We are happy to share a video edited by Jackson Engel and Bowen Parrish who had the opportunity to attend one of the leopard immobilisations that our team did on the Farm Krumhuk in April 2015.
The female L065 estimated to be 6 years old and weighting 36 kg was fitted with a GPS collar within the framework of our leopard research project in the Auas Oanob Conservancy, in central Namibia.
Felids
Tiger Trap
A king without a kingdom…
Public Domain Public domain
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species has been labelling the iconic lion as ‘vulnerable’ since 1996. Various estimates show that populations have been going down by about 30–50% over each 20-year period of the second half of the 20th century. Starting with a population of around 400,000 in 1950, lions are now down to around 16,500-47,000 living in the wild based on estimates from 2002–2004 (certainly less than that now).
What’s happening? Mostly habitat loss and conflicts with humans, as well as some disease outbreaks.
The best way to illustrate just how much things have changed for lions is with the map above. The red areas show the species’ historic range, while the blue areas show where they can be found today… Sad, isn’t it?
For more on this, see our previous article about the “catastrophic collapse” of lion populations in West Africa.
Personal comment:
I trully hope that this beautiful animal will not be devanished one day. Theere is nothing like hearing the lion roaring from your tenth. I had this amazing feeling both in Botswana and Namibia and there is nothing compaable to it!
To end this post, some lion pics from my last trips
Lion, Botswana. Photo: Rubén Portas
Lion, Botswana. Photo: Rubén Portas
lion cub, Namibia. Photo: Rubén Portas
Collared Lioness, Namibia. Photo: Rubén Portas
Lion, Namibia. Photo: Rubén Portas
Saving More Than Just Snow Leopards
By PETER ZAHLER and GEORGE SCHALLERFEB. 1, 2014
The cold and rugged mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and China seem an unlikely place to find a flourishing combination of new community institutions and international diplomacy. Few people live there. Those who do are mostly desperately impoverished livestock herders. They have been largely isolated from the rest of humanity on these enormous mountains where the Indian subcontinent once crashed into Asia, buckling the earth’s crust and raising peaks over 20,000 feet.
However, despite its isolation — or perhaps because of it — something fascinating has been happening in this cold mountain landscape. Communities are coming together to manage this fragile and unforgiving place, where people scrape a living from sparse alpine pastures. At the same time, neighboring countries are finding ways to cooperate across borders that in recent history have become almost as hostile as the rugged terrain. As odd as it may seem, a big cat is helping to lead the way.
Once largely ignored because of its nearly inaccessible habitat and secretive behavior, the snow leopard has slowly gained notice as studies have found that it is increasingly threatened, with likely fewer than 7,000 animals left across its enormous range in Asia. In turn, this interest in the cats has drawn attention to the human communities of these mountains and the fragility of their ecosystem, particularly their watersheds, which are crucial to the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people in the lowlands.
Elusive Cats and Their Endangered Prey
Threats to leopards’ prey vary widely over remote areas, where research is difficult at best. Here are three prey species known to be in decline.
In this wilderness above the tree line — where Marco Polo sheep with horns six feet from tip to tip crash heads and the magnificent ibex scales cliffs as if they were stairs — the smoke-colored snow leopard glides silently and nearly invisibly as the top predator. The cat is what biologists call an “indicator species” of the health of the overall ecosystem. Efforts by scientists and local and national governments to save the snow leopard are rooted in the idea that, like the big cat, environmental threats are not confined to political boundaries.
It was not until the 1970s that wildlife biologists began to roam the mountains in search of clues about the snow leopard’s mysterious existence. Sometimes going months without a sighting, biologists used indirect evidence — tracks, droppings, stories from local herders — to deduce details of the cat’s life.
It turns out that snow leopards face several major threats: poaching, both for their skins and body parts, sought after by the traditional medicine trade; the decline of prey such as wild sheep and goats; retaliatory killings by shepherds and villagers for livestock lost to snow leopards; and shrinking wild habitat.
As these threats grew in both clarity and immediacy — with snow leopards having been exterminated in some mountain ranges and decimated in others — it became clear that this iconic big cat could disappear entirely if immediate action was not taken. Conservation organizations turned from research to focusing on helping local villagers manage their land and wildlife.
