This week I went to a couple lectures outside the normal and learned about Red Wolves and their conservation, big cats and their behaviors, and photo elicitation from my advisor. This last one proved to be way more interesting and meaningful to my work than I thought it would be.

Red Wolves
About 45 Red Wolves exist today. They are threatened with a few things but right now they are threatened by poor management and loud anti-wolf voices. A Defenders of Wildlife speaker came to campus this last week and described the Red Wolf situation. I knew they were in a rough spot but I remember reading about them a couple years ago and I remember the take-away being that the numbers aren’t great but they’re improving and the population has been steadily increasing for the past couple decades. Apparently I didn’t misremember too poorly: they were doing fairly well and on the right trajectory two years ago. However, two years ago some significant changes started occurring. The major changes were: the USFWS (the Federal agency in charge of the wolf) terminated the Red Wolf position and divvied up the responsibilities amongst an already stretched workforce, they reduced the necessary range for a healthy population by 89%, and they started under-enforcing poaching. Given the information is from a fairly pro-wolf biased source but it is also one of the only organizations looking out for the wolves and also a source I trust.
The last piece of news that does not bode well for the Red Wolf conservation is something that I was aware of but not its implications. This summer genetic analysis came out saying that the Red Wolfs are genetically indistinguishable from wolf/coyote hybrids and do not constitute a separate species. On the surface of this it could potentially eliminate the Red Wolf from Endangered Species Act Protection. The DOW has good arguments stating why this would be silly including the fact that they are still ecologically relevant, morphologically dissimilar, and that the genetics do not fully account for separate species. The best argument however is that the only reason that they are hybrids are because their numbers are so low and so they have had to mate with only coyotes for the past half a century. Their argument actually uses this genetic information as stating that the only way to save what’s left of the Red Wolf genetics is to save what’s left of the Red Wolf
They summarized the talk saying that if current trends continue it will be impossible for the species to beat extinction by 2025. I was unaware the Red Wolf situation was so dire and I would imagine this is news to most people.
 
Cheetahs and Lions, Jaguars and Ocelots
Another speaker came by school this week on her way to presenting at The Wilderness Society’s conference. Dr. Marcella Kelly of Virginia Tech spoke about her work on carnivores in Africa, Madagascar, Borneo, and Central America. Her hour long lecture was captivating and had gems quite relevant to carnivore researchers, ecologists, and conservationists alike.
Two of the topics that I think are interesting to everyone though are the relationships she discovered between some big cats. Her work in Africa showed that as lion numbers increase, cheetah numbers decrease. The reason why is both logical and mystifying. Lions apparently are kleptoparasitic upon cheetahs and steal cheetah kills – this is the logical part to understanding why cheetah numbers go down. Just based on this though you would think that cheetahs and lions would set up a mutual benefit relationship or something. However, lions are also known to eat cheetah cubs – this is the mystifying part. Why would lions kill cheetahs that provide them with food? Wouldn’t you want cheetahs around to provide more free meat for you?
            The central American Jaguar/Ocelot relationship is the opposite. As Dr. Kelly was describing her team’s work of trekking through the impossible rainforests full of dense trees, muddy roads that eat rental cars, and armed locals, she shared decades’ worth of data tracking big cats and mesopredators. Based on her Africa work she expected to find that wherever jaguars roam, ocelots would decrease. However, the relationships were constant and ran parallel with each other – where one succeeded, the other did. This has yet to be explained and the causality may or may not be there either.
 
