mammal populations using camera traps all over the country. Moll and his colleagues used three years of the data, which is collected during the fall, and combined it with a number of other variables, like satellite land cover data to look at different types of habitat, harvest data, and range maps from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine overlap of other predators like black bears (Ursus americanus), mountain lions (Puma concolor) and gray wolves (Canis lupus) with coyotes.
One of their main findings was that hunting didn’t decrease coyote numbers. In fact, “they can respond with increased numbers,” Moll said. Past research has shown that when older individuals are removed from the population, younger individuals can move in, and litter size eventually increases as well. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that hunting can’t reduce their numbers,” Moll said. “It can, if it’s focused and intense.”
The researchers uncovered other findings, too. In some instances, other predators reduced coyote populations. For instance, in Yellowstone, evidence suggests that gray wolf reintroduction decreased coyote packs and their territory size. But Moll’s study found that wasn’t always the case—the relationships between coyotes and large predators were dependent on habitat and location. Scavenging opportunities, for example, could allow coyote populations to increase despite predator presence.
“Our paper would support the general idea that in terms of regulating coyote populations, large carnivores probably have a stronger effect than broad-scale hunting regulations,” he said. “So if coyote numbers really need to come down, it’s going to be very challenging to do that without large predators.”
Moll and his colleagues also noticed some patterns when it came to urbanization and coyote presence. When they looked on a large scale—about five kilometers out from urbanization—they saw a positive effect on coyotes. “They do well in fragmented habitats because they often have a lot of prey,” he said. “They also have travel corridors—they can use roads at night, for example.” But at a smaller scale of about 100 meters, the effects of urban development were negative on the coyotes. “They like a little bit of development, but they usually don’t live right in the heart of development,” he said.
Moll said the results of this paper can be useful in understanding some of the nuances of coyote patterns and relationships in the U.S. “This is correlative, and we were looking at this in the fall and on a very broad scale,” he said. “Experimental studies would be helpful in either confirming or opposing what we found.”
Tens of millions of bees are dying in road collisions every day on western U.S. highways, researchers found. Bees, like many other insects, are facing declines in the U.S. “Bees are keystone species that support plant diversity and reproduction,” said Joseph Wilson, an evolutionary ecologist and professor in the Department of Biology at Utah State University Tooele, in a press release. “Understanding how we can support pollinators at a landscape scale is an important step toward the protection of these important insects.” In a study published in Sustainable Environment, Wilson and his colleagues attached sticky traps to car bumpers to determine how many bees collided with vehicles on highways in the western U.S. The researchers suspect the high bee mortality, especially in deserts, is related to water runoff from roads creating flowering plants on roadsides that attract pollinators. The team also found that the highest bee mortality from vehicles occurred near national parks, where visitation has increased along with traffic. “We’ve raised a lot of questions,” Wilson said. “More research is needed to better understand how roads and roadside habitats are impacting insect movement, along with ways roadway design and maintenance, as well as vehicle designs, can be less detrimental to these pollinators.”
New working group meetings at The Wildlife Society’s Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, drew large crowds of interested members. TWS working groups allow members with common professional interests to network, exchange information, and promote science-based decision-making and management of a variety of wildlife and their habitats.
At the 2024 conference, some working groups met for the first time, while others held interest meetings to determine potential member engagement in particular topics. Each new group interim chair said that the idea for their working group began as an effort to fill a subject matter and interest gap within TWS.
Conservation Detection Dogs Working Group
The Conservation Detection Dogs Working Group meeting attracted such a crowd that the small meeting room was standing room only by the time the meeting was underway. Led by interim chair, Julia Nawrocki, the group’s goal is to promote the ethical and scientific approach of using K9 teams in conservation research and management.
“We want the working group to serve as a place for people who are currently doing detection dog or any kind of K9 work to come together and share ideas and push the field forward,” Nawrocki said. “We also wanted to provide a place for biologists and ecologists who maybe want to use the method and create the knowledge for those who want to incorporate dog teams into their studies.”
The group only had their interim status approved in late 2023, but Nawrocki said that their member roster is already close to 90 people. A conservation detection dog symposium was held during the 2024 conference with 16 presenters and two question and answer sessions discussing topics from what makes a good detection dog to case studies of how dog teams have been used in research across the world.
Coastal and Marine Wildlife Working Group
The Coastal and Marine Wildlife Working Group held its first in-person meeting at the 2024 conference. The group focuses on both coastal and marine biology, including species like marine mammals, sea turtles, sharks, shorebirds and more.
Hannah Henry, interim chair of the working group and PhD student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, said that the group is meant to be a space where wildlifers can come together, collaborate and discuss issues across taxa. She was inspired to start the working group after attending her first TWS conference in 2023.