Protecting ecosystems can be a complicated undertaking. In both Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, disease is a serious threat to livestock. Vaccinations have reduced livestock losses and made villagers less inclined to retaliate against the cats for the few sheep and goats they kill. The problem is that vaccinations can result in a rapid increase in livestock numbers — and to overgrazing, habitat destruction, the disappearance of wild prey and, perversely, an increase in the number of domestic animals killed by snow leopards. So villagers must agree to limit their livestock numbers in return for vaccinations.
However, after years and in some cases decades of hard work and trial and error, real successes are being seen. For example, 55 communities in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and 65 in northern Pakistan (where the Himalayas, Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Pamir mountains come together) have recently formed committees to safeguard their resources. These committees now deploy almost 200 volunteer community rangers to monitor snow leopards and their prey and enforce anti-poaching regulations. In northern Afghanistan, community rangers have helped capture four snow leopards and fit them with GPS tracking collars to better understand their ecology.
Governments have been supportive of these efforts and are working to strengthen local groups. For example, in Afghanistan, two new protected areas — the second and third in the country’s history — are being developed in tandem by communities and the national government, with the expectation that they will be co-managed by both to protect snow leopards, Marco Polo sheep and ibex.
In Qinghai Province on the Tibetan Plateau, considered the “water tower of China” because the headwaters of the great rivers — the Yangtze, Yellow and Mekong — are there, the Chinese government has initiated a major bottom-up community-based conservation program to train local people to monitor the health of the habitat and create an “ecological civilization,” as they call it. Certain communities have been given rights by the government to protect and manage their own land, and some areas have even set up their own conservation organizations, as have some Buddhist monasteries.
Recent meetings among Asian nations have led to proposals for sharing data, coordinating research and creating a large protected area for snow leopards across China, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. China and Pakistan are working cooperatively to manage the adjoining Taxkorgan Natural Reserve in China and Khunjerab National Park in Pakistan. And government officials from all 12 snow leopard range countries met in Kyrgyzstan last fall to join in a declaration to better protect the snow leopard.
Even so, huge challenges still exist. The region will always be physically isolated and difficult to reach. Local poverty remains a significant problem that can slow or even impede change. In some areas security is a real concern, and events at the regional or international level can threaten to derail progress.
But one thing is clear: Changes are afoot in the high mountains of Asia. And a mysterious, secretive and snow-colored cat appears to be leading them.
Peter Zahler is deputy director for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asia Program. George Schaller is a senior conservationist at the society and vice president of Panthera, a conservation group focused on saving the world’s wild cats.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/saving-more-than-just-snow-leopards.html?
Cheetah : Against All Odds
In the Serengeti, cheetahs live uneasy lives. Females with cubs must hunt. Left alone, their offspring are exposed to the savagery of more powerful predators. Even scavengers can gain the upper hand over these felines. Cheetahs are the fastest, but also the most vulnerable of the big cats. In this new film we follow two cheetah mothers, both with varying fortunes, as they struggle to raise their families against all the odds.
Cheetah, Price of Speed (Full episode)
Some special moments:
You will never guess how biologists lure jaguar to camera traps
Field biologists are increasingly turning to camera traps to collect data. The set-up is really simple: when an animal passes in front of a camera, an infrared sensor becomes activated, and the camera silently snaps a photo. Sometimes – especially for camera traps designed to detect nocturnal species – an infrared flash, invisible to most mammals and birds, is used.
The photographs generated from camera traps can then provide researchers with far more data than they would be able to collect themselves with more traditional field observations. Often, this allows them to generate photographic evidence of a species’ natural behaviors without the confounding effects of direct human observation. It allows them to collect data continuously, throughout the day and night. And a camera trap can help researchers collect evidence of rare species or rare behaviors, as was demonstrated last week when a camera trap captured a golden eagle preying upon a sika deer. Or they could help researchers come face-to-face with an animal that might otherwise be dangerous or harmful. An array of camera traps is also more cost efficient than paying an army of field assistants to observe animal behavio or to conduct a census.
Camera traps are also far less invasive than most other forms of wildlife data collection, since critters don’t need to be trapped and released. And their presence is far less stressful for most animals compared with human observation.
