Using Technology to Help Wild Cats and People Coexist

In Central India, F&ES doctoral student Jennie Miller is helping develop strategies to limit the increasingly frequent interactions between humans and wild cats that have triggered massive declines in populations of tigers and leopards.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller

For centuries, populations of tigers and leopards in central India have plummeted in the face of habitat degradation, the loss of prey, and a rise in sport hunting. Over the last few decades, however, it has been the increases in poaching and “retaliation killings” by livestock owners that have become the greatest threats facing these big cats.

 

Jennie Miller, a doctoral student at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, says the best strategy to stem these losses is to limit the interactions between these rare cats and livestock animals. And she’s developing strategies that use spatial technology to achieve this goal.

 

In an interview, Miller describes the relationship between wild cats and humans in this part of the world, how simple technologies can reduce conflicts, and the risks of working so close to these predators.

 

Can you describe the research you’re doing in India? 

In a nutshell, I’m creating geospatial tools to help people and big cats sustainably coexist. In many parts of Asia, people graze their livestock in landscapes shared with tigers and leopards. Big cats regularly kill domesticated livestock since they are easy prey, causing profound livelihood loses for livestock owners. For example, in the Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India where I work, more than 400 cattle, buffalo, goats, and pigs are killed each year. Though this is less than 0.5 percent of the 85,000 livestock in the area, even a small number of attacks can create a sense of insecurity and frustration for livestock owners. To reduce attacks, owners sometimes lace livestock carcasses with pesticides to poison the cats when they return to feed. Since only about 3,500 tigers remain in the wild, every cat counts for the survival of the species.

My research aims to help reduce this human-carnivore conflict by minimizing carnivore attacks on livestock. I’m building spatial models to understand where tigers and leopards are most likely to attack livestock. These models also generate “risk maps” to predict where future attacks may occur to assist the Forest Department and villagers when managing and grazing livestock. If livestock can be grazed in habitats where carnivores are less likely to attack — for example, away from dense forests where tigers hunt — then coexistence between people and tigers and leopards may be more feasible.

 

What are the threats facing these animals? And, for that matter, the people who live in these communities?

Over the past few centuries, habitat degradation, prey loss, and uncontrolled sport hunting have caused massive declines in tiger and leopard populations. However, in the past few decades, poaching and retaliation killing have emerged as the two greatest immediate threats for these big cats. Recent surges in the value of tiger and leopard body parts in international markets in southeast and east Asia — where they are sold for traditional medicine — are motivating a spree of illegal poaching, especially within India, which supports half the world’s wild tigers.

 

Retaliation killing — when villagers poison carnivores after losing livestock — also contributes to species declines, particularly since these incidences often kill young dispersing tigers and leopards as they move through agricultural fields to colonize or join other populations in nearby protected areas. And poaching and retaliation killing can be closely linked, since poachers may capitalize on a livestock owner’s desire to remove a troublesome tiger.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Jennie Miller interviews a forest guard

Attacks on humans are rare — far less frequent than deaths due to car accidents or even snake bites. Perhaps due to their rarity and primal essence, the media often sensationalizes these “man-eater” attacks, which can further instigate anger, fear, and retaliations from people. Nonetheless, attacks do occasionally happen. People who share forests with tigers and leopards are very aware of these risks and take precautions to avoid chances of attack, such as staying indoors at night, traveling in groups and regularly protecting small children. There is a great amount of respect — driven by a mixture of fear, appreciation and reverence — for large cats in India.

 

What does the mapping technology you’re using reveal? 

We’re at an exciting point in time where spatial technology like GPS units and satellite data are enabling the development of simple tools for management and conservation. One example is “spatial risk mapping,” which I use for my research. Basically, I recorded the GPS coordinates of hundreds of dead livestock in my study site as well as random sites to measure variation across the landscape. I combine these with information about the location of other environmental and human features, such as roads, villages, forests, and shrubs. I then build statistical models to predict the probability of a tiger or leopard attack on livestock across the landscape.

 

The end result is a map that can help visually identify where attacks might occur in the future. These maps can serve as powerful tools because they transcend language and education barriers by visually representing risk and so could be useful to help villagers in remote areas protect their livestock.

 

What have you learned so far?

Since tigers and leopards both use stalking hunting tactics to attack prey, I expected them to show similar hunting patterns. However, I found that tigers and leopards differ greatly in where they tend to kill livestock: Tigers attack most often in dense forests away from human infrastructure like roads and villages, whereas leopards kill in more open vegetation and aren’t as deterred by human presence. In fact, on several occasions, leopards boldly strolled into villages at night and killed livestock in bamboo enclosures adjacent to people’s mud huts while they slept inside!

“People generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks.”— Jennie Miller

I also expected livestock owners to have a strong sense of where both tigers and leopards kill. Yet when I interviewed owners and compared their perceptions about where these two cats tend to kill, I found that owners have a very accurate sense of where tigers attack but a poorer understanding of where leopards attack. I suspect this disparity occurs because tigers are constrained to hunting in dense forests but leopards can kill in a broader diversity of habitats, making it generally harder to predict where a leopard will attack. This means that people generally know how to avoid tiger attacks but could perhaps benefit from more conservation support for actively protecting livestock from leopard attacks, such as by strengthening night enclosures or hiring livestock herders. 

 

What do you hope will come out of your research?

These results provide valuable insights into how big cats, livestock, and people interact which I hope will help strengthen animal husbandry and livestock management to better protect livestock and reduce human-carnivore conflict. I’m working with the Forest Department of Kanha Tiger Reserve to integrate these spatial risk models into management to help guide their conservation efforts. For example, risk maps can be used to understand carnivore hunting behavior and patterns, especially the distinction between tigers and leopards, for developing strategies for protecting livestock. In considering the risk of an attack alongside other grazing considerations — such as browse quality and access from villages — livestock owners may also be able to make grazing decisions in a more informed way.

Photo courtesy of Jennie Miller Miller inspects the remains of a cow killed by a wild cat.

What other skills have you had to develop to conduct this research? 

