At the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Washington, inmates are raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs for reintroduction into the wild. Compared with frogs raised in zoo programs, the frogs at Cedar Creek are significantly beefier and reach maturity faster. Maybe that’s because the prisoners, who are paid 42 cents per hour for their work, baby their tiny charges day and night. They monitor the water constantly and make sure that each frog gets plenty of crickets to eat.

The frogs are entrusted to prisoners as eggs, not much bigger than the tip of a pencil. The prisoners keep detailed notes and growth charts as the eggs grow into tadpoles, then frogs, before being released into a protected wetland at Joint Base Lewis-McChord—a large army and air force facility at the southern end of Puget Sound. Cedar Creek inmates raised 162 frogs last year, recently doubled their capacity, and are taking in undersized frogs from zoos for special attention.

Raising frogs is just one of several conservation efforts established by the Sustainable Prisons Project, a partnership between The Evergreen State College and the Washington State Department of Corrections. At a large men’s prison in Aberdeen, Washington, inmates are rearing 16 species of rare native plants for prairie restoration and conducting experiments with smoke-infused water to stimulate seed germination. Meanwhile, prisoners working in a new greenhouse at the Mission Creek Correction Center for Women are raising endangered Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies, which have been reduced to a few small, isolated populations in the Pacific Northwest. The prisoners not only tend the rare butterflies but also help scientists study which plants the butterflies prefer for laying their eggs.

Prisons turn out to be an ideal place for this type of conservation work, because they are carefully controlled environments that are home to people with lots of time on their hands. Prison administrators, who know that idleness can be dangerous, have embraced the program.

In a world that couldn’t be farther removed from nature, inmates are bonding with plants and animals. The project’s directors hope that the prisoners will gain not only a stewardship ethic but also valuable job experience and an appreciation for science and the environment.

The notion of using prisoners for conservation work isn’t entirely new, of course. For decades, minimum-security prisoners have been assigned to fight wildfires, conduct prescribed burns, build trails, erect fencing, set traps for invasive predators, and plant trees. But only in the past three years have prisons begun to take on a new mission of conserving endangered species.

The Sustainable Prisons Project now operates in four Washington prisons, and project leaders hope to teach prison officials from across the West how to implement similar programs in their own states. The conservation projects are part of a larger sustainability effort that also gets inmates involved in gardening, composting, recycling, beekeeping, aquaculture, and working with dogs and cats to make them adoptable. Some projects aim to reduce the carbon footprint of prisons, while others focus on economics. One prison, for example, was able to avoid a costly upgrade to its water-treatment plant simply by asking prisoners to scrape their plates before washing them. For all these programs, the prisoners learn not just how to do things sustainably but also why.

“Prisons could be models for sustainable societies, because everything that comes into and out of a prison is monitored. They have to function as self-reliantly as possible,” says Carri LeRoy, a stream ecologist at Evergreen and, with Washington’s director of prisons, codirector of the Sustainable Prisons Project.

Because 97 percent of all prisoners re-enter society at some point, the project’s directors hope that it will do as much for prisoners as for the vanishing species that they are helping to restore. “Even though their time might not be up yet, [prisoners] can have some comfort in knowing that these organisms get back out there,” LeRoy says.

In 2010, for the first time, scientists from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife found egg masses in the wetland where they had released the Oregon spotted frogs raised by prisoners. That means some of the frogs have survived and are successfully reproducing in the wild. ❧

—Dawn Stover

Photos by Benj Drummond, courtesy of Sustainable Prisons Project

The God Species
By Mark Lynas
National Geographic, 2011

On or about October 31, 2011—for the first time in history—the world population topped 7 billion. According to Mark Lynas, it’s a human world, and everything else is just along for the ride. So what do we call this epoch? The Homogocene? The Anthropocene? For Lynas, such terms are insufficient. People are not merely the central characters in this new world—they are its gods. Lynas joins the growing chorus of neo-environmentalists who argue that saving the world will require us to be more human, not less. That is, we need to embrace technologies, such as nuclear power and genetic engineering, that environmentalists traditionally view with suspicion. Lynas tackles his topic with broad strokes. He defines a host of planetary boundaries—including biodiversity loss, freshwater use, ozone depletion—and deals with each in turn, rigorously documenting its dire straits and suggesting alternative paths to salvation. ❧

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The Nature Principle
By Richard Louv
Algonquin Books, 2011

In his 2008 book, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv argued that severing the connection between children and the outdoors stunts development, leading to what he called “nature-deficit disorder.” In The Nature Principle, he turns his attention to adults and coins a new term—Vitamin N (“N” is for nature). In a world where the only glow many people see comes from an LED screen, we need natural light. With more Vitamin N, a new class of “citizen naturalists” will emerge, leading healthier, suppler, and more attentive lives. The book is something of a clearinghouse of research and accounts on the restorative powers of the planet and its nonhuman denizens. “Inevitably,” Louv writes at one point, “the context is shifting from humans and nature to humans in nature and humans as nature.” ❧

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My Green Manifesto
By David Gessner
Milkweed Editions, 2011

Manifestos are usually born of rage, but David Gessner’s seems to come from a sense of weariness. Tired of “guilt-ridden mystical envirospeak,” Gessner takes to the Charles River and canoes his way toward a new environmentalism—by way of “Bahw-ston.” When his guide, Dan Driscoll, was just starting out as a young environmental planner, the Charles was a famously stinking cesspool. But, Driscoll tells Gessner, “I looked at the maps and saw possibilities.” Twenty years later, the banks of the Charles are home to native plants, birds, and other wildlife as well as to Gessner’s hope. Rivers, John McPhee has written, symbolize life. And this is true for Gessner. Environmentalism, he argues, should begin with just such a connection to a place. The Charles River—compromised but beautiful, wild if you know where to look—is his. ❧

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1493
By Charles C. Mann
Knopf, 2011

In his previous book, 1491, Charles Mann upended a bevy of popular beliefs about the pre-Columbian Americas. In 1493, he picks up the story on the other side of colonization. Where previous historians saw technical superiority, metallurgy, or some other manifestation of European imperialism, Mann sees biology. Europe and the Americas, separated for 200 million years, were suddenly joined and thousands of species ferried between the two continents. From Jamestown and tobacco through Ireland and the potato; from malaria and slavery to economics, ecology, and epidemiology—Mann tugs and tests many, many threads. But his telling is lively and clear. “Events four centuries ago,” he writes, “set a template for events we are living through today.” ❧

Gary Paul Nabhan of the University of Arizona in Tucson spent much of his career highlighting the need to preserve heirloom crops and culturally important native plants. Now he’s taken on the threat that modern food processing and cultural homogenization pose to the biodiversity of peperoni, pickles—and beer. In other words, Nabhan is calling on the conservation world to protect the microbial menagerie that brings us flavor.

