Birds in a net

I found a 20 meter unattended net in Santa Fe National Park in Panama with many stuck birds including the rare Black-crowned Antpitta. I took some photos and went to the police. To make a long story short, I eventually learned the net was part of a museum specimen collection project of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. This information wasn't volunteered. I don't know why or how long the net was unattended. This type of science reminds me of Japanese research whaling. I've written in more detail about this on my site. Maybe others will view this differently than me.

Species ID welcome as well.

This is terrible and the people responsible should have their licences revoked immediately. I can't imagine it was done purposely but nevertheless, there has to be zero tolerance, even if it were a mistake. Have you contacted the Smithsonian and reported the incident? The Director should be made aware of it and it will not be hard to track down the perpetrator.

The specimen collecter did write me last night. Among other things, he writes:

I don't hide the fact that much of my field research involves scientific collecting. I've been collecting birds in Panama for nearly 8 years, I've given several public seminars, including an extremely well-received talk at Panama Audubon, I've been profiled twice in the nation's leading newspaper, and I have a well-visited website: mj-miller.net and a blog: neo-ornithology.blogspot.com that are linked to by the leading websites dealing with Panamanian birding by Panamanians.

If the birds are being collected (i.e., killed for museum specimens) is still means that they have to be treated in a humane way and according to animal care committee guidelines (STRI has their own animal care committee according to their web site). Leaving birds to struggle in an unattended mist net is not considered humane.

One question in this regard is what "unattended" actually means. If it means that no one was in the general area of the net at the time, and removing birds regularly from the net, then this is beyond standard operating procedures for mist nets. However, perhaps the worker had several nets up and was visiting them in rotation and you happened to find this net with birds entangled. There is usually a short delay between a bird being trapped and it being removed from the net.

Greetings from Panama. Based on some off-board emails with Tom, it appears that the set of nets Tom refers to are my nets. There are two points that I want to address: a justification of modern scientific collecting, and ethical use of mist-nets.

I recall the first time I ran into a collections-based ornithologist in the field. As a Master's student doing field work in Ecuador, I was a bit troubled and shocked by staying at a hostel with a PhD student who was collecting birds. The next morning I went into the field and saw just how skilled as a naturalist this guy was. A year later, I read "A Parrot With No Name", which I recommend to everyone who loves birds, especially Neotropical birds. As I studied over Conservation International's Rapid Area Reports, I realized that museum biologists play a disproportionate role in discovering and drawing attention to the world's biodiversity hotspots; that was when I realized that I too wanted to be a museum-based ornithologist.

Fortunately, I took up my PhD under Kevin Winker, at the University of Alaska Museum, probably the world's expert on the value of modern ornithological collections, and the author of about a dozen or more scientific articles highlighting the critical role that ornithological collections play in 21st century science. Much of this goes well beyond biodiversity discovery. Most people are aware of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and it's role in banning DDT. If you know "Silent Spring" you know that it was thinning egg shells that served as the "smoking gun." But fewer people recognize that this discovery was only possible because of historical collections of bird eggs. During the end of the 1800's egg collecting was fashionable, and perhaps often done for reasons of vanity rather than illumination of knowledge. Nonetheless, these collections served as a background from which more modern specimens could be compared. In more recent years, museum specimens have been used to trace increases in environmental contaminants and even more recently to go "back in time" and determine when a wildlife-borne disease such as influenza or West Nile virus first appeared in a region. In late 2004 a tanker carrying soybeans crashed off Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands. The next summer, as a PhD student, my colleagues and I cleaned bits of seabirds from the globs of oil-tar that encased them: just like "Bones" but without the fancy equipment. We compared over 1500 oiled carcasses to a reference set of skeletal specimens: this was critical not just for conservation planning, but also to allow the US Fish and Wildlife Service to assess the full amount of damages to those responsible. The reference skeletal collection was developed from the 1970's to 1990's without any anticipation of an oil spill in 2004.

