Bear safety while hunting

Some sage advice from Rick Sinnott summarizing the research on bear attacks on Alaskans, and the best defence against them:

Is a firearm better protection than bear spray? Bear spray -- a concoction of propellants and capsaicin (from red pepper) that burns the eyes and mucous membranes -- is effective up to about 30-35 feet. Dr. Tom Smith, Herrero and others assessed the effectiveness of bear spray in 72 incidents in Alaska where someone used it in defense. Bear spray was effective in 92 percent of the 50 cases involving grizzlies and 90 percent of the 20 cases involving black bears. No one who used bear spray was killed. In the nine instances where a grizzly charged a person, the bear broke off the encounter after it was sprayed, and only one person was injured. The injury was relatively minor, deep scratches requiring stitches. Eventually, someone who uses bear spray will be severely injured or killed by the bear. But it seems clear that bear spray promises to be at least as effective at preventing maulings as a firearm.

I would actually go further than he would, and say that despite my earlier critique of of research on the subject, bear spray is more effective than firearms. I've been sprayed before, and even with my puny human nose, it was incapacitatingly painful. And I only got a short burst. When I hunt, I always carry bear spray too, despite the fact that I obviously have a gun, and have it at the ready.

Of course, the best deterrent is the one you actually use. Bear spray is uesless if it's at the bottom of your pack, or you don't spray the bear...

Pictures

Does caffeine help you drink?

It was my brother who told me that drinking coffee while drinking alcohol was a good idea - it would lessen the effects of intoxication. I launched into an ethanol fuelled discussion of how physiologically implausible that sounded to me, but we were celebrating a great occasion, and so I don't think I got much beyond slurring something about cyclic AMP before we instead had some of Arizona's finest porter. But I recall that exchange fairly well, a few years later.

It's with the fact that I'm taking on my brother that I write this - here's a man who can, and has when I was younger, beat me up, so I'll be diplomatic about it. Energy Drink-Cocktails have been in vogue for the last little bit, so Ferreira and colleagues decided to perform a small experiment of the effects of Redbull® and vodka. They took 26 subjects, all Brazilian males, and were put on treatment of one of two doses of vodka (a lesser and greater amount), modulated with and without Red Bull. There were a total of 3 treatments at least 7 days apart, and the whole thing was double blinded throughout - meaning neither researchers nor subjects knew whether they were getting alcohol, or the alcohol mixed with the energy drink. They also standardized the subjects on calories in a novel way - they used a big mac as a pre-drinking caloric unit. Who knew McDonalds was a research tool?

The graph most worth reproducing is the one that shows absolutely no effect on breath alcohol concentrations. I've included it to the right. I'm not fond of breath measurements (blood is better), but that aside, the effect is pretty clear: there is none. Co-drinking caffeine does not appear to modulate your BAC. Already, one urban myth dead.

But even if it doesn't effect your BAC, perhaps it effects how intoxicated you are, or your performance while intoxication. They tested this, by examining motor co-ordination and visual reaction time. In both cases, there was no effect of energy-drink on performance. Having a Red Bull® does not improve your ability to function while intoxicated. The popular myth of co-administered caffeine appears well and truly dead. But this raises the question, why did such a persistent myth get started?

There's no good figure for this (basically a page of tables), but at the same time they asked their subjects a variety of questions about wellbeing, and how they felt at the time. It covered the field from tiredness, tremor, to speech impairment and so on. Now, right now, these menus are basically a laundry list, and some of the results can easily show up as positivity spuriously. With that in mind, they found that individuals felt they had significantly better motor co-ordination than they in-fact had. Remember, they were double blinded, so they didn't know what they had just drank. The expectation bias should be weak in this instance - something about the energy drink makes us /feel/ illusory confidence in our motor skills. Perhaps it prevents us from feeling how poor our skills have become, or perhaps it bolsters confidence in the skills. It's hard to divine which, from the data.

Aside from the problem of multiple tests on that, I've got one other criticism of the study, and that's how they standardized their subjects. I've long suspected that self-reported alcohol consumption is not a reliable indicator of true alcohol (or other drugs) consumption. There's a stigma attached to excessive drug consumption, and so people are likely to under-report their use. There needs to be a better way to gauge participant alcohol consumption.

---

Ferreira, S., de Mello, M., Pompeia, S., & de Souza-Formigoni, M. (2006). Effects of Energy Drink Ingestion on Alcohol Intoxication Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 30 (4), 598-605 DOI: 10.1111/j.1530-0277.2006.00070.x

From the "You can't make this up" Files

I recognize that keeping good public relations and education is important for carnivore conservation. After all, ranchers don't like their cattle being eaten, joggers don't like being mauled by bears, and that lady who was mobbed by eagles was kinda unhappy at the time.

