Top carnivores increase their kill rates on prey as a response to human-induced fear

We all know that human activity can influence the lives of nearby animals, especially those top predators that now have to play second fiddle to our ever-expanding interests. However, a new study has shown that not only do our actions impact them, but also our mere presence may cause majestic killers like pumas to grow so fearful that they change their hunting habits for the worse.

In the first-ever real-time tracking of leopard populations in India, researchers have determined that the big cats are surprisingly fearless when it comes to wandering near human neighborhoods. This was determined in a new GPS study, which has uncovered how these animals try to thrive in a man’s world.

That’s at least according to a new and fascinating study recently published in the Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which details how, among pumas living in California, those living closest to humans were found to kill a lot more prey, but eat less of each kill, compared to pumas in more wild and secluded areas.
This was determined after a team of scientists from the University of California captured and tagged 30 wild pumas with GPS collars so they could track their movements. The territory and hunting grounds of these animals were then identified, breaking the pumas up into those that are living either near more rural or suburban human environments. The team also investigated kills, measuring just how much of each kill was eaten before a puma elected to slip away.

What they found was startling. In areas near a higher density of human housing, female pumas in particular were found to kill about 36 percent more large prey – mainly deer – than the more “rural” pumas.
Strangely, it wasn’t that the suburban pumas were hungrier. Instead, it appears that they are eating less of each kill – revisiting kill sites less frequently and spending less time taking their meals, compared to your average puma.

REINTRODUCING WOLVES IS ONLY EFFECTIVE AT LARGE SCALES

It is a rule in ecology that big animals outcompete little animals. Sometimes the big animals kill the little animals, sometimes the big animals eat the little animals, and sometimes the big animals drive the little animals out of one territory and into another, safer one. That basic pattern – “interspecific competitive killing” – has pushed scientists to try to understand how large carnivores shape entire ecosystems.

Leopard vs Crocodile

The astonishing spectacle of a leopard savaging a crocodile has been captured for the first time on camera. A series of incredible pictures taken at a South African game reserve document the first known time that a leopard has taken on and defeated one of the fearsome reptiles. The photographs were taken by Hal Brindley, a wildlife photographer, who was supposed to be taking pictures of hippos from his car in the Kruger National Park.

The giant cat raced out of cover provided by scrub and bushes to surprise the crocodile, which was swimming nearby. A terrible and bloody struggle ensued. Eventually, onlookers were amazed to see the leopard drag the crocodile from the water as the reptile fought back. With the crocodile snapping its powerful jaws furiously, the two animals somersaulted and grappled. Despite the crocodile’s huge weight and strength, the leopard had the upper hand catching its prey by the throat. Eventually the big cat was able to sit on top of the reptile and suffocate it. In the past, there have been reports of crocodiles killing leopards, but this is believed to the first time that the reverse scenario has been observed.

Mr Brindley said: ‘I asked many rangers in South Africa if they had ever heard of anything like this and they all said NO. ‘It just doesn’t make sense. The meat you get out of a crocodile is just not worth the risk it takes a predator to acquire. The whole scene happened in the course of about 5 minutes. Then the leopard was gone.

Source: http://uk.pinterest.com/duncanmoon/leopard-attacks-crocodile/

Wolves in a Tangled Bank

by Cristina Eisenberg

The wolves’ return to Yellowstone and the subsequent recovery of plants that elk had been eating to death in their absence has become one the most popularized and beloved ecological tales. By the 1920s humans had misguidedly wiped out most of the wolves in North America, thinking that the only good wolf was a dead one. Without wolves preying on them, elk and deer (also calledungulates) exploded in number. Burgeoning ungulate populations ravaged plant communities, including aspen forests. Decades later, the wolves we reintroduced in Yellowstone hit the ground running, rapidly sending their ecological effects rippling throughout the region, restoring this ecosystem from top to bottom. Yet today some scientists caution that this story is more myth than fact because nature isn’t so simple.

For decades scientists have been investigating the ecological role of wolves. In his 1940s game surveys, Aldo Leopold found ungulates wiping out vegetation wherever wolves had been removed. He concluded that by controlling ungulates, wolves could restore plant communities and create healthier habitat for other species, such as birds.