Let’s define our terms: what are food microbes?
They’re the reason all beers do not taste like Budweiser and the reason that the yogurt I grew up eating in Lebanon was distinctively sour and viscous and easy on the stomach. More precisely, food microbes are microscopic life forms that give special tastes and textures to the foods and drinks they’re used to ferment.

Some tasty examples, please.
Soy sauce, tofu, pickles, fish sauce, crème fraîche, sauerkraut, peperoni, chorizo, sake, and wine. I could go on for quite some time, since there are tens of thousands of these foods and drinks around the world.

And where did the cultures used to make these products come from?
People have been finding and domesticating food microbes since before we knew what microbes were. In China, there is evidence that people drank fermented drinks at least 8,000 years ago. In Egypt, we’ve discovered the remains of leavened bread dating back at least 4,000 years. Fermentation quickly spread around the world in an intensely local way. [Microbial] cultures used for some breads were kept secret from outsiders; cultures used to help make wine varied from valley to valley.

What went wrong?
Many things, starting roughly 50 years ago. Mass production pushed a lot of locally fermented foods off the market, as did the rapid spread of the idea that foods were safe only when sterilized. The indiscriminate use of microbial soaps may have helped wipe out local cultures, as has the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.

I would guess that nobody paid attention to the disappearance of these cultures.
Back then, there weren’t any scientists who studied microbial ethnobiology—and there were plenty who looked for ways to fight the “bad” microbes that helped spread human diseases. There’s much more awareness now of the potential threat to local food microbes and the tastes they help produce. But we’ve still got a long way to go: As far as I know, there’s still only one country that is actively attempting to conserve and catalog important food-based microbes. That is Ethiopia, where the National Institute of Biodiversity Conservation maintains roughly 400 microbial cultures collected from local kitchens.

So who comes to the rescue here?
Several groups could help a lot, beginning with the scientists who finally have the tools needed to count and study more “good” microbes. That field of science is exploding now, which is a good thing.

Is there a role for so-called “citizen scientists” . . . “kitchen scientists”?
It’s essential. They can start maintaining and reviving local food microbes, just as many [gardeners] now husband their heirloom seeds. If that kind of movement spreads, it’s sure to turn a lot of heads.

And what about the companies that collect and sell live “probiotics” for your guts . . . the brewers who fly all over, looking for cultures that will make their beer taste better. Can they help?
A lot, unless they try to patent their discoveries. Then we’ll have a whole new set of problems.

Nabhan, G.P. 2009. Ethnoecology: Bridging disciplines, cultures, and species. Journal of Ethnobiology doi:2993/0278-0771-29.1.3.

Illustration by David Badders

By Elin Kelsey

Consider this. You and I may not know each other, but we probably know some of the same people. At least we know someone who knows someone who knows someone we have in common. “It’s a small world,” we say when a new acquaintance turns out to be linked to us through a chain of other people. It happens surprisingly often. Everyone, so the saying goes, is separated from one another by no more than six degrees of separation—by six friends or friends of friends. The six degrees of separation hypothesis originated in 1929 in a short story called “Chains” by the Hungarian writer Karinthy Frigyes. A range of social psychologists, mathematicians, and Internet gurus have been applying and confirming its validity ever since. The idea is famous for inspiring the play Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare and the subsequent 1993 movie starring Will Smith. You can even test the theory yourself by logging on to the website of the computer science department at the University of Virginia and linking the relationships between any film star in the world and the actor Kevin Bacon, via the Oracle of Bacon website.

Now it turns out that dolphins are even more closely connected to one another than we are. David Lusseau, an ecologist at the University of Aberdeen, has spent more than a decade studying the social networks of dolphins to find out who knows whom and how often they meet. In the 130-strong community of bottlenose dolphins living off the east coast of Scotland, he discovered it takes an average of just 3.9 steps to link any two dolphins by the shortest possible route through mutual friends. Lusseau previously found a small world in a New Zealand population of bottlenose dolphins with 3.4 steps between animals. Such tight social networks might facilitate the rapid spread of news, such as the location of a food source. “Adult females serve as hubs of information. They have a large number of associates,” explains Alejandro Acevedo-Gutiérrez, an ecologist at Western Washington University. He believes dolphin communities could be very vulnerable to the loss of a few key individuals. The impact of 6 million dolphin deaths imposed by the tuna fishery on the cultural stability of dolphin populations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific is impossible to fathom.

Trauma affects societies directly through an individual’s experience and indirectly through the collapse of traditional social structures. The effects of violence persist long after the event. Studies of human genocide survivors indicate that trauma early in life has lasting effects on the brain and behavior. A December 2005 article in the Washington Post reports a drastic increase in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) claims in the past five years. “Experts say the sharp increase does not begin to factor in the potential impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because the increase is largely the result of Vietnam War vets seeking treatment decades after their combat experiences.”

Gay Bradshaw, a psychologist with the environmental sciences program at Oregon State University, studies human-caused breakdown of elephant communities in Africa and Asia. In 2005 she and a team of prominent wildlife researchers made international news with their announcement that elephants, too, suffer from PTSD. “Elephant society in Africa has been decimated by mass deaths and social breakdown from poaching, culls, and habitat loss,” they write. From an estimated ten million elephants in the early 1900s, there are only half a million left today. Wild elephants are displaying symptoms associated with human PTSD: abnormal startle response, depression, unpredictable asocial behavior, and hyperaggression.”

According to Bradshaw, elephants are renowned for their close relationships. Young elephants are reared in a matriarchal society, deeply embedded in complex layers of extended family. Culls and illegal poaching have fragmented these patterns of social attachment by eliminating the matriarchs and older female caregivers (what scientists call allomothers). Calves witnessing culls and those raised by young, inexperienced mothers are high-risk candidates for later stress disorders, including an inability to regulate stress-reactive aggressive states. Even the fetuses of young pregnant female elephants can be affected by prenatal stress during culls.

If our understanding of dolphin societies truly does lag a century behind our knowledge of land animals, as Bruce Mate claims, it will be too many years before the full impact of the yellowfin tuna fishery on dolphins is understood. For now the meaning of “dolphin-safe” continues to be debated in the courts, and no standardized system for labeling tuna exists.

