September 16, 2022 by

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Should we introduce “days without hunting” ? Created following a petition asking for the measure, a Senate mission answered no on Wednesday, September 14, while proposing a series of new rules, including a ban on the consumption of alcohol and narcotics while hunting.

The mission had been set up last November, after more than 120,000 people had signed on the site of the upper assembly a petition launched by the collective “Un jour un chasseur”, created following the death of a young man 25 year old Morgan Keane, “shot by a hunter while chopping wood in his garden” in the Lot. In particular, it called for the establishment of “Sundays and Wednesdays without hunting” or even of “protective distances around residential areas which are equal to the maximum range of weapons”.

On the days without hunting, advocated during the presidential campaign by candidates Yannick Jadot and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the mission rejected “a uniform national rule”while saying “convinced that local demands must be heard”. She therefore suggests “allow prefects to limit hunting days and times to ensure people’s safety” and establish a “mandatory prior declaration of big game hunts”, the most accident-prone.

According to figures from the French Office for Biodiversity, the number of hunting accidents has been on a downward trend for twenty years. For the 2021/22 season, “The OFB has identified 90 hunting accidents in total (bodily injuries related to the use of a hunting weapon), including eight fatalities. Among these, two involved non-hunter victims”. Opponents of hunting point out that the number of hunters is decreasing, this decrease is normal. According to the figures cited by the senatorial mission, in twenty years the number of accidents has fallen by 46%, that of deaths by 74%, while the number of hunters has fallen less, by 29%.

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Instead, it suggests creating “an offense of obstructing the carrying out of legal sporting or leisure activities”, a claim by hunters against activists who are trying in particular to prevent hunting with hounds. She also rejects the idea of ​​protective distances, emphasizing that they “would lead, given the range of weapons, to ban hunting in a large part of France”. On the other hand, it offers“prohibit alcohol and the use of narcotics while hunting” and D’“align the blood alcohol level retained, the prohibition of narcotics as well as their respective sanctions with the rules in force in terms of the Highway Code”.

Among the 30 proposals are also measures to strengthen training, without raising the age of obtaining the license but in “generalizing tutoring”, or the obligation to pass a first aid certificate and an annual medical examination. The president of the National Federation of Hunters Willy Schraen denounced “totally exaggerated proposals and for some stigmatizing”. On alcohol, he pointed out that he was involved in “7% of hunting accidents [9% selon la mission sénatoriale]much less than on the road”. “What right do you have to reserve that for hunters, a drunk guy on a bike is dangerous too”he fumed.

TOPICS:BiodiversityExtinctionMachine LearningMammalsPopularRice University

By RICE UNIVERSITY SEPTEMBER 13, 2022

An illustration depicts the lost animal diversity of central Colombia. Credit: Oscar Sanisidro/University of Alcalá

The scale of the biodiversity crisis is shown by recreating 130,000 years of mammal food webs.

A recent study, published in the journal Science, provides the clearest picture yet of the long-term effects of land mammal declines on food webs.

It’s not a pretty sight.

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“While about 6% of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50% of mammal food web links have disappeared,” said ecologist Evan Fricke, lead author of the study. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past and now, are key for mammal food web complexity.”

A food web is comprised of all the connections between predators and their prey in a given region. Complex food webs are essential for managing populations in a manner that allows more species to coexist, hence promoting the biodiversity and stability of ecosystems. But animal losses may diminish this complexity, thereby reducing the resilience of an ecosystem.

Illustration depicting all mammal species that would inhabit central Colombia (left), Southern California (middle), and New South Wales, Australia, (right) today if not for human-linked range reductions and extinctions from the Late Pleistocene to the present. Credit: Oscar Sanisidro/University of Alcalá

Although declines of mammals are a well-documented aspect of the biodiversity crisis, with many animals either extinct or surviving in a small portion of their historic geographic ranges, the extent to which these losses have impacted the world’s food webs has remained unclear.

To understand what has been lost from food webs linking land mammals, Fricke led a team of scientists from the United States, Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Spain in using the latest techniques from machine learning to determine “who ate who” from 130,000 years ago to today. Fricke conducted the research during a faculty fellowship at Rice University and is currently a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A predator-prey interaction between cheetahs and an impala in Kruger National Park, South Africa in June 2015. Credit: Evan Fricke

Using data from modern observations of predator-prey interactions, Fricke and colleagues trained their machine learning system to determine how species characteristics impacted the probability that one species would prey on another. Once trained, the model could predict predator-prey interactions between species pairings that have not been seen directly.

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“This approach can tell us who eats whom today with 90% accuracy,” said Rice ecologist Lydia Beaudrot, the study’s senior author. “That is better than previous approaches have been able to do, and it enabled us to model predator-prey interactions for extinct species.”

The research offers an unprecedented global view into the food web that linked ice age mammals, Fricke said, as well as what food webs would look like today if saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, marsupial lions, and wooly rhinos still roamed alongside surviving mammals.

“Although fossils can tell us where and when certain species lived, this modeling gives us a richer picture of how those species interacted with each other,” Beaudrot said.

By charting changes in food webs over time, the analysis revealed that food webs worldwide are collapsing because of animal declines.

“The modeling showed that land mammal food webs have degraded much more than would be expected if random species had gone extinct,” Fricke said. “Rather than resilience under extinction pressure, these results show a slow-motion food web collapse caused by selective loss of species with central food web roles.”

The study also showed all is not lost. While extinctions caused about half of the reported food web declines, the rest stemmed from contractions in the geographic ranges of existing species.

“Restoring those species to their historic ranges holds great potential to reverse these declines,” Fricke said.

He said efforts to recover native predator or prey species, such as the reintroduction of lynx in Colorado, European bison in Romania, and fishers in Washington state, are important for restoring food web complexity.

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“When an animal disappears from an ecosystem, its loss reverberates across the web of connections that link all species in that ecosystem,” Fricke said. “Our work presents new tools for measuring what’s been lost, what more we stand to lose if endangered species go extinct and the ecological complexity we can restore through species recovery.”

Reference: “Collapse of terrestrial mammal food webs since the Late Pleistocene” by Evan C. Fricke, Chia Hsieh, Owen Middleton, Daniel Gorczynski, Caroline D. Cappello, Oscar Sanisidro, John Rowan, Jens-Christian Svenning and Lydia Beaudrot, 25 August 2022, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.abn4012

The study was funded by Rice University, the Villum Fonden, and the Independent Research Fund Denmark.