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The struggle was real for post-Soviet-collapse animals
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s turned the society and economics of Russia and Eastern Europe upside-down, but it wasn’t just people who were being affected.
According to a new study in the journal Conservation Biology, the populations of several mammal species living in Russia declined starting about the same time that the Soviet Union was in its death throes.
“What we did was to prove there was a simultaneous decline for wild boar, brown bear and moose in most regions of Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, which was right after the collapse [of the Soviet Union],” study author Eugenia Bragina, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told BBC News.
“All three species are very different and have different habitat requirements,” added Bragina, who earned her PhD at Moscow State University.
She also noted that each decline was driven by a set of factors unique to each species.
“For example, moose prefer successional forests where there are young trees that they can forage on,” Bragnia said. “Wild boar really love agricultural crops, which people in the Soviet Union used to plant for this species.”
Not all species struggled
The study, which was based on an examination of eight large mammal species in Russia between 1981 and 2000, did find one species that benefitted from the fall of the Soviet Union: the grey wolf.
“In the Soviet Union, they controlled the population of the grey wolf,” Bragina said. “There were incentives to hunt the wolves – such as free licenses for ungulate species – but, of course, during the turmoil of the collapse, people had other things to worry about.
This increase in the number of wolves, in turn, had its own negative effect on the country’s moose population, the study team said. Notably, the Eurasian lynx population also experienced a decline in the years included in the study. However, this decline could not be tied to political or economic factors, the researchers said.
Alas, there is good news for boar, moose, bear, et al.
In a second part of the study, the research team did find some good news: many of these mammal populations are on the mend. For example, the wild boar population is bigger now than it was in 1991.
“However, it is a very adaptive species,” Bragina said about the boar. “So after a few years, it found new sources of food, somehow managed to survive and now it is doing well.”
The study team said their work should have implications for conservation strategies in areas going through socio-economic turmoil.
“When something like that happens we do need to pay close attention to what is happening to the wildlife,” Bragina suggested. “Of course, when poverty increases rapidly like it did in Russia in the 1990s, there are no resources for people to pay attention to the management of wildlife.
“I think that is the moment when international conservation groups should pay attention and consider ways to preserve the wildlife,” she concluded. “Otherwise we may find that important or iconic species are put in jeopardy.”
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1113317376/soviet-collapse-affected-animals-too-012015/
