Pronghorn Antelope Migration Route: 160 Miles Plus

October 29, 2009

From the Wildlife Conservation Society:

New Long Distance Migration Route for Pronghorn Found

in Idaho by Wildlife Conservation Society and Lava Lake Institute

 

GPS collars reveal that southern Idaho pronghorn population

has one of the longest overland migrations in the American West

 

Effort underway to protect herd numbering 1,000 animals

threatened by increasing development

 

            BRONX, NEW YORK (October 29, 2009) – Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Idaho-based Lava Lake Institute for Science and Conservation discovered a new overland migration route of pronghorn antelope that ranks among the farthest for any land mammal in the Western Hemisphere.

            The migration route stretches from the base of Idaho’s Pioneers Mountains to the continental divide’s Beaverhead Mountains, passing through Craters of the Moon National Monument and Reserve – a round trip in excess of 160 miles.  The route crosses federal, state, and private land and narrows in one stretch to a bottleneck less than two football fields wide.  There, animals are restricted by mountains, fences, a highway, and fields of jagged lava from Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve.

(Images: WCS)

            The discovery is part of an ongoing study to track pronghorn using GPS and radio collars.  The study’s investigators include Dr. Scott Bergen of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Tess O’Sullivan of the Lava Lake Institute of Science and Conservation, and Mark Hurley of Idaho Fish and Game.

            “This study shows that pronghorn are the true marathoners of the American West,” said Scott Bergen, project director for WCS.  “With these new findings, we can confirm that Idaho supports a major overland mammal migration – something that is becoming increasingly rare in the U.S. and worldwide.”

            The researchers tracked the pronghorn’s daily movements during their annual migration.  They estimate 100-200 pronghorn currently use the migration route.  During the winter, the pronghorn congregate with other regional herds from the area, making it Idaho’s largest pronghorn herd of around one thousand animals.

            The authors warn that the route is threatened by increased habitat fragmentation from development and other land-use changes.  Growing interest in development of large-scale wind farms and their associated power-lines could threaten the migration route. 

            “As the American West continues to face increased development pressure, preserving migratory corridors will become more and more crucial to safeguarding large populations of wildlife like pronghorn,” said Dr. Jodi Hilty, Director of North America Programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society, and author of the book Corridor Ecology.  “We have lost so many migrations globally, that these sorts of finds should inspire more of us to help give this uniquely American species a chance to roam in Idaho and throughout its range.”

            WCS is working with ranchers, conservationists, and public lands managers to safeguard the large family ranches that have helped support this migration route over the past 100 years. The Pioneers Alliance, a coalition of landowners, ranchers, conservationists, and state and federal land managers, is working to develop conservation easements and other mechanisms to protect working ranches and farms that are part of the pronghorn migration route.

            “We are committed to working with many partners, including private landowners and state and federal land managers to take the steps needed to sustain this long distance migration,” said Tess O’Sullivan, Program Director for the Lava Lake Institute.

            Some of the data collected by the GPS collars will help researchers better understand – and ultimately protect – the pronghorn’s little-known wintering grounds.  Data will also be used to inform the Western Governor’s Association, which continues to work toward protecting pronghorn migration.  Recently the Governors of Idaho and Montana signed agreements with the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Energy to improve management on federal lands where pronghorn migrate.  In addition, Congress has recognized the value of wildlife migrations corridors as a strategy for adapting to global warming in pending climate change legislation. 

            In 2005, Wildlife Conservation Society scientists used GPS collars to document another migratory herd of pronghorn in Wyoming that travel from Grand Teton National Park to the Green River Valley.  With the leadership of the U.S. Forest Service, the nation’s first designated wildlife migration corridor to protect 150-mile round-trip movement of pronghorn in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem was created.  It has since been safeguarded in a unique public/private partnership called “Path of the Pronghorn.”