These are the thoughts that haunt me as I gaze at the “classic tuna” option on the Subway Sandwich menu. “Dolphin-safe tuna and creamy mayonnaise are lovingly blended together to make one of the world’s favorite comfort foods,” the sign reads. Trouble is, I no longer feel comfortable. ❧

–Elin Kelsey is the author of Saving Sea Otters, Finding Out about Whales, Strange New Species, and other books. She consults for environmental organizations including the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). She is a faculty member in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University in Canada.

This essay is adapted from Watching Giants: The Secret Lives of Whales by Elin Kelsey; published by University of California Press. ©2009 by The Regents of the University of California.

Image © Marty Wakat | Dreamstime.com

The Lionfish Cookbook: The Caribbean’s New Delicacy
By Tricia Ferguson and Lad Akins
Reef Environmental Education Foundation, 2010

It’s not a new idea, Navjot S. Sodhi of the National University of Singapore, Rhett Butler of Mongabay.com, and Peter H. Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden concede in Biotropica. “Similar calls have been made previously,” they write, “but the current level of disarray (e.g., ongoing habitat loss and unrestricted commercial exploitation) warrants a reiteration.” Also fueling their concern is a perception that current large-scale efforts to reduce tropical deforestation, such as the United Nation’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) effort, “have been conceived in such a way as to limit community involvement, a fatal flow over the short to medium run.”

“Protected areas (PAs) often present quintessential examples of top–down conservation initiatives,” they note. “For those who live in industrialized countries, the preservation of large, pristine, wilderness areas is often seen as an essential component of all approaches to conservation… Driven by this philosophy, the forcible expulsion of indigenous or rural people from some conservation areas in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia has led to serious conflicts between conservationists/governments and local people, and has sometimes even increased the intensity of natural resource harvesting. These examples illustrate the necessity of building a greater understanding of the existing interactions of local people with nature as an important component in achieving effective levels of conservation. Unfortunately, human interactions with nature, including cultural and spiritual aspects of resource harvesting, have been generally undervalued or misunderstood.”

There are some exceptions, the authors argue. In Thailand, for example, conservationists have integrated 28 hornbill poachers into conservation efforts, producing a 39% increase in the number of nests with fledglings. In Borneo, “locals gain affordable healthcare through forest protection… and additional incentives are given to the communities that protect” local parklands from illegal logging. In Indonesia, conservationists are working to protect the endangered maleo bird (Macrocephalon maleo) – the eggs of which are an important local food source – by helping people shift an alternative prey, an invasive fish. And in India, researchers are helping develop a local technology – a cheap water filtration system that uses rice husks, an abundant waste product – to produce local benefits.

“We urge a heightened effort to understand existing environmental technology used in the developing world,” the authors conclude. “If practiced widely, these may curb environmental damage and thus benefit biodiversity and human well-being.” – David Malakoff | September 5, 2011

Source: Sodhi, N., Butler, R., & Raven, P. (2011). Bottom-up Conservation. Biotropica, 43 (5), 521-523 DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2011.00793.x

Image © Yurmary | Dreamstime.com

Changing a dirty diaper isn’t a fun job. Eating a diaper is even less fun, but luckily there are fungi that can do just that.

Oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus, can devour 90 percent of a disposable diaper within two months, observed Alethia Vázquez-Morillas of the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City in the journal Waste Management. (1) What’s more, the mushrooms grown on diapers are edible. Vázquez-Morillas has dined upon them herself.

“They are cleaner than most of the vegetables you can find in the market, at least in Mexico,” said Vázquez-Morillas in an interview with The Economist. Disposable diapers normally take centuries to biodegrade in landfills. They are mostly made of cellulose, the tough material that plants use for structural support. In the airless netherworld of a landfill, cellulose can take 500 years to break down. But oyster mushrooms thrive on cellulose. They are already grown on cellulose-rich materials such as barley straw, coffee grounds, and even the leftovers from making tequila.

Mexico alone throws away 5 billion diapers a year, noted Vázquez-Morillas. When you consider the billions of diapers thrown away around the world, a huge waste-management problem could be turned into a cheap supply of mushroom food.

But will people really eat mushrooms grown on Junior’s diapers? Vázquez-Morillas asserts they are safe, since the diapers are sterilized before use. The diapers are steam-sterilized before being inoculated with mushroom mycelium, the network of white threads that makes up much of the fungus’s structure. Steaming kills any bacteria and other fungi that could out-compete the oyster mushrooms for living space on the diapers. It should also knock out any creatures that cause disease in humans.

Unfortunately, the cost of steam-cleaning could make the process economically impractical as far as growing mushrooms for market is concerned. But the value of breaking down diapers goes beyond the sale price of oyster mushrooms.

Landfills are filling up fast and becoming more expensive to build. Reducing the intake of garbage extends the life of the landfills already in existence. And it looks like mushrooms can help. ♣

—Tim Wall

1. Espinosa-Valdemar, R.M. 2011. Disposable diapers biodegradation by the fungus Pleurotus ostreatus. Waste Management doi:10.1016/j.wasman.2011.03.007.

From: “Tasty Mushrooms From Dirty Diapers” by Tim Wall, posted on DiscoveryNews.com on June 15, 2011.  Courtesy of Discovery Communications, LLC.

By Adelheid Fischer

Field Notes on Science & Nature
Michael Canfield, editor
Harvard University Press, 2011

In science, a journal article usually represents a process finished, an end of a sort. In this rich and beautiful volume, editor Michael Canfield lets us see the means to that end: the scribbles and sketches and half-formed ideas that, in the hands of our most accomplished field biologists, advance scientific understanding. Canfield presents excerpts of the notes and journals of a dozen scientists and naturalists, from Bernd Heinrich to George Schaller to Jenny Keller. The visuals alone are often astonishing. “The humblest field record is always an act of translation,” writes Jonathan Kingdon, a taxonomist and illustrator, at the start of his chapter. Flip forward to his field sketches—field sketches!—of the golden mole or the red-tailed guenon monkey. Linger over a few pages from Claire Emery’s illustrated notebooks. Translation never looked so good.

The Wild Life of Our Bodies
By Rob Dunn
Harper, 2011

“Let our lives again be where the wild things are.” So begins The Wild Life of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn, a biology professor at North Carolina State University. Your body is an ecosystem teeming with complex interactions, and Dunn is out to make you comfortable with that fact. Much of our evolution, he argues, was carried out in congress with creatures that we now try to wipe out with antibacterial soap (kills 99.9 percent of germs!) or antibiotics. Dunn explores how rekindling those older relationships, such as rewilding your gut with intestinal parasites, might actually help people lead healthier lives. After all, how different is that from restoring a wetland? “We have gone from lives immersed in nature to lives in which nature appears to have disappeared,” he writes. “Our disconnection from the nature in which we evolved is unprecedented in its extent and in its consequences.” This reviewer is not altogether sure he’s ready to give himself a hookworm to stave off Crohn’s disease, however.