Take the jaguar. The third largest cat in the world after tigers and lions, jaguars (Panthera onca) are nocturnal, solitary cats. Females’ territories can range from twenty-five to forty square kilometers, and males can roam areas twice as large. Due to primarily to habitat loss and to conflict with farmers, jaguar populations are declining; they’re considered “near threatened” by the IUCN. Oh, and a mature jaguar’s jaws are capable of biting down with two thousand pounds of force, the strongest of any cat. It subdues its prey in an ambush attack by biting down on the skull, its massive teeth puncturing the brain adjacent to each ear.
Put together, this makes jaguars well suited for for camera trap research. Still, human observers can do things like change the direction they’re looking. Cameras generally can’t. So biologists like Miguel Ordeñana try to hedge their bets and optimize the probability that an animal of interest will come by and trigger the camera’s shutter.
Ordeñana is a biologist with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. He’s an expert on camera traps, and when he’s not using them to understand the mountain lions who make their homes in the mountains of Los Angeles, he conducts field research on jaguars in Nicaragua.
Meow.
And the best way to convince a jaguar to trigger a camera trap? Calvin Klein Obsession for Men. Seriously.
According to Ordeñana, a Bronx Zoo researcher once tried a bunch of different scents and discovered that jaguars really liked the Calvin Klein cologne. A researcher might spray some of the cologne on a tree branch that sits within the camera’s field of view.
What’s so special about this particular scent mixture? “It has civetone and it has vanilla extract,” he says. Civetone is a chemical compound derived from the scent glands of civets, smallish nocturnal cat-like critters native to the Asian and African tropics, and it’s one of the world’s oldest perfume ingredients. “What we think is that the civetone resembles some sort of territorial marking to the jaguar, and so it responds by rubbing its own scent on it,” he explained to me. And the vanilla might set off the cats’ curiosity response. No matter which compound is responsible for jaguars’ interest – or both – the key is that the scent gets them to stick around long enough to activate the camera’s shutter.
The molecular formula for civetone is C17-H30-O
I asked Miguel if he avoids wearing Calvin Klein Obsession for Men while doing field work in Nicaragua. “I don’t really care, because the chances of me running into a jaguar are so slim.” Which, after all, is why he uses the camera traps in the first place.
Still, you probably wouldn’t want to wear the cologne and then take a nap, alone, at night, in the jungle. Then again, you probably wouldn’t want to do that anyway.
A jaguar captured by one of Miguel Ordenana’s camera traps on January 7, 2013. Click photos to enlarge.
Images: Header image via Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikimedia Commons. Camera trap photos via Paso Pacifico, used with permission.
Update: It’s worth pointing out that most modern perfume makers use synthetic versions of civetone, extracted from palm oil, so that they don’t have to harass actual civets…
About the Author: Dr. Jason G. Goldman received his Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at the University of Southern California, where he studied the evolutionary and developmental origins of the mind in humans and non-human animals. Jason is also an editor at ScienceSeeker and Editor of Open Lab 2010. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. Follow onGoogle+. Follow on Twitter @jgold85.Jaguar attacks cocrodile in Pantanal
How Pumas and Other Apex Predators’ Populations Affect The Big Biodiversity Picture
Two years ago, a stellar cast of ecologists changed the way conservation scientists think about biodiversity. As we tumble headlong into the sixth great extinction, biologists have focused largely on protecting regions with the highest number of species. By saving the most species, the thinking goes, you’ll conserve the greatest number of ecological interactions and so the greatest biodiversity. But in a study that drew on ecological theory and contemporary studies of apex predators like wolves and pumas, the all-star team of ecologists found that some species matter more than others. Losing top predators, they argued, can have far-reaching, irreversible effects on the structure, function and biodiversity of ecosystems.
Ecological theory predicts that changes in the abundance and distribution of top predators can cause substantial shifts in ecosystems. And recent studies—many published in the new millennium—have shown how theoretical predictions play out on the landscape. The collapse of sea otter populations on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands decimated kelp forests by allowing unfettered expansion of sea urchins, the otters’ main food. The loss of wolves in Yellowstone’s Lamar River Valley famously allowed elk to forage with abandon, arresting the development of streamside willows and other riparian vegetation. In Venezuela, forests without jaguars, pumas and eagles had almost no vegetative underbrush compared to the lush understory in forests where predators kept ungulate herbivores in check.
