Research conducted by field biologist Dean Biggins with the US Geological Survey indicates that, once it arrives, the plague is there to stay. They tested thousands of fleas in the lab, and only a handful were positive for plague. When they tested prairie dogs, those came back negative too.
Where does it hide in that background low-level period? What are the conditions that allow it to re-emerge? Interestingly for a disease that takes up so much space in the popular imagination, researchers still have a lot of questions about how plague moves through its environment. Until black-footed ferrets nearly went extinct, researchers primarily studied plague ecology with humans in mind.
Now, there is intense interest in studying how the disease is disrupting North American ecosystems. Left scrambling to ward off an invisible, virtually undetectable and highly lethal enemy, biologists like Livieri and Biggins consider the story of black-footed ferrets and plague to be a prime example of how dangerous a poor understanding of disease can be, and why we must invest in proactive research long before a species is circling the drain.
You bring the cage door up, and you let them go and you walk away. Find more age of extinction coverage here , and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features.
An invisible enemy: the battle to save black-footed ferrets from the plague. A black-footed ferret bred in captivity in northern Colorado. The mid-October weekend was one of four each year when staff and volunteers stay up all night driving dirt roads with a high-powered spotlight shining out the window, scanning for the green eye shine that signals a black-footed ferret staring back.
Lately, many teams have come back with zero sightings. Back in , the U. But then, the once-successful endangered species reintroduction site suddenly began losing its ferrets. Researchers are struggling to figure out why. Jennifer Cordova, a wildlife specialist with the Arizona Game and Fish Department who leads ferret program work in the Aubrey Valley, says she has seen ferrets elsewhere in the area, but that they seem to be missing from the valley itself.
They might be dispersing out of the recovery area, dying from disease, starving, or becoming prey themselves. Research is underway to track the possibilities, but the last few years have been as much about figuring out which questions to ask as about answering any of them. When species become critically endangered or vanish from their historic habitat, the U.
Fish and Wildlife Service deploys reintroduction programs to restore those animals. There are some success stories. Back in , a captive breeding program for California condors started with just 27, and the wild population is now estimated at nearly Since wildlife managers in Colorado released 96 Canada lynx in , their population has reached more than in the state. Sometimes these species even enjoy banner successes, like gray wolves becoming so abundant in the northern Rocky Mountains that the population was removed from the endangered species list.
But other cases, like red wolves and Mexican gray wolves, have fared less well, with wild populations estimated at 40 and , respectively. The U. Fish and Wildlife Service envisions a population of 3, breeding adult ferrets in dozens of colonies across their historic range. Fraser estimates, at best, are alive in the wild now. The number had reached nearly 1, by the end of the s, but has since drifted backward. Geological Survey. When Hicks began working on black-footed ferrets in , the Game and Fish Department was finalizing plans to take the relocation effort statewide.
Then, the decline in the Aubrey Valley accelerated. Before they could move forward, she said, they had to step back and figure out what was going on with this reintroduction site. The Center for Biological Diversity is a c 3 registered charitable organization. Tax ID: The black-footed ferret is the only ferret native to North America.
Join now. As European expansion changed the landscape of the American West from wilderness to agricultural lands, different members of the plains ecosystem faced new challenges. In particular, prairie dogs were hit hard, often exterminated on farms and ranches by rodent poisons. Black-Footed Ferrets were listed as endangered in , and by , the last known wild ferret population located in Mellett County, SD, just 81 miles away from Badlands National Park vanished.
Just four years later in , the last captive Black-Footed Ferret died, and the species was thought to be extinct… …until Shep came along. Shep was a ranch dog on a farm in Meeteetse, Wyoming who killed a Black-Footed Ferret and brought it to his owners in A small relic population of ferrets was discovered on the Wyoming farm and was monitored closely by wildlife biologists. Unfortunately, this population suffered from disease.
By , only 18 of the original ferrets remained. At this point, scientists captured the remaining Black-Footed Ferrets, and these ferrets became the foundation for later reintroductions. Beginning with Wyoming in , Black-Footed Ferrets have been reintroduced to 29 sites across 8 states, Canada, and Mexico.
About Black-Footed Ferrets are currently living in captive breeding facilities and, according to Nature Conservancy, about ferrets now live in the wild. About 3, Black-Footed Ferrets are necessary to fully recover the species.
Although the hundreds of living ferrets today is an improvement upon near-extinction, the Black-Footed Ferret is still an IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature endangered animal and is one of the most endangered animals in North America.
The species is still at risk from disease, loss of habitat, and related declines in prey.
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