Richard Conniff's Blog, page 53

Lyme Disease? Apply 30 Live Ticks and Call Back in the Morning.

Soon to be available by prescription? The deer tick, Ixodes scapularis

Anyone who has admired the modern medical use of leeches to ease the reattachment of grafts, or maggots to clean infected wounds (anyone?) has gotta like this.  Lyme disease researchers are working on a diagnostic test that requires applying up to 30 live ticks to a human patient.

I am especially excited about the new test because I live in Old Lyme, CT, which is Ground Zero for the Lyme Disease epidemic.  Our high school robotics team actually calls itself the Techno Ticks.  Go, Mighty Arthropods!  Bite, Bite, Bite!

Go, Ticks!

I’ve had the disease two or three times, as have most members of my family.  We know the symptoms pretty well, and the available test are spectacularly unreliable.  So we just call up the family doctor, describe the fatigue, the headaches, the bull’s-eye rash (sorry, I mean erythema migrans), and start right in on our doxcycline.

But now cutting edge medicine promises a more reliable technique for answering the great positive-negative question, in the form of xenodiagnosis.  The study reports that volunteers agreed to be bitten by up to 30 ticks at a time.  (What we call “going outside.”)  And the procedure was “well tolerated by volunteers.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work.  (But, hey, it was kind of fun.)  Here’s the press release:

In a first-of-its-kind study for Lyme disease, researchers have used live, disease-free ticks to see if Lyme disease bacteria can be detected in people who continue to experience symptoms such as fatigue or arthritis after completing antibiotic therapy. The technique, called xenodiagnosis, attempts to find evidence of a disease-causing microbe indirectly, through use of the natural disease-carrier — in this case, ticks. It was well tolerated by the volunteers, but investigators could not find evidence of Lyme disease bacteria in most of the cases where enough ticks were collected to make testing possible.

Larger studies are needed, the scientists say, to determine the significance of positive xenodiagnosis results in cases where Lyme disease symptoms persist following antibiotic therapy.

Adriana Marques, M.D., of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and Linden Hu, M.D., of Tufts Medical Center, Boston, led the pilot study. Findings appear online in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

The most common tick-borne illness in the United States, Lyme disease is caused by Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria that are transmitted to people by ticks of the Ixodes genus.

“Most cases of Lyme disease are cured by antibiotics, but some patients continue to experience symptoms despite the absence of detectable Lyme bacteria,” said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. “This poses a mystery that requires continued research into new or improved ways to diagnose Lyme disease and determine the cause of unresolved symptoms.”

“Xenodiagnosis using ticks to detect B. burgdorferi has been used previously in animal studies, but this is the first time it has been tried in people,” said Dr. Marques. “Our primary goals in this initial trial were to develop procedures for tick xenodiagnosis and to determine its safety in humans.”

Thirty-six adult volunteers enrolled in the study at locations in Maryland, Connecticut and Massachusetts. Participants included 10 people with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS); 10 who had high levels of an antibody against B. burgdorferi after antibiotic treatment; five who had erythema migrans (a bull’s-eye rash) and had received antibiotic treatment in the past; one person with erythema migrans who began antibiotic therapy at the time of tick placement; and 10 healthy volunteers.

Participants consented to have up to 30 laboratory-bred, pathogen-free, larval ticks (each smaller than a poppy seed) placed under a dressing. When possible, the ticks were placed near areas where a rash had been observed or near affected joints. After four to six days, investigators removed the ticks and processed them to detect whether any Lyme disease bacteria were present.

The investigators found that xenodiagnosis was well tolerated. “The most common adverse event experienced by volunteers was mild itching at the site of tick attachment,” said Dr. Marques.

Not all of the placements yielded enough blood-engorged ticks to perform xenodiagnosis. Twenty-three volunteers with Lyme disease had at least one tick tested; of these, 19 people tested negative. Two people had indeterminate results, thought to be due to laboratory contamination. Xenodiagnosis was positive for B. burgdorferi DNA in the person with erythema migrans who underwent xenodiagnosis early during therapy and in a volunteer with PTLDS.