            This project is being supported by the Wildlife Conservation Society, Lava Lake Institute for Science and Conservation, Idaho Department of Fish and Game, Bureau of Land Management, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Idaho Conservation League, LightHawk Aviation, National Park Foundation, the National Park Service, The Conservation Fund, Wood River Land Trust, Carey area landowners and ranchers, The Nature Conservancy, and the Craters of the Moon Natural History Association.

                 The Wildlife Conservation Society saves wildlife and wild places worldwide.  We do so through science, global conservation, education and the management of the world's largest system of urban wildlife parks, led by the flagship Bronx Zoo.  Together these activities change attitudes towards nature and help people imagine wildlife and humans living in harmony.  WCS is committed to this mission because it is essential to the integrity of life on Earth. Visit: www.wcs.org

 

The Lava Lake Institute works to accomplish conservation and increase understanding of wildlife and ecosystems of the  Pioneer Mountains – Craters of the Moon Region. www.lavalakeinstitute.org

 

Cool Pronghorn Facts

• Lewis and Clark called pronghorn “speed goats.”  They can reach speeds of 60 mph, making them second only to cheetahs in speed for land animals.
• Researchers collar speedy pronghorns using helicopters that launch nets to temporarily capture them.
• Once numbering in the millions, pronghorn have been reduced by some 90-95 percent although almost a million still live in the American West.
• A previous WCS study showed the pronghorn benefit from wolves by reducing populations of coyote that normally prey heavily on pronghorn fawns.
• WCS’s Queen Zoo recently debuted a pronghorn fawn.

Noisy Moth Jams Bat Sonar

At Discovery News you'll soon learn how hungry bats cause fireflies to flash. It turns out that many insects have evolved rather unusual defenses against night sky prowling bats. The below Wake Forest University press release sent to me today by its author, Cheryl Walker, explains how one moth plays a sound trick to avoid becoming a bat treat. Be sure to watch the short video at the end as it shows a moth demonstrating the technique, foiling the bat's planned attack.

(Bat Image: Wake Forest University)

In the ongoing evolutionary battle between bats and moths, a species of tiger moth plays a trick with sound to avoid becoming a bat's tasty treat, according to new research by professor William Conner and PhD student Aaron Corcoran.

"This is the first example of prey that jams biological sonar," says Professor of Biology William Conner, who made the discovery with PhD student Aaron Corcoran.

In a series of experiments set up in a "bat cave" in the basement of Winston Hall, Corcoran and Conner observed free-flying big brown bats hunting moths. High-speed infrared video cameras recorded the interactions between predator and prey. They also recorded the high-frequency sounds made by both the bats and the moths during each interaction.

(Biology graduate student Aaron Corcoran conducts research on bats and moths with professor William Conner. Photo illustration by Ken Bennett.)

When a tiger moth hears the sonar pings of a bat in search of prey, it clicks back using a paired set of structures called "tymbals," Corcoran says. The high-speed, high-frequency clicks disrupt the bat's echolocation cycle. Although they have yet to discover exactly how the jamming works, the sounds could mask the echoes that the bat uses to locate the moth. Or, it might blur the bat's acoustic image of the moth so the bat can't determine its exact location.

"Sonar jamming illustrates a new level of escalation in a 50-million-year-old arms race," Corcoran says.

Their research was first published in Science and later reported in The New York Times, on National Public Radio and in other media outlets. Corcoran presented the findings at the Animal Sonar Symposium in Japan last summer, and he will speak at the North American Symposium on Bat Research in November.

Now, Corcoran is doing field research to learn more about how the sonar-jamming defense works in the wild. He has found the perfect place to study the ultrasonic battle of bats and moths in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona, where one in every three moths is a Bertholdia trigona, the species of tiger moth that uses ultrasonic clicks as a sonar-jamming defense. Many species of bats, including the one they studied in the lab, are also prevalent.

He is trying to figure out if the moths are using evasive maneuvering along with sound to evade capture. "Are they combining defenses or does sonar jamming work so well that they go along their way without making elaborate loops and spirals to avoid being eaten," he says.

