Science vs. Pseudo-science
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![Lorca nurses her yearling daughters Lala and Lela.
(Note the milky breast)
(c) 2002 S. Stringham
(c) 2002 Stephen Stringham
SMOKEY AND MIRRORS:
The War Between Science and Pseudoscience
in Grizzly Bear Conservation
by Stephen F. Stringham (c) 2000
(Wild Earth Magazine, Fall 2002)
As late as 1850, roughly 100,000 grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) lived between Canada and Mexico, from the Pacific Coast to the Mississippi River. A century later, only a handful of population fragments survived. In 1975, Threatened status was granted to the metapopulation of six fragments living south of Canada.
Because this metapopulation was one of the first protected under the Endangered Species Act, it has been the subject of many pioneering efforts at implementing the ESA. Approaches to conserving many other species and ecosystems have shaped conservation of the grizzly and its habitat. Reciprocally, the basic strategies developed for grizzlies and many of the lessons learned from them, should apply to other high-risk species. Although the specific techniques and tactics of conservation vary from one species to another, the fundamental challenges and strategies should be nearly universal.
After a quarter-century of Threatened status, efforts are underway to remove this protection from the grizzly—to delist the species. Proponents of delisting argue that protection under the ESA is no longer needed to assure viability of the metapopulation. Opponents respond that claims of recovery are based on politics, not biology—that risks to the great bear have not declined, but intensified and will continue to do so over the foreseeable future. They assert that much of the evidence upon which recovery claims have been based is at best poor science, and at worst pseudoscience—smoke and mirrors.
This controversy does not arise from lack of research on the grizzly. Few other large carnivores have been systematically studied so intensively for so long. It is not the amount of research done nor the amount of money spent that are deficient, but the key questions that are asked or ignored by official researchers and managers, the specific data they have chosen to consider or omit, and how data have been interpreted. Although much of the research has been technically adequate, scientific findings have been used less to determine management decisions than to rationalize decisions made for other reasons. Bear biologists whose research has not supported agency claims have sometimes been marginalized or blackballed; their research receives virtually no government funding.
Why Grizzlies?
Ecologically, the health of our biosphere depends far more on flowering plants, insects, amphibians, and many other relatively obscure groups of organisms than it does on charismatic species such as bears, eagles, wolves, gorillas and dolphins. So why focus on grizzlies? Three reasons:
● Charismatic species are of great strategic and symbolic importance. Bears capture public interest and imagination to a degree equaled by few other creatures, making them flagships of the conservation movement.
● Because of their sensitivity to disturbance, large home ranges, and exploitation of a wide array of niches, the status of bears in an ecosystem is seen as a barometer of human impacts on the ecosystem, and of how well conservation programs actually work.
● Individual bears may require hundreds or thousands of acres of diverse, relatively pristine ecosystems. Robust populations require vast areas of such habitat. Conserving the ecosystems upon which bears depend provides a critical umbrella of protection for many other species of flora and fauna.
Conversely, strictly protecting expansive, high-quality habitat in bear country potentially deters, displaces, or delays natural resource extraction and other kinds of economic development in these areas. Bears are thus seen as a political keystone by both those who promote conservation and those who oppose it. With millions of development dollars at stake, disinformation and suppression of dissent are common. To understand the extent to which the public has been misled about long-term viability of the grizzly, one need only consider how poorly the ESA is actually implemented by federal conservation measures.
Grizzly Science and the ESA
The ESA defines an Endangered species as one that is in danger of extinction over a substantial portion of its range. A Threatened species is one that is likely to become endangered (that is, inviable) within the foreseeable future. Logically, therefore, a species has not Recovered until it is no longer endangered or likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future.
The ESA also stipulates that decisions about whether a species warrants classification as Endangered, Threatened, or Recovered must be based solely on the best available scientific information, not on political or socioeconomic considerations.
In the book Science and the Endangered Species Act, the National Research Council, noted that these decisions should be based on rigorous scientific assessment of impacts and of consequent risks of extinction and endangerment. For instance, using arbitrary figures, the threshold for Endangerment could be defined (e.g., by the US Fish & Wildlife Service) as a 5% risk of extinction over the next 100 or 500 years—what Mark Shaffer called the brink of inviability. Thresholds for Threatened and Recovered status could be set at 5% and 0.5% risks of endangerment in 100 years. Yet, to date, the USFWS has never committed to maintaining any minimum levels of viability, much less to basing species status on viability level.