Changing Planet, Changing Health
By Paul Epstein and Dan Ferber
University of California Press, 2011

In the 1980s, about four percent of American children suffered from asthma. By 1995, that figure had doubled—a rise that Paul Epstein links to climate change. In the book Changing Planet, Changing Health, Epstein, a medical doctor with Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, and journalist Dan Ferber crisscross the planet to muck about in the trenches of various climate-related health crises. In Mozambique, Epstein confronts a cholera epidemic, seeing in the disease’s quick spread a harbinger of calamity: a vast, marine reservoir of the bacterium that causes the illness and that is made more virulent as the oceans warms. Elsewhere, in North America, malarial mosquitoes are able to spread with the heat to more northerly climes. The book makes for a sober read. Epstein and Ferber might not come right out and say it, but climate change quite literally is killing us.

“The more you think you know, the more you think you’re right.” Now comes a study of sex, skin color, and political ideology that suggests this pretty much sums up how some white male conservatives in the U.S. respond to climate change.

“Even casual observers” of those arguing that climate change isn’t a serious problem “likely notice an obvious pattern,” Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University in East Lansing and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater write in Global Environmental Change. “The most prominent denialists are conservative white males”—from media pundit Rush Limbaugh to politicians such as Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe. But the pair wondered: “Does a similar pattern exist in the American public?”

To find out, the researchers analyzed ten annual polls on environmental issues conducted by the Gallup organization from 2001 to 2010. Together, they included responses from more than 10,000 adults. After slicing and dicing the numbers, the researchers spotted clear trends: “Conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views,” they write. And “these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.”

Overall, while 29.6 percent of conservative white males (CWMs) believed that the effects of global warming “will never happen,” just 7.4 percent of all other adults shared that view. Similarly, 58.5 percent of CWMs—but only 31.5 percent of all other adults—denied that recent temperature increases are caused primarily by human activities.

• We Have Met the Enemy–and It Isn’t Ignorance
• Why is Climate Change Denial So Seductive?
• Beyond an Unreasonable Doubt

But “denialism is sufficiently diffuse within the American public that it obviously cannot be attributed solely to conservative white males,” they note. “What is most sobering, especially for the scientific community and climate-change communicators, is that climate-change denial has actually increased in the U.S. general public between 2001 and 2010.”

– David Malakoff

McCright, A.M. and R.E. Dunlap. 2011. Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States. Global Environmental Change doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.06.00

Photo: ©Robert Byron/Dreamstime.com

The Baby Boom is about to give way to the Corpse Boom, as planners begin to ponder where we’ll bury the roughly 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. The die-off will boost demand for burial space and pose a challenge to land-use planners, a new study concludes—but also create opportunities for innovative, conservation-friendly “landscapes of death.”

“Creating cemeteries may be one of the most lasting land-use decisions a community makes, fraught with all manner of wicked issues,” researchers from Florida State University in Tallahassee and from Iowa State University in Ames write in Landscape and Urban Planning. There can be concerns about how bodies are handled and allowed to decay, plus conflicts over converting green spaces to more dedicated uses.

And once the bodies are in the ground, cemeteries can become hallowed ground: “The geography of burial is essentially permanent: difficult to move and almost as difficult to plan around.”

Despite these challenges, demand is up. Researchers estimate there are already more than 100,000 cemeteries in the U.S., but the distribution “is quite uneven, ranging from around 30 in Hawaii to over 12,000 in Tennessee,” the authors note. And with a majority of Americans saying they still prefer to be embalmed and buried in a casket—not just cremated and scattered to the winds or waves—there will be a need for millions of new plots.

The researchers offer a system for figuring out just how much more burying ground a city or region might need. It “requires the understanding of four factors: mortality rates, cremation rates, burial migration (how many bodies are moved elsewhere for burial), and the land area available for interment,” they note. So, for instance, they calculate that Palm Beach County in Florida—which has more than a million residents, many of them elderly—could need another 66 acres of cemeteries over the next 30 years. Such totals, however, could be much lower if Americans adopt land-saving burial practices that are commonplace elsewhere—such as “rent-a-graves,” which allow cemetery owners to bury new bodies on top of old ones after decades-long leases run out.

• Exit Strategies
• Last Wishes

– David Malakoff

Coutts, C., et al. 2011. Projecting landscapes of death. Landscape and Urban Planning doi:10.1016/j.landurbplan.2011.05.005.

Photo: ©Linda Steward/iStock.com

“There is a lot of research looking at poverty in parks, but much of it amounts to looking just at the present-day location of poverty,” says geographer Lisa Naughton-Treves of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), the lead author of the study, which appears in a special section of the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences focused on biodiversity conservation and poverty. In contrast, her team spent a decade – from 1996 to 2006 – studying the changing fortunes of 252 families living near Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Then, using statistical techniques to combine field data with land-use trends gathered from satellite images, the team was able to answer some basic questions, Naughton-Treves says: “What were the starting conditions? What were the ending conditions? And did the park matter?”

The general trend, they report, was toward greater prosperity, as measured by access to clean drinking water, ownership of more livestock, and living under an improved roof rather than the traditional thatch. “Most of the households came out ahead, are a lot better off than when we started,” said Naughton-Treves, who has worked in Uganda for more than 20 years. “I go back every couple of years, and people are generally optimistic, some say they never imagined life would be this good.”

That doesn’t mean poverty wasn’t a problem. Ten percent of the families in the original study sold or lost their land and moved away, which indicates severe poverty, notes co-author Jennifer Alix-Garcia of UW-M. “The sale of land does not sound so terrible to us, but in Uganda, land is your most productive asset, and once you sell it, you don’t have anything to rely on.”

The park, however, appears to buffer the very poor from the worst outcomes, perhaps explaining why the poor are disproportionately represented along the park boundary. “Apparently the park provides a source of insurance,” Alix-Garcia says. People “can hunt, or sell firewood or thatch from the park,” she says. So appearances can be “misleading. If you look, you see more poor people living near the park. But when you look at the change in assets, you see that the poor people who live next to the park have lost less than poor people who live farther away.”

The take-home message: The park is unlikely to explain the increased poverty among its close neighbors.

“This project demonstrates the value of using integrated approaches to examine the complex interactions between people and the environments they occupy,” says Thomas Baerwald of the U.S. National Science Foundation, which partially funded the study.