Modern museum ornithology attempts to preserve as much as possible from a specimen and archive it for society's use for as long as possible. Unlike most scientists, the museum scientist's job it to work primarily archiving material not for their own studies but for future generations of scientists. To this end, from the birds that we collect, we commonly preserve the following material:

a study skin, which anchors the identity of that bird and allows future scientists to know exactly what their DNA or pollutant sample came from...it also provides evidence of the subspecies, age and sex of the bird, as well as allows fine measurements to better understand micro-evolution;

two tissue samples, for DNA and RNA based studies...just last month I was asked for tissues to look for cryptic reservoirs of disease in bird tissues;

blood serum: for antibodies to measure whether a bird was exposed to a virus at some earlier point in it's life. Critical for eco-epidemiology models;

whole blood: for avian malaria parasite studies;

partial skeleton: along with traditional skeletal uses, these bones may be used for tracing environmental contaminants;

intestines: often non-lethal surveys of birds for AIV can only tell positive from negative, the intestine may hold enough virus to allow for viral sequencing, which can tell you WHAT strain of influenza;

ectoparasites: probably 85% of the birds of Panama carry ticks, lice, and mites that are involved in disease (including diseases that may affect humans) but are completely unknown to science. We save all, and then ship to experts in these fields;

Currently, most of my funding comes from the US Center from Disease Control and the National Institute of Health to look at how diseases move through avian populations. Specifically we are looking for pathogens such as influenza and West Nile disease. The advantage of our specimen-based approach is our ability to archive and preserve the above-mentioned tissues. As expert field ornithologists we can provide samples and care for them to preserve their scientific value in ways no one else can.

In the particular case of Santa Fe, I am trying to figure out how species formation occurs in tropical birds. Santa Fe is at a true biological cross-roads: where from a given species: Central American Caribbean, Central American Pacific and South American originated populations cross the low continental divide and mingle. During our time in Santa Fe, in a Pacific drainage we've captured normally-Caribbean lowland Golden-collared Manakins (Manacus-vitellinus) not Orange-collared Manakins (Manacus aurantiacus) that can be found just 30 km away in the Pacific lowlands). For other species, preliminary studies show that Santa Fe bird populations can be comprised on individuals that differed by 5-8% in mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA that is widely studied and is often used as a standard for measuring how distinct two species are). Interestingly, we differ from chimpanzees by about 9%. The Santa Fe case is one of only a few cases where such genetically distinctive mixing occurs, and raises the question as to whether we're dealing with cryptic species not yet recognized by science, or the ability for interbreeding at genetic distances that experts believe should result in genetic incompatibilities (e.g. T. Price 2008, Speciation in Birds).

I realize that this treatise has gotten long-winded. I'll follow up the ethics of bird netting and collecting in a second post, based on your groups' feedback. But I hope that I've left you with the impression that our science is driven by a passion for birds, and their collective welfare and conservation, that I believe that we only preserve what we know, and that my team and I are doing everything possible to facilitate the scientific discovery of as much as possible about Panama's birds. I would argue that is quite different than "Japanese research whaling". You can read more about my research, and the role that specimens play in that research, on my websites: www.mj-miller.net and www.neo-ornithology.blogspot.com.

Matt

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Originally Posted by MatthewMiller

In the particular case of Santa Fe, I am trying to figure out how species formation occurs in tropical birds. Santa Fe is at a true biological cross-roads: where from a given species: Central American Caribbean, Central American Pacific and South American originated populations cross the low continental divide and mingle. During our time in Santa Fe, in a Pacific drainage we've captured normally-Caribbean lowland Golden-collared Manakins (Manacus-vitellinus) not Orange-collared Manakins (Manacus aurantiacus) that can be found just 30 km away in the Pacific lowlands). For other species, preliminary studies show that Santa Fe bird populations can be comprised on individuals that differed by 5-8% in mitochondrial DNA (a type of DNA that is widely studied and is often used as a standard for measuring how distinct two species are). Matt

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Hi Matt

Would you explain the advantage killing the birds has over non-lethal research methods such as collecting feather and blood samples for DNA analysis and ringing/banding? From what you have said your area of work seems ideally suited to studying a live population.

John