Cats: our feline friends, or are they?

(Cat eating a bird it has just killed.)

About a decade ago I had a student in my Conservation Biology class named Scott Boomer. We were discussing the problem of non-native organisms that week, and Scott told me he had kept some interesting records on the behavior of three cats that he and his wife had at that time. The cats (one male, two females, and all neutered) had access to food and water in Scott’s apartment around the clock. The three natural predators had the habit of capturing prey outside and bringing it back to Scott, often dropping it at his feet or putting it in their bathtub. Scott is a biologist and he was able to identify all the prey items returned to his apartment over a 2-year period.

The list included:

Mammals: 5 deer mice, 2 woodland jumping mice, 5 Eastern chipmunks, 4 meadow voles, 1 gray squirrel, 6 star-nosed moles, 4 short-tailed shrews, 1 cinereus shrew, 2 little brown bats, 1 Eastern cottontail

Amphibians: 2 green frogs

Reptiles: 1 Eastern painted turtle, 3 Eastern garter snakes

Birds: 3 common yellowthroats, 2 black-capped chickadees, 1 house wren

Total: 43 animals

Now, there are about 90 million cats in the U.S., according to the 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey. A certain percentage of those cats never go outside. But anyway you run the numbers, the collective mortality on native wildlife by U.S. cats must total millions of individuals of dozens of species. In some places in the world, feral cats, those that have gone completely wild, are responsible for the demise of rare species of birds. The Stephens Island wren (a flightless species) in New Zealand went extinct in the late 1800’s due to the island’s cats, or so that story goes. The wedge-tailed shearwater in Hawaii is also impacted by cats. Conservation biologists actively control cats (as well as non-native rats, mongoose, etc.) in such places today, especially on oceanic islands.

We hear a lot these days about our “ecological footprint”, or the impact that a human has on the earth’s natural resources and ecosystems. I doubt that our pet ownership is included in these calculations. Remember that I tend to think in terms of quantity and quality of habitat for biodiversity. I usually think of our “habitat footprint” as defined by the boundaries of our house and the lawn surrounding it. But the effect of that living space penetrates further depending on the chemicals we use on the property, how far away we or our children trounce on the environment, and the influence of our pets, of which cats are probably the worst offenders. There are zones of concentric circles beginning with the epicenter of the house itself, which include areas of decreasing influence on the fauna and flora that is there now, as one moves respectively outward. Cats probably have an effect in each of those zones, but they may represent the only threat in the outermost circle, which is perhaps several hundred meters from the edge of the house.

In fact, last year someone built a new house about 100 meters from the edge of my woodlot. For the past few months, I have had two cats roaming my property that I am sure live at that house. I have not had cats on my property in 20 years. And so it goes. We increase our collective ecological footprint, we chip away at the quantity and quality of wildlife habitat and, in my opinion, the quality of life is diminished just a little bit more---again.

In these few paragraphs I wanted to increase your awareness of an idea that perhaps you have not thought much about--- how that lovable pet cat of yours is possibly reducing the biological diversity in your neighborhood. I do not intend to explore a detailed solution to this problem, although attaching a simple bell to your outdoor cat would probably reduce its kill rate. You might be thinking that cats kill organisms that people do not like very much anyway, so what the heck. But I can assure you that every one of those species killed by Scott’s cats represents a unique and interesting biological story. Remember that not so long ago, nearly everyone thought it was fine to shoot, trap, or poison wolves, mountain lions, and eagles.

Senecence sucks: The sleep clinic (part 5)

(This woman in the Sleep Clinic is sleeping like a baby---a robot baby.)

Last week I had a sleepover at the hospital.  My wife made me report to my family doc at my annual physical that I suffered from sleep apnea, where you stop breathing for periods of time and then gasp for air.  Snoring is usually associated with this.  Apnea is, of course, disruptive to your normal sleep and can affect the body's ability to restore and repair itself.  I think my wife has the same affliction, so I sent an anonymous message to her family doc yesterday.  I squealed like a stuffed pig.

