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Big Cats

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By Jason G. Goldman

Biologist Miguel Ordeñana crouches down in the shade of a forest and reaches into his pack for a small bottle. He sprays the substance on a tree just a few feet above the ground. A few meters away behind him is a camera trap he’s deployed. The liquid he’s spraying is a cologne called Calvin Klein Obsession for Men and if he’s lucky, the scent will convince a jaguar to stop and sniff it long enough for the camera to snap a photo or two.

Nobody knows why this particular aroma is enticing to the big cats. It could be the vanilla extract, or it could be the civetone, a synthetic chemical meant to mimic the excretions of a small nocturnal cat-like mammal native to the Asian and African tropics. Either way, jaguars go nuts for the stuff.

That was a few years ago, and Ordeñana, a wildlife biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles who was then collaborating with Paso Pacífico, did get lucky. While locals had reported seeing jaguars in the region, this was the first time they were formally documented by scientists. In the years since, the spotted cats have made their presence known in the Paso del Istmo region, a corridor of land sandwiched between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean.

Male jaguar in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, April 2014

A male jaguar pads along a trail in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in April 2014.

These cats are something of an anomaly. “We know that jaguars have dipped their toes into the Paso del Istmo,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom, “but they’re pretty much gone from western Nicaragua, which is a pretty large area. And they’re gone from El Salvador and they’re probably gone from western Honduras.” In other words, the big cats have been driven out of almost the entire Pacific dry forest of Central America.

The region’s other big cat has suffered a similar, if less precipitous, decline. The puma, also known as the mountain lion, cougar, panther, ghost cat, catamount, and almost forty other common names in different areas, has the widest range of any modern large cat, stretching from the Northern Yukon all the way to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia. And while a single puma was photographed with a camera trap last year in El Salvador, and a second one recently turned up dead, shot by hunters, that species is likewise only rarely seen in western Central America.

It’s certainly not unusual for large cats to be extirpated from parts of their range, or to go extinct entirely. The jaguar is largely extirpated from the United States, for example, besides the odd sighting in Arizona. And the cougar has disappeared entirely from the U.S. east of the continental divide, save for a small population hanging on in Florida. But Central America is home to the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Hotspot, a region that has both a high rate of endemism (species found there and nowhere else) and a high rate of habitat loss. It contains the third largest forested area in the world and is a vital linkage between the ecosystems of North and South America.

Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.

Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.

As agriculture and urban development have expanded, large mammals like jaguars and pumas have lost habitats that are vital to their survival and movement, but habitat loss alone doesn’t account for the cats’ plummeting populations. Add revenge killings, when ranchers kill predators due to real or imagined threats to their livestock, and the global trade in wildlife parts, and you have a recipe for extinction.

It’s due to the habitat concerns, in part, that many big cat conservation projects have historically focused on the more intact forests of eastern Central America rather than the more heavily populated and more intensively altered regions closer to the Pacific Ocean. But maintaining or restoring habitat doesn’t, by itself, solve the anthropogenic problems. That’s why Paso Pacífico has dedicated its efforts towards coexistence.

“Paso Pacífico disagrees with the idea of ignoring the importance of major predators in human-dominated ecosystems. We think that you still need these major predators on these landscapes,” says Otterstrom. “You need them to be able to survive at some level.”

That’s because the carnivores at the top of the food chain, also known as apex predators, help to regulate the rest of the ecosystem. Free from the pressure exerted by large predators, medium-sized carnivores like coyotes, foxes, and ocelots (also called mesopredators) would see their populations go through the roof. But as a result, their prey base – the small mammals, like rabbits and rodents – would decline. Populations of the largest herbivores, like deer, tapirs, and peccaries, would expand because their own predators would be missing. If those animals over-grazed the plants they eat, it could have impacts on everything from insect communities to carbon sequestration to hydrology. In other words, the entire system would go sideways in an ecological process called a trophic cascade.

One need only look at mega-cities like Los Angeles or Mumbai to understand that large predators like mountain lions and leopards, respectively, can co-exist alongside human communities – as long as they are protected from being shot, run over, or poisoned. If cats such as these can make it in two of the most heavily urbanized landscapes on the planet, surely there is a place for jaguars and pumas in western Central America.

Making space for predators in these regions requires re-imagining what suitable habitat looks like. “As we restore areas, the cats come back,” says Otterstrom, adding that as predator conservation efforts succeed, resources will need to be marshaled for addressing the human-wildlife conflicts that will inevitably follow.

To start with, people should probably avoid spraying themselves with Calvin Klein Obsession for Men when out in the woods.

