conservation | Ecology for the Masses

Tag Archives: conservation

10,000 Hours Listening For Screaming Koalas

Posted on February 9, 2022 by Sam Perrin 8 comments

Image Credit: sandid, Pixabay licence, Image Cropped

Mini-acoustic sensors reveal occupancy and threats to koalas Phascolarctos cinereus in private native forests (2021) Law et al., Journal of Applied Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14099

The Crux

Forests that lie on privately owned land make up a huge percentage of Australia’s native forests – over 23%. That’s 164 million hectares, a massive swathe of territory for Australia’s amazing endemic species to call home.

The problem is that because it’s private, it’s often difficult to survey. Which means there’s a huge chunk of an ecosystem that we have very little knowledge about. Sometimes this frustrates, but other times it breeds novel approaches to conservation.

This week’s authors wanted to survey native Australian forests, with one species in mind – the charismatic and oft-threatened koala. They took an approach which brought land-owners on board, and sent them audio recording equipment to register the presence of koalas, in an effort to figure out how many koalas made use of private forests.

What They Did

Spread across Australia’s privately owned forests, the researchers found just under a million hectares worth of land that they estimated to be suitable for koalas. They contacted the owners of said land and explained the project and its significance. Once the owners understood the concept and the work involved, they were sent ‘Audiomoths’ – small recording devices that can be attached to trees in koala habitat and record male koalas bellows during mating season (September to December).

Recording koala bellows isn’t that straightforward though, and many recordings had to be removed from the final results as heavy wind and rain made it difficult to determine what was making what noise.

Once koalas were identified, their presence was modelled against a range of different human impacts, including nearby roads and land clearance, and environmental variables like extent of vegetation and local fire severity.

Did You Know: Koala Extinction

Koalas are notoriously picky eaters, and many people know that they will only eat eucalyptus leaves. Yet it goes further, with some koalas only eating leaves from certain species of eucalyptus tree, having grown so accustomed to these species that their gut bacteria can’t tolerate anything else. It means that relocating koalas can be almost impossible, and that preserving their natural habitat is of the utmost importance (and benefits a huge range of other species).

Read More: What Being Functionally Extinct Means, Why Koalas Aren’t, and Why Things Are Still Pretty Dire

What They Found

The survey resulted in almost 10,000 hours of recordings across 128 properties and three years. Over 1,600 bellows were recorded across 41% of all the sites surveyed.

The only variables which had an affect on koala presence were the proximity of sealed (paved) roads and the vegetation cover. The closer by a sealed road was, the less likely koalas were to show up. Heavily forested areas were also less likely to house koalas, whereas forest that was more fragmented by grassland and open woodland were better suited for them.

Problems

The study mentions early on that there are often differences between private and public forest, yet there’s no comparison here between the two. Using Audiomoths in public nature reserves would have made for a great comparison, particularly to check whether the environmental and human variables affected koalas in the same way. However the constraints here are financial ones, and I think the authors would agree that it’s more interesting the double the data for this particular experiment rather than double the Audiomoth budget and make a comparative study.

So What?

The environmental results here aren’t particularly interesting – koala’s habitat preferences are relatively well studied. What is a real positive is the success of the technique used, that of bringing private landowners on side and getting a wealth of data in return. An added bonus of a project like that is that as well as collecting data, you get the opportunity to share scientific knowledge and teach a group of the public about local wildlife.

Dr. Sam Perrin is a freshwater ecologist who completed his PhD at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is currently working as a climate data analyst at Ducky AS. You can read more about his research and the rest of the Ecology for the Masses writers here, see more of his work at Ecology for the Masses here, or follow him on Twitter here.

Paper of the Week

Don’t Look Up Isn’t A Perfect Climate Change Film. The Lord of the Rings Is.

Posted on January 17, 2022 by Danielle Crowley Leave a comment

Come on Frodo, drop those fossil fuel subsidies (Image Credit: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, New Line Cinema, 2003)

Regardless of your opinions on it, Don’t Look Up got people talking. The latest in a line of apocalyptic climate movies, will this be the one to effect change? I think we need more climate movies, but ones that are powerful, that stick with you after the Twitter hashtags vanish, films that embed themselves in our cultural consciousness. Maybe one like…

Opinions

Hairy Pawter and the Genetic Mix-Up

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Tanya Strydom Leave a comment

Red wolf and coyotes are an interesting conundrum when it comes to thinking of hybrids as ‘good or bad’. Thought to be a product of hybridisation between coyotes and grey wolves, red wolves have a lot of cultural significance in the southeastern United States. Native ranges of captive breeding programmes have worked at trying to re-introduce and establish red wolf populations in their historic ranges.

Yet these wolves have started having hybrid offspring with coyotes. This isn’t ideal, but because the red wolf population is so small, there isn’t a lot of genetic diversity among current red wolves. What if some ‘new’ genetic diversity can be found in wolf-coyote hybrids? There is a population of coyotes-not-coyotes in Galveston, Texas that have red wolf DNA – DNA that isn’t found in current red wolves! This ‘ghost’ DNA could be exactly what the doctor ordered when it comes to injecting some diversity back into the wolf population.

So if we were to breed (hybridise) the Galveston coyotes with red wolves we’d be introducing genetic diversity back into the population (yay!) but then also be making more hybrids, which… goes against what we would want – right? This is quite the tricky situation and has caused some head scratching when it comes to how best to approach this situation and really goes to show that we can’t be too black and white in our thinking.

