Week 3: Small Animal Passages
Hello everyone!
My expert advisor is still out in the field working with the trail cameras, so I want to use this time to explain what my next steps are going to be. Me and another student researcher were both given 2 different hard drives at the beginning of the project (one of which has the videos of the ocelot from last summer). Our job was to initially go through the hard drives with the trail camera videos and sort them based on what they contained. Once we are done with our initial sort through we are going to swap the hard drives and go back over each others filings, and this time we are going to count how many of each animal are in each video. Although we aren’t scheduled to swap for a few more weeks, I am getting close to being done with my hard drive. So stay tuned for when we go deeper into analyzing the videos!
Now, to pivot slightly, back during my first week on-site we had a meeting with a few ASU students where we discussed an interesting and recent article about the effect of the USA-Mexico border wall on wildlife movement. The border wall connects to how infrastructure and loss of habitat connectivity is one of the ocelots’ largest threats in the wild that is actively contributing to their population decline. The article focused on how in a few parts of the border there are small wildlife passages that help to facilitate animal movement. Small wildlife passages are almost exactly as they sound- they are a small gaps of space (21.5 x 27.8 cm) in between two pillars of the border created for animals to pass through. Ocelots are likely positively affected by these passages simply because of the fact that they are likely small enough to go through them. On the other hand, larger animals like Black Bears can’t fit into these passages, which limits their movement.
The border may be a factor that is affecting ocelot’s presence here in Arizona and could be contributing to the sporadic ocelot sightings. During our meeting we considered how we could apply this article and its findings to the Phoenix Zoo’s own study in the Atascosas Mountains and what we would’ve done differently ourselves. We talked about how it would be interesting to see the effect of the large path in front of the border on animal crossings and movement. Furthermore, the Atascosas Mountains are very close to the border, so this study is extremely relevant and could be having an impact on the wildlife and populations in the region. Also, it’s important to note that this study used trail cameras to record the crossings and see how often successful crossings happen for both different types of border infrastructure and different animals1. This really shows just how versatile trail cameras can be and how they can provide a large variety of different data and information to aid wildlife conservation for all species, not just ocelots.
Until next week,
Tiffany
Citation:
- Harrity EJ, Traphagen M, Bethel M, Facka AN, Dax M and Burns E (2024) USA-Mexico border wall impedes wildlife movement. Front. Ecol. Evol. 12:1487911. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2024.1487911
If you want to read this article for yourself, here’s the link!
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2024.1487911/full
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