Just returned home from UC Davis, where the John Muir Institute of the Environment was hosting a day-long forum, “Exploring New Opportunities for Educating Conservation Professionals” (here’s the blog). Two fora in the morning, both hosted by Andrew Revkin, focused on how to prepare graduate students for jobs in conservation. The first panel were a group of federal agency folks, and the second were an impressive collection of representatives from WCS, TNC, CI, WWF, and the American Museum of Natural History. Here’s the short version of their message: to be a good candidate for a position in conservation, and to be an effective conservation biologist, you must be an economist; a linguist; a sociologist; a political scientist; a manager of people and programs; a great communicator; an organizer of meetings; a do-er, and more importantly, a finisher. Oh and it helps if you have some scientific background, but not so much that you are fanatically attached to having enough data. You are the decider.

There was a lot of encouraging information, but perhaps too many expectations. The major road blocks to graduate students gaining that experience are obvious: first, it’s hard to put participatory and applied conservation into a dissertation chapter; and second, the people training you are academics. They know, quite well, how to prepare yourself for an academic job. But for me, and I suspect most graduate students in ecology, the idea of shooting specifically for a job in academia without making room for other options is unrealistic, and there wasn’t much discussion of the best ways to hedge your bets. Few of the graduate students I know are strongly set on one career over another, but it makes for a lot of indirect academic paths. The real message from the meeting, I suppose, was keep your options open, spread yourself wide, but keep strong to your core discipline. It was a real pleasure to see so many dedicate conservation professionals in one place, especially ones who all seemed satisfied with their varied careers.

Photographs, get your photographs.

There’s a tiger that’s been prowling Hamilton, Ontario for a few weeks now. Some immortal hand or eye (okay it was a camera) finally captured its fearful symmetry.

Frank Leslie’s Boy’s & Girl’s Weekly, March 2, 1867

Most in the conservation world know nearly by heart Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Moment,” featuring what Bill McKibben called “the key Damascan Road story of American environmental conversion.” The pioneer of game management-cum-wildlife ecology recalls when he “was young…and full of trigger-itch,” reflecting:

Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen edible bush and seeding browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.

Taking nothing away from Leopold, I was delighted nonetheless to discover the following passage—similarly prescient about conservation biology and ecological niches —in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, published (and set!) on this day in 1857. The narrator, surveying the St. Louis waterfront, spots a

peddler [who] hawked , in the thick of the throng, the lives of Meason, the bandit of Ohio, Murrel, the pirate of the Mississippi, and the brothers Harpe, the Thugs of the Green River county, in Kentucky—creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same regions, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulations, and is so to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.

This article is suitably flippant about people dying. A hunter -sorry – poacher in Kruger National Park was killed by hippos and eaten by lions: “While authorities may have their hands full when it comes to stopping hunters, there remains a more natural form of justice, lurking among the wildlife so often pillaged–and in this case justice, like dinner, was served.” Ugh.

This is an interesting conceptual map of risks to the world economy. Biodiversity loss is included, though I bet a lot of conservation biologists would disagree with the missing links. Biodiversity could certainly be used as an investment in infrastructure (ecotourism, ecosystem services), preventing food price volatility, transnational crime and corruption and international terrorism (Somali pirates), and how on earth did they leave out Pandemics? The really interesting thing, though is their plot of likelihood and severity. Biodiversity loss is about midrange in the likelihood scale, but fourth-lowest on the severity scale. Meanwhile, asset price collapse is listed as the highest likelihood and highest severity. It’s an fascinating view on how economists think about biodiversity loss.

We teach and talk about ecology as a tale of balance: the decline of one population generally leads to the increase in another. Nature abhors a vacuum. The cycling of predators and prey. Unfortunately, that complexity leads to a lot of problem in application. I can’t think of a better example than Macquarie Island, where cats were introduced about a century ago. The cats then destroyed the local community of birds. Unfortunately, when managers removed all the cats, the rabbits took over. There have been a bunch of similar stories on unanticipated ecological results and other catch-22s recently. Where I work, it’s not clear whether management should focus on the endangered San Joaquin kit fox or its prey, the endangered giant kangaroo rat. Managers in Washington are facing the same problem with orcas and Chinook salmon (you’ll recall that managers in Oregon had no such qualms about killing California sea lions that were eating salmon). Or take this study that shows prescribed burns in the Western U.S. could actually decrease our carbon footprint. Consider that swift populations in the UK are declining due to housing renovation projects.

There’s an emerging science on ecological traps, where changes in habitat (generally human-caused) lead to novel environments that appear to be high quality for a species, but are in fact low quality. In the Negev desert, for example, managers establishment of pits and dykes to increase moisture in certain areas led to increased mortality for an endemic lizard. The increased moisture led to trees, which served as perches for shrikes, who preyed on the lizards. The lizards had no exposures to trees and so didn’t anticipate the negative consequences.

In a recent discussion section for our wildlife ecology class, students were asked to draw parts of the Yellowstone ecosystem, to try to understand the consequences (direct and indirect) of removing wolves. After a sufficient number of convoluted arrows had been added among humans, wolves, elk, aspen, beaver, fish, soil, &c. &c., one student shouted “It’s all connected, man!” A total Berkeley moment.

All of you out there with consblog.org as your homepage will be dispirited to learn that, in biodiversity battle, the forces of darkness have brought the fight to the Web. The BBC, reporting from CITES in Doha, uncovers online lion cub auctions. Lovely.

Yes, I’m still here. No, I’m not sure if this is a repeat.