Learning Hindi has enabled me to more personally relate with villagers in India to understand the ramifications of livestock losses, as well as to understand the jokes made by my field assistants. Since I surveyed dead livestock and collected tiger and leopard scat for a year, I quickly developed a tolerance for bad smells, maggots, blood, and feces. I realized this a few months into fieldwork when I found myself elbow-deep in a bucket of water and tiger feces, separating the hair from particulate matter in order to identify prey contents. And to this day, I still reach for my GPS when I smell road kill. But more seriously, I also acquired a deep respect for the villagers and forest guards who literally risk their lives daily to live alongside tigers and leopards.

 

Have you ever felt unsafe doing this work, walking in places where these animals lurk?

Definitely! Though tigers and leopards rarely attack people, one or two people — usually solitary livestock herders or forest guards — are attacked in Kanha Tiger Reserve every year. These big cats don’t usually approach groups of people, so I always took a team of three to 10 people with me when surveying livestock carcasses. We also tried to avoid visiting fresh kills to reduce the chance that the cats would still be feeding when we approached. But sometimes this couldn’t be avoided and I can recall several cases when we knew a cat was lingering nearby.

 

Once, when my team and I were walking through a dense forest towards three cow carcasses killed the night before, the villagers in front of me said they could hear the tigress walking. When we reached the carcasses a few moments later, there was fresh blood on the carcass, indicating that she had been feeding a few minutes before we arrived. That day I truly began to understand the risks that villages take in living with these cats.

 

What made you want to focus your research in India? 

In January 2005 when I was a sophomore in college, I accompanied my father, a yoga and meditation teacher, on a visit to India to meet his guru. During our trip I saw first-hand the sudden tragedy of the tsunami in coastal Chennai and also heard stories while on safari about man-eating tigers in the dense jungles of Corbett Tiger Reserve. I was mesmerized by the people’s vibrancy and resiliency despite these unpredictable hardships, and greatly impressed by the extent to which Indians are economically and spiritually connected to nature. The trip helped inspire me to major in ecology and take classes in South Asian religion, art and language, and to later return to India as a Fulbright Scholar to study bird conservation in the western Himalayas. After a year of research in India I was hooked. I hope that I can continue working in India for the rest of my life.

Source: Yale University

Targeted culling of deer controls disease with little effect on hunting

A new study found that the targeted culling of deer prevents the rampant spread of chronic wasting disease to healthy deer.

Chronic wasting disease, the deer-equivalent of mad cow disease, has crept across the U.S. landscape from west to east. It appeared first in captive mule deer in Colorado in the late 1960s. By 1981, it had escaped to the wild. It reached the Midwest by 2002. Little is known about its potential to infect humans.

The effort to keep chronic wasting disease in check in Illinois is a success, report researchers Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, left, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey; U. of I. animal sciences professor Jan Novakofski; and postdoctoral researcher Michelle Green.

Now researchers at the University of Illinois offer a first look at the long-term effectiveness of the practice of culling deer in areas affected by CWD to keep the disease in check. Their study appears in the journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine.

Each year, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources tests 7,000 (hunted, culled or incidentally killed) deer for CWD infection, conducts aerial surveillance to see where deer congregate and sends in sharpshooters to cull deer at the sites with disease, said Jan Novakofski, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois and an author of the study.

"We know a lot about how far deer typically move," he said. "If they're sick, they're going to spread the disease that far. So if you find a deer that's sick, you draw that small circle and you shoot there."

Novakofski called this approach "a textbook scientific strategy for control. You reduce contact and you reduce the spread of infection with the smallest overall impact on healthy deer."

He and his colleagues at the Illinois Natural History Survey (part of the Prairie Research Institute at the U. of I.) found that the strategy worked: The prevalence of CWD in tested Illinois deer remained at about 1 percent from 2002 to 2012.

The team also found that hunters were killing more deer each year in each region of the state (north, central and south) regardless of CWD and CWD management. Statewide, the number of deer killed by hunters went from 147,830 in 2001, before the appearance of CWD, to 181,451 in 2012. The only exception: Two counties out of 10 with cases of CWD saw a reduction in hunter harvest over the same period.

"We wanted to know whether Illinois hunters have fewer deer to hunt now than they did before CWD," said Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist at the INHS who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Mary Beth Manjerovic. "We found that hunter harvest has increased, and the prevalence of CWD has been maintained at low levels for 10 years in Illinois."

This finding answers a long-time complaint by some hunters that the culling of deer makes it harder for them to find deer to shoot, Novakofski said.
"Since 2001, hunter harvest of deer has increased similarly in the northern region of Illinois, where CWD occurs, and the rest of the state, where there is no disease or sharpshooting," he said.

In the two Illinois counties with fewer deer, "the reductions were 11 to 20 percent," Manjerovic said.

The team compared the Illinois experience with that of Wisconsin, which changed its CWD-management strategy from one that relied on culling to one that consisted primarily of allowing hunters to thin deer herds, the researchers said. Wisconsin saw a striking increase of infection in CWD-tested deer after it did that, the team found.

"In the early years in Wisconsin, (CWD prevalence) was still about 1 percent, just as it was in Illinois," Manjerovic said. "Then the strategy changed. Since 2007, CWD prevalence has increased to about 5 percent."

"We can't find an environmental or other variable that explains the increase in prevalence except a change in management," Novakofski said.

The numbers may not seem alarming to some, said postdoctoral researcher and co-author Michelle Green. But the trend is of concern, she said.

"CWD is a prion disease (like mad cow disease) and it's 100 percent fatal. 
There's no current way that we can actually make the deer better, so it's important that we keep it from spreading too far throughout the population," she said. "And then there's also the connection to mad cow disease. We don't have enough information yet to really understand what the impact to human health could be."

"We all hope that there is never a case of chronic wasting disease in humans. We all hope that it never spreads to people or agricultural animals," Novakofski said. "If it ever does, the investment in maintaining prevalence at a low level in Illinois will be repaid a thousand-fold."