Photo Elicitation
My work is qualitative work. I am trying to understand the social interactions and implications of conservation. This is partially because I believe that conservation is a social act and a social value (as opposed to an ecological or biological decision) and partially because my mind does not work very well quantitatively. In trying to understand quantitative methods and processes we learned about Photo Elicitation this past week. I was skeptical reading the readings and looking into it. However, the moment my advisor/professor explained it I immediately recognized the benefit it could pose to conservation.
Basically photo elicitation is art theory. On another level it flips the power structure of the objective/subjective and the interviewer/interviewee. How this method occurs is by having the subject either take photos of something meaningful to them, share photos meaningful to them, or review photos they are involved in somehow. From there, you get the interviewee to then explain the photo and their responses. This takes the ‘known’ knowledge (the objective, the positivistic knowledge) out of the hands of the researcher and puts it in the hands of the subject. The subject holds all the information and the researcher is absorbing it from the subject. The power of this technique is that it gives communication to something that does not have language or does not readily open itself to description.
One of the examples used was of a researcher trying to understand what “old” meant in a community and why it was valued. However, if you were to ask someone valued old buildings the data received did not hold much substance. In essence, people don’t know why they value ‘old’ things. But, if you give them a camera and tell them to take photos of things in their community/city that they hold dear and are special to them they will take photos of old things and then you can get them to describe them according to a rubric you develop. From here you can track trends and code similar responses. The whole time, throughout the whole process you never have asked the question “why do old things matter” but have instead allowed it to come out of the objects presented by interviewees authentically.
I thoroughly believe that we do not know why conservation matters. I mean this in a few ways, one of them being that the general public cannot explain it. Another reason being that even the most knowledgeable and well trained people will give you either local answers or subjective morality answers – both of which are unsatisfying to me. I do think conservation matters both objectively and subjectively and we are closer than ever to figuring it out. I also think that we haven’t created the language to explain it. I think a technique like photo elicitation can help me give words to a value that we cannot explain.

This week I read some pretty heavy conservation theory. I want to share that but haven’t fully processed it yet so I don’t feel like I can share it fully. I did learn a few plants though. Beautiful flowers. Those, Constraint Theory, and Keystone Threats. 

Plants
This week I learned new plants. I actually learned about 50 but I remember about 7 and am only sharing these three crazy looking, yet extremely common flowers to this area. These three plants are native and so common that they are found all through the Americas and even into Europe and Africa. I have never even heard of the Families though! The California Floristic Province contains one of the most biodiverse floral regions and I grew up 10 miles from the most biodiverse spots of that area as it is where the CFP, the Sonoran Desert Province, the Colorado Desert subregion, and the Mojave Desert Province all meet. And plants are my thing – more than birds or reptiles or whatever. Sometimes I let my hubris get a hold of me and am surprised when I am surprised about things I should know. I should know common plants in North America. I should at the very least know common families in North America. I suppose the journey of the naturalist is never-ending and I am grateful for that.
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The three that I learned are beautiful and infinitely strange. Below are their common and latin names as well as a couple photos I pulled from the internet:

Keystone Threats
Instead of Keystone Species, which are species in an ecosystem that have a disproportionate effect on the system, one of my advisors edited a book and in it he identifies the Keystone Threats idea in one of his chapters. This idea is similar to EO Wilson’s biodiversity threats of HIPPO (human development, invasive species, human population, pollution, and overharvesting); guns, nets, and bulldozers from the new Nature article(https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/biggest-threats-biodiversity-guns-nets-bulldozers); and somewhat related to the Stockholm Resilience Center’s 9 Planetary Boundaries.  Focusing on the threats to a particular habitat, Dr. Baldwin shows that there are particular threats that when removed assuage disproportionately the impact on the habitat. It’s like the Keystone Species Theory in reverse: when you add wolves back to the Yellowstone habitat you get elk moving which gets trees growing again and rivers changing course.

I suppose that a corollary to this could be two impacts related to Keystone Species: Trophic Cascades and Mesopredator Release. Trophic Cascades are basically top-down (like the wolf example above) or bottom-up as in when you remove the primary producer (plants, algae, etc) that herbivores feed on. Mesopredator release is when mid-level predators are allowed to run rampant because they have nothing keeping them in check (i.e. a wolf outcompeting and predating upon coyotes or foxes). Mesopredator release has been theorized as one of the drivers for an inordinate impact upon bird, rodent, and small mammal populations. The idea is that while wolves don’t eat bird eggs, raccoons do and if wolves keep their populations in check then birds can have a more robust population. Keystone threats might work indirectly in such a way.

