As researchers and conservationists, a key component of our work is to make our research findings accessible to everybody and engage with the general public. This is particularly important for sensitive and ‘political’ topics such as the recolonisation of the Swiss territory by large carnivores.
Gabriele talks to adults and children about his work on bears in Turkey and wolves in Switzerland, as part of the Grimm’s special exhibition organised by the Zürich Zoological Museum. If you are keen to learn more and talk to Gabriele, do not miss the next opportunity on Sunday 29th January 2017 at 11:30 in the museum main building.
Having lived my entire life in the Northern Hemisphere amidst humans, it was with a heady concoction of childlike enthusiasm and amazed disbelief that I made my way through 31 hours of buses, trains, flights, queues, halts and drives to the Southern Hemisphere to spend two weeks with animals. I keep having to pinch myself from time to time to check if these dreamy places my academic pursuits carry me to are not just wishful figments of my imagination – first Switzerland, then California, and now the Kalahari desert in South Africa! Three continents! With shining eyes, I watched from the very edge of the car seat as my inward excitement seemed to be reflected in the gloriously red sunset illuminating two gigantic halves of the sky – one serenely reflecting the receding rays of the summer sun (summer in February! Something I hadn’t even dreamt of experiencing!), and the other ravaged by a colossal storm split open every so often by humongous lightning strikes. Here’s a picture of how the sky looked like from my car window (did not manage to get the lightning strikes in this one though).
My PhD is about understanding the process of dispersal in meerkats using inertial sensors such as accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes. The idea of extracting meerkat behaviour just from signals recorded on these sensors fascinates me, and I could have spent 4 years immersed in this world of signals, processing techniques and interpretations. But to have the unbelievable fortune to go to the very place these signals come from and actually see wild meerkats prancing about in the sands of the Kalahari desert, creating new dispersal strategies and group dynamics in real time in their own environment and according to their own mysterious rules, is something that makes me send out intense beams of gratitude into the universe every now and again. The Kalahari Meerkat Project is situated at the Kuruman River Reserve – a river that last flowed about a 100 years ago now lies as a flat bed surrounded by different shades of sand (whitish to yellowish to reddish) and low, flat dunes dotted with thorny shrubs and acacia trees. The first picture below shows the Kuruman river bed, and the second one shows the typical landscape seen in this part of the Kalahari.
This place is home to a mind-boggling assortment of desert fauna such as meerkats (charismatic creatures who seem to be in a perennial state of urgency), warthogs (Pumba!), desert squirrels (rather arrogant, look like balloons), leopard and tented tortoises (named so because of the respective patterns on their shells), bat-eared foxes (which surprisingly almost exclusively eat termites; they’re nocturnal and prefer periods of lower temperatures; they’re currently being ravaged by an outbreak of rabies in the region), aardvarks (phenomenal diggers that use the three huge claws on their paws to create holes 1.5 – 2m deep!), porcupines (also great diggers that find a juicy shrub-root, dig into the sand to reach the tuber, and eat the plant from the inside out), and pangolins (so elusive that even experienced field biologists there had seen just 3-4 in their time).
Coming to the ungulates, there are springbok (identified by the white underbelly), steenbok (identified by the big ears and smaller size), hartebeest (similar to steenbok, but usually much bigger in size and with less prominent ears), gemsbok (huge antlered beasts almost as big as adult cows but more muscled and mobile, also known as Oryx, which by the way is also the name of the entertainment software in Qatar Airways flights), wildebeest, duiker (a kind of antelope), some common elands (second largest antelopes in the world, after the giant eland), and giraffes (introduced artificially by some farmers here). There are also African wild cats, spring hares (look like miniature kangaroos, are actually rodents), and wild hares (usually nocturnal, and go toing-toing-toing as soon as you catch them in your car headlights).