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Teeth, sex and testosterone reveal secrets of aging in wild mouse lemurs

A brown mouse lemur in the wild. Mouse lemurs, weighing a mere 30 to 80 grams, are the world's smallest primates. Credit: Jukka Jernvall

Mouse lemurs can live at least eight years in the wild -- twice as long as some previous estimates, a long-term longitudinal study finds.

PLOS ONE published the research on brown mouse lemurs (Microcebus rufus) led in Madagascar by biologist Sarah Zohdy, a post-doctoral fellow in Emory's Department of Environmental Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health. Zohdy conducted the research while she was a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki.

"It's surprising that these tiny, mouse-sized primates, living in a jungle full of predators that probably consider them a bite-sized snack, can live so long," Zohdy says. "And we found individuals up to eight years of age in the wild with no physical symptoms of senescence like some captive mouse lemurs start getting by the age of four."

It is likely that starvation, predation, disease and other environmental stressors reduce the observed rate of senescence in the wild, Zohdy notes, but a growing body of evidence also suggests that captive conditions may affect mental and physical function.

"We focused on wild mouse lemurs because we want to know what happens naturally when a primitive primate is exposed to all of the extrinsic and intrinsic mortality factors that shaped them as a species," Zohdy says. "Comparing longevity data of captive and wild mouse lemurs may help us understand how the physiological and behavioral demands of different environments affect the aging process in other primates, including humans."

The study determined ages of wild mouse lemurs in Madagascar's Ranomafana National Park through a dental mold method that had not previously been used with small mammals. In addition to the high-resolution tooth-wear analysis for aging, fecal samples underwent hormone analysis.

The researchers found no difference between the longevity of male and female mouse lemurs, unlike most vertebrates where males tend to die first.

"And even more interestingly, we found no difference in testosterone levels between males and females," Zohdy says. Mouse lemurs are female dominant, which may explain why their testosterone levels are on a par with males.

"While elevated male testosterone levels have been implicated in shorter lifespans in several species, this is one of the first studies to show equivalent testosterone levels accompanying equivalent lifespans," Zohdy says.

A co-author of the study is primatologist Patricia Wright of the Centre ValBio Research Station in Madagascar and Stony Brook University. Other institutions involved in the study include Colorado State University, Duke University and the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Mouse lemurs, found only on the island of Madagascar, are the world's smallest primates. They are among nearly 100 species of lemurs that arrived in Madagascar some 65 million years ago, perhaps floating over from mainland Africa on mats of vegetation.

Mouse lemurs weigh a mere 30 to 80 grams but in captivity they live six times longer than mammals of similar body size, such as mice or shrews. Captive gray mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus) can live beyond age 12. By age four, however, they can start exhibiting behavioral and neurologic degeneration. In addition to slowing of motor skills and activity levels, reduced memory capacity and sense of smell, the captive four-year-olds can start developing gray hair and cataracts, Zohdy says.

The wild brown mouse lemurs in the study were trapped, marked and released during the years 2003 to 2010. A total of 420 dental impressions were taken from the lower-right mandibular tooth rows of 189 unique individuals. Over the course of seven years, 270 age estimates were calculated. For 23 individuals captured three or more times during the duration of the study, the regression slopes of wear rates were calculated and the mean slope was used to calculate ages for all individuals.

"We found that wild brown mouse lemurs can live at least eight years," Zohdy says. "In the population that we studied, 16 percent lived beyond four years of age. And we found no physical signs of senescence, such as graying hair or cataracts, in any wild individual."

Limitations of the study include the inability to document gradual physiological symptoms of senescence in the wild. "Our results do not provide information about wild brown mouse lemurs that can be directly compared to senescence in captive gray mouse lemurs," Zohdy says. "Further research, using identical measures of senescence, will help to reveal whether patterns of physiological senescence occur consistently across the genus and in both captive and wild conditions."

Another confounding factor Zohdy cites is "the Sleeping Beauty effect," the fact that wild mouse lemurs hibernate for half the year, possibly boosting their life span.
"We now know that mouse lemurs can live a relatively long time in the wild," she says, "but we don't know the exact mechanisms behind why they live so long."

Source: Emory Health Sciences

Attitudes about knowledge, power drive Michigan's wolf debate

MSU research has identified the themes shaping Michigan's wolf debate and offers some potential solutions as the debate moves forward. Credit: Courtesy of Michigan DNR

With both wolf proposals shot down by Michigan voters on election day, the debate over managing and hunting wolves is far from over.

A Michigan State University study, appearing in a recent issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management, identifies the themes shaping the issue and offers some potential solutions as the debate moves forward.

The research explored how different sides of the debate view power imbalances among different groups and the role that scientific knowledge plays in making decisions about hunting wolves. These two dimensions of wildlife management can result in conflict and stagnate wildlife management.

The results indicate that tension between public attitudes about local knowledge, and politics and science can drive conflict among Michiganders' stance regarding wolf hunting, said Meredith Gore, associate professor of fisheries and wildlife and co-lead author of the study.

"Given the trend in wildlife management toward increased stakeholder input, finding solutions that approach science and politics as complementary, rather than competing, approaches may aid the public participation processes," she said.

This study represents a first attempt at defining and describing the association between knowledge and power in contentious management of a species recently delisted from endangered status. This study focused on wolves, but it has applications for other endangered or invasive species, added Gore, an MSU AgBioResearch scientist.

These findings shed light on why the voting and support for the issue appears to be muddled, at least in terms of traditional quantifiers. Knowing these splits explain, in part, why the issue won't likely be resolved by swaying the pro- or anti-hunting vote.

Gore and Michelle Lute, former MSU fisheries and wildlife graduate student and co-lead author who's now at Indiana University, unearthed these disparities by conducting in-depth interviews with many stakeholders close to the wolf debate. Rather than trying to prove a specific theory, the researchers allowed the interviews to reveal the main criteria driving the issue.

The researchers unearthed four themes and offered potential solutions to each.