Since Leopold’s time, many scientists have studied food web relationships between top predators and their prey—called trophic cascades. In the 1960s and 1970s Robert Paine, working with sea stars, and James Estes, working with sea otters, showed that ecosystems without top predators begin to unravel. John Terborgh called the ensuing rampant species extinctions an “ecological meltdown.” Paine created the metaphorical termkeystone species to refer to top predators and noted that when you remove the keystone, arches and ecosystems collapse. Over the years ecologists found trophic cascades—also called top-down effects—ubiquitous from coral reefs to prairies to polar regions. However, William Murdoch and others have maintained that sunlight and moisture, which make plants grow, drive ecosystem processes from the bottom-up, making predators relatively unimportant. The Yellowstone wolf reintroduction provided the perfect setting to test these contrasting perspectives.

In the mid-1800s in his book The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin presciently described nature as a “tangled bank.” Nature’s complexity results from myriad species and their relationships with other species and all the things that can possibly affect them individually and collectively, such as disease, disturbance, and competition for food. Science works incrementally, taking us ever deeper into nature’s tangled bank as we investigate ecological questions. Each study answers some questions and begets new ones. Sometimes we find contradictory results. Learning how nature works requires what Leopold called “deep-digging research” in which we keep searching for answers amid the clues nature gives us, such as the bitten-off stem of an aspen next to a stream where there are no wolves.

Trophic cascades science that focuses on wolf effects is still in its infancy, with huge knowledge gaps. For example, we’ve linked wolves to strong effects that cascade down through multiple food web levels. However, we’re just starting to parse how context can influence these effects. Some Yellowstone studies have found that wolves have powerful indirect effects on the plants that elk eat, such as aspens, due to fear of predation. With wolves around, elk have to keep moving to stay alive, which reduces browsing pressure. Conversely, a growing body of studies are finding no wolf effect—that aspens in places with wolves aren’t growing differently than those where predation risk is low. Other studies have found that wolf predation risk doesn’t affect elk feeding behavior. In my own research I’ve found that wolves need another keystone force—fire—to most effectively drive trophic cascades. With wolves and fire present, elk herbivory drops, aspens thrive, and biodiversity soars due to the healthy habitat created by young, vigorously growing aspen.

It’s human nature to try to find simple solutions. Today we are grappling with monumental environmental problems such as climate change and habitat fragmentation. Due to the wolf’s iconic status and our need to fix broken ecosystems, the environmental community and the media have run with the science that shows a strong wolf effect. This has inspired other scientists to prove that ecosystems are more complex than that. These dissenting studies demonstrate that the wolf dwells in a tangled bank, working alongside many other ecological forces.

Tangled banks seldom yield simple answers. However, arguing about what exactly carnivores do ecologically and why we need them is fiddling while Rome burns. Large, meat-eating animals improve the health of plant communities and provide food subsidies for the many species that scavenge on their kills. A system with wolves in it is far richer than one without and can support many more grizzly bears, coyotes, wolverines, and eagles. There are things we don’t know and disagreements about what we do know. But given the accelerated human-caused extinctions we are experiencing today, a precautionary approach to creating healthier ecosystems means conserving large carnivores.

Beyond empiricism, scientists often operate based on instinct. Instinct led Darwin to dig more deeply into species adaptation and Leopold to doggedly delve into the effects of predator removal. For many of us who conduct trophic cascades science, our instincts are telling us that wolves should be conserved in as high a number in as many places as possible, due to the invaluable benefits they can bring to ecosystems. To do anything other than conserve wolves would be foolish, given all we’ve learned thus far.

Source: http://ipfieldnotes.org/wolves-in-a-tangled-bank/

Coexisting with Carnivores—Why It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game

By Paul Thomson on Wed, 02 Apr 2014

It was late in the summer, and the two young lions had been on a camel killing spree. Over a period of three months, they had entered the villages of the Samburu people at night and killed ten prized camels.

It wasn’t long before they paid the price. One hot, hazy day in early September, when the male lions were napping under a scraggly acacia tree, a group of five young men came upon them. The men fired their AK-47s. Lguret, whose name means “cowardly,” ran off. Loirish, who was the more aggressive of the pair, may have stood his ground. He may even have tried to fight back, but he was no match for the rifles.

