It is the last day of the conference, and the sun is shining. It feels like California, but for the amethyst-throated Sunbirds and the skunky reek of buchu. Oh, and the fact that there were two kinds of beef biltong (like jerky) with lunch.

Some people loading a braai (that's a barbeque) into the back of a truck, coordinating in Afrikaans. From the grass, a student group chats in Xhosa, with its wonderful click sounds. Further off, I think that I hear Spanish.

Here are some of the best one-liners I have collected at the conference.

"Parasitism is the most popular lifestyle on earth"
--Kevin Lafferty, United States Geological Survey, talking about the importance of parasites in food webs. In the California salt marsh environment he works on with Andrew Dobson all the tiny parasites added up together would outweigh all the birds added up together.

--"Lions breed like bunnies"
Rob Slotow on one of the problems of managing lions in reserves.

--"Triage is an undeniable consequence of living in a resource-limited world."
Hugh Possingham on why people need to rationally and mathematically order conservation priorities with money in mind.

Posted by Emma Marris at 05:55 PM | Permalink

Samuel Wasser is a conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, and an outspoken opponent of elephant poaching. He talks to Emma Marris about his genetic methods for tracing poached ivory.

Read the Q&A here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

More detail on the green and pro-development efforts at the conference. The decor is all native plants. The lunches are served on cardboard, with wooden cutlery. And here is more on those sedge bags: http://www.sizanacraft.co.za/contentpage.aspx?pageid=3745. Meanwhile, the café in the tent is run by Umzi Wethu, a vocational training school for "vulnerable youth" that places its graduates in the ecotourism industry—and takes them hiking.

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:37 PM | Permalink

When people talk about "the social aspects of conservation biology" I get confused. Isn't it all social? If the goal of conservation biology is to undo the havoc that humans wreak on biodiversity then isn't it all about people and societies—what they shoot, what they eat, what they burn, what they grow, what they make and spill?

Patrick Ofori-Danson Kwabena of the University of Ghana interviewed Ghanaian fishermen about hunting the rare and reserved West African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). He found that 38 had been killed between 1998 and 2001, that the fishermen had no inkling that they needed to be conserved and that they relished the meat. Additionally, many believed that one had to have certain special powers to make a manatee kill. Compare that with their attitude towards dolphins, which in some places are—in Kwabena's words—"revered as gods". When they beach or wash up on shore, sometimes special buildings are built over the corpses.

Posted by Emma Marris at 02:11 PM | Permalink

Here are a few interesting nuggets of information from this year's posters.

According to Kathryn Williams, estimates of breeding populations of birds often undercount due to obscuring vegetation and the fact that not all birds nest at the exact same time.

Invasive species alert!. Tomás Ibarra reports the bird-eating mink (Mustela vison) have made it to formerly "pristine" Navarino Island, off of Cape Horn. In Newfoundland, invasive moose (Alces alces) are dooming the balsam fir, according to Luise Hermanutz. And menacing and ubiquitous invasive shrub Lantana (Lantana camara) shrubs are being made into furniture by Southern Indians, according to Kannan Ramesh.

A mining company has constructed an artificial island for flamingo to nest on behind Kamfers Dam, by Kimberley, South Africa. The birds like hanging out there, but whether they'll nest there successfully seems to be an open question. (more here from a South African environmental TV programme.)

Yun Fang conducted some of the first observations ever of the "nearly unknown" Sichuan Wood Owl (Strix davidi), in China, by tempting a pair to nest in a specially-built nest box. He recorded their song and watched a male and female call and beg to one another.

Paul Grobler has investigated the problem of black and blue wildebeest (Connochaetes gnou and C. taurinus), which, when brought together by the vagaries of wildlife management, have fertile hybrid offspring. This is apparently distresses managers, who want to keep the populations separate and conserved. Grobler's attempts to tell genetic lineage with microsatellite analysis of 13 loci worked on the herd level, but not on the individual.

