The 114^th session Congress began in January, bringing changes to the leadership of committees and subcommittees with jurisdiction over wildlife in both the House and the Senate.

The House Natural Resources Committee has seen some organizational changes since the beginning of the 114^th Congress. Congressmen Rob Bishop (R-Utah) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona) were appointed Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee respectively. Chairman Bishop moved to restructure the Natural Resources subcommittees. He disbanded and redistributed the responsibilities of the Fisheries, Wildlife, Oceans and Insular Affairs Subcommittee and created the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. The new oversight subcommittee will be led by Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

The entire Committee also recently released a 10-page Oversight Plan, outlining the primary focuses of the Committee for the 114^th Congress, some of which are specific to wildlife. The plan states that the Committee intends to examine ways to effectively address problems caused by non-native species; the Committee also plans to conduct a series of oversight hearings on provisions to the Lacey Act, a 1900 law prohibiting the trade of illegally obtained fish, wildlife, and plants.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) will be under the jurisdiction of the full House Natural Resources Committee. The Oversight Plan states that the Committee “will continue to examine ways to update and improve the ESA.” Last year, the Committee released a report questioning the independence of peer reviews used in ESA listing decisions.

On the Senate side, both the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and Environment and Public Works Committee have jurisdiction on wildlife-related issues. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) were appointed Chairwoman and Ranking Member respectively of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. The Committee has four subcommittees, including the National Parks Subcommittee and Public Lands, Forests, and Mining Subcommittee.

The Environment and Public Works Committee houses the Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife Subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over the ESA, invasive species, and National Wildlife Refuges among other items. The Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife Subcommittee is chaired by Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska).

Source: Energy & Environment Daily (January 29, 2015)

Wildlife poaching and trade are a serious threat to wildlife conservation. The escalation and severity of this threat has prompted the United States to take action. On February 11, 2015, a presidential task force released an Implementation Plan, which will guide efforts to execute the National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking.

To undermine illegal wildlife trade on both the domestic and international stage, the Implementation Plan and National Strategy prioritize three objectives: strengthing law enforcement, reducing consumer demand for illegally-traded wildlife and products, and collaborating with other countries, governments, agencies, and organizations. “Wildlife crime has to be treated as a serious crime,” said Craig Hoover, chief of the Wildlife Trade and Conservation Branch of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Poaching, the source of various illegal wildlife products, has dire ecological consequences. “Some of these species that are most heavily exploited are being driven to extinction,” said Craig Hoover. Illegal wildlife trade threatens elephants, rhinos, tigers, sharks, sea turtles, great apes, exotic birds and pangolins among others. Species that rely on those animals also are impacted negatively. “The National Strategy and the Implementation Plan heighten the profile of the issue,” said Hoover.

Over the past several years, illegal wildlife trade activity has escalated to what the plan claims is a “wildlife trafficking crisis.” Rhino poaching in South Africa — the rhino’s major range state—has skyrocketed in the last two to three years. The South African Department of Environmental Affairs reported 13 rhinos killed in 2007 compared to the 1,000 poached in 2013 and the 1,200 slaughtered in 2014.

African elephants (Loxodonta africana) also have also suffered a recent explosion in poaching activity. One study found the number of African elephant killings dramatically increased after 2008, peaking in 2011 with an estimated 40,000 murdered that year. For both species, killings are projected to outpace births in the near future, making extinction an imminent possibility.

“We face the very real possibility of losing rhinos, of losing at least some national populations of elephants, of losing lesser known species such as pangolins, simply because of the scale of poaching and the scale of illegal trade,” said Hoover.

In addition to the alarming number of poaching incidents, the infrastructure and organization of poaching operations has changed. Poaching and illegal trade has shifted from small-scale crime to what Hoover calls “highly-organized, professionalized, illegal activity, involving organized networks of criminals and corrupt officials.” Organized crime syndicates, which often use sophisticated weaponry and smoother smuggling operations, are attracted to illegal wildlife trade by the rising demand for and value of wildlife contraband.

