Book Review: Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom, by Daphne Fairbairn

Odd Couples, book cover

Since becoming a first-time mum last summer, I’ve become painfully more aware of the sexually-based differences between myself and my husband as we navigate the new-to-us territory of parenthood. (How can men listen to a baby wail for so long without doing anything?! And why do I feel I traded my career for motherhood, while his career is taking off and he gets to be an awesome dad?!) Yet, no matter how baffling these differences feel to me, they are negligible compared to the ones explored in Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Odd Couples is a refreshingly informative and passionate jaunt through the extreme differences found in the sexes of eight different animal species. Evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn infuses her rigorously researched text with elegant and poised language, a pervasive sense of insatiable curiosity, first-hand experiential scenes and learned suppositions. The result is a feeling of listening, enthralled, to the best lecturer in far-and-away the best college biology course you ever experienced.

Fairbairn begins the book with a standard introduction revealing biographical information which exemplifies her expertise in evolutionary biology. She shares that the roots of her questions about sexual differences stretches back to her early-career field studies on wild deer mice. The main questions her book explores are “why sexual differences are such a pervasive and significant part of the fabric of animal variation and, in particular, why males and females have come to differ to truly extraordinary degrees in some animal lineages.”  

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The Secret World of Red Wolves

Yesterday I came home from the Science Writers 2012 conference in Raleigh, N.C. feeling very good about seeing many old and new friends. Despite dealing with the travails of traveling as a nursing mom without her baby, it was an awesome trip. But even more awesome awesomesauce was awaiting me at home. Lurking in the middle of my stack of mail was the new UNC Press catalog for their spring/summer book releases—and gracing the cover is a large, handsome red wolf, a nice nod to the upcoming release of my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves next April! (Click here to download a partial PDF of the catalog and read more about the book.)

I am thrilled the press chose a photo from my book to put on the cover of their catalog! It is a wonderful gesture to their faith in the importance of this book, and it is also a welcome bit of positive news for the red wolf which is currently plagued by the fallout of a decision by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to allow the night spotlighting of coyotes throughout the state, even within the endangered red wolf’s five-county recovery area. For this, they are being sued. (I first wrote about the threat of this change to the state hunting regulations for the Scientific American Guest Blog, and for the Charlotte Observer, and I’ll be writing more about it elsewhere in the coming month.)

The photo on the catalog cover is also the photo for my book cover, which will look like this:

Now, is that a nice cover or what? I love the way they framed the wolf’s gaze with the title.

But back to the catalog. This is the first step in marketing my book, and that makes me very excited because I actually finished writing the book in November of 2011. At the time, I had no idea that it would take more than a year for the project to transform into a saleable hardback form! (In fact, the process took so long, I actually went through pregnancy and birth and now have a beautiful baby boy! Some people have commented that it must feel pretty good to have a book and a baby both “born” within the same year. It does feel good, though also a tad overwhelming as I try to regain my foothold with writing now that my life is re-centering around another human being.) Because of my recent inauguration into motherhood, I’ve not been blogging much the past few months, but I hope to rectify that situation in the months to come. Goodness knows there is so much to write about with recent developments for the worse for red wolves.

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Are wolves really all that?

Gray wolves chasing an elk.

Have conservation scientists become carried away, touting the ecological benefits of wolves where there are perhaps — dare I say it? — not as many as we believe there to be? Perhaps some people in the media, and even some in science, have gotten carried away with the ecological changes that wolves are actually capable of mediating, says globally-renowned wolf biologist L. David Mech in his most recent paper “Is science in danger of sanctifying the wolf?”

Ever since the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, and by extension the Northern Rocky Mountain ecoregion, the role of apex predators in regulating trophic cascades has been an issue of great debate. Among the first to publish a correlation between a return of aspen and willow recruitment to stands where they’d been long absent, at the same time that wolves were reintroduced, were a pair of researchers from Oregon State University, Ripple and Beschta. They promulgated an idea dubbed the ecology of fear which postulated that the presence of wolves caused a behavioral shift in elk, leading them to graze less often in open riparian corridors where they were more likely to be attacked by wolves. Their warier behavior, and shift in browsing pressure, led to a rebound in the aspen and willow growth. It’s become a familiar, almost calcified narrative, and one that many wildlife proponents have embraced (myself included).

