I have opened an online shop where I’m selling all kinds of products with designs I've made from my photography. If you haven't seen it on my Facebook or Instagram already, the link to my shop is curryosities.myspreadshop.com (or find it in the menu under Other Fun Stuff). This shop is dedicated to my dearly departed mutt, Paughey. He was the most adorably dopey good dog and looks pretty good on a t-shirt! My nephews wear their Paughey shirts proudly with Parker making sure those who comment on it know “he’s dead”. Kids say the darndest things! I'll be releasing new designs periodically and introducing them here! So keep checking back until you find something you like. Or, if there's something you're interested in, a specific product or animal, LET ME KNOW! I'll do my best to make it happen! I’ve already done several custom orders to rave reviews. While this was intended to be an artistic outlet, it’s also a side hustle of sorts, so I do get a portion of the profits from your purchase. Help a girl working for a non-profit, living with her parents out.
2 Comments
I have moved on from being a graduate student. Although I don't graduate until December, I have started a new position as a post doctoral scientist of conservation genetics at the Center for Conservation Research (CCR) at Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium (OHDZA)! I will be working mostly on projects on lemurs and other species from Madagascar, throwing in the occasional elephant and big cat project to keep myself associated with main land Africa. I'm still settling in but it won't be too difficult a transition when I can see orangutans out the lab window and I get to take a daily safari walk to see all my favorite animals.
Being so close to the action I'll hopefully be able to get the inside scoop (like I did with the Indian rhino. The repro team showed us the birth video only hours after it happened!) and you know I'll be making regular visits to their enclosure to bask in the tail poof glory. I'd have to pass by sloth bears and tigers on the way there too. Darn.
A ban on the hunting of big cats in Zambia, which has been in effect since January 2013, was officially lifted a few days ago. Hunting of leopards will resume at the end of this year/beginning of next and hunting of lions will return about a year after that.
Zambia, however, is one of 5 countries to have lion populations 1000+ individuals strong and, in areas with thriving lion populations, a hunting ban could actually have potentially deleterious effects (and not just on eco-tourism). Studies have shown that the presence of hunters deters poachers, providing protection for the habitat and other animals. Revenue brought in by hunters also contributes to anti-poaching efforts as well as community assistance by providing jobs and other resources. So, after the realization that a continued full ban in Zambia on hunting for big cats could be damaging for the population (and economy), the government decided to reinstate hunting under the pretense there will be “cautionary quotas.” Tourism and Arts Minister, Jean Kapata, said "safari hunting was profitable and good for off-take of wildlife and could benefit the whole country if well nurtured." The study I just submitted for publication will (hopefully) be used to help with decisions for setting quotas and implementing management to prevent loss of diversity while big cat hunting is permitted.
Just some elephant play time from August 2005... ENJOY! One of the reasons, which I have mentioned before, a decline in carnivore populations can be detrimental to an ecosystem is the spread of disease. Without the proper balance of large wildlife populations (which includes your large carnivores), smaller, disease carrying species (primarily rodents) can overrun an ecosystem causing an increase in disease for local wildlife and humans alike. A study published last week looked at this phenomenon in an area in Africa called the KLEE (the Kenya Long-Term Exclosure Experiment; a well-controlled, replicated large herbivore removal experiment based in central Kenya - an area which includes species such as elephant, giraffe, zebra and lion). Through three years of sampling, this project determined that declines in large wildlife increased the occurrence of landscape-level rodent-borne disease. The concept is pretty simple (although the analysis from the study is fairly complicated); loss of large wildlife causes a loss in the regulation of the rodent population which, in turn, causes an increase in rodents and their parasite carrying friends, the flea, which increases the amount of disease found in humans and other wildlife. The difficult part is figuring out how to counter this effect (aka prevent disease). The options – prevent the loss of large wildlife so the rodent population can naturally regulate itself or artificially regulate the rodent population. Setting out a few rodent traps out in the middle of the African savannah probably won’t do the trick so, I say, let’s try letting the megafauna do its job and keep working on large wildlife conservation to keep those large wildlife numbers where they should be.
|