Way before we had TV shows or manufactured board games, bowhunting may have been the pastime that brought communities together and marked individual prestige in societies.

New archaeological evidence suggests that some early agricultural communities may have collectively focused on hunting as a pastime — similar to its current role in society.

“Hunting was an element of social cohesion,” Xavier Terradas said, in Spanish, of a culture that existed in modern day Spain around 7,200 to 7,400 years ago. Terradas is an archaeologist with the Spanish National Research Council and a coauthor of the paper published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Neolithic wooden artifacts like this one were preserved for more than 7,000 years and show that humans may have used hunting as a form of social cohesion.
Image Credit: Spanish National Research Council

La Draga, a Neolithic site in Catalonia, Spain where Terradas worked, revealed a number of important archaeological artifacts from the period including full wooden bows that had been preserved under water that has receded more recently.

“The bows recovered in La Draga, besides being unique material documentation of early Neolithic archery and hunting technology, become part of the earliest archaeological evidence available on the social role of hunting in the first farming societies, especially in order to evaluate structural aspects such as economic specialization, division of labor and the nature of resource access,” Terradas said in a release.

The archaeologists also uncovered evidence that the people who lived there primarily drew their nutrition from agriculture and domesticated animals. Numerous seeds were found as well as the bones from cattle.

“Based on the bones, we can tell whether the animals are domestic or hunted,” Terradas said.

Researchers also discovered bones of hunted prey like deer, wild goats and other animals, but they estimated that only about 3 percent of the diet of the Neolithic people in this area actually came from hunted animals.

“Hunting is not related to subsistence but other elements,” Terradas said the authors concluded. They found a variety of projectiles made from different materials like rock, wood and bone, but Terradas said that there wasn’t much armed conflict between different groups of humans around that time. Instead, the study found that prestige was one of the main drivers of this form of social hunting and was linked to the type of animals hunted and prey distribution.

After conducting laboratory, field, and modeling studies, researchers at the University of South Florida recently found that biodiversity of predators that consume parasites, such as dragonflies, damselflies, and aquatic bugs, can limit the spread of parasitic infections in tadpoles and frogs.

While most studies focus on host diversity, this particular study looked at predator diversity. “We conducted a field survey of frogs, macroarthropods and infections in ponds in Minnesota and discovered that the more species of parasite predators, the fewer infections in amphibians,” said Jason Rohr, associate professor at USF’s Department of Integrative Biologist and lead author of the study. “Additionally, the diversity of these predators was a better predictor of flatworm infections than nutrients, frog immunity or the diversity and abundance of hosts,” Rohr said.

Interestingly, researchers noted more complex findings in the laboratory when they began searching for similar patterns using dragonfly larvae. If the dragonfly species ate both the parasite and the tadpole, there were more parasites in the environment per remaining tadpole, and the remaining tadpoles had higher infection levels. However, when the predator species only consumed the parasites, there were fewer parasites in the environment, and the risk of disease was reduced.

Next, researchers returned to a field survey and confirmed that the reduction of disease was mostly due to predators that ate only parasites and not the hosts. “This is really important because we found convincing evidence that diversity can suppress parasite transmission and we may be able to manage the diversity of parasite predators to reduce disease risk,” Rohr said. He also hopes to find out if these findings would apply generally to most host-pest systems. In fact, Rohr and his colleagues note similarities between their results and past research on the role of predator diversity in controlling crop pests.

“If we can convincingly demonstrate a meta-analytical result, general across all host pest systems, we may have identified a general mechanism in which predators can suppress pests,” Rohr said.

The researchers hope that this study can guide the management of predators to help reduce human and wildlife diseases along with pest populations.

“We hope to have improved human health and ecosystem services by providing decision makers, wildlife managers and farmers with guidance on how to manage predators to reduce pests and disease,” Rohr said.

The President’s budget request for Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 was released by the Office Management and Budget in early February. Each agency has released their individual budget justifications outlining requested funding for all programs. The budget requests notable increases for several wildlife programs across different agencies.

