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TEHRAN, December 12 -Researchers across New England and Canada scramble to protect the iconic species from growing parasite populations
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC)-Amid lightly falling snow on a gray April morning, Lee Kantar crouches over a dead moose calf. Its head rests on the ground and its legs are tucked beneath its frail torso. A GPS collar Kantar had strapped around its neck in January pinged his phone the night before, signaling the calf had not moved in more than six hours and was likely dead.
“Nose is normal. Eyes are normal. Ears are normal—quite a bit of ticks on her ears,” Kantar calls off to his field assistant, Carl Tuggand, who records the data on a clipboard. “There are a lot of ticks on her.”
Responding to tick-covered dead moose has become a regular springtime routine for Kantar; as Maine’s official state moose biologist at its Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, he has strapped necropsy equipment to his snowmobile and bushwhacked through dense forests dozens of times over the past five years.
He is studying how growing infestations of winter ticks have seized entire populations of this iconic animal. As climate change shortens winters and improves living conditions for these ticks—which do not carry Lyme or other human-harming diseases—their population size and range have begun to expand.
Now scientists in Canada have embarked on a similar five-year study in New Brunswick and Quebec to document how moose there are being affected as the raisin-size parasites spread northward.
The researchers seek to slow this expansion and figure out ways to bolster moose populations. For eastern Canada, “it’s a new phenomenon,” says study leader Steeve Côté, a biologist at Laval University in Quebec City, “and people are highly concerned about it.”
Source: scientificamerican
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