Species in Trouble

Stuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the 'Hottest of the Hot Spots' in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity p.3

She and another Pimm Group international doctoral student, Fernando Colchero, recently joined an experienced team that captures and attaches radio collars to jaguars. With the collars, they can track the jaguars by satellite along jungle corridors in the Yucatan Peninsula. "One of the most exciting things is to have eye contact with a wild animal such as a jaguar in a tree in its natural ecosystem," Conde said. "When we went on the jaguar capture he (Pimm) stayed with us the whole time to see how well we were doing on our work project."

Conde will soon go to southern Africa to do elephant-related research. She will visit a "peace park" within several contiguous nations to search for ecologically friendly corridors that the pachyderms can negotiate without interfering with or being harmed by humans. "The idea is to use elephants to choose corridors that are not only politically but ecologically viable," she said.

Elephant conservation is a special challenge, says Pimm, who spends enough time in Africa to teach at the University of Pretoria. (He isn't paid a salary, but some of his expenses are covered.) "If you get their management right, you have elephants. If you get it really right, you have far too many," he quips, "and they destroy the habitat." On his first day teaching his Applied Population Ecology class at Duke, Pimm was still jet lagged from attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. So he showed the students a "very opinionated, very controversial" movie on the problems of elephant-human relations. "At the end, I said, 'Two weeks from now I want you to tell me what your solution is.'" he said.

Pimm and his students pick such "sentinel" species to address broad issues of people versus animals and preservation versus environment in the growing numbers of places that they work. Besides elephants in South Africa, jaguars in Mexico, birds in the Amazon, and fossas in Madagascar, there are sooty terns on the Dry Tortugas off south Florida. "Until about seven or eight years ago my program was largely U.S.-based," he said. "Then I began to realize that just working in the richest country in the world was not the right way to do conservation. So I began looking for opportunities to work internationally."

Pimm says he uses birds "as a window into what is happening to the rest of the environment, and with other kinds of species. We really look at whole ecosystems, but we tend to do this through the window of studying birds, because we know birds so well."

A major sentinel species he studies in Florida's Everglades is the small, brown Cape Sable Sparrow, which he describes as "about as uncharismatic and unlovely a bird as you can imagine. The work that we do involves the fact that poor water management decisions have caused the sparrow to be flooded out of part of its range, and burned out of another part where it's too dry." Pimm might "not mention its name for hours" as he meets with officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "What we may talk about are the issues of restoring Florida's natural ecosystem dynamics," he said. "If they get those right, the sparrow will come back."

Pimm's goals include building a "really good" conservation biology program at the Nicholas School, and training an international cadre of specialists, both PhDs and Masters of Environmental Management (MEMs), to address complex problems in various countries. A major conference he organized with Intel founder Gordon E. Moore and Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson produced a paper, "Defying Nature's End," that recognized the "need to train a lot more people to tackle these issues," he said. "Just like politics is local, conservation is local. So a great part of what I do involves being with my group in different parts of the world and showing that they're working with the local communities. In all the places we work, we have immediate, direct ties to the policy makers and managers."

While the Nicholas School's MEM program "is clearly the best professional masters program in environmental sciences in the country, its students are predominantly young American women and men," he said. "We need to have students coming in from other countries to get training and go back to their countries."

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