Digital Tree of Life Shows Evolution of Nearly Everything

September 21, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

How exactly is it that a coyote is related to a mushroom, or a whale to a human?

An online draft of the Tree of Life attempts to answer that, showing the various relationships between all known life on the planet.

“This is the first real attempt to connect the dots and put it all together,” said Karen Cranston of Duke University — the principal investigator of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — in a press release. “Think of it as Version 1.0.”

While a great number of studies detailing smaller sections of the trees have been published, the authors say this is first time the whole sum of life on the planet has been compiled into a single place in a digital form.

Cranston also stressed the ongoing nature of this online tool. Since many relationships between species like insects aren’t always well understood, the team is also developing software that will allow researchers to log on, update and revise the tree as new information on these species comes in. Researchers will also be able to add new species to the database when they are discovered.

“As important as showing what we do know about relationships, this first tree of life is also important in revealing what we don’t know,” said co-author Douglas Soltis of the University of Florida in a release.

Mississippi Chapter Opposes Hunting of Deer Over Bait

September 21, 2015 by Zachary Sheldon

The Mississippi Commission on Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks proposed a change to regulations in Mississippi that would allow the hunting of deer over bait in late August. The Mississippi Chapter of the Wildlife Society, along with a coalition of conservation groups including chapters of the Wildlife Federation, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, and Safari Club International, opposed the measure and sent a statement of opposition to the Commission last week.

Current regulations in Mississippi allow for supplemental feeding of deer but do not allow hunters to be within 100 yards of a feeder or have a feeder be in their line of sight while pursuing deer. The proposal removes the language prohibiting the hunter from having a feeder in their line of sight, which will effectively permit hunting of deer over bait.

The Mississippi Chapter of TWS’ statement of opposition to this proposal details the negative impacts of baiting on wildlife. Research has shown that baiting negatively impacts wildlife, both target species and others such as songbirds, by causing them to gather in numbers and concentrations far higher than what naturally occurs. These high concentrations increase the risk disease transmission, further habitat destruction, heighten the risks of predation, and alter the behavior of the wildlife. The Wildlife Society published a Technical Review that examines the impacts of supplemental feeding and bating on wildlife in 2006.

The statement also makes the case that baiting is not an effective wildlife management tool for deer. The Chapter explains numerous studies have found that improved habitat management yields the greatest benefit to deer, wild turkeys, and other wildlife for a fraction of the cost of baiting and supplemental feeding. When allowed to bait wildlife, landowners will often ignore the proven long-term benefits of habitat improvement and instead hope for quick short-term results. This squanders the limited resources available to improve conditions for wildlife.

The statement disagrees with the Commission’s justification for the proposed change in policy. The Commission claims that the majority of sportsmen wanted the change, according to a survey they conducted. The statement notes that the survey only questioned hunters, and as such does not represent the opinions of the public at large. They add that the survey’s report included non-residents and the survey’s summary says that if they only looked at the responses of Mississippi sportsmen that greater opposition to baited hunting would have been reported.

At the public comment period for the proposed change Dr. James Miller, a Past-President of The Wildlife Society, spoke on behalf of the Mississippi Chapter as he testified against the proposed regulation as well as submitted his own personal statement of opposition. Three other witnesses testified, all against the proposed change. Despite the arguments against the regulations, the Mississippi Commission voted 4-1 to approve the change and allow baited-deer hunting in Mississippi and will go into effect November 1.

Dr. Miller summarized his opposition to the regulations in his personal statement to the commission, saying, “the biological and sociological data simply do not support the Commission’s proposed regulation change. Professional wildlife biologists and the conservation community believes this proposed change will move Mississippi backwards, and impede the progress MDWFP has made with Mississippi’s most ecologically and economically valuable wildlife species.”

TWS encourages, recognizes, and publicly advocates the appropriate use of wildlife, ecological, and conservation science in policy determination and decision-making processes, and has a position statement on baiting and supplemental feeding of wildlife. In October 2014, the Virginia Chapter of TWS also advocated for the incorporation of science into policy decisions regarding the use of bait while hunting.

Sources: The Clarion-Ledger

Wild Cam: TWS Members Find What’s Eating Lemurs in Madagascar

September 21, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

Despite having one of the highest rates of endemism in the world, relatively little is known about animals in Madagascar. But wildlife in much of the country is suffering from habitat loss and fragmentation as forests are cut down to make way for farming. Predator-prey relations are also changing as a result of hunting and an increase in feral cats and dogs.

