behavior

Bioacoustics

December 5, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Researchers are increasingly placing microphones in forests and other ecosystems to monitor birds, insects, frogs, and other animals. Advances in technology are enabling the wide-spread use of bioacoustics as an important research tool.

Studying animals in their natural habitat Is often a difficult task. For one thing, many animals are difficult to find, and the presence of humans disrupts their behavior or even drives them off. Remote cameras are useful, but cameras can only see what is in front of them and aren’t much use for detecting small animals, hidden animals, or ones high up in trees.

Biologists have long recognized the value of recording sound to identify animals and learn about their havior. Animal sounds can be as definitive a means of identification as visual images and microphones can pick up the sounds from animals located anywhere within their detection range.

The two advances in technology that are turning bioacoustics into a widely used tool are a steep drop in the price of recording equipment and the rapidly expanding capabilities of user-friendly artificial intelligence algorithms.

Autonomous environmental audio recorders tended to cost between $500 and $1000 until quite recently. Now, such equipment can be had for as little as $70.

The other big challenge is analyzing audio data. Finding specific animal sounds among hundreds of hours of recordings is an untenably tedious task. Identifying the characteristic sounds of specific species in crowded environments is a tricky business. But neural network-based artificial intelligence technology is making such big data analysis quite practical and, remarkably, it is becoming quite user-friendly.

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Web Links

Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics

Photo, posted January 28, 2013, courtesy of Felix Uribe via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Exotic Pets Can Become Problems

August 26, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Each year, millions of exotic animals are sold as pets around the world. The term “exotic” lacks a set definition but is generally used to refer to an animal that’s wild or more unusual than standard pets, like cats and dogs.

The exotic pet trade is a multi-billion dollar industry, involving tens of millions of individual animals from thousands of species, including reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals.

Some of the exotic pet trade is legal, but a lot of it isn’t. Many animals are illegally captured from the wild to meet the global demand for exotic pets.

People often purchase exotic animals without completely understanding the consequences. Some exotic pets, for example, can live nearly twice as long as the average dog. Caring for exotic pets can be both expensive and risky, since they are largely undomesticated (and therefore can have unpredictable behavior).

As a result, it’s not uncommon for owners to release exotic pets intentionally. When this happens, the consequences can be catastrophic. Sometimes the animal dies from starvation or predation, but in other instances, the animal proliferates and becomes an invasive species.

Invasive species are the second largest driver of biodiversity loss worldwide, and they cost the U.S. $120 billion a year.

According to an academic review recently published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the exotic pet trade is one of the primary causes of the spread of invasive species and has fueled the establishment of hundreds of them. Tegus, Burmese pythons, and red lionfish are examples of pets-turned-pests.

The best way to combat this trend is through education, detection, and rapid response.

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Web Links

Why you should never release exotic pets into the wild

Photo, posted September 19, 2010, courtesy of Mike Baird via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Fishers Helping To Clean The Oceans

August 2, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Marine litter – particularly plastics – is a global, persistent, and increasing threat to the oceans. Much of it comes from discarded materials on shore that makes their way to the sea but waste from the fishing industry is a also a major contributor to the problem.

Commercial fishers are acutely aware of the potential for marine litter to damage and even destroy their livelihoods and are starting to try to be part of the solution instead of just part of the problem.

An initiative called Fishing for Litter, which has been operating around the British coastline since 2006, is an example.

With hubs in Scotland and South West of England, FFL aims to reduce the amount of marine litter in the sea by physically removing it while also highlighting the importance of good waste management in the fishing fleet. Fishers have to assume responsibility for their own waste and dispose of it in a responsible manner. They also have a unique ability to access remote and hard to reach marine litter caused by others.

A survey of 120 commercial fishers revealed that they often found marine litter in their hauls and that keeping the sea and coasts clean was important to them.

The responsibility for reducing marine litter does not belong to any single industry or organization. It requires a collective global change of behavior. The problem directly affects fishers, so they are especially motivated to do something about it. They can make an important contribution to an issue that ultimately affects us all. Groups like Fishing for Litter are providing a model for behavior that we can only hope that others around the world can emulate.