The researchers note that a limitation of the study is the relatively small number of people on which xenodiagnosis was attempted. “Future studies are necessary to determine the incidence of positive xenodiagnostic results for B. burgdorferi after antibiotic treatment, if these results represent viable organisms or remnants of infection, and whether these results can be related to ongoing symptoms in patients after therapy for Lyme disease,” they write.

A final note: If you really like this idea, you can volunteer for the continuing study here.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Touts Bad Science To Push Gray Wolf Toward Extinction

(Photo: Ken Canning / Getty Images)

I’ve been meaning to get to this study for a few days now.  But happily, Michelle Nijhuis got there first.  Her article originally appeared in OnEarth.org.

About 300 wolves live in the nearly 2-million-acre swath of central Ontario forest known as Algonquin Provincial Park. These wolves are bigger and broader than coyotes, but noticeably smaller than the gray wolves of Yellowstone. So how do they fit into the wolf family tree? Scientists don’t agree on the answer—yet it could now affect the fate of every wolf in the United States.

That’s because last June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing gray wolves across most of the country from the endangered species list, a move that would leave the animals vulnerable to hunting. To support its proposal, the agency used a contested scientific paper—published, despite critical peer review, in the agency’s own journal—to argue that gray wolves never existed in the eastern United States, so they shouldn’t have been protected there in the first place.

Instead of the gray wolf, the service said, an entirely different species of wolf—the so-called “eastern wolf,” a species whose remnants perhaps survive in Algonquin Park—once inhabited the forests of eastern North America. Canid biologists have argued over the existence of this “lost species” for years. Yet researchers on all sides say that even if the Algonquin wolves are a separate species, that shouldn’t preclude continuing protections for the gray wolf.

On Friday, an independent panel of five leading geneticists and taxonomists came down hard on the agency’s proposal to delist gray wolves, unanimously concluding that the service had not relied on the “best available science.” Individual panel members described “glaring insufficiencies” in the supporting research and said the agency’s conclusions had fundamental flaws.

“What’s most significant,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of land and wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), “is that this is coming from a group of eminent biologists who disagree with each other about the eastern wolf—and even so, they agree that the agency hasn’t properly understood the scientific issues at hand.”

Read the full article here.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Touts Bogus Science To Push Gray Wolf Toward Extinction

(Photo: Ken Canning / Getty Images)

I’ve been meaning to get to this study for a few days now.  But happily, Michelle Nijhuis got there first.  Her article originally appeared in OnEarth.org.

About 300 wolves live in the nearly 2-million-acre swath of central Ontario forest known as Algonquin Provincial Park. These wolves are bigger and broader than coyotes, but noticeably smaller than the gray wolves of Yellowstone. So how do they fit into the wolf family tree? Scientists don’t agree on the answer—yet it could now affect the fate of every wolf in the United States.

That’s because last June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing gray wolves across most of the country from the endangered species list, a move that would leave the animals vulnerable to hunting. To support its proposal, the agency used a contested scientific paper—published, despite critical peer review, in the agency’s own journal—to argue that gray wolves never existed in the eastern United States, so they shouldn’t have been protected there in the first place.

Instead of the gray wolf, the service said, an entirely different species of wolf—the so-called “eastern wolf,” a species whose remnants perhaps survive in Algonquin Park—once inhabited the forests of eastern North America. Canid biologists have argued over the existence of this “lost species” for years. Yet researchers on all sides say that even if the Algonquin wolves are a separate species, that shouldn’t preclude continuing protections for the gray wolf.

On Friday, an independent panel of five leading geneticists and taxonomists came down hard on the agency’s proposal to delist gray wolves, unanimously concluding that the service had not relied on the “best available science.” Individual panel members described “glaring insufficiencies” in the supporting research and said the agency’s conclusions had fundamental flaws.