Birds include pied babblers (named so because the sound they make resembles ‘babbling’), yellow-billed hornbills (unexpectedly heavy – I was sitting on the branch of a tree near the Farmhouse writing down my observations of the day when I almost toppled over because the branch started shaking suddenly even though there was no wind. I looked up to see that a hornbill couple had landed on the end of my branch and were probably deciding whether I deserved to sit on the same branch as them. In hindsight, the branch probably moved so much because of the greater torque resulting from the big radius arm, since they settled at the end of the long branch), ostriches (when they run with the car you’re driving in, it looks like a scene from Jurassic Park – the claws on their feet look just like those that the velociraptors had! Their huge eggs are shown in the picture below – unfortunately I did not have time to put anything for size-reference – the mother was running after us!), and many others I do not know of.
Coming to the insects and crawling creatures, there are vibrantly coloured grasshoppers, burrowing skinks, millipedes (one’s shown in a photo below – the tracks of its two rows of legs can also be seen in the sand just behind it). They’re coated with a poisonous substance so that they can’t be readily eaten. But the clever meerkats roll it around in the sand first so that the poison is scrubbed away, and then they happily devour it), and scorpions (4 varieties, of which 2 are very poisonous).
Reptiles include cape cobras (I was very surprised to see that they are orangish-yellow in colour!), puff adders (rely on stealth for hunting. Move very slowly and stay camouflaged in a single place for a long time waiting to pounce upon unsuspecting prey. When humans unwittingly go near one hidden behind a bush, they make a loud hissing noise. Rather funnily, sometimes when volunteers yawn near meerkats, they alarm them since the yawn ends up sounding like a puff adder hissing sound!), and big yellow-and-black monitor lizards.
Nature’s canvas drapes over you with its innumerable colours when human ‘over-presence’ does not stifle its palette. This was the first time I saw the Milky Way the way it is shown and described in books on space – a cloud of stars stretching across the night sky in a splendid disk of bright light. Extrapolating that disk across the entire surface of the Earth made me marvel at the scale of things, and how exquisite this force called gravity was, keeping us bound to the surface so that we don’t float off into the black nothingness that the stars were pinpricks on. When you close your eyes at night, do you also have several doors and corridors between you and the peace you are trying to seek? During sundowners (drinks with friends atop a dune during sunset), I closed my eyes and all the doors and corridors disappeared, and each long, slow breath seemed to be a conversation beyond words with everything around me – the hot sand, the amusedly twinkling stars, the hope of coolness in the wind, the barking geckos, the scrabbling insects, the hooting owls… sending busily chattering tingles down my spine. Another thing that struck me was the sky during daytime. The trees here aren’t very tall, the region here is pretty flat, and the only tall human construction for miles around is a solitary fire tower towards the east of the reserve next to Botswana Road. This means that you can see the horizon around you in every direction! Here is a picture of one of the sundowners we did at Big Dune (the tallest dune on the reserve, situated right in the middle, to the north of the Farmhouse (where the ‘meerkaters’ and ‘moleratters’ lived) and west of Gannavlatke, or GV (where the ‘squirrelers’, bat-eared fox people, and we lived)) below.
Being surrounded by field biologists was simply exhilarating. Every comment and word floating around me carried a new and exciting snippet of information about this foreign land with its exotic vegetation and creatures that had hitherto only existed on the National Geographic and Discovery Channels for me. For instance, I had no idea that acacia trees have roots that are 20-30 m long so that they can reach the water reserves below and thrive; the trees themselves are about 10 m tall, which means that most of the tree is actually underground! Babbler Jess, the multi-talented bird nerd told me this.