And the animals are paying the price. For example, one incident involved an insurgent group using automatic weapons to methodically shoot and kill more than 400 elephants in northern Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjida National Park in 2012.

In light of these and other incidents, the president signed the Executive Order Combatting Wildlife Trafficking, which called for the creation of an interagency task force, in July of 2013. The Departments of Justice, State, and the Interior — which includes FWS — co-chair the task force. Representatives of those departments worked together to create the National Strategy launched in 2012 and the Implementation Plan released last week. The plan guides the execution of the strategy.

One key component of the plan, according to Hoover, is the call for interagency collaboration. “The only way to effectively tackle [wildlife crime] is to have a whole-of-government approach addressing the problem from source to consumer,” he said. The task force comprises 17 federal agencies and offices, bringing new agencies and resources to the table.

“I’m very hopeful that we are moving in a positive direction and will continue to do so,” said Hoover. “We’ve made a number of significant strides, but there is plenty of more work to be done.”

Earlier this month, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) — an alliance of more than 1,400 membership-based hunting and fishing organizations — created a coalition to put a stop to several earlier proposals to transfer federal lands over to states.

According to Joel Webster, director of the Center for Western Lands at the TRCP, transfer of federal lands to states means less public access to the land. Since 72 percent of hunters in the Western states rely on public land — currently overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other federal land managers — for their sport, many hunting groups grew concerned when states began these proposals a few years ago.

As land transfer proposals in Utah, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and other Western states gained political momentum late last year, and people began supporting the idea, many hunting and fishing groups came together to launch a PR counterattack against land transfers.

“We’ve pulled together a coalition called Sportsmen’s Access,” Webster said. “We brought together 20 hunting and fishing organizations to put a stop to the bad idea of transferring land to states. Part of what we’re doing is building a petition for hunters and anglers to sign opposing land transfers.” TRCP has also released a public report about nine hunting and fishing areas that are being considered for federal land transfer including the Arizona Strip, segments of the St. Joe and Clearwater Rivers in Idaho, the Missouri River Breaks in Montana and the Book Cliffs in eastern Utah.

“What concerns us is that the states’ idea is so ridiculous most people didn’t take them seriously at first,” Webster said. “But now they’re funded and organized, so it’s time to take them seriously. We don’t want their ideas to have traction in Congress.”

Webster said the plan to transfer federal lands to states will affect everyone — not just hunters and anglers since everyone will have less access to land where they once enjoyed recreational activities.

“I think the idea that federal land should be transferred to states is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “States just don’t have the resources to manage the land.”

Webster said that if federal lands were transferred to states, one likely scenario will occur. States won’t be able to keep up with the costs of maintaining the land, and they will sell their land to private owners, he said.

“The concept threatens the future for outdoor traditions and wildlife management by taking the public resources away from the public,” Webster said. “In our opinion, it’s clear that there’s public frustration with the way federal lands are managed, but those lands are one of the greatest assets we have. What we need to focus on is improving this asset to benefit the public in the long term. Selling to states is not a legitimate option.”

The main takeaway is that transferring land to states will mean less public access, Webster said.

“It’s all about access,” Webster said. “We need these lands for access to hunting and fishing. They are some of the last places in America where everyone can go and use these lands regardless of how much money they make or where they sit in society. If federal land transfers occurred, traditions of hunting and fishing as we know them are gone.”

The best way for some moths to avoid ending up on an upside-down dinner plate is by sporting a lot of tail, according to new research.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday reveals that luna moths (Actias luna) have evolved long tails to help them elude big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus).

Copioteryx semiramis moth.
Image credit: Geena Hill, University of Florida

“These bats were clearly attacking luna moths and loved it when they got them,” said Jesse Barber, an assistant professor of biology at Boise State University and the lead author of the study. But due to the long, flowing tails the moths sported, that didn’t happen quite so often.

The idea first came to Barber while on a field study in Borneo where they took a mobile testing tent into the jungle. While they were working on something else at the time, Barber and others tossed some moths into the tent along with some bats and noticed that the bats seemed to be grabbing onto the insects’ tails.

“In the tropics you can see a really interesting bat-moth interaction,” he said.

