TRIAGE IN THE WILD
As the world’s wildlife vanishes at an alarming rate, some experts argue it’s time to act like battlefield doctors and choose which species to save
In a scrub meadow north of Napanee, Ont., Hazel Wheeler fixes her binoculars on a distant cage and waits. The inmates — seven endangered eastern loggerhead shrikes, masked like bandits and just as jittery — approach the open cage door then retreat inside, again and again.
The biologist with Wildlife Preservation Canada wants to see these captive-raised birds join the wild. Their release, she says, offers some hope for one of Canada’s rarest animals. The reluctant shrikes seem not so sure.
This summer, Canada’s eastern loggerhead shrike population fell to just 11 confirmed pairs — despite 885 shrikes being released since Environment Canada spearheaded a captive-breeding program 14 years ago to bolster wild populations.
The effort, which costs more than $160,000 annually, is intended to buy time while scientists try to determine why the birds are failing. But the mystery remains, and the shrikes teeter at the brink.
Environment Canada appears ready to give up. “They’ve basically decided to throw in the towel on funding the captive breeding going forward,” says Randal Heide, executive director of WPC, which leads the project.
“So we’re going to have to fund that other ways.”
Environment Canada, which has a $44-million budget to help 521 species listed as “at risk,” would not discuss the decision. The money may simply be better spent elsewhere, even if the program stands between the birds and oblivion.
The decision reflects a shift in the way some conservationists think about saving species.
Increasingly, scientists say conservation priorities should follow battlefield-style triage, the medical practice of sorting mass casualties to save those most likely to recover or those considered most important, rather than those most in need.
Triage might mean redirecting the $12 million spent over the past two decades to recover the endangered Vancouver Island marmots (a species related to hoary marmots on the mainland) to help other species that attract fewer dollars but may be more evolutionarily distinctive, such as the Rocky Mountain Tailed Frog, or more ecologically distinctive, such as the mudpuppy mussel.
It might mean forgoing herculean efforts — such as helicopter wolf-kills — to save the near-vanished southern herds of caribou to spend more on populations with a better chance of survival farther north.
While traditionalists warn against betraying conservation’s tenet that every species from polar bears to pygmy pocket moss shares the right to exist, others say conservation efforts have been valuing certain species over others in a hodgepodge fashion for decades. They say, a coherent approach is needed.
“If we want to differentially value species ... we want to do it explicitly so we understand what we’re talking about,” says Arne Mooers, a biodiversity expert at Simon Fraser University.
According to a 2012 Canadian Nature Survey, most Canadians say they value biodiversity and understand the role of wildlife in the ecosystems we depend on for clean air, water and food.
But the World Wildlife Fund’s 2014 Living Planet Index showed numbers of 10,000 worldwide benchmark species are half what they were in 1970.
Canada has an endangered species law that follows science-based rules for identifying imperilled species and granting them protection according to a ranking of their risk of extinction.
But the ranking system says nothing about which species should get support. Decisions are left to the whim of governments or conservation groups.
Most spending, Mooers says, goes to a few species. Money to recover endangered whooping cranes or burrowing owls is in the millions, while the equally endangered white flower moth or the heart-leaved plantain gets little.
Other countries show the same skewed spending. This month, the New York Times reported that U.S. spending on at-risk species in 2013 was more than $10 million for grizzly bears and $34 million for upper Columbia Chinook salmon, yet just $214 went to helping the desert slender salamander. In Britain, a 2011 study of 38 species-recovery efforts found just five species accounted for 80 per cent of the money spent.
Triage has been gaining acceptance as a new metaphor for wildlife conservation. With fixed resources, priorities should be set to do the greatest good — not simply devoting resources to those most likely to recover but also on species that may be more valuable.
Among values to be considered are: rarity; ecological role (predators such as wolves, or ecosystem engineers such as beavers, often have more impact); esthetics; monetary worth (plants furnish pharmaceutical discoveries); and evolutionary importance.
Mooers’ work focuses on the latter. “I’ve been exploring the idea that species that have no close relatives are somehow more valuable and should be higher up that list than species that have more close relatives,” he says.
“Some people feel that if you start giving differential value to biodiversity that you’re actually condoning extinction,” says Mooers. “We’ve been pitching it in terms of identifying things we cannot lose rather than things we can lose.”
Bridget Stutchbury is unconvinced: “My personal belief is that the word triage is proxy for giving people permission to let species go extinct.”
Setting priorities may make sense, says Stutchbury, a professor of ecology and conservation biology at York University, but triage is unnecessarily pessimistic: why choose what species to save or let go when the problem can be solved with more money?
“I think we can all agree that saving nature is important, and if we agreed to spend the money on it, I think we certainly can afford it,” Stutchbury says.
Back in their pastureland cage near Napanee, the shrikes are oblivious to the controversy as they wonder whether to cross the threshold of the open cage door.
“Why protect this bird amongst all the others?” says Wheeler. “Well, as a biologist, biodiversity is sacred to me. Yes, we can lose some things along the way and ecosystems won’t collapse. But if we let this go, what next?”
Some people feel that if you start giving differential value to biodiversity that you’re actually condoning extinction. We’ve been pitching it in terms of identifying things we cannot lose rather than things we can.