Going out to the field with Gabriele felt like having a heavy-duty torch in pitch darkness. Having spent his entire PhD in the jungles of Botswana working on wild dogs, and then several years as a postdoc working on lions, bears and butterflies, he has an amazing eye that scours the surroundings for little clues that nature slips out every now and again to tell you what it’s up to… if only we could pay more attention! Searching for meerkats, he would suddenly stop at some tracks on the ground and tell you that a puff adder had slithered by not too long ago. Or how a burrowing skink had dug its way through the sand, emerged at some point, and then gone back down in another direction – just from the tracks! Or how a particular part of the reserve was slightly greener, because it had rained some days ago there (rain in the Kalahari is very localized!). Or whether someone had driven past a while ago on the same road, or why it was completely devoid of car tracks (because one of the caretakers had driven along that road with a tyre dragging behind to smoothen and flatten it). Here’s a picture of a road in the reserve. Some of these things seem like logical conclusions in retrospect, and one would maybe have been able to infer them if one were paying attention to that particular thing. But one has to bear in mind that the ‘only’ goal of our drives through the reserve was to look for meerkats, and these insights came while everyone’s eyes were peeled to catch a glimpse of the meerkats. Noticing these ‘extra’ things while your mind is centred on something else is something that is hard to do, and probably comes with you simultaneously looking for these supplementary little things over a long period of time – the mark of hours and hours of experience in the field. I felt very lucky to be in the presence of someone so knowledgeable and experienced, and to be constantly nourished with these little snippets of information that taught me the language nature was speaking to us all in. Here’s Gabriele on a fence, waving the antenna around, trying to catch the signal from the RF collar of the meerkat we were trying to find that day.
One morning, as we were driving past one of these fences, we suddenly heard a strange thumping noise on the wires. Gabs stopped the car and we spotted a duiker caught helplessly upside down on the fence. It had tried to jump over it, and one of its hind legs had gotten caught in the two uppermost wires. It must have swung down due to the impact, and even its neck had gotten stuck between two of the lower wires. As we rushed out from the car towards it, we noticed that the wires had drawn some blood as well. We immediately set to work freeing the poor duiker which was now shrieking in fear since it probably thought we were going to kill it. Those desperate, helpless cries were heart-wrenching, and trying to imagine how close to death the trapped animal must have felt as we approached it rattled my bones. With clippers, Luc slowly cut the wires on the fence binding her (under Gabs’ directions) as Gabs held on to her front paws so that she wouldn’t kick out and injure the people trying to free her. To calm her down, Gabs suggested we cover her eyes, so I took off my shirt and covered her face with it and she finally stopped shrieking frantically. I then jumped over the fence to hold her third paw steady and then slowly eased it out of its death trap. Then cautiously, gently, we eased her out of the fence on my side and backed off as she somehow found the strength to get out and gingerly run away with numb, bleeding legs. An unforgettable experience!
Clouds during the day are a relative rarity in the Kalahari, but when they do come by, not only do they offer some welcome respite during tracking, but they also lead to some breath-taking sunsets with the bright sand reflecting even more light onto the clouds. They seem to hang much lower than anywhere else I’ve seen (maybe because there was no sufficiently tall reference for scale, such as the Alps outside EPFL), and I felt that if I managed to climb a tall enough tree and threw a stone really hard, it might have pierced the lowest cloud! Of course that’s not true (but maybe gemsbok meat gave me superhuman strength and I just don’t know it yet), and I wonder if there is actually some meteorological phenomenon that makes these clouds hang so low.
A typical day would start off even before the crack of dawn, since getting meerkat-weights as soon as they woke up and shuffled out from their burrows was very important for other parallel studies looking at weight-variation with various parameters such as vegetation, meerkat life-history, age, group, climate, temperature, etc. We would wake up at 4:30 am ourselves, I’d fix myself some breakfast and Gabs and I would leave the house at 5:10 am, reaching the Farmhouse 4 km away at 5:20 am (this 10-minute would often be quite silent, spattered with occasional exclamations of ‘Oh God, I could sleep some more’). At this time, it was usually still pretty dark, and all we would see were just silhouettes of trees in the backdrop of a sky which had just pressed the snooze button.