More posters tomorrow…

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:23 PM | Permalink

Sometimes I wonder about all the studies in this field that involve walking transects—i.e. straight lines—in gorgeous country, usually noting the species that are around and other landscape variables. I am sure there's usually some reason for gathering the data, but all that adventuresome hiking in untrammeled land must make these studies more appealing.

Clint Epps takes off after the conference to Tanzania for his second season of walking transects in and between two big protected areas. He's trying to determine whether elephants hop between the two areas along the Great Ruaha River, and if they do, whether they are a good proxy for the presence of other large mammals (and therefore, perhaps, a compelling case for linking the two parks with a proper protected corridor).

Last season, armed with a machete and a GPS unit, he clocked up 400 km by walking every morning between 7:00 AM and about 2:00 PM with his wife, Lauren Gwin, and a couple of assistants. In the afternoons the team would try to find the beginning of the next transect and meet with village officials and hire a local scout. Unpleasant adventures abounded. They were stranded in one bush camp for two weeks by torrential rains; Black Mambas shot by them in the fields; and elephants got uncomfortably close to the unarmed party.

But Epps' classic transect tale is the time the truck was robbed of $1,000 worth of gear. Thieves had waited for the team to leave on their walk and smashed the windshield open. Epps repaired the windshield with duct tape and informed the locals, who told him that for $10 for their meals, five scouts would track the robbers. The scouts duly found the thieves and recovered everything, but Epps was told that he would have to transport the criminals to the police office unless he trusted them to take the bus there themselves. Of course everyone came along, so here was Epps driving a dual-cab Toyota truck with seven people in it, including the thieves, one on another's lap, their hands tied with rope, and the windshield held together with duct tape. Naturally, upon arrival, the police confiscated all the team's gear as evidence.

His talk at the conference bizarrely failed to cover these key details. He did say that signs of elephants were found across the potential corridor and that their presence was significantly correlated with how many other large mammals were around—excluding a few really big ones like buffalo and giraffe. So there could be, he said, "some utility for using elephants as a focal species."

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:02 PM | Permalink

Families turn to natural resources after losing key bread-winners.

The high level of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa is taking its toll on the landscape, say conservationists.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing I am learning here in South Africa is that the "wild" animals, especially the big mammals, may be more like those in your local zoo than you think. Is a rhino in a 4,000 hectare game reserve really roaming free? What about lions bouncing off the electrified fences at pocket-sized reserves? What about the "semi-habituated" elephants with which one can gambol around a park with, hand in trunk?

Somewhere in this uneasy middle ground are the cheetahs released by the De Wildt Wild Cheetah Project, outlined yesterday at the meeting. Most of South Africa's cheetahs live outside protected areas, often in game ranches, where each plump ungulate means big bucks to the landowner. Naturally, the landowners are not too fond of the cats, and have been known to trap and kill them. So De Wildt provides safe cage traps and more or less buys the cats off of them. They then vaccinate and tag the cats and begin a laborious months-long process of habituating them to humans in various pens for eventual release in some protected area. Why the habituation? Because un-habituated cats are invisible and invisible cats are no good for the tourists. Most of these cheetahs will be bought by people who run wildlife reserves for profit. So is the cheetah still wild? And what of the 65 cubs born to cheetahs that have been through this process?

Many large wild animals are intimately known to researchers by sight. Many are named. Many will be knocked out and either tagged, sampled or relocated during their lives. Their family trees are all worked out. Their water is provided. Their pictures have been taken so often that as the flashes pop the animals recline in the shade at ease and yawn. What defines a zoo? Is it perhaps just the size of the enclosure?

Posted by Emma Marris at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Conservation biology—unlike other sciences—has an explicit agenda. Its practitioners want to conserve the subjects and ecosystems they study. So when they convene they convene green. This year for the first time the SCB offered delegates the opportunity to pay a bit extra to carbon-neutralize their conference attendance. 97.3% chose to do so.