The FY16 request for the Department of the Interior totals $13.2 billion. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) requested $1.2 billion. The National Wildlife Refuge System request was $508 million, an increase of $33 million over FY15 enacted funds. The Refuge System includes over 150 million acres of land and water and an additional 418 million acres in Marine Monuments. After program funding had remained stable for several years, FWS also requested a $10 million increase for State and Tribal Wildlife Grants, which provide funds to develop and implement programs for the benefit of fish and wildlife and their habitats in states and territories under the direction of individual State Wildlife Action Plans.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) request is $1.2 billion. Some major increases included allocating an additional $37 million to wildlife management, bringing the total up to $89.4 million. The 2016 priorities for wildlife management include the continued implementation of the BLM’s sage-grouse conservation strategies, with $37 million of the wildlife management request is dedicated to sage-grouse habitat restoration efforts; migratory bird conservation; and big game conservation. Despite the close to 50,000 feral horses and burros occupying public lands and the additional 48,000 animals in holding facilities, the FY16 request includes only a $3 million increase above FY15 levels for the wild horse and burro management program.

The United States Geological Service’s (USGS) Ecosystems program would receive an increase of $19.3 million above FY15 levels. USGS Ecosystems conducts research and monitoring of natural systems. The increase includes a $2.8 million expansion of landscape-level modelling. The request also allocates funding to monitor critical ecosystems, including sagebrush steppe. An additional $2 million was requested for the invasive species section of the Ecosystems program to support early detection of and rapid response to emerging invasive species.

The U.S. Forest Service request is $4.9 billion of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) total request of $25 billion. The budget includes language to classify wildfires as a disaster, allocating $795 million for fire suppression and allowing an additional $855 million to meet fire suppression needs beyond the base appropriations in emergency situations.

Several other USDA agencies, like the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) impact wildlife management. The APHIS Wildlife Services program funding request dropped about $10 million to $99 million for FY16. A total of $20 million of that budget is allocated for national control programs for feral swine. NRCS implements several Farm Bill programs. While the Wetlands Reserve Program, Grasslands Reserve Program, and Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program receive no funding in FY16, they were incorporated into the Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which requested $450 million ($56 million increase), and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which requested $1.35 billion ($3 million increase).

Over the next few months, the Congressional Appropriations Committees will develop appropriations bill based on these requests, and Congress will a series of appropriations bills, which should go into effect at the beginning of the next fiscal year in October.

Eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillars (papilio glaucus) are even cooler than they look. With lime green snake-like bodies, scary faux black and yellow eyes and an orange forked-tongue that often releases a stinky substance around predators, this is really saying something.

Nick Grishin, a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and his team were the first to sequence a complete genome for the unique insect that is honored as the state butterfly in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, and as the state insect in Virginia. Their findings, published in Cell Reports, gave insight into these popular, yet less understood butterflies.

The researchers caught one individual caterpillar in the wild and were able to completely sequence its genome. Only three other butterfly species’ genomes were previously sequenced, Grishin said — Long-wings (heliconiinae charithonia), Monarchs (danaus plexippus) and Glanville fritillary (melitaea cinxia).

Grishin said the main goal of the study was to sequence genomes with high levels of genetic variation at a reasonable cost. Although this was the primary focus of the study, Grishin and his research team discovered surprising facts about the Eastern tiger swallowtail along the way.

Grishin said they discovered the reasons why Eastern tiger swallowtails break free from their chrysalises immediately rather than sleeping through the winter like the closely related Canadian tiger swallowtails. The Eastern tiger swallowtail’s genome data showed mutations in proteins responsible for the circadian rhythm.

“We found that these two species diverge from each other in only a small portion of proteins, and they are significantly different in circadian clock proteins,” he said. “We came to the hypothesis that the difference in these proteins between the species may be related to their different behavior in the timing of eclosion in response to the environment.”

The researchers also discovered the reason for the emission of a stinky substance called terpenes that the caterpillars use to scare off predators. The analysis of the genome sequence showed that the gene encoding enzyme that synthesizes terpenes was multiplied in the Eastern tiger swallowtail’s genome. The butterflies were found to have more diverse proteins in the terpenes family, rather than just two, which is what most butterflies have.

According to Grishin, the new findings are just the beginning of many to come. “We think the power of comparative genomics can be fully exploited only when there are thousands of genomes available,” Grishin said.

Not only did Grishin and his team determine some interesting findings about the swallowtail, but their report also shows that at a reasonable price of new genomes at below $4,000, it’s possible to buy the genome of almost any wild insect. To obtain a genome, chemicals and enzymes must be purchased, and the steps of sequencing are paid for as well. If a company agrees to get a genome for you, the cost would be 100 times more, Grishin said.