This was ‘field o’clock’, and it would change depending on the time of the year and when the earliest meerkat group would wake up. From the Farmhouse, we’d leave at about 5:45 am, armed with sunscreen lotion (called ‘suncream’ by the Britishers), sunglasses, heavy-duty boots to guard against the thorny shin-level bushes, and a water-bottle. It’s quite surprising how we don’t realize how much and how soon we get dehydrated there – it’s so dry that I never sweated; the only tell-tale signs I would notice later were thick traces of s alt on my T-shirt and shorts from all the perspiration that quickly evaporated. We would reach the burrow at about 6:10 am and stay there till the meerkats woke up. Then we would take their morning weights, encouraging them to climb the weighing machine pan by using little pieces of boiled egg and water from a bottle. The pic below shows Peter taking weights right outside the first burrow I visited. A big part of the field biologists’ work is to habituate the wild meerkats to the researchers’ presence so as to facilitate basic important tasks such as weight-measuring and ultrasounds on the females to see if they’re pregnant. Here’s a picture of Peter doing an ultrasound at the same burrow while Nino looks on.
There is a huge temperature variation in the Kalahari. On the first morning at field o’clock, after the huge storm the previous night, the temperature was 14 degrees Celsius. A few days later, while doing some measurements with the magnetometer on the tracking device, I recorded a temperature of 58 degrees Celsius in the Sun at midday, and 43 degrees Celsius in the shade! A difference of about 40 degrees Celsius on the same day… mind-boggling! In the winters, the temperature can drop to about -15 degrees Celsius. I did not have a fan in my room, but since I was mentally prepared for the heat, the discomfort lasted just a few moments at the beginning of the first night. I actually slept quite well – the human body can adapt to so much! In the moments when it was the hottest, and the Sun would penetrate even the layers of laboriously applied suncream and start cooking me alive, I would think of the legendary nomadic Saan bushmen who lived in these parts as hunter-gatherers up till about a hundred years ago. Thinking about how they derived water from the little roots and tubers and leaves in the ground, and walked barefoot on the boiling sand made me forget the heat at these difficult moments, and I would almost laugh at my small discomfort.
Meerkats are charismatic animals. Frankly, if an animal’s favourite food is scorpions and it is specialized in biting the sting off a scorpion before happily munching it, it easily qualifies as a very cool animal in my books. They are intelligent creatures who, from time to time, exhibit very human reactions. They always seem to do things with a definite sense of purpose, and a small group of 4-5 on the move resembles a well-organized military unit – they will scurry in one organized movement in a particular direction, then stop suddenly, stand up on their rear legs and survey the surroundings around them for any dangers or possible paths to follow, and then take off again. They have very keen long-range vision, and when they look up in alarm and lie down flat on the ground, you can be sure it’s a raptor (biologist’s term for bird of prey. How cool is that!) even if you can’t see one immediately. The most feared raptor is the magnificent martial eagle (Babbler Jess’ favourite bird) which I had the exceedingly good fortune of seeing right on the last day on the drive from GV to the Farmhouse with Gabs and Rebecca. A wingspan of 2-3 metres and perfectly orchestrated, calm and graceful movements made it one of the most elegant animals I saw at the Kalahari – it was like watching Federer play a backhand down the line. Anyway, sometimes the meerkats think they’ve seen a raptor, and they scurry to lie flat on the ground, but then it turns out to be a vulture (which scavenges, doesn’t hunt), so then they start breathing easy once again.
Individual meerkats are identified by specific dye-marks put on them by the volunteers, and also (since the dye-marks wear out within a week), by a tiny transponder chip inserted into their body when they’re very young. Here’s a picture of Jules with the Jaxx group, where the dye-marks are particularly prominent. Note for instance the two meerkats on the right in the picture below – one of them (entering the burrow) has a dye-mark on the back, and the other (exiting the burrow) has two, one on the base of the tail and the other along the tail.
When a new collar has to be put on, or a blood sample has to be taken, or an X-ray needs to be done, the meerkats have to be captured (taken by the tail and put into an opaque sack so that they can’t see anything and hence calm down). They are then anaesthetized using a gas mask, and then these various tasks are carried out. Whenever they’re captured, hydration shots are injected into their muscles to keep them in good health. As a general rule, a given meerkat is never captured more than 4 times a year (to prevent de-habituation). The picture below shows an unconscious meerkat with a collar containing the inertial tracking unit.