Samburu warrior Letoiye mourns the loss of Loirish, a lion he had been tracking.

Then the men butchered Loirish. They used their knives, adorned in colorful plastic as all Samburu warrior knives are, to cut off the lion’s head and feet. Then they took Loirish’s head and burned it in a small fire, an unusual act that was probably meant to destroy the GPS tracking collar we had placed on him to track his movements so we could warn herders. By the time we got to the grisly site, Liorish’s feet were missing. The men had taken them, perhaps to be sold on the growing black market for traditional Chinese medicine.

Letoiye, a member of the Samburu tribe and a part of our field team which had been tracking Loirish up to that day, stared at the blackened head in the pit and asked no one in particular, “Why did they kill my lion?”

Warrior Watch

Liorish unfortunately shares his fate with a growing number of large carnivores around the world who have clashed with humans and didn’t survive. Of the 31 large carnivores species like him—including lions, tigers, cougars, wolves, and snow leopards—most live not in some pristine wilderness, as we’d like to believe, but in landscapes dominated by humans and their activities. As a result, these animals are caught in a struggle between two sides of humanity—the one that wants large carnivores preserved and the other that would like to see them eliminated.

Letoiye is a Samburu moran, or warrior, a group that has traditionally been neglected in conservation. He never went to school and instead roamed the countryside tending to his family’s livestock while keeping a watchful eye on the land around the village. Despite their lack of formal education, Letoiye and his fellow moran possess skills that are the envy of many biologists and wildlife authorities. Because their job is to ensure their community’s security—which in rural East Africa often involves watching for predators—the moran know an impressive amount about lions and other predators.

A lioness gazes over the plain at Buffalo Springs National Reserve in Kenya.

Warriors like Letioye inspired us to set up Warrior Watch four years ago. They offer an intimate knowledge of the landscape and how lions and other wildlife move throughout it. In return, we teach Letioye and his peers how to identify each lion’s unique whisker spot pattern and how to discuss carnivore issues with fellow Samburu. We also offer weekly lessons on reading and writing in English and Kiswahili.

Before Warrior Watch, it wasn’t uncommon for moran to hunt and kill lions without question from their peers. But now, this program and others in Kenya are proving that attitudes towards lions and other large carnivores can change. A recent study of the program showed that participating warriors and their communities had a higher tolerance of lions and better understanding of their value.

The situation in the United States is not much different from the Samburu in Kenya. In California in 2013, for example, the state’s Department of Fish and Game issued 148 permits to eliminate cougars that had killed livestock and pets. As the suburbs expand out into once-wild areas, cougars are becoming more common in people’s backyards, where they occasionally kill goats and pets. While our livelihoods don’t always depend on our animals in the same way that the Samburus’ rely on their livestock, cougar-human clashes in California illustrate a broader point. The U.S. and Kenya share a bond that is at the heart of human-carnivore conflict: we both kill carnivores when we perceive them as threats to things we value.

Population at Risk

The reality is, of course, that we are a far greater threat to carnivores than they are to us. The cougar, for example, was all but eliminated from the eastern half of the United States during the 20^th century. And in Africa, in the last half a century, the number of lions roaming in the wild has declined from 200,000 to fewer than 35,000. That’s mostly due to habitat destruction by humans. Lions used to roam most of the continent. Today, they occupy just 20% of their original territory, scattered across the continent and separated by cities, highways, villages, and farm fields. Some live on reserves, but that protected area isn’t enough to cover lions’ still expansive home ranges.

A moran scouts the savannah

A large number of conservationists favor creating more protected areas like national parks and reserves. After all, the largest intact populations of lions live in Selous and Ruaha National Parks, giant expanses of land under protection in Tanzania. These parks not only protect lions, they also support the entire ecosystem, fostering healthy savannahs that nurture gazelles and other prey species that keep lions sated. They also generate income through tourism, a not unimportant fact in many impoverished regions.

Large carnivores like lions require expansive ranges to meet their daily needs.