The ESA can reasonably be interpreted as mandating that once a species has been listed as Threatened or Endangered, continued protection should be automatic until there is compelling proof of recovery: until the listed population or metapopulation has achieved long-term viability.
Has this burden of proof been met for the grizzly?
No.
Viability appears to be declining; for several of the most potent sources of risk to the grizzly are not waning, but intensifying.
How then, can the USFWS consider delisting this bear? Because meeting the agency’s official Criteria of Recovery does not equate with restoring long term viability.
Ultimately, the fate of a population—whether it thrives or goes extinct—depends on whether enough individuals are born and survive to adulthood to offset those dying–much as your financial solvency depends on income offsetting expenses. Unless births/income equals or exceeds deaths/debits, a population/account shrinks. If birth and survival rates are impaired too long, a population will decline towards extinction.
Assessing status of an interest-bearing checking account depends on knowing its rates of interest, deposits, and debits. So too, assessing status of a wildlife population depends on knowing its vital rates of growth, birth, and death. Current status is assessed from current rates; future status is predicted by estimating how each rate is likely to change over coming years, decades, and centuries. That, in turn, depends on future supplies of food, cover, security from threats, levels of human impact, and other factors.
Assessment of vital rates, and analysis of the factors controlling them, is central to wildlife management and ecological research worldwide. It should likewise be central to management of grizzly bears and other high-risk species—but with even greater rigor, to compensate for higher risk and narrower tolerance for error.
Is this what we actually find?
Not for the grizzly bear. Consider the official criteria by which Recovery of at least the Yellowstone population is to be judged, according to the federal government’s Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan–something which may be easiest to understand if we draw parallels between the information needed for managing bear populations vs. bank accounts.
● If your bank account received payments from numerous clients, would it make sense to keep track only of the number of payments received, but to ignore their amounts? Not if amounts vary substantially. Yet, in essence, this is what the government does with grizzlies. Instead of taking into account all cubs born each year, as population biologists normally do, the Recovery criteria consider only the number of litters born (estimated from the number of sows seen with cubs). Litter size [payment size] and total cub numbers [total deposits] are ignored–even though this information is already in hand.
● How long could you avoid overdrawing a checking account if you kept records only on what was spent on just recreation, without recording checks for rent, food, utilities, clothing and other expenses? Yet, this too is essentially the government approach. Instead of taking into account all mortality [debits], the Recovery criteria consider only known human-caused mortality, as a percent of estimated population size. Even if most adolescents and adults do eventually die from direct human causes, the proportion of human-caused vs. natural deaths can vary widely over time. Furthermore, a high proportion of mortality among immature bears is due proximally to “natural causes.” Yet, natural mortality rates are entirely ignored by the Recovery criteria.
●Back to spending for recreation: Is this excessive? That depends on how much money is needed for other expenses, and on your total account balance. Yet, by analogy, the government not only ignores other expenses [causes of mortality], but it has only the crudest estimates of account balance [total grizzly numbers].
How crude? Consider this: Suppose that over a period of say 1975 to 1985, your mean checking account balance on July 4 was $1050, and that during each of these years the account received 100 deposits. The [apples/oranges] ratio of balance to deposits would be 10.5. How safe would you be in assuming that your July 4th balance in 2001 was also 10.5-fold the number of deposits made that year?
I’ve got to be kidding? Unfortunately not; this is essentially the government approach. During a several-year period more than a decade ago, the ratio of the number of cub litters seen vs. a rough estimate of total population size was about 10.5. So, despite the roughness of that ratio even for past years, size of the Yellowstone grizzly population in each following year has been estimated by multiplying cub litter abundance by approximately 10.5. Even if better information becomes available, this will apparently be ignored in assessing when Recovery is achieved.
● Suppose that you were interested in buying a small business–say a shop that sells hiking and camping gear. You would want to know how profitable it has been in the past; how solvent it is now; and how profitable it is likely to be in the future–how much its income is likely to exceed its expenses. So too, a reasonable criterion of Recovery would be whether grizzly births have been exceeding deaths for a substantial period, and whether they are likely to continue doing so in the future. Yet, past and future balance is ignored by government Recovery criteria. Government criteria don’t even address relationships between its singular component of income (the number of cub litters seen) and its singular component of debit (human-caused mortality).