But it’s not clear what the Uganda results mean for the rest of the world, since parks, landscapes, societies and economies vary widely, Naughton-Treves says. But the study is one of the first to look at parks and poverty over the long term, and the results challenge the notion that parks are to blame for poverty. “There are many other factors,” she says, such shrinking land availability. “It’s not just the park.” – David Malakoff | August 24, 2011

Source: Naughton-Treves, L., Alix-Garcia, J., & Chapman, C. (2011). Biodiversity Conservation and Poverty Traps Special Feature: Lessons about parks and poverty from a decade of forest loss and economic growth around Kibale National Park, Uganda. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (34), 13919-13924 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1013332108

Image Courtesy Lisa Naughton-Treves, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“The ways human beings benefit from the conservation of invertebrates are hard to quantify and the general public is often unaware of them,” the quartet — Pedro Cardoso and Terry L. Erwin of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Paulo A.V. Borges of the Universidade dos Açores in Portugal, and Tim R. New of La Trobe University in Australia – write in Biological Conservation. About 80% of all described species are invertebrates, they note, and economists estimate that insects alone provide $57 billion a year in pollination and other services. “Despite their high diversity and importance for humankind,” however, “invertebrates are often neglected in biodiversity conservation policies.”

There are at least seven reasons, they write. “Three of the impediments are societal dilemmas, which interested parties face when deciding how important invertebrate conservation is,” they note. “Four of the impediments are scientific shortfalls, related to areas of knowledge that are still far from sufficient and that sometimes reflect critical lack of data and understanding.”

The seven impediments are:

(1) Invertebrates and their ecological services are mostly unknown to the general public – a problem the team dubs “the public dilemma.”

(2) Policymakers and stakeholders are mostly unaware of invertebrate conservation problems (the political dilemma).

(3) Basic science on invertebrates is scarce and underfunded (the scientific dilemma).

(4) Most species are undescribed (called the Linnean shortfall, after Carl Linneaus, the pioneering 18th century naturalist who devised the system for naming species).

(5) The distribution of described species is mostly unknown (the Wallacean shortfall, named after the 19th century biological geographer Alfred Russell Wallace ).

(6) The abundance of species and their changes in space and time are unknown (the Prestonian shortfall, named after biologist Frank Preston, who studied how common and rare species change over space and time).

(7) Species ways of life and sensitivities to habitat change are largely unknown (the Hutchinsonian shortfall, after 20th century ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson).

There are solutions to each of these dilemmas, the authors write. To boost the public profile of invertebrates, and help overcome some of the political impediments, the researchers recommend “better public information and marketing,” including greater use of “red lists” of threatened species, and making sure invertebrates are addressed in environmental impact studies. For the scientific dilemmas, they offer a range of solutions, including greater use of citizen science programs to catalog species, increased funding for taxonomy, inventories and related studies, and the creation of standardized protocols for inventorying and monitoring.

“These impediments represent only one of the several possible ways of dividing the problems related to invertebrate conservation,” the authors conclude. But it is, they add, a “constructive” way of conceptualizing a tough problem. – David Malakoff | August 21, 2011

Source: Cardoso, P., et al. The seven impediments in invertebrate conservation and how to overcome them. Biol. Conserv. (2011), doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2011.07.024

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“Unfortunately in conservation and natural resource management, many of the behaviors of concern are sensitive because they are illegal or socially taboo,” a team led by Julia P.G. Jones of Bangor University in the United Kingdom notes in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. As a result, it can be hard to know who to target in campaigns aimed at protecting endangered species from poaching. But new survey methods have the potential to produce “improved estimates of the prevalence of illegal natural resource use,” the researchers note.

Some methods rest on a psychological concept known as the “false consensus effect,” in which people tend to imagine that others are more like themselves than they really are. So cigarette smokers, for example, are more likely to estimate that a higher proportion of people smoke than non-smokers. Another method, known as “randomized response technique” (RRT), uses dice to “add an element of chance to the question-answer process.” If the respondent rolls certain numbers, for instance, they are instructed to tell the truth, but other numbers require a “yes” or “no” regardless of the truth. “RRT has been shown to increase the validity of data on sensitive topics,” such as illegal abortion and health insurance fraud, the researchers note.

To see if such methods might offer insight into who was killing both threatened and non-threatened carnivores in north-eastern South Africa, the researchers administered surveys to 99 farmers who were attending cattle and game auctions between May and September of 2010. Survey questions probed their attitudes towards carnivores and other predators, whether they were using poison to kill them, and if they held valid permits when killing protected species.

The results suggest that “the majority of respondents had killed snakes, and more than 45% had killed the common and widespread jackal, while 22% had killed caracal (the other nonprotected species included in the study),” the authors write. “Nineteen percent of farmers had killed leopards on their ranches in the last 12 months, while only 6%… had killed brown hyaena.” About 20% of farmers had used poison to kill carnivores, and hunted without a valid permit, the surveys suggested.

The leopard numbers, in particular, are “worrying, given the species’ low reproductive rate, cub and sub-adult survival,” the team notes. And the relatively widespread use of poison suggests that “communication and/or enforcement of wildlife laws is inadequate.”

But the survey also suggested that “farmers’ decisions to kill carnivores on their land is not based purely on economic costs and benefits,” and that education and marketing campaigns might help increase “tolerance” toward the animals. “A social marketing campaign promoting the view already held by many farmers, that killing protected carnivores is generally socially unacceptable, and encouraging national pride and tolerance towards South Africa’s protected carnivores may be an effective way of changing farmers’ behavior,” the team concluded. In the meantime, however, the researchers suggest simply stepping up law enforcement may be the best way to protect leopards and hyenas. – David Malakoff | August 8, 2011

Source: St John, F., Keane, A., Edwards-Jones, G., Jones, L., Yarnell, R., & Jones, J. (2011). Identifying indicators of illegal behaviour: carnivore killing in human-managed landscapes Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1228

Image Richard Yarnell.

Until recently, water resource vulnerability assessments typically tackled only the waterways themselves, ignoring economic and social issues, three researchers from Finland’s Aalto University note in Applied Geography. “The vulnerability of rivers and river basins is in many ways preconditioned by the governance situation, economic status, social matters, hazard occurrence and so forth.”