But protected areas haven’t been a panacea for large carnivores. As in the U.S., most African parks do not offer complete protection. Poachers have infiltrated many parks specifically to go after lions, while herders grazing their livestock inside park boundaries inadvertently take resources away from lion prey like gazelles and wildebeest.

Which is why some conservation biologists are suggesting that the only way to truly protect lions is to fully enclose reserves in fences. Yes, this would trap lions inside the parks, but it would also create a physical barrier between them and us. Such a move certainly has the potential to reduce poaching and limit human-animal conflict, but it could also reduce the viability of individual lion populations inside. Large carnivores like lions require expansive ranges to meet their daily needs. Plus, they can suffer from a phenomenon known as bottlenecking when overcrowded, which can lead to higher incidence of genetic disease and inbreeding. Fencing in lions to creating carnivore islands is one tool that might be effective in some cases, but given the potential for problems, it is not a “one size fits all” solution.

Building Tolerance

A better solution is to raise the tolerance of the land—and the people—living around protected areas. Lions, cougars, and other large carnivores will be able to live with people if they have safe refuge and as long as we keep ourselves and our property at a safe distance. Yet carnivores don’t belong in every human landscape, so we also need to carefully manage the areas where they can be supported.

That’s why we’re working hard in northern Kenya to create these landscape mosaics where local people can tolerate carnivores. We use a combination of high-tech research activities combined with low-cost community-sourced education programs like Warrior Watch. This year, we are fitting GPS-enabled tracking collars on ten young adult male lions. By mapping lion movements through the landscape, we can identify key corridors and refuges that might be prioritized for lions. The tracks also let us know which communities are in the lions’ territories so we can reach out to them with programs like Warrior Watch.

One of the lions collared and tracked as a part of the Warrior Watch program

At the same time, we’re also using the GPS collars to tell herders where the predator hot zones are. That way they can keep their livestock clear, avoiding unnecessary confrontations and losses. We can also track lions like Loirish that are known for killing livestock. When we locate one, our warriors go in to tell the villagers to be especially vigilant.

We can apply these lessons here in the U.S., too. As cougar and other carnivore populations make a comeback, a mixed approach is key. Protected areas are certainly important, since they provide carnivores and their prey with crucial strongholds. But we also need people to develop a tolerance to carnivores if we are to sustain that coexistence.

Everyone’s point of view needs to be included in the process.

It’s starting to happen in places like the Santa Cruz mountains where conservation groups, state agencies, academic institutions, and landowners are working together to improve tolerance of cougars. Homeowners are learning how to properly fence their goats to keep them safe from cougar attacks, which can reduce the need to kill cougars in retaliation. And local governments are installing culverts under roadways to let cougars cross highways without risking dangerous collisions with vehicles. There are other innovative measures, too, like the protection of a forest behind a cement plant that cougars took a liking to. Portions of the plant grounds are open for recreational hiking while the important cougar habitat is being left intact. There’s something for everyone.

Additionally, we need programs that educate hikers and pet owners as well as ones to work with groups, like the Samburu warriors, that haven’t been a part of traditional outreach programs.

Finally, the most important thing to remember is that everyone’s point of view needs to be included in the process. It’s useful to keep in mind that the Samburu don’t need to be told how to live with lions—they’ve been doing that for tens of thousands of years—or that Americans don’t like being pandered to. Together, we can figure out how humans, livestock, pets, and wild carnivores can live together in increasingly crowded landscapes.

Not Alone

Back in Kenya, Letoiye remains troubled by the killing of Loirish. In some respects, his new way of thinking clashes with the old ways that many of his people still follow. He no longer sees lions as a threat, but as a unique part of his identity. He feels a responsibility to protect them, and he works everyday to convey a message of coexistence. But not everyone wants to listen. Loirish’s death is perhaps the most vivid reminder of that.

Fortunately, Letoiye’s not alone. Another warrior on our team, Jeneria, once said something that gives me hope: “Lions are in my blood now.” Losing lions is something Letoiye, Jeneria, and their fellow warriors are no longer willing to accept.