Halloween E-Cards from the Monterey Bay Aquarium

October 27, 2009

The Monterey Bay Aquarium in California has just released a set of Halloween e-cards featuring real-life marine species that could easily star in a Hollywood sci-fi horror flick.

 

 

 

The vampire squid card slimed its way into my virtual mailbox today. It came with very interesting information about the featured species, and I believe all of the cards come with such educational info. To send one or more of the free e-cards to your favorite trick or treaters, please go to this Monterey Bay Aquarium site.

Unicorn Fly Buzzed During Dinosaur Age

Meet the newly discovered "unicorn fly," described in the following Oregon State University press release:

Just in time for Halloween, researchers have announced the discovery of a new, real-world “monster” – what they are calling a “unicorn” fly that lived about 100 million years ago and is being described as a new family, genus and species of fly never before observed.

(Images: OSU)

A single, incredibly well-preserved specimen of the tiny but scary-looking fly was preserved for eternity in Burmese amber, and it had a small horn emerging from the top of its head, topped by three eyes that would have given it the ability to see predators coming. But despite that clever defense mechanism, it was apparently an evolutionary dead end that later disappeared.

“No other insect ever discovered has a horn like that, and there’s no animal at all with a horn that has eyes on top,” said George Poinar, Jr., a professor of zoology at Oregon State University who just announced the new species in Cretaceous Research, a professional journal.

“It was probably a docile little creature that fed on the pollen and nectar of tiny tropical flowers,” Poinar said. “But it was really bizarre looking. One of the reviewers of the study called it a monster, and I have to admit it had a face only another fly could have loved. I was thinking of making some masks based on it for Halloween.”

This fly lived in the jungles of Myanmar and was found trapped in amber that was from 97 to 110 million years old. The gooey, viscous tree sap that flowed down over the fly and later turned to stone preserved its features in lifelike detail, including its strange horn topped by three functional eyes.

“If we had seen nothing but the wings of this insect, it would have looked similar to some other flies in the family Bibionomorpha,” Poinar said. “But this was near the end of the Early Cretacous when a lot of strange evolutionary adaptations were going on. Its specialized horn and eyes must have given this insect an advantage on very tiny flowers, but didn’t serve as well when larger flowers evolved. So it went extinct.”

Poinar named the new fly Cascoplecia insolitis – from the Latin “cascus” for old and “insolates” for strange and unusual.

The fly also had other very unusual characteristics, the study found, such as an odd-shaped antenna, unusually long legs that would have helped it crawl over flowers and extremely small vestigial mandibles that would have limited it to nibbling on very tiny particles of food.

Pollen grains found on the legs of the fly suggest that it primarily must have fed on flowers.

This fly lived during the time of the dinosaurs, but also in a period when Triassic and Jurassic species were becoming extinct, modern groups were appearing and angiosperms, or flowering plants, were diversifying. Some of the characteristics of the fly were common to other families found around that time, but others were extremely different – especially the horn with eyes on top.

The specimen found in amber was well-preserved, lacking only the rear left portion of the abdomen and a portion of the left hind leg. It’s rare to find specimens with essentially a complete body as well as wings, scientists noted in the report. The fossil came from an amber mine in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, first excavated in 2001.

Poinar is an expert on insects and other life forms that have been preserved in amber, and has used them as clues to create detailed portraits of ancient ecosystems.

“None of the specialized body characters of Cascoplecia occurs on previously reported Cretaceous bibionids,” the report concluded. “This ‘unicorn’ fly was one of the oddities of the Cretaceous world and was obviously an evolutionary dead end.”

Unless, of course, it shows up once again as a scary looking Halloween costume – with wings, grasping claws, and a horn with three piercing eyes on top.

Family Tree Created for World's Most Numerous Group of Animals

October 26, 2009

Take a guess as to what is the world's most numerous group of animals before reading the below press release just in from Wageningen University and Research Center...