“Madagascar is a top conservation priority,” said Zach Farris, a student member of The Wildlife Society and an author of a recent study published in the International Journal of Primatology that attempts to estimate the population density of carnivores in the island country.

This latest Wild Cam series examines what Farris, coauthor Marcella Kelly ­— also a TWS member and an associate professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University — and others discovered in their camera trap study in Makira National Park in northeastern Madagascar.

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 1

Image Credit: Zach J. Farris and the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar Program and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The researchers looked at three species of lemurs — the white-fronted brown lemur (Eulemur albifrons), mouse lemurs (genus Microcebus) and woolly lemurs (genus Avahi ) — and, based on camera trap photos, determined whether they could predict if predators like these two ring-tailed vontsiras (Galidia elegans) were more or less likely to show up in the same area. Vontsiras, a native carnivore species related to mongooses, feed on a number of small lemurs and other species. The researchers found that the presence of carnivores like these was a good predictor of the absence of certain species like mouse and woolly lemurs.

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Image Credit: Zach J. Farris and the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar Program and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

A cat carries a native rodent in its mouth. “This photo helped us demonstrate the presence of this exotic predator in this forest site and highlight their ability to successfully hunt and kill native species,” Farris said. Cats have been shown to kill and consume a number of native species from rodents and birds to tenrecs (family: Tenrecidae) and even lemurs.

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 3 Asia Murphy photo credit

One of the southernmost populations of silky sifakas (Propithecus candidus) known to exist sits in a tree. “There are believed to be less than 250 individual silkies remaining in the world and this population is facing intense pressure from an expanding cat population at this forest site,” Farris said.

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Image Credit: J. Farris and the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar Program and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

The study showed that the country’s largest carnivore, the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox), is typically smaller than feral cats and dogs that were captured in the forest habitat. Farris also found that fossas and other native species turned up less in fragmented forests where humans and feral cats and dogs also occur.

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 5 Asia Murphy photo credit

Image Credit: Asia Murphy

It’s not necessarily all in the eyes when you have such a distinct territory call as the indri (Indri indri), one of the Madagascar’s largest lemur species. “This critically endangered lemur species is threatened due to forest loss, bush meat consumption, and the spread of exotic carnivores,” Farris said. “We believe its very loud calls may make it an easier target for exotic dogs and cats to locate and hunt.”

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Image Credit: Zach J. Farris and the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar Program and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

A feral dog investigates a greater hedgehog tenrec (Setifer setosus), endemic to the island country. Farris said that dogs prey on tenrec species and lemurs. “Our work across Madagascar has shown that many native species have much lower probability of occupancy in the presence of dogs,” he said. Other species like mouse lemurs also didn’t occur where feral dogs, cats or native predators appeared in contiguous forest, showing that they may be avoiding these areas when they had elsewhere to go.

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 7

Image Credit: Zach J. Farris and the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar Program and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

A female white-fronted brown lemur looking alert. These lemurs were one of the few studied that avoided areas with native predators like the fossa but didn’t avoid areas with humans, feral cats or dogs. “This may demonstrate evidence of a threatened lemur species successfully avoiding native predators while failing to avoid an unknown, alien predator,” Farris said.

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 8

“The relationship between humans and dogs in this region is quite strong as dogs often travel with their owners into the forest when they travel there to work or collect materials,” Farris said. “It is believed that while in the forest, dogs are then allowed to travel freely and hunt for food. Some local people even train their dogs to assist with bush meat hunting activities, which have been shown to be widespread and prevalent across this region of Madagascar. Our research demonstrates that the presence of these dogs within the rainforest, and the local people they travel with, poses an added pressure to these already threatened and endangered lemur species occupying these forests.”

Conservation - wildcam lemurs - 9

An aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis), the “world’s most bizarre and unique primate” according to Farris, using its trademark feeding technique of knocking on wood to locate insects before chewing into the bark with special teeth and using a large middle finger to scoop them out. “The aye aye is listed as endangered by the IUCN as it requires a very large home range and is threatened by forest loss and persecution by local people,” Farris said.