• Mistrust among decision-makers -- Some interviewees view wildlife management agencies as political agencies rather than supporting what's best for wildlife. Increasing transparency and gathering more stakeholder input could increase trust.
• Special interest groups leaving many voters disenfranchised -- Strong lobbying groups leave some individuals feeling powerless and their votes meaningless. Striving for equitable distribution of risks and benefits among all stakeholders could address these feelings.
• Political influencers overriding science -- Some believe that scientific studies are downplayed by political officials. Equitable sharing of responsibility, risks and benefits may ease perceptions of tension between politicians and scientists.
• Decision-makers ignoring local sources of information -- Some interviewees felt cast aside, and their knowledge was labeled as mythology or folklore. Processes that seek shared-learning outcomes may balance local and scientific knowledge.

"Our research shows that as any management process moves forward," Gore said, "all sides should address the issue from the perspective of these four criteria. Regardless of how people voted, these aspects may represent common ground for all sides."

Source: Michigan State University

Odor that smells like blood: Single component powerful trigger for large carnivores

African wild dogs compete for a log impregnated with blood or a single component. Both were equally attractive. Credit: Linköping University

People find the smell of blood unpleasant, but for predatory animals it means food. When behavioural researchers at Linköping University in Sweden wanted to find out which substances of blood trigger behavioural reactions, they got some unexpected results.

Matthias Laska is professor of zoology, specialising in the sense of smell. For some time his focus has been on scents that directly affect the behaviour of animals.

"For predators, food scents are particularly attractive, and much of this has to do with blood. We wanted to find out which chemical components create the scent of blood," he says.

The study, conducted at Kolmården Wildlife Park, found that for the animals, one particular component of blood odour was just as engaging as the blood odour itself.

"It's a completely new discovery that raises interesting questions on evolution," says Prof Laska.

The study has been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

When Prof Laska did a search for the contents of volatile substances in mammalian blood, he found nothing. Human blood has been analysed for disease markers, but we have very little information on the substances that give blood its characteristic scent.

A master's student was sent to Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen Germany, to analyse mammalian blood with the help of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, methods used for separating and identifying chemical compounds in a sample. The machine detected some 30 substances, of which some are decomposition products from fats. But the machine lost the job to the human scent experts who had also been engaged. They identified scents that the gas chromatograph missed completely.

One substance stood out: an aldehyde called trans-4,5-epoxy-(E)-2-decenal, which emits the typical metallic scent that humans associate with blood.

Once the researchers had identified a scent candidate that the predators should be attracted to, they wanted to test whether the predators were actually attracted to it in reality. So they designed a study to be conducted at Kolmården Wildlife Park, involving four predator species. How would the four predators -- Asian wild dogs, African wild dogs, South American bush dogs and Siberian tigers -- react when they caught a whiff of the scent?

Half-metre long wooden logs were impregnated with four different liquids: lab-produced aldehyde, horse blood, fruit essence, and a near-odourless solvent. The animals were exposed to one scent per day in their regular enclosure, while a group of students carefully observed their behaviour.

The results were unequivocal. The logs containing aldehyde were just as attractive stimuli as those containing blood, while the two other logs aroused little interest. The commonest behaviours were sniffing, licking, biting, pawing and toying. The tiger was the most persistent, while the South American bush dogs lost interest more quickly than the other species.

The study is the first to show that a single component can be just as attractive as the complex odour.

"How this has developed through evolution is an interesting question. Perhaps there is a common denominator for all mammalian blood," says Prof Laska.

He has plans for several follow-ups of the study, including how prey animals such as mice react to blood odour.

For the wildlife park, the study provided results that can be used in its daily operations. Animals in captivity require stimulation, so as not to deteriorate or become fat. The odourised logs can be a popular addition to the animal's environment.

Source: Linköping University

For tiger populations, a new threat

This is an Amur tiger photographed by camera trap. Credit: WCS Russia Program

Along with the pressures of habitat loss, poaching and depletion of prey species, a new threat to tiger populations in the wild has surfaced in the form of disease, specifically, canine distemper virus (CDV). According to a new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and its partners, CDV has the potential to be a significant driver in pushing the animals toward extinction.

While CDV has recently been shown to lead to the deaths of individual tigers, its long-term impacts on tiger populations had never before been studied.

The authors evaluated these impacts on the Amur tiger population in Russia's Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik (SABZ), where tiger numbers declined from 38 individuals to 9 in the years 2007 to 2012. In 2009 and 2010, six adult tigers died or disappeared from the reserve, and CDV was confirmed in two dead tigers -- leading scientists to believe that CDV likely played a role in the overall decline of the population. Joint investigations of CDV have been an ongoing focus of WCS and Russian scientists at Sikhote-Alin Zapovednik and veterinarians at the regional Primorye Agricultural College since its first appearance in tigers in 2003.

A key finding of this study: Modeling shows that smaller populations of tigers were found to be more vulnerable to extinction by CDV. Populations consisting of 25 individuals were 1.65 times more likely to decline in the next 50 years when CDV was present. The results are profoundly disturbing for global wild tigers given that in most sites where wild tigers persist they are limited to populations of less than 25 adult breeding individuals.

The scientists used computer modeling to simulate the effects of CDV infection on isolated tiger populations of various sizes and through a series of transmission scenarios. These included tiger-to-tiger transmission and transmission through predation on CDV-infected domestic dogs and/or infected wild carnivores (such as foxes, raccoon dogs and badgers). High and low-risk scenarios for the model were created based on variation in the prevalence of CDV and the tigers' contact with sources of exposure.

Results showed that CDV infection increased the 50-year extinction probability of tigers in SABZ as much as 55.8 percent compared to CDV-free populations of equivalent size.

"Although we knew that individual tigers had died from CDV in the wild, we wanted to understand the risk the virus presents to whole populations," said WCS veterinarian Martin Gilbert. "Tigers are elusive, however, and studying the long-term impact of risk factors is very challenging. Our model, based on tiger ecology data collected over 20 years in SABZ, explored the different ways that tigers might be exposed to the virus and how these impact the extinction risk to tiger populations over the long term."