But honestly, can we admit that sometimes, the public is kind of stupid? This woman is suing the province of Alberta:

A woman just west of Grande Prairie, Alta., says the province's wildlife officers could have prevented her two miniature donkeys from being killed by a grizzly bear in May.
Christie Olesen discovered the bodies of donkeys Tabasco and Jewel on her property on May 13.
[...]

"[The bear] basically ripped them open, ate their organs out and just left their bodies there," Olesen said Tuesday.
Olesen said officers from Alberta Fish and Wildlife knew the bear was in the area and should have warned her.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2010/06/16/edmonton-grizzly-donkey-attack.html#ixzz0rszCpggC

Her argument - that the Province should have let her know that there was a collared bear in the area - makes sense right up until you put some thought to it. 

First you're left with the problem that no one is monitoring collar data 24x7 if it's a GPS collar, and if it's a radio collar? Well, you know where the bear is even less often. 

And it'd be difficult to warn everyone about all the collared bears, everywhere.

And there's the fact that this woman wasn't even taking common sense precautions to protect her valuable livestock, despite the fact that she lives in BEAR HABITAT. You know, like putting the valuable animals in the barn for the night as a matter of course. So they don't get eaten by any of the uncollared bears. Or wolves. Or coyotes. Or, depending on their size, the aforementioned eagles. Or wolverines. Or feral dogs. Or cougars. Or... well, you get the picture.

Aside from that, her argument is great. 

Donkey Lady:

Hat tip to http://overlawyered.com/

Sentences worth pondering

Currently, the primary practical factors ensuring that Alaska predator populations remain sustainable include 1) lack of tradition and interest in harvesting wolves and bears relative to harvesting moose or caribou, and 2) the greater challenge and cost associated with harvesting wolves and bears because predators are elusive, particularly in forested areas, and usually occur at low densities compared with moose or caribou. A substantial, long-term change in ≥1 of these factors will warrant a reexamination of whether sustainability of predator populations is adequately ensured.

This from Science and Values Influencing Predator Control for Alaska Moose Management in the new issue of JWM.

How screwed is the polar bear?

Even deniers like Akasofu wouldn't argue that the planet isn't warming. He just casts the blame elsewhwere, in a probably incorrect manner. It's the naïve who say that global warming is a hoax because "it snowed a lot last winter" (and so are those who believe in global warming because it's hot today, but for different reasons), that or the ideologues who view this through a partisan lens. Let there be no mistake, creatures like polar bears are adapted for conditions that won't occur again until the next ice age, and things are only going to change more as time goes on.

That's not to say we know everything about polar bears. The problems are not trivial - logistics are massive, the creatures elusive, and weather is ever your foe. It's difficult to get a reasonable trend on the species, in whole or in part, because counting is easier said than done. That's where morphemetrics supposedly can come in. The idea is that we can measure things, take masses, count the cubs, and figure out from there how well everyone is doing. In some respects, this has many advantages over census, where populations can be high, but unwell and ready for a massive decline.

And so, Dr. Rode, Dr. Amstrup and Dr. Regehr, all three Forest Service or USGS here in the state, have published a paper collating 28 years of morphometric data from polar bears in the southern Beaufort sea, which spans from midway between Point Hope and Wainwright, to somewhere just west of Nunavut's western most continental extreme. Thankfully, the spell out their study aims very nicely:

Specifically, we addressed the following four questions:
(1) Is reproductive output, quantified as litter mass, associated with maternal condition? If so, what measures of female stature/condition (condition indices, body mass, skull size) are most closely related to reproductive output?
(2) Did body mass, skull size, or condition relate to interannual variation in available ice habitat?
(3) Did body mass, skull size, or condition of polar bears exhibit a trend between 1982 and 2006?
(4) Did reproductive output (litter mass and cubs per-female) exhibit a trend between 1982 and 2006? Was it related to interannual variation in available ice habitat?

The study is deceptively simple in terms of field methods - they flew out in a helicopter oppertunistically tracking polar bears in May when polar bears are aggregated on the continental shelf, or in a few years in the Autumn when they're more on the shorefast ice or land. They would dart the bear, jab any cubs, and then take some basic measurements including skull width, body length, mass, they would age the bear (which can be done from the teeth), and quantify the cubs. In all, they captured between 5 and 152 bears a year

For the ice, things became more... mmm... abstract, we'll say. Instead of taking satellite measurements of ice, they use collar data to generate a resource selection function - which is to say, where the bears prefer to be. They called the top 20%, where 70% of the bears dwell, optimum habitat, or "Ice." From there, they dive into what I can only call model-mania, which is typical of a paper of this nature. They compete different models to see which are the best, and generate many tedious tables that all but the most interested individuals find themselves nodding off during. Don't get me wrong, the information of these models can be highly informative, as can their weights, but they're incredibly dry. I've sometimes caught individuals trying to use this fact to their advantage in sneaking through poor data and hoping people nod off after a hearty meal of model stew. I'll spare you the details of the growth curves, but suffice to say they broke the bears up into 2 age classes for each gender, and 1 for cubs which included all but bi-yearlings.