● Having information on only a fraction of your sources of income and debits is more than enough to handicap most businesses; errors in that information only make matters worse. Grizzly management suffers from both limitations. The amount of income and debit that the government records each year depends on how much effort is put into gathering this information, and on how well the job is done. Funding is critical to both. Indices of population health [by contrast to health itself] could be improved simply by increasing money for counting litters and decreasing money for monitoring human-caused deaths.
● Finally, instead of considering how the population is likely to be influenced by long-term trends in habitat size, quality, utilization, accessibility, carrying capacity, and impacts, official Recovery criteria are based on much more simplistic indices—for instance, the number of “Bear Management Units” within the designated Recovery Zone where mother-cub families have been seen.
* * *
From an ecological standpoint, the government’s demographic and (especially) habitat criteria of Recovery are arbitrary and capricious—determined not by the “best available science” but by the greatest bureaucratic convenience and ease of achieving politically correct results.
Assessing population status in terms of simplistic, easily monitored indices would suffice only if there were compelling evidence that:
● these indices could be measured accurately and precisely;
● the indices were shown to be very highly correlated with the actual vital rates—for example, if an X% rise or fall in cub litter abundance were always accompanied by an X+5% rise or fall in total cub abundance and in total population size;
● the indices would reveal with certainty (say, 99% probability) any population decline quickly enough for managers to reverse it before viability is lost.
But none of these burdens of proof has been met, and it is doubtful that they could be.
* * *
Vital rates and risk—the probability that a population will become endangered or even go extinct—are governed by many factors. For bears, one of the most critical factors is the supply of food, especially protein and lipid. The higher the levels of soluble protein and of lipid (fat/oil) in the diet, the higher the rate of reproduction. Females on the richest diets tend to achieve the largest body size, to grow and mature most quickly to independence from the mother, and to produce their own cubs at the youngest age; they tend to produce larger litters of larger cubs. Rich diets likewise tend to increase cub survivorship, so long as exploiting the rich food sources doesn’t make cubs especially vulnerable to enemies or other hazards.
Within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the major sources of protein and lipid are bison carrion, spawning cutthroat trout that have left lakes and entered streams where they are accessible to bears, army cutworm moths, and nuts from whitebark pine trees. All four of these food sources are already declining or can be expected to decline in the near future.
Bison numbers are being reduced to minimize the potential transfer of disease (brucellosis) from bison to cattle. Cutthroat trout are being eaten by lake trout, a fish that bears cannot harvest. During part of their life cycle, moths are an agricultural pest that farmers attempt to eradicate. Both moth and pine nut abundance are vulnerable to global warming. White-bark pine trees are also suffering from plagues of blister rust and bark beetles.
The last time the Yellowstone National Park grizzly population suffered loss of a major food source—when garbage dumps were closed beginning in 1968—many years were required for bears to fully adapt, and a high proportion of the grizzly population died before the shift was complete. Bison, trout, moths, and nuts cushioned the loss of garbage, but what will cushion their loss? Can grizzlies compensate for loss of bison carrion by eating more elk (how is this affected by rising wolf numbers)? Can bears make up for loss of moths by digging more earthworms or tearing apart more logs for ants? Is there evidence that any grizzly population in North America can remain viable on such an impoverished diet? How long would the dietary shift take? How many Yellowstone grizzlies would die in the meantime? How much would risks of extinction and endangerment rise? How many people would the desperate bears maul? Available information is too limited to yield definite answers; but the future looks grim.
As normal food supplies shrink, bears are put at greater risk as they seek alternative food sources such as livestock, beehives, camp coolers, and garbage. This brings them into more contact and conflict with people. Conflicts could also increase due to the exploding human population in grizzly habitat, where some of the fastest-growing communities in America are located. Bears are killed because (a) people are panicked by exaggerated rates of ursid ferocity; to protect property from damage by bears; or in the pursuit of sport or profit.
If trends in food scarcity and bear-vulnerability to human persecution continue as expected, rates of reproduction and survival for grizzly bears will decline. The population faces a habitat bottleneck that may not support even the current number of bears. This would nullify any growth of the population over the past decade or two, and cause it to shrink again. Indeed, these populations may already be at higher risk than when they were listed as Threatened.
