As part of my job I have to read a newspaper every day. I check to see if there are any dodgy science stories, if there are any major misrepresentations of research and collect articles related to ongoing projects. Currently I'm on the Times, not as bad as the Telegraph and with less hype than the Daily Mail. In the last couple of weeks I've seen some stories about British wildlife that have made me sad and slightly despondent with the current state of our wildlife and how we treat it.

The first was reporting on the huge decline in the number of British hedgehogs. These lovable creatures, favourites among children's cartoons and Green Cross Code adverts, are an integral part of our culture. But they have suffered a huge decline from their number of around 30 million in the 1950's to less than a million today. They are declining at a rapid rate and Micheala Strachen has warned that they could be extinct within 10 years. However, the treasure of British children's wildlife TV is over blowing the reality of the situation. But just because they wont be extinct within a decade doesn't mean nothing should be done. The habitat of these nocturnal foragers has become highly fragmented, making it difficult for them to search for food. Decreasing pockets of habitat are never good for a species, as smaller areas can support fewer individuals and if dispersal is difficult it can lead to reduced genetic diversity. Smaller populations are also more vulnerable to stochastic events that can lead to local extinctions. All-in-all, not great.

But hopefully a bit of publicity will do the hedgehog some good. People don't tend to like it when cute, charismatic species are doing badly. With this one on our door step, it should be easy to encourage people to make the minor alterations to their gardens, such as cutting small holes in fences, that can de-fragment their habitat. But hedgehogs might be the victim of the perceived dullness of British nature, and people caring more about animals in distant corners of the globe than declining species like starlings and cuckoos that live within our shores. I'm a victim of this, I went of to South Africa to study exotic species rather than any one of the plethora of our native fauna. In South Africa everyone wants to study their native species and are intensely interested in their conservation, they take pride in their local biodiversity. This is starting here in the UK, with the growth of programmes like Spring and Autumn Watch, but we need to do more to educate and engage.

The second story was about badgers...oh the poor badgers. I wont write too much as I have written stuff about badgers before (and sadly not much has changed!). The Times ran two stories, one about DEFRA ignoring the British Veterinary Associations calls to stop the cull because it's not been shown to be an effective or humane way of killing bagders (LINK £). The second was an opinion piece by the Deputy President of the National Farmers Union, Minette Batters (LINK £). Ms Batters' piece argues that culling badgers is the same as culling any other species of animal, but this misses the point. Deer are culled because they damage vegetation and prevent the growth of trees, by culling deer there are less of them and so less damage is caused. The number of deer killed is probably (I'm not an expert on deer ecology, so this is with pinch of salt) highly correlated to the amount of damage caused to vegetation. Badger are a completely different kettle of fish. They are culled to reduce the spread of bovine TB, and a very extensive, long-term and well carried out study looked into the effect of culling badgers on the spread of TB. If you cull but not to a high enough level then you actually make the spread of bTB worse. All of the evidence that has been gathered points to this course of action being one that will not achieve its aim. So the argument put forward doesn't work: one type of culling we know works and the other we know doesn't.

The argument made by people like the NFU's deputy president assumes that the opposition to the badger cull is an emotive, bunny hugging, tree-hugging hippie one. It's not. It's one based on the science and evidence. All the major scientists have said that it won't work and have huge problems with the way the cull is being evaluated (no longer independent and with marksmen collecting their own data). I just hope that someone, somewhere in DEFRA decides to look at the evidence, because this course of action could make the problem of TB in cattle worse.

This post is really inspired by two things that happened on the same day. Firstly, one of my old office mates has a paper published in American Naturalist (possibly the most fuddy-duddy, old school journal I have come across). Secondly, the Times reported on dolphins having a social network, because no one knew that....

So the Am Nat paper, it's about how the social structure that cichlids are born into shapes their development. This is interesting because all social species have to interact with other members of their group, and so they have to constantly deal with aggression, hierarchies and recognising other individuals. This stuff has to be learned, and there is a potential cost to that. What Stefan Fischer et al. found was that being reared in a large group means that you have better social skills later in life. Not only did they find behaviour differences between individuals from small groups but also structural changes to their brains. What this study hints at, is that the costs of learning how to behave in a group might mean that it only pays to invest in these behaviours and developmental changes if you need to. This adds a further cost to sociality, one that had not been measured before.

Fischer et al. (2015) Rearing-group size determines social competence and brain structure in a cooperatively breeding cichlid. Am. Nat. 

The second new bit of research is on dolphins. These marine mammals live in cool fusion-fission societies, where group compositions constantly change and groups can be subsets of much larger units. From what I can gather from the abstract, I no longer have any university affiliations and so can't access non-open access journals, one of the cool things they found was that the habitat "narrowness" influenced the level of sociality observed. They found that dolphins spent more time with certain individuals than with others, much like humans. This type of social network is important for things that range from disease transmission to social learning. But finding a link to the environment is really interesting, as scientist have theorized that some environments are more likely to select for group living species but this finding might hint that environments may select for the type of social organisation within those groups. But having been unable to read the paper this could be wild speculation!!

Here is the abstract so you can make up your own mind:
Titcomb et al. (2015) Social communities and spatiotemporal dynamics of association patterns in estuarine bottlenose dolphins. Marine Mammal Science, DOI: 10.1111/mms.12222
Network analysis has recently been used to delve into the dynamics of cetacean sociality. Few studies, however, have addressed how habitat shape influences sociality, specifically how linear water bodies constrain the space where individuals might interact. We utilized network and spatiotemporal analyses to investigate association patterns and community structure in a bottlenose dolphin population in a linear estuarine system, the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), Florida. Using sighting histories from a multiyear photo-identification study we examined association patterns for 185 individuals collected over a 6.5 yr period (2002–2008). The population was highly differentiated (S = 0.723) and organized into six distinct social communities (Q = 0.544), spread in an overlapping pattern along the linear system. Social organization differed between communities, with some displaying highly interconnected networks and others comprising loosely affiliated individuals with more ephemeral associations. Temporal patterns indicated short-term associations were a significant feature of the fission-fusion dynamics of this population. Spatial analyses revealed that social structure was shaped by an individual's ranging patterns and by social processes including preference and avoidance behavior. Finally, we found that habitat “narrowness” may be a major driving force behind the sociality observed.