I packed my pajamas, a pillow, some reading material (see below), and a toothbrush and headed off in the direction of all those scrub gowns and the Sleep Clinic at 8:30pm.  All I knew was that I had to sleep there all night.  I didn't prepare anything.  After all, I have been sleeping my entire life.  How difficult could this be?  Just to make sure I could sleep, I went into my den and pulled Prosser's Comparative Animal Physiology off the shelf, a textbook I used 30 years ago.  A few minutes of reading about osmotic balance in the Chondrichthyes should do it.  If not, maybe there is a baseball game on tv.  Ten minutes max.  I'll be out.

But when Mike the technician appeared in my room, I realized there was a bit more to all of this than just a leisurely snooze.  He explained that he would be monitoring me during the night from his observation room, but that first he had to "wire me up".  He proceeded to clean up spot after spot on my body with alcohol, then smeared a glue-like gel in all those places, and then attached an electrical lead to each of those areas.  This is way more than I do each night at home before going to bed, and my wife used to be an ER nurse.  Maybe I kiss her good night, but nothing electrical.  When he finished, I had 24 leads attached to my head and a couple on my chest and lower legs, with all wires leading to a box on my night stand. Mike also attached devices in front of my nose and mouth to monitor my oxygen level and respiration.  Judas Priest!  I'm ready to begin filming Frankenstein now.  Sweet dreams.

But seriously, after I was wired, I was fearful about turning on the tv.  What if Mike wired me incorrectly and when I turned on the television I saw Desperate Housewives inside my head, for the rest of my life?  Was he an electrical engineer at Cornell?  He didn't look like one, and I've seen plenty.  The wires are supposed to transmit electrical signals from MY brain to HIS instruments in the observation room.  But what if the polarity got reversed and HIS machines sent impulses to MY brain?  I'm never going to get to sleep now, and I read all there is to know about osmotic balance in fish.

Fortunately, there was a baseball game on the tube.  By the third pitch, I was sending data to Mike's machines.  I slept more or less normally, for me. Tough to move or turn on your side when there is a half mile of wires running from your body. I would not do this during the summer when thunder storms are common. If lightning hit the hospital, I would probably look like Wiley Coyote after his own dynamite blew him up. (Which reminds me, how can a mammal not outsmart a bird? A coyote's brain is the size of an apple; a roadrunner's brain must be no larger than a few apple seeds. Come on Wiley. This is embarrassing.) 

When Mike greeted me in the morning, he was all too cheerful.  He removed the wires and other monitors, and gleefully reported that he got about 1,000 pages of data that now needed interpretation.  Amazing, in 30 years of doing scientific research, I never generated that much data.  How could I possibly accomplish all that in one night while asleep?  What a fool I have been all these years, staying awake, and working like a dog to gather a little data, sometimes only a datum.  Maybe our university students have had it right all this time.  Many of them must have generated copious amounts of data right in front of my eyes while I lectured.  I left the Sleep Clinic hurriedly, and bought the first legal stimulant I could find.

What in the world is Danby?

(Make sure you come with a full gas tank.  We have no gas station.)

The late Carl Sagan, who was a professor at Cornell, once said that Danby, NY was nothing but an IGA store along the side of a highway.  Well, those were the good ole days.  That store closed a couple of years ago, and our only gas station burned down about the same time.  The elementary school closed in 1980, the year we moved here, so our children had to be bussed into Ithaca.  Closing the only school in a small town causes the place to lose spirit and a bit of its identity. Sad, really. Danby does have a small town hall and a nice looking church.  Danby's most famous resident was Martin Luther Smith, who graduated from West Point in 1842, and served as a general in the Confederate army.  Geography was not his strong suit.

But it is not that bad, if you don't like crowds.  I always said I would not live in a city if it was so busy it needed a traffic report on tv.  And the best town of all is one where the elevation is greater than the population; Danby almost meets this criterion.  We have a populaton of 3,000 and Danby is at an elevation of about 1,500 feet.  (By the way, I just tried to get this information off the Danby town web server, but I repeatedly got a Fail to Connect message, so I had to go to Wikipedia.  Maybe we lost our server also.).