Speculation that bears will find and learn to exploit alternative foods helps rationalize the claim by Recovery Coordinator Chris Servheen and his associate Mark Boyce (in the Final Environmental Impact Statement on reintroducing grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot range) that the risk of remaining populations all going extinct over the next century is down to less than 1 in a million, and probably far lower. But both notions are wrong, and two wrongs don’t add up to one right. If Boyce’s methods of calculating future risks for our few remnant populations were applied to the many grizzly populations that existed as late as 1850, they would predict that nearly all of those original populations would still be flourishing; in fact, nearly all have disappeared. An approach that cannot account for the rash of past extinctions certainly cannot be trusted to reliably assess risk of future extinction for the few bear populations that remain.
Even if extinction risk were really as low as agency biologists assert, what would that tell us about endangerment risk, which is the actual measure of Recovery specified in the ESA? Even if a population is viable now, how likely is viability to be lost over the next one to five centuries? This is the key issue, yet the Recovery Team has never adequately addressed it.
It is only more smoke and mirrors to claim that long-term risks can be kept in check by implementing management techniques such as augmenting bear food supplies or reducing human disturbance. There is no proof that such techniques would suffice to prevent the grizzly from again becoming gravely imperiled, much less that managers will ever have the ability, funding, or political mandate to implement further restrictions on human impacts in bear country. America’s new international trade agreements, which override many of our environmental laws, might alone preclude adequate protection, especially by state governments.
Have these defects in the Recovery process been brought to the attention of government agencies? Yes, many times. Have they responded? Yes and no. Yes, government research has become more sophisticated. But, no, this hasn’t modified the Recovery criteria. There is little reason to believe that the Recovery Team will ever adequately address these and other deficiencies of the criteria–which seem locked in stone. Recognition of these defects and any new information which could improve assessment of viability are all being ignored by the bureaucratic-political juggernaut that is steamrolling its way towards premature delisting. Indeed, preparations for official delisting are already well underway [Bush promises to delist by 2005], and the planned grizzly reintroduction program for the Selway-Bitterroot Mountains was recently cancelled by Interior Secretary Gale Norton
It would be highly irresponsible to remove the grizzly’s ESA protections without compelling evidence of true recovery; indeed, the weight of evidence suggests that long-term risks are increasing. But will this evidence ever receive due consideration? Not if government agencies and agency-controlled NGOs continue to control access to and dissemination of critical information.
Protecting Science from Politics
How the challenge of grizzly recovery is handled by wildlife scientists, managers, activists, politicians, judges, and other interests is already setting precedents that will affect the fate of bears and many other imperiled species.
High-risk populations have little chance of long-term survival unless key government agencies and NGOs quit squashing dissent—and begin to support joint efforts to reliably assess (a) current and future impacts, as well as consequent risks of extinction and endangerment; (b) the minimum protections needed to adequately limit these impacts and risks; and (c) how to achieve sufficient protection at minimal socioeconomic and financial cost. (At the 2001 congress of the International Association for Bear Research and Management, dissenting scientists were initially given permission to hold a workshop on premature delisting; then permission was withdrawn because of protests by agency personnel; conference papers favoring delisting were given precedence over dissenting ones.)
Will such corruption ever be abolished? Will rigorous science ever play a decisive role in assessing impact and risk, and in decisions about when and if charismatic (if controversial) species such as the grizzly have fully recovered? If not, what likelihood is there that ESA conservation programs for species of less interest to the general public will be anything but pseudoscientific exercises in political gamesmanship?
Ultimately, the war between science and pseudoscience in grizzly conservation is symptomatic of much large issues. This war is not just about conserving bears or other wildlife and ecosystems. It is also about conserving democracy—about freedom of inquiry, information, and communication; about limitations on government’s ability to coerce, and about the rule over politicians and corporations by an informed public, rather than the rule over a disinformed public by velvet-gloved tyrants.
No battle was ever won by sitting on the sidelines. It is past time for major scientific organizations to identify examples of pseudoscience in implementing the Endangered Species Act and demand that government agencies better insulate their scientists from political pressures, be more thorough and timely in sharing information from government research with the scientific community at large, better foster peer critique of government research and management, and then use these critiques to upgrade government research and management of wildlife and ecosystems. Now is the time to act—to protect the bears and the biologists who study them.
Stephen F. Stringham, PhD - Director, Bear Communication & Coexistence Research Program
NOTE: If you found this article interesting, you might also want to read the book
SCIENCE UNDER SIEGE by Tod Wilkinson.](Science%20v%20PseudoScience_files/shapeimage_14.png)