The answer to question (1) appears to be an unqualified yes, with high probability. Sow mass influences cub mass, and not inconsiderably. This is true of cubs of the year in both autumn and spring, and yearlings in just the autumn. This is unsurprising, but it's good to see that their variables are measuring what they think they're measuring, for purposes of our future analyses. The answer to (2) is also yes, but only for some age groups. Curiously, a trend over time is only evident if you look at age classes  (7-11yr olds), but there appears to be a simple explanation for this - lighter weight bears tend to die more. This leaves only the older bears, for whom there is no trend over time. They would be left at a reduced number, if this was the case. The best trends appear to come from skull width for females and "Ice", and Skull width and body length for both sexes early in life. This is curious, since neither variable acts fast. Bone is a slow growing (though dynamic) tissue, and you would expect it to react slowly to yearly variation of ice. This is to contrast with mass, which can change quite rapidly as conditions worsen. An explanation why it's a major factor for fast growing polar bears is that this is a key stage in their development, and environmental stress is getting 'recorded' in their body. An older bear just needs to pile on the pounds, and care for cubs, whereas a younger bear needs to do this as well as continue to grow larger and larger. As anyone who has been around teenagers know, this takes a lot of food.

Question (3) is a yes - there were trends over time in female skull width, body length, and some fewer variables in males. I'm less interested in this fact than I am in the trend in reproduction, where litter mass is trending down over time (while being positively associated with "Ice") at the same time that yearlings are trending down over time, with the same positive association with "Ice." This suggests there is a "Double Whammy" - not only are there fewer cubs, but lighter cubs. Recall that mass is good for survival, so these lighter cubs will be more likely to die earlier, and sire or whelp fewer cubs of their own. This is a real matter of concern, and should highlight how important it is to keep a close watch on the SB sea polar bears in the future.

They discuss the variance and trend in their "Ice" variable. As "Ice" doesn't truly measure ice, I'm hesitant to draw too much from this. What the graph I've put to the right really shows is that in some years, bears are more clustered than others, and over time the clustering is increasing. There are many  factors that could lead to this pattern, including decrease in true ice coverage, changing patterns of seal availability, and increased human related disturbance. The arctic is a changing place, and it is becoming a busy place, and I saw no attempts to disentangle their "Ice" from this. We don't actually know that true ice declines lead to any future trends we see in this paper, we only know that an increase in bear density (or a decrease in habitat selected) does. This is this paper's strongest weakness, and makes all further "Ice" models slightly weaker, in my mind.

Can be density increasing? If the population is declining, then a decrease in habitat selected could maintain the same density of bears. However, there is no statistically robust trend of bear population for the SB sea. The problem is that measurements in the 80s had a large deal of imprecision associated with them. I generally suspect bear census is declining, but as a properly skeptical scientist, I must point out this has not been well demonstrated. Discarding that hypothesis, density would increase, leading to many of the downstream
 findings that I've previously discussed. We know that density is bad for survival (males kill cubs), increases stress, and can decease resource availability to any given bear. Additionally, it can lead to an increased transmission of disease. The authors rightly discount selective hunting for large bears driving the trends (polar bears are shot opportunistically), and argue that contaminants are just as unlikely to be a source for a decline. But given the poor support for their "Ice' variable, we can equally argue that what we're seeing is density dependant effects from some other factor that might not stem from ice per-se. I am a fan of keeping my datasets simple. If I wish to measure ice's association with polar bears, I would prefer to measure the ice.

Rode KD, Amstrup SC, & Regehr EV (2010). Reduced body size and cub recruitment in polar bears associated with sea ice decline. Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America, 20 (3), 768-82 PMID: 20437962

Bear Rancher update

Remember Charlie the Bear Rancher? He's the guy who decided that he was going to feed a whole mess of bears dogfood for years. He was training them to... who knows. Musically fart Easter hymns, for all I know or care. The man is clearly not engaging his brain, if he thinks romping around with bears is a fantastic idea.

Well, the Bear Rancher has plead guilty to feeding wildlife, and is going to get slapped with some fine and probation. I don't see this stopping the next brilliant person who wants to do this, because the state let it go on for 20 years before acting. Treadwell was a good demonstration that Bears are not Pets.

