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.

River otters have made a comeback in West Virginia and might be rewarded with a place on the trapping list. Generally, I think I’m pretty good at not anthropomorphizing animals, but killing otters does seem a good deal like killing preschoolers. But I’ll harden my heart.

(While I was researching this post, my girlfriend stumbled upon a wonderful tongue-twister: “otter article.”  Enjoy!)

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.

The importance of tagging things is becoming obvious. I had to go through every video to ensure this hadn’t been posted. On a separate note, could they have maybe gotten somebody a little less abrasive t narrate this thing? Like Gilbert Gottfried?

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.

• The return of wolves is not just a problem in the U.S. Grey wolves in Eastern Germany are increasing their population size and expanding their range.
• Katherine Belov and colleagues at the University of Sydney appear to have found a population of Tasmanian Devils that are immune to devil facial tumor disease, a transmissible cancer that’s decimated (literally) the species.
• Dave Melhman (TNC) has done a fantastic job blogging the State of the Birds 2010 report.
• The IUCN on restoring bison in North America.
• It’s March Madness, time, and the NCAA seems to have a lot of endangered species in its bracket. Those not yet extirpated from the tournament: Baylor bears, Kentucky and Kansas St Wildcats and Northern Iowa Panthers. Lobos, terrapins, grizzlies, owls, bears, and spiders all apparently not covered under the Endangered Species Act. Obama should send out an executive order.