“What’s most significant,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of land and wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), “is that this is coming from a group of eminent biologists who disagree with each other about the eastern wolf—and even so, they agree that the agency hasn’t properly understood the scientific issues at hand.”

Read the full article here.

Hot Calamari: The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

I spotted this one today in The Guardian and it struck me as a strange, but suitable, image for Valentine’s Day.  Here’s how The Guardian describes it:

In Hokusai’s masterpiece of the Japanese erotic art genre known as Shunga, a woman diving for pearls is being pleaured by two octopuses. The larger of them enfolds her pale, naked body in its tentacles as it performs cunnilingus, its subtle attentions releasing rapture.

Check out the rest of the article for one writer’s selection of the 10 sexiest works of art.  (By way of reciprocity, there’s also a Picasso image of fellatio, but oddly joyless and not his best work.)

May your Valentine’s Day be full of delights.

Dogs Have Evolved to Be With Us Even In Thin Air

Last month I posted a story about studies demonstrating that both Tibetans and Sherpas, the celebrated Himalayan climbers, have evolved a special set of adaptations to their high-altitude way of life.

From my point of view, that explained why I am such a high country wuss. Damn you, EPAS1!

Now it turns out their dogs have me beat, too.

Here’s the press release:

As humans have expanded into new environments and civilizations, man’s best friend, dogs, have been faithful companions at their sides. Now, with DNA sequencing technology readily available to examine the dog genome, scientists are gaining new insights into canine evolution.

In a new study published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, author Dong-Dong Wu, et. al., explored the genetic basis of high-altitude adaptation of Tibetan Mastiffs, which were originally domesticated from the Chinese native dogs of the plains.

The authors examined genome-wide mutations (called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs) of 32 Tibetan Mastiffs, and compared them to 20 Chinese native dogs and 14 grey wolves. Overall, they identified more than 120,000 SNPs, and in their analysis, narrowed these down to 16 genes that have undergone positive selection in mastiffs, with 12 of these relevant to high altitude adaption.

These candidate genes have been shown to be involved in energy production critical to high-altitude survival under low oxygen conditions. Similar categories showing selective signatures have been observed in other high-altitude animals, suggesting that “independently, genes can be adaptively evolved to yield similar phenotypic adaptive responses,” said Wu

One hypoxia-inducible factor (HIFs), called EPAS1, has also been found in hypoxia adaptation in Tibetans, supporting the possibility of convergent evolution occurring between dogs and humans, though the authors caution that much more work needs to be done for a full comparison of high altitude adaptation. For future studies, the authors will explore using whole genome sequences from individual Tibetan Mastiffs to gain better insights into high-altitude adaptations and canine evolution.

Journal Reference:  Yan Li, Dong-Dong Wu, Adam R. Boyko, Guo-Dong Wang, Shi-Fang Wu, David M Irwin, and Ya-Ping Zhang. Population variation revealed high altitude adaptation of Tibetan Mastiffs. Mol Biol Evol, February 11, 2014 DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msu070

How The Outrage Echo Chamber Ruins Social Discourse

This article in the Kennedy School Review struck me as a spot-on analysis of how the internet is ruining our political discourse by encouraging “moral exhibitionism.”   The phenomenon is disturbing, especially because we are all guilty.  But I also love the article’s language of “flocking bias,” “filter bubbles,” “clickbait,” and “outrage generators.”  It’s written not by one of our leading thinkers, but by a graduate student in forensic psychology at The University of New South Wales, who works as an advocate for Australian nurses.

BY CLAIRE LEHMANN

The political divide between conservatives and liberals is growing increasingly bitter. Each side thinks that the other is evil. At the same time, a new currency is emerging within the eco-chambers of social media. It is the currency of outrage, and it is eroding our ability to listen to one another.

