The Future of Wildlife Management?

I recently attended the Western Black Bear Workshop and like many of these meetings the theme was on how to reduce human-bear conflict.  The workshop is mostly a forum for managers from different states and provinces to gather and exchange ideas on management problems and solutions, population trends, and hunting regulations.  I tried to capture…

What We’re Reading- Sept 8, 2017

Pro-Active Management of Genetic Diversity This paper quantified changes in genetic diversity in an experimental translocation of brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) into four isolated populations from a single source population.  The authors found that translocating 10 fish into the experimental populations significantly increased allelic richness and heterozygosity in the first generation following translocation.  They also…

Keep Wildlife Wild: Don’t Feed the Animals

I was having lunch with several wildlife managers during the 24th International Conference on Bear Research and Management, and asked them, “what is the one conservation message you want to get out to the public?”  And I loved this response from Colleen Olfenbuttel (North Carolina’s bear and furbearer manager): “Keep bears wild.” There are several…

Charismatic Megafauna Conservation vs Charismatic Megafauna Conservation

Prioritizing research efforts and on-the-ground action is essential for conservation, but also incredibly hard.  There’s plenty of debate about how best to set conservation priorities: save everything, triage/mathematical formulas for decisions, how to weigh expert opinion and societal values, etc.  Since conservation decisions can have real consequences for protecting species (and local human communities and…

What We’re Reading: May 6, 2016

Location, Location, Location It’s easy for people who live far from wildlife to criticize management and/or policies without considering how people who live near wildlife feel about the salient issues.  Particularly with species which may have an economic impact or are potentially dangerous, regulators ignore the human dimensions of human-wildlife interactions at their peril.  This…

Landmark Studies for Evolution

First up, this post is about using landmarks (on bones) to answer evolutionary questions, not my list of significant papers in evolution*.  Landmarks are points on a specimen (e.g. bones, leafs, etc) that can be identified based on a specific rule (example- widest part of the cheek bone).  I’ve highlighted a few landmarks on two bear…

Infanticide in Mammals

I was very excited to see this year’s Disney Nature film, “Bears.” The movie follows a first time brown bear (Ursus arctos; note in North America the brown bear subspecies is the grizzly bear Ursus arctos horribilus) mother and her two cubs from their den exit to next year’s entrance. Bear cubs are born in…