To give policy makers a more useful way of thinking about the future, they took a broader view of ten river basins that stretch across 12 nations: the Indus, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Irrawaddy, Salween, Chao Phraya, Mekong, Red River, Pearl River, Yangtze and Yellow River. “The governance systems of the twelve countries under study are in a precarious position,” they write, “given the vast and rapidly changing challenges that the countries and the river basins are facing.” About 1.7 billion people currently live in the basins, for instance, but by 2050 that number could grow to more than 2.4 billion. Rapid urbanization and economic development is leading to overexploitation of resources and water quality problems.

To assess these threats, the research team created a risk profile for each basin using a variety of data on environmental conditions, demographics and governance. The most vulnerable rivers, they concluded, are South Asia’s Indus and the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna system. The other eight river basins received lower but similar vulnerability scores, but with different underlying causes. For three river basins in China, for example, ”the poor state of the environment appears to be the biggest challenge,” but in Southeast Asia, rivers “seem to be particularly vulnerable in terms of governance, economy, environment and hazards” (such as flooding).

Their method ends up providing an explanation of threats that is more accessible to non-technical audiences, the researchers write. And they believe it gives a more complete picture by examining “the interlinkages of water to several other sectors and facets of the human society as well as of the natural system.” – Matthew Dieter | August 1, 2011

Source: Olli Varis, Matti Kummu, and Aura Salmivaara (2011). Ten major rivers in monsoon Asia-Pacific: An assessment of vulnerability. Applied Geography DOI:10.1016/j.apgeog.2011.05.003.

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The critically endangered turtle, known to science as Dermatemys mawii, is entirely aquatic. It primarily lives in three isolated river basins in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize that are separated by high mountains. So when scientists launched a genetic study by collecting tissue samples from 238 wild turtles from 15 locations, they expected to find “a different genetic lineage in each drainage basin,” says Gracia González-Porter of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

Instead, the testing showed a “surprising lack” of genetic structure, González-Porter and her colleagues report in Conservation Genetics. “We found the mixing of lineages; it was all over the place,” she says, suggesting the turtle populations had been in close contact for years.

How could that have happened? The answer, the researchers say, may rest with the Maya and even older Olmec culture, which appear to have traded the turtles for ritual and food use. Archeologists have found the remains of one turtle, for instance, in an ancient Teotihuacan burial site in Mexico, more than 186 miles outside of the turtle’s current range. And there is an ancient sculpture of a river turtle that was found in the Basin of Mexico, more than 217 miles outside the current range.

“The turtle is tame and resilient,” González-Porter explains, “which makes it easy to transport. Their shells give them lots of protection. People don’t have refrigeration so they put the turtles in ponds in their back yards.” And during the rainy season, floods could have allowed the captive turtles to escape and mix with the local turtles.

The ancient practice still persists today. In Guatemala, Central American river turtles are kept in medium-sized ponds where they can be easily captured when needed. Similarly, in the State of Tabasco, Mexico, captured turtles are kept in rustic ponds and raised until they are either consumed or sold.

Unfortunately, the taste for turtle meat is threatening the future of the turtle, the last surviving species of a once large family of giant river turtles. A kilogram of river turtle meat can now fetch $100, and the turtles are now largely restricted to remote areas that are inaccessible to humans. – David Malakoff | July 24, 2011

Source: González-Porter, G. et al. 2011. Patterns of genetic diversity in the critically endangered Central American river turtle: human influence since the Mayan age? Conservation Genetics DOI: 10.1007/s10592-011-0225-x

Image courtesy of Gracia González-Porter

“Water is one of the most important physical, aesthetic landscape elements,” Sebastian Völker and Thomas Kistemann write in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health. But researchers have shown an “inattentiveness to blue space [that] makes it difficult to measure long-term effects of blue space on well-being.” To bring more attention to the issue, the pair launched a global search for studies on the benefits of inland water bodies. From a pool of thousands of water-related papers, they ultimately analyzed 36 studies from industrialized nations that examine everything from water’s impacts on emotion to its role in relaxing recreation.

Overall, the studies show that people often respond positively to the presence of water. But “important aspects of the sensual perception of blue space” include “the sound of water, its color, clarity, motion, and context,” the authors note. In some studies “blue water is generally preferred to yellow water… Blue water is associated with coolness, white water with power and roaring sounds” and “yellow waters are accepted when they are perceived as natural.”

Researchers have also found that “the occurrence of, for example, gently curving banks, calm aquatic scenes, high diversity or an admirable human urban design enhance the aesthetic values of blue spaces.” People also often recognize water “as a natural mirror, creating mystery by providing a picture that is not as clear as a normal mirror.” And many religions have a “concept of water as a ‘sacred substance.’” A little liquid also can make people feel better. “The perception of cleanliness and refreshment associated with water leads to a sense of regained energy, youth, and health,” they note.

“Despite striking results showing that blue space has manifold influences on human health and wellbeing,” however, “research in blue space is still at best a by-product of environmental psychology and environmental health research,” the researchers conclude. To change that, they “suggest introducing ‘blue’ as a new color (both literally and metaphorically) into debates on environmental health and therapeutic landscapes.” In particular, they argue, “more research needs to be carried out on the emotional and experiential response to blue space,” including both fresh and marine waters. – David Malakoff | July 3, 2011

Source: Völker, S., Kistemann, T., The impact of blue space on human health and well-being – Salutogenetic health effects of inland surface waters: A review. Int. J. Hyg. Environ. Health (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ijheh.2011.05.001

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“In spite of significant recent advances in understanding how to conserve species, we are failing to conserve some of the most beloved and charismatic, with severe population losses, shrinking ranges and extinctions of subspecies,” Elizabeth Bennett of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Bronx, New York write in Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation. The Sumatran rhinoceros, for instance, “is almost certainly now extinct in Thailand and probably in Peninsular Malaysia,” she writes, and “even formerly seemingly-secure populations are now at risk: South Africa lost almost 230 rhinoceroses to poaching during January–October 2010, one every 30 hours.”

The main reason for the killing, she notes, “is hunting for illegal trade in highly valuable body parts. Such trade is increasingly controlled by organized criminal syndicates with sophisticated smuggling methods and modes of operation.” The smugglers bribe officials, and hide goods in secret compartments in cargo containers carrying legal products. And they are often working for criminal networks that feed demand in wealthy Asian nations, with webs “radiating out across Asia and Africa ultimately link to the markets of East Asia. “The traders are also light on their feet, frequently changing routes and modes of operation as enforcement commences in any one place,” she notes.

And the contraband can be extensive: Last year, for instance, officials seized 239 African elephant tusks at Bangkok International Airport, and in 2007 Russian authorities seized 332 tiger bones, two tiger skulls, 531 saiga antelope horns and 283 Asiatic black bear paws near the Chinese border.