WCS Russia Program Director Dale Miquelle said, "Tigers face an array of threats throughout their range, from poaching to competition with humans for space and for food. 

Consequently, many tiger populations have become smaller and more fragmented, making them much more susceptible to diseases such as CDV. While we must continue to focus on the primary threats of poaching and habitat destruction, we now must also be prepared to deal with the appearance of such diseases in the future."

Priorities for future research, according to the authors, include identifying the domestic and wild carnivore species that contribute to the CDV reservoir, and those that are the most likely sources of infection for tigers. Tigers are too rare to sustain the virus in the long term, so CDV must rely on more abundant carnivore species to persist in the environment. 

Understanding the structure of the CDV reservoir will be a critical first step in identifying measures that might prevent or control future outbreaks. In addition, since we now know that small tiger populations are at greater risk to diseases such as CDV than larger populations, conservation strategies focusing on connectedness between populations become all the more important. "Estimating the potential impact of canine distemper virus on the Amur tiger population (Panthera tigris altaica) in Russia," appears in the current online edition of PloSONE. Authors include: Martin Gilbert of WCS and Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health at the University of Glasgow; Dale G. Miquelle of WCS; John M. Goodrich of Panthera; Richard Reeve, Sarah Cleaveland and Louise Matthews of Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health at the University of Glasgow; and Damien Joly of WCS and Metabiota.

This study was made possible through generous support from Morris Animal Foundation, Zoo Boise Conservation Fund, AZA Tiger Species Survival Plan Tiger Conservation Campaign, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

"Morris Animal Foundation is thankful to Dr. Miquelle and his team for helping protect the Amur Tigers," said Diane Brown, DVM, PhD, DACVP and Chief Scientific Officer for Morris Animal Foundation. "Our Foundation values their hard work and dedication to this study and we look forward to many more partnerships with the Wildlife Conservation Society."

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society

Camera trap images help wildlife managers ID problem tigers in India

Researchers with WCS and other partners in India are camera traps to ID individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people. Credit: WCS

Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners in India are using high-tech solutions to zero in on individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people.

In recent tiger-conflict cases involving both a human fatality and the predation of livestock, both occurring near two of India's national parks, WCS scientists helped to identify problem tigers using stripe pattern-matching software and additional information to make the connections. Both tigers have been captured and relocated to a nearby zoo.

Reducing human-wildlife conflict while promoting human welfare and conservation in important wildlife habitats is one of many topics under discussion of the World Parks Congress, a once-in-a-decade event focusing on the management and expansion of the world's protected area networks and the wildlife they contain. The congress, which took place in Sydney, Australia concluded today.

A new paper titled "Photographic Database Informs Management of Conflict Tigers" appears in the latest version of the journal Oryx. The authors are: Ullas Karanth, N. Samba Kumar, and Divya Vasudev of WCS's India Program.

"The vast majority of tigers generally avoid humans and focus only on natural prey species," said Dr. Ullas Karanth, WCS's Director for Science-Asia and lead author on the paper. 

"Using scientific methods to locate individuals involved in conflict with humans and livestock helps us to mitigate threats to people and prevent the capture of the wrong tigers, especially wherever tigers may venture beyond protected area borders."

While tigers struggle to survive in other landscapes across their range through Asia, the big cats in the Malenad Tiger Landscape of southwest India have thrived, becoming one of the largest tiger populations in the world with an estimated 400 animals.

Part of this conservation success has been due to a WCS research program focused on the identification of individual tigers. The system uses unique stripe patterns to identify and track individual animals, and software programs have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of the process. Since the initiation of the research protocol, more than 750 tigers have been identified from six protected areas in the Malanad Tiger Landscape in the Western Ghats across India. The system also enables researchers to keep track of other data such as home range locations, age and ex of individual animals, activity patterns. Over the longer term it even enables estimation of survival and recruitment rates and changes in numbers, all of which can be used to inform management decisions on wild tigers.

The tiger database has become a key factor in finding and capturing problem tigers. One of the recently captured animals was involved in the loss of human life near Bandipur National Park in late December of 2013. Scientists managed to get pictures of the animal from camera traps set up near the area of conflict and discovered a match with an animal photographed over a 5-year period and probably past its prime. Old tigers unable to catch natural prey animals can sometimes resort to hunting livestock, bringing them in conflict with people.

Another tiger, involved in the killing of cattle in a village next to Nagarahole National Park, was by contrast a 2-3 year old youngster some 35 kilometers from locations in which it was previously photographed. Scientists concluded this young tiger was likely searching for a territory, beyond protected areas.

Once ranging across Asia from Turkey to Indonesia, the tiger has been decimated by a combination of habitat destruction, overhunting of prey animal, poaching for the illegal trade and retaliatory killing by humans. The total wild population has been reduced in numbers from perhaps 100,000 at the turn of the 20th Century to a current estimate of fewer than 3,500 animals remaining in only 6 percent of the species' historic range.

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society

Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated.

The scientists fitted GPS collars and motion sensors on 38 free-ranging lynx for the study. Credit: Image courtesy of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

An international research team recorded and analyzed the activity patterns of 38 wild cats over the course of months Whether a lynx hunts by day or by night and how active it is overall depend primarily on the behavior of the wild cat's most important prey and its individual traits -- lighting conditions, on the other hand, do not play a major role in its basic behavioral patterns. This is the key finding of a study published in the journal PLOS ONE by an international research team led by forest scientist Dr. Marco Heurich.

The scientists fitted GPS collars and motion sensors on 38 free-ranging lynx for the study. Since the study sites were located across a wide latitudinal range from Central Europe to northern Scandinavia, the length of days and nights varied greatly between them. The team recorded and analyzed the activity patterns of the wild cats on a total of more than 11,000 days. The results reveal that lynx in more southerly regions are most active at dawn and dusk and that they move more by night than by day. They take their longest break in the middle of the day, and this break is extended as daylight duration increases. However, the cats exhibit this basic behavioral pattern independently of lighting conditions: "Lynx keep to a 24-hour rhythm with an active and a resting phase even on the polar day and the polar night," reports Heurich.