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Web Links

Fishers keen to help address the problem of marine litter

Photo, posted July 9, 2009, courtesy of Rennett Stowe via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Wildlife Bridges

June 17, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Highway accidents involving animals are a big problem for both people and animals. About 200 people die every year in the U.S. as a result of collisions with animals. In total, one to two million large animals are killed by motorists every year. And these crashes are expensive: deer-car collisions cost an average of more than $8,000 each; elk-vehicle collisions about $25,000; and moose-vehicle collisions over $44,000.

In the United States, there are 21 threatened and endangered species whose very survival is threatened by road mortalities. These include Key deer in Florida, bighorn sheep in California, and red-bellied turtles in Alabama.

One solution that has been quite effective around the world in reducing car-animal collisions is wildlife overpasses and underpasses. Crossings and fencing that guide animals over or under highways reduce collisions by 85-95%.

These traffic-spanning bridges and tunnels have been popular in Europe since the 1950s. The overpasses usually look much like regular overpasses for cars but are decked out with native flora. The underpasses, which assist shyer and smaller animals, are typically invisible to drivers.

Washington State has recently started building wildlife bridges and underpasses on Interstate 90. These passes will allow elk, black bears, mountain lions, pika, and even trout to traverse what was once a near-impenetrable barrier of road.

Some animals that are accustomed to human structures start using the crossings almost immediately. For others, there is learning curve. As in many things, the early adapters are important as they provide paths and model behavior that more reticent animals learn to follow.

Wildlife bridges are a very good thing for wildlife and for people.

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Web Links

How wildlife bridges over highways make animals—and people—safer

Photo, posted July 22, 2017, courtesy of David Fulmer via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Reducing Polar Bear Attacks

April 8, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The increasing reduction of sea ice in the Arctic is changing the behavior of polar bears. Because they are spending more time on land, they are interacting with people much more frequently, occasionally with deadly results.

A study, published in 2017, looked at 144 years’ worth of polar bear attacks on humans in the Arctic. Between 1960 and 2009, there were a reported 47 attacks by polar bears on people – between 7 and 12 per decade. Between 2010 and 2014, as sea ice reached record lows, there were 15 attacks, a record for a four-year period. Since 2000, 88% of attacks have occurred between July and December, when sea ice is at its lowest level of the year.

Last July, a young male polar bear attacked and killed a man who was berry picking with his children. A month later, a mother polar bear attacked and killed an Inuit hunter and injured two others. This was the first known fatal attack by a mother polar bear.

As a result, Inuit communities in the Nunavut region are asking for higher legal polar bear harvest quotas, arguing that bear populations have increased to a dangerous level.

These recent human fatalities have also provided an impetus for developing new non-lethal conflict-resolution tools than can be used in northern communities before more people as well as bears are killed.

There are now polar bear patrol teams tasked with driving bears away from settlements. There is a bear hotline and electric fencing around sled dog compounds.

The changing face of the Arctic is creating growing stress on the polar bear population and on the people who make their home in that region.

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Web Links

As Polar Bear Attacks Increase in Warming Arctic, a Search for Solutions

Photo, posted September 28, 2015, courtesy of Anita Ritenour via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

Your Children’s Yellowstone

January 25, 2019 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Yellowstone National Park was the first national park in the US and according to some sources, the first in the world. It is the home of charismatic megafauna and stunning geysers that attract over four million visitors a year. It is the only place in the United States where bison and wolves can be seen in great numbers. And it is changing.

Over the next few decades of climate change, Yellowstone will quite likely see increased fire, less forest, expanding grasslands, shallower, warmer waterways, and more invasive plants. All these things will alter how and how many animals move through the landscape. Ecosystems are always changing, but climate change is transforming habitats so quickly that many plants and animals may not be able to make the transition at all.

Since 1948, the average annual temperature in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem has gone up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. On balance, winter is 10 days shorter and less cold. The Northern Rockies snowpack has fallen to its lowest level in eight centuries. Summers in the park are warmer, drier, and increasingly prone to fire.

Non-nutritious invasive plants like cheatgrass and desert madwort have replaced nutritious native plants. When plants like these take over, they suck moisture out of the ground early so that bison and elk cannot be sustained throughout the summer.

The behavior of elk and other animals is already changing, with many staying outside the park to nibble lawns and alfalfa fields. In turn, wolves go where the elk go. Forests and waterways are changing as well.

The rapid changes going on at Yellowstone mean that the park that our children and grandchildren will visit in the future is likely to be a very different one from the Yellowstone we remember.

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