Even though this was just a short 15-day stay in the Kalahari, I saw and learnt so many new things, met so many new people, made so many new friends, and had so much fun cooling off in the pool, playing volleyball, having coffee conversations at GV every day, climbing trees, going for sundowners, feasting at braais (Afrikaans for barbeque), eating the best steak ever at Van Zylsrus hotel, having everyday food consisting of [vegetarians skip this part] springbok, eland, hartebeest or gemsbok meat, or beef, that it seemed as if I’d spent a much longer time at the Kalahari – so complete was my experience. I can’t wait to get back out there after 5-7 months and test the algorithms that I’m going to write in the interim. Here’s a picture of the ‘dispersal team’: from left to right – Nino, Luc, Gabriele, me and Peter.
I think this visit also helped me define one of the important things I want to do during this PhD, and perhaps what to go into after it. I want to combine this field experience with the technology and data analysis techniques that I have learnt and am learning in engineering to answer research questions in the domain of population dynamics, and eventually, animal conservation and management. It pained me to see that the analytical techniques employed in field biology are about 20 years behind the cutting-edge in say physics or computer science. For instance, I believe that if the level of data analysis techniques currently used in particle physics (case in point – direct detection of gravitational waves at LIGO up to an accuracy of one part in 10^21… like measuring the width of a human hair at Proxima Centauri 4 light years away!) could be complemented with cool biological insights from the field, we could answer some critical questions regarding animal movement and management, and help preserve biodiversity and bring about mutually beneficial human-animal coexistence before it’s too late. I think my PhD is already part of this vision, and I am really looking forward to doing my best to bring it to fruition!
The second Movement Ecology Summer School, organized by the Ozgul’s group as part of the PhD Program in Ecology of the Life Science Zurich Graduate School, has been a great success. Twenty-five highly motivated students from UZH/ETHZ and from overseas gathered at the Ostello-Cappuccini in Faido (Ticino) for what has been an inspiring and productive week.
Under the guidance and supervision of leading scientists (Gabriela S, John F, Luca B,Garrett S, Frank P and Gabriele C) the participants learned to source and manipulate remote sensing imagery, to decompose movement trajectories, to compute home ranges and investigate habitat selection. All these skills combined were used to disentangle the movement behavior of Apollo, Botswana’s most famous spotted hyena!
The movements of Apollo were thoroughly analysed during the entire week. All results pointed towards a univocal conclusion: Apollo is by far Botswana’s most famous spotted hyena.
Participants had the opportunity to alternate high-quality lectures with social activities, which had the scope to create a cohesive group and promote interactions and establish future collaborations.
Great food, amazing people, stunning weather were the recipe for a successful weekAnd we also worked hard! Very hard!. Despite Prof Börger and Prof Street attempts nobody fell asleep…almost.
We received very positive feedbacks from all participants, which is very encouraging, and we are therefore keen to offer a similar, and even more exciting, course during the summer 2017! Stay tuned on this blog if you want to be part of the next MESS and learn everything about Apollo!
PhD students from UZH and ETHZ will have priority, but few places shall be available for external participants too.
This one-week course covers several aspects of animal movement ecology and includes both theoretical/conceptual and practical sessions.
The course builds on analytical complexity and leads the participant through several steps. During day one, the participants will learn to source landscape information through available remote sensing imagery and to import, manipulate and represent geographical data into R. Day two will be dedicated to the decomposition of movement trajectories and characterisation of movement modes and phases. During day three the participants will be exposed to common methods used in the calculation of home ranges and discuss the pros and cons. During the next day we will use presence/absence data to analyze habitat selection and create species distribution models. Finally, during the last day, the participants will be exposed to some new tools and methodologies to include data from alternative sensors (e.g. accelerometers) in the study of animal movements. Fundamental aspects such as study design, spatial autocorrelation, sources of error and time varying covariates will be discussed.