In addition, the conference bags are attractively woven of sedge by rural women. Each delegate is issued one mug to be used at all coffee breaks. The full program is on CD only. Finally, many delegates appear to be saving water and energy by wearing the same clothes to the meeting every day. Or it could be that their clothes are still flying around the world in the belly of some 767. At least one poster at the session was replaced by a sign saying "Sorry, British Airways has my poster" and I am aware of at least one portable PCR machine sitting in the airline lost and found.

Included in those sedge conference bags? A mini bottle of South African liquor and an AIDS awareness kit including a condom. Well, what are conferences for?

Posted by Emma Marris at 05:29 PM | Permalink

The first two plenary sessions have taken as their subject conservation in Africa. Yesterday, Yaa Ntiamoa-Baidu, a Ghanaian conservationist with positions in government, academia, and at an NGO, recounted a story from youth. She returned to her hometown after graduating from college and announced her plan to manage wildlife for a living. An old man took her to task, asking what such a career could possibly do to help their impoverished village.

And while Ntiamoa-Baidu spent the rest of her talk asking how conservationists can better demonstrate how their projects improve the lot of local people, there remained a suggestion of doubt. Perhaps not all conservation projects do improve lives.

Ntiamoa-Baidu looked at 50 random World Wildlife Fund programs in Africa. While 92% of project managers felt that their projects were helping develop the community, very few of these projects had built in any way to measure or show this. There is no data. And, according to Ntiamoa-Baidu, to convince politicians, donors and local people, you need the data.

Today, Stuart Pimm threw up a side with a series of tough questions on it. Do development efforts develop anything? Do conservation efforts conserve anything "or do we merely have conversations about it"? Does development necessarily lead to conservation ("I think we all have a sinking feeling that that might not be the case", he said)? And does conservation necessarily lead to development?

As he talked through the slide he said "I hope you are squirming uncomfortably in your seats."

This issue is not new. People have been advancing and questioning the notion that there is some real tie between conservation and development for some time. Whether it is a real relationship that holds good across contexts or just wishful thinking is the question, and one I am not prepared to answer. But in Africa, where dire poverty, HIV/AIDS and what Pimm called "inept governments" are the order of the day, one clearly cannot just waltz around saving the landscape without taking account of the people. It is their land, after all, and most of them use it every day.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:51 AM | Permalink

In work both simple and poetically sad, Florian Werner shows how trees left behind in clearings, separated from the mass of the forest, lose their epiphytes—those plants that live on them, including ferns, orchids, and bromeliads. Werner discovered that the harsh micro-climate of an isolated tree kills off epiphytes, especially those that love moisture, while the distance from the forest reduces new seedlings and that same harsh micro-climate kills off many of the seedlings that manage to germinate.

The presentation reminded me of a work of art in the new Seattle Olympic Sculpture Park, on the waterfront downtown. The piece is by Mark Dion, the same fellow who did the excellent "Thames Dig" exhibit at the Tate in London. It is a mammoth and gorgeous 60-foot long fallen tree in an 80-foot long greenhouse. The tree has become a nurse log, and is covered with ferns, lichens, fungi and insects. But since it is in a glass box in downtown Seattle, the beautiful log will not develop as other nurse logs do in the rainforest it was helicoptered out of

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:41 AM | Permalink

I saw an interesting talk in the speed sessions. These are four minute talks followed by a long interaction session, where all the presenters sit at tables and one can go up and chat with them. Excellent format, in my opinion.

The talk was on whether or not corridors make or break animal species living in forest fragments. In a lot of places in the world, what was once a forest remains only as small patches like islands surrounded by a sea of cultivated or developed land. The thinking has been that in order to keep gene flow moving between the inhabitants of these patches, corridors of trees need to be provided, like bridges between islands. The conventional wisdom that these corridors were also necessary for many birds, including the subject of the study, the small, ant-eating Australian brown treecreeper.