Overall, he says that the kind of avoidance most lemurs showed to native and introduced predators in contiguous forests weren’t as strong in fragmented forests. “As these forests become patchier and lemurs have less ability to move freely in the forest, they are encountering dogs and cats and humans a lot more,” he said.

This photo essay is part of an ongoing series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project and have photos you’d like to share, email Joshua at jlearn@wildlife.org.

Bees Have Ways of Self-Medicating

September 18, 2015 by Nick Wesdock

It seems to make sense that chemicals such as alkaloids would be found in stems and leaves of plants and flowers as a way to deter potential herbivores. But it has long been questioned why their nectar contains these potentially harmful chemicals.

“Flowers have traits that both attract mutualists and deter an herbivores. We set out to ask whether nectar chemicals could function as pollinator attractants,” said Leif Richardson, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vermont and lead author of a new study published in the journal Ecology. Richardson, who conducted the study as part of his graduate research at Dartmouth College, set out to determine whether the chemicals could actually be an attractant to native bee species rather than a repellant.

What he found was that bees and plants can both benefit from higher concentrations of these chemicals.

In his first experiment, Richardson fed various chemicals to parasitized bees in a lab, including aucubin and catalpol. Of the eight chemicals he fed them, more than half had strong negative effects on the parasites, and which was good for the bees. Then, in a second experiment, Richardson took that knowledge to the field, creating artificial nectar with varying chemical concentrations and injecting them into bunches of control flowers, which he placed in a wetland environment. After carefully observing and recording data on bees that visited his flowers, Richardson collected each bee and tested it for parasites.

Bees that were found to have gut parasites tended to favor flowers with higher concentrations of the chemicals, whereas bees that were not parasitized either avoided the highly concentrated chemicals or made no distinction between the flowers. However, the bees could also experience some negative physiological effects of consuming high concentrations of these chemicals. Richardson likens it to humans only taking antibiotics when they are sick. Also noteworthy was the fact that the flowers with higher concentrations of chemicals exported more pollen because bees fed on them longer, suggesting these flowers would have higher reproductive success.

“We know that some bees are declining because of parasites,” Richardson said, who believes this new knowledge of bee diet and nutrition could lead to management practices that help stop population decline. “It’s possible that people could design landscape plantings or farm layouts a little differently so that bees would have more access to plants that have these medicinal chemicals in their nectar.”

As pollinators, bees play a big role in the success of agriculture in the U.S. In fact, according to Richardson, research shows that the majority of pollination for many agricultural crops comes from wild bees and, as a result, it’s important to understand and facilitate this natural service. “Because plant chemistry can affect bee health, farms — where plants are grown — could affect bee health. So just as farms can be places where bees get sick because of insecticide use, farms could also be places where bees gather medicinally active chemicals.”

Uncovering Natural History of Endangered Frog

September 18, 2015 by Dana Kobilinsky

The reclusive crawfish frog hasn’t been studied much — until now.

The federal government recently funded a state wildlife grant to carry out local conservation research on the frogs endangered in Indiana that can spend up to 11 months in a year hidden away in crayfish burrows.

“Crawfish frogs are a secretive species,” said Jonathan Swan, a graduate student researching the species as an ongoing project at Indiana State University. “We’ve known about them since the mid to late 1800s. Despite knowing about them for some time, their life history and behaviors prevented work from being done on them.” Swan is working with his adviser and professor of anatomy and cell biology at Indiana University Michael Lannoo to learn more about the species.

A common gartersnake (Thamnophis sirtalis) occupies an artificial crayfish burrow. Researchers installed camera traps to monitor crawfish frogs. Image Credit: Bushnell Trophy Cam Model 119436

A common gartersnake (Thamnophis sirtalis) occupies an artificial crayfish burrow. Researchers installed camera traps to monitor crawfish frogs.
Image Credit: Bushnell Trophy Cam Model 119436

In an effort to help with the conservation of the species, Swan released juvenile frogs into artificial burrows that he created and monitored them for two months. By mimicking crayfish burrows, Swan hoped to increase the survival rate of the frogs in their early stages following metamorphosis, which is a critical time for their survival success. Swan created burrows that were four feet deep so that there wouldn’t be any freezing when the frogs were wintering and there would be enough moisture in the air at the bottom of the burrows.

