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I am a 4th year student in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation with a minor in Entomology. I have moved all over the US, living in Florida the longest. I have no background or experience in human dimensions but I think it is a super important field that should get more attention.

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Public opinion of bats shifted around the time of Covid

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Hi! I'm a third year Wildlife Ecology and Conservation major at the University of Florida. My hometown is Miami, FL. Pictured is me with a baby woolly monkey that I helped raise during my time studying in the Amazon Rainforest at the USFQ's biodiversity station. I'm really passionate about wildlife rehabilitation!

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Livestock predation by jaguars can be an issue in Latin America

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Hi, I’m Gabi. I’m in my fifth year of Natural Resources Conservation Engineering at the Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) in Valdivia. My hometown is Santiago, but 7 years ago my family and I moved to Cunco, in the La Araucanía region. I love mushrooms!

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Human-Condor conflicts have increased in Ecuador over the last decades, and the species is now heavily threatened by habitat loss due to urban and agricultural expansion, forest plantations and mining activities, illegal hunting, competition with feral dogs, and carrion poisoning.

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The University of Florida is consistently ranked as one of the best public universities in the United States!

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Repeat performance: UF again ranked No. 5 among public universities by U.S. News & World Report

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For the second year in a row, the University of Florida is listed as one of the top five public research universities in the nation, according to the 2023 Best Colleges rankings released today by U.S. News & World Report.

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Hi! I’m from Costa Rica! I have a bachelor's degree in biology, with an emphasis in ecology and sustainable development. I am very interested in the topic of coexistence, specifically with felines. I hope to start my master's degree next year on a related topic.

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Hi! I’m Isaac. I grew up here in Gainesville, FL and lived in Colorado for 6 years. I’m majoring in Natural Resource Conservation and minoring in Wildlife Ecology at UF. I am really interested in habitat management and how it impacts different wildlife. 

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This summer, I had the opportunity to go study pollinators in rural Oregon. Pollinator populations have been decreasing all over the US because of habitat loss. This is a Columbia silk moth that I found while setting up a transect to sample for bumblebees.

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Prescribed fire is an important part of habitat management in Florida. Fire is a natural process that has shaped the ecosystems and wildlife in the southeastern United States. People are sometimes scared of prescribed fires and human dimensions is necessary in educating and informing the public about the importance of burning the landscape.

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My favorite Latin American wildlife issue is invasive hippos in Columbia. Following the raid of drug lord Pablo Escobar's estates, his captive hippos were not properly managed. This led to an established population of hippos causing harm to waterways in Columbia. Authorities shot one hippo, and images of his body went public. This caused controversy among the citizens of Columbia and animals rights groups. Devising a management plan that pleases all stakeholders has proven difficult.

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During heavy rains, extra water floods into the hippo pools, churning up the putrefying muck and sending it off downstream. For good reason, these events are called "flushing flows." To study them, Dutton and Subalusky used an oxygen-logger-an arm-long cylindrical device that, to the untrained eye, looks rather like a pipe bomb. "We always get stopped at airports," Dutton says. Once dangled off the side of a bridge, the logger revealed that flushing flows dramatically reduce the oxygen levels of the downstream river, often to levels that are lethal for many aquatic animals. That, says Dutton and Subalusky, suffocates the fish.

The duo went out of their way to confirm this idea. They added hippo poop to bottles of water and demonstrated that oxygen levels fall. They added poopy water to "experimental streams"-long trays designed to simulate a flowing river. But they still craved a more realistic experiment. "We were talking about ways of how we could create a flood through a pool, and some other researchers said: Why don't you build a small dam?"

Inspired, the duo used sandbags to block off the water supply to a nearby pool that's in hippo territory but not frequented by the animals. A Maasai fixer connected them to a guy who had a large truck, another guy who owned two huge 4,000-liter tanks, and a third guy who owned a large wastewater pump. With all of that, the team transferred 16,000 liters of soiled hippo water into their artificial pool. And when they released the sandbags, they found that oxygen levels did indeed plummet in the water downstream.

Bizarrely, this is the second study to be published this week on how hippo poop affects river environments. Keenan Stears, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, did similar work in Tanzania's Great Ruaha River. Unlike the Mara, the Ruaha's waters have been heavily drained by upstream farms. During the dry season, it stops flowing altogether, and its hippos are confined to isolated pools. Stears found that pools with lots of hippos have much less oxygen than those where the beasts are rare. As such, they had half the diversity of fish and invertebrate species, and just 4 percent the numbers of fish. Only in the wet seasons, when water once again flowed between the pools, did the fish and invertebrates bounce back.

Stears estimates that around 94 percent of hippo populations in Africa live in rivers like the Ruaha that have either already started to dry up or will likely do so as the climate changes. "The results from our study are indicative of emerging issues relevant to the whole of Africa," he says.

This "reinforces the need to maintain flows in these river systems during the dry season," adds Frank Masese, from the University of Eldoret in Kenya.

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Hippos Poop So Much That Sometimes All the Fish Die

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During heavy rains, extra water floods into the hippo pools, churning up the putrefying muck and sending it off downstream. For good reason, these events are called "flushing flows." To study them, Dutton and Subalusky used an oxygen-logger-an arm-long cylindrical device that, to the untrained eye, looks rather like a pipe bomb.

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To me, the Kingdom Fungi is wonderful. Its diversity in ecological functions, sizes, and shapes is impressive. Fungi play a fundamental role in the decomposition of organic matter and form symbioses with various organisms. They act as transformers, cooperators, communicators, and competitors in the ecosystem. They are both strange and beautiful. Some people love them, while others fear them. As humans, we still have much to learn about them and how to relate to non-human organisms. For my undergraduate thesis, I am conducting an ethnographic study of the popular culture of mushrooms to understand their valuation and impact on the conservation of the Fungi kingdom in southern Chile. May our connection with nature regenerate and grow through love, just like the mycelium.

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Hi! I'm a third year student in social and political sciences. I grew up in Marseille, in the south of France and I've been living in Toulouse (the city in the photo) for two years for my studies. I'm interested in the political dimension of environmental policy management and I would like to acquire new knowledge in wildlife ecology.

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I'm currently in Costa Rica for a year, doing an internship in biological research. I analyze camera traps to study feline behavior and their interactions with humans. I also feel lucky to be able to observe Costa Rica's landscapes and wildlife for real.

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Hey everyone! My name is Alex and I am a fourth-year Wildlife Ecology and Conservation student at UF. I am from Tampa Florida and have lived in Florida my whole life. I am super interested in the human dimensions aspect of natural resource conservation and would love to research in the future more about traditional ecological knowledge and environmental justice. This picture is of me when I put on a dry suit to go snorkeling in Iceland between two tectonic plates!