Data sets will be provided but the participants are encouraged to bring their own data. Basic knowledge in R is required. Participants should bring their own laptop with the latest version of R installed. Active participation during the course is required to obtain the credit points.
“…The bears living in the Sarikamis Forest National Park belong to an isolated and relict population not connected to any other larger and viable bear populations…”. This is what we believed two years ago, at the beginning of the project. And we were wrong!
Now, after two years of continuos data collection from 16 GPS radio-collared bears, we are slowly starting to understand their local and regional movement patterns their ecology and social organisation.
Together with our collaborators of the turkish-based NGO Kuzei Doga, the University of Utah, and the University of Zagreb we discovered that our study bears are capable of long-distance movements of more than 100 km. And this across an allegedly hostile and human-dominated landscape. These long distance trips thus allow the bears to reach a larger bear population that lives along the Black Sea coast and across Georgia.
Interestingly, only half of the collared bears undertook these long-distance movements. The other bears never left the surrounding of the Sarikamis forest, instead they regularly visited the Sarikamis city garbage dump.
We were so able to characterise two distinct behavioural morphs: (i) ‘dump bears’ who never left the Sarikamis forest and fed at the city dump, and (ii) ‘wild bears’ who never visited the dump and regularly migrated. As the observed migratory trips happened right before hibernation, we speculate that they are linked to fattening before the winter. This idea is corroborated by the fact that dump bears also increased their visit rate at the dump right before hibernation.
Future work will allow us to tell which of the two strategies is the most adaptive: McDonald fast food or bio-products?
For the time-being we are happy to have made it to the public media.
Well, sometimes it is about fathers and sons, but sometimes it is also about sisters and unrelated males to find each other and settle down…
Three months after the beginning of our fieldwork we finally recorded our first long-range dispersal event. Following aggressive eviction from the natal group, a dispersing coalition of five subordinate females joined a group of unrelated roving males and left the core study area. The newly- formed group went undetected for several weeks until Nino found one of the coalition members (VLF152) …back on the reserve where she was captured and collared 5 weeks before. Interestingly enough she wasn’t with any of her original coalition partners and instead paired up with two newly evicted sisters.
Dispersal event of one female (VLF152) from the five-members dispersing coalition showing a typical migration pattern (see Bunnefeld et al. 2011, Börger and Fryxel 2012) as represented by the increasing and subsequent decreasing distance from the site of capture (origin). VLF152 returned home after a 25 km round trip lasting 31 days. The other four coalition members have not returned and possibly established a new territory (red circle), following a typical dispersal pattern (left side of the blue dotted line) characterized by departure (1) roaming (2) and settlement (3).
But where were the other four sisters? Did the coalition simply split or did the other die? Or did they settled down somewhere with the males? But if so, why did VLF152 “return home” instead or remaining within them? Is this because, even within the new group, she was occupying a low rank and had therefore no chance of reproducing (for only one female, the dominant female, reproduces within a group)? We are currently trying to find the other four females to answer some of our questions. Knowing the where about of VLF152 – information that we can remotely download from her GPS collar – should help in this task since we can restrict our search radius.
This dispersal event adds to the previously collared individuals. At present, three dispersal coalitions returned to the natal group, one female returned to the natal group after her coalition partner got hit by a car but got evicted again, three coalitions are still dispersing and one single disperser got predated by a raptor. We thus recorded two cases of dispersal-related mortality. These movement data will allow us to investigate the influence that individual traits (e.g. age, size) but also the environment and the social spatial context (i.e. the distribution of territorial groups) have on dispersal patterns and dispersal success (survival rate and settlement likelihood).
Preliminary movement data from eight dispersing coalitions fitted with GPS radio collars. Each color represents the trajectory of a different dispersing unit in (A) the environmental landscape and (B) the social context. Note the long-range dispersal event southwest of VLF152 (violet/pink)! In (B) a utilization distribution map for the main study area is created based on the location of territorial groups (warm color= high encounter likelihood, cold colors= low encounter likelihood); long range dispersal event may end in areas where the social context is unknown (white)
!!! Merry Christmas from us all and a successful 2014 !!!
