As rare animals disappear, scientist faces 'ecological grief'

Date:
June 12, 2020
Source:
University of Colorado at Boulder
Summary:
Five years before the novel coronavirus ran rampant around the
world, saiga antelopes from the steppes of Eurasia experienced
their own epidemic.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Five years before the novel coronavirus ran rampant around the world,
saiga antelopes from the steppes of Eurasia experienced their own
epidemic.


========================================================================== Millions of these grazing animals -- easily recognizable by their
oversized snouts -- once migrated across what is today Kazakhstan,
Mongolia, Georgia and more.

But then, over the span of three weeks in 2015, nearly 200,000, or
two-thirds of their existing population, sickened and died from a
bacterial infection.

Today, the a little more than 100,000 saiga are hanging onto survival
in a few pockets of Eurasia.

The decline, and uncertain fate, of the saiga is a story that resonates
with Joanna Lambert. She's a conservation biologist at the University
of Colorado Boulder and a coauthor of a paper published this week in
the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. The study explores the
current state of ungulates, or hoofed animals like the saiga, in the
western U.S. and around the world.

Lambert, who has studied ecological communities in both North America
and Equatorial Africa, explained that many of these creatures aren't
well-known outside of their home regions. But when these animals
disappear, entire ecosystems can reshuffle, occasionally beyond
recognition.

"We're losing these animals without people ever knowing they were
there in the first place," said Lambert, a professor in the Program of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder.



==========================================================================
For the researcher, the study's publication marks an opportunity to
reflect on how she stays hopeful even amid tremendous losses -- and
how to talk about the natural world during a period of unprecedented
social upheaval.

"I tell my students, 'I have to give you the facts. This is the world
you're growing up in, but don't let that paralyze you,'" Lambert said.

Unsung species The new research was led by Joel Berger of Colorado State University and also included scientists from Bhutan, Argentina and Chile.

The team decided to look at ungulates because -- with a few exceptions
like rhinos and elephants -- they don't usually pop up in brochures for conservation organizations. But, Lambart said, they're still in trouble: Huemel, for example, once roamed across the Patagonia region of South
America. Today, a little more than 1,000 of these fluffy deer still live
in the wild. The tamaraw, a pint-sized buffalo from the Philippines,
is down to just a few hundred individuals.



==========================================================================
"The whole world knows the stories of pandas and mountain gorillas,
but there are untold numbers of unsung species that come and go without
the world's attention," she said.

Their cases also show just how complicated conservation can be.

Lambert has spent years trekking the grasslands and forests of Yellowstone National Park to study wildlife. After federal officials killed all
the park's wolves in the 1940s, elk herds there began to multiply --
big time. Head counts for these herbivores surged from a few thousand individuals to tens of thousands, and they devoured once-abundant plants
like cottonwood and willow trees.

"When you pull one species out of its community, or if you add a new
one in, the entire assembly changes," Lambert said. "That has been
the history of what humans have done on the planet." When the park
brought wolves back in the 1990s, and elk numbers dropped back down,
something unexpected happened: beavers, which had also disappeared from Yellowstone, began reappearing, too. The furry swimmers, it turns out,
depend on those same tree species to build their dams.

"In many cases, we don't know what rules these ecosystems followed in
the past," she said. "Even when we do know, it doesn't matter because
we now have this added element of human tinkering." Ecological grief
Lambert has also struggled to keep going as a conservation biologist as
the wilds around her field sites in Africa and North America dwindled,
then vanished entirely.

"As I returned each year from the field, it was taking me longer and
longer to recover from a sort of existential depression," she said. "I
realized that I have been profoundly impacted by the losses I've seen."
Many of Lambert's students feel similarly hopeless, a phenomenon that psychologists call "ecological grief." She tells them to focus on the
success stories, however rare they are. Protected areas like Yellowstone
have saved countless animals from extinction and have given others like
wolves new chances at survival. Lambert is also providing scientific
guidance around proposals to return wolves to Colorado.

And there are still a lot of animals out there -- including the few
remaining herds of big-nosed saiga.

"We need to fight like hell to keep all that," she said.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_Colorado_at_Boulder. Original written by Daniel
Strain. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Joel Berger, Tshewang Wangchuk, Cristobal Briceno, Alejandro
Vila, Joanna
E. Lambert. Disassembled Food Webs and Messy Projections:
Modern Ungulate Communities in the Face of Unabating Human
Population Growth. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2020;
8 DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2020.00128 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200612172216.htm

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