A team of eight spent months following treecreepers around near the town of Wagga Wagga, in both properly corridored areas as well as areas with patches and miscellaneous non-connected trees. Project leaders Erik and Veronica Doerr at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra Australia found that the birds, despite being "dumpy" fliers, in the words of Erik Doerr, moved patch to patch and made forays just as often without purpose-built corridors.

"There is a bit of corridor obsession at the moment," said Erik. While he cautions—of course—that these results are quite preliminary and of unknown generalizability, he does think that perhaps having patches that are large and relatively close together may turn out a bit more important than having the perfect, 40-metre-wide leafy green Champs Elysées between them.

Speed presentation MC Marc Hunter, strolling by Doerr's table during the meet and greet session added that "people are starting to replace the term corridor with the broader term "connectivity", which is whatever it takes to get the animal across the landscape."

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:28 PM | Permalink

This year's conference is being held at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University which opened in 2005 upon the merger of several institutions. The opening reception in the school's arena was crowded and fun. Introductory speeches were alternated with performances from a high school girl's choir and an energetic dance troupe which showed off African dance stylings including 1940s jive. The proceedings were marred, though, but a continual basso continuo of chit chat from the back of the room. Don't people know that those free drink tickets are a kind of payment for attentive silence during the unavoidable preliminary speeches? Hold up your end of the bargain, people.

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I write from windy Port Elizabeth, South Africa, a port city on the Eastern Cape of the country. It is described by some as "the Detroit of South Africa" for its prowess in the manufacturing sector. It is also an embarkation point for those with a yen to commune with large African mammals. Many of these do their communing through the medium of a large gun.

"And you are here to stop that?" queries my cab driver, as we drive by a billboard outside the airport which advertises the reason I am here: the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology.

The reason this conference is so interesting is that no, the people gathered here from the four corners of the earth are not necessarily interested in stopping that. These scientists do have an agenda, but it is not protecting the lives of individual animals but of whole ecosystems. If hunting dollars can go towards protecting and managing a piece of bio-diverse land, and if the hunting is controlled so that the hunted species are not at overall risk, great. If it keeps land clear from development for the exuberant and beautiful ungulates and felines of Africa, cool.

And there's lots of money in this kind of hunting. Trophy hunting generates $1 million in revenues for South Africa, according to the Professional Hunters' Association of South Africa (which's motto is "Conservation Through Hunting").

The aesthetics of the average conference-goer and the average hunter are clearly distinguishable variations on the theme of "I'm comfortable with dirt and the outdoors" but they rubbed shoulders on the plane in to PE (as the many call it) with ease. There are lots of reasons why the two groups would get along. They both like nature. They both want to see it preserved.

In fact, yesterday a workshop on "conservation hunting" takes a look at the growing trend and examines case studies of where it is has worked and where it hasn't. The workshop was led by Lee Foote of the University of Alberta who notes in program that "Unfortunately, neither a theoretical basis nor sufficient critical overview of [conservation hunting] has yet been advanced."

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:41 AM | Permalink

Illegally hunted animals turn up in markets from New York to London.

Baboons, duiker antelopes and cane rats are available by the pound in markets in major cities in North America and Europe, a scientist reported at the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in San Jose, California, this week.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Well, another SCB has come to a close. Next year's meeting is in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and the theme is "One World, One Conservation, One Partnership" http://compworx.isat.co.za/scb/. I hope to see you there.

Posted by Emma Marris at 07:00 AM | Permalink

Okay, so Nick Salafky's big idea isn't just his, but a whole bunch of people who have been meeting and meeting and meeting to hammer out one standardized vocabulary to describe the conservation problems and solutions. He described it as "so unsexy", but so important. The idea is, that if you are a conservationist describing a bit of land being threatened by overgrazing, you could describe that problem as "cows" or "cattle" or "grazing" or "overgrazing" or any number of other words. But if everyone uses the same words, suddenly everyone can work off of the same checklist, can summarize their site in just a few simple words, and search databases and journals effectively for similar issues.