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By Jason G. Goldman

The writing was on the wall more than a decade ago, or at least it seemed to be. Though the species was classified as one of “least concern” by the IUCN, yellow-naped amazon parrots were struggling in the Paso del Istmo region of Nicaragua. The green-feathered birds sport patches of red on their wingtips and are named for the yellow on top of their necks. A 2008 survey in the department of Rivas found that ninety percent of the parrots’ nests failed. Their nesting trees were being chopped for firewood and timber. Their nestlings were succumbing to Africanized bees and to predators. Most of all, the chicks were being stolen out of their nests by people looking to sell them into a pet trade with an extraordinarily high demand for the chatty species.

The species, which ranges on the Pacific slope of Central America from southern Mexico to Costa Rica, and on the Caribbean slopes of Honduras and Nicaragua, was reclassified as “vulnerable” in 2012, and then as “endangered” just five years later. Meanwhile, thanks to the hard work of Paso Pacífico biologists and the dedication of a small group of landowners, the population in Rivas is rebounding.

That change has come about one landowner at a time. If a nest is found on a farmer’s property – and they agree to protect it – they’re paid a small fee. They’re paid again to allow biologists to periodically monitor the health and development of the chicks, and again if the birds successfully fledge. The cash incentives add up to slightly more than $200 per nest altogether. In recent years, more than a dozen landowners have participated in the program.

Incentives like these are intended to shift local communities’ perspective of these animals from a commodity to be traded to a resource worth protecting, to promote the notion that animals are worth more in the wild than in cages. In addition to the inducement offered by cold, hard cash, a more robust parrot population offers an opportunity for communities to generate revenue indirectly through ecotourism and birdwatching.

If successful, then after enough years of cash payouts, community members would come to value the presence of the birds on the landscape in a more abstracted manner. That, in turn, would enable conservationists to redirect scarce funds towards other conservation efforts.

Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom believes that this transition has already begun in Rivas, though the need for cash-based incentives has not yet faded. “We have gotten a good amount of community members expressing their happiness and joy to hear and see parrots again,” she says, adding that Paso Pacífico’s Junior Ranger program, now in its twelfth year, likely has an impact on attitudes as well. Many of the earliest participants, now entering adulthood, are likely uninterested in pursuing the parrot trade.

The program’s impacts can be seen even by an untrained observer. “When we started we couldn’t find any roosts, and now we have roosts with over one hundred birds in them at a time. The social behavior of the parrots on the landscape has changed,” says Otterstrom. “We have really effectively reversed declines of the yellow-naped amazon parrot in Rivas.”

Having proven an effective strategy for avian conservation, Paso Pacífico has begun to replicate it in Cosigüina, near the Gulf of Fonseca in northwestern Nicaragua. That’s where the last remaining population of wild cyanoptera scarlet macaws on Central America’s Pacific coast can be found. This unique subspecies is nearly extinct in the wild, but if landowners there can be motivated to protect the macaw nests, just as their counterparts have protected yellow-naped amazon nests in Rivas, they might just have a fighting chance.

3 yellow-naped amazon parrots in flight. Photo by Orlando Jarquin.

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By Jason G. Goldman

The world lurched to a standstill in the spring of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic infiltrated nearly every corner of the planet. But while our daily lives slowed and changed, the rest of the natural world kept plodding on, almost oblivious to the fear and angst gripping human communities. Spending all that time at home, many people began looking out their windows or going on long walks in their neighborhoods and noticing, some for the very first time, the plants and animals that have quietly found a way to survive alongside us in big cities.

Perhaps that explains why a gentleman living in San Salvador began photographing the birds flying by his ninth-story condominium. Because of its work elsewhere in El Salvador, Paso Pacífico has been featured in local news quite a bit, so the man thought to reach out to the organization about the birds he had been watching.

They turned out to be yellow-naped amazon parrots, the same endangered species that Paso Pacífico was hard at work restoring in southern Nicaragua. When Paso Pacífico biologists began looking, they counted more than eighty parrots, including two roosts of at least thirty birds each. In order to protect the birds, which can fetch high prices on the black market for the pet trade, Paso Pacífico is not revealing the roosts’ specific locations. Still, their behavior suggests that these birds do not hesitate gathering in busy, crowded areas, near heavily trafficked roads – as long as there are trees with dense foliage where they can go relatively unnoticed.

The researchers suspect that the reason the parrots have gone undetected until now is because they remain active at night, when people are indoors and asleep. By the time the sun rises, most of the birds have moved on to other spots in the city, with only a few stragglers left at the roost sites.

It’s not actually all that surprising that the species has found a way to persist in the big city. Several years ago, a team of Mexican and American researchers observed yellow-naped amazons at two different sites in Costa Rica. They found that the parrots were equally able to thrive in ranchland, where natural vegetation is more widely distributed, as on farmland, where the little remaining natural areas are more densely clustered in small habitat patches.