After 5 weeks spent in South Africa it is time to draw the first conclusions regarding our new-born project on dispersal in meerkats. I do not want to sound presumptuous but I feel confident saying that this trip has been a great success. And as you know…well begun is half done. But let’s start with some facts from the field.
After few days spent testing the new collars and equipment, getting familiar with the terrain and the road system on the reserve, and getting to know all researchers and volunteers working at the Kalahari Meerkat Project, things got suddenly hectic when one morning we received a radio call from Teja (one of the volunteers) saying that she sighted a female evicted by her natal group a few weeks before being chased by some members of the neighboring group. We could not miss that chance, our first evicted female!
A breathing mask is applied over the head of the meerkat while it is still in the pillow case
In few minutes and with the much-appreciated help of Lewis and Sky (the project field managers) we prepared the equipment to capture and anesthetize what turned out to be VLF143 (or spelled out: Female 143 of the Lazuli group). It took only a split second for Sky to close his fingers around the base of the tail of VLF143 that, without even noticing, found herself rowing with the four legs in the air before being gently put in a pillow case to be immobilized. Sky and Lewis applied a breathing mask with a mixture of Isoflurane and Oxygen over her head and in few seconds VLF143 was fast asleep. Few minutes later she was up and running again and, as if nothing happened, she resumed her activities. But this time with a collar around her neck. In the following 13 days, thanks to the precious calls of the volunteers – our eyes on the reserve – we successfully collared additional 3 females (VEKF010, VJXF035 and VAZF027) from 3 different groups. Hopefully, by the end of this first field season, we will have collared a total of 10 females.
We are closely monitoring each collared individual to make sure that the collars do not negatively influence the animals and to collect important behavioral and ecological data. Daily observations already allowed collecting important information that will allow fine-tuning our research questions. GPS movement data automatically recorded by the collars at one-hour interval during daytime will be analyzed as a function of environmental factors (e.g. rainfall, temperature), social circumstances (e.g. number of individuals in the dispersing coalition but also their location in relation to unrelated territorial groups) and the animal’s individual state (e.g. body condition, stress level). In the long run, we aim to use information on dispersing individuals such as survival rate and reproductive success to improve already existing population dynamic models.
Close follows up are essential to record important behavioural and ecological information and to keep the animals habituated to researchers
The first days of our monitoring already provided us with some very useful information. Female VJXF035 lost her sister (VJXF039) with whom she was travelling with after a car run her over. VJXF035 is now back with her group after the dominant female allowed her to rejoin. The collar that we fitted on female VAZF027 (who was dispersing alone) got found lying on the ground…without VAZF027. The collar was covered in blood and fur indicating that VAZF027 got predated, most likely by a raptor. Female VLF143 seems to have found a clever strategy to avoid spending too much time alone (the more eyes scanning around the lower the chance to be taken by a raptor of course); she has already associated, and mated, with 8 different males… I spare you the details. We hope that sooner or later she will build a somehow more stable bond with one or more males and that they will soon set off to find their own territory. Female VEKF010 seems to be the more enterprising and has already crossed the territory of two foreign groups. She has occasionally associated with a couple of males but she seems to be prioritizing a disperser’s business (the actually dispersing) to a disperser’s pleasure (I believe it is clear what I am referring to…).
Movements of four collared females in and around Kuruman River Reserve, home to the Kalahari Meerkat Project
While I had to return to the foggy and miserable Zurich weather, Nino will remain in the sunny Kalahari until the end of March and will continue monitoring dispersing individuals. More info will follow soon.
Our Lab is proud to announce Arpat’s “Antrittsvorlesung” (inaugural lecture), which will be held Monday, 11 November 2013 at 5 pm at the University of Zurich.