He didn’t get the chance to test these theories until years later in a special “custom built bat-insect battle research facility” equipped with cameras. The researchers took luna moths — species found widely across North America and appear to have coevolved cousins in many parts of the world — and tethered them with string in the range of the cameras in the lab so that they could watch the interactions more closely. They would then release big brown bats, a species also appearing across North America, into the room and sat down to watch the show.

“It’s like any kid’s dream,” Barber said of the lab and research. “We’d pit them against each other one at a time.”

The tiff is two video frames from a high-speed movie of a big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus) biting the tail off a luna moth (Actias luna).
Image Credit: Boise State University

They also used different kinds of moths, both smaller and larger, as well as luna moths without tails, to see how the interactions would change. They found that the bats could get a hold of the smaller bugs and the luna moths without tails much more easily. While size was an advantage — the bats caught the smaller moths more often than larger lunas — “Tails appear to give you a great advantage than size alone.”

Statistically, the researchers found that the bats only caught tailed moths 55 percent of the time, and that luna moths with tails had a survival advantage of 47 percent over luna moths minus tails.

The knowledge of these interactions is important for a larger understanding of the ecosystem as well as evolution. “Understanding these battles is very critical to understanding the diversification of life,” Barber said.

Yellowstone National Park is teaming up with Utah State University to conduct a study that will help determine why the northern Yellowstone elk herd has declined 60 to 70 percent since 1990, according to Doug Smith, senior biologist at the park. “We are really working hard to understand the elk population in a predator rich environment.”

Researchers will use the same radio-collared elk that they survey annually to determine if certain predators are to blame for the decline, Smith said. He said that while there are very few long-term studies on elk, Yellowstone’s vision is long-term.

The study will begin next winter and will help determine how accurate the annual elk survey is, according to Smith. The group will monitor trends in the Yellowstone elk population and evaluate other contributing factors including predation, hunting and environmental conditions. After collecting this long-term data, researchers will assess the numbers.

Yellowstone National Park researchers also are teaming up with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the U.S. Geological Survey and the state of Montana next year to collect data and conduct a more accurate elk population survey after a somewhat surprising increase in elk in this past winter survey.

Smith said that in the 1980s, an elk sightability model — developed to account for variation in detection of elk — was created that showed the average number of missed elks is 30 percent when they are counted. “What we report is an undercount, but each year we don’t know by how much,” he said. “We are redoing the study because the factors that affect sightability have changed since the 1980s.”

In fact, when biologists with Yellowstone National Park surveyed its elk herd population this winter, they were surprised to see a 24 percent population increase. On the surface it seemed like the once-struggling elk population was making a comeback, but, according Smith, it could just be that the survey count was better this year. “It appears the earlier we count elk in the winter, the better the elk distribution is,” Smith said. “Counting earlier in the winter is better than counting later.”

In the 1990s, the Yellowstone elk population prospered, reaching about 20,000 individuals. With the reintroduction of grey wolves in the park, however, the elk population has fallen over the years. “Wolves declined in 2008, and they declined 60 to 70 percent in the area where we do the elk count,” Smith said. “Since then, their numbers have been pretty stable at the lower numbers since 2008.” Other factors such as heavy elk hunting, harsh winters and impacts from other predators such as bears and coyotes has led to a further decline in elk populations.

This winter, though, the survey determined that there are 4,844 elk in Yellowstone, about 1,000 more than in 2013, and the largest population since 2010. While the news is promising, Smith and other biologists are working to determine whether that represents an actual increase in numbers or if other factors such as an earlier count could be at play. If there was, in fact, an increase in elk population, it would be due to a higher survival rate for newborn calves, Smith said.

Aside from the increased number of calves, there has also been an elimination of elk hunting that might have helped the population thrive. State wildlife officials eliminated a late-season elk hunt in 2011 in Gardiner that had previously issued permits for more than 1,000 elk a year.

“Predators and prey are going to oscillate at a stable equilibrium for years to come,” Smith said. “The main takeaway is that we need to improve the accuracy of our counts.”