In defence of gulls, skuas, and giant petrels

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conservation, giant petrels, gulls, skuas

I’m a lariphile. I love gulls, skuas, and their ilk. I think they’re gorgeous, intelligent, highly adaptable, and I will always have a soft spot for them in my heart. It will not likely come as a surprise to know that this is a minority view.

Gulls, skuas, giant petrels and other predatory seabirds (i.e., those that eat other birds) are often maligned, both in terms of management and in culture. They’re called flying rats, flying garburators, disgusting, and lacking in any redeeming qualities. So what? They can’t understand us, so presumably are immune to humanity’s slanders and insults. We, however, are not.

A Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) on Gough Island

Gulls, skuas, and giant petrels are seen as horrendous things that eat cute fluffy things which we see as being “better” (in an anthropomorphic sense) than these cruel predators. Newsflash: all birds are predators. None of them can photosynthesize, so they gotta eat. Fish, krill, squid, berries, dead things… you name it. Why then do we cast aspersions upon these species, but not the puffin when it eats herring, or the albatross when it snares a flying fish? Because flying fish and herring are cute and fuzzy and easily portrayed as defenceless individuals by nature documentaries.

Take the BBC’s Planet Earth 2 series, wherein skuas are shown haranguing Chinstrap Penguins on Zavadovski Island. A friend, mostly tongue-in-cheek, asked if the skuas had any redeeming qualities. Why should their foraging mode impact our evaluation of their “worth”?

Lest we believe this is an issue for far-flung islands of the Southern Ocean, consider the plight of gulls in North America and Europe (particularly the UK). They’re seen as pests, a nuisance, and in many areas were historically subjected to extensive “control” (i.e., culling). The result? European Herring Gull is now listed as Red in the UK’s Birds of Conservation Concern. I helped co-edit a special issue of the journal Waterbirds focusing on gulls, and in paper after paper we see the same thing – precipitous declines in both American Herring Gull and Great Black-backed Gull over the last 30 years.

Four Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus) on Gull Island, Newfoundland

On Gull Island, Witless Bay, Newfoundland, for example, there were <30 pairs of Great Black-backed Gulls when I was there in 2011-12 (compared to 115 in 2000-01). In the last 15 years, the islands in Witless Bay have lost >50% of their breeding gulls (read our paper here).

So why aren’t we doing anything about it? Gull control still takes place (though now on a smaller scale than in the 80s and 90s), but if there was “control” of a rapidly-declining albatross, the conservation world would be up in arms. Because gulls are also seemingly ubiquitous in urban environments, they’re also seen as being common (so much so that multiple species are lumped into the highly inaccurate term “seagull”).

After a kerfuffle about a debate on gulls in Aberdeen that took place in the UK House of Commons, I suggested that the following question be a highly relevant one (for conservation and policy) for wildlife management/conservation students:

When it comes to gulls in the UK, it’s a question of how does one manage a threatened species that could easily get multiple ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders)?

And this is highly relevant today, right now, because what we’re doing at the moment clearly isn’t working for the conservation of these species, or the public’s perception of them.

A Southern Giant Petrel (Macronectes giganteus) on Gough Island

Just another example of how species’ ecology and behaviour influences our perception of their conservation need.

In praise of researching (and publishing) “local” conservation science

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conservation, local, publishing

If you’ve published a scientific paper in a journal, you’ll know that part of the challenge is making it relevant to a broad audience. Why should a conservationist in Outer Mongolia, Zambia, Murmansk, or Baton Rouge care about your study? Chances are they study )or are concerned with/interested in) different species in different places. The pressure, therefore is to wrap much of our conservation science in global policy and priority frameworks: the Aichi Targets, multilateral environmental agreements, globally threatened species, or highly imperilled habitats. Which is good and fine and has resulted in lots of policy relevant science and conservation action.

But conservation also operates on a much smaller, more local scale, and with individuals on the ground in communities who can influence local, regional, and national policies and conservation actions. And this requires the science underpinning these actions to be, at least in part, local in nature. Sure, we all know that global warming is driving our planet further down the 6th Great Extinction, but most people will only take action when they see this manifest in their own backyards. Why have the doves returned a month early? Where did all the swifts go? Weren’t there fish in this lake?

And this is where “local” conservation science comes in. And it’s some of the most rewarding science with which I’ve been involved, even though it can be some of the most difficult science to publish. Providing the evidence base for local problems gives scientists and conservationists a better bargaining chip when holding governments to account, to speaking with the public and with media. A local story is usually more relatable than one from a seemingly abstract land far away.

Local conservation needn’t be novel, ground-breaking, cutting-edge, or revolutionary. It’s purpose is rather different, though from an implementation perspective just as important (if not more so). But this very nature makes it a more difficult problem for academic researchers to tackle as it’s unlikely to be of global significance, gain copious citations, or end up in a journal with an impact factor >4. It therefore often falls to scientists in government agencies, independent researchers, and non-governmental organizations to contribute to this science.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in a couple of these kinds of studies, and have a few more in the pipeline. We showed migratory patterns and geographic distribution of a Flesh-footed Shearwaters in the northeast Pacific Ocean (Bond & Lavers 2015), and described the current status & threats facing Streaked Shearwaters in the Korean peninsula (Hart et al. 2015). In these papers, we learned a heck of a lot about the species involved, and hope that these will become go-to papers when someone compiles details into whole-species assessments of status, distribution, and threats.

Overall, the key to success with local conservation science is the involvement of local people. The paper on shearwaters in Korea was only possible because of people in Korea. The same is true of the other (as yet unpublished) bits of work I’m involved with. These local connections make the work more likely to be well received (if received at all) by the people who matter (those who will enact policy or implement conservation interventions on the ground). The days of colonial science, where outsiders (often from the UK, US, or other countries with an advanced state of scientific inquiry) come in, do something, leave, and then issue what amount to scientific edicts (which are often promptly ignored) are over (or at least should be).

