Tag: wayne

Snakes in Suburbia

  • The timber rattlesnake has been wiped out in several states in the East and Northeast and is not doing well in the Midwest. (Photo by David Larson, Saint Louis Zoo)

Scientists are worried that
snakes living in sprawling areas could be affected.
In one region, researchers have implanted dozens of
snakes with radio transmitters. Julie Bierach reports, it’s part of an effort to prevent a
decline in the snake population and educate people
that they can live with them:

Transcript

Scientists are worried that
snakes living in sprawling areas could be affected.
In one region, researchers have implanted dozens of
snakes with radio transmitters. Julie Bierach reports, it’s part of an effort to prevent a
decline in the snake population and educate people
that they can live with them:


Wayne Drda loves snakes:


“I think they’re really neat animals.”


In this wilderness area, Drda and his team are studying the basic movement patterns and habitat use of
Timber rattlesnakes and Osage copperheads:


“A lot of the wildlife areas, are being surrounded by subdivisions and homes, and some are
completely surrounded. And so the animals tend to wander out of the wildlife areas into
backyards and many of them don’t survive that.”



The timber rattlesnake already has been wiped out in several states in the East and Northeast. And the
timber rattler is not doing very well in many states in the Midwest. Drda says snakes in general get a
bad rap. A lot of people don’t like them, so otherwise peaceful people can turn into what he calls “nature
vigilantes,” and they kill snakes on sight:


“Well, I guess the most common way is with a shovel. That’s always the common joke, the
shovel. (Laughs)”


Drda wants to prevent that from happening as often in his area. He’s the field manager for the Pitviper
Research Project at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center near the suburbs of St. Louis,
Missouri. He’s trying to help suburbanites understand that the Timber rattler is a much less aggressive
species of rattlesnakes.


Drda and his team have implanted 26 snakes with the radio transmitters, and track them daily using a
GPS system. Ryan Turnquist is one of the students tracking the snakes:


“And basically we use that to map it on an area photo and determine how far the snake moved,
where the snake moved, what kind of habitat they used, home range size.”


On this day, they’ve already tracked 8 snakes. And now, they’re on their way to find another. Turnquist
turns on the GPS system. And we begin to plow through the woods. Each snake has been named and assigned its own frequency on the transmitter.
The 4-foot-long male rattlesnake we’re tracking has been named Aron.


As we get closer, the signal gets stronger. Turnquist leads the way pointing the big steel antenna in
several directions. And then, we see him. Aron is lying in the sun, half coiled, near a log . He blends in
with the pile of leaves that surround him. He doesn’t rattle, but instead is still, hoping we don’t see him.
Wayne Drda has been studying snakes for 40 years. He knows what Aron is up to:


“This snake is probably in the most conspicuous situation you can find him in, except being out in
the road. He’s not going to give away his position by doing anything until he feels like he’s
really threatened. I mean he knows we’re here, but he’s probably not going to rattle.”


That happens a lot more often than you expect. Drda says they’ve already tracked some snakes that
have made their way to backyards of homes in the area. And the homeowners don’t even know it:


“We’ve been trackin’ this one snake, her name is Hortence. She’s basically been in somebody’s
backyard now for three weeks I guess.”


So far, the team has learned that the male timber rattlers have a larger home range. They breed in late
summer, or early fall, and they never breed with females from the same den where the males hibernate.


Jeff Ettling is with the St. Louis Zoo. He’s conducting a DNA analysis to determine which areas need to
be kept open so the snakes can travel back and forth without running into someone with a shovel:


“If we can get enough samples within a given area, we should be able to tell what the relatedness is
and which males are moving between dens. That’s what we’re hoping to find out. I mean, we have a good
idea by tracking them where they go. But which females are they breeding with from different
dens we really don’t have any idea right now.”


The research team is finding new scientific information about the snakes. But, they say the ultimate
goal is to explain to the people who live in the area that you can live with the rattlesnakes. They don’t
have to kill them. Drda wants people who find a timber rattler in their backyard to call a herpetologist,
instead of running for the shovel.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Bierach.