Within the population Lannoo’s team is studying, there are about 300 frogs. In the state, it’s estimated that there are up to 1,000, and east of Mississippi, there are less than 4,000 adults. Adults can live up to 10 years, but to restore the population, it’s important for more juveniles to survive, which is no easy feat. Previous research showed that only three to four percent of juveniles survive to breed as adults, Swan said.

As part of their research, after releasing juvenile frogs into artificial burrows as well as reptariums — cages placed in ponds used to keep the frogs housed and protected — researchers monitored the frogs’ behavior through wildlife camera traps placed next to the burrows, and found that they have a propensity to move, which decreased with time after their metamorphosis. In the photographs, the researchers also observed some snake predation while the frogs were at the burrows. They also put radio transmitters on a small subset of juveniles to determine where they were moving to. In one instance, a frog moved from an artificial burrow to a crayfish burrow, only to be eaten by a common gartersnake.

The dispersal stage for the frogs is important, Swan said, especially since survivorship has a lot to do with metamorphosis to adulthood. “When looking at the focus of conservation, we want to find what management practices are viable to support frogs in the future,” he said. “We found that for management, the artificial burrows at the field site worked well.” Swan said that the point is to provide juvenile frogs a cover to stay moist while they are on the move. “The impetus is for them to move and locate another [burrow],” he said. “We just need to get them past the first week.” Lannoo plans to monitor the population and its success in the future.

Cracking the Code of Predator-Prey Relations One Lion at a Time

September 17, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

A huge, healthy population of prey may be too much for predators to feast their eyes on — at least proportionately.

Researchers have discovered a widely applicable principle that could explain the maximum carrying capacity of predators that a given prey base could support.

“What we now have is a baseline for how many predators there should be, given a certain amount of prey,” said Ian Hatton, who was a PhD student at McGill University while working on a study recently published in Science. “All these different ecosystems lined up along this pattern.”

Hatton began by studying large mammals across protected areas of Africa. He compared published studies on the number of lions and other predators in the Kalahari Desert, which doesn’t have much prey to go around, with those of the Ngorongoro Crater — a lush area packed with wildebeest and other prey.

“We gathered as much data as we could,” Hatton said, adding that a lot has been published since the 1950s.

He and the other researchers found a “very striking” pattern: The number of predators didn’t increase proportionately with the number of prey.

In the Ngorongoro Crater, which Hatton said has one of the highest densities of prey on the planet, “there are three times less predators for every pound of prey,” he said.

But the declining ratio of predators seemed to match closely with another statistic.

As populations of most animals increase in a given area, things become crowded, and the proportion of overall reproduction begins to drop. For a lion this means that there are more able-bodied adult wildebeests and less calves, which generally make for a comparatively easy meal.

“The constant stream of new food supporting the predator population decreases,” Hatton said. They had found their match.

From Africa to the World

A lion feeds on a buffalo. Image Credit: Amoury Laporte

A lion feeds on a buffalo. Image Credit: Amoury Laporte

The study didn’t stop with African mammals. Researchers gathered data from approximately 1,000 different predator-prey studies from ecosystems all over the world, including tigers in Southeast Asia, wolves and their prey from Alaska to Quebec, and even zooplankton eating algae in oceans and lakes.

“We also looked at production and biomass,” Hatton said. “Basically everywhere we looked we found this same pattern, this same mathematical function to describe this system.”

Carolyn Kurle, an assistant biology professor at the University of California-San Diego who has studied other predator-prey relations, said that this study puts a new twist on an old debate among ecologists about whether the natural world is governed through food webs from the top-down or bottom-up.

“With top-down regulation, predators keep their prey numbers low, which releases plants from excess herbivory which allows the world to be green,” Kurle said. Bottom-up regulation, on the other hand, says that “when systems are less productive, all levels of the food web above are kept in check.”

But this study shows that the control comes from the bottom up, but it is not linked to primary production as researchers usually assumed. “Highly productive regions support more prey, but the crowding lowers prey reproduction, which in turn helps keep predators in check.

She said the results of this study also show how useful long-term census data can be to large studies like this.

TWS Pushes for Landscape Conservation Cooperatives Funding

September 17, 2015 by Zachary Sheldon

The Wildlife Society, along with over 100 other conservation groups, sent a letter to Congress requesting support for funding for the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCC) in the fiscal year 2016 appropriations. Current provisions call for cutting LCC’s budget by nearly 50%, far below an $8 million increase requested by the White House.