But, for me, the bottom line is that I find this kind of science fun. It’s adding a piece to a puzzle, and I find it very rewarding, especially when it’s highly driven by local collaborators (I usually just provide some stats, and editing… they do the real work of data collecting, and then working with the community to influence change). And at the end of the day, I like to think that it has some benefit for the species and sites we’re trying to look after.

Conservation of species: is there a publishing gap?

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conservation, journals, publishing

This post was prompted by two recent/submitted papers, one of which I’m involved with, and the other of which a colleague published.  They both concern what I consider the fundamental building blocks of ecology and conservation: how many of species X are there, what external forces affect those numbers, and how have they changed over time?  The conservation of species is, for better or worse, the basic unit of biodiversity and the main purpose of the IUCN Red List.  Ecosystems consist of species, and the number of their individuals.

Such “status, distribution, & threat (SDT)” papers are often relegated* to “natural history” journals. In the rush to be appeal to a broader audience, many taxon-specific journals (and here I’m referring primarily to ornithological journals) eschew such submissions.  Conservation journals (e.g., Biological Conservation, or Conservation Biology) are more interested in umbrella or big-picture ideas, or at the least, novel methods/approaches (this is  just my interpretation, and I’m happy to hear otherwise!). Not to mention a bias against marine organisms. As someone who works primarily on marine birds, this is particularly bothersome.

SDT** papers generally take the form of reviewing past population estimates & threats, adding in some new data, maybe an analysis, and at the end of the day, should provide the information needed by conservation authorities (international, national, or subnational; more on that below) to adequately know what’s going on. Very often, the historical data relating to seabirds’ distribution and abundance is… how shall I put it?… wrong.  Errors on the ground (or, frankly, just wild guesses) get propagated in monumental (and exceptionally well-cited) tomes, and taken as the Gospel Truth. So SDT papers can be a chance to correct the record, which is crucial for effective (and sound) management and mitigation of things like bycatch. If you thought there were 300,000 of species X, then annual bycatch of 2000, though not good, wasn’t terrible. But if it turns out that a misplaced decimal here, and a poor survey there meant there were only 60,000, that allowable bycatch level becomes very worrying.

As a consequence, SDT papers tend to have lots of information, and some of it is messy. Lots of it is probably from grey literature, government reports, or unpublished data, and a SDT paper is a chance to get that information out into the wider world.  But this is problematic for journals because they thrive on brevity. In one of my case studies, we were advised recently to cut the results section by 90% because “people do not want that level of detail”. Utter bollocks. In the other case study, the paper went through at least 4 formal revisions, and 2 with the handling editor, resulting in a paper that didn’t have a bunch of information in it.

The problem is only compounded when working in the non-English-speaking world, where much of the information is in “foreign literature” that is less accessible to the broader scientific community (that doesn’t mean you should ignore it, though!).  SDT papers are a chance to get information in that Russian technical report, or that Korean government document into the English-speaking world (and let’s face it, science is an enterprise dominated by English, for better or worse).

Conservation is also practiced at a huge range of spatial scales – from global (think the IUCN Red List) to national (think COSEWIC in Canada, or the ESA in the US, or the Nature Directive in Europe), to subregional (states, provinces), or even local levels (individual breeding colonies).  These all, ultimately, matter for conservation because these are the levels at which decisions that will affect species and populations are made.  So if we have a species that has 90% of its population in Country A, and 10% in Country B, it’s important to know what’s going on in Country B because its policies, implementation, and national interest will affect that part of the population, and these can be different from Country A (arguments about genetic distinctiveness and “evolutionary significant units” aside).

 

So I hope I’ve now established why we need SDT research. The question is how to disseminate it, particularly at the national or subnational level? When I posed this question on Twitter, there were some excellent answers – Endangered Species Research (though when working with species that are globally Least Concern, I’m not sure how well that would go down. And there’s the €1050-1500 fee), and a variety of fish journals.  In the bird world (where there is no shortage of journals!), there are 3 obvious choices.  Avian Conservation and Ecology (of which I’m on the editorial board) generally doesn’t accept SDT papers. The Condor focuses on “the application of scientific theory and methods to the conservation, management, and ecology of birds; and the application of ornithological knowledge to conservation and management policy“, which in my mind doesn’t really fit SDT papers (or my experience with the journal).  Bird Conservation International looks for papers on the “conservation of birds and the habitats upon which they depend“, which is the closest fit I’ve seen, but isn’t known for its speed (it’s also the one with which I have no experience, so again, I’m happy to hear otherwise in the Comments).

 

Given that the conservation of the natural world is really a broad way of saying the conservation of individual species (and the ecosystems they comprise), which depends on knowing the status, distribution, and threats these species face, I wonder why there isn’t a Journal of Species Conservation? Online-only (so no worries about length or colour figures or number of tables, etc.), of minimal cost to authors, ideally Open Access, and with relatively rapid publication. The focus would be on the conservation status, distribution, and threats to species (or groups of species) at any spatial scale. I know that’s a lot to ask, but a conservation biologist can dream, right?

I’m certainly not offering to start one up, but if an enterprising publisher were looking for an obvious niche to fill*** I’d strongly suggest this one, and would gladly help edit, review, and submit to such an outlet.

 

 

*Natural history journals shouldn’t be seen as a lower tier, but they are sometimes less likely to be online (and so more concerned with length and publishing costs), less widely available, and read/cited, and often take long times from submission/acceptance to publication.

** Yes, I chose the order of the words purposely

*** Let’s hold off on the debate about whether niches can, in fact, be empty.