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An Interview with Eric Larsen, Eric Larsen is a wildlife biologist who serves as coordinator of the WDFW Priority Habitats and Species Program. He was hired by the former Department of Wildlife in 1993 to develop management recommendations for some of Washington's priority habitats. The Department has identified 161 priority species and 19 priority habitats. Eric graduated from The Evergreen State College, with a bachelor of science degree concentrating on ecology and evolution. Before joining the Department he worked on field studies of marine mammals, shorebirds and the at-sea ecology of marbled murrelets. He also worked at the UW's Burke Museum on a study of natural selection mechanisms in red-wing blackbirds.
Eric can be e-mailed at: larseeml@dfw.wa.gov |
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Q: What animals are you focusing on now? A: For the last four years, I've been providing agency input into issues relative to bats. The agency doesn't have a biologist dedicated to bats and has very few people who know much about bats. My involvement with bats was born out of the Priority Habitats and Species program because I wrote the management recommendations for caves, and I became bat-literate, I guess you'd say. As I became involved I recognized there are some unique management needs relative to bats.
In 1994 I formed a Washington Cave Habitat Work Group and we were able to identify some of the most important roost sites and caves for a particular kind of bat called the Townsend's big-eared bat. We formed some partnerships and we were able to gate these caves with some state-of-the art, zero-air-flow-disturbance, bat-friendly gates. These were sites where bats had declined over time, because of disturbance. That activity evolved last year into the Washington Bat Work Group. We went from cave-specific activities to bat needs. Bats are one of the few critters that you can deal with as a group; it makes more sense than just focusing on habitat because they use so many habitats. The Washington Bat Work Group is a consortium of researchers, managers and conservationists who are organizing themselves in the interest of Washington bat conservation. This is a mechanism by which we can organize a very disorganized and diffuse group of folks from state and federal agencies and private industry, who are trying to do something for bats. We are developing an educational poster on Washington bats. The bat poster just came out of bats being so far off the radar screen in this agency. The public demand for information got to the point where a fellow from another agency and I sat down and said: "Let's do a poster." And we got 10 participants together who put up either money or services and we developed a "Bats of the Pacific Northwest" poster. It should be available early in 1999. Its intended to de-mystify bats and also to bring anyone up to speed on general bat information—which species we have here; what habitats they prefer. This poster is designed to be sort of a myth-buster as well, for example bats are not blind but, as we know, it's difficult to see in the dark and they are nocturnal.
Q: Why are bats important? A: There are 15 species of bats in Washington and like other groups of fish and wildlife they all play a part in an intricate ecosystem. As far as human interest goes, in the sense of what does this species do for me, bats probably play a significant role in controlling pest species—they are insect eaters. They may play an important role in nitrogen distribution through what is called the salt-and-pepper effect of bat feces being distributed through forest systems and throughout the landscape. We have a couple of species of bats in Washington which are unusual in that they are locally rare and very, very particular about the habitat parameters on which they depend. Bats are our only true flying mammal. They navigate and hunt prey using a very sophisticated system known as echolocation; they emit very high-frequency sounds through their noses or mouths and listen for reflected echoes and their brains process images of that. They can detect an object as fine as a mosquito in the dark. So there are a number of things that make them different from other animals. Some of our bats are migratory, some are hibernators. If you're an insect eater in life, whether you're a bird or a bat, you've got basically two choices come winter—you can either go where the insects are or you can shut down your metabolism so efficiently you can survive on your fat reserves until spring when insects are again available. And bats do that—they go into what's called torpor. Torpor is interesting because their body temperature approaches freezing and their heart and breathing rates become almost imperceptible. And whatever fat they've accumulated is what sees them through until spring. And bats are social animals; females usually form colonies called nursery colonies to give birth and communally raise their young. Q: Is bats' bad rap changing? A: I think it's changing; the tide is turning. But you'd be amazed at the number of people who still believe the myths—that bats will get tangled in your hair; that all bats are blood-suckers. The closest blood-eating bat lives in Central America and the chances of them coming up here is very remote. All Washington bats are insect eaters. Q: What about rabies? A: In America there are two distinct kinds of rabies—terrestrial and non-terrestrial. In Washington our only rabies is non-terrestrial; we don't have the kind of rabies that occurs in foxes, raccoons and so on, so our only rabies source population is bats. However, that doesn't mean that anybody who gets rabies necessarily gets it from a bat. Bat rabies can be transmitted to a house cat, say, and the cat could bite someone. So it's called bat rabies, even though the transmission mechanism was through a cat. An analysis of the last 27 cases of rabies in the U.S. showed that 18 were attributable to bat strains, but in half of those cases they couldn't find any evidence of the transmission being attributable to bats. Bats occur in Washington; rabies occurs in bats and we know that a small proportion of bat populations in the wild can be rabies carriers. What that means is you don't want to handle bats. Usually you don't encounter bats and when you do—in the daytime, if they're sitting on the ground, that sort of thing—most of the bats you encounter are sick from something. You want to be extra aware not to touch them. Q: What is a priority habitat? A: The WDFW Priority Habitat and Species (PHS) program seeks to answer three questions which are believed to be the fundamental responsibility of a resource agency: What are your most important resources? Where are they located? What needs to be done to preserve and protect them? The PHS program develops and maintains a list of those resources that are considered a priority, provides maps statewide that show where these resources occur, and develops management recommendations for those habitats and species based on the best-available science. It's kind of a hub with three spokes. The Department is responsible for around 1,000 vertebrate species and countless invertebrates. The question is which of those are the most important—what are the ones that should be highest on the radar screen—that's what PHS addresses. And then once we know what's highest on the radar screen—where are they on the ground? And when we know what they are and where they are, what should we do relative to land uses? I was hired as one of the writers to develop those management recommendations—that part of the program that says, "I have oak woodlands here and I'm a county planner and what does that mean to me?" That's where I started in ‘93, and now I coordinate that program, supervising two biologists, two GIS mapmakers and a computer support person.