The commentators in ADN, as usual, prove we have the brightest and best here. Some people asked why they're going after a guy who feeds bears when they only tried and punished people engaged in the wanton waste incident in the North-West. Like this fine person:

This man taught us a lesson that hopefully the youth of today will remember, that harmony is possible under the proper conditions. As usual, the authorities must impose their will upon those who don't conform. I can only imagine the price of his fine might equal the value of his property. This is just plain wrong, we have a person who feeds bears in a remote location and is looking at a minimum fine of 20K. And meanwhile back on the tundra we have a caribou slaughter that results in a comparative wrist slap.
I think the blindfolded broad with the scales has lost her freaking mind.

Ah, yes. Because, you know a guy who can afford to ship 10,000 lbs of dog food to feed bears each year just can't take a fine. Where is he going to find money to feed the 2011 bears, I ask you? Why, with such a large fine, he won't be able to feed bears for at least five years! Big brother is out to get us!!!!one

pkidwell  wrote on 04/07/2010 06:41:11 AM:
I long for the days when the government will get out of our lives and allow us to live as we had before the kooks took over.

Don't you love how this person just claimed Charlie the Bear Rancher is one of the sane, normal people needing protected from the "Kooks?" Nothing says "Normal Behaviour" feeding bears for 20 years to train them to do stuff. Why, that's our god given right to do that!

Anton_Chigurh  wrote on 04/07/2010 07:52:22 AM:

A 100 years ago no one would have given a care in the world as long as he was not hurting himself or others. Complete government take over of almost every aspect of our lives is on the horizon. You'll see

Top on the Obama commo-fascist take over's agenda is to take your god given, constitutional right to feed random bears and strip them like ladies at a Republican fundraiser in Vegas. Yes, it turns out the New-World-Order is mostly concerned with getting states to enforce laws they had before the New-World-Order. How insidious.

Alaska. Seriously:

Top Photo by Alaska Department of Fish and Game / The Associated Press

On the Origins of Polar bears

From PNAS  March 16, 2010   vol. 107  no. 11  5053-5057 "Complete mitochondrial genome of a Pleistocene jawbone unveils the origin of polar bear" Lindqvist et al. 2010.

The polar bear has become the flagship species in the climate-change discussion. However, little is known about how past climate impacted its evolution and persistence, given an extremely poor fossil record. Although it is undisputed from analyses of mitochondrial (mt) DNA that polar bears constitute a lineage within the genetic diversity of brown bears, timing estimates of their divergence have differed considerably. Using next-generation sequencing technology, we have generated a complete, high-quality mt genome from a stratigraphically validated 130,000- to 110,000-year-old polar bear jawbone. In addition, six mt genomes were generated of extant polar bears from Alaska and brown bears from the Admiralty and Baranof islands of the Alexander Archipelago of southeastern Alaska and Kodiak Island. We show that the phylogenetic position of the ancient polar bear lies almost directly at the branching point between polar bears and brown bears, elucidating a unique morphologically and molecularly documented fossil link between living mammal species. Molecular dating and stable isotope analyses also show that by very early in their evolutionary history, polar bears were already inhabitants of the Artic sea ice and had adapted very rapidly to their current and unique ecology at the top of the Arctic marine food chain. As such, polar bears provide an excellent example of evolutionary opportunism within a widespread mammalian lineage.

I've attached a copy of their phylogeny to this post, over to the right there. You can see the clearly 'nodal' (Basal) position of the polar bear they found. My first instinct was that this blew my pet hypothesis out of the water - that polar bears first underwent cultural evolution to adapt to ice based lifestyles, and then subsequently underwent phenotypic evolution. This would explain the the fact that ABC brown bears are paraphyletic to the rest of the brown bears (but only with mtDNA markers!). However, there's something that's... mmm... niggling? I think that's a word.

See, there are two issues. First is that identification is based on morphology. It looks like a polar bear skull, therefore progenitor polar bears looked like modern polar bears. On the other hand, you would see nothing if progenitor polar bears looked like modern brown bears, because we'd mis-classify them as arctos instead of maritimus. Therefore, the study could only find that polar bears were more like modern polar bears in morphology. Connected to this issue is that given the only the left mandible (jawbone) could be recovered. Granted, that's more than what we'd have otherwise, as polar bear remains are rare (As things that hangs out around water tend to be!). Still, it may be premature to state that this is substantial morphological evolution.

My second issue is that bone are far less static than we commonly think of them. Bone is an incredibly dynamic tissue, like muscle, that grows and whithers based on whether it's used, and how it's loaded with stress from the muscles. Look at the bones of people using percussive machines such as jackhammers, for example! In biologist talk, this is what we call "Environmental induction", where your environment causes you to have some feature, not genetics or heredity. To begin with, the differences between maritimus and arctos is subtle, as I've illustrated to the right with skulls from our teaching collecting here at UAF.  Compare the right skull to the picture of the skull I have below. Ignoring the intra-individual differences (and the differences from differential weathering), the skeletal differences between the two species is incredibly subtle. There's few characters you can use to differentiate them, but it takes a trained eye. No one, to my knowledge, has checked to see if varying brown bear diet varies cranial morphology. Ditto for polar bears.

