Shifting Baselines : Why Did The Moose Cross The Road?

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Jennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses.
Josh Donlan is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

Scientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

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July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

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July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound:.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card

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Why Did The Moose Cross The Road?

Category: New Research
Posted on: March 13, 2008 11:49 AM, by Josh Donlan

We all would love to see a moose and its calf along the roadside, right? I woke up to one on my front deck last week. Well in Yellowstone National Park, your chances are better than ever. Moose may be smarter than you think though: they are using you and your car as a shield. Human shields.

University of Montana and Wildlife Conservation Society Biologist Joel Berger has been studying Yellowstone moose for decades, and he started noticing that moose were hanging out along roads a bit more than in the past. Why? To hide from grizzly bears. "We think they are doing it because they've figured out that the paved road is a bear-free zone where their newborns stand a better chance of survival. Up in Alaska, grizzly bears have been observed killing between 50 and 90 percent of the newborn moose population. We think that the Grand Teton moose have figured out a way to use humans as shields for their babies." says Dr. Berger. These complex interactions of people, predators, and prey documented by Berger and others fundamentally question the extent to where animals are found and how they behave is independent of even subtle human influences. Read more about Joel Berger and his work in the New York Times. The study was recently published in Biology Letters.

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Comments

When I saw the question in the title, I thought the answer would be this. How wrong I was!

Posted by: Coturnix | March 13, 2008 6:57 PM

I'm afraid I have to answer your lead question with a strong NO, DEFINITELY NOT! At least not if the road in question has any motor vehicle traffic.

A moose on the roadside is very likely to, indeed, want to cross the road. Their faculties of judging time to impact the approaching car are not quite as well-developed as those of some other pedestrians, and the result is all too often a thousand pounds of mass falling through the windscreen onto the lap of the driver and front passenger. The results are likely to be not pretty.

Other than that, yes, a moose is a magnificent creature to meet.

Posted by: Jussi Suuronen | March 13, 2008 11:27 PM