Those of us who follow news and commentary on Twitter flock together in groups according to our shared values and interests. On Facebook, algorithms selectively filter what we see based on our past search history, clicking behavior and friendship groups. The Twitter flocking bias and Facebook filter bubble have created eco-systems in which moral exhibitionism flourishes.

Because we are all interconnected within these online environments, we inevitably have our collective buttons pushed by skillful ‘outrage generators’ peddling a type of commentary designed for mass online circulation. When outrage pieces go viral, they capture gale-storms of righteous indignation converting outrage into clicks and cash.

Sharp-tongued columnists have always been a central part of the news media. But platforms such as Twitter have inspired new levels of hyperbole. Articles about morally-loaded topics trigger high-octane reactions in tweets, incentivizing writers to produce them.  The writers inspire dozens to share their views in comments sections, where readers disagree with each other, fist-fighting with words. Herein lies the hook: after commenting, readers will return endlessly to view responses to their comments, driving page-view statistics. Of course, page-view statistics secure the advertising that subsidizes such platforms.

Clickbait bouncing off the walls within online echo chambers may seem relatively harmless. What does it matter if news merges with entertainment? What does it matter if political convictions are amplified? In the context of most people being politically apathetic, isn’t inspiring people to have stronger convictions a good thing?

Possibly not. Psychologists know that having political views that strongly oppose others’ has a gratifying and rewarding effect. It gratifies us because it allows us to feel as though we’re part of a team. It feels good for the simple reason that it helps us to feel connected and forget ourselves for a period of time—we become immersed in something larger. But at its most extreme, partisanship becomes psychologically addictive. It leads to fundamentalism and blind, unquestioning faith. This is the dark side of strong conviction.

Studying the moral psychology of political partisanship, Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Business Ethics at NYU, argues that we are fundamentally intuitive animals. Contrary to popular belief, moral decisions are made with emotion first, with reason occurring later. In The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion, Haidt argues that moral arguments are “mostly post-hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted for strategic social aims.” It is a process driven by a very deep and unconscious need to belong. Outrage pieces exploit this psychology by fulfilling our evolved need to be part of a tribe, ready to defend our group or go into combat.

Social media, especially Twitter, has provided the architecture for pitting teams against each other. Those who shout the loudest often drown out expert opinion. Speed and anonymity have also changed the rules of engagement, making it easier to start heated arguments and making it less likely that bullying will carry consequences (such as a damaged reputation). The ability to comment or tweet immediately amplifies our impulsiveness, the enemy of cool-headed decision-making.

In an era in which social media provides the fuel for partisanship, online platforms are monetizing the flames. But they are also burning the bridges between us. We seem to have fewer shared goals. Our most pressing moral challenges are ones which require creative, long-term solutions of cooperation and commitment. Globally and locally, we face environmental calamities, rising economic inequality, and ageing populations. The need for bipartisan solutions has never been stronger.

Reinforcing bitterness between groups of people by invoking indignant outrage may be a good business strategy for online news outlets, but it is terrible for encouraging the social cohesion required to address problems facing our society . To foster cross-pollination of ideas, we need both to be aware and to listen. We should endeavor to avoid joining online digital mobs where we might throw verbal stones at anyone who may disagree with us. Ideally, we would consume a balance of information that both comforts us by adhering to our world-view and challenges us by expanding it.

It may also be possible for us to build better tools for social engagement, having our tribal and irrational psychological biases in mind. If we don’t like how our tools are working, we can always endeavor to engineer newer, better ones. But the issue is largely a cultural one, and there is no easy solution or quick answer.

Despite the promise of the Internet and social media to bring connectivity to our public discussions, we need to remain aware that we may actually be falling further apart.

How Do Plants and Animals Fare in Our Cities?

Humans are increasingly an urban species, and a new study, the largest dataset of its kind ever compiled, looks at how our cities perform as habitats not just for us, but for plants and animals.  The study appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  Here’s part of the BBC’s story on what it found:

The team analysed the data and found that cities retained about just 8% of bird species and 25% of plant species of comparable undeveloped land.