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Invasives Destroying Great Lakes Food Chain

  • Biologists sorting fish. The populations of smaller fish that game fish eat have collapsed in Lake Huron. (Photo courtesy of MI DNR)

Although zebra mussels have been affecting the ecology of the Great Lakes since they were first found in 1988, researchers are continuously surprised at how much damage they’ve caused. Now, biologists are wondering if zebra mussels and the more recently arrived quagga mussels are to blame for a collapse of the fishery in one of North America’s largest lakes. Lester Graham reports the researchers are also wondering if this collapse is a preview of what will happen to all of the Great Lakes:

Transcript

Although zebra mussels have been affecting the ecology of the Great Lakes since they were first found in 1988, researchers are continuously surprised at how much damage they’ve caused. Now, biologists are wondering if zebra mussels and the more recently arrived quagga mussels are to blame for a collapse of the fishery in one of North America’s largest lakes. Lester Graham reports the researchers are also wondering if this collapse is a preview of what will happen to all of the Great Lakes:


It’s off-season for charter boat fishing and Captain Wayne Banicky asked if we could meet at a local watering hole called the Boat Bar. Captain Banicky takes people out fishing on Lake Huron. Well, he used to. The past few years he’s been charter boat fishing in Lake Michigan. He says fish started to become more scarce on Lake Huron, and he was forced to make the move.


“Economics, pure and simple. Dollars and cents. Once you start seeing a decline and being on the water every day and you see those declines in your numbers, it’s just a matter of time before financially you can’t afford to stay there. Those dock fees aren’t given up free. That’s an expensive tab to pay every year.”


Fishing for most species in Lake Huron is not good. But the story is not just a matter of not stocking enough fish or just a bad year, it’s a matter of a collapse of the bottom of the food chain. It’s not just the fish sport fishers like to catch that are down, it’s their prey: the smaller fish those big game fish eat. Prey fish stocks have collapsed, and supplies of the food those small prey fish eat, the plankton, have also collapsed.


Jim Johnson is with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources Alpena Fisheries Research Station.


“There was a huge decline in the amount of nutrients available to zooplankton and phytoplankton in the middle of Lake Huron. These are the basic nutrient bits that fish eat. And it appears now to most of us in the scientific community that a large portion of the nutrients that used enter Lake Huron are now being trapped by zebra and quagga mussels and not finding their way to alewives and other prey fish.”


Scientists from different government agencies and universities in the U.S. and Canada had been noticing changes, but things have gone seriously wrong very quickly in Lake Huron, and it might go wrong other places.


Tom Nalepa is with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab. He says tiny aquatic food sources for fish, such as a shrimp-like organism called diporeia, are declining dramatically in other Great Lakes.


“All the players are in place for it to happen in these other lakes too, you know, the loss of diporeia, the expansion of quagga mussels. And maybe Lake Huron is the first to show a collapse in the prey fish. What does it mean? Well basically, you know, there’s not going to be many fish out there for the sport fisherman to catch anymore.”


And sport fishing is multi-billion dollar industry in the Great Lakes. Back at the Boat Bar, charter fishing boat captain Wayne Banicky says fishing is still good in Lake Michigan, but he worries when he thinks about what happened in Lake Huron.


“I think that the fishery as a whole in the Great Lakes is in serious jeopardy right now. Something’s got to be done.”


But the question is what? What can be done when invasive species are changing an entire ecosystem to the point the fishery collapses?


“I don’t know to be honest with you. I don’t think any one of us knows. It’s scary, that much I will admit to you. It is scary right now.”


And guys like Captain Banicky aren’t the only ones worried.


Jim Johnson at Alpena Fisheries Research Station says you can’t undo the damage that’s already done. It’s just a matter of waiting to see how nature responds to the invasive zebra and quagga mussels and other invaders. Johnson says the key is to prevent more invasive species from being introduced to the lakes.


“The best we can do right now, I think the single most effective thing we as managers can do, is to make it understood by the decision makers just how disruptive the invasive species are and try to put a stop to those.”


The source of many of these invasive species is the ballast tanks of foreign ships entering the Great Lakes. Some regulations have reduced the chance that more invasive species will hitchhike to the Great Lakes, but more are still getting in. In the meantime, agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Coast Guard say Congress hasn’t given them the authority to regulate foreign ships strictly enough to stop new invasive species from entering.