Landscape Conservation Cooperatives are public-private partnerships comprised of states, tribes, federal agencies, non-governmental organization, universities, and other partners. They were created by the Department of Interior to better manage natural and cultural resources as issues surrounding them became increasingly complex. In general, LCCs have two functions: providing the science and technical expertise needed to support conservation planning at landscape levels; and promoting collaboration among their members in defining shared conservation goals.

The letter calls attention to the efficiency of LCCs, purporting that they minimize redundant efforts between agencies, provide pathways to share information and best practices, and create a platform for shared projects. These factors combine to lower the costs of natural resource management and save taxpayer money through increased efficiency and effectiveness.

Recent projects involving LCCs include a range-wide survey of wolverines across the west, a project evaluating the impacts of climate change and rising sea levels on habitat for migratory waterfowl in San Francisco, and the development of tools to conserve the eastern brook trout. Projects like these and several others have convinced the signors of the letter that with adequate funding LCCs can achieve collaborative conservation solutions that will improve the nation’s natural resource assets and the many benefits they provide.

Congress has until September 30 to pass a budget for fiscal year 2016. Currently none of the twelve appropriation bills, legislation that sets federal funding for the upcoming year, have been passed. If Congress fails to pass a budget or continuing resolution by the deadline, the federal government will shut down until lawmakers come to an agreement. Many expect Congress to attempt to pass a short-term continuing resolution, which would fund the government at the same levels as last year for a specified amount of time, to allow for more time to work out a budget for 2016.

Social Media Uncovers Parasitic Wasp Range

September 16, 2015 by Dana Kobilinsky

While sifting through insect samples from Arkansas for a trapping study he was working on, Michael Skvarla, a PhD candidate at the University of Arkansas, came across a parasitic woodwasp — an insect that’s rarely collected and, therefore, not quite what Skvarla was expecting to find.

After investigating further, Skvarla, lead author of a paper recently published in Biodiversity Data Journal, and his colleagues found a second specimen. And a third. This was the first time researchers were seeing woodwasp samples in the state, which suggested that the species’ range — originally found only in the Northeast, south through Virginia — extended further west than previously thought, and the Arkansas specimens were not a fluke.

A female parasitic woodwasp of the Orussus minutus species. Image Credit: Michael Skvaria

A female parasitic woodwasp of the Orussus minutus species.
Image Credit: Michael Skvarla

Investigations continued. Skvarla discovered photos of the wasp taken in Iowa, Minnesota and Manitoba on social media sites such as Flickr and BugGuide — a citizen science website where experts collect citizens’ photographs of bugs from the United States and Canada for identification and research. Skvarla contacted the photographers who allowed him to use their photographs for his research.

Parasitic woodwasps live on wood boring beetles and wood boring wasps. “They’re fairly rare and they’re not controlling insects as far as we know,” he said. “They’re just out there doing their thing.”

Skvarla isn’t surprised by the recent discovery of the species’ expanded range primarily because places such as the Ozarks in Missouri and Arkansas are understudied and the wasps are also hard to detect making their range difficult to determine. “When nobody looks, it’s easy to make new discoveries like this,” he said.

Social media proved to be a useful tool in Skvarla’s research. “People are taking photos of things not knowing if they’re important or not.” Increasingly, researchers are discovering new species and learning more about wildlife through websites such as Flickr and Facebook, according to Skvarla. “I think in the future, it won’t be a big component of natural history and basic science, but it’s an additional tool we can use,” he said.

FWS Reaches Settlement on Candidate Endangered Species

September 16, 2015 by Caroline Murphy

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reached a settlement last Wednesday, September 9, dictating when FWS must decide whether ten avian, fish, and invertebrate species warrant listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The settlement lays out the deadlines by which FWS must complete a 12-month finding for each species to evaluate if a threatened or endangered listing is warranted, not warranted, or warranted but precluded given the best available scientific data. The deadlines to release 12-month findings for the Mohave shoulderband snail, glacier stonefly, yellow lance mussel, black-capped petrel, and six fish species included in this settlement range from April 11, 2016 to September 30, 2020.

The settlement includes a limit to the number of court challenges and ESA petitions CBD can file with FWS through the end of FY2016. If CBD fails to stay within this limit, or FWS decides they cannot reach these deadlines as a result of other court orders or agreements, this settlement can be re-negotiated.