Scientists from Wageningen University and Research Center have published the largest nematode Phylogenetic Tree to date in cooperation with the Dutch Plant Protection Service (PD) and the University of California (Riverside) in the November issue of the journal Nematology. It contains over 1,200 species and is entirely based on the analysis of DNA sequence data. It is relatively straightforward - and in fact we’ve shown it already - to define species-specific DNA barcodes on the basis of this data set that allows for the detection of nematodes in soil with an unprecedented accuracy.

Nematodes are the world’s most numerous group of animals with two to 20 million individuals, usually smaller than one millimetre, per square metre of soil. These nematodes include a minority that can cause diseases to humans, animals or plants. Unfortunately these pathogenic organisms share a strong resemblance to each other as well as to useful nematode species. This makes finding out which nematodes are present in a soil of a given area an extremely time-consuming and a specialist task.

The international group of scientists studying nematode DNA selected a specific element of the DNA that codes for a major part of ribosomes, parts of the cells of both plants and animals responsible for the production of proteins. Containing 1,700 building blocks, this piece of DNA allowed scientists to distinguish between most nematode species. In fact the resolution of the datya set appeared to bre much better than we had ever expected.

Based on the DNA-analyses, the scientists could make some major steps forward towards to the reconstruction of the evolution of this successful group of animals, including the ones that - because of their feeding behaviour – cause major damage to lifestock and crops. Our results provided sufficient information for distinguishing a number of plant-parasitic nematodes. The new technology has already been used to study tens of thousands of soil samples. Faster and more accurate than traditional microscopic analyses, the technology has been an immediate success.

Mary Magdalene and the Tower of Fish

For the first time, a relic attributed to Saint Mary Magdalene is in the United States. Father Thomas Michelet, a Dominican priest, brought the revered bone—part of the tibia—from France into the U.S. 

(Photos courtesy of EWTN Global Catholic Network)

 

According to the Gospels, Mary Magdalene was the first to witness the resurrection of Jesus.

Bishop Dominique Rey of the Diocese of Frejus-Toulon, where the relic is normally housed, issued a letter concerning the relic. (Click on any of the photos to enlarge them.)

In Matthew 15:39, it's mentioned that Mary Magdalene came from the region of Magdala. The Talmud also makes reference to this city, but by its Aramaic name, which translates to "Tower of Fish." The early Greeks described it as a place for salting and processing fish. The fish might have been smoked as well.

Historians today think the fish were Kinneret sardines, plentiful in the region.

Jim Gerrish of the "Church and Israel Forum" online points out that two miracles described in the New Testament included "some type of small fish," which he thinks might have been processed in Magdala.

Many cultures offer different interpretations of the stories concerning Mary Magdalene. Among Eastern Orthodox Christians (including Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Russian, Romanian, Serbian and Ukrainian), Mary Magdalene was said to have performed her own miracles. One tradition holds that she held an egg up to Emperor Tiberius at a banquet, proclaiming, "Christ is risen!" As Caesar laughed, the egg in her hand supposedly turned bright red in color. To this day, Greek icons often show Mary Magdalene holding a red Easter egg. 

One of my own favorite traditions, still practiced today, is the blessing of the animals at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church in Georgia. Many churches worldwide hold such an event, where owners bring their animals in order to have them blessed. St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church this year reports that few kitties showed up, and "birds, farm animals and snakes decided to take a day off." But dogs showed up in force, with quite a few shaking their fur and looking rather shocked when the priest sprinkled "Holy Water" on them.

Often these animal blessing events are held earlier this month, to coincide with the feast day of yet another saint, Francis of Assisi. According to tradition, he was an early animal lover and conservationist.

For more information on the Mary Magdalene relic, tune into "EWTN Live" Tuesday at 10 PM ET, as Father Thomas Michelet will be the program's special guest.

