Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Outside the pound, Heath escorted Mason into the cab of his pickup for the drive home. He
turned onto I-90 and made for the house of his employer-landlord, Sam Wasser, a renowned
conservation biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Heath was an accomplished
dog handler, and Mason was one of the first candidates to become a new breed of working
canine. The dog seemed delighted to be out of the kennel and most interested in the tennis ball
hidden in the pocket of the person he was now accompanying. So began an improbable jour-
ney, from incarcerated stray on death row to professional scent dog set loose in the Brazilian
outback.
Carly was one of Sam's students. She decided to try out scent dogs in her pilot study
site, Emas National Park, in south-central Brazil, home to all of the Cerrado's largest ver-
tebrates. “Ema” is the Brazilian name for the greater rhea, an ostrich relative that is com-
mon there. So are many other species that could be dangerous to a domestic animal bounding
across the wild Cerrado. Having been trained to heel was vital if a dog were to stumble upon
whitelipped peccaries, for example, which could tear a dog to shreds. The Cerrado is also
home to fifty-three species of snakes. Carly wore snake guards to protect herself from the
poisonous ones. Vipers, rattlesnakes, and fer-de-lances are all capable of killing a canine in
one deadly strike. She was worried about unexpected encounters with anacondas, too. So she
carried a machete in case there was a confrontation.
Protected areas are the best places to sniff out giant anteaters and giant armadillos in the
Cerrado. Most grassland and dry forest mammals of South America are essentially rain forest
species that have adapted to residing in seasonal forests and savannas. Thus, their extinction
in the Cerrado may not spell the end of the species because others of their kind may still
lurk in numbers in the forest. The maned wolf is an exception. Biologists call it an “obligate”
grassland species because it cannot survive in the forest, having adapted, like the lion, to hunt
its prey in open country.
Parks such as Emas, which is 1,320 square kilometers in size, are established to protect
rare species, and they often perform well for habitat specialists and global rarities that live
at high densities in small areas. The wandering kind of rarities, such as the maned wolf and
giant anteater, that live at low densities can be much harder to protect. Outside of the deep
Amazon, their world is changing by the minute. Circumstantial evidence shows that many
rare tropical carnivores disappear when they leave the safe confines of their reserves.
The purpose of Carly's study was to determine how wide-ranging, low-density species
such as maned wolves, jaguars, and pumas navigate the countryside and to learn how they cir-
culate among the highly altered and fragmented habitats outside reserves. She also wanted to
learn whether these wild species can shift from living in natural grasslands and adapt to feed-
ing in soy fields and cattle ranches. Finally, using maned wolves as a test case, she wanted
to learn if animals that live in the Ag are more stressed, less healthy, or less reproductively
active than individuals that live inside the park. New techniques that Sam and Carly were
