Whales vs. gulls: Assessing trade-offs in wildlife and waste management in Patagonia, Argentina

© 2015 Elsevier B.V.In Península Valdés, (Patagonia) Argentina, the consequences of poor waste management and an overpopulation of kelp gulls has led to gulls feeding on living southern right whales, potentially causing losses to the tourism industry through loss in coastal quality and suboptimal right whale viewing experiences. Despite local progress in closing waste disposal sites and culling gulls, both waste and pest problems persist. While this problem could impact the long-term viability of the site as a whale watching destination and present conservation concerns, little research has been done concerning the socio-economic aspects of the problem. The present study interviewed 650 tourists about their willingness to pay to manage the gulls versus the waste in order to reduce the gull population and remove the risk to the whales. This research finds that tourists favor addressing the human-driven component of the problem, the waste, over culling the natural component of the problem, the kelp gulls. These findings present a remarkable insight to assessing trade-offs between two management strategies to a local problem associated with coastal development and tourism. The results could further be broadened to other destinations facing waste and pest management challenges in the face of growing tourism and urbanization

Social Competitiveness and Plasticity of Neuroendocrine Function in Old Age: Influence of Neonatal Novelty Exposure and Maternal Care Reliability

Early experience is known to have a profound impact on brain and behavioral function later in life. Relatively few studies, however, have examined whether the effects of early experience remain detectable in the aging animal. Here, we examined the effects of neonatal novelty exposure, an early stimulation procedure, on late senescent rats' ability to win in social competition. During the first 3 weeks of life, half of each litter received daily 3-min exposures to a novel environment while the other half stayed in the home cage. At 24 months of age, pairs of rats competed against each other for exclusive access to chocolate rewards. We found that novelty-exposed rats won more rewards than home-staying rats, indicating that early experience exerts a life-long effect on this aspect of social dominance. Furthermore, novelty-exposed but not home-staying rats exhibited habituation of corticosterone release across repeated days of social competition testing, suggesting that early experience permanently enhances plasticity of the stress response system. Finally, we report a surprising finding that across individual rat families, greater effects of neonatal novelty exposure on stress response plasticity were found among families whose dams provided more reliable, instead of a greater total quantity of, maternal care