Why Bo Isn't in the First Family Portrait

October 24, 2009

Here is the new official portrait of President Barack Obama and his family, taken by photographer Annie Leibovitz:

The image was posted to Flickr yesterday, appearing on the administration's photo feed. The First Family is shown sitting together in the Green Room of the White House.

So where is First Dog Bo?

According to First Lady Michelle Obama's spokesperson, "Bo didn’t make the cut. He was upstairs at home.”

Since so many people will view the image, it would have made a powerful statement to show Bo as a member of the Obama family. But this is the image the White House wishes to present. A beautiful, well-composed photo to be sure.

The status of dogs in America has evolved over the years. They used to be treated more as just workers, a furry presence that took care of some necessary task and enjoyed the occasional attention from their owners.

Surveys reveal that view has radically changed in the past few decades, as dogs have come to be treated like true members of the family. We often give them human names, like Bo, instead of something like "Fido." Owners now often include their dogs in their wills. Custody battles over dogs erupt when couples break up. And dogs can get health insurance. (Will leave that last, loaded topic for another post...)

My guess is that a photo of Bo with the First Family will soon surface from this shoot. In this particular image, Liebowitz faced three limitations:

• the size of the loveseat (Malia had to perch on the armrest and Sasha had to scoot into her father's space to get everyone in there)
• the angle of the shot
• the center of focus

It's amusing to visualize Bo draped across the laps of all of them. And the upward angle of the lens would have missed Bo if he had been on the floor. A nice touch might have been to show him next to the fireplace on the right, perhaps ruining the photograph's center of focus.

At least Bo was in the White House and not in the dog house.

Drug Company Merger Shields Over a Million Horse Deaths

October 23, 2009

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer recently acquired another major drug manufacturer, Wyeth, for 68 billion dollars. It is the most expensive drug industry merger of the year so far.

Missing from the upbeat reports about the lucrative merger is the cost in horse lives as a result of Wyeth's production of the hormone replacement therapy (HRT) drug Premarin. Most estimates put the horse death toll linked to Premarin at well over one million.

(Horse: Karpati)

The active ingredients for Premarin—used by around nine million women to relieve menopause symptoms—come from the urine of pregnant horses. The mares are confined to narrow stalls for 20 hours at a time while hooked to collection devices, MSNBC reports. The foals of these mares usually go to auction, where they are often snapped up by bidders known as "horse killers," who send the horses to feedlots. There the animals are fattened before slaughter, according to the report.  

Since so much money is at stake, it's a hard cycle to stop, but staff at Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue in California are trying to save as many of the HRT horses as they can.

I just learned about Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue this week after connecting with musician Woody Simmons. In an unrelated project, Simmons is working with Discovery filmmaker Ed George on a film that will feature, among other luminaries, Jane Goodall.

Tonight, however, Simmons is performing in a benefit with singer Kitty Rose to raise money for the private California horse rescue group. She told me that Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue "buys horses from auction that would otherwise be slaughtered."

"They have saved many mustangs, and others, and have property where horses that cannot be adopted can live out their lives," Simmons added. "They have a small operation, but provide at least one alternative to a few horses. They also provide another route for educating and informing the public of the plight of horses. 95,000 horses are sent out of our country every year to be slaughtered for meat, dogfood, etc. They are sent to Mexico and Canada."

In a related project, one of Simmons' songs, "Who'll Save the Animals," is out on a new CD. All of the proceeds will go to benefit PETA. She said it was put together by Mel Watson and is titled Compassionism on Monkey Records.

Simmons' collaborator on the horse rescue benefit tonight, Katharine "Kitty Rose" Cole, takes horse rescue to heart.

(Kitty Rose with her rescued horse Anicca. Credit: Katharine "Kitty Rose" Cole)

"I have my own mini-sanctuary in Hopland, California, where I have five horses who would not have a home otherwise," Cole told me.