What the study found to be more important for explaining the wild cats' activity patterns are their individual traits: Young lynx are more active than adult lynx, and male adults are more active than female adults. In addition, they move more in spring and summer than in fall and winter, and the farther north they live, the larger the territory they cover -- and this of course results in higher activity. Lynx adapt their hunting schedule to the behavior of their prey. In polar regions, the height of their activity at dusk is less pronounced. 

This corresponds to the behavioral pattern of reindeer, which exhibit a steady movement profile outside of their sleeping phases.. In Central Europe, by contrast, the team found a maximum amount of activity at dusk -- in lynx as well as in deer. "The findings of this study make an important contribution to our understanding of the habits of predatory animals in our landscape," says Heurich. "They also show that human activities in the areas included in the study do not have a general influence on the activity pattern of the animals."

Study of mountain lion energetics shows the power of the pounce

The SMART wildlife collar is equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and a magnetometer to provide detailed data on where the animal is and what it is doing.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz, using a new wildlife tracking collar they developed, were able to continuously monitor the movements of mountain lions in the wild and determine how much energy the big cats use to stalk, pounce, and overpower their prey.

The research team's findings, published October 3 in Science, help explain why most cats use a "stalk and pounce" hunting strategy. The new "SMART" wildlife collar--equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and other high-tech features--tells researchers not just where an animal is but what it is doing and how much its activities "cost" in terms of energy expenditure.

"What's really exciting is that we can now say, here's the cost of being a mountain lion in the wild and what they need in terms of calories to live in this environment," said first author Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "Understanding the energetics of wild animals moving in complex environments is valuable information for developing better wildlife management plans."

The researchers were able to quantify, for example, the high energetic costs of traveling over rugged terrain compared to the low cost of "cryptic" hunting behaviors such as sit-and-wait or stalk-and-ambush movements. During the actual pounce and kill, the cats invest a lot of energy in a short time to overpower their prey. Data from the collars showed that mountain lions adjust the amount of energy they put into the initial pounce to account for the size of their prey.

"They know how big a pounce they need to bring down prey that are much bigger than themselves, like a full-grown buck, and they'll use a much smaller pounce for a fawn," Williams said.

Cats on treadmills

Before Williams and her team could interpret the data from collars deployed on wild mountain lions, however, they first had to perform calibration studies with mountain lions in captivity. This meant, among other things, training mountain lions to walk and run on a treadmill and measuring their oxygen consumption at different activity levels. Those studies took a bit longer than planned.

"People just didn't believe you could get a mountain lion on a treadmill, and it took me three years to find a facility that was willing to try," Williams said.

Finally, she met Lisa Wolfe, a veterinarian with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who had three captive mountain lions (siblings whose mother had been killed by a hunter) at a research facility near Fort Collins, Colorado. After eight months of training by Wolfe, the mountain lions were comfortable on the treadmill and Williams started collecting data.

Power animals

According to Williams, the treadmill data showed that mountain lions do not have the aerobic capacity for sustained, high-energy activity. "They are power animals. They have a slow routine walking speed and use a burst of speed and the force of the pounce to knock down or overpower their prey," she said.

In addition to the treadmill studies, the captive cats were videotaped wearing the collars while doing a wide range of activities in a large outdoor enclosure. This provided a library of collar acceleration signatures specific for different behaviors, from resting and grooming to running and pouncing. "We got all the different behaviors videotaped and analyzed with the corresponding accelerometer traces," Williams said.

Meanwhile, coauthor Chris Wilmers led a team that deployed the collars on wild cats in the Santa Cruz mountains. Wilmers, an associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, leads the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which has been tracking mountain lions in the area to study the effects of habitat fragmentation and developing new technology for understanding the animals' behavior and energetics.

"Because mountain lions are a cryptic animal, we can't really observe them hunting and killing prey. With the SMART collars, we can see how they go about doing that, what their strategies are, and how many calories they are expending to do it," Wilmers said. "The ability to estimate the field energetics of animals in the wild opens up a whole new suite of questions we can ask about the ecology of these animals, which ultimately informs not only our basic understanding of them but also their conservation and management."

State-of-the-art collars

Coauthor Gabriel Elkaim, professor of computer engineering at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering, worked on signal processing of the accelerometer data and is continuing to develop the state-of-the-art tracking collars. The prototype used in this study, called the Species Movement, Acceleration, and Radio Tracking (SMART) wildlife collar, was developed by computer engineering graduate student Matthew Rutishauser. The collars include a GPS unit, accelerometers, and a magnetometer to provide detailed data on where an animal is and what it is doing. "We hope this will be an enabling technology to allow a much greater depth of understanding of animals in the wild," Elkaim said.

The researchers now want to look at mountain lion energetics in a range of different habitat types. In particular, Wilmers said, he is interested in how human land use and habitat fragmentation may be influencing the energetic demands on mountain lions in the wild. Williams and her students also have projects using the new collar technology to study other large carnivores, including wolves, polar bears, and Weddell seals.

"A lot of these large carnivore species are threatened or endangered, and understanding their physiological limitations has been a big missing piece in conservation planning," Williams said. "This technology gives us a whole new level understanding of what these animals are doing and what it costs them to live in the wild, and that can really help move the science of conservation forward."

In addition to Williams, Wilmers, Wolfe, and Elkaim, the coauthors of the paper include Tracy Davis at Colorado Parks and Wildlife; program manager Traci Kendall and head trainer Beau Richter in Williams's lab at UC Santa Cruz; and UCSC graduate students Yiwei Wang and Caleb Bryce. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of California - Santa Cruz

On a safari through the genome: Genes offer new insights into the distribution of giraffes

Three young, male Angola giraffes. Credit: © Julian Fennessy, GCF

The Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis), a symbol of the African savanna and a fixed item on every safari's agenda, is a fascinating animal. However, contrary to many of the continent's other wild animals, these long-necked giants are still rather poorly studied. Based on their markings, distribution and genome, nine subspecies are recognized -- including the two subspecies Angola Giraffe (Giraffa c. angolensis) and South African Giraffe (Giraffa c. giraffa).