I thought I post it on our blog to put some extra pressure on Arpat… 😉
Do not miss that out… apparently the apèro afterwards is really nice! Oh, yeah and of course the lecture will be absolutely amazing
The last week of August could not have been more hectic and inspiring for some of the people of our lab. The first Animal Movement Ecology Summer School held at the University of Zurich as part of the PhD Program in Ecology of the Life Science Zurich Graduate School has been a great success. We managed to bring together 30 highly dedicated and motivated participants from UZH/ETHZ and from overseas as well as seven top lecturers for what has been an intense and dynamic week.
Participants had the opportunity to alternate high-quality lectures – covering a wide range of topics, such as remote sensing, home-range and movement analysis, patch occupancy models, population dynamics – with some social activities, such has bbq and the long-sought-after jump in the Limmat, the local river. The scope of such activities was to quickly create a cohesive group and promote interactions among the participants and with the lecturers to establish future collaborations. A great success has been the day organised at the Tierpark Goldau, where we had the possibility to follow lectures in a natural and inspiring environment.
Participants interacting during one exercise in the suggestive class room at the Tierpark Goldau
We, organizers, received very positive feedbacks from all participants, which is very encouraging, and we are therefore keen to offer a similar, and even more exciting, course during the summer 2014! Stay tuned on this blog if you do not want to miss-out and want to…keep moving forward!
At the beginning of May, at the end of the winter, which on the mountains of north east Turkey lasts unexpectedly long, it was finally time to go into the field and check on the status of the bears that we collared in October 2012, and to deploy the new collars kindly provided by the Georges und Antoine Claraz Foundation.
Of the seven GPS collars deployed last year we were only able to re-locate five, and at present the fate of two bears/collars remains unknown. The bears may have abandoned the study area, may have died in a place not accessible to us, or simply the collars may have stopped working. The team based in Turkey will, however, continue looking for them.
The retrieved collar
While searching for one of the collars, Mark (a PhD Student from Sekercioglu Lab, Utah University) and I ended up reaching one of the highest and partially covered with snow ‘hills’ within the study area. Unfortunately, instead of spotting a moving bear wearing a fancy necklace we found the collar lying without owner on the snow. What happened was quite obvious: after re-emerging from hibernation the bear was so underweight that with ‘a bit’ of effort (the steal brackets of the collar have been bent!!!) he managed to slip the collar of his neck. Luckily the four other bears are doing fine and they are all moving around the forest. One of the two collared females was “kind” and let us approach close enough to see that she was accompanied by one new-born cub. It will be interesting to see how the presence of the cub restricts her movements and use of her territory.
After checking on the status of the bears collared last year, we focused on capturing some more bears to increase our small sample size. Together with Josip Kusak, Emrah Coban and Ayşegül Karaahmetoğlu, who in the meantime joined us in Sarikamis (the closest town to the study area) Mark and I started setting traps to catch the bears. The traps consist of a bait, a cubby (small enclosure built with branches that have the scope of forcing the bears to step in a particular place) and a foot snare at each entrance of the cubby. Within few days we managed to successfully capture three bears and fit them with GPS radio collars. We still have one collar in hand that the guys who are still in Turkey (I had to come back to CH) will try to deploy in the next days.
Movements of the last of the collared bears between forest patches south of the town of Sarikamis
Exciting enough, our bear traps have been quite successful in capturing wolves… and within only ten days of bear capturing we trapped three wolves! This for the joy of Josip, who despite a life trapping wolves never managed to trap them with snares set for bears, and of the rest of the team who could not believe the luck! The three wolf collars to our disposal got so deployed within ten days only instead of the planned 6 weeks… (wolf project is a collaboration between KuzeyDoga and Ministry of Forest Management)
Our bear sample size is back to seven individuals and hopefully, in few days, after the last collar will be deployed, eight. Slowly we are getting to a reasonable sample size to start having interesting and exciting results!
Keep checking the blog from time to time for more updates on the bear project!
