Tag Archives: wildlife

From Royal Prisons to Leaders in Conservation: A Brief History of Zoos

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Zoos have taken many forms since they first appeared thousands of years ago. What started as a collection of animals purely for the sake of royal entertainment has gradually evolved into a public source of education, conservation, and entertainment. When you ask someone to picture a zoo, they no longer picture an animal behind bars. However, it’s taken a long time for zoos to become bastions of conservation from their starting point as hallmarks of animal cruelty.

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Placing a Camera Trap for Beginners in 5 Easy Steps

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Image Credit: Pikrepo, CC0 1.0, Image Cropped

If you haven’t yet heard, April is Citizen Science month, so we’re posting a spate of articles on how people can help out and contribute to science without spending months making tiny adjustments at the whims of peer reviewers! This week Sammy Mason (of the UK’s MammalWeb project) and I have put together a checklist for anyone who wants to organise their own camera trap.

For those not in the know, a camera trap is essentially a camera placed out in the wild which records the movement of local animal species whenever they pass by. It’s a fantastic way to document your local wildlife, and it’s a huge help in collating important data about our wildlife. If you’re not convinced, check out the article below.

Bringing Wild Mammals to the Classroom: The MammalWeb Program

So for those of you who would life to set up a camera trap, let’s get stuck into what you have to consider.

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Fishing for Invaders

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Image Credit: California Department of Fish and Wildlife, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

Angling as a source of non-native freshwater fish: a European review (2019) Carpio, De Miguel, Oteros, Hillstrom & Tortosa, Biological Invasions, doi.org/10.1007/s10530-019-02042-5

The Crux

People love fishing. It’s an intrinsic part of some people’s lives, whether as a livelihood or a past-time. People who have grown up fishing often have specific species that they enjoy fishing for. Nothing wrong with that.

Yet people’s desire to go after one fish species will often lead them to move that species around. This can happen on a small scale, with people moving a species from one lake to another slightly closer to their homes. Or it can happen on a massive one, with a species being transported to new continents.

This has shaped entire freshwater communities in modern-day Europe, where 195 species now reside that have no natural range in the continent. Most of these have been introduced since the nineteenth century, which is around the time that fishing became a popular recreational activity. This week’s authors wanted to find out what the role of recreational fishing was in shaping the make-up of today’s invasive freshwater fish populations in Europe.

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Rasmus Hansson: The Intricacies of Environmental Politics

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Rasmus Hansson, former leader of the Norwegian Green Party and the Norwegian WWF (Image Credit: Miljøpartiet de Grønne, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped)

Environmental politics is a tricky business. We live in a world where environmental crises are at the forefront of the news cycle, and in which science is simultaneously becoming the subject of distrust. So it makes sense that at this point, politics should be adapting and evolving as science does.

So when Rasmus Hansson stopped by NTNU last month, Sam Perrin and I took the chance to sit down with him and see whether this was the case. Rasmus studied polar bears at NTNU in the 70s, before later becoming the leader of the World Wildlife Fund in Norway and then of the Norwegian Green party. We spoke with Rasmus about the transition from conservation to politics, the clash of ideologies and the future of environmental politics.

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