Conservation Science

In 2014, Fellows Brett Amy Thelen and Brad Timm received a Network Innovation Grant to support a small project aimed at piloting field techniques for assessing the effectiveness of amphibian road crossing brigades, and at convening potential collaborators for a larger regional research initiative focused on reducing amphibian road mortality in the northeastern United States. Here is some of what they've learned from this project.

Green crabs have been lurking in local waters for a while. They came to wider New England awareness as an invasive species to be reckoned with in 2013, when researcher and marine ecologist Brian Beal convened a green crab summit in Orono, Maine. Spinoff meetings in Massachusetts followed. I attended those meetings, then bought a crab trap, baited it with herring and other fish, and before long was hauling hundreds of crabs at a time from a tidal estuary in the salt marshes of Ipswich.

You’d be surprised by the ripples left by a day-hiker’s ramble through the woods. In 2008 Switzer Fellow Sarah Reed, an associate conservation scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, and her colleagues found fivefold declines in detections of bobcats, coyotes and other midsize carnivores in protected areas in California that allowed quiet recreation activities like hiking, compared with protected areas that prohibited those activities.

2014 Fellow Andrea Adams’s dissertation research involves the study of disappearing frogs in Southern California. “One species, the foothill yellow-legged frog (Rana boylii) disappeared from the region during a short period of time in the mid-1960s to early 1970s,” Andrea explains. “One thing that can cause such rapid declines in amphibians is the pathogenic amphibian chytrid fungus. I study this fungus’s distribution and disease dynamics in different amphibian species in Southern California to see if it could have been a major contributing factor to the disappearance of the foothill yellow-legged frog in the region. To do this, I conduct molecular work in the laboratory, as well as field and museum work.”

The Klamath’s problems will get worse with climate change and increasing river temperatures, says Rebecca Quiñones, a U.C. Davis researcher who has extensively studied the Klamath ecosystem. “All the climate models show that the main stem of the [Klamath] river is going to be really Some conservationists say hatchery production is making Chinook salmon more vulnerable to warming trends. inhospitable to salmon,” Quiñones says. Read more

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Biologists have long thought that when large mammals, such as elephants and gazelles, are driven to extinction, small critters will inherit the earth. As those critters (think rodents) multiply, so will the number of disease-carrying fleas. Scientists have now experimentally confirmed this scenario, which is troubling because it could lead to a rise in human infection by diseases that can be transferred between animals and people.

On a recent Friday evening, I hovered among a small group of guests in a tiny storefront gallery in Bushwick. Each of us was there in anticipation of a rare chance to smell a phantom flower. When the pendant on a necklace I’d been given at the door began to glow, an attendant dressed in white led me behind a folding screen to a corner where the artist Miriam Simun waited. In silence, she fitted me with a plastic device that hooked over my ears and rested on my nose like a pair of glasses.

They're the blue blobs ­unnerving swimmers on [Australia's] Gold Coast beaches. The catostylus mosaics jellyfish, which have been spotted washed up on local beaches and floating in ­waterways over the past two weeks, aren’t new to the Coast and there’s little risk of harm. ... American biodiversity scientist Dr Healy Hamilton had to battle through the jellies to do research in the Broadwater for the past week. “It was like we had to swim through clouds of ­jellyfish to find seahorses and pipefish,” she said.