The biggest threat is development. Once you build a strip mall that land is gone forever and the open space adjacent to it is now affected by the human presence. I would imagine that removing the development (or threat of such) reclaims the land, reduces edge effects, allows species that are less reclusive to pioneer away from the Core, and thereby reducing pressure on other species. In essence, it’s a pressure release valve allowing all species more space and agency. This inordinate removal of pressure is greater and has more indirect impacts than say noise pollution from a nearby airport or snowmobile access. The latter are both legitimate threats that require attention but far less a priority than a Keystone Threat.

Constraints Theory
Discussing what motivates people to conduct recreation (of any kind - adventure backpacking to table tennis), my professor discussed Constraint Theory. This theory identifies three basic constraints to participation:

• intrapersonal constraints – fear, motivation, lack of skill,
• interpersonal constraints – not knowing anyone, not having right socialization, etc
• structural constraints – the real-world ability to do something doesn’t occur; structural barriers keeping you from engagement

Basically, this is a strategy to organize barriers and identify specifically what discourages engagement. I am a big believer in “what gets measured can be managed” and this is the measurement part of that. Once you identify the Constraints you then apply the appropriate methods for removing those restraints. Where this gets fun is when one constraint is masked as another or so heavily dependent linearly on one constraint that the other constraints fall away. An example would be someone not feeling confident in their abilities to swim but really they just don’t have the money to get to the pool enough to practice. Once you remove that constraint by providing free swim class afterschool or a free bus route to the beach, the perceived intrapersonal fear can fall away and the challenge looks exciting.
 
Technically, as it relates to leisure, this is called the Hierarchical Model of Leisure Constraints. When I was trying to do my own research I looked up Constraints Theory and it, apparently, is its own legitimate theory in Industrial Management. I found this equally as interesting as it provides a terrific framework to not just expect constraints (in commercial production) but also a very useful strategy to then adaptively manage a complex situation to still achieve successful metrics.

​Earlier this year, Governor Brown signed a bill affirming the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s decision to remove wolves from the state Endangered Species Act and essentially block judicial review. Although the delisting decision and subsequent passage of HB 4040 dealt wolf recovery a blow, the wolf conservation and management plan ultimately determines the fate of this keystone species.
 
Eight years ago there were no wolves in Oregon. Twenty five years ago there were no wolves in the west. There are currently not just wolves in Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, but in Northern California as well. Ecologically wolves have been described as ecosystem engineers, keystone species, and natural “vaccines” for disease spread. Through their predation of deer and elk they decrease browse time which allows appropriate plants to grow, they increase the available scavenger food source for a wide variety of other animals, they decrease the abundance of destructive mesopredators (raccoons, coyotes, skunks, etc), and they thin otherwise healthy herds of elk and deer of chronic wasting disease.  
 
Ecologically, wolf conservation is smart. In extrapolating how much time, energy, and money I spent in the past couple years trying to photograph wolves in the wild, I imagine conserving this species makes economic sense as well. The argument that wolves are devastating livestock operations and harming humans doesn’t stand the test of time. Sure, there are some livestock losses and in those rare instances that they occur, ranchers are compensated.  However the depredation of livestock does not outweigh the benefits wolves bring to our ecosystem.  It’s baffling to me that the “big bad wolf” myth is still perpetuated and ultimately creating more fear and anger.
 
The modern human and wolf interaction is novel. With the policies we enact and the support or opposition we provide we collectively decide how we want to live with other species and within our ecosystem. Wolf protection and management is an experiment for future large carnivore recovery in this country and globally. For the last ten thousand years humans have done a terrific job of killing the monsters of our nightmares: saber-tooth cats, mastodons, short-face bears, and American lions -- all the way up to the wolves. I’m pleased to see that as a society we’re investing in wildlife and fostering recovery for the many predator species we nearly wiped out: grizzly bears, wolverines, jaguars, and mountain lions. 
 
We can continue to deny protection or we can use these interactions as opportunities to learn how to cohabitate better. Wolves embody not just the image of wilderness but the definition of a natural system working. If we make decisions that give them that chance, we are not only supporting the natural resources of Oregon but also contributing to the legacy of our state. The wolf question needs to be answered but constructive and mutually beneficial results do not occur from removing their protection and ultimately, the species.