In my last post I mentioned that giraffe populations have been falling since at least the start of the 20th century, in part due to habitat loss, poaching, and changing climatic conditions. Has the past decade given us clearer insight into the problems facing them and ways to counteract those losses? In some ways things […]
Archive for the ‘disease’ Tag
Giraffes at home on the range
Building a better squirrel conservation program
In my last post, I provided a long (and depressing) list of squirrel species and subspecies facing challenging situations. The very good news is that there are quite a few people conducting research to better understand exactly why certain populations are in decline and how to most effectively reverse those trends. Not all of their […]
Life in the slow lane
In some ways tortoises represent an old conservation issue- as early as the 1800s, for example, people were concerned about overharvesting of giant tortoises on islands such as the Galapagos and Seychelles. Because they can be easy to approach (one study I read used the term ‘run’ with a special citation because none of these […]
Disturbing the seas
In my last post, I explored the large issues facing harbor seals throughout the 20th century, including competition with humans, pollution, and disease. In looking at the last decade or so, these themes continue to be important but I think that they have become more indirect in nature in some cases. Although seals still eat […]
Harboring organochlorines
A quick look at harbor seal population trends around the world suggests that there have been ups, downs, and even some unknowns- catastrophic crashes in one part of the world while numbers grew in another and scientists couldn’t determine the pattern in a third. This wide-spread species shows corresponding variation in population status, but three […]
A disappearing act
I’ve spent the last few days trying to get a sense of how frogs are faring around the world, and what I found was generally depressing- according the to the first Global Amphibian Assessment which was completed in 2004, at least 43% of amphibian species are in decline worldwide (Ben-Ari 2005). This trend seems to […]