The legal wolf harvest in Idaho disproportionately affects breeding individuals—males and females that lead packs—during the breeding season.
Previous research reveals that removing these individuals from packs can hinder population growth.
“Those breeders are more vulnerable during the breeding season—they have breeding on the mind,” said Peter Rebholz, a research biologist at the University of Idaho.
In a study published recently in Wildlife Society Bulletin, Rebholz and his colleagues identified breeders from tissue samples from wolves harvested in Idaho. Then, they determined what proportion of the harvested wolves were breeders and what season they were harvested in.
Researcher Peter Rebholz at an active wolf den. Credit: The Gray Wolf Research Group
Using genetic analysis, the researchers could identify breeders when they could compare the genes from tissue samples from parents—gray wolf (Canis lupus) packs typically only have one breeding couple—and direct descendants.
They found that breeding wolves were disproportionately harvested in January and February—their breeding season.
This may be due to breeders often being the first to investigate scent lures or predator calls. “Breeders [are] the first in a fight—the first to defend the territory—and in the breeding season, they are even more ramped up,” Rebholz said.
He said that wildlife managers can use this information to adjust or remove seasonal hunting regulations, depending on whether the goal is to have more or fewer wolves on the landscape.
It’s also possible that removing these breeders has other effects on pack behavior. Pack leaders usually guide hunts and know their territory better than other individuals.
Rebholz works in the lab. Credit: The Gray Wolf Research Group
Removing the breeders could cause packs to break up, and the movements of individuals may become more erratic for a period of time, as individuals set out to form new packs or join other preexisting ones.
“The longer a breeding pair is together, the more successful that pack tends to be in terms of hunting, raising young, and, a lot of times, staying out of the way of humans,” Rebholz said.
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A national nonprofit is leading the charge in one of the largest amphibian and reptile headstarting efforts in the U.S. The Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC) began the effort earlier this year to help conserve a number of species, many of which are close to extinction. “Headstarting isn’t a new technique, but ARC is taking it to an entirely new level,” said the organization’s executive director, JJ Apodaca. “In the most comprehensive effort of its kind, we’re targeting multiple critically imperiled species simultaneously while also tackling the root causes of their declines.” The organization will be raising in captivity species, including the federally threatened bog turtle (Glyptemys muhlenbergii), federally threatened Chiricahua leopard frog (Lithobates chiricahuensis), federally endangered Houston toad (Bufo houstonensis) and others. Then, they will release them back into the wild to bolster populations.
The Dallas Safari Club Foundation has granted their annual Education Award to The Wildlife Society. The award recognizes the contributions of TWS to wildlife conservation and education.
The DSC Foundation, which is the charitable arm of the DSC, provides direct financial support to organizations that promote the global conservation of wildlife through well-regulated hunting.
The Education Award recognizes the efforts of TWS in preparing its members to be well-trained wildlife professionals since its inception in 1937. Corey Mason, former CEO of DSC and current TWS member, nominated the Society for the award. “TWS has been pivotal in educating young biologists as well as serving as the space for continued learning and engagement for all in the conservation field,” Mason said.
He also noted that as a Certified Wildlife Biologist® and a past president of the TWS’ Texas Chapter, the Society has been a formative part of his career. He is currently the executive vice president of conservation and chief operating officer of the Wild Sheep Foundation. “I greatly appreciate all the work that TWS does,” Mason said.
TWS CEO Ed Arnett was in Atlanta, Georgia, at the 2025 DSC Convention & Sporting Expo to receive the award on behalf of the organization.
TWS CEO Ed Arnett receives the Education Award from the Dallas Safari Club Foundation at their recent convention in Atlanta, Georgia. Credit: DSCF
“Peer recognition is a true pinnacle of accomplishment for any individual or organization,” he said. “The Wildlife Society strives every day to be a leader in wildlife science and education and to serve as a technical resource for its members, partners, decision-makers, and the public. To be recognized with the Education Award by our partners at the Dallas Safari Club Foundation is truly an honor that is deeply appreciated and a motivator to continually improve on delivering our professional and educational services.”
Arnett said he plans to use the $10,000 grant from the award to further the Society’s mission in providing educational and professional development for its young members.
