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Chapter 1: What historical insights do Lewis and Clark's wildlife observations provide?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. In the early 1800s, Lewis and Clark loaded up their camping gear and journals and headed west to the Pacific, recording what they saw along the way. The expedition, partly about natural history, partly about future colonization, returned with a record of biodiversity in the early 1800s in the now United States.
200 and some years later, a new expedition is headed west to find out how wildlife populations have changed over the centuries. Dr. Roland Kayes and his team are traveling the same route using camera traps and enlisting local scientists to document the wildlife along the way.
Roland Kayes is the head of the Biodiversity Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and he's on the line to give us an update about his trip and what they're finding. Hey, Roland, welcome to Science Friday.
Hey, great. Thanks for having me.
Where are we finding you today?
Right now, I'm basically in a van down by the river. We're on the Missouri River, which is most of the route that we're following. We're presently at a dam, Fort Peck Dam in Montana.
What are the days like? What are you doing all day?
Well, we are driving and kayaking along the Missouri River. So we're hitting some of the more significant, more interesting, more beautiful parts of the river in canoes and kayaks, and otherwise we're driving. And we're obviously looking for wildlife ourselves, but we're also collaborating with a team of scientists, over 100 scientists across the country who are running camera traps.
And these cameras let us document in a systematic way what animals are living all along the route today.
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Chapter 2: How is the modern expedition tracking wildlife along the Missouri River?
What about the science of this? Is it scientifically meaningful if you happen to see the same animals that Lewis and Clark did 200 years ago?
Well, sure. So we're not the first ones to look at wildlife in North America since Lewis and Clark, right? There's a long, rich history of that. So what we're doing is using this as a time point to get a really good systematic survey across this region with the camera traps.
And so that's one that we can use to compare from one region to another and from one year to another, you know, in recent time with camera traps. Lewis and Clark didn't have camera traps. So, you know, the comparison with what they saw... isn't going to be, you know, super statistically robust.
But there are some big obvious patterns that we can see, you know, not only from the Lewis and Clark time point to today, but, you know, over the last few decades, the last few centuries. And so we're really trying to tell some of those stories of how the wildlife's doing in our country and what have we done to help them and what have we done to hurt them?
And what can we do sort of moving forward to maintain sustainable, healthy wildlife populations?
What are you seeing so far? I mean, have you seen anything unexpected? Have there been surprises?
Well, so a lot of, when you look at the big arc of wildlife, a lot of what we see today is good news. A lot of the animals that we see today are doing way better than they were a hundred years ago. We started in Pittsburgh where Lewis started his journey. And by the time he was leaving Pittsburgh, a lot of the big animals had already been shot out.
And he observed flocks of passenger pigeon and not that long afterwards, those birds were shot out and they went extinct. He didn't even observe Sandhill Crane there. But when we visited a wildlife-friendly farm north of Pittsburgh, we saw Sandhill Cranes every day. There were deer all over the place. The turkey were super abundant.
And the reason this happened is because we invented things like protected areas, right? There didn't used to be protected areas. We invented hunting regulations like bag limits and seasons. There didn't used to be those. And we did it at just the nick of time because, you know, we almost lost the American bison. We almost lost the black-footed ferret.
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Chapter 3: What are the primary questions being addressed by the wildlife survey team?
OK, so we've been doing these paddles along the river, you know, some of the important places. And we're paddling up the Missouri River at the mouth near St. Louis. And all of a sudden, this bald eagle starts swooping down on the river. It's like, oh, wait, he's trying to get something. And he swooped twice and he didn't get it. And we're trying to see what was he going after.
And, you know, we're paddling upstream and the water is coming downstream. And we realized it was a baby duckling. that was getting attacked by this bald eagle. And this baby duckling literally jumped into our boat for protection from this bald eagle. So that was pretty incredible. I've never experienced anything like that before. So we brought the duckling back over to the shore.
The bald eagle kind of got scared away by our boats. And so the duckling survived the moment. But that was one certainly incredible moment we had.
You know, this is a very human-powered approach to this question, but you're also an author on the science paper Just Out that takes a very different approach to tracking wildlife. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Well, yeah. So we're using tracking data on animals, which tells us incredible detail about where they're going. This technology has gotten so much better over the last decade that we can really see how they're moving around. And in this case, we're able to pair it up with tracking data on humans, which has not been really wisely available to really look at the details and the impact.
Unless you're big tech. But anyway, go ahead.
Right. Well, right. So it is available, right? But you've got to spend tons of money on it if you actually are going to get it. Like, advertisement companies will get it and use it. And so this was one of the first times that we've been able to combine those two data sets together and look at, you know, how wildlife are disturbed by people on the landscape. This comes back to sort of some of the
So the sort of crowded planet problems of can we find ways for humans and animals to share space together? And, you know, sometimes animals can figure it out. Sometimes animals can adjust and habituate. But some animals and some animals in some places cannot.
And so understanding where are animals still really freaked out by humans and how can we manage that for their long term conservation is really important.
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Chapter 4: What surprising wildlife changes have been observed since Lewis and Clark's time?
Um, and this maybe isn't totally surprising because, uh, it may be that those animals are less habituated to being around humans. Um, but what it really means is that, um, The way that we've been approaching this in the past, just looking at habitat modification, is not enough to understand our impacts as a whole.
Okay, so animals responded more strongly in less developed areas. Give me an example.
Yeah. So, for example, we see that cougars shrink the amount of space that they use as the density of humans goes up, as more humans are present on the landscape. But they shrink it by even more when they're in a less developed area than a more developed area.
Yeah, that's really interesting. So it's like we have a bigger impact when we're not frequently around.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly. An interesting exception to that were gray wolves who actually expanded the amount of area that they used. And again, expanded it even more in rural areas. And we don't know totally why that is, but gray wolves have this really long history of persecution in North America.
And so it could be that they're especially sensitive to humans and are having to cover even more ground to accomplish their sort of daily activities to avoid us.
I feel like these stories are always, though, like humans are taking up all the room and animals have to adapt. I mean, does this study suggest ways we might think about coexisting with animals better?
Absolutely. I think one of the things that we're most excited about from the study is that it gives us optimism that there are other conservation interventions that we could make that could help wildlife. You know, we've seen these big patterns of species going into decline. but we actually don't totally understand why.
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