So, fishery managers can only watch the other Great Lakes for more signs of a collapse of the fisheries as they’ve only been able to stand by and watch happen in Lake Huron.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

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Turning Nuke Waste Sites Into Playgrounds

  • Grassland prairie flowers from Weldon Spring, part of the Department of Energy's restoration effort to control erosion and add aesthetic beauty to the area. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)

Across the U.S., there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons programs.
The government is trying to return these Cold War relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery visited one that was recently opened to the public:

Transcript

Across the US, there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the
nation’s nuclear weapons programs. The government is trying to return these Cold War
relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much
like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery recently visited one that was recently
opened to the public…


A thick grove of trees opens up to a clearing that reveals a white mound of limestone
rock. It rises like a tomb from some long-forgotten civilization, were it not for the water
towers and golf courses on the horizon.


Mike Leahy and his 9-year-old son Cameron came to this rock dome to catch the view
atop its 75 foot summit. But the real attraction was what they did not see:


“We read the sign and saw what was buried and how they did it, and – it’s kind of
disturbing, what’s in there.”


Beneath their feet lay more than a million cubic yards of spent uranium, asbestos and
PCB’s. The 45 acre mound is a disposal cell, where the government buried thousands of
barrels and tons of debris. That history didn’t bother young Cameron:


“It’s really cool. They keep all that nuclear waste under all that and it can’t harm
anybody.”


The Weldon Spring site, 30 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri began during World War
Two as an Army TNT factory. In the 1950’s, the plant refined yellow cake uranium for
later use in nuclear weapons. All that stopped in 1966 and all the radioactive waste just
sat there. Weldon Spring became an EPA Superfund site in 1987. After a 900 million
dollar cleanup, the site was opened to tourists in 2002.


(Sound of frogs)


Today, frogs sing in a native prairie at the foot of the cell. In April, officials opened a
hiking trail adjacent to a once-radioactive landfill. The route connects to a state park.


Weldon Spring is not a park per se, but project manager Yvonne Deyo says urban sprawl
prompted them to think like one:


“There’s subdivisions and lots of infrastructure going in…and that just kind of hits home
how important green space is, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do a little bit of
here at the site.”


Weldon Spring is one of about 100 such sites the Department of Energy is converting to
what it calls “beneficial re-use.” Many are becoming recreational venues. Another
closed uranium plant near Cincinnati is adding horseback riding trails. In Wayne, New
Jersey, a former thorium processing facility is becoming a baseball field. And a national
wildlife preserve is in the works at Rocky Flats, the site outside Denver that made the
plutonium cores of nuclear warheads.


The Department of Energy says Weldon Spring is safe for visitors – though some residual
contamination remains.


(Sound of Burgermeister Spring)


Burgermeister Spring runs through a 7-thousand acre state reserve adjacent to the site.
This is where uranium-laced groundwater from Weldon Spring rises to the surface.
Though the spring exceeds the EPA’s drinking water quality standard, there’s no warning
sign here. Officials say the contamination is so low that it poses no immediate public
hazard. The spring feeds into one of the most popular fishing lakes on the property.
Most visitors are surprised to hear that:


“Huh.”


Jeff Boeving fishes for bass four or five times a month:


“(Does that concern you to hear that?) Yeah – absolutely…I mean, they’ve got a great
area out here and they’re kind of messing it up if they’re going to have contaminants, you know, going into it.”


The government’s vision of post-nuclear playgrounds is not without its critics. Arjun
Makhijani heads the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park,
Maryland. He says recreational sites near urban development zones risk losing their
original purpose:


“Institutional memory tends to be very short; after 30, 40, 50 years people forget, they
begin to develop the land, and pretty soon you could have houses, farms and schools in
the area. So it’s not necessary that it will stay recreational forever.”


Recreation is only one option the Department of Energy is considering for all of its sites.
In the last two years, the agency’s budget has doubled with the addition of nearly a dozen
radioactive properties. Officials say Congress has so far supported its fiscal requests.
And with the future of a proposed permanent nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain still
in doubt, even more tax dollars will likely be spent converting the nuclear dumps in
America’s backyards to a place where families play.


For the GLRC, I’m Kevin Lavery.

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