useful to humans to help them overcome "jet lag" experienced after long trips by air through several time zones. And, carrying this a step further, some suggest that it may be helpful as a sort of "sleeping pill," to enable people to get a good night's sleep. So, to those who question the value of the fur industry to society, we can point out that mink, over and above the beautiful pelts they p...

Karakul sheep breed has a lot to offer to livestock production in many parts of Botswana. This breed of sheep is acclimatised to desert conditions, which prevail in most parts of Botswana. This breed produces a range of products viz meat, milk, fur/pelt and wool, allowing for diversification of farm produce hence reduced risks attached to the production of a single product. The Karakul breed ha...

-The keratins are a closely related family of chemically stable proteins composing mammalian hair, horn, hooves, and avian feathers . Sheep hair (wool) has been much studied chemically because of its economic value. To our knowledge, no studies have been conducted on the long-term stability of other keratins from a museum perspective. We present here differences in the stability of feathers and...

Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the importance of biological diversity in supporting and maintaining ecosystem functions and processes has become increasingly understood [1]. Biodiversity “connects the web of life,” that is, biodiversity represents the diversity of species in an ecosystem, landscape, region and globe. It is their combined interactions, with each other and their e...

Swift foxes (Vulpes velox) were once distributed across most of the shortgrass prairie of North America. The arrival of settlers and the concurrent loss of habitat, trapping, incidental poisoning, and shooting brought about a decline in its numbers until the swift fox remained only in the southern part of its historic range. A current understanding of swift fox population ecology is important t...

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on Journal blog. Achieving conservation and natural resource management goals requires changes in human behaviour, which involves understanding perspectives how people might adopt new values, approaches or practices (Nielsen et al., 2021; Stankey & Shindler, 2006; Stoll-Kleemann, 2019). Successful outcomes may depend identifying viewpoint ar...

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Mahoney, S. P., and V. Geist, editors. 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, U.S.A. ix+166 pp. US$74.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-421-43281-6. International Management: Conservation Challenges in a Changing World. Koprowski, J. L., P. R. Krausman, 2019. xv+226 978-1-421-43285-4. model for wildlife conservation the United States Cana...

The nutria or coypu (Myocastor coypus) is a rodent native to South America that has been introduced almost worldwide since the early 1900’s, originally with the intent of fur farming in many cases. The nutria is a large (over 6 kg), semi-aquatic rodent with a voracious appetite and high reproductive potential. Nutria became established in the Louisiana wetlands in the 1930’s. The habitat proved...

Transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 from humans to animals has been reported for many domesticated species, including farmed minks. The identification novel spike gene mutations appearing in minks raised major concerns about potential immune evasion and challenges the global vaccine strategy. One genetic variant, known as “cluster five,” arose among Denmark resulted ...

Defaunation, the loss or population decline of medium and large native vertebrates represents a significant threat to the biodiversity of tropical ecosystems. Here we review the anthropogenic drivers of defaunation, provide a brief historical account of the development of this field, and analyze the types of biological consequences of this impact on the structure and functioning of tropical eco...