There are messages I'm taking home, though. First, the date of the split of the species. I'll buy it based on the stratigraphy, the tree they generated, and how well it jives with the rest of the evidence. This makes polar bears a really recent species (not that we had any suspicions to the contrary!), which is interesting. Second, whole mtDNA genome sequencing for ancient remains: even cooler than I thought it was. Third, polar bears had a polar bear diet when they split. Pretty dang cool right there. As for the course of evolution of the polar bear, I remain somewhat sceptical and hesitant to accept their conclusions. 

Edit to add: Oh, wow, am I embarrassed! I posed the wrong skull comparison! The one I have above is arctos and americanus! That's entirely wrong! Here's a proper polar bear skull!

Lindqvist, C., Schuster, S., Sun, Y., Talbot, S., Qi, J., Ratan, A., Tomsho, L., Kasson, L., Zeyl, E., Aars, J., Miller, W., Ingolfsson, O., Bachmann, L., & Wiig, O. (2010). Complete mitochondrial genome of a Pleistocene jawbone unveils the origin of polar bear Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (11), 5053-5057 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914266107

Conservation priorities

Here are some facts that conservation biologists don't like to hear:

1. Conservation money is limited. Conservation effort is also limited.
2. There are many species in need of conservation.
3. The number of species in need of conservation is likely to grow.

And I'll add on one fact that I don't think any conservation biologist would disagree with:

4. Some species are harder to conserve than others.
   

Given these four basic premises, one conclusion pops out: we need to be selective in what we attempt to conserve, so to maximize the number of species we can conserve. It also means we shouldn't be wasting money on things that don't contribute significantly to conservation, like banning Canadian Polar Bear rugs, or wasting enforcement money chasing down native subsistence users who hunt polar bears through a ban (luckily, that one would be politically untenable).

Some species are challenging to conserve for space issues - try keeping a Grey Whale in captivity for captive breeding! Others are difficult for husbandry issues, like the Shanghai soft-shell turtle where the only male in China once attacked a female instead of mating. And ask the Black Footed Ferrets what re-discovery did to their numbers - I once heard a colleague describe the worst thing that happened to the Black Footed Ferret as being "Scientists discovered they weren't extinct yet."

The idea that we should maximize our bang-for-our-buck in conservation is a very unpopular one, though one that more scientists are coming around to. Recently, this argument poked its head up in the main stream media when a prominent scientist advocated just letting the Giant Panda go extinct. MSNBC downplays his comments through a rebuttal from another scientist - and would have thought the WWF, an organization that uses a Giant Panda as their logo, would oppose it?

Mr Packham is probably more in the right, here. The problem is that the Giant Panda is too much of a specialist, and its habitat is disappearing, and likely can't be re-created. Even if we stabilized their numbers at their current levels, they're (and would always be) highly vulnerable to chance events - like the introduction of a new disease, or a dry year. But from a public relations point of view, it would be un-reasonable to let the Panda go quietly into the night. People like bears (so long as they don't have to live with the). They're willing to shell out millions of dollars to see even a small return on their investment. Practically speaking, not the best course of action. But the one we're apparently taking, none the less.

The future of Polar Bears is Styrofoam

There's a stock number of questions I get all the time. Usually the first question I get is something about whether I shoot wolves or not. But just as often, after a long discussion about predator control, I'll get asked about Polar Bears, and whether I support their listing.

My answer is, of course, that given my knowledge of Polar Bear biology (admittedly incomplete), it seems prudent to protect Polar Bears. People will then ask me if I support subsistence harvest for Polar Bears. Which, given my knowledge of Polar Bear ecology, I do. `Ah ha!` someone will cry. `You're biased to subsistence! You wouldn't let a bunch of white guys go out and shoot a Polar Bear, but you're happy to let natives do it even when you want to protect a species!`

This is when I get out the clue-by-four and begin beating them with it until they get a clue.

So how can a species need protection, but still be available to harvest? Well, unlike many things in biology, this is actually mostly straight forward.

Let's say you have a Polar Bear.

Yes, yes you are a Polar Bear. Incidentally, if you want my art skills using paint, check out this tutorial.

Okay, let's take that Polar Bear, and put it with all her buddies.

What a wacky bunch! They should have their own prime-time sitcom.

Now, in this system, we have something that is a limiting factor, and something that will become an increasingly large limiting factor - habitat. Particularly, ice habitat. We're going to have a lot less of it. Some Polar Bears are going to have it...