Unfortunately, Bennett writes, “the legislation and methods of addressing illegal wildlife trade in many countries were not developed to tackle this type of organized crime,” which can include things like web sites touting the sale of illegal wildlife products. And enforcement of conservation laws is too often lax or not taken seriously. “To save these species this trade must be treated as serious crime,” she writes, arguing that “we have taken our eye off the ball… Where enforcement is thorough, and with sufficient resources and personnel, it works… But such programs are lamentably rare and resources applied to combating such crime generally grossly inadequate.”

What’s needed now is “a total change in the way that wildlife crime is treated by governments and wider society,” she concludes. That means hiring more investigators and providing better training and equipment. And it means taking advantage of the international agreement on wildlife crime to strengthen global partnerships. “Unless we start taking wildlife crime seriously and allocating the commitment and resources appropriate to tackling sophisticated, well-funded, globally-linked criminal operations,” Bennett predicts that “populations of some of the most beloved but economically prized charismatic species will continue to wink out across their range and, appallingly soon, altogether.” – David Malakoff | June 24, 2011

Source: Bennett, E. (2011). Another inconvenient truth: the failure of enforcement systems to save charismatic species. Oryx, 1-4 DOI: 10.1017/S003060531000178X

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“Over the past few decades, ‘non-native’ species have been vilified for driving beloved ‘native’ species to extinction and generally polluting ‘natural’ environments,” a team of 19 researchers write in Nature. “Intentionally or not, such characterizations have helped to create a pervasive bias against alien species that has been embraced by the public, conservationists, land managers and policy-makers, as well by as many scientists, throughout the world.”

One problem, they write, is that the “native-versus-alien” worldview ignores the fact that although some introduced species can have harmful impacts – especially in places like islands – they can also bring benefits. So while native North American pine beetles are now a major threat to trees, introduced honeysuckle vines and tamarisk trees (pictured) have become key habitat for some birds. And numerous efforts to eradicate invasives have proved expensive failures that make “little ecological or economic sense.”

Another challenge is “that human-induced impacts, such as climate change, nitrogen eutrophication, urbanization and land use change are making the native-versus-alien species dichotomy in conservation increasingly meaningless.” It is “impractical,” they add, “to try to restore ecosystems to some ‘rightful’ historical state.”

Conservationists shouldn’t abandon efforts to stop new invasions or solve serious problems caused by introduced species, they conclude. “But we urge conservationists and land managers to organize priorities around whether species are producing benefits or harm to biodiversity, human health, ecological services and economies.” – David Malakoff | June 15, 2011

Source: Mark Davis et al. Don’t Judge Species On Their Origins. Nature, 9 June 2011, Vol. 474 (2011). www.nature.com.

Image Elizabeth Makings/ASU

“Traditionally, people have inhabited places with ready access to fresh water,” a research team led by Matti Kummu of Aalto University in Finland writes in PLoS ONE. But the rise of cities and modern wells and pipelines could mean that “the geographical distance to a freshwater source is not as vital for everyday survival as it was in the past.”

To see whether people still feel a special draw to water, the researchers gathered maps that showed population, freshwater bodies, climate and geographical boundaries. Then, they used software to calculate how far people lived from water, how climate and geography affected residence patterns, and how “water scarcity” affected how far people lived from water.

They found that population distance to water varied around the globe. In the far north and in the tropics, for example, people tend to live very close to water, in part because there are numerous lakes or rivers. In contrast, in arid areas people tend to live further from a cool drink. Overall, however, more than 50% of the world’s population lives within 3 kilometers of freshwater, and 90% within 10 kilometers, the team found.

And average population densities tend to fall the further you get from water – within 2 kilometers of water, densities are about 150 persons per square kilometer; that falls to around 50–60 persons per square kilometer at a distance of 25 kilometers from a freshwater body.

The mapping project offers some insight into future water challenges, the authors note. For example, in arid regions “where the population lives far from water bodies, adaptation based on water transport may become prohibitively expensive and unsustainable, and groundwater use and rainwater harvesting may be more effective and/or efficient.” And similar studies could help improve water access for the some 800 million people who still lack access to “improved” drinking water sources. – David Malakoff | June 11, 2011

Source: Kummu M, de Moel H, Ward PJ, Varis O (2011) How Close Do We Live to Water? A Global Analysis of Population Distance to Freshwater Bodies. PLoS ONE 6(6): e20578. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020578

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“Surprisingly, very little research has been carried out to assess the currently available fibers in terms of their ecological sustainability,” a research team from the The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in China notes in the journal Ecological Indicators. To patch that hole, the researchers developed a model that evaluated ten kinds of textiles, including conventional and organic cotton, wool, flax, polyester, nylon 6, nylon 66, polypropylene, acrylic and viscose (which is similar to rayon). Then, they looked a wide-range of factors that affect sustainability, including: how much energy, water, land and chemicals were used in production; whether the fiber was recyclable or biodegradable; and even the amount of oxygen and greenhouse gases fiber production created or consumed. Finally, they developed a scoring system that ranked the fibers in terms of their ecological sustainability.

“Organic cotton seems to have the least environmental impact and is a more sustainable fiber,” the authors conclude. Flax is next, with conventional cotton and viscose – which is made from wood pulp — close behind. The “least preferred fiber in terms of environmental impact and ecological sustainability?” Acrylic, an early synthetic invented in 1941 by DuPont, and now produced mostly in Asia. – David Malakoff | June 7, 2011

Source: Muthu, S.S., et al., Quantification of environmental impact and ecological sustainability for textile fibres. Ecol. Indicat. (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2011.05.008

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In June 2009, researchers in Rwanda noticed a female mountain gorilla coughing as she fed in her forest home. Within days, she was dead—and researchers now conclude that she and an infant gorilla were killed by a virus that appears to have spread from human visitors.

“We usually think of viruses as jumping from wildlife to humans, but what we often don’t realize is that this is a two-way highway,” says Gustavo Palacios, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity (CII) who studied the incident.

The threats posed to humans by pathogens such as the avian and swine flus are well publicized. Less discussed are the diseases that humans can pass on to our closely related ape relatives. That threat is particularly relevant in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the world’s 786 remaining mountain gorillas live in two national parks popular with tourists.

“An ecotourism industry for viewing human-habituated gorillas in the wild is thriving in all three countries,” Palacios’s team notes in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The visitors help “ensure the sustainability of the species by generating much-needed revenue and increasing global awareness,” they add. “Tourism, however, also poses a risk for disease.”