Photo credits: Paul Thomson/Ewaso Lions, Tony Allport

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/coexisting-with-carnivores/

Desert Lion Conservation Project

With only in the region of 120 free roaming desert adapted lion remaining in Namibia, and the increase in incidents of human-animal conflict on the rise, Dr Philip Stander of Desert Lion Conservation, tracks and monitors these unique animals.
Relying solely on donations from the public and support from local tourism operators, Dr Stander has devoted his life’s work and resources to researching the desert adapted lions of Namibia, managing human-animal conflict in an environment of sustainable tourism.
Links: http://www.desertlion.info

Over the past few months conflict between the lions and farmers in the Kunene region of Namibia has reached a peak. Money is urgently needed for the erection of kraals and more collars, so that lions can be tracked in real-time and farmers alerted as to their position. Dr Stander relies solely on donations from the public and support from local tourism operators,these can be made by contacting logistics@desertlion.info

The Ecology of fear in Washington

Discover why wolves in Washington State are an essential part of the ecosystem

Learn more on website: http://ow.ly/uhcU5

THE UNWANTED SIDE EFFECTS OF POISONING DINGOES

Image © Kitch Bain | Shutterstock

In parts of Australia, people drop poisoned meat from airplanes or helicopters or leave it along dirt roads to keep dingo numbers under control. The justification is that dingoes attack livestock and need to be suppressed. But dingo poisoning has set off a cascade of ecosystem changes that affect other wildlife: according to a new study, small mammals are taking a hit too.

Figuring out what happens when you get rid of top predators is tough. It’s impractical to do a large-scale experiment in which predators are removed from an ecosystem, and such studies would often be illegal or ethically questionable anyway.

But the study authors had the chance to follow a “natural experiment”. In New South Wales, Australia, they identified seven pairs of sites with different levels of dingo control. Within each pair, dingoes had been regularly poisoned at one site for the last five years; at the other site, less than 50 kilometers away, people hadn’t made much of an effort to control dingoes.

The researchers monitored kangaroos, wallabies, foxes, cats, possums, and small mammals such as rodents at each site. They searched for the animals by identifying footprints, scanning the area while driving, or setting traps with peanut butter, oats, and honey.

At the sites with frequent poisoning, the authors found more kangaroos and wallabies and more signs of fox activity, presumably because fewer dingoes were hunting or harassing those animals. Since kangaroos and wallabies are herbivores, the density of understory plants went down. And the number of small mammals, which take cover among plants and are preyed on by foxes, also dropped.

“Dingo control programmes in conservation reserves may be counter-productive from a biodiversity conservation perspective,” the authors write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Managers will need to find a way to keep dingo numbers up and farm animals safe at the same time. — Roberta Kwok | 13 March 2014

Sources:

http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/03/unwanted-side-effects-poisoning-dingoes/

Colman, N.J. et al. 2014. Lethal control of an apex predator has unintended cascading effects on forest mammal assemblages. Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.3094

Overkill – trophy hunting slams BC’s Grizzly bears

In BC, Canada, a surge in trophy hunting may be reducing Grizzly bear populations, writes Anna Taylor. A new study finds evidence of serious Grizzly bear ‘overkill’ from multiple causes of mortality – in which trophy hunting is a big contributor.

In one area, trophy hunters killed 24 more grizzlies than the quota allowed, and overhunting was particularly prevalent for female bears that are critical for a sustainable population.

The British Columbia Government claims that the quotas they set for the number of Grizzly bears allowed to be killed each year ensure that hunting practices are sustainable.

But a new study into the management of Grizzly bears in BC, published in the open-access journalPLoS ONE, finds that so-called ‘overkills’ occurred in half the Grizzly bear populations.

The findings are also relevant to the USA andproposals to strip Grizzly bears of federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Worrying discoveries

Scientists set out to test the BC Government’s claim and made some worrying discoveries. Kyle Artelle, from Simon Fraser University and lead author of the study, explains:

“We tested how well managers were able to maintain grizzly bear kill rates below limits their own biologists have deemed sustainable.

“This assessment was straightforward – for a given population and across three management periods we simply compared the number of bears the province said could sustainably die (‘mortality limits’) by human-caused kills to the number that actually died.”

Too many unknowns

To do this his team looked at three key quantities that carry considerable uncertainty: population estimates; population growth rates; and the number of unreported human-caused bears deaths, including poaching kills.