The residents in Danby mostly work in Ithaca, a 20-minute drive away.  It is rural, with some dairy farms, hayfields, and forests, including some state land called Danby State Forest.  We boast Jennings Pond, where you can fish for bass or swim, after the community cleans up the beach in the spring.  We have a volunteer fire department to keep us safe.  Lots of volunteering around here, and I am not very good at that.  Many people heat their homes with wood and there is some logging of large trees to help pay the taxes.  We are located in the southern part of Tompkins County, where the soil is not as good as the northern half, but it is hillier and there is more forest.  The farms are smaller and not as productive as those to the north. Within a mile of my home, there is a small and tired cemetery with dates from the 1800s.  Danby is my kind of place.

Whenever a new house is built in the U.S., I detest it, as the human footprint grows larger on the land. I long for the day when the only new house built is constructed on the foundation of an old one that had to be taken down. If a new house is built within a mile of my home, I am depressed for a month.  At present, I have another three weeks to be depressed. Residents of Danby are economically stressed generally, and so everyone does what they have to do to make it in the short term, but who speaks for the landscape and for the long term?

In the evening I sometimes sit outside around a bonfire in my woods and listen to the Barred Owls calling and the coyotes whooping it up a short distance away.  One of my favorite scenes is when I walk away from the fire in the dark and look back at the light and embers shooting up into the forest canopy.  I imagine that it might have looked just like that in this very place 300 years ago when Cayuga Indians gathered around the heat to keep warm.  I can spend all day in my woods doing chores, but it really doesn't seem like work at all, although I would have complained bitterly about it as a young boy.  What changed?

I live at the top of one of the hills in Danby. If I urinate in the drainage ditch alongside my driveway, those molecules flow into a stream down the road, then into the Susquehanna River, and eventually empties into Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. If I walk 100 yards up and over the ridge and then urinate, it flows through small creeks and streams into the southern end of Cayuga Lake and out the north end, then through a couple of rivers to be dumped into Lake Ontario. That great lake empties to the east into the St. Lawrence River, which flows another 750 miles to the northeast into the largest estuary in the world and the north Atlantic. I used to recite this story to my students when they visited my property, but they never seemed as enthused in hearing it as I was in telling it. So depending on whether I want to send a little "message" to Maryland or to Quebec, I urinate outdoors either on this side of the hill or on the other side. This morning I am in the mood to say "bonjour" to our friends to the north, although it will probably take a month for the message to arrive.  Entertainment comes cheap on this hill.  But Danby is a place where one still has the luxury of sending a liquid message.

Of invasive plants and Big Macs

(A McDonalds in Cairo.  Your order please.  Hamburger or hummus?)

One of the first-hand observations I have made over the past few years is the tendency to homogenize the world’s biota, especially plants. Jacaranda trees native to Brazil are common as ornamentals in Nairobi, Norway maples native to Europe are common on the streets of eastern U.S. cities, and the bird of paradise flower native to South Africa is found in nearly every city in the tropics worldwide. The botanical situation reminds me of the proliferation of franchised fast food restaurants, where you can now find Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Cairo and Kampala as easily as in Louisville. The homogenization of biota and the homogenization of cultures disturb me.

I tend to bond with habitats like most people bond with their friends or their pets. I also bond with humans and dogs, so I am not totally weird. But I have a close affinity to every place where I have spent considerable time: the meadows of upstate New York, the riparian habitat along the San Pedro River in Arizona, the sagebrush community in Idaho, the rain forests of Costa Rica, and, of course, the forest around my home in Ithaca. When a real estate agent is asked to name the three most important aspects of a home’s value, they usually say “location, location, location.” Similarly, we biologists often say when asked to name the three most important elements in conservation, “habitat, habitat, habitat.”