South African Giraffes occur farther north than previously assumed

Like most other giraffes, these subspecies are now mainly found in nature reserves. Until recently, scientists assumed a clear demarcation of their ranges: Angola Giraffes occur in Namibia and northern Botswana, while South African Giraffes reside in southern Botswana and South Africa. "However, according to our studies, the distribution areas prove to be much more complex. South African Giraffes also occur in northeastern Namibia and northern Botswana, and Angola Giraffes can be found in northwestern Namibia and southern Botswana, as well," explains the study's author, Friederike Bock from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center (BiK-F). A look at the new distribution map reveals the presence of a population of Angola Giraffes in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the world's second-largest national park, quasi nestled between two populations of the South African Giraffe, with both subspecies living side by side.

Subspecies were the result of early geographic separation

According to the research team, the fact that two genetically distinct subspecies could develop within the same region may be explained by the local geographic conditions that prevailed approximately 500,000 to two million years ago. Back then, the mountain range along the East African Rift Valley was sinking, creating vast wetlands and lakes, such as the paleo lake Makgadikgadi. According to Professor Dr. Axel Janke from the BiK-F, "these large bodies of water may have separated the populations for long periods of time. Moreover, female giraffes likely do not migrate across long distances, thereby contributing to a clear separation of the maternal lines." Today, there no longer exist any barriers that prevent the possible mingling of both subspecies; an investigation of these processes is however subject to further genetic analyses.

Angola and South African Giraffes can be uniquely identified by their maternal gene profile

For the study, the researchers created a profile of the subspecies' mitochondrial DNA, using tissue samples from about 160 giraffes from various populations across the entire African continent. On the basis of this genetic material, inherited from the maternal side, the often similarly marked subspecies can be uniquely identified genetically and the relationships between various populations can be clearly demonstrated. "Our focus was on giraffes in southern Africa, in particular in Botswana and South Africa. There, we sampled populations that had not been genetically analyzed before," says Bock.

New insights enable improved protection measures for the giraffe

According to estimates by the World Conservation Organization IUCN, the world's giraffe population is about 100,000 individuals -- showing a decreasing trend. In Botswana alone, the population has dwindled by more than half in recent years. In order to achieve effective protection measures that will preserve the majority of the giraffe's subspecies, it is indispensable to gain knowledge that allows their reliable identification as well as detailed information regarding their distribution. The surprising results concerning the distribution of the two subspecies in Namibia and Botswana emphasize the importance of additional taxonomic research on all giraffe subspecies.

Source: Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum

Electric eels deliver taser-like shocks

News research has discovered that the electric eel delivers Taser-like shocks. Credit: Kenneth Catania, Vanderbilt University

The electric eel -- the scaleless Amazonian fish that can deliver an electrical jolt strong enough to knock down a full-grown horse -- possesses an electroshock system uncannily similar to a Taser.

That is the conclusion of a nine-month study of the way in which the electric eel uses high-voltage electrical discharges to locate and incapacitate its prey. The research was conducted by Vanderbilt University Stevenson Professor of Biological Sciences Kenneth Catania and is described in the article "The shocking predatory strike of the electric eel" published in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science.

People have known about electric fish for a long time. The ancient Egyptians used an electric marine ray to treat epilepsy. Michael Faraday used eels to investigate the nature of electricity and eel anatomy helped inspire Volta to create the first battery. Biologists have determined that a six-foot electric eel can generate about 600 volts of electricity -- five times that of a U.S. electrical outlet. This summer scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced that they had sequenced the complete electric eel genome.

Until now, however, no one had figured out how the eel's electroshock system actually worked. In order to do so, Catania equipped a large aquarium with a system that can detect the eel's electric signals and obtained several eels, ranging up to four feet in length.

As he began observing the eels' behavior, the biologist discovered that their movements are incredibly fast. They can strike and swallow a worm or small fish in about a tenth of a second. So Catania rigged up a high-speed video system that ran at a thousand frames per second so he could study the eel's actions in slow motion.

Catania recorded three different kinds of electrical discharges from the eels: low-voltage pulses for sensing their environment; short sequences of two or three high-voltage millisecond pulses (called doublets or triplets) given off while hunting; and volleys of high-voltage, high-frequency pulses when capturing prey or defending themselves from attack.

He found that the eel begins its attack on free-swimming prey with a high-frequency volley of high-voltage pulses about 10 to 15 milliseconds before it strikes. In the high-speed video, it became apparent that the fish were completely immobilized within three to four milliseconds after the volley hit them. The paralysis was temporary: If the eel didn't immediately capture a fish, it normally regained its mobility after a short period and swam away.

"It's amazing. The eel can totally inactivate its prey in just three milliseconds. The fish are completely paralyzed," said Catania.

These observations raised an obvious question: How do the eels do it? For that, there was no clear answer in the scientific literature.

"I have some friends in law enforcement, so I was familiar with how a Taser works," said Catania. "And I was struck by the similarity between the eel's volley and a Taser discharge. A Taser delivers 19 high-voltage pulses per second while the electric eel produces 400 pulses per second."

The Taser works by overwhelming the nerves that control the muscles in the target's body, causing the muscles to involuntarily contract. To determine if the eel's electrical discharge had the same effect, Catania walled off part of the aquarium with an electrically permeable barrier. He placed a pithed fish on other side of the barrier from the eel and then fed the eel some earthworms, which triggered its electrical volleys. The volleys that passed through the barrier and struck the fish produced strong muscle contractions.

To determine whether the discharges were acting on the prey's motor neurons -- the nerves that control the muscles -- or on the muscles themselves, he placed two pithed fish behind the barrier: one injected with saline solution and other injected with curare, a paralytic agent that targets the nervous system. The muscles of the fish with the saline continued to contract in response to the eel's electrical discharges but the muscle contractions in the fish given the curare disappeared as the drug took effect. This demonstrated that the eel's electrical discharges were acting through the motor neurons just like Taser discharges.