The population growth rates are key in this, says Artelle – also a wildlife scientist with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation – because they are used to estimate how many bears can be killed in a given population without causing declines.

“You can imagine how these might contribute to undetected overkills – for instance if you assume a population is a given size and set your hunting quotas accordingly, if it turns out the population is actually smaller, then the hunting quotas you set would have been too high.

“We addressed this quantitatively and found that, based on unaddressed uncertainty, overkill rate might indeed be considerably higher than previously assumed.”

They found that overkills – defined as taking place when the number of kills exceeds the mortality limits that are set by the government – occurred in half of the populations that are open to hunting. Artelle says that hunting is adding to the other problems faced by the bears:

“Although these were caused by a mix of hunting and other human-caused kills – road and rail accidents, self-defence kills, ‘problem bear’ kills and so on – we found that almost all overkills could have been prevented by reducing or eliminating the hunt.”

Hunting quotas breached

In one area, trophy hunters killed 24 more grizzlies than the quota allowed, and overhunting was particularly prevalent for female bears that are critical for a sustainable population. This shows that guidelines that encourage hunters to avoid females are clearly inadequate.

There is considerable uncertainty about Grizzly bear population growth rates and unreported human kills, as well as how hunting affects other aspects of Grizzly bear biology such as genetics, social interactions and evolutionary processes.

It is also uncertain exactly how long different populations take to recover from population declines, the effects of changes to food availability and cumulative effects of other threats to grizzlies, logging and development for example.

Population uncertainties

Of great concern is the uncertainty of total population size. The current best estimate is 15,000 Grizzly bears in British Columbia – however the figure could be higher or lower.

It appears that few on-the-ground surveys have actually been done, with the estimate being largely based on computer modelling or expert opinion.

The government claims the management of the Grizzly bear hunt is based on “sound science” – yet Jessie Housty, tribal councillor of the Heiltsuk First Nation, doubts this.

On the Central BC Coast, where government sanctioned trophy hunting is at odds with tribal law that prohibits it, she emphasises that no inventories have been conducted.

“How could the government possibly have a solid understanding of these bears they condemn to the hunt without setting foot in our Territory?”

These are known unknowns

The government is failing to take all of these uncertainties into account when setting hunting limits, says Artelle.

“This uncertainty in and of itself is not inherently a problem – uncertainty exists in all management. The problem in BC Grizzly bear management is that the uncertainty is simply ignored.

“Although the government maintains their targets are conservative, a simple comparison between their own limits and their own records of kill rates show that is clearly not the case.”

Dr Chris Darimont, science director at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation (RCF) and a co-author of the study, is worried:

“Ignoring uncertainty – in dimensions such as true population size – is like playing Russian Roulette. As the history of wildlife management has shown repeatedly, the consequences of not accounting for the unknowns are grave.”

The RCF has raised concerns about BC’s Grizzly trophy hunt in the past. The European Union banned the import of BC Grizzly bear parts in 2002 due to their concerns over sustainability.

Hunting quotas should be halved – or banned

There is one very simple solution to the problem of overkills – reduce the hunt.

“If the government wants to ensure mortality levels are kept below limits set by their own biologists their targets need to be reduced,” says Artelle.

The scientists found that the BC government could reduce the risk to their Grizzly bears by cutting its hunting quotas by at least a half, which would reduce the probability of overkills by an average of 85%.

British Columbia is one of the last strongholds for North American Grizzly bears. Since European colonization, they have lost half of their continental range, and even in BC around one third of populations have either gone extinct or are currently threatened.

Multiple threats

“We know that grizzly bears are highly vulnerable to management error – because of their reproductive biology populations that suffer declines often don’t recover, or take considerable time to do so”, said Artelle.

“And at a provincial level the trend is not promising – through recent decades we have seen an overall trend of more and more populations gaining threatened status or disappearing altogether.

“We also know that grizzlies face a variety of other threats that are not yet fully understood, from declining salmon stocks on BC’s coast, white-bark pine failures inland, and climate change and development pressures throughout the province.

“Given the considerable threats many argue that grizzly managers should err on the side of caution, which our analyses strongly suggest they are not currently doing.”