Despite being members of the same species, the two groups of parrots – separated by just thirty kilometers – employed different strategies for establishing territories, selecting suitable habitats, and roosting. Even more impressive was what happened when the researchers translocated parrots between the two sites. Despite having been raised on ranchland, the parrots released on farmland quickly took on the survival strategies of those who had always lived there. That was also true for those parrots captured on the farm and released later in the ranching area.

In other words, yellow-naped amazons turn out to be remarkably malleable, able to rapidly adjust to a wide variety of different conditions – including, as the birds of San Salvador have shown, to heavily urbanized areas.

The birds’ numbers may be dwindling throughout their range, but they have apparently found a way to survive in some of the most intensely disturbed habitats in El Salvador. Indeed, these urban flocks might well comprise the largest population of yellow-naped amazons in the whole country. “The hope for the yellow-naped amazon parrot in El Salvador comes from the city,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Dr. Sarah Otterstrom.

2 yellow-naped amazons perched against a gray stone wall. Photo by Carlos Jenkins. Two yellow-naped amazon parrots fly over a roof with foliage in the background. Photo by Carlos Jenkins. Low light - 3 perched yellow-naped amazon parrots, photo by Carlos Jenkins
Parrot photos: Carlos Jenkins.

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By Jason G. Goldman

As the sun sets on the beaches of Costa Rica’s Pacific coastline, a man walks along looking for comma-shaped scoop marks in the sand, the telltale sign of a nesting sea turtle. He follows a set of tracks from the water’s edge until they stop. That’s where he starts digging. Eventually, he uncovers a hundred or more leathery eggs, each the size of a ping-pong ball. Inside each of the eggs is a small gamble. Around one percent of the eggs on any beach will survive long enough to hatch, and around one percent of those hatchlings will survive long enough to reproduce themselves as adults. Each of the world’s seven sea turtle species are considered endangered, giving each egg a vital role to play in their future.

It is illegal in Costa Rica to remove sea turtle eggs from the beach, but this is something the man has been doing his whole life. The same is probably true of his father, who learned it from his father, and so on. But something is different this time. In addition to the dozens of eggs he’s scooping into a bag, there’s a stowaway: a small decoy 3D-printed to look like the real thing. If you cracked it open, in place of a turtle embryo, you’d find a battery, a GPS transmitter, and a SIM card like the kind you’d find inside a cell phone.

Once each hour, the decoy egg – called an “InvestEGGator” – transmits its location to satellites orbiting the Earth, and from there, the information passes securely to the internet. University of Kent ecologist Helen Pheasey can track its movements online from anywhere on the planet.

Starting from the beach, the eggs make their way over the course of two days to the loading bay of a supermarket in the populous Central Valley region, home to some two thirds of the nation’s inhabitants. The next day, it turns up on a residential property nearby, the end of a 137-kilometer long journey. Researchers believe that the supermarket is a hand-off point, where the eggs are transferred from the poacher to a salesperson.

“It used to be thought of as an aphrodisiac,” says Pheasey, “but everyone made it a joke. They know it’s not really an aphrodisiac. It’s a food product, a seasonal treat,” she explains, the same way Americans enjoy pumpkin spice flavored treats for a few months each year. “They might fry them into an omelet, in the streets you can buy them hardboiled, and the other way is to crack them into a salsa and swallow them whole as a bar snack.”

Pheasey has spent lots of time talking with local community members, with law enforcement offers, and with the poachers themselves. She learned that sea turtle egg poaching is not like other forms of illegal wildlife trafficking. They do not drive an economy since they don’t fetch a very high price locally, and they don’t fulfill a nutritional requirement for local communities. Turtle eggs are simply something on which Costa Ricans have always enjoyed snacking, and poachers are just after a quick, easy payday.

Paso Pacifico scientist Kim Williams-Guillen, who invented the InvestEGGator, has spent the last few years field testing her prototypes to be sure that the sensitive electronics inside could hold up to real life conditions on wet, sandy, tropical beaches – and to confirm that the decoys looked enough like the real thing to escape detection by poachers.

Pheasey agreed to run the first comprehensive field trial as part of her dissertation research. In all, she and her team secretly inserted decoys into 101 turtle nests on four beaches in Costa Rica – three on the Pacific and one on the Caribbean – including those of olive ridley, green, and loggerhead sea turtles.

Around twenty-five percent of the decoys were poached, allowing the researchers to track the movements of five clutches. Though that is a small number, Pheasey says it still provides useful insight into the local trade networks for turtle eggs. For example, she discovered that poached eggs in Costa Rica seem to stay in local communities; they do not cross borders or enter into international trafficking rings.

The decoys that remained on the beaches were helpful too. After the turtles hatched, the researchers returned to each nest, to verify that the decoys themselves didn’t impose any negative consequences on the real eggs. Indeed, Pheasey found no statistical difference in hatching success between those with and without decoys.