“Current and future conservation efforts fundamentally depend on a strong, well-trained workforce of wildlife professionals,” Arnett said. “This generous award will be used to help fund travel grants for wildlife students in need of assistance to allow them to attend our annual conference and all of the networking, mentoring, and training workshops we provide at this event.”
Preventing the extinction of 99 Australian species would require an estimated $15.6 billion per year for 30 years, researchers found. Australia’s wildlife has faced massive declines—over the last three centuries, 100 endemic species disappeared from the country. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers aimed to determine how much it would cost to prevent the extinction of 99 of the country’s 110 priority species. While they found that $15.6 billion would prevent extinction of many of the threatened species, they also discovered that some species would not recover. Many frogs, including the mountain-top nursery frog (Cophixalus monticola) and swan galaxias (Galaxias fontanus), fell into the latter category with threats from climate change. “Australia’s ever-growing list of threatened species is a direct result of decades of under-spending,” said Romola Steward, co-author of the study and WWF-Australia’s head of evaluation and science. “Turning this tragedy around will take a dramatic increase in action and investment. This is achievable for a wealthy nation like Australia. If we fail to put our wildlife and wild places on a path to recovery, our economy and environment will suffer, and we will see more species silently slide towards extinction.”
Bats don’t appear to avoid turbines, and some even face population declines due to wind turbine strikes. A recent Yale Climate Connections radio program shared TWS member Sarah Fritts’ expertise on the best way to deter bats from this type of infrastructure. To keep bats away, researchers have placed devices that emit high frequencies, similar to that of bats’ prey of tiger moths, onto turbine towers. When a tiger moth encounters a bat, it emits high frequencies that jam the bat’s sonar. Fritts, an associate professor at Texas State University, who is testing these bat deterrents in a flight cage, found that these devices can be effective for some species. But the problem is turbines are getting larger, and adding a device to the turbine’s tower may not emit a strong enough signal to keep the bats away. Instead, these high-frequency devices may have a stronger effect when placed on the actual blades of the turbine. Yale Climate Connections interviewed Fritts at The Wildlife Society’s 2024 Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
After finding no evidence of the slender-billed curlew in three decades, scientists have declared it extinct. This is one of the first recorded losses of a bird from mainland Europe. In research published recently in IBIS, researchers used the extinction probability framework developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature on the slender-billed curlew (Numenius tenuirostris), a shorebird that hasn’t had a confirmed sighting since 1995. The model revealed that the bird has a 96% chance of being extinct. The species used to breed in southern Siberia and Central Asia and spent winters in the Mediterranean Basin and in Arabia. The bird likely went extinct due to the loss of habitat in breeding grounds and in migratory stopover sites, among other factors.
Wildlife managers are turning to the sky to keep wolves from livestock, scaring the predators away with drones equipped with speakers.
“We were able to effectively haze wolves away from cattle—and in one case—even stop an attack in progress,” said Dustin Ranglack, Predator Project leader at the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s Wildlife Services National Wildlife Research Center.
This technology could become an effective, affordable and time-saving method to limit wildlife conflict without resorting to culling, Ranglack said.
The gray wolf (Canis lupus) population in southwestern Oregon moves between Crater Lake National Park and private and other public lands south of there. For several years, cattle ranches in the Klamath River Basin had experienced a number of wolf attacks on their livestock as the predators recolonized the area. For a period of 20 days in the summer of 2022, the Rogue Pack preyed on cattle 11 times—more than once every other night.
Tasked with managing the wolf-livestock conflicts, Ranglack and his colleagues at Wildlife Services struggled to keep up with the predators. While driving around on night watch, the team would either listen for wolf howls or respond to visual reports of wolves nearby sent through Wildlife Services or other agencies. They would directly engage the predators, chasing them out of the pastures and away from the cattle by foot or vehicle and making noise. But it was a difficult task catching up with individuals within the pack. The team wondered if just a “little more elevation” would help them get a clearer view of wolves approaching cattle from a greater distance.
Researcher Lori McCurdy is a coauthor a new paper examining the use of drones to haze wolves. Courtesy of Dustin Ranglack
Wolf drones
As a pilot test, Ranglack and his colleagues turned to drones to help them haze wolves in the Rogue Pack found in southwestern Oregon during the summer of 2022. They published their findings recently in Global Ecology and Conservation.