Q: How is priority habitat information used? A: PHS is the primary mechanism by which the agency brings information to bear in the planning arena. It's used for city and county growth-planning exercises, under the Growth Management Act. When cities and counties want to control growth, PHS is the mechanism through which we provide the fish and wildlife component to that process. Also, PHS information is used in reviewing forest practices statewide, not just in the public arena but in public-private forests so that forest practices can be affected by that information. We provide information for hydraulic project approvals (HPAs), and for habitat conservation plans (HCPs), which are when large-scale landowners want to develop comprehensive plans for next 100 years. In our own agency PHS information is extremely useful for our day-to-day activities—if I'm out doing restoration for salmon along a stream, what other fish and wildlife do I need to be aware of where I'm working? What else could I consider when developing a watershed plan? Q: What are your other fields of interest in your work? A: Mostly what I'm focused on is landscape-level planning. I'm involved with some folks in the Department who are looking at how to shift our management paradigm from crisis-driven management, for instance dealing with fish-and-wildlife conservation issues once they become crises like our salmon situation, to one that's more pro-active and forward-thinking, using an idea that's called Alternative Futures. It's the idea where you use available information on human population growth, couple it with modeling the needs for fish and wildlife and develop a suite of alternatives that we can choose to pursue or not pursue in the public-policy arena. This is based on the idea that Washington's population is going to double in most of our lifetimes. By 2045 Washington's population will double. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look out the window, or drive up the I-5 corridor and see the vast infrastructure and some of the problems with that infrastructure that we have today, and then to think of it doubling. The projections are that we will have to accommodate another 29 cities the size of Tacoma or Spokane in the next 50 years. If you assume that uncontrolled growth is going to affect fish and wildlife, and I would argue that virtually all fish and wildlife issues are related to human population growth and land use, you have to assume that a whole bunch of salmon crises are in the making. The idea of landscape planning and Alternative Futures says, "Let's acknowledge that, let's acknowledge where we're going in the next 50 years and start making smarter decisions based on what we know is coming as opposed to managing by looking through the rear-view mirror." It's an idea that is starting to show up everywhere. I work in the landscape planning division of the Lands and Habitat Program; there are a few of us who are dedicated not just to bringing that approach to our own program, but bringing it to the agency as a whole. Q: What's an example of something you'd do differently using the Alternative Futures concept? A: Population growth over time—if we know we're going to have so many people moving to Thurston County over the next 50 years we can look at the past behavior of growth, we can look at where growth typically occurs, low-elevation areas that are not prone to flooding, and predict people will move to those areas and build infrastructure—roads, shopping centers, developments, schools and all the things that support our communities. You can start to overlay that on maps and say this is the land area that will get gobbled up by pavement. And as we all know when you hit a certain threshold of pavement, ecosystem functions start to go, relative to streams, water-quality and that sort of thing. We can predict with some reasonable degree of accuracy where this will occur. If you use those assumptions to your advantage you can also say what if we steer growth another way into watersheds that already are heavily and negatively affected by growth. And we can take another watershed that is relatively untouched and keep it that way. So what you can do is feed in some different, alternative information into the model and come up with some different outcomes for fish and wildlife. This isn't really anything new, the economic arena has been doing this for years—forecasting. What is different for us is that we've never used it to make decisions about the land and this is our chance—I think you'll be seeing it more and more not just in this agency but the Department of Natural Resources is doing it significantly. What is it about where you've been that can influence your decisions on where you go? Our agency's got a very entrenched history of steering the ship by looking backwards at where we've been. If you picture a ship going across the ocean, and being forced to steer it by looking at the wake that you leave behind as your only clue as to where you're going, you can see mistakes are inherent in not looking forward. The idea of Alternative Futures is that we know that there are going to be more people in Washington and that we need to be a little smarter about what that means. Q: Realistically, what are the chances of this agency influencing land use where there are private, economic interests at stake? A: Alternative Futures provides information of the consequences of land-use behaviors. There's a difference between identifying those and advocating for one of those alternatives. I think the Department has some soul-searching to do about what it wants biodiversity in Washington to look like in the next 50 years and whether we can continue to fool ourselves that we can save everything, everywhere, all the time. Alternative Futures offers us the opportunity to have a strategy that unifies our tactics. We're a very tactical agency; we do so many tactical things that it's amazing to me, but they lack a unifying strategy. They are very diffuse. Here's an example—the closest we can get to a corporate belief system in this agency is "Preserve, perpetuate and protect." Well what the heck does that mean, and how do you know when you've done it and how do you get there? The Futures idea starts to tell you what you should and what you shouldn't be doing. We have lacked that information. And that is where my program is heading in a conceptual sense. We're starting to reach out to other programs in the Department to further this concept. We've also had a lot of interest from other state and federal agencies and academic institutions, like the University of Washington and Evergreen State College. These separate entities are all waking up independently at the same time. We got here from not planning; let's be smart and realize if we're going to go another 50 years that planning can help us. |