But what about those who won't? Or those who get sub-optimal habitat?

Well...

I joke. It's not curtains time for them, but those bears will be much worse off. The boars probably won't get to breed, and the sow will have very low cub survival, because the sows will be in poor condition. There may be some small contribution contribution to the next generation's numbers, but the contribution will be dominated by chance (stochasticity).

It's my contention, and the contention of US gov't., that harvesting a small number of Polar Bears is entirely acceptable (albeit unsustainable). If you shoot a Polar Bear, either a) it wasn't going to make a large contribution to the demographics (especially if male) or b) it frees up the limiting factor (habitat) for another animal who will now be able to make a larger contribution to the next generation. And if you keep your hunts low, the mortality will rarely make a blip on the population magnitude radar. The story is simplified slightly, yeah. And I glossed over a few things. But on the whole, it holds water.

"Wait! You said it was unsustainable. What's with that" Well, sure. Eventually, given the trends in habitat, there will be very little habitat left to Polar Bears. Short of building Styrofoam icebergs for them, there's nothing we can do about that. Thus, it's not a sustainable situation. However, it's got less to do with hunting pressure and more to do with people running coal fired power plants. Here's some cold hard facts to throw a damper on your day: There probably won't be many Polar Bears in the future, Yup'ik Language is dying, someone will have to take a cut in their lifestyle because every country can't all have it and Africans will eventually want to start eating food too, and eventually India will kick our ass economically. Oh, and there's no Santa.

So, that all said, the ban on importing Polar Bear rugs from hunts is pissing into an active volcano. Sure, it feels good, but it doesn't get anything done to Polar Bear conservation. Worse, it has the unintended consequences of cutting off the livelihood of people. And it will consume resources enforcing the ban which would be better spent doing conservation in other ways. Like, say, putting up a few few wind turbines. But if we were really serious about solving these problems, things would be different, wouldn't they?

Predator Control by Press Release

If I was doing science by press release* to try and convince people everything was great about Predator Control, I don't think I would have taken the tack used in the AP story that the News Miner and the ADN picked up. This story is rife with problems.

First, while it's true that the current program really got started by Murkowski, there has been active predator control of one sort or another since pre-statehood. Poison, bounties and aerial shooting was employed by government agent until statehood. Aerial shooting continued with the public until 1972, when the federal Airborne Hunting Act was passed. This coincided with several harsh winters in the state, resulting in heavy predator depression of game populations.

In 1975, the first wolf control was authorized in game management unit 20A, which is south of the Tanana river from Fairbanks. This was conducted by only ADF&G staff. The policies were shaped over time through the 80s, and in 1992, the Board of Game (BOG) added control to three areas. Due to massive backlash from tourists, Hickel reconsider and BOG revoked their plan. In 1993, BOG authorizes additional predator control for 20A. Predator controlled continued until Knowles became Governor, and suspended all programs.

Because of the long history, I don't think it's fair to say Murkowski is responsible for predator control. It would be like saying I started the tradition of having breakfast this morning. Sure, it's technically true, because there was a gap of about 24 hours where I had no breakfast tradition, but it ignores all the breakfast I've had other days.

My next big complaint about the story has to do with mis-leading verbiage. The story implies that of all areas of predator control, a few have been successful. It then cites McGrath, and the Southern Alaska Peninsula. If we're allowed to talk about predator control as a holistic idea, a better example would be the aforementioned GMU 20A. The area currently hosts some of the largest populations of moose in the state, and very healthy populations of wolves (though not the healthiest, due to the 2003 invasion of a depeliating parasite).

If we're only talking about current areas, then I have some complaints. First, it's too early to be talking about successes. You only know whether you were successful after you remove predator control. One of two things will happen. Either population levels will remain stable, or the population of game species will decline again. If the number of game animals declines again, you know you've mis-characterized the ecological situation, and you're attempting to apply predator control where it doesn't work; if they remain stable, you know that you've been successful**. I will admit, if you don't see an increase in game numbers, it is fairly indicative that your current predator control regime is not applicable.

If we're limited to current predator control areas, then the Southern Alaskan Peninsula Caribou Herd is not great example of anything, right now. The situation is complex, and it's my studied opinion that we're not entirely in possession of all the facts in that system.  While Calf Mortality is clearly a major issue with the SAPCH (<2 per 100 is a very low number indeed), I'm yet to be fully confident that there are not other, conflating factors involved in the long term population trends.

