Salal pickers put forestry research at risk
Bill Cleverley Times Colonist

<img src="http://mirror.media.canada.com/idl/20040503/49980591-393f-4ad8-9002-b6e6a6943bca.jpg" hspace=5 align="right":> Researcher Brian Titus says signs like this one prohibiting salal picking have disappeared. CREDIT: Deddeda Stemler, TC
 
"Trespass-pickers" cashing in on bounties of the forest floor are causing setbacks for research projects that could lead to increased profits for all, researchers claim. Pickers looking for Christmas greenery stripped bare two rare white pine trees near Coombs that were about to be used in the fight against blister rust disease. And a research site on salal near Shawnigan Lake is now being abandoned because of overharvesting by pickers.

Ironically, the researchers say, proper pruning would ultimately have benefitted not only their projects but the pickers as well with better future harvests. The pickers either ignored or didn't understand the coloured ribbons and numbered tags on the trees that identified them as two of a handful of white pine trees in B.C. resistant to blister rust. The salal research plots near Shawnigan were posted with signs in nine languages advising that research was underway and prohibiting picking. The signs, unfortunately, disappeared. ...

Saving lives of moose and men
Blaine Harden Washington Post

This female elk's radio collar triggers warnings to motorists if she nears Washington state's busy Highway 101. (Mike Dashiell -- Sequim Gazette)

SEQUIM, Wash. -- When elk amble across Highway 101 here on the Olympic Peninsula of western Washington, radio collars around their necks set off flashing lights up and down the busy road. A continent away, when moose wander across Route 4 in the mountains of western Maine, their hulking bodies break an infrared beam that triggers flashing lights on moose warning signs.

On reengineered highways between the wireless elk and the beam-breaking moose, there are underpasses for tortoises in California, vibration-detectors for deer in Wyoming and a 52-foot-wide overpass for deer, foxes, coyotes and opossums on Interstate 75 in Florida. At an accelerating pace, federal and state highways across much of the United States are being tricked out with critter-crossing technology, high and low. It is an attempt to halt a rising tide of roadkill -- the grisly result of more cars, more sprawl and a continent-wide resurgence of large hoofed animals, including deer, elk and, deadliest of all, moose. ...

Although moose and elk are the deadliest (to human beings) of animals commonly hit on U.S. highways, the country's primary roadkill problem is deer. Like moose and elk, deer numbers have exploded because of less farming and more habitat, including succulent suburban lawns and shrubs. But unlike moose or elk, which are proliferating mostly in New England and the Rocky Mountain West, deer are multiplying everywhere. ...

The Trans-Canada Highway cutting through Banff National Park used to be called the "meat-maker" because of frequent collisions of cars with elk, deer, grizzly bears and wolves. But since the mid-1980s, when Parks Canada began installing fences and highway crossings -- 22 underpasses and two 150-foot-wide overpasses -- roadkill has plummeted by 95 percent, said Tony Clevenger, a research ecologist who works in Banff. "These measures have not only been highly effective in reducing road mortality, they are very effective in connecting core habitat for all wildlife species," Clevenger said. "We have found that cougars and black bear prefer narrow tunnels under roads, while grizzly, elk, deer, moose and wolves prefer the overpasses." ...

Noted: Giant cod discovered in remote Arctic lake
Margaret Munro CanWest News Service/Times Colonist

Ogac Lake, Baffin Island: Fish isolated for 8,000 years.
 
The biggest cod left on the planet, creatures so large and hungry they have been known to swallow loons whole, are thriving in a remote saltwater lake researchers call a "living laboratory" in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists studying the huge cod -- which can measure more than a metre in length and weigh as much as 26 kilograms, many times the size of cod now found in the sea -- say the fish are cannibals with voracious appetites that eat almost anything that crosses their path, including prickly sea urchins, each other, and in at least one case, an entire loon. ... The story of how the Atlantic cod, a marine creature, ended up in an Arctic lake is almost as intriguing as the creature itself. ...