Settlements such as this are not new for FWS, nor are the lawsuits that cause them.

The ESA is largely unique in its broad allowance of individuals and groups to both petition the federal government for species protections as well as sue the federal government to ensure ESA deadlines are met. These types of citizen actions have been used with increased frequency in recent years. In 2009, 63 species were petitioned for ESA listing. This number jumped to 451 in 2010 in large part due to increased action from groups such as CBD and WildEarth Guardians.

These increased demands have overwhelmed the human and financial resources of FWS, resulting in an inability to meet listing deadlines. This has caused an increase in the use of settlements, such as in this case as well as a September 2011 settlement also involving CBD that set listing decision deadlines for 251 species.

Included in these 251 species was the greater sage-grouse. This species has become a contentious legislative issue, with some lawmakers calling for a delay in the listing decision. FWS is due out with a listing decision for the greater sage-grouse by September 30.

FWS has proposed changes to the petition process that may reduce the number of petitioned species in coming years. These changes include only accepting one species per petition instead of the multi-species petitions currently accepted. Another proposed change is to require petitioners to obtain relevant information from state fish and wildlife agencies to include on a domestic species’ petition. FWS hopes the adoption of these proposed changes will result in improved quality and content of each petition, which should in turn better focus the energies of FWS’ resources on species of greatest concern.

Settlements resulting from lawsuits have led to FWS determining that listing was warranted for 170 species as of July 2015. As the deadlines of these large agreements begin arriving en masse for FWS, the agency may find themselves continuously challenged by statutory deadlines if the issues they currently face are not addressed.

Additional Sources: E&E News PM (September 9, 2015), Greenwire (July 27, 2015), E&E News PM (September 9, 2011), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Listing Program Work Plan Questions and Answers

Visit a Marvel in Energy Efficiency

September 16, 2015 by Joshua Rapp Learn

The building is so efficient in heating that even in the dead of winter in Winnipeg, the building still needs to be cooled if the sun is out.

Manitoba Hydro Place — the headquarters of the province’s electric power and gas utility — is one of the most energy efficient buildings in North America, and it accomplishes this in a capital city with some of the most extreme temperatures in the world.

“It uses less than 70 percent of an energy efficient building,” said Tom Akerstream, the energy adviser for the 21-story structure that opened in 2009. “The building saves over a million dollars in energy cost per year.”

The building is streamlined in order for the windows to get the maximum exposure possible from the sun. In fact, the building comes to a point on the north end — the only side which never receives sun rays.

A diagram showing the amount of natural daylight that reaches different parts of Manitoba Hydro Place. The white represents the most daylight while the blue represents zero percent.

A diagram showing the amount of natural daylight that reaches different parts of Manitoba Hydro Place. The white represents the most daylight while the blue represents zero percent.

The heating and cooling is provided by a geothermal system which maintains the building more or less at ground temperature, which never gets as cold or warm as the outside air during the winter or summer.

“We take the temperature out of the ground and use it to heat the building,” Akerstream said.

Fresh air also enters the building through vents on the south side. The air is regulated by passing through areas with more controlled temperatures and becomes humidified by passing through a waterfall.

The buildings are also equipped with three six-story indoor winter gardens complete with plants, working spaces and a huge sunny window that allows heat and light to enter. The offices are designed so that the natural sunlight reaches them through the windows.

“All of the offices are in the core, and the work spaces are in the loft area,” Akerstream said.

The natural light may be having an effect on the work ethic as well — he said that since the new building opened in 2009, Manitoba Hydro has had 20 percent less absences among its employees on average.

“Manitoba Hydro Place proves that to be the most energy efficient building you have to have the highest quality of space,” he said.

Sixty conference attendees can sign up for The Wildlife Society’s free field trip to tour Manitoba Hydro Place during the 2015 TWS Annual Conference. An orientation talk and overview of the building and its construction will be provided from 1:30-2:15 at the Convention Centre. Tours lasting 45 minutes will then begin at 2:45, 3:00 and 3:15 at Manitoba Hydro Place, just a five-minute walk from the Convention Centre. To pre-register, email Nick Wesdock at nwesdock@wildlife.org, or sign up on-site at Registration (space permitting) during the conference.