Very simply, habitat is where an organism lives. It is comprised of the plants, animals, and microorganisms in a particular location. The species composition of a habitat is determined by many factors, but it includes the climate, the historical path leading to species’ colonization or evolution in that location, the interaction of species over time, geology, soils, and more. Each habitat on earth is absolutely unique—they each have their own physical appearance, their distinctive sounds of birds, frogs, and insects, and their complex blend of odors. I am convinced that if I were blindfolded and dropped into any habitat where I have ever spent any amount of time that I could identify where I was by simply smelling the air. The ponderosa pine forest of the Kaibab Plateau and the cloud forest of Costa Rica come to mind. The sounds would make it even easier—vermilion flycatchers along the San Pedro River, bellbirds and black-faced solitaires in Monteverde, cicadas (different species) in Ohio or Las Cruces.

Now, before my ecology friends jump all over me, I realize fully that habitats are not static. Habitats change over time. The habitats I love will not be the same a century from now. During that amount of time, some ecologists would say that the habitat has changed or matured; some would say that it has become a different habitat altogether. I am not interested in that debate. I just do not want readers to think that I think these entities are unchanging. I have watched the woodland around my house change dramatically in 30 years. Therefore, I am not arguing that we do whatever we can to prevent habitats from changing. That would be folly, and would be an unwise strategy biologically.

But I am arguing that we do what we can to allow habitats to develop along a more or less “normal” path. We can also argue for a week about what is meant by “normal” or “natural.” I am bored with that argument. Simply put, there are certain events or conditions that I define as “unacceptable”, and which I think are an impediment to following a normal path to change.

One of the unacceptables is the human-assisted invasion of a habitat by plants or animals that are native to some other part of the world. That is a no-brainer for me, and a reason I spend many hours per month eliminating Tartarian honeysuckle, multiflora rose, autumn olive, and common buckthorn from my woodland, four species indigenous to Eurasia. I know they were not here a century or so ago, so when I see them it offends my sensibilities. From a conservation perspective, I am not even sure there is a practical reason to eliminate them. Certainly, if they became superabundant, they would exclude native plants from growing there, with the result that some ecological interactions between those native plants and other organisms would be disrupted or extinguished. But when they are in limited abundance, their greatest danger may be that they will not remain at such low densities. I eliminate these plants because I can; the large Lumbricus earthworms that are so common in my part of the world are not native here either, but there is little I can do to diminish their numbers.

To me, there is a certain parallelism between what I observe in our native habitats and what I observe in cities around the world. When I am in a foreign country, the last place I want to eat a meal is in a Pizza Hut or a McDonalds (in fact, I guess they even kind of offend me here). And when I am in a forest near Ithaca, NY, the last plant I want to see growing there is a European or Asian species. In both cases, something is being lost and, although I can not put to words exactly what that loss is, I believe it is important.  But it goes something like this for me: The invasion of our landscapes with non-native plants is like a technician at the Louvre deciding to "touch up" the Mona Lisa with watercolors.  The average person would not even see the difference, but the art expert probably would.  The act of changing the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world, would transform this important and beautiful object from what it was to a different piece of art.

On the other hand, are Costa Ricans or Egyptians offended when they see an American franchise restaurant in their cities?  Possibly not.  They might even think it is chic that they have this international influence.  I don't get offended to see a Chinese restaurant in Ithaca, but seeing a Pizza Hut in Alexandria bothered me a great deal.  Maybe I am uncomfortable because I fear that these restaurants, and these invasive plants, will not simply be an addition to what was already there, but that they will come to replace the original.  This creeping sameness makes the world less diverse and less interesting, but does that bother anyone else?
 
So I pull and cut and sometimes spray and my students think I’m that crazy ex-prof who would rather declare war on invasive plants than talk on a cell phone.  How weird.  And I eat rice and beans in Costa Rica instead of Big Macs, and I eat hummus in Egypt instead of pizza.  Is this what happens to us as we age?  We rebel at "progress"?  We cuss at the automobile for replacing the horse, or lament that email caused the extinction of the hand-written letter.  Or that friends were replaced with acquaintances. Or that family time was replaced with sitcoms.  I wonder, maybe I just have too much time on my hands.