While more and larger field trials are clearly needed before the InvestEGGator can become a reliable strategy in the law enforcement toolbox, Pheasey is quick to point out that law enforcement must itself be only one strategy in a multifaceted approach to reducing the threat of poaching.

Rather than simply punishing those who illegally harvest eggs, she says, resources should be devoted towards prophylactic efforts like education, so that children can grow up to succeed in jobs that would render poaching unnecessary. “Preventing people from needing that quick buck is key to this,” she says. “That’s going to be much better than penalizing individuals that are struggling as it is.”

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Every winter, the willow flycatcher travels from the U.S. to Central America for the season. Five years ago, we began studying the bird’s habitat use in Nicaragua. What we learned was surprising! The birds return each year to nearly the same location. These small flycatchers prefer scrubby vegetation near water. Sadly, these are areas most frequently burned or cleared by farmers. Will you help save one willow flycatcher? Your donation will enable farmers to delay clearing and keep the birds safe.

Challenge

The southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus) is native to southwestern U.S. This endangered bird migrates south each winter. Genetic studies have linked this subspecies to birds that spend their winter in Central America. Unfortunately, the birds face many perils during migration. In Nicaragua, farmers burn and clear land just weeks before the northward migration. As a result, the willow flycatchers might begin their journey in poor health, potentially leading to death.

Solution

This project will help solve this problem by offering incentive payments to farmers with willow flycatchers on their land. Farmers are rewarded cash for delaying clearing by several weeks. By raising awareness amongst local communities about migratory birds that are dependent on habitats commonly found in fallow agricultural land. By monitoring birds during winter, seeing which survive from the prior year, and by identifying their origins through genetic study.

Long-Term Impact

Research has shown that neotropical migratory bird populations are impacted by death during migration. Scientists have confirmed that in order to protect migratory birds, an approach that addresses the whole life cycle is required for conservation success (from nest to wintering grounds and back). Scientific collaborators on this project include the Southern Sierra Research Station, the University of Nevada Reno – Department of Geography, and the Partners in Flight Western Working Group.

 

Save an endangered willow flycatcher now!

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By Jason G. Goldman

This is the third article in a three-part series on connectivity. Click here to read part one: “Coexistence, Not Corrals” and click here to read part two: “Building Bridges – Literally.”

Once upon a time, an animal that was sufficiently motivated could safely travel the 2500 miles from the forests of southern Mexico through Central America to wind up safely in Colombia. The so-called Mesoamerican land corridor is still used by animals that take to the skies, but those who are encumbered by Earth’s gravity must contend with an obstacle course of death just to go about their day. Wildlife-vehicle collisions on roadways are increasing throughout the world. Animals become electrocuted on power lines and battered by wind turbines. They are accidentally poisoned, burned, and drowned. They are intentionally poisoned, burned, and drowned.

One of the most damaging – but most invisible – threats they must overcome while navigating the hazards of daily life in the Anthropocene is the slow, steady deterioration of the habitats they rely on for food and shelter. As demand for pastures and cropland has grown, Central America has lost some eighty percent of its native vegetation. In the last twenty years alone, Nicaragua has lost more than 20 percent of its native forest cover. The forests that do remain have become fragmented, islands of habitat separated by wide swaths of city, suburb, and farmland.

Several years ago, researchers from Paso Pacífico, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Wisconsin wanted to understand how monkeys respond to the increasing conversion of the forests they and their ancestors have longed called home.

They discovered that the more fragmented, less protected forests in the Paso del Istmo region of Nicaragua hosted a more diverse primate population than did the Rio Escalante-Chococente Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses the largest remaining tropical dry forests in the country. Though the wildlife refuge supported more monkeys overall, they were mainly howler and capuchin monkeys, both classified as species of “least concern” by the IUCN.

It was only in the Paso del Istmo that any endangered black-handed spider monkeys were spotted – along with the howlers and capuchins. Conventional wisdom holds that spider monkeys require large, well-connected forests with a wide variety of fruit trees to survive. Their home ranges are quite large and they reproduce rather slowly, which ought to make them especially sensitive to habitat disturbance. Yet it turns out that even highly fragmented landscapes can still support populations of endangered monkeys.

It’s likely that at least some spider monkeys persist in the wildlife refuge where they are, apparently, harder to spot. Still, the lesson to take from the study is that our intuitions for conservation priorities would, at least in this instance, lead us astray. It might seem obvious at first glance that forest-reliant species would rapidly disappear along with forest cover, but the truth turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. Were conservationists to disregard fragmented areas simply because they were fragmented, it might be a net loss for conservation.

In Central America and elsewhere, landowners have been encouraged to cultivate trees as living fences in order to link larger swaths of forest elsewhere. Birds, bats, insects, and monkeys have all been observed using these as habitats and as travel corridors. In parts of Nicaragua where landowners have already begun implementing living fence rows, farmers report seeing spider monkeys and howler monkeys using them, alongside squirrels, sloths, iguanas, and a wide range of birds and insects.