Yet hunting increased

Despite these threats to the Grizzlies, during the study period, between 2001 and 2011, hunting mortality actually increased. For this reason, many people in BC are in favour of the complete elimination of trophy hunting in their province.

The Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine BC First Nations, have called upon Premier Christy Clark to end the hunt by organizing a petition.

They have banned trophy hunting in their expansive traditional territories in BC’s Great Bear Rainforest because they believe that the government is risking the long-term survival of the bears.

Jessie Housty says: “Our responsibility as First Nations is to step into that regulatory vacuum, and protect the bears in our territories.”

80% of BC residents oppose the grizzly hunt

Environmentalists are also strongly opposed to the hunt, as are 80% of British Columbians, according to a recent McAllister Research Poll.

Throughout North America it is being recognised that hunting must be stopped in order to protect Grizzly bears. Yet in BC, despite widespread disapproval and bad science, the hunt looks set to continue. Artelle concludes:

“In other jurisdictions, such as the province of Alberta and the Kenai peninsula in Alaska, hunts have been closed due to sustainability concerns. In BC there has been a trend through time of a growing number of populations gaining threatened status.

“Whereas history from within and beyond the province suggests cautious management might be warranted, our research found that current management entails considerable risk, suggesting that continued overkills are likely.”

Anna Taylor is a freelance science journalist, specialising in environmental issues and new discoveries in conservation biology. She posts regular blogs on Conservation Jobs.

Anna has also worked in conservation and conservation research for RSPB and other employers in the UK, Africa and the Amazon. She has a BSc in Conservation Biology and a Masters in Ecology and Environmental Biology.

Source: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2271852/overkill_trophy_hunting_slams_bcs_grizzly_bears.html

BC grizzly bears are being over hunted, putting the future of the population at risk, say the authors of a new study released today in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

Researchers from the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University and Raincoast Conservation Foundation show in their report that there are serious shortfalls with the management of the grizzly bear hunt in BC.

Researchers found large discrepancies between the upper limit to kills set by the provincial government and the number of grizzly bears killed.

“In half of BC’s remaining grizzly populations, our audit detected overkills, and almost all were associated with excessive trophy hunting,” says Dr. Chris Darimont, UVic geography professor, Raincoast science director and the study’s co-author. “The pattern of overkills we documented surprised and alarmed us, especially for female grizzly bears, which are the reproductive powerhouses of populations.”

BC represents one of the last strongholds for grizzly bears, which have lost about half of their historical range in North America since European colonization.

The report, Confronting Uncertainty in Wildlife Management: Performance of Grizzly Bear Management, is co-authored by Kyle Artelle (lead) and Sean Anderson, SFU PhD students; SFU professors Dr. John Reynolds and Dr. Andrew Cooper, and Dr. Paul Paquet, Raincoast senior scientist and adjunct UVic geography professor.

The report is available at PLOS ONE http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078041

HOW TO AVOID SHARK ATTACKS WITHOUT KILLING SHARKS

Sometime last weekend a three-meter female tiger shark snared itself on a hooked line that was attached to a floating drum just off the southwestern coast of Western Australia. A commercial fisherman later motored by and, with the blessing of the government, shot it in the head. Four times.

The controversial cull began this weekend as a response to the deaths of seven people over the past three years at the hands – er, teeth – of sharks in Western Australia. At a press conference the state’s premier, Colin Barnett, said, “I get no pleasure from seeing sharks killed, but I have an overriding responsibility to protect the people of Western Australia, and that’s what I’m doing.” Protecting swimmers and other beachgoers is indeed important, but are culls even effective in the first place? And are there other methods that are better able to both protect swimmers and the sharks that many would rather avoid?

While the scientific data on the effectiveness of shark culls is scant, what data is available suggests that they aren’t terribly effective. In a 1994 paper in the journal Pacific Science, University of Hawaii researchers Bradley M. Wetherbee, Christopher G. Lowe, and Gerald L. Crow took stock of nearly two decades of shark control programs in Hawaii.

The programs were implemented with two main objectives. The obvious aim was to reduce the number of sharks in the water. In addition, data was collected from the sharks that were captured in order to add to the body of knowledge on shark biology. If the sharks were going to be killed, at least scientists could benefit from the data. At least, that was the idea.