The AP left out something re: the non-resident hunter situation that I think ADF&G would have pushed strong for inclusion. That is, that non-resident hunters are a substantial economic factor, especially in small villages. In order to access the non-resident permitted areas, a guide is typically required. Further, non-resident hunting parties can spend several thousands of dollars per person, and each tag typically results in multiple hunters in a party. While the Nelchina is a complex situation, one that I swore I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot stick, game there is not so precariously positioned that those permits need to be cancelled.

One thing I wish people understood is that Predator Control is like science in general: It's really, really complex. There are no simple answers to pretty much anything; everything is wrapped up in assumptions that need met, confidence intervals, and highly situational knowledge. There should be an * beside pretty much every simple line inside these sorts of articles saying "Well, X is true 85% of the time, and the other 15% of the time, Y and Z are true." We're letting ourselves get trapped by these simple story explanations which don't even begin to cover the truth.


*Science by press release is a pejorative comment to describe non-peer reviewed science that's pushed out there by Public Offices of Agencies and Universities. the chief complaint is that science by press release is rarely accurate, and never goes through the rigour of peer review.


** This is seriously simplified, moreso than everything else here. But the nut of the matter is sound - you don't know, until it's over.

Hadn't we been on this ride before?

This comic panel from the ever-funny XKCD. Click for the whole strip...
The sad thing is, I know people like that. I'm boring by proxy!

Today I'm distracted from blogging by letter writing. Yet again, predator control is in the news for someone wanting to shut it down. Yet again, the whole thing is ignoring the science, and all about people's emotions. Management needs to be based on sound scientific principles, and not our whim of the day. Both the sides that think wolves should be protected because they're lovable and squeezable and the side that thinks wolves are awful and should all die are enemies of proper, rational, sound scientific based management which we claim is the goal. Cooler heads need to prevail; science frequently requires people to be dispassionately critical, something many people aren't used to being.

I really should have saved the last batch of letters, because I'm just going to say the same thing. Predator control works, but only some times. There appears to be instances where we've mis-applied it. Predator control is temporary, in an area, even if it might seem permanent as a program. The theoretical basis for predator control is strong, but only in some situations. Predator control is not the same wolf hunting the states engaged in during the 19th century. Predator control is incredibly expensive. Predator control is not about the predators, but about the game species. Predators in Alaska are not threatened like they are in the states.

If it sounds like I've been through this before, yes, I have. Endlessly. In fact, the first thing people ask me is often "Do you shoot wolves from a plane?" or some variation of that. Most of the time, by the end of the conversation, they're reading whatever answer they want to hear from my reply. People are too used to treating this as a visceral topic, and not used to treating it like a matter of science. I'd say that has to change, but honestly, I don't see it changing.

Cauga una?

Here's lastweek's:
Of which I'm sad to report the one on the left is Brown Bear (Ursus arctos) and the one on the left that's been peroxide washed is Black Bear (Ursus americanus). The yugcetun for bear is pretty complex. It's one of those things that depends who you're talking to. Like `Cougar,` `Puma,` and `Mountain Lion.` Black bear tends to be tan'gerliq. Brownbear doesn't tend to be anything. Carayak, sometimes. But for other people, that's a ghost. Or something else.

You all were on the right track with the more disk like face, but really, the thing that gives it away is the slope of the muzzle. Brownbear pitches forward more near the brows, and blackbear is more smooth, gradual angle. Here, you can see it better with a picture. A brownbear:
Look where the pen tip touches.


On to new stuff! I like the way these guys (and it is a male!) look. I have a still frame, and a crummy video.
That's a picture from this weekend, to give you an idea of the plumage. Obviously, Alaska. Interior Alaska at that.
The bird won't show up for a few seconds, so be patient. My digital camera isn't a very good video camera recorder.

Who is this handsome beast?

Caugak ukuk?

For those of you who forgot what we had up for naming, here's the picture again!This is on a lake near my home, and it contains the following!
x2 Bonaparte's Gull (Larus philadelphia). Naruraq (maybe?).
x2 Lesser Yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) I don't know this one.
x1 Mallard (Anas latyrhynchos), or Curcurpak.

I like ducks much more than I like other birds. Sometimes, you see rpak on the end of animal names, which means big. So does vak, so Qimulvak would be a big dog, and tuntuvak is a big caribou (better known as a moose!). So a mallard is a big curcuq? There's no such word. Or, not anymore. :)

This if I were to just ask, it would be too easy. These are bears. One is a blackbear, and one is a brown bear.



But which is which? :)

Pictures

DNM on Online Bear Baiting

I've been thinking about Bear Baiting a whole lot, recently. I'm curious about the process, and whether it is an effective tool for population management. I'm especially curious whether the genetic characteristics of bears caught through bear baiting are different from those harvested via a more "traditional" hunt. I'm considering showing up to ADF&G's clinic on the subject, to give me a utilitarian grounding in the subject.