During their night watches, the team would go to areas where they expected wolves based on a combination of radio telemetry data from some collared individuals, reports from the public, and areas with documented wolf howls. The team spent much of their time sitting in their trucks all night with the windows rolled down, listening and scanning with handheld infrared cameras as they waited for action.
Often, the drone pilots would fly concurrently while the ground teams were surveying for wolf activity from their vehicles. When the team detected wolves or cattle behaving skittishly the pilot would fly the drone over to investigate. If wolves were present, the pilot would immediately start hazing the wolves away from the cattle.
They saw a lot of different activity from above, including elk (Cervus canadensis) and black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus). They even witnessed bobcats (Lynx rufus) hunting rabbits. “You get to see some really neat stuff,” Ranglack said. Over the study period, they encountered wolves 51 times. Often, they scared them away.
Due to their work, the rate of cattle predation dropped from nearly one every two nights to only two cattle in the 85-day period when they tested these drones.
In one case, they actually managed to interrupt a pack preying on a cow. Two wolves were hanging off the steer’s hindquarters while a third circled around. “It looks like a schoolyard elementary fight,” Ranglack said. As the drone arrived, the wolves immediately made themselves scarce, and the cow only needed minor medical attention the next morning. “We know for sure there was a cow life saved because of the drone,” he said.
A wolf is captured on drone footage near a fence in southwestern Oregon. Courtesy of Dustin Ranglack
A voice from above
The drones didn’t always work effectively, though. During one interaction, the drone approached a wolf, and it dropped into a play bow, thinking the device was a toy, Ranglack said.
As a result, the team added speakers to the drones, which they used to shout at the wolves. The human voices were more effective than having no sound—the wolves turned tail and ran in these cases.
This study was only a preliminary test to see if the idea worked. Ranglack said his team is currently assessing what kind of noise might be most effective, such as the sounds of gunshots or AC/DC music.
One drawback to the drones was the short flight times—the team needed to change batteries often, for example. The researchers also needed licensed drone operators because the UAVs were not the cheap commercial types. The technique may also be less effective in areas that have a lot more forest cover.
“Now, we are more thoroughly evaluating it because it’s not a silver bullet,” Ranglack said.
However, he thinks the method is promising, especially as artificial intelligence gets better at identifying individual species like wolves and making autonomous flights. But determining the best way to employ them will require a lot more testing, he said.
Wildlife detection dogs are onto a new target these days—invasive spotted lanternflies. Scientists first confirmed spotted lanternflies (Lycorma delicatula) in Pennsylvania in 2014. The insects that originate from Asia have since spread to 18 other states, where they damage trees and other vegetation in forests and vineyards. Conservationists recently trained a Labrador retriever and a Belgian Malinois to sniff out the lanternflies in vineyards and forests in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Humans detected more egg masses in vineyards, where the females lay eggs, than dogs, the researchers found in a study published in Ecosphere. But in forests where the lanternflies overwinter, the dogs had 3.4 times more detections than people. “The dogs find egg masses by smell,” said Angela Fuller, a TWS member and professor in Cornell University’s Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. “So, in a very complex environment, it’s easier for a dog to smell something than it is for a human to see something that is small and cryptic.”
In 2016, Silviu Petrovan got an unexpected call from a florist in Sheffield, England. The floral designer asked him to identify a live frog that arrived in a shipment overnight. Petrovan, who studies humans’ effects on biodiversity and has a longstanding fascination with amphibians, first thought it was a prank. But it wasn’t: he was looking at a North Andean tree frog (Dendropsophus norandinus) from Colombia that arrived in England via a shipment of cut roses.
Petrovan wondered, if an animal as delicate as a frog could survive in a bulk flower shipment across the ocean, what other undetected species could travel the world in potted plants or rose bouquets?
In his lab at the University of Cambridge, Petrovan and his collaborators set out to understand the ornamental plant trade and its growing environmental risks. They published their findings in a new paper in BioScience.
To conduct the study, Petrovan’s team aggregated and analyzed import and export data about plants, bulbs, cut flowers and foliage. They also contacted customs agencies around the world and asked for access to data on interceptions of things such as nonnative wildlife in imports of ornamental plants. They only got data on nonnatives intercepted in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. None of the other countries provided requested interception data. “The lack of available datasets is a major impediment to properly understanding environmental risks,” Petrovan said.
