Climatic warming is likely to exacerbate nutritional stress and reduce weight gain in large mammalian herbivores by reducing plant nutritional quality. Yet accurate predictions of the effects of climatic warming on herbivores are limited by a poor understanding of how herbivore diet varies along climate gradients. We utilized DNA metabarcoding to reconstruct seasonal variation in the diet of No...

The objective of this study was to compare fatty acid weight percentages and cholesterol concentrations of longissimus dorsi (LD), semitendinosus (ST), and supraspinatus (SS) muscles (n = 10 for each) of range bison (31 mo of age), feedlot-finished bison (18 mo of age), range beef cows (4 to 7 yr of age), feedlot steers (18 mo of age), free-ranging cow elk (3 to 5 yr of age), and chicken breast...

A fatal enteric syndrome was identified in American bison (Bison bison) at a large feedlot in the American Midwest in early 1998. An estimated 150 bison died of the syndrome between January 1998 and December 1999. The syndrome was identified as malignant catarrhal fever (MCF), primarily the alimentary form. Clinical onset was acute, and most affected bison died within 1-3 days; none recovered. ...

Bacillus anthracis, the cause of anthrax, was recovered from two plains bison (Bison bison bison) cows killed by wolves (Canis lupus) in Montana, USA, without associated wolf mortality in July 2010. This bison herd experienced an epizootic in summer 2008, killing ∼ 8% of the herd, the first documented in the region in several decades. No wolf deaths were associated with the 2008 event. Surveill...

1. Competition between livestock and wild ungulates is commonly perceived to occur on shared rangelands. In the Henry Mountains (HM) of Utah, a free-ranging population of bison Bison bison has raised concerns among ranchers holding grazing permits on these public lands. Bison are the most conspicuous potential competitors with cattle, but lagomorphs (mainly jackrabbits Lepus californicus) are a...

For gregarious animals the cost-benefit trade-offs that drive habitat selection may vary dynamically with group size, which plays an important role in foraging and predator avoidance strategies. We examined how habitat selection by bison (Bison bison) varied as a function of group size and interpreted these patterns by testing whether habitat selection was more strongly driven by the competing ...

The Texas State Bison Herd is directly descended from the herd assembled from 5 wild-caught bison by Charles Goodnight in the 1880s. In 1997, 36 bison were used to establish a herd at Caprock Canyons State Park. To aid in the development of a long-term genetic conservation plan for this population, we examined and analyzed allelic variation at 54 microsatellite loci representing each of the nuc...

Ecologists and conservationists have long assumed that large grazers, including bison (Bison bison), did not occur in post-Pleistocene southwestern North America. This perception has been influential in framing the debate over conservation and land use in the northern Chihuahuan Desert. The lack of an evolutionary history of large grazers is being used to challenge the validity of ranching as a...