She said she can care for her horses by herself, but it is quite another matter when handling the 80 plus horses that Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue currently has. In addition to taking in HRT horses, this group also rescues "nuisance" wild horses, horses that owners cannot properly manage, and other horses that would otherwise be slaughtered or abandoned.

"The Wild Horse Rescue is an amazing example of what one person can do to help horses in need," Cole said, adding that "these folks were brave enough to take personal action to protect these horses and put themselves on the line in their stead. Now they have created a beautiful sanctuary which folks can visit and learn and care for these national treasures and hopefully become a part of the surge of interest to protect them from being destroyed."

Information about tonight's benefit for Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue at El Rio in San Francisco, CA, is here. 

(Kitty Rose Band with Simmons on the left, Rose in the middle and Stephanie Lee on the right. Credit: Katharine "Kitty Rose" Cole)

I also invite you to visit the website for Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue.

Largest Orb Weaving Spider Found

October 22, 2009

A newly discovered spider has a 5-inch leg span and webs that are over 3 feet wide. It's now the world's largest orb weaving spider, according to this release from the Smithsonian:

Researchers from the United States and Slovenia have discovered a new, giant Nephila species (golden orb weaver spider) from Africa and Madagascar and have published their findings in the Oct. 21 issue of the journal PLoS ONE. 

(Images: M. Kuntner)

Matjaž Kuntner, chair of the Institute of Biology of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a Smithsonian research associate, along with Jonathan Coddington, senior scientist and curator of arachnids and myriapods in the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, also reconstructed size evolution in the family Nephilidae to show that this new species, on average, is the largest orb weaver known. Only the females are giants with a body length of 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) and a leg span of 4 - 5 inches (10 - 12 centimeters); the males are tiny by comparison. More than 41,000 spider species are known to science with about 400 - 500 new species added each year. But for some well-known groups, such as the giant golden orb weavers, the last valid described species dates back to the 19th century.

Nephila spiders are renowned for being the largest web-spinning spiders. They make the largest orb webs, which often exceed 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter. They are also model organisms for the study of extreme sexual size dimorphism and sexual biology.

Giant golden orb weavers are common throughout the tropics and subtropics. Thousands of Nephila specimens that have been collected are in natural history museums. Past taxonomists collectively recognized 150 distinct Nephila species, but in his doctoral thesis, Kuntner recognized only 15 species as valid. Linnaeus described the first Nephila species in 1767, and Karsch described the last genuinely new Nephila in 1879. All more recent descriptions turned out to be synonyms.

"It was surprising to find a giant female Nephila from South Africa in the collection of the Plant Protection Research Institute in Pretoria, South Africa, that did not match any described species," said Kuntner, who first examined the specimen in 2000.

Kuntner, Coddington and colleagues launched several expeditions to South Africa specifically to find this species, but all were unsuccessful, suggesting that perhaps the Nephila specimen, first collected in 1978, was a hybrid or perhaps an extinct species. In 2003 a second specimen from Madagascar (in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien in Vienna, Austria) suggested it was not a hybrid. No additional specimens turned up among more than 2,500 samples from 37 museums. The species seemed extinct. Then a few years ago a South African colleague found a male and two females in Tembe Elephant Park, and it became clear that the specimens were indeed a valid new species.

In the PLoS ONE paper, Kuntner and Coddington described N. komaci as a new species, now the largest web-spinning species known, and placed it on the evolutionary tree of Nephila. They then modeled evolution to test if natural selection had affected body size. They found strong evidence that it had, but only in females. Nephila females consistently through time increased in size and, mainly in Africa, a group of giant spiders evolved. Nephila males, in contrast, did not grow larger, but instead remained about five times smaller than their mates. Although males look like "miniatures" next to their mates, the males are actually normal-sized; the females are giants.

 
The new species was named after Kuntner's best friend Andrej Komac, who died in an accident at the time of these discoveries. "My friend, himself a scientist, encouraged me to tackle this PhD, but did not live to see the discoveries made," said Kuntner. "He was a big inspiration, and a great friend, thus it was logical to name this new species to his memory."

