I’ll admit that the reading I’ve done on white-nose syndrome over the last few weeks has been pretty depressing- at one point I saw an estimate of 6.7 million bat deaths so far (Cohn 2012), which is a horrifying number. But I think it would be even more horrifying to simply resign ourselves to the […]
Archive for the ‘conservation’ Tag
Helping bats get to the light at the end of the tunnel
If the fungus can’t take the heat (or cold), will it leave the bat alone?
Looking through the most recent literature on white-nose syndrome isn’t exactly reassuring, although it does suggest that progress is being made in understanding how the fungus affects bats and what conditions may help bats survive infection. As of last year, at least 19 US states and 4 Canadian provinces contained infected bats (Blehert 2012) and […]
Losing our insect control
Over the past week, I’ve been looking into when and how scientists first became aware of white-nose syndrome in northeast bats, as well as what the loss of those bats could mean for all of us. It’s pretty depressing reading on the whole- especially when you realize that it has developed so quickly. What were […]
Things that flutter in the night
This month I had some help picking a topic to focus on- a fellow doctoral student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette had approached me about doing something together and then suggested bats as a topic. To be specific, she suggested white-nose syndrome, and I agreed with her for several reasons: first, bats are […]
Keeping parrots in their place
Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking into conservation issues involving parrots, and it turns out that there are two very different sides to this story: on the one hand, habitat destruction and the pet trade are threatening wild populations around the world; on the other hand, the pet trade (and to a certain […]
A colorful invasion
In my last post, I looked at the status of several wild parrot species which have been negatively impacted by habitat loss, hunting, and other human activities. This week in my reading I investigated the other side of the equation: invasive parrot populations around the world. To be perfectly honest, although I had been vaguely […]
Out of the cage
Over the past week, I’ve looked into aspects of parrot conservation, and there seemed to be something of a split between two lines of investigation: parrots threatened in their native range, and parrots causing problems as introduced species. This week I’ll concentrate on the former and then next week, I’ll gather some information on the […]
A different feather
I had some time during a recent road trip to think about the topic for this month- many ideas came to mind as I wondered about this aspect of conservation or that issue of research, but I kept coming back to birds, maybe because they show up so often as you travel (such as the […]
Repelling the invaders
During the past few weeks, I’ve been looking into invasive aquatic plants- it’s clear that there are many species and that we are doing a good job of helping them find new habitats to exploit. It’s also clear that there are big differences between species in terms of impact and the locations where they pose […]
Going with the flow
As I mentioned in my last post, invasive aquatic plants are a big concern- although we are still learning about how they impact invaded ecosystems (and it’s not necessarily bad), we do know that plants such as water hyacinth, Spartina spp., and milfoil can clog waterways, change habitat, and alter faunal communities. And, as we […]