The cooperating groups are the IUCN and the CMP, and the new classifications are available at www.conservationmeasures.org. This August, at the first European Congress of Conservation Biology, a symposium will put this idea together with two others that have as their aim the rigorization (to coin a word) of conservation. You can read about the two other ideas here.

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:43 AM | Permalink

This year the SCB tried out a new presentation format, modeled off speed dating. In the first half of the session, each presenter got 3 minutes to present their work, and in the second half, everyone milled around chatting with those presenters whose work intrigued them.

Personally, I felt that it was a brilliant format. Three minutes really is enough to convey the bottom line, everyone got their questions in, and lots of real back and forth dialogue seemed to be going on. Certainly, business cards and so forth were flying about, and the noise level of the room was a happy din.

One particularly odd moment came when Guillermo Andres Ospina, rather than trying to cram everything about his project into three minutes in a second language, simply presented all the slides from his full-length talk on "Biodiversity conservation under armed conflict in Colombia" quickly, in silence, one after another. I must say, it felt very futuristic, as if we were all absorbing all the words and images flashing on the screen with wiser, more powerful brains.

The speed presentation idea was cooked up by four people, including bow-tied conservation gadfly Kent Redford, who told me the idea owed its birth to the concept of the remote control. One other co-inventor, Nick Salafsky, introduced his talk by explaining that the three minute time limit appealed to him because he felt his topic was so dull. Actually, I thought his topic was pretty interesting, and I just might write my next post on it.

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I hesitate to write this next item, as it may well make you turn off your computer and put on your hiking boots. Patricia Zaradic of the University of Illinois has found an eerily tight correlation between a decline in attendance at US National Parks since 1987 and the rise of electronic entertainment: movie rentals, video games, and our friend the internet. Oil prices fit well too. So, although it is just a correlation, one can easily make up a story about a nation of people who can't afford to drive to parks, who are turning away from nature and towards screens.

Like many of the findings being presented here, this is pretty depressing news. Nature is being whittled away and no one cares much, because, well, we can always use computers to generate images of nature if we need them. The silver lining, I guess, is that if fewer people are going to National Parks, they are bound to be less crowded.

Posted by Emma Marris at 03:02 AM | Permalink

Here's an interesting story. John Neidel from Yale went to Kerinci Seblat National Park on Sumatra, a supposedly pristine wilderness. There are two villages inside the park, accessible only by foot, which, according to Neidel, are generally seen by conservationists as encroachments. Neidel did a bit of poking around, and found something like 40 former village sites, some with evidence of moats around them, some with large stones. Some of the villagers have documents supporting their residency that go back to the seventeenth century.

Neidel's take seemed to me to be that there is an underlying bias in conservation circles towards this "pristine wilderness" idea. It seems that evidence of long-term habitation by villagers was overlooked or ignored in the efforts to save the forest there. "instead of the people encroaching on the national park, one could say that the national park is encroaching on them," he said.

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:54 AM | Permalink

Here's an update on interesting research trying to a get a handle on the number of forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) in Africa. These animals, which are smaller and thiner-trunked than savannah elephants, live beneath trees, so are harder to count. But they do make noisel—low deep rumbles that travel great distances. Once it was determined that the elephants call at a fairly constant rate, researchers at Cornell began counting the calls to estimate of the number of animals.

Nature has written about this neat project before: here. Mya Thompson, a graduate student on the project, told me that they are working on funding to use the equipment to detect more sinister sounds: gunshots, chainsaws—the sounds of illegal logging or poaching. The ultimate idea is to equip their stations with the means to alert the authorities when one of these suspicious sounds is recorded.

Posted by Emma Marris at 01:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Former US Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt spoke to the SCB last night (he's flogging a new book). Now "free at last to say what I think" he took the Army Corps of Engineers to task for their plan for restoring the sinking Louisiana coast, which can be found here. To be fair, this plan was completed before Hurricane Katrina, but Babbitt claims that its estimate of how much land will be lost is way off, because it assumes that land-loss rates from the seventies through 2000 will continue in the future.