Kuntner and Coddington urge the public to find new populations of N. komaci in Africa or Madagascar, both to facilitate more research on the group, but also because the species seems to be extremely rare. "We fear the species might be endangered, as its only definite habitat is a sand forest in Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal," said Coddington. "Our data suggest that the species is not abundant, its range is restricted and all known localities lie within two endangered biodiversity hotspots: Maputaland and Madagascar."

New Park Protects Tigers, Elephants and Carbon

A former logging operation in Cambodia has just been converted into a protected area for wildlife. Some good environmental news for a change! Several new animal species were even recently discovered at the designated site. Here's today's press release from the Wildlife Conservation Society:

Cambodia Creates First Park to Protect

Carbon and Wildlife

 

Forest stores carbon and provides key habitats

For monkeys, tigers, and elephants

 

Wildlife Conservation Society conducted key research

That led to park’s creation 

 

Creation of park is part of WCS’s new

“Carbon for Conservation” initiative

 

            NEW YORK (October 22, 2009)—The government of Cambodia has transformed a former logging concession into a new, Yosemite-sized protected area that safeguards not only threatened primates, tigers, and elephants, but also massive stores of carbon according to the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), which worked closely with governmental agencies to help create the protected area.

(Credit for Images: WCS)

The Royal Government’s Council of Ministers recently declared the creation of the Seima Protection Forest, which covers more than 1,100 square miles along Cambodia’s eastern border with Vietnam.

“We commend the Royal Government of Cambodia for their decision to protect this important refuge for the region’s wildlife and also for safeguarding stocks of carbon,” said WCS Asia Program Director Colin Poole.

Seima is the first protected area in Cambodia created with the conservation of forest carbon as one of its key goals. WCS is helping to measure carbon stocks contained in Seima Protection Forest to calculate the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that will not be released to the atmosphere as a result of the project’s work on reducing deforestation.

This effort will support WCS’s “Carbon for Conservation” initiatives to help provide incentives to people to protect their forest in high-biodiversity landscapes, which are being developed in conjunction with negotiations on a proposed international policy known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD).  In addition to work in Cambodia, WCS is supporting similar efforts in Bolivia, Guatemala, Chile, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Madagascar, and Indonesia.

“In addition to safeguarding the wildlife of Cambodia, Seima Protection Forest will serve as an important model for demonstrating how REDD could be implemented on the ground,” said Dr. Jane Carter Ingram of WCS’s Conservation Support Team. “Forests provide numerous benefits for both wildlife and rural communities, so efforts such as these will help on local, regional and global scales.”

The newly designated protected area contains 23 species of carnivore, including seven cat species, two bears, and two species of wild dog. Researchers have recently discovered species new to science, including one species of bat and two species of frog.

Seima will also continue to benefit local hunters and farmers from the Bunong ethnic minority, who have used the forest for many generations and will retain access in the newly designated protected area.

In addition to providing assistance to the Royal Government in the wildlife surveys used to establish Seima, WCS also works with law enforcement agencies to strengthen on-the-ground protection and engages with local communities on issues integral to balancing conservation with sustainable development such as land titling and natural resource usage.

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s conservation work in this area is supported by: Asian Development Bank, Eleanor Briggs, Danish International Development Assistance (DANIDA), Department for International Development (DFID) United Kingdom, The East Asia and Pacific Environmental Initiative, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation, New Zealand Aid, Panthera, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and The World Bank.

                The Wildlife Conservation Society saves wildlife and wild places worldwide.  We do so through science, global conservation, education and the management of the world's largest system of urban wildlife parks, led by the flagship Bronx Zoo.  Together these activities change attitudes towards nature and help people imagine wildlife and humans living in harmony.  WCS is committed to this mission because it is essential to the integrity of life on Earth. Visit www.wcs.org.