The same principles apply even if you live in a city or suburb thousands of miles from the nearest monkey. Backyards benefit just as much from trees as do farms and ranches. Trees don’t simply offer habitats to urban-adapted critters; they create habitat complexity, making a space for species to move vertically as well as horizontally, or to hopscotch from yard to yard. The impacts are cumulative. According to a study conducted in Illinois, streets with multiple wildlife-friendly yards hosted nearly twice as many types of birds as those with fewer.

The ongoing loss of natural vegetation heralds a wide array of consequences for climate and biodiversity, but the truth is that many wildlife species are tenacious and can find a way to survive – and sometimes, even thrive – within a human-dominated landscape. And if wild animals can find a way to get by even while we convert their forests into farms and ranches, shouldn’t we do our part to make life at least a little bit easier for them?

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By Jason G. Goldman

This is the second article in a three-part series on connectivity. Click here to read part one: “Coexistence, Not Corrals” and click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

The natural world is being carved and sliced into smaller and smaller parcels. Forests and grasslands and deserts are becoming like individually wrapped fun-size candy bars of nature, each with its own fragmented community of wild plants and animals. The natural world is in many ways a collection of islands; where they’re not separated by water, they’re separated by pavement.

In 2015, a global team of researchers estimated that seventy percent of the planet’s forests lie within just one kilometer of an edge. One out of every five trees is rooted within just one hundred meters of an edge. That’s less than the length of an American football field. Fragmented habitats have lower species richness, lower nutrient retention, and lower animal movement.

Given how rapidly the Earth’s landscape has become fragmented in recent decades, the long-term impacts on biodiversity remain unknown. Depending on the animals or plants in question, it might take years or even decades before the effects of fragmentation begin to become apparent. Still, reversing those effects has, in many places, already begun.

Habitat restoration is one strategy to reverse the effects of fragmentation, but there are many places where this is simply impossible. In those places, researchers and conservationists have turned to mitigation strategies instead: if the habitat fragments can’t be fully reintegrated, perhaps we can provide opportunities for animals to safely move between them. It wouldn’t just help to maintain genetic diversity, but to perpetuate the movement of nutrients across a wider landscape.

Here are some of the ways that conservationists are experimenting with increasing connectedness, in Central America and around the world.

Living Fences

Starting nearly a decade ago, Paso Pacifico began working with landowners in Nicaragua’s Paso del Istmo region to reforest small areas of their farms and ranches. By prioritizing areas near rivers or existing forests, the idea was to increase the amount of space available to wildlife. In all, some 250 hectares were restored in this way. The problem for landowners was that any reforestation meant losing out on potential financial gains from working that land.

To circumvent that problem, Paso Pacifico began encouraging the cultivation of living fencerows, a mix of native tree species that could be planted alongside existing property lines or field boundaries. It’s a strategy that was already becoming widespread throughout Central America.

Fencerows can have a tremendous impact on biodiversity. One study conducted in Costa Rica and Nicaragua documented at least 167 animal species within fence rows, including birds, bats, beetles, and butterflies. Animals used fencerows to feed on fruits, flowers, and nectar. They used them for shelter. Some were even seen mating within them. Perhaps most importantly, birds, bats, and monkeys have all been documented using fencerows as travel corridors. Even so, at one site, at least a third of the birds observed in fencerows were considered “forest dependent.” It means that these corridors weren’t just used for travel but functioned themselves as suitable habitat.

It’s not just beneficial for wildlife. Farmers can use their living fencerows as well, sustainably harvesting fruit and firewood for sale or for their own personal use. As with most conservation strategies, the most productive ones benefit people and animals alike.

The Right (of) Way

Long rows of trees and shrubs can create travel corridors for wildlife even in the most heavily developed parts of Europe and North America. Some utility companies there have begun to treat their easements and rights-of-way, such as the space below aerial power-lines, alongside railroads and highways, or above gas pipes as potential wildlife habitats.

Like the fencerows of Central America, these corridors aren’t only a means of traveling between two larger, protected areas, but function as habitats themselves. According to a 2016 study conducted in Sweden, for example, power-line corridors were important habitats for butterflies, whether or not they were near larger forests. It turned out that power-line corridors increased butterfly diversity in an area ten times wider than the corridor itself.

Similarly, of all native ant, spider, and grasshopper species in the Netherlands, more than half have been recorded using these bits of habitat, including a number of threatened or endangered species. In North Carolina, rare toads, turtles, and snakes have been spotted in roadside patches, and in Australia you can find two rare types of pygmy possums alongside highways – if you look closely enough.

Rights-of-way are also helpful for conserving rare plants. In Australia, green corridors along highways are home to most of the remaining individuals for two rare types of Acacia; more than a fifth of 32 rare plant species in Sweden rely on rights-of-way for their continued survival.

To be sure, rights-of-way can only offer suitable habitats insofar as they are managed with biodiversity in mind. That’s why the Kansas Audubon Society consults with the state’s Department of Transportation, for example, to develop sustainable mowing practices and seeding disturbed sites with native vegetation. It’s why in Tennessee, the Department of Transportation now waits to mow until winter begins, allowing the vegetation growing alongside its 13,000 miles of roads to provide useful habitat all spring and summer. It’s also why an Indiana-based power company has begun cultivating wildflowers beneath some eighty acres of solar panels in an effort to aid pollinator conservation in tandem with a shift to more sustainable energy generation.

Bridges and Tunnels

The last remaining migration of pronghorn antelopes occurs in western Wyoming. The 150-mile “Path of the Pronghorn” is one of the longest mammal migrations left in North America, but the corridor intersects with roads and highways. Twice each year, up to two thousand pronghorn – and another three thousand mule deer – pass through the area. They’ve been using this stretch of what is now highway 191 for at least six thousand years.

Several years ago, the state of Wyoming decided to install eight crossings along twelve miles of US Highway 191: two overpasses and six underpasses, each with strategically placed fencing to funnel animals towards those spots. Before the crossings were built, there were 85 wildlife-vehicle collisions per year, on average. Afterwards, that number dropped by 70 percent. By the fourth year, every single pronghorn successfully avoided crossing the highway’s asphalt-covered surface

Elsewhere, Canada’s Banff National Park, through which passes the Trans-Canada Highway, has six wildlife bridges – and a whopping thirty-eight tunnels. That’s the highest number of crossings in a single area anywhere on the planet. According to one study, over the course of sixteen years, eleven species of large mammals, prey and predators alike, were recorded using them more than 150,000 times. The elk were so eager to use them that they didn’t even need to wait for construction to be completed!

Bridges can even be in the sky. In South India, lion tailed macaques – an endangered monkey found only in this part of the world – were too often killed trying to cross a highway that cut through their forest. To solve the problem, a group of NGOs worked together with the government to fund the installation of aerial bridges, connecting the tree canopy on either side of the road. It’s a fairly low-cost way to ensure that monkeys, and other animals that spend their time among the leaves and branches, can avoid the threat of becoming roadkill.

Click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

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By Jason G. Goldman

This is the first article in a three-part series on connectivity.

It was the first of March, 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law. With his signature, the nation’s first national park was officially born. It’s hard to say exactly where the idea for a national park came from, but the origins of Yellowstone seem to lie in the Golden State, several thousand miles to the west. Eight years earlier – well before it became a national park itself – Congress granted the Yosemite Valley and surrounding areas to the State of California, with a mandate to manage them as a public park.

Yellowstone and Yosemite were far from the first attempts by human communities, whether indigenous and colonizing, to grant special status to certain landscapes. Still, in the nearly one hundred fifty years since the first “crown jewel” of America was established, the idea has spread across the globe. The writer Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had,” and the concept has perhaps become one of America’s most influential cultural exports. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), today there are more than three thousand national parks scattered across more than 180 countries.

National Parks are only a small slice of the protected area pie. There are more than 12,000 public and private parks and preserves on the planet, encompassing some 15% of the planet’s surface (not including Antarctica), though the level of protection afforded to the wildlife and the habitats within them certainly varies widely – as does the primacy of biodiversity in the first place.

Indeed, a 2017 analysis found that while biodiversity protection was a top stated priority in land conservation agendas across the globe, it has only a minor influence on which areas are set aside for protection in practice. Instead, areas that were isolated, lightly populated, had little agricultural value, or had high tourism value were more likely to be set aside than were areas that were notably high in biodiversity or habitat richness.

But even where biodiversity is well represented within protected areas, the reality is that nature does not lend itself to confinement. This so-called fortress conservation approach to biodiversity protection – animals live here, and people live there – ignores the fact that ecosystems can only remain functional if organisms, along with the materials, energy, nutrients, and information they carry with them, can move across the landscape. And while there are fenced areas large enough to enclose authentic ecological processes – South Africa’s Kruger National Park is one notable example – they are few and far between. In most places, another solution is needed.

Connected Canopies

Like other dry forests of Central America, Nicaragua’s Paso del Istmo region, also known as the Rivas Isthmus, was first colonized at least four hundred years ago. Centuries of human pressure have resulted in patchwork quilt of habitat types: developed towns and villages scattered across a mosaic of farmland and natural forested areas. Some estimates suggest that less than 0.1% of the original old growth Mesoamerican dry forest remains intact.

It was once thought that spider monkeys by virtue of their arboreal lifestyle, required extensive closed-canopy forests to survive. Yet despite this dramatic loss of habitat, spider monkeys have persisted alongside human communities in the Paso del Istmo. While the monkeys – there are species all in the genus Ateles – are widespread through Central and South America, the black-handed spider monkey Ateles geoffroyi was re-listed as endangered in 2008 because they continue to suffer not just from habitat loss, but from hunting and from capture for the international pet trade.

These spider monkeys will not be saved by a National Park. The Paso del Istmo is home to more than 165,000 people; it can’t be simply walled off for wildlife. Instead, humans and monkeys alike must find a way to share the landscape.

A Global Challenge

Elephants illustrate the problem in a slightly different way. In Kenya and Tanzania, males can maintain territories of up to some seven thousand square kilometers, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. And since elephants migrate seasonally following the availability of fresh water, they total area they rely on over the course of a year can be quite a bit larger. Even if they spend lots of time within protected areas, they also must move between them, through farmland and even through villages. And that’s where elephants get into trouble. They raid crops, they siphon water from community wells, and they even kill people. Sometimes, they get shot or poisoned for doing so.

The need for coexistence with large, charismatic, and sometimes dangerous wildlife even occurs in some of the most densely populated, wealthiest cities on the planet. The second leading cause of mortality for male mountain lions in Los Angeles is being hit by cars zipping down the nation’s most crowded highways. (The first is being killed by other males, which is appropriate for the cats.) High-speed roadways cut each group of lions off from the others onto islands of habitat surrounded by oceans of asphalt and traffic. The habitat patches they do have are relatively high quality but that doesn’t matter if the most courageous lions are reduced to roadkill while their more risk-averse kin suffer from the biological defects that follow from inbreeding.

Researchers warn that unless something is done, pumas will spin down an “extinction vortex” and disappear from the only mega-city in North America in which large cats have so far made a home. It could happen in fifteen years.

Similar stories can be told about jaguars, parrots, peccaries, raptors, and more. Even snakes and turtles and butterflies attempting to cross narrow dirt roads can suffer if they can’t do it without being killed by passing motorists. In other words, protecting even quite large areas of high quality habitat is insufficient to address the looming biodiversity crisis. Animals must be able to safely move about, even after leaving the sanctuary of formal protection. In almost every ecosystem on the planet, humans must find a way to make space for wildlife: physical space, yes, but also psychological.

Click here to read part two: “Building Bridges – Literally” and click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

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This year’s pandemic is causing extra poaching for the pet trade in Central America. Endangered baby spider monkeys are now much more likely to be stolen from their mothers and sold into a life of captivity.

But there’s good news: you can help!

Giving Tuesday officially kicks off the holiday giving season. Will you please send a year-end gift today to protect at least one baby spider monkey during the coming year?

Your gift will protect a baby spider monkey by thwarting poachers and stopping other threats. This young monkey will thrive if it grows in a forest protected by your support.

Victor, one of our rangers, recently told us about his experience with a baby monkey and its mother. Victor’s story will show you how needed and powerful your gift is!

Victor and his brother started monitoring black-handed spider monkeys in El Salvador last year. The monkeys in their area are so shy that most people believed them to be locally extinct. Last spring, these rangers found a small troop with a baby and its mother.

When our rangers approached, the mother monkey was terrified. To Victor, it was plain that she had seen poachers before. She shielded her baby from view and tried to hastily move away. But with her baby clinging to her chest, she was slower—an easy target for poachers.

She didn’t know it, but that day she was fortunate. The men below were friendly rangers there to protect her family.

If they had been poachers, she would have been killed. Her little baby would have been pried off her dead body, taken to a market, and sold. Its buyers would have likely chained the infant and fed it table scraps for the remainder of its life. This horrific tragedy happens every year, and we fear this coming season will be worse because of COVID-19.

Victor and his brother protected that mother and baby. He stopped the poaching this year, but he knows that the poachers will soon return.

You can see why it’s so important to act now. The consequences of waiting are heartbreaking, and they can’t be undone. It’s urgent that you give before the end of the year. If the spider monkeys aren’t protected this coming year, poachers will kill more mothers, steal more babies, and push this species closer to extinction. We don’t want that to happen, and neither do you.

But your gift will protect a baby spider monkey in its forest home! And your gift will support all the work of Paso Pacífico. You’ll be a part of recovering many endangered species, like the yellow-naped Amazon parrots in Nicaragua. You’ll help our community rangers defend wildlife, put out forest fires, and stop illegal logging. You’ll also support the Junior Ranger education program, which teaches children to safeguard local animals such as the spider monkey.

Would you send a gift today to protect at least one baby spider monkey? Not only will you protect the baby and its mother, but you’ll be part of a group of generous donors restoring the unique beauty found only in Central America. One of them has even offered to match the first $10,000 donated this season to help baby monkeys. And you’ll make sure Paso Pacífico starts next year on the best possible financial footing.

But it all starts with protecting one baby spider monkey in its forest home.

This holiday season, there are spider monkeys that need your help. Please send in a special gift to protect one spider monkey in its forest home! Please donate here.

Thank you.

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By placing 3D-printed and GPS-enabled decoy sea turtle eggs into nests on the beach, it’s possible to gather key evidence needed to expose rampant illegal trade of the eggs, suggests a study publishing in the journal Current Biology on October 5. The researchers specifically tested how well the decoy eggs work and their safety for the endangered turtles.

“Our research showed that placing a decoy into a turtle nest did not damage the incubating embryos and that the decoys work,” says lead author Helen Pheasey (@HelenPheasey) of the University of Kent. “We showed that it was possible to track illegally removed eggs from beach to end consumer as shown by our longest track, which identified the entire trade chain covering 137 kilometers.”

The egg decoys, dubbed InvestEggator, were developed by the conservation organization Paso Pacífico to address the illegal trade of endangered sea turtles in Central America, where the eggs are smuggled from beaches and sold to restaurants and bars as a delicacy. Paso Pacífico-affiliated scientist Kim Williams-Guillén conceived and designed the decoys in response to a call for proposals from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge. They were looking for projects using technological advances to fight wildlife poaching.

“The idea was kind of an ‘Aha’ moment,” Williams-Guillén says.

It immediately brought to mind two of her favorite TV shows, Breaking Bad and The Wire, which both happened to deal with illegal drug trafficking. “In Breaking Bad, the DEA places a GPS tracking device on a tank of chemicals to see who receives the chemicals,” she said. “In one episode of the Wire, two police officers plant an audio device in a tennis ball to surreptitiously record a suspected drug dealer. Turtle eggs basically look like ping pong balls, and we wanted to know where they were going—put those two ideas together and you have the InvestEGGator.”

To see how well they’d work in practice, Pheasey and her colleagues put the 3D-printed decoys in 101 turtle nests on four beaches in Costa Rica. A quarter of the fake eggs were taken illegally from the nests, allowing the researchers to track eggs from five clutches, including two green turtle nests and three olive ridley nests.

One of the decoys made it close to a residential property before going silent. Another went two kilometers to a bar. The one that went farthest ended up 137 kilometers inland, spending two days in transit from the beach to a supermarket loading-bay and then on to a residential property. The researchers assume the egg wasn’t sold at the market but was rather handed off there, from a trafficker to a salesperson.

They also got some anecdotal reports of cases where someone discovered the decoy. “One decoy went off-line in a residential area near Cariari, a town 43 km from the deployment beach,” they wrote. “After 11 days, we received photographs, sent from Cariari, of the dissected egg.”

Along with the photos, they got information about where the egg was purchased and how many eggs had been exchanged. The findings show that the decoy eggs already are yielding intelligence from the local community in addition to tracking data, they note.

Pheasey says that the early evidence shows that the majority of stolen eggs don’t leave the local area. The finding reaffirmed their suspicions, as well as some local reports that most of the trade takes place close to the nesting beach. “Knowing that a high proportion of eggs remain in the local area helps us target our conservation efforts,” Pheasey says. “We can now focus our efforts on raising awareness in the local communities and direct law enforcement to this local issue. It also means we know where the consumers are, which assists us in focusing demand reduction campaigns.”

Pheasey says that the key thing isn’t to find the people who take the eggs from the beach. To a large extent, that’s already known. From a law enforcement perspective, the critical thing is to identify those who are trafficking and selling the eggs, often door to door. “As trafficking is a more serious crime, those handover points are far more valuable from a law enforcement perspective than catching someone taking a nest,” Pheasey says.

That’s what makes the InvestEGGator such an important tool, according to Williams-Guillen. “But,” she adds, “it really must be used in the context of a multi-pronged conservation approach that uses education, building better economic opportunities, and enforcement to help fight sea turtle egg poaching.”

The researchers say they’d like to see more sea turtle projects use the decoys on their nesting beaches. Such efforts could shed light on differences in the turtle egg trade in different countries. In addition to continuing to improve the technology and its deployment, they’re also interested in expanding the technology to other species—for example, Paso Pacifico plans to work with Costa Rican scientists to adapt the transmitter for use in tracking shipments of shark fins. They are also considering its use in tracking the theft of eggs from parrot nests.

 

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This work was supported by USAID Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge and supporters of Turtle Tracks.
Current Biology, Pheasey et al.: “Using GPS enabled decoy turtle eggs to track illegal trade” https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31255-0 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.065

Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

Author Contacts:

Helen Pheasey
University of Kent
helenpheasey@gmail.com

Media Contacts:

Carly Britton
Press Office
Cell Press
+1 (617) 417-7053 | press@cell.com

Olivia Miller
University of Kent
o.miller@kent.ac.uk

Sarah Otterstrom
Executive Director
Paso Pacifico
sarah@pasopacifico.org

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