The ACOE plan estimates that Coastal Louisiana will lose 328,000 acres by 2050. Babbitt says that he figures that subsidence and sea level rise (thanks to our pal global warming) will submerge some 6 million acres by 2100. Even assuming that New Orleans is safely walled off, he says that a million people "are in grave risk of floating by the end of the century."

Then he took the conservation community at large to task for taking the ACOE study seriously. "The most charitable explanation is that we—I mean all of us…tend to operate in a climate of political intimidation," in which telling hard truths about very large scale problems is not the done thing.

"We risk undermining our credibility by going along with these kinds of analysis," he said.

Posted by Emma Marris at 11:55 PM | Permalink

The other side of inbreeding

Inbreeding is generally regarded as bad for species, if not downright icky. But something called "purging" has sometimes been invoked to explain why some populations squeeze through a bottleneck and blossom on the other end with few problems. Now some fly experiments have confirmed the power of purging – at least in the lab.

[click on for more]

Continue reading "SCB: Binge and Purge" »

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:59 PM | Permalink

At this meeting, it is a pure pleasure to hear about some tiny bit of our beleaguered globe in which the environment is improving. In this case, according to Elizabeth Heise of the University of Texas at Brownsville, we have the Texan passion for high school football (the US kind, naturally) to thank.

Bahia Grande means Grand Bay, but the Bahia Grande, which is near the mouth of the Rio Grande on the East coast of Texas, has, since the 1930s, been more like the Desierto Grande—dammed dry and grazed to nothingness. This great expanse of empty land became the source of huge amounts of airborne dust, which reduced visibility on the football field of nearby Port Isabel High School. So, "the largest wetland project is United States history" according to UT Brownsville, was undertaken.

10,000 acres were re-flooded a year ago, and now it is filled with invertebrates, fish, birds, and native plants planted by students. Heise showed a picture of a flamingo that fished there for several weeks this year. She hopes it will return next year, as it brought them an awful lot of good press. Go Port Isabel Tarpons!

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The opening reception for the SCB featured a whole lot of people doing interesting things, from modeling the date that the mammoths went extinct to fishing in Maine to determine which species of fish's gills are home to freshwater mussel larvae. There were hints of good sessions to come, particularly one on "Advocacy in Conservation Science", which will try to answer the question of whether Conservation Biology and its journals should explicitly endorse various policy options ("we should remove Dam X") or just present the science (If we remove Dam X, this or that will likely happen"). This is interesting stuff. After all, the very name "Conservation Biology" contains an implied bias: things ought to be conserved. In a way, it is unique. One doesn't hear about a discipline called Let's Go To Mars Space Science.

Hot topics included whether or not the ivory billed woodpecker is extinct or not, the usefulness—or not—of the "biodiversity hotspot" concept, and whether US conservationists are good at math. As usual for the SCB, dress was distinctly, even defiantly casual, beards and sandals were in abundance, and small children and babies were well represented: a laid-back vibe concealing a whole bunch of smart and passionate nature geeks. Good people, in other words.

On the other hand, a glass of Charles Shaw wine, a whole bottle of which one may purchase at Trader Joe's in most parts of the US for two or three dollars (thus, "Two Buck Chuck"), was running $5.75. Boo.

Posted by Emma Marris at 09:02 PM | Permalink

This year's assemblage of conservation biologists takes place in San José, California (frequently written without the accent), which lies at the Southern end of San Francisco Bay. It is divided from the Pacific Ocean by a series of hills which stop ocean moisture. So, here it is hot and, from the air, a burnt grass colored landscape surrounds the city. Formerly an agricultural town—its seal features a plump bouquet of wheat—it is now part of Silicon Valley, that famed US home of high tech.

The theme of the conference is "Conservation Without Borders" so expect to hear the latest about geographical, organizational, political and disciplinary blurring of all kinds. Stay tuned…

Posted by Emma Marris at 06:30 AM | Permalink