But Wetherbee and colleagues reported that only one scientific paper derived from the shark cull data was ever published. As a result, the reports made by those who carried out the culls went unchallenged by the formal peer review process. And while the reports declared the culls successful insofar as fewer sharks were caught as time went on, a correlation does not prove causation. The researchers point out that while “the removal of nearly 4700 sharks from Hawaiian waters over an 18-yr period undoubtedly resulted in a substantial decrease in the population, and declines in shark abundance are evident in reduced catch rates in long-running programs,” other factors that could have contributed to that decline were never considered, such as predictable seasonal shifts in local shark populations, or weather patterns, which not only drive changes in shark behavior but also have a tendency to foul fishing efforts.

More damning evidence comes from the finding that there was no statistical difference between the average number of attacks per year for the eighteen years prior to the first control program and the eighteen years in which control programs were intermittently implemented. “Consequently,” Wetherbee writes with an excessive amount of understatement, “conclusions made about the effectiveness of the programs in reducing shark populations might well have been stated with less confidence.”

If culls don’t seem to work, are there any other methods for making swimmers safer? Gill nets have been shown to be effective at reducing shark encounters, but they have the downside of indiscriminately catching dolphins, dugongs, turtles, birds, rays, tuna, other non-dangerous sharks, and even whales as well. And the removal of larger sharks from the sea by drowning them in gill nets has led to the proliferation of smaller sharks in some areas, which in turn compete with fishermen for the same fish stocks. Indeed, removing apex predators can have widespread effects on the entire ecosystem, something that was made obvious with the removal and subsequent reintroduction of wolves fromYellowstone National Park.

A 2013 paper in the journal Animal Conservation describes a more welfare-oriented, ecologically conscious approach to shark attack mitigation in Recife, Brazil. The problem was that 55 shark attacks were recorded along a twenty-kilometer stretch of coastline between 1992 and 2011, 19 of which resulted in fatalities. As a result, the state government created a Committee for the Monitoring of Shark Attack Incidents, which formulated a new strategy to manage the risk of shark attacks. The guiding principle was removing sharks from high-risk areas rather than from their populations. It was actually quite simple: sharks were captured, transported, and released farther from shore. If effective, the reasoning went, such a strategy would reduce the risk of shark-human encounters while also maintaining the structure of coastal ecosystems.

Not only did the catch-and-release method avoid creating a massive ecological upset, but it was also overwhelmingly effective. Between 2004 and 2011, the shark relocation program was in operation for 73 months, and was inactive for 23 months due to funding shortfalls. Thus, researchers were able to compare the frequency of shark attacks while the program was active to months it was on hold. While the program was operational, Recife saw an impressive 97% reduction in the monthly shark attack rate.

While the shark cull program began in Western Australia last week, groups of Japanese fisherman continued their annual dolphin slaughter. It is perhaps not surprising that the kind of outrage directed towards the Japanese town of Taiji has not been aimed towards Western Australia. The cultural narrative that surrounds dolphins is one of friendliness. Dolphins are thought of as smart, playful tool-users, their faces plastered in a permanent smile. Sharks, on the other hand, are traditionally seen as little more than sets of flesh-shredding steak knives with fins. Of course neither tale is complete. Dolphins can bejerks and sharks can actually be quite clever. As shark scientist David Shiffman wrote in a recent blog post, perhaps the best strategy to avoid the needless slaughter of sharks is simply better education. Maybe swimmers can simply be taught the most effective behaviors for reducing the risk of an unfortunate encounter. Combined with a catch-and-release program, humans could then safely enjoy our brief visits to the sea. – Jason G. Goldman | 29 January 2014

Sources:
Wetherbee B.M., Lowe C.G. & Crow G.L. (1994). A Review of Shark Control in Hawaii with Recommendations for Future Research, Pacific Science, 48 (2) 95-115.

Hazin F.H.V. & Afonso A.S. (2013). A strategy for shark attack mitigation off Recife, Brazil, Animal Conservation, n/a-n/a. DOI: 10.1111/acv.12096

http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/01/welfare-oriented-approach-avoiding-shark-attacks/