Because of this reasonable price, scientists have the opportunity to sequence more genomes quickly. This means that if scientists are able to become better at predicting, or even changing, animals’ characteristics based on DNA, they will be able to do so at a quicker pace and a reasonable cost.

“We are hoping that we, together with the scientific community, could sequence many insect genomes, like thousands of them,” Grishin said. “At that point, through comparative genomics, we could have a lot of data-driven discoveries, especially to find the links between phenotypes and genotypes. The eventual goal is to predict the phenotypes from genotypes and even use the knowledge to design new organisms.”

Genome sequencing may even be available to college and high school students in the near future, Grishin said.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is nearly impossible to kill in the deer that are affected by it. But government agencies in some regions of North America are fighting a battle of public perception in their very ability to track the disease.

“It’s been accepted that eradication is difficult, if not impossible,” said Katherine Mehl, an ecologist with the fish and wildlife branch of the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment. Mehl is responsible for a CWD program that no longer exists. The government of Saskatchewan stopped their surveillance program in the fall of 2013 due in large part to a lack of participation from Saskatchewan hunters, who were asked to turn in deer heads for sampling and testing. “The sample sizes were declining. Overall it started off with quite a few samples,” she said.

CWD is sometimes referred to as a prion disease, which would put it in the same category as the mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) and scrapie. Prion diseases act more like infectious proteins than other disease transmitters like viruses, fungi or bacteria. Prions mostly affect the brain and are almost always fatal in mammals. The disease is currently known to affect members of the deer family like elk (Cervus canadensis), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), moose (Alces alces) and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus).

Mehl said that the program she worked on also attempted to reduce the spread of infection by reducing concentrations of wild deer. They offered more hunting licenses under certain conditions and in certain areas where the disease was known to be prevalent on the conditions that hunters sent them deer heads to test for CWD. But they received less than a 100 heads from key areas.

“Based on the modeling it has the potential to affect populations,” Mehl said of CWD. “It is a disease that could have some importance to the wildlife.”

Despite the fact that the effort was made to protect deer populations from the spread of the fatal disease, the thinning of deer populations in the province conflicted with other stakeholders and contributed to the lack of public support for the project, Mehl said. She’s had some indication that this support is starting to increase and said public backing is necessary as the program to track and monitor the disease is very expensive and difficult to maintain otherwise.

Some researchers theorize that the disease was first created when captive deer were housed in a research facility at the University of Colorado in Fort Collins next to populations of sheep infected with scrapie in the late 1960s. The CWD prions are particularly hard to kill, as even burning the proteins doesn’t appear effective. “This is resilient beyond anything we’ve pretty much seen,” said Darrel Rowledge, an advocate with Alliance for Public Wildlife, a non-profit organization that focuses on preserving and promoting the North American model of wildlife conservation.

CWD has also become a political flashpoint between operators of private deer farms and wildlife and hunting advocates against the establishments. Rowledge blames commercial deer farms for the proliferation of the disease and believes that governments like Saskatchewan are making a dangerous gamble in stopping their monitoring program.

“We now have thousands of infected deer being consumed by people every year and we’re soon on our way to tens of thousands if we don’t deal with this,” he said.

But the deer farm operators and other stakeholders point out that there is no proof that to show that CWD is dangerous for humans. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website on the prion disease said that there has been no “strong evidence of CWD transmission to humans” reported, but they continue to monitor the disease.

“Specific studies have begun that focus on identifying human prion disease in a population that is at increased risk for exposure to potentially CWD-infected deer or elk meat,” their website said. “Because of the long time between exposure to CWD and the development of disease, many years of continued follow-up are required to be able to say what the risk, if any, of CWD is to humans.”

John Fischer, the director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study housed at the University of Georgia, said that the disease should be tracked regardless. “It’s a work in progress where we continue to learn things about the disease and that will help us control the disease.”

He said this was made more difficult in the U.S. when the federal Department of Agriculture stopped helping states fund tracking operations, but he believes testing should continue as CWD is “a very significant disease” that needs to be monitored.

“Just because something doesn’t appear real fruitful immediately doesn’t mean that you stop,” he said. “Responsible wildlife managers would not be inclined to let a poorly understand disease spread throughout their wildlife.”