TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2010
KLMNO
POLITICS THE NATION
&
DIGEST
How to count grizzlies? Ah, there’s the rub.
by Juliet Eilperin
In the year of the census, Mon-
FRED PROUSER/REUTERS
A fundraising effort will save the Hollywood sign from urban sprawl, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) says. A $900,000 donation from Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and a $500,000 matching grant capped the $12.5 million drive to protect 138 acres near the iconic sign from the development of luxury estates.
TERROR CASE
Video may show suspect in training
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of trying to blow up a jet plane on Christmas Day, is shown training with al-Qaeda in Yemen in a newly discovered video.
Abdulmutallab, 23, fires weap- ons and speaks in Arabic about his impending attack in the vid- eo, which was obtained and broadcast Monday by “ABC World News.” A U.S. intelligence official said
Monday that the preliminary judgment is that it is Abdulmu- tallab in the video and the foot- age is consistent with the under- standing that he was in training. It is not clear where and when the video was made.
According to ABC News, the video was produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
— Associated Press
EXTRADITION
U.S. puts Noriega on flight to France
The United States extradited former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to France on Monday, clearing the way for him to stand trial on money- laundering charges. The former strongman, who had been held in a federal prison just outside Miami, was placed on an overnight Air France flight to Paris, according to a Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity
because he was not authorized to comment on the case.
— Associated Press
NEW YORK
Police seek pair in stabbing death
At least seven people walked by a homeless man who had been stabbed as he lay on a Queens street for nearly an hour last week, video footage showed. Police say Hugh Alfredo Tale-
Yax had been walking behind a man and woman on April 18 and tried to intervene when the cou- ple began to fight. Authorities say that the man stabbed him, and that he and the woman ran off in different directions.
— Associated Press
California votes to change 1950 law on gays: California lawmak-
ers voted unanimously Monday to modify a 1950 law that classi- fies gays as sexual deviants and calls for research on the causes of homosexuality. The bill, ap- proved by the state Assembly, now goes to the state Senate.
NASA’s last shuttle mission
pushed back: NASA’s last space shuttle mission will be delayed until November so scientists can adapt a $2 billion particle detec- tor for an extended life aboard the international space station, officials said Monday. The U.S. space agency had planned to close out the program by Sept. 30 with a final mission by the shuttle Discovery to resupply the orbital outpost.
— From news services
tana’s grizzly bears are standing up — or, rather, shinnying up against trees — to be counted. The hair that grizzlies leave on trunks and branches acts as a kind of genetic calling card, and scientists have been gathering it, strand by strand, to track the threatened species’ population trends. This new high-tech kind of bear hunt is preferable to the conventional radio collars and baited hair traps because it is cheaper and less risky — for scien- tists and bears alike. Collaring a bear is fraught with obvious dangers, and hair traps, which involve dousing wood with a pungent mixture of rotten fish and cattle blood, are time- consuming and expensive to make, maintain, check and move around so that bears don’t avoid them over time when they realize there is no actual food. “The great thing about bear rubs is you aren’t asking the bear to do anything it’s not normally doing. They’re just rubbing all the time,” said U.S. Geological Survey research scientist Katherine Ken- dall. The process of rubbing, she explains, is a form of chemical communication that bears use to mark their territory. “You get very precise estimates of trends. That’s difficult to do with bears.” The work of the scientists who are analyzing the genetic material contained in ursine hair —their findings are being published Tuesday in the Journal of Wildlife Management — provides an un- expected coda to a signature punch line of Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential bid. For years, McCain has mocked the research of Kendall — who re- ceived $4.8 million through the appropriations process to track grizzlies in the 7.8-million-acre Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem for a study conducted between 2003 and 2008. His criti- cism peaked during the 2008 campaign, when he ran a com- mercial calling the earmark “un- believable.”
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DEIRDRE EITEL/DAILY CHRONICLE VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
To count Montana grizzlies such as this one, scientists study the DNA of hair left on trees the bears rub against. The technique is cheaper than others, safer for humans and bears, and may be more accurate.
Now Kendall and two col- leagues have published a paper suggesting that recovering bear hair from trees can provide an ac- curate and cost-effective picture of how grizzlies are doing—and that the population in northern Montana is doing better than re- searchers originally estimated. Scientists can monitor 10 times
as many bears through rub sam- ples as through radio collars, Ken- dall estimated. And the rubs pro- vide far more accurate data than the sight checks that had served as the basis for past population estimates, in which researchers extrapolated the total population count from the number of females with cubs they saw in the area.
Although radio telemetry pro- vides a precise account of a bear’s fate—scientists can learn where the animal moves, whether it has cubs and at what point it dies—it is costly in addition to being risky. And the hair traps take extensive work to prepare as well as to de- ploy and maintain. Christopher Servheen, who has
served as the U.S. Fish and Wild- life Service’s grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the entire 29 years of the program’s existence, said the new analysis gives man- agers more confidence in the data
they’ve already culled from hair traps and radio collars. “How do we get the highest lev- el of confidence with the smallest amount of money? That’s our challenge, and it’s not always easy,” said Servheen, co-author of the Journal of Wildlife Manage- ment paper along with Kendall and its lead author, University of Montana graduate student Jef- frey Stetz. Stetz and his colleagues ana- lyzed 13,000 genetic samples culled from four years of bear rubs, from 1998 to 2000 and 2004. They also looked at 21,000 samples collected from hair traps. Their findings, coupled with the genetic analysis stemming from Kendall’s study, suggest there are roughly 765 grizzlies in the North- ern Continental Divide Ecosys- tem— 21
⁄2 times as many as the
initial estimate. Local business operators hailed
the new analysis, saying they hoped it meant Montana’s griz- zlies would eventually be taken off the endangered species list. Chuck Roady, who heads the
Montana Wood Products Associa- tion, said lumber and forest man- agers in the area have struggled with road closures, curtailed log- ging and other policies aimed at helping the region’s grizzly bear
population recover. “It’s been a tough road for us with all the re- strictions,” Roady said.
All grizzlies south of Canada
have been listed as threatened since 1975. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne delisted Yellow- stone’s grizzlies in 2007, but envi- ronmentalists challenged the de- cision, and last fall a court order placed the bears back on the list. Kendall, with the aid of a $250,000 U.S. Forest Service grant, is testing the rub tech- nique, monitoring bear rubs from 4,900 trees between 2009 and 2011.
And now that he’s off the cam- paign trail, McCain seems less in- clined to criticize bear population sampling. Though he used to say of taking bear DNA, “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or crimi- nal, but it was a waste of money,” now he smiles and calls it “one of the great breakthroughs” in mod- ern science. “It’s probably right up there with the mapping of the human genome. It justifies every penny of the taxpayer dollars ever spent on it,” the senator said, with a grin, as he walked to catch the Capitol subway last week. “The bears in Arizona will be
very interested in it.”
eilperinj@washpost.com
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