But, according to the study, the loss of large top predators can also lead to soaring rates of wildfires, infectious disease and carbon emissions, and degrade water quality and nutrient cycles.
These “top down” trophic cascades, which the ecologists dubbed “trophic downgrading,” have been documented from the poles to the equators and every major biome in between, making the loss of top predators, they wrote, “arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world.” Earth has weathered five mass extinctions but never before at the hands of one species—human beings. And we humans seem hell bent on clearing the Earth of larger bodied apex predators.
I considered all this as I read a new paper from wildlife ecologist Chris Wilmer’s lab (published last week in PLOS ONE) that looks at how human development affects pumas. Like most large carnivores, pumas need vast territories to hunt, find mates and raise young. Pumas living in the San Francisco Bay Area have no such luck. Wilmers, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, has been studying the effects of habitat fragmentation on the behavior, ecology and even the physiology of pumas around the Santa Cruz Mountains. He develops cutting-edge GPS collars to track both the location and behavior of his animals.
Fragmented landscapes often pave the way to extinction for wide-ranging large carnivores like pumas, with cascading effects. Freed from the threat of top predators, smaller carnivores like foxes increase in number, driving declines in birds and small mammals. But habitat fragmentation can produce effects similar to extinction because large predators tend to avoid small fragmented parcels. Given the heterogeneous patterns of human developments—with houses and other structures interspersed among natural areas—predicting how animals might respond, and with what consequences, presents a serious challenge.
Since pumas make risk-benefit calculations just like the rest of us and typically avoid humans—their biggest cause of death, aside from roads—Wilmers wanted to know what factors govern their decisions. He and his team figured the cats would steer clear of neighborhoods, where they’d risk seeing their nemesis in various activities, more than roads, where traffic can be sporadic. And they predicted the cats would respond differently depending on their reproductive status. If running into humans meant losing a meal, that would prove less costly from an evolutionary perspective, than if it meant losing a chance to mate or raise young—since, as any evolutionary biologist will tell you, we exist primarily to reproduce.
The team combined their GPS data with field visits to determine whether cats were simply going about their business—that is, feeding (based on the analysis of GPS data and confirmed by finding prey remains) or moving about the landscape (GPS readings not linked to kill or den sites)—or engaged in reproductive behavior—denning (indicated by a female staying within a spot and making repeated return visits) or communicating (indicated by “scrapes,” urine-soaked leaves and debris mounded with the hind feet, the puma version of “here’s my number”).
As predicted, the cats’ response to developments varied with their reproductive status. The data collected on their 20 collared pumas (12 females and 8 males) showed that the animals give human developments a wider berth when engaged in reproductive behaviors. Given how frequently human run-ins result in death for pumas around the Bay Area, it’s not surprising that evolutionary pressures selected against placing the next generation at risk. Similarly, the cats seem to have learned that placing their calling card near trails leaves them vulnerable to destruction by hikers and bikers.
Still, it appears that taking care of large cubs makes mom willing to take more risks. The team found that females with dependent young showed higher tolerance for residential developments than males, possibly because they can’t afford to be choosy about where they find prey. Still, one male in the study did go near developments—a young male seeking new territory—an extremely risky behavior that the sexually immature male shot in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto learned too late.
There’s no doubt that our behavior influences the big cats’ behavior. If you live on the edge of puma habitat and plant lush gardens, you’ll attract deer—and likely their ancient predator. If you don’t safeguard your goats and sheep in enclosed pens at night, you’re just asking for trouble. An astonishing eight of the 11 adult pumas the team studied were shot for attacking livestock.
By understanding where, when and how pumas use their increasingly fragmented habitat, Wilmers and his team can predict how they might respond as development continues. They can also predict, and hopefully mitigate, likely conflicts between humans and the increasingly boxed-in carnivores. But ecologists, even the best ecologists, can do only so much. They need the rest of us to decide whether we’re ready to reverse the trophic downgrading of the planet before it’s too late.
Between Thorn Bushes and Claws 