But in his newest paper, Mech reviews the literature both supporting and refuting wolves as the mechanism of a behaviorally-modulated trophic cascade in Yellowstone. He asserts that other factors may be at play in stimulating the willows and aspen to regrow, and that they at least deserve more serious discussion. Mech seems to feel that some conservation scientists have become so myopically focused on wolves as the mechanism of ecological change that we tend to view as positive that they are unwilling or unable to look beyond wolves for alternative or contributing factors.

I have to admit, if this paper had been written by someone other than Mech, I’d probably have not have paid as much attention to it. This is because I find myself wanting to believe the wolf-as-ecological-mediator narrative. I freely admit, I’m biased in this regard. But the fact that a wolf biologist as learned and experienced as Mech produced this definitely caught my eye.

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Book Review: The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

Wolverines are badass animals. That’s probably why Marvel Comics made a character based on them. But unfortunately, we know more about the comic character than the real deal! Myth tells us that these animals are enormous gluttons, so much so that their latinized name is Gulo gulo, which means glutton glutton. I suppose the double name speaks to the intensity of glutton they were once thought to be.

Wolverines are a modest sized animal that can weigh anywhere from 15 to 70 pounds, with most being in the 30-50 pound range. They have the lithe muscular bodies of young black bear cubs, but with the wide digging-ready paws of a badger. Their heads look like a mashup of a Tasmanian devil with a mongoose. They have enormous strength that allows them to gallop for hours on end through deep snow fields, swim through freezing streams and rivers, and haul their bulk up nearly vertical cliff faces. And did I mention their skulls harbor bone-crushing teeth? Well, they do, and they make good use of them, gobbling up bones from carrion and fresh kills alike to process the fatty, nutritious marrow that many other animals can’t access.

Despite their obvious badassery, wolverines have remained one of the most understudied mammalian predators on the continent.

A few years ago, a multi-year project to study the life history details of these animals was undertaken at Glacier National Park, where a small population of the animals still remain. The study provided the perfect vehicle for Douglas Chadwick, who volunteered on the project, to write a book about these amazing but largely unknown carnivores.

In The Wolverine Way Chadwick narrates the time he spent as a volunteer on the Glacier project. His voice offers a mix of wonder and humility with just the right amount of swagger. But that last element stems almost solely from what we learn of wolverines: how they can scale sheer rock and ice mountain faces in times that make the most ardent mountaineers green with envy; how they can roam twenty or more miles across rugged topography in a single day, treating mountain slopes as if they were flat; how they can go head-to-head with grizzlies to stake a carcass as their own; and how they can munch bones like so many stale breadsticks to carry them between meaty meals.

Chadwick’s engaging, at times poetic, writing and reflections of the natural world are what elevates this book from a mere documentation of a project to an insightful tome into what I can only call the mindset of a wolverine. Check out this video trailer to see what I’m talking about:

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Poland’s wolves trot across key wildlife overpasses

Critically endangered Central European wolves have learned to use wildlife overpasses that span the major A4 autostrada in western Poland. The first hard evidence of regular overpass use by three separate wolf packs was recently documented by Dr. Robert W. Mysłajek of the Association for Nature, ‘Wolf.’ a Polish organization, and Dr. Sabina Nowak. The pair plan to formally announce their findings at the upcoming IENE 2012 International Conference in Potsdam-Berlin, Germany. {1}

This video, supplied by Mysłajek, clearly shows several wolves loping and trotting across the wildlife overpass, while the sound of vehicular engines ebb and flow in the distance:

The wolves appear to be using the overpasses during the cover of night and the light of day. A highway as large as the A4 is a major obstacle for the movement of predators such as Poland’s wolves, bears and lynx, as well as other wildlife. Which is why it is exciting that these particular wolves are using these particular overpasses.