For those of you outside the state, bear baiting is using a large scent lure (often putrid fish and ungulate offal) to attract bears, where the hunter evaluates the bear from a tree stand or ground blind, and selects one for harvest. It's slightly controversial, and it's generally only done for black bears. In Alaska, you can only legally bear bait blackies.

Tim Mowry isn't a fan of bear baiting - that much is clear from his editorial piece in the Daily Minor News - but he's even more `down` on using the internet for certification. I'm curious whether there will be a difference in

1. Overall rates of incidents between last year and this year.
   
2. Difference in incident rates between hunters who took the course online vs. clinic.
3. Whether other factors (land use, etc.) predicts compliance better.
   

These are all scientific questions, and not something based in opinion. Either something has an effect, or it doesn't. So, I guess I'm adding a whole bunch more things `to watch` to my list!

Pictures

Keeping it Fake

This picture is unabashedly altered. I used photoshop to remove the background, which seriously detracted from the sculpture. (When I do anything serious in photoshop, I'll let you all know). I'll post the original on my Wednesday `Pictures` rotation some month soon.

Sculpture: Arctic Shadow (1996), by Jacques and Mary Regat
UAF Museum of the North.

When Pandas Attack.

There was another mauling in a Chinese Zoo, when a man jumped a barrier into a panda enclosure.Obviously, I blame the bear. They are, after all, heathen animals that only desire to feast on our flesh. The bear is a repeat offender, as the bear had mauled a person who tried to hug it, on the grounds that the human was drunk.

I've written about the danger of these monsters before.
Remember, the only good Panda Bear is an extinct panda bear.

Glacier NP Bears redux!

Remember Kendall? I wrote a little something about her methods on the big Glacier Grizzly Bear project a while back. It's going to be a classic `how to` for non-invasive DNA mark-recapture population estimates, even if that's a mouthful. Let's talk about what she found, now.

To get an appreciation how big of a project it was, she had 5, 14 day sessions. That's ten weeks of pure field work, plus breakdown and set up times. In the lab, the research group had 5,562 samples from between 626 and 633 snag sites, with a 28% return on the hair traps. They checked between 660 and 829 hair rubs, and collected a total of 3,985 samples from them (11.7% return on the rubs).

Hell, I have a hard time keeping track of 500 samples.

When they analyzed the samples genetically, they couldn't determine the species of about 9% of the hair trap samples - so those go right out. They're no good. 63.5% were black bears, and 27.5% where grizzly bears. When it comes to the tree rubs, 12.2% couldn't have the species be determined, 36.9% where black bear, 50.9% were brown bear. I can't help but wonder if the difference in the `failure to identify` rate is significant. With that high of a sample size, it's quite possible.

Luckily, mixed samples - if two bears rubbed against the same tree, or same trap - where rare, with only about 2% from both traps and rubs. That 2% wasn't analysed, because there's no way to sort out which hairs belonged to which bear.

For the technical minded Ho was 0.71, and the P-ID was 6E-6. P-SIB was 7E-3. That's some good battery of µsats for such a low population large carnivore! When all µsats were considered, each bear differed at at least 4 markers, or more. Things that make you go `hmmm.`

In total, they found 185 unique bears in one year, and 22 in the other - 58% female at the hair traps. That sex ratio seems a little high in favour of males. Maybe someone can tell me if that's unusual, for Brown Bears, since they're not typically my forte. Using a mathematical mark-recapture model, they calculated 241 bears in 1998 (95% CI=202-303) and 241 in 2000 (95% CI=205-304). Mean bear density from this was 30 bears per 1000 km^2 (95% CI=27-35).

What does this all mean?

First, Kendall says `huzzah! Our first rigorous estimate! Cake for everyone!` And she's right. This is the first time we have a scientifically valid estimate of how many bears there are for the area. The density is comparable to a number of other studies in interior NA, though the authors throw in a healthy dose of `take that with a grain of salt.` Third, it supports the notion that the habitat in Glacier NP is much, much better for bears than what's going on around GNP. This isn't a trivial difference, either.

What's notable in their discussion is what isn't there. This data will go to court to try and support a de-listing. Probably anticipating it, the authors made zero policy recomendations as to whether they should unprotect the Grizzly. If you read between the lines, and look at some of the other data they show in multi-use land (16 bears / 1000 km^2), it seems like the authors are leaning towards not. While GNP remains a core of strong bear populations, the area around it drops off quickly. By allowing collection on the fringes, you could quickly exterpait edge of the GNP population, due to the large home ranges of the animals. There's really insufficient connectivity between GNP and the nearest patch of grizzly habitat to allow for some population resilience outside the park - that is to say, fragmentation is an issue, here.

But that's just my two cents. With additional data, I could find I'm wildly wrong on that.