Next Catania turned his attention to the way in which the eel uses electrical signals for hunting. The eel is nocturnal and doesn't have very good eyesight. So it needs other ways to detect hidden prey.

The biologist determined that the closely space doublets and triplets that the eel emits correspond to the electric signal that motor neurons send to muscles to produce an extremely rapid contraction.

"Normally, you or I or any other animal can't cause all of the muscles in our body to contract at the same time. However, that is just what the eel can cause with this signal," Catania said.
Putting together the fact that the eels are extremely sensitive to water movements with the fact that the whole-body muscle contraction causes the prey's body to twitch, creating water movements that the eel can sense, Catania concluded that the eel is using these signals to locate hidden prey.

To test this hypothesis, Catania connected a pithed fish to a stimulator.. He put the fish in a clear plastic bag to protect it from the eel's emissions. He found that when he stimulated the fish to twitch right after the eel emitted one of its signals, the eel would attack. But, when the fish failed to respond to its signal, the eel did not attack. The result supports the idea that the eel uses its electroshock system to force its prey to reveal their location.

"If you take a step back and think about it, what the eel can do is extremely remarkable," said Catania. "It can use its electrical system to take remote control of its prey's body. If a fish is hiding nearby, the eel can force it to twitch, giving away its location, and if the eel is ready to capture a fish, it can paralyze it so it can't escape."

The research was funded by a Pradel Award from the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim fellowship and National Science Foundation grant 0844743.

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Source: Vanderbilt University

Flu at the zoo and other disasters: Experts help animal exhibitors prepare for the worst

After experiencing power outages during a 2007 ice storm in Springfield, Mo., Dickerson Park Zoo officials improved their backup power and heating systems to keep animals -- like Henry, pictured here -- safe and warm. Credit: Dickerson Park Zoo

Here are three disaster scenarios for zoo or aquarium managers: One, a wildfire lunges towards your facility, threatening your staff and hundreds of zoo animals. Two, hurricane floodwaters pour into your basement, where thousands of exotic fish and marine mammals live in giant tanks. Three, local poultry farmers report avian influenza (bird flu) in their chickens, a primary source of protein for your big cats.

What do you do?

These are among the many potential disasters the managers of zoos and aquariums ponder in their emergency preparedness drills and plans. But these stories are not just worst-case scenarios: The events described above actually happened, and the aftermath -- often heroic, and sometimes tragic -- depended in large part on the institutions' preparedness training, planning and forethought in calmer times.

When bad weather strikes or illness invades, zoos and aquariums are among the most vulnerable facilities affected, said University of Illinois veterinarian Yvette Johnson-Walker, a clinical epidemiologist who contributes to emergency response training efforts at animal exhibitor institutions. She is a clinical instructor in the department of veterinary clinical medicine at Illinois, and lead author of a new paper on emergency preparedness at zoos and aquariums in the journal Homeland Security & Emergency Management.

Some animals are likely to suffer if the electricity goes out for long, she said. Others are large, skittish and dangerous under normal conditions.

Training caretakers and keepers to minimize their own risks while attending to their animals in an emergency is a challenge, but leads to the best outcomes, she said.

In 2012, Johnson-Walker joined forces with Yvonne Nadler, a project manager with the Zoo and Aquarium All Hazards Preparedness Response and Recovery Center, to bring vital emergency training to accredited animal exhibitor institutions in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri. This effort, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and supported by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums, has since expanded, providing training to staff from zoos and aquariums in 23 states.

The trainings, dubbed "Flu at the Zoo," focus on avian influenza, a viral disease that spread in the 2000s among wild and captive birds and also infected hundreds of people, primarily in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Bird flu serves as a useful model scenario to help train participants in basic preparedness skills.

One such skill is familiarity with the Incident Command System (ICS), a framework developed by firefighters and adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that allows first responders to quickly set up their emergency response operation and assign vital tasks. The ICS has long been used by public safety, law enforcement and public health entities involved in emergency response.

"We wanted zoos and aquariums to have a seat at the table when there's planning for how we're going to respond to emergencies, and to be able to fit into the system, know who to talk to and how to communicate," Johnson-Walker said.

It's also important to recognize the other responders and understand their roles, she said. If the event involves a disease like bird flu, the USDA, FEMA, National Institutes of Health, state veterinarian, state and federal wildlife services, public health authorities, veterinary organizations, police, hospitals and perhaps even local poultry operations will be involved in the response. Knowing who does what can speed communication in a crisis.

Planning also helps managers make best use of the limited supplies or equipment they have on hand, Nadler said.

"There are certain types of livestock trailers, for example, that can be adapted to moving big cats," she said. "Is that your preferred method of movement? Of course it isn't, but in an emergency that might be your only option."

One beneficiary of the emergency training, Melinda Arnold, knows firsthand the value of preparedness. Arnold is public relations director for Friends of the Zoo, affiliated with Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Missouri. The zoo suffered a blackout during a 2007 ice storm that shut off power for most of the city for several days.

"We did have backup generators," Arnold said. "The greatest problem with the generators was that those fueling stations in town that did have gas didn't have power, so they couldn't pump the gas."

Zoo staff had to travel many miles outside of the affected area with gas cans to collect gas to run the backup generators, she said.

"Now we have some propane-powered backups," Arnold said.

A more recent incident at the zoo, the accidental death of a zookeeper in 2013, caused Dickerson Park Zoo officials to re-evaluate all of their safety protocols. Even though the zookeeper had decades of experience and was guarded by a protective barrier, a skittish elephant rushed him at an unguarded moment, and he fell and was trampled to death.
"It made us step back, not only in our elephant management but in all areas of the zoo, and look at our safety procedures and points of contact with dangerous animals and evaluate those safety conditions and make improvements," Arnold said.

The preparedness plans, drills, discussions and training all help zoos and aquariums reassess their procedures, even those that seem to be safe after decades of operations and no major incidents, she said.

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign