Gorilla street party

Linkhttp://gorillacd.org/2009/10/21/gorillas-throw-a-street-party-in-goma-to-sell-briquettes/, http://gorillacd.org/, http://endingcharcoal.wildlifedirect.org/

Conservation in action is exemplified in the video made by the group from the Democratic Republic of Congo's Gorilla Conservation group.

They are obviously having fun and doing great conservation work at the same time as they promote the use of briquettes to reduce the enormous pressure on the forests and the heavy use of charcoal. Take a look and make sure you sound is turned on. The music alone if worth listening to!

You can learn lots more about this kind of work at the Wildlife Direct Blog site here. Have fun and watch this! Then follow some of the links to see what is going on.

Bad news for books and publshers

Linkhttp://www.skwriter.com/, http://216.219.85.117/

Bad news on the book front. In British Columbia the provincial government has suddenly withdrawn all its annual support, terminating a 22-year partnership with the non-profit society that sponsors B.C. BookWorld. The withdrawal was announced by phone, giving little notice, and the B.C. book publishers’ association and the B.C. magazine publishers’ association got the same message on the same day. Callous, calculated or what?

At the Federal level our government has made similarly draconian moves, in one of the worst cases, entirely removing a program that supported artists (of all stripes) in their overseas travels. Most artists, apart from the high profile stars, have incomes well below the so-called “poverty line” as it is defined in Canada. Being invited to travel to galleries and shows may be a two-edged sword if the organizers are unable to offer full coverage. Going to an event and taking our Canadian culture along may be impossible

Another program that has been savaged is the support for magazines through postal subsidies. If circulation is below 5000 there is no subsidy. This hits particularly hard in small population areas (like Saskatchewan) but may not affect magazines with larger catchment areas like Quebec and Ontario.

It seems to me that the politicians are forgetting that culture is at the very foundation of what we are about as humans. They all went to school. Maybe some of them hated their English teachers.

Writing is the bedrock. With writing comes reading. There you have two of the Three “R”s. Without them, we are mere cavemen, daubing ochre and charcoal on rock faces, banging, scratching and blowing on primitive instruments.

Link

Black-footed ferret reintroduction

Linkhttp://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2009/02/c3014.html, http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5iR4nbQUHgcK2oBdXvtGDJ3sXOjNA,
http://www.prweb.com/releases/black-footed_ferrets/Grasslands_National_Park/prweb2981044.htm

Next week I’ll be heading south to the Frenchman River Valley, one of my favourite places in the province. The scenery is quite different than most of the rest of this part of the world, and the wildlife is also somewhat different.

A few years ago bison were brought back to the Grasslands National Park to repopulate a region where they must have existed in their thousands at one time. One piece of the evidence for this is a deep buffalo jump site where the bones of many animals can still be found.

Another important re-introduction has been the smallest of all the canid species in Canada, the swift fox, no larger than many a house cat, that was extirpated in Canada and only reintroduced after many years of tireless work that was started by Miles and Beryl Smeeton of Cochrane, Alberta.

The latest arrivals, or re-arrivals, are a group of thirty-four black-footed ferrets. Several news services have picked up on this story and sent out releases such as WWF Helps Masked Bandit Return to Prairies and
Calgary Zoo helps return black-footed ferrets to Canada after 75 years!

These attractive black-masked relatives of the weasel, the otter and the mink were extirpated in Canada many years ago, having last been seen in Saskatchewan in 1937. No one knows for sure how this population died out, but in other areas the numbers of their main prey, the black-tailed prairie dog (a relative of the ubiquitous gopher, or Richardson’s ground squirrel) crashed mainly because of farming practices. On top of that disease, especially the plague (yes, the same bacterium that caused the black death) probably took a heavy toll.

By the late 1970s it was thought that the ferret had become extinct, but in 1981 wildlife officials in Wyoming found a small group. Captive breeding programs were started in a number of zoos, including Toronto and Calgary in Canada. Many partners cooperated in the captive breeding program and you can find a black-footed ferret microsite at Calgary Zoo’s web site. It contains educational vignettes and will be updated regularly.

Despite some early bumps, which included the near loss of many animals from canine distemper (that I wrote about in my last blog of October 2nd) the program has been a success, and there are now 17 sites in the USA where reintroductions have taken place, as well as one in Mexico and now near the small town of Val Marie, where the Grasslands NP headquarters is located. There are plans to bring more ferrets in future years, as this release is just a start, and the numbers are not sufficient to ensure long-term success. No one has asked the prairie dogs what they think about all this, but for thousands of years the ferrets were part of their every day lives, and even made their homes in the burrows of their prey.

If you want to see black-footed ferrets head to the park. You might find them near prairie dog colonies and you will likely see other wildlife that is not found in many other spots of Canada, let alone Saskatchewan. Even if you don’t the sunsets over the hills are well worth the visit.

Canine Distemper in a new species

Linkhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TD6-4X9TTTY-6&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d3ed97ecb6027210b92b683fe472e67d, http://wdin.blogspot.com/, http://asuka.wildlifedirect.org/2007/03/

Once again the Wildlife Disease Listserv and blog has provided an entry into a convoluted story of disease among wildlife, domestic animals and even people.

A recent report published in the journal Microbiology has further broadened the range of species that can contract and die from a nasty virus disease once thought to occur, as its name implies, in dogs. It is canine distemper. The title of the article, written by Zhaozeng Sun, Aixue Li and their colleagues, is Natural Infection with Canine Distemper Virus in Hand-feeding Rhesus Monkeys in China.

It has been known for many years that some other species can contract the virus, or its very close relatives, and it seems obvious that the virus itself is able to undergo slight changes that allow it to infect new hosts. In the last thirty years it has been seen in seals (hence phocine distemper), dolphins, and other species. In Africa it had devastating effects on the African Wild Dog populations and was reported in jackals and hyaenas. It would be no surprise to learn that it also killed other canids like bat-eared foxes, but they tend to fly a bit under the radar and do not have the charismatic appeal of the larger species – they only weigh about 3 kg. Then in 1994 an epidemic occurred in lions in the Serengeti, killing an estimated 30% of the population, something like 1000 animals, in two years!

As I wrote in The Trouble With Lions

“There is a dramatic, but grim, movie clip shown on the Glasgow Veterinary College web site, taken by modeler Professor Ray Holborn, of a lion in the Serengeti in the throes of a grand mal seizure, which is one of the classic signs of distemper”.

I have just spent a fruitless 30 minutes trying to find the video, but it seems to have been taken down.

In dogs some of the classic signs of distemper are fever, loss of appetite, respiratory symptoms and thickening of the footpad. Another name for the condition used to be “Hardpad” and at one time this was even thought to be a different disease. Distemper was once a major killer of inner-city dogs in Glasgow and we students used to go into slum areas and take part in free vaccination clinics. This is much the same as the clinics that now take place around national parks like the Serengeti and Masai Mara in Kenya and Tanzania. You can read more about this on the Wildlife Direct blog here.

Many dogs developed central nervous system signs and seizures were common before they went on to die. There is no mention of CNS signs in any species other than the lions, but deaths certainly occurred. That is exactly what took place in the Chinese Rhesus monkeys where twelve of twenty that were sick went on to die.

So, will distemper jump to humans? Maybe it has done so already, aeons ago, in the form of measles. We may be lucky, because the distemper and measles viruses are closely related. So much so that for many years measles vaccine was used to protect puppies. Another point. When measles vaccines programs fail, or folks take decision not to vaccinate children, the consequences can be terrible. Measles was once a major factor in many areas of the world where European invaders arrived and brought the disease to fully susceptible people.

Wildlife smuggling

Linkhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/6204087/South-African-caught-at-airport-with-crocodiles-in-luggage.html,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/09/090911-pythons-florida-giant-snakes.html

In The Trouble With Lions I wrote:

There seems to be some debate about which illegal trade generates the most income, but the top four are drugs, arms, people (mainly women as sex workers) and animals. All are worth billions of dollars a year and the animal trade involves the death of a vast proportion of its victims even while in transit.

It now seems as if wildlife smuggling has leapt into second place behind drugs in South Africa and overtaken arms.

The latest report of a bizarre case comes from the Wildlife Disease News Digest listserv of Sept 21st to which I subscribe. They provided a link to a story from Britain’s Telegraph online news outlet. The headline reads

South African caught at airport with crocodiles in luggage

It was not only crocodiles that he had tried to smuggle in his luggage, but a real mix that included snakes, a turtle, spiders, scorpions and frogs. In all some seventy animals were involved.

The man had flown in from Thailand and many, if not all (the article in not clear about this) of the animals were non-native and came from the Far East. There were at least three endangered species.

There are several issues to think about. First, and obvious, is the drain on species in the countries from which the animals came. Then comes the other big question. What happens when the smuggled animals arrive at destination; will they bring foreign diseases; what impact will they have on native wildlife?

The most recent and well-publicised example of a bad news answer to this question comes from Florida in the USA. Two species of non-native python have been found in the state. They are the Burmese Python and the African Rock Python. No doubt so-called “pet” owners released them when they got too big to handle. What is alarming about the rock python story came in a Sept 14th report by Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic News who wrote:

“Six African rock pythons have been found in Florida since 2002. More troubling, a pregnant female and two hatchlings have been found, which means the aggressive reptiles have set up house.”

The smuggling continues and will no doubt do so as long as bad people want to make money. Maybe scanners like the one I wrote about in the blog on bushmeat need to be used in all airports.

Bushmeat smuggling from Africa

Linkhttp://www.silive.com/news/advance/index.ssf?/base/news/1252497614318590.xml&coll=1, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05/seizure_of_bushmeat_from_lugga.html

In The Trouble With Lions I wrote about an unusual case of bushmeat smuggling in the USA. An immigrant woman from Liberia had been prosecuted for smuggling monkey parts. At her pretrial deposition in the Brooklyn federal court in Brooklyn she stated that she ate the bushmeat for religious purposes and

‘because monkey from the wildlife is a very smart animal’.

The case has moved along and a report by Frank Donnelly in the Staten Island Advance of Sept 9th states that the woman, named Mamie Manneh (or Jefferson) has pleaded guilty to smuggling illegal monkey parts. This happened after her church minister debunked her claim of bushmeat's religious significance. She will be sentenced on Nov 13th in Brooklyn Federal court.

One of the issues raised by the prosecution was the potential of disease spread from bushmeat. The prosecution veterinary expert mentioned Ebola, measles, tuberculosis, monkeypox and retroviruses similar to HIV but added that she was ‘she was unaware of any documented cases of such diseases being spread through consumer bushmeat.” It maybe that she was referring to such diseases occurring in the USA, but it is important to recognize that several of these diseases are known to have crossed into humans from bushmeat in other countries. The classic is the spread of HIV to humans from chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys on at least seven occasions in the last 100 years. Then there is the more recent finding of a gorilla derived form of HIV occurring in a human, which I recounted in this blog on August 4th under the title Gorillas and AIDS.

In a somewhat related case a Ugandan man was caught red-handed with bushmeat and fruit when his luggage was screened at Newark Liberty International Airport. Reporter Christopher N. Dela Cruz, writing in New Jersey Real-Time News, which is associated with the Star Ledger related that parts of antelope and cane rat were found along with fruit and other illegal commodities.

Lest anyone think that bushmeat smuggling is unusual, local authorities in Newark relate that this was the sixth seizure of bushmeat since October last year, totaling over 41 pounds. Last year, similar seizures weighed in at 88 pounds. Once again, and entirely appropriately, disease transmission to people from bushmeat was raised by federal authorities.

One of the slightly odd things about this report was that a picture accompanying the report showed a uniquely North American species, the pronghorn antelope. It seems possible that the newspaper lacked a picture of the most common antelope species in Uganda, the Uganda kob, (pictured here) which is often a target for poachers in Queen Elizabeth National Park and elsewhere.

In this case the man, whose name was not given, was fined $300 and released.