“I was doing a talk about dolphins, but when I came here I thought, ‘Where is everyone within this field?’ so it felt like there should be a dedicated space where professionals can talk about these specific coastal and marine wildlife topics.”
Henry said that the group has already had many productive discussions and hopes to have a full symposium at a future conference.
“It’s really beneficial for working groups to come together at the conference because of the networking and finding people who share your interests,” she said. “I met someone at my own university that I’d never worked with before, and now we’re talking about doing a sea turtle project together.”
Latin American and Caribbean Working Group
Another group holding their first in-person meeting was the Latin American and Caribbean Working Group. The working group is dedicated to fostering collaboration and addressing critical wildlife and conservation issues while also enhancing communication and accessibility for people within Latin American and Caribbean communities.
Carlos Hinojosa, the group’s interim chair and senior at Virginia Tech, said that TWS Council just approved the working group in March.
“The working group is a great opportunity to connect with other Latin American professionals, and it’s great to see a large array of people from different places,” Hinojosa said. “From the Cayman Islands, Mexico, Belize, to Brazil, they saw the Latin American and Caribbean Working Group meeting on the itinerary and wanted to come take part.”
Hinojosa said that the working group is focused on highlighting Latin American and Caribbean achievements in the wildlife field while bringing attention to their work and advocating for Latin American and Caribbean conservationists.
“I wanted it to be an inclusive space where we can advocate for people and their work in the region,” he said. “That’s why I especially wanted to highlight the Caribbean. I feel like they often get left out of the conversation, but we’re all connected.”
Future opportunities for growth
Other new working groups that met for the first time at the 2024 TWS conference included the Disabilities, Neurodivergence, and Allyship Working Group, as well as an interest meeting for a private land-specific working group.
Those interested in joining any of the above working groups or other groups can learn more on the TWS working groups page.
Busy roads, a lack of green space and supplemental feeding is changing the genes of Eurasian red squirrels in Japan. Researchers recently looked at the genetic structure of the squirrels living in urban and rural areas in Hokkaido, Japan. They found that gene flow between the urban and rural populations of Eurasian red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) decreased, and genetic diversity has decreased in urban areas. The researchers believe these genetic changes occurred only within the last 30 years.
The winners of TWS’ 2023 publication awards include information about wildlife stewardship on Tribal lands, research on the response of greater sage-grouse to sagebrush reduction treatments in Wyoming, the effects of climate change on dispersal of reptiles and amphibians in the southwestern United States and more.
Here are the publications and authors that took this year’s prizes.
Terry Bowyer won the award for authored book for their publication Sexual Segregation in Ungulate: Ecology, Behavior, and Conservation. Bowyer’s book brings together his past four decades of work studying ungulates and the large carnivores that prey on them. He investigates the phenomenon of how different species living apart has far-reaching consequences for ungulate behavior.
Serra Hoagland and Steven Albert earned the best edited book award for their book, Wildlife Stewardship on Tribal Lands: Our Place is in Our Soul. The publication brings together Native American and Indigenous scholars, wildlife managers, legal experts and conservationists from dozens of Tribes to share their philosophies, histories, principles and practices for wildlife stewardship.
The book, The Codex of the Endangered Species Act: The First Fifty Years, earned Lowell Baier and Christopher Sega the award for best biography and history of wildlife management. As 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, the authors take readers through the history of the act, including its complexity and controversy.
I applied for the Fulbright Program not long after many Eastern European nations had split from the Soviet Union. I knew three researchers who had traveled to and worked in Eastern Europe, which piqued my interest. Never did I think my application to become a Fulbright senior lecturer and research scholar would be accepted, but the thin envelope I received held an acceptance letter.
Schweitzer conducts an aerial survey of nesting wood storks (Mycteria americana) in North Carolina to estimate nesting pairs. Credit: Melissa McGaw.
Soon, I was moving to Sofia, Bulgaria, to teach wildlife conservation and begin research. For the next four years, I went back to start a study abroad program and conduct avian research in the Central Balkans National Park.
I saw numerous bird species I had not seen before, as well as brown bears (Ursus arctos), red deer (Cervus elaphus) and chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra). The biologists were incredibly knowledgeable and assisted with plant and bird identification, as well as surveys in wilderness areas and along established hiking trails.
Schweitzer holds a great egret (Ardea alba) as part of a radio-telemetry project in coastal North Carolina. Credit: Matt Abraham
I met lifelong colleagues, exchanged ideas about conservation policies, and helped develop a monitoring program for the park.
I encourage everyone to undertake challenges that you don’t think you’ll surmount—success takes hard work and perseverance.
Breaking new ground and helping develop a long-term monitoring program for newly established ministries was exceptionally fulfilling, although it was a huge effort that took many years to accomplish.
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.
