Defenders Magazine

Wild Life: Eye on the Tiger

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Eye on the Tiger

It seems Big Brother’s eyes reach everywhere these days: surveillance cameras on British streets, wiretapping in the United States and now satellite spy technology in India tracking the whereabouts of one group’s entire population.

But it’s not as Orwellian as it sounds, at least in India. Officials there are monitoring tigers—not people—and no one is up in arms about it.

In fact, the government’s intent is to disarm poachers who between 1999 and 2003 slaughtered more than 100 tigers and by late 2004 had wiped out all 28 in the world-famous Sariska tiger reserve. A tiger skin fetches a handsome $12,500 in China, and a tiger penis—used in traditional Chinese medicine—brings in even more.

It’s a lucrative operation, but at the rate they’re going the poachers might just poach themselves out of business. India, home to a majority of the world’s tigers, has only 2,000 to 3,700 left, compared with 40,000 a century ago. Without a concerted effort by the government, the endangered species could disappear within a generation.

To find out where these cats stand and as a first step to help them gain new footing, the government is creating photo identification cards for the tigers and fitting them with radio collars, allowing satellites to track their every move. Once a national census is complete, officials plan to use hidden cameras in the country’s national parks to get an even clearer picture of tiger density levels and disturbances—keeping this endangered species on the prowl and poachers on the run.

Pika on a Hot Tin Roof

You’ve no doubt heard the news about polar bears drowning because of melting ice in the Arctic. Now comes word of another animal scrambling to avoid the effects of global warming, this one a little closer to home: the American pika.

The pika—a stocky, tail-less relative of the rabbit found at higher elevations in the West—is extremely sensitive to high temperatures. New research indicates that climate change is causing the creature to climb further up in search of cooler ground. The problem is it’s running out of places to go.

Population surveys in 2003 showed that the average minimum elevation of 18 surviving pika populations in the Great Basin (the area between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains) was 8,310 feet, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Biogeography. After analyzing 57 archeological sites dating as far back as 40,000 years, Donald Grayson, a University of Washington archaeologist, found that pika habitat historically averaged an elevation of 5,741 feet. He also discovered that seven of the 25 historically described populations appear to have gone extinct before the close of the 20th century.

As-yet-unpublished findings by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Biology point to even more bad news, says Grayson. Pikas in Yosemite National Park are now found only above 9,500 feet. In the first decade of the 20th century, surveys found them at elevations as low as 7,800 feet.

“We might be staring pika extinction in the Great Basin—maybe in Yosemite, too—right in the face,” says Grayson. “Today, the Great Basin pika is totally isolated on separated mountain ranges and there is no way these populations can get to one another. What’s happening to them is telling us something about the dramatic changes in climate happening here. This makes controlling our current impacts on them all that more important.”

Dog Virus Attacks Yellowstone Wolves

In a sad sideline to the success of wolf reintroductions in Yellowstone National Park, only 22 of the 69 wolf pups born last year lived to the end of 2005. It’s the biggest drop in pup numbers since wolves were reintroduced there 11 years ago. Experts monitoring the packs believe parvovirus—a disease spread by domestic dogs—is to blame.

Highly contagious, the virus was first discovered in Minnesota wolves in 1973. Causing severe diarrhea, dehydration and death, it can kill adults, but tends to mostly affect pups, says Doug Smith, the park’s wolf project leader. “Clearly, it’s devastated the pups,” he says. “In the northern ranges, only eight of the 49 pups born survived.”

But given that parvo doesn’t usually occur in successive years, park officials say they expect wolf numbers to bounce back. “Any time you get that sort of mortality, you stand up and take notice,” says Smith. “We are concerned but not alarmed.”

The last outbreak hit Yellowstone’s wolves in 1999. Biologists think flareups occur during dry, hot weather, which allows the virus to spread more readily.

A vaccine exists—and is often used to prevent the disease in domestic dogs—but it requires multiple vaccinations shortly after weaning to build up immunity. “We’d have to hit them two or three or four times, and we’d be raiding dens,” says Smith. “The wolves just wouldn’t deal with that.”

Despite the drastic loss of wolves in Yellowstone, officials don’t plan to change the way they manage wolves in the region. “Overall numbers in the tri-state area—Idaho, Montana and Wyoming—are up,” says Smith.

Right Whale, Wrong Temperature

Southern right whales live halfway around the globe from polar bears and pikas (see story above), but that hasn’t protected them from the effects of a warming planet.

An international team of scientists recently found that these whales have fewer calves in years when the powerful weather phenomenon known as El Nino heats up their feeding grounds in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica.

“The warmer water causes a reduction in the abundance of krill, which are shrimp-like crustaceans eaten by large whales and other predators,” says Vicky Rowntree, a University of Utah biology professor and member of the study team. This reduced availability of krill during the summer feeding season is likely causing some pregnant mothers to abort and calves to die, says Rowntree.

Right whales are rotund, dark-colored ocean dwellers that may stretch 50 feet or more in length. An adult female generally gives birth every three years, but if she loses her calf before or shortly after birth, she needs two years to recover, expanding the interval between calves to five years.

Rowntree and her colleagues drew on 30 years of photographic data to monitor individual females in a group of more than 1,800 right whales that breed in waters off Argentina. The researchers compared data on the number of whale births to information on sea-surface temperatures in the Southern Ocean. When temperatures increased on the feeding grounds, calving rates decreased on the breeding grounds.

Right whales have been protected internationally since 1935 and are still recovering from the devastation wrought by centuries of whaling. However, consistently rising ocean temperatures during the past 50 years leave scientists to wonder: What will happen when the krill is gone?