In addition to official data, the team analyzed two unpublished databases of accidentally discovered exotic amphibians and reptiles at flower and plant shops, ornamental plant greenhouses and airports in the Netherlands and the U.K.
“Just the tip of the iceberg”
Their analysis revealed a “considerable volume” of hitchhiker species in ornamental plant imports. In particular, potted olive trees from Italy and Spain have likely introduced various nonnative reptiles, including lizards, gecko and snakes, to the Netherlands and U.K. that may have the potential to wreak havoc on local ecosystems.
“What we’ve found here is likely just the tip of the iceberg,” Petrovan said. In the case of the invertebrate data the researchers received from the two countries, many of the contaminants couldn’t be identified to genus level, a job especially challenging for the often extremely diverse species coming from tropical producer countries. Petrovan noted a lack of resources and expertise needed to deal with the overwhelming volume of plants crossing international borders every day. “Even with the best will from the customs authorities, there are all these kinds of taxonomical baggage and logistical issues that make it difficult,” Petrovan said.
An Italian wall lizard on an olive tree. Credit: Silviu Petrovan
Invasion risk in the United States
According to the study’s global market analysis, the United States is among the top three importers of ornamental plants, including bulbs, live plants and foliage. The U.S. is the top importer of cut flowers, which Petrovan calls “the definition of a short shelf life.” Because of the need for rapid transport and travel through customs, these flowers pose a higher risk for importing hitchhikers compared to similar imports, like many agricultural products.
One example of an invasive species that international trade has already brought to the continental U.S. is the Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis). Research indicates that one of the pathways for Cuban tree frog establishment was horticultural shipments, especially in palm trees. This species, which was introduced to southern Florida in the early 20th century, has been steadily moving northward and causing ecological damage along the way. Cuban tree frogs, which are larger than native tree frog species, prey on native frogs and lizards, and their tadpoles outcompete native tadpoles for space and food. They can also cause power outages in the state by short-circuiting utility equipment.
Managing for the future
Petrovan and his colleagues found that the ornamental plant trade has doubled in value over the last 20 years, clocking in at over $23 billion in 2022. Production has ramped up in tropical areas like South America and East Africa, creating local employment in rural areas, but also additional concerns for biodiversity loss, aquifer depletion and pollution from the use of pesticides, many of which the U.S. and European Union have banned.
Old olive trees on sale in a garden center in the U.K. Credit: University of Cambridge
In some ways, the environment is at the whims of current trends. People are digging up 100-year-old olive trees from old olive groves in the Mediterranean region and shipping them across Europe, including England, for their popular use as ornamentals. These old trees have gnarled bark and lots of character, which gives them their commercial appeal, but also many hiding places for small vertebrates. The trees also tend to have large root balls that can conceal stowaway critters and are generally difficult for import officials to thoroughly inspect. Consequently, they have introduced the Italian wall lizard (Podarcis siculus) to much of Europe.
“While amphibians and reptiles come with risks, for us, they’re not actually the biggest worry,” said Petrovan. Stowaways like insects, snails, flat worms or any of these creatures’ eggs have a higher chance of becoming problematic, Petrovan said. They’re also both hardier and more difficult to detect.
While future horticultural trends and increasing trade are likely to bring their own ecological challenges, Petrovan emphasized that now is the time to consider how to make the industry more sustainable from an environmental and ecological perspective. Certification programs for suppliers and shifting imports from high-risk, resource-intense products like cut flowers to bulbs or seeds can help manage risks inherent in global plant trade.
Petrovan said that a comprehensive prevention strategy needs to begin with a robust reporting system. “I hope that more countries make these datasets available,” Petrovan said, adding that more investigation is needed on species that aren’t being identified in reports.
A new bioenergetics model has uncovered that polar bears in the Western Hudson Bay have declined by half over the last several decades. The reason is loss of sea ice and fewer chances to hunt, researchers found using the model. In a study published in Science, researchers collected information from polar bear monitoring and captures that occurred over the last 42 years. They ran this data through a model that uses polar bears’ energetic needs in combination with environmental limitations to determine what drives population trends. The model revealed that sea ice loss and the resulting lack of hunting opportunities mostly drove about 50% of population decline since the mid-1990s.