But [lead author Myla] Aronson added: “Contrary to popular belief, we show that the plants and birds of cities are not all the same across the world.

“Owing to the fact that cities around the world share similar structural characteristics – buildings, roads etc – it is thought that cities share a similar biota, no matter where they are in the world.

“Few species are shared across cities, such as pigeons and annual meadow grass, but overall, the composition of cities reflects the unique biotic heritage of their geographic location.”

She said the data revealed that, overall, cities supported close to 20% of the world’s bird species and 5% of known plant species.

“Conserving green spaces, restoring natural plant species and adding biodiversity-friendly habitats within urban landscapes could, in turn, support more bird and plant species,” Dr Aronson suggested.

Commenting on the study’s findings, Prof Philip James, of the University of Salford – who was not involved in the research – said that many cities grew in areas that were diverse and rich in natural resources, plants and animals.

“So the challenge is to use our knowledge of urban ecology to enrich the lives of the ever-increasing number of people living and working in cities,” he told BBC News.

“Seeing birds from our windows, hearing their songs and having pleasant, natural places to walk are all beneficial to our health and well-being.”

Read the whole BBC story here.

Treetop Alligators

This is a deeply disturbing idea.  Imagine paddling down a stream and looking up to see an alligator or crocodile looking down.  Check out the press release:

When most people envision crocodiles and alligators, they think of them waddling on the ground or wading in water — not climbing trees. However, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, study has found that the reptiles can climb trees as far as the crowns.

Vladimir Dinets, a research assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, is the first to thoroughly study the tree-climbing and -basking behavior. The research is published in the journal Herpetology.

Dinets and his colleagues observed crocodilian species on three continents — Australia, Africa and North America — and examined previous studies and anecdotal observations. They found that four species climbed trees — usually above water — but how far they ventured upward and outward varied by their sizes. The smaller crocodilians were able to climb higher and further than the larger ones. Some species were observed climbing as far as four meters high in a tree and five meters down a branch.

“Climbing a steep hill or steep branch is mechanically similar, assuming the branch is wide enough to walk on,” the authors wrote. “Still, the ability to climb vertically is a measure of crocodiles’ spectacular agility on land.”

The crocodilians seen climbing trees, whether at night or during the day, were skittish of being approached, jumping or falling into the water when an approaching observer was as far as 10 meters away. This response led the researchers to believe that the tree climbing and basking are driven by two conditions: thermoregulation and surveillance of habitat.

“The most frequent observations of tree-basking were in areas where there were few places to bask on the ground, implying that the individuals needed alternatives for regulating their body temperature,” the authors wrote. “Likewise, their wary nature suggests that climbing leads to improved site surveillance of potential threats and prey.”

The data suggests that at least some crocodilian species are able to climb trees despite lacking any obvious morphological adaptations to do so.

“These results should be taken into account by paleontologists who look at changes in fossils to shed light on behavior,” said Dinets. “This is especially true for those studying extinct crocodiles or other Archosaurian taxa.”

Dinets collaborated with Adam Britton from Charles Darwin University in Australia and Matthew Shirley from the University of Florida.

Research by Dinets published in 2013 found another surprising crocodilian characteristic — the use of lures such as sticks to hunt prey. More of his research can be found in his book “Dragon Songs.”

Source: Dinets V, Britton A, Shirley MH. Climbing behavior in extant crocodilians. Herpetology Notes, 2014

China (!) Leads Crackdown on Wildlife Trafficking

This report comes from CNN.  To put it in perspective, the announcement is undoubtedly timed to this morning’s opening of the Wildlife Trafficking Symposium in London.  (More on that below.)  Even so, it’s gratifying to see China take the lead against an illegal wildlife trafficking epidemic it has, up to now, largely tolerated and paid for:

A wildlife operation involving dozens of countries and organizations, seized more than three tons of ivory and a bevy of rare wildlife products as well as rare wood.