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Wildlife Services: A true DISservice to wildlife

Wildlife Services sounds like a benign name, right? Yet this little-known government agency in the Department of Agriculture provides the farthest thing from a “service” to wildlife that you could possibly imagine. Don’t be confused… I’m not talking about the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the Department of Interior agency tasked with recovering endangered species and monitoring all kinds of wildlife. Wildlife Services is diametrically opposed to the FWS. It’s a radically different shadow agency tasked with killing millions of animals each year. I’m not kidding — millions of animals that bear feathers, fur, and teeth. Unfortunately, the bulk of Wildlife Service’s efforts have historically gone into killing predators such as wolves, coyotes and foxes, usually at the behest of the livestock industry which benefits from having fewer wild carnivores on the landscape. And even more unfortunately, they often kill many more species than their intended targets.

Starting last week, the Sacremento Bee published a three-part investigative series on Wildlife Services that was written by veteran environmental reporter Tom Knudson. (Part I, Part II, Part III) According to the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, it took Knudson one year to report and write the stories. They detail an agency out of step with science, and out of sync with modern times. For a truly disturbing inforgraphic, check out this one which details all the animals which Wildlife Services killed on purpose, and by mistake, between 2006 and 2010. (And think, this is only what was reported as by-catch… their trappers and agents have a long history of not always reporting nontarget kills, so these numbers are likely the lowest possible estimates.)

Shortly after the series ran, WildEarth Guardians announced they were suing Wildlife Services… which makes me think they were holding off on their NOI to sue until after Knudson ran his stories so they could use them as leverage for public opinion. (Kind of sneaky, but also exactly what I would have advised them to do if I was running their PR dept.)

As most readers of Wild Muse know, I’m intensely interested in predator ecology and predator conservation. With all that is now known about the importance of predators in our ecosystems, it’s sickening to think that a government agency is working to “control” them through lethal means. Even worse that this is occuring despite evidence that Wildlife Service’s own methods aren’t working (see Knudson’s articles for more on that).

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North Carolina Nights video shows similarity of red wolves & coyotes

This video was produced by Jeff Mittlestadt, a journalism graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was published yesterday on Reese News. Jeff’s thesis work focuses on red wolves, and in this video he shows wild canids active at night, and asks: Are these red wolves or coyotes? The question gets to the issue of whether coyote hunters would be able to satisfactorily distinguish between common coyotes and globally imperiled red wolves if the state allows them to shoot coyotes at night, statewide, with no bag limit and no permit required. Listen to local hunters from Hyde County, within the red wolf recovery area, discuss whether or not they shoot coyotes now and why or why not.

Do you think nighttime coyote hunting ought to be legal in North Carolina? Tell the state Wildlife Resources Commission whether you agree or disagree with their proposal to allow it. Read proposal W1 on this page, then click on the online form to submit your comments. The comment period is open until April 16 — just four more days. (If you are not a NC resident, you can still comment, just select your state in question-6, and scroll past all the NC counties for question-7 to select “out of state” at the very bottom.)

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Nighttime coyote hunting could harm federally-endangered red wolves

A shorter version of this story was published in the Charlotte Observer Sci-Tech pages on April 9, 2012. If you would like to submit comments to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission about their proposal to allow the nighttime hunting of coyotes then please visit this page and click the online form link for proposal W1. The comment period is open until April 16, 2012.

Captive male red wolf. Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven/USFWS

Since 1993 it’s been legal to shoot coyotes during daylight hours throughout North Carolina, but a new rule proposed by the Wildlife Resources Commission would expand statewide coyote hunting opportunities to include nighttime. The new rule would allow the use of artificial lights to blind coyotes after dark where hunting is currently legal. There would be no season, no bag limit, and no permit required.