The original research can be found here: Rediscovery of Red Wolf Ghost Alleles in a Canid Population Along the American Gulf Coast

Tanya Strydom is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal, mostly focusing on how we can use machine learning and artificial intelligence in ecology. Current research interests include (but are not limited to) predicting ecological networks, the role species traits and scale in ecological networks, general computer (and maths) geekiness, and a (seemingly) ever growing list of side projects. Tweets (sometimes related to actual science) can be found @TanyaS_08.

Elology for the Masses

Of Course Climate Change Is A Threat To Global Ecosystems

Posted on December 20, 2021 by Sam Perrin One comment

Last week, prominent Australian conservation scientist Professor Hugh Possingham caused quite a stir when he stated that “personally [he is] not convinced that climate change is a huge threat to many species”. This naturally sparked heated debates among ecologists the world over, with varying levels of vitriol. As Dr. Charlie Gardner put it, it “is an extraordinary thing to hear from a leading conservation scientist”.

Opinions

Can We Figure Out Where Human-Wolf Conflicts Are The Most Likely?

Posted on December 15, 2021 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

Image Credit: Isster17, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped

Men and wolves: Anthropogenic causes are an important driver of wolf mortality in human-dominated landscapes in Italy (2021) Musto et al., Global Ecology and Conservation, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01892

The Crux

The reintroduction of wolves into many regions in the Northern Hemisphere is massively controversial, and even a constant parliamentary debate in some countries. There are no doubts that wolves bring considerable benefits to local biodiversity wherever they are reintroduced, but there are also no doubts that their reintroduction is met with trepidation by the local human populace.

That makes figuring out where conflicts are likely to arise and wolves and likely to be shot, poisoned, or hit by a car really important. If we can figure out where wolves are most likely to be killed, it can help conservationists figure out where their populations need the most attention, and where outreach to local farmers could prevent further conflicts. That’s what today’s authors wanted to figure out.

Paper of the Week

PORTFOLIOCEAN

Posted on December 3, 2021 by Tanya Strydom Leave a comment

Its always cool when we can marry two wildly different fields to try and solve a problem. In this case researchers took a mathematical framework (Modern Portfolio Theory- originally developed to help investors that are risk-ad verse to maximise returns) and applied it to help identify the coral reefs that are most likely to ‘do well’ under future climate change.

One pretty neat result of the study is that the researchers took into account the various risks and identified 50 areas that are resilient to different risks of climate change predictions – i.e. we wouldn’t be putting all our eggs in one basket, and we’d be ‘diversifying’ our ‘investment portfolio’.

The Guardian did a pretty neat breakdown here: Nobel-winning stock market theory used to help save coral reefs

And those interested in the research article can find it here: Risk-sensitive planning for conserving coral reefs under rapid climate change

Elology for the Masses

How Fur Colour Influences The Arctic Fox’s Survival Chances

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Sam Perrin 2 comments

This is a guest post by Lukas Tietgen

Fur colour in the Arctic fox: genetic architecture and consequences for fitness (2021) Tietgen et al., Proceedings B, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.1452

The Crux

Researchers who try to understand the dynamics of wild populations often look at how different traits affect the survival and reproduction of different individuals within those populations. Usually, the investigated traits are visible and easy to observe, like an animal’s size or their colour. However, there may be cases where the important traits are not as conspicuous or even hidden behind more striking features.

The arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) occurs with two distinct fur colours, often called morphs. The two most common are the white morph and the blue morph. Which of these morphs is more common depends on the population. In Norway, the white morph is more common but in recent years an apparent increase in foxes of the blue morph has been observed. Previous research has shown that blue arctic foxes are usually fitter, but until now there hasn’t been a good explanation of why.

We wanted to dive a little bit deeper into the differences between the two colour morphs, explore the genetics behind this trait and seeing whether we could find any “hidden” traits connected to fur colour that could explain the difference in fitness between the two morphs.

Paper of the Week

Bad Neighbors

Posted on November 10, 2021 by Adam Hasik Leave a comment

The disruption of a keystone interaction erodes pollination and seed dispersal networks, Vitali et al., 2021 Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3547

Image credit: Ennio Nasi, CC BY 4.0

The Crux

Ecological communities are incredibly complex networks, made up of interactions between the species that reside in them. To properly understand how these interactions shape a community, researchers have to employ a variety of analytical methods and modelling approaches. This was something that I had to learn to appreciate in my work, because I always thought that studying ecology would involve a lot of time outdoors working with animals. While that does happen (and I spent months outside during my PhD), most of the ecological research I’m familiar with centers on math and statistics.

Using math and statistics to model ecological communities helps us to break down how various organisms are connected with one another. For example, keystone species are organisms that are connected to so many others within a given ecosystem such that any change to their populations will have consequences for the entire community. Understanding the processes that affect these keystone individuals (and all of the organisms linked to them) is vital to predicting how processes such as climate change and invasive species will affect natural communities in the future.

Today’s authors investigated how disruption of an important species interaction affected pollination and seed dispersal networks in Patagonia. A hummingbird species (Sephanoides sephaniodes) is the main pollinator for a mistletoe species (Tristerix corym-bosus), while the mistletoe provides the hummingbird with nectar in the winter. The colocolo opossum (Dromiciops gliroides) is a small marsupial that is vital for the mistletoe, as mistletoe seeds must pass through the opossum’s gut to trigger their germination. Additionally, the opossums defecate many seeds on branches in a “necklace” arrangement, which likely helps the mistletoe to parasitize their plant hosts. These three species are tightly connected to one another, and any reduction in abundance for one species may affect the other two, and even destroy the entire food web.