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Researchers recorded a fifth outbreak in June 2009 in a group known as “Hirwa.” Ultimately, researchers documented moderate-to-severe respiratory disease in 11 of the group’s 12 members. They gave drugs to five of the animals to help fend off the sickness.

Now, tissue samples from the two dead gorillas have revealed the probable cause: a human metapneumovirus (HMPV). The virus is known to have killed chimpanzees exposed to tourists, so it’s not surprising it would kill gorillas, too. Exactly where the virus came from is a mystery, although tests show it is related to strains circulating in South Africa, more than 1,000 miles away.

—David Malakoff

Palacios, G. et al. 2011. Human metapneumo-virus infection in wild mountain gorillas, Rwanda. Emerging Infectious Diseases doi:10.3201/eid1704100883.

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Researchers often assume that “forest gain necessarily equates with biodiversity conservation,” James P. Robson and Fikret Berkes of the University of Manitoba, Canada, write in Global Environmental Change. Their field work in two small traditional farming communities in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, however, have caused them to “question this assumption.” Both communities – San Juan Evangelista Analco and Santiago Comaltepec – sit in the rugged ridges and steep valleys of northern Oaxaca , and both have seen extensive “outmigration” of residents to the United States and Mexican cities. To better understand the consequences of these shifts, the researchers extensively surveyed residents and land-use changes in the two communities.

Overall, they found that local farmers have abandoned many fields, allowing forests to regrow. Today, “as across much of Oaxaca, fewer people are farming,” they write. “Farmers are cultivating less land, working closer to settlements, and growing fewer crop varieties.” That has triggered “unprecedented changes in ecological succession,” they note, including changes in the size of forest and grassland patches, and the availability of “edge” habitats favored by many organisms.

Although they did not collect specific data on the region’s biodiversity, they “speculate” — based on work in other parts of Mexico showing that traditional farming practices have helped promote diverse ecosystems — that the changes could result in the “gradual loss of the forest–agriculture mosaic, leading to localized declines in biodiversity, despite (or because of) extensive forest resurgence.”

They concede that the idea “goes against the grain of conventional conservation thinking,” and write that more research is needed to flesh it out. But it “adds a layer of complexity to how we perceive forest transitions in tropical country contexts…. (T)he relationship between population and the environment is neither linear nor deterministic.”

The indigenous cultures in Oaxaca “should not be seen as an environmental constraint,” they add, “but as an agent of landscape renewal and source of heterogeneity that generates biodiversity. The fact that indigenous landscapes exist in Mexico that allow for both cultural and biological diversity to flourish is something that national and international conservation bodies need to more fully recognize and incorporate into future policies and initiatives.” – David Malakoff | May 23, 2011

Source: Robson, J., & Berkes, F. (2011). Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Global Environmental Change DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.04.009

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Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that reproduces only in cats. They shed the organism in their feces, and other animals – including humans — can pick it up from contaminated soil or water, or by eating infected animals. Infection can lead to neurological problems, and sometimes death. Researchers have long known that feral housecats, and wild felines such as bobcats, can spread the parasite in urban and rural areas. But they weren’t clear about how transmission played out in large protected areas.

To find out, a research team spent two years surveying cats and parasite infections in wildlife in a 600-hectare natural area in central Illinois. Using scent-detecting methods, live traps and camera traps, they documented plenty of feral housecats, particularly in park areas near buildings, but found no bobcats. They collected blood samples from 18 cats, and one-third carried antibodies indicating they were infected with T. gondii, they report in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. They also collected blood from hundreds of other mammals — including raccoons, opossums, squirrels, mice, woodchucks, chipmunks and rabbits – and many were also infected.

In general, they found that animals with relatively large ranges (more than 100 hectares), such as raccoons and opossums, were more likely to be infected than those with smaller ranges, such as mice. Although the wider-ranging animals “could have acquired T. gondii infection somewhere outside of the park,” the small ones likely picked up the infection close to where they were trapped, says Nohra Mateus-Pinilla, a wildlife veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Prairie Research Institute and leader of the study. And the infection pattern suggests that the parasite had penetrated even the interior of the park. “It just takes one cat to bring disease to an area,” notes Shannon Fredebaugh, a graduate student who worked on the study.

The findings also suggest that testing little critters could be a useful way of monitoring the parasite’s spread. “The small animals,” Mateus-Pinella says, “are screening the environment for us.” – David Malakoff | May 16, 2011

Source: Fredebaugh, Shannon L. et al. (2011) Prevalence of Antibody to Toxoplasma Gondii in Terrestrial Wildlife In A Natural Area. Journal of Wildlife Diseases.

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Since the 1990s, the region’s once robust vulture populations have plummeted by up to 99.9%. Today, research estimate just 11,000 oriental white-backed vultures (Gypos bengalensis) remain, for instance, down from tens of millions. Long-billed vultures (G. inidcus) are now thought to number about 45,000 and slender-billed vultures (G. tenuirostris) just 1,000.

The culprit, studies showed, was an anti-inflammatory drug called diclofenac that farmers commonly gave to cattle and buffalo to ease pain and swelling. The birds die of kidney failure after eating the carcasses.

India, Nepal and Pakistan banned veterinary use of diclofenac in 2006. Now, in PLoS ONE, researchers report that fewer carcasses are contaminated with the drug, and that even contaminated animals have lower concentrations. Overall, at the time of the ban, about 11% of carcasses in India were contaminated. That proportion has now fallen to about 6.5%, and concentration of the drug in contaminated animals has also fallen.

The bad news, however, is that the numbers suggest substantial illegal use of the drug continues – and that the gains won’t stop vulture deaths. For instance, the researchers estimate that populations of the most susceptible species –the white-back vulture — will continue to decline at 18% per year.

So far, the only safe alternative to diclofenaic used in India is a drug called meloxicam, but vets are still prescribing other drugs that threaten the birds. “There is still a job to do to make sure that safe alternative drugs are used,” says the study’s lead author, Richard Cuthbert of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the United Kingdom. “Unfortunately some of the alternatives have not been tested for their safety to vultures and one drug in increasing use, ketoprofen, is already known to be toxic to vultures.”

Even as conservationists work to end the drug threat, they are also thinking about vulture restoration. There are now five captive breeding centers for vultures in India, Pakistan and Nepal, and five Indian zoos are developing new facilities. – David Malakoff | May 11, 2011

Source: Cuthbert R, Taggart MA, Prakash V, Saini M, Swarup D, et al. (2011) Effectiveness of Action in India to Reduce Exposure of Gyps Vultures to the Toxic Veterinary Drug Diclofenac. PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019069

Image Courtesy Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, UK