Opponents to the rule say it unnecessarily places federally-listed red wolves at risk of being shot by mistake because they appear physically similar to coyotes. Red wolves range in weight from 55 -75 pounds while coyotes are usually 35 to 40 pounds, according to the Red Wolf Recovery Program Coordinator David Rabon.

“We have suffered a number of problems during daylight hours with mistaken identity, and hunting at night is only going to add to that,” Rabon said. On average, six to eight red wolves are killed each year in cases where the shooter believed they were taking a coyote but instead shot a red wolf. Red wolves are most active at night.

Because coyotes and red wolves will hybridize under certain conditions, the Fish and Wildlife Service has sterilized coyotes in the five-county red wolf recovery area since about 2000 to prevent interspecies breeding. Rabon said the program is currently monitoring about 40 sterilized coyotes in Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell, Washington and Beaufort counties. These coyotes and all known red wolves wear radio collars, which might add to the identity confusion. Rabon fears the rule change would harm his program’s hybridization management if sterilized coyotes are shot, and he questions what WRC is trying to achieve in terms of wildlife management.

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Night-hunting coyotes is risky to red wolves

Red wolf, Barron Crawford/Fish and Wildlife Service

Wild Muse has been terribly quiet lately. If you think that means something is up behind the scenes around here… you’re right! I’m stuck in Book Revision Land for the next month or so. But I made time last week to write about a timely wildlife management issue in my state. The NC Wildlife Resources Commission has proposed allowing the night-hunting of coyotes with artificial lights state-wide, with no bag limit, no season, and no permit required. The weirdest part? To the untrained eye, coyotes and federally-endangered red wolves are hard to tell apart in the daytime, much less at night. What will this proposal mean for red wolves? Read more in my in-depth report on the Scientific American Guest Blog.

 

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Cool future for brook trout, even in era of climate change

Eastern brook trout, photo from Trout Unlimited

This article first appeared in the Charlotte Observer on Feb. 27, 2012.

A spot of good news is surfacing for North Carolina’s brook trout, and the anglers who hold their speckled brookies so dear.

Not so long ago, scientists forecast that much of what remained of eastern brook trout habitat would be severely affected by climate change. In fact, it was thought the only native trout in the Eastern United States might vanish from large parts of its southern range, leaving only a few populations concentrated mostly in western North Carolina.

But a new study in progress across seven Southeastern states has found reason to believe that many cold-water streams – those found at elevations where brook trout love to linger – may be less vulnerable to warming temperatures than previously forecast.

The study’s investigator, Andrew Dolloff, is team leader for the cold-water fisheries research unit of the Forest Service’s Southern Research Station in Blacksburg, Va. Brook trout are very sensitive to water temperatures, preferring to live in the cleanest cold water streams below a critical threshold of 69.8 degrees.

“They can survive above this threshold, but making a living is much, much more difficult for them,” Dolloff said.

Brook trout are also one of the most widely spread temperature-sensitive aquatic species in the East. This makes them good indicators for understanding the effects of climate change. “If a trout can’t live somewhere anymore, there’s going to be a whole bunch of other species that can’t live there either,” Dolloff said.

Brookie background

In 2006, Trout Unlimited released a report that showed a 20 percent reduction in the historic range of brook trout. Trout Unlimited is a not-for-profit organization which protects, conserves and works to restore cold-water streams and rivers in North America. The report also showed that brookies were greatly reduced in an additional 47 percent of their historic range. This led some to question what the future might hold, given predictions of a warming world.

An answer to this question came about, also in 2006, when scientists attempted to scale down findings from a continental-scale model of climate change. The model assumed a correlation between water and air temperatures of about 0.8 degrees. This meant that for every one-degree change in air temperature, they modeled a 0.8-degree change in water temperature.

Most climate-change models predict about a four degree increase in air temperature in the next 100 years, so the study predicted a corresponding 3.2 degree increase in cold-water stream temperatures over the same period. This resulted in a dire forecast that the brook trout’s remaining habitat would contract radically, leaving intact less than half of the habitat that remained.

“It caused a lot of consternation, and rightly so,” Dolloff said.

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