EurekAlert: SNAPSHOT USA: First-ever nationwide mammal survey published. “How are the squirrels doing this year? The bears? The armadillos? How would you know? A new paper published June 8 sets up the framework for answering these questions across the United States by releasing the data from the first national mammal survey made up of 1,509 motion-activated camera traps from 110 sites located across all 50 states.”
Bonner County Daily Bee: Digital archive documents caribou extirpation from North Idaho. “The ‘Storying Extinction: Responding to the Loss of North Idaho’s Mountain Caribou’ research project will educate people about the history of the caribou and the factors that contributed to their decline and 2019 extirpation, including logging, development and wildfires.”
Wildlife Conservation Society: WCS Releases Archive of Stunning, Forgotten Historical Wildlife Illustrations. “The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) released to the public a digital collection of some 2,200 forgotten, historical scientific wildlife illustrations from its Department of Tropical Research (DTR), which it ran from 1916 to 1965. The stunning illustrations include montages of otherworldly deepwater fish, stately portraits of sloths, strange insects, brightly colored birds, snakes, frogs, and other wildlife. Many of the illustrations seem almost whimsical, yet are scientifically accurate.”
Audubon: Here’s How to Spot a Faked Wildlife Photo—and When to Be Skeptical. “The phony-image debunker behind a popular Twitter account shares tips for telling when the perfect shot is too good to be true.”
Ubergizmo: AI Used To Predict Where Poachers Might Show Up Next. “The system uses data pulled from the SMART platform that was originally developed by the World Wildlife Foundation. This platform helps to suggest the most efficient routes based on the theory of security games. So far, the system has proved itself to be pretty accurate with its predictions. In a trial conducted in 2014, the rangers found that areas that the AI predicted as having a higher risk of poachers resulted in more snares being found, versus areas that the PAWS AI deemed as lower risk.”
News 12: Your social media posts about seals at the Jersey Shore may be hurting the animals. “Wildlife experts say that the fastest-growing threats to these seals are humans looking for social media likes. Center workers say that they are seeing a disturbing increase in the number of people getting closer than the 150-foot minimum distance allowed by federal law – mostly to take pictures for Instagram and Facebook.”
Harper’s: The Crow Whisperer. “Last May, as the number of coronavirus deaths continued to rise, many of the animals that live among us in cities and towns—residing in gutters and trees and parks and crawl spaces—had their worlds turned upside down. City centers were empty; dumpsters were no longer filled with scraps of food; fewer cars were on the road; neighborhood parks were thick with people who would otherwise have been working or at school. If it weren’t for the coronavirus, Mona would never have been outside that morning chasing fledglings, because Adam and Dani would have been where they usually were in the middle of the day—at work.”
Atlas Obscura: California’s Elusive Urban Lizards Can’t Hide From Citizen Scientists. “AS A LIZARD-LOVING KID GROWING up in the San Francisco Bay area, Greg Pauly sometimes found himself running an accidental rehabilitation center for wayward reptiles out of his parents’ house. One neighbor wasn’t particularly sold on the squamates that lived around her yard, he recalls, but her cats, Crackers, Peepers, and Stinkers, kept intercepting them and delivering them to her. Pauly remembers that she paid him a dollar to take the unwelcome gifts off her hands, so he adopted the ‘three-legged, no tail’ lizards as pets.”
Scientific American: ‘March Mammal Madness’ Brings Simulated Animal Fights to Huge Audiences. “Ever idly wondered if a capybara could somehow take down an elephant in a beachfront brawl? That’s the kind of thinking behind March Mammal Madness (MMM), an annual social media event based on the March Madness NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament. Like its namesake, this educational project encourages viewers to fill out brackets predicting which teams would triumph in a hypothetical head-to-head showdown—with the ‘teams’ in this version being specific mammals.”
Phys .org: Tourists could be spreading the virus causing COVID-19 to wild mountain gorillas by taking selfies with the animals. “Tourists could be spreading the virus causing COVID-19 to wild mountain gorillas by taking selfies with the animals without following precautions. Researchers from Oxford Brookes University examined nearly 1,000 Instagram posts and found most gorilla trekking tourists were close enough to the animals, without face masks on, to make transmission of viruses and diseases possible.”
Victoria Harbor Times: DNA database to track bushfire impact to local wildlife. “The impact of the devastating Black Summer bushfires on native plants and wildlife will be able to be tracked, thanks to a new database being created in Canberra. A DNA database of local flora and fauna is being developed as part of a collaboration between the University of Canberra, the Australian National University and Canberra company Diversity Arrays Technology.”
Global News: USask Professor creates pig plotted map for locating wild boars on Google Earth. “Ryan Brook has been researching and tracking wild pigs and extremely invasive species across Saskatchewan and Western Canada for over a decade, recording over 54,000 wild pig occurrences over that span…. Brook took all of the data he’s collected over the years and used it to create a ‘pig-pointed’ map. The map can be downloaded and then layered over top of google earth, highlighting the presence of pigs in the provinces’ rural municipalities.”
Phys .org: A quarter of known bee species haven’t appeared in public records since the 1990s. “Researchers at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) in Argentina have found that, since the 1990s, up to 25% of reported bee species are no longer being reported in global records, despite a large increase in the number of records available. While this does not mean that these species are all extinct, it might indicate that these species have become rare enough that no one is observing them in nature.”
ABC News (Australia): Drones count koalas faster and cheaper than manual spotting methods: study. “A team with a drone was able to spot koalas more effectively and cheaply than a team using more traditional methods, such as studying the forest floor for traces of koala scat, or shining spotlights into trees at night to catch a glimmer of eye-shine.”
WWF: Google’s AI technology to identify animals impacted by bushfires. “Artificial intelligence and an army of new sensor cameras will be used to track the recovery of animals impacted by bushfires in one of the most extensive post-fire surveillanceprograms ever undertaken in Australia. WWF-Australia and Conservation International, supported with a USD 1 million grant from Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, have launched An Eye on Recovery, a large-scale collaborative camera sensor project.”
