Publications

The family Serrasalmidae is a morphologically and ecologically diverse group of South American freshwater fishes consisting of 16 genera and about 91 valid species. This chapter is a summary of the current state of knowledge on serrasalmid taxonomy, species richness, and ecology, and provides an identification key to the genera and references to relevant literature for species-level

Toxoplasma gondii is a feline protozoan reported to cause morbidity and mortality in manatees and other marine mammals. Given the herbivorous nature of manatees, ingestion of oocysts from contaminated water or seagrass is presumed to be their primary mode of infection. The objectives of this study were to investigate oocyst contamination of seagrass beds in Puerto Rico and determine the

We compared water-quality effects of 13 beaver ponds on adjacent free-flowing control reaches in the Coastal Plain of rural North Carolina. We measured concentrations of nitrate, ammonium, soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP), and suspended sediment (SS) upstream and downstream of paired ponds and control reaches. Nitrate and SS concentrations decreased, ammonium concentrations increased...

The importance of the role that parasites play in ecological communities is becoming increasingly apparent. However much about their impact on hosts and thus populations and communities remains poorly understood. A common observation in wild populations is high variation in levels of parasite infestation among hosts. While high variation could be due to chance encounter, there is...

Tigers predominantly prey on large ungulate species, such as sambar (Cervus unicolor), red deer (Cervus elaphus), gaur (Bos gaurus), banteng (Bos javanicus), chital (Axis axis), muntjac (Muntiacus muntjak), wild pig (Sus scrofa), and bearded pig (Sus barbatus). The density of a tiger population is strongly correlated with the density of such prey species (Karanth et al. 2004). In the...

From these histories, capture frequency statistics and estimates of capture probabilities can be derived.

Drinking water treatment plants rely on purification of contaminated source waters to provide communities with potable water. One group of possible contaminants are enteric viruses. Measurement of viral quantities in environmental water systems are often performed using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or quantitative PCR (qPCR). However, true values may be underestimated due to...

Conservationists and managers are continually under pressure from the public, the media, and political policy makers to provide “tiger numbers,” not just for protected reserves, but also for large spatial scales, including landscapes, regions, states, nations, and even globally. Estimating the abundance of tigers within relatively small areas (e.g., protected reserves) is becoming...

Mangrove forests provide a wide range of ecosystem services to society, yet they are among the most anthropogenically impacted coastal ecosystems in the world. In this chapter, we discuss and provide examples for how macroecology can advance our understanding of mangrove ecosystems. Macroecology is broadly defined as a discipline that uses statistical analyses to investigate large-scale...

Managers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge (CRNWR) desire to update their management plan regarding the operation of select springs including Three Sisters Springs. They wish to refine existing parameters used to predict the presence of federally threatened Trichechus manatus latirostris (Florida manatee) in the springs and thereby improve their...

Red tides (blooms of the harmful alga Karenia brevis) are one of the major sources of mortality for the Florida manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris), especially in southwest Florida. It has been hypothesized that the frequency and severity of red tides may increase in the future because of global climate change and other factors. To improve our ecological forecast for the effects of...

Poaching can have devastating impacts on animal and plant numbers, and in many countries has reached crisis levels, with illegal hunters employing increasingly sophisticated techniques. Here, we show how geographic profiling – a mathematical technique originally developed in criminology and recently applied to animal foraging and epidemiology – can be adapted for use in investigations of...