Operatives found rare animals — both living and dead — during the international, month-long operation.

The China-led transnational effort, codenamed Cobra II, aimed to crack down on illegal wildlife trade. Authorities recovered over 10,000 live European eels and pig-nosed turtles, as well as over 2,000 live snakes, according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.

They also seized three tons of ivory, 36 rhino horns, and over 1,000 hides and skins from tigers, leopards and snakes as well as several hundred kilograms of pangolin scales from wildlife traffickers.

The operation included 27 other countries including the United States. The effort had the support from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the World Customs Organization and Interpol, reported Xinhua.

During the operation, China’s law enforcement officials suspected a Chinese man of being the head of an ivory trafficking group after customs staff at Taoxian Airport in northeast China found luggage containing 1,226 ivory beads, according to Xinhua.

Both Chinese and Kenyan police cooperated in the investigation and suspected that the man, whose last name was reported as Xue, operated a crime ring buying, transporting and selling ivory.

Xue was arrested in Nairobi, Kenya on January 17 and extradited to China, the news agency reported. His arrest marks the first time China has arrested a wildlife crime suspect overseas, the report said.

Read the full article here.

In London, meanwhile, John Robinson, the chief conservation officer of the Wildlife Conservation Society made some key points in his opening statement:

“This symposium is less about political consensus and more about prioritizing the strategies and approaches. This symposium is about reaching a technical and scientific consensus on what is feasible if we want to hold onto the species under threat—indeed, not on the problem, but on the solutions.

“There is a broad consensus on the nature of the threat to conservation:

1.   The present scale of the illegal trade is huge – it is now being valued at more than $19 Billion a year.

2.   The impact of the trade on species of high commercial value has been dramatic: the loss of African elephants of between 25 and 40 thousand animals a year; African forest elephants (the cyclotis subspecies) in particular have been devastated by poaching and have declined by about 76 percent since 2002; dramatic declines in many tiger populations since the early 2000’s, with their extirpation from Vietnam and Cambodia; increases in the number of African rhinos being poached over the last 5 years, and a very significant decline in the proportion of horns being recovered by law enforcement.

3.   Much of those in the illegal wildlife trade are primarily well-organized syndicates that operate as transnational criminal networks and often participate in other illegal activities, including trafficking in narcotics and weapons.

4.   The corrupting influence of these criminal organizations cannot be overemphasized. Those charged with regulating and managing wildlife – government officials, police, park staff, the military at both local and national levels – often have little incentive to do their jobs, and every incentive not to do so. Wildlife officials in particular are often poorly paid, under-recognized, and sometimes not paid at all for long stretches of time.

5.   Many of these criminal networks have links with terrorist or militia networks: locally the trade undermines the rule of law and threatens local community development and livelihoods; revenues from the trade promote further corruption and civil unrest.

“The breakdown of effective governance affects conservation and natural resource management more broadly.

“The SCALE, URGENCY and PERVASIVE BREAKDOWN in governance means that our options are limited.

“Those options can be broadly placed in three categories:

1.   Protecting and managing wildlife populations on-the-ground (“Stop the killing”).  We know this can work. Effective monitoring and enforcement on the ground have been demonstrated to be successful in Central Africa, forest elephants occur at densities seven times higher in sites with ecoguards than those without ecoguards; parks and protected areas in Asia, even if not always well managed, remain the refuge for tigers – 42 “source sites”, which cover an area of only 6% of the tiger’s present range, account for 70% of the remaining tiger population; effective protection at Nagarahole National Park in the western ghats of India since the early 1970s has supported a 400% increase in the tiger population.

2.   Controlling the illegal trade flow of wildlife products (“Stop the Trafficking”) might be the greatest challenge. It is here where the criminal networks have their most direct impact.  By definition, the trade is underground; is fed by corruption; and assessing the extent of the trade is difficult. Controlling the trade in one area or in one country can just shift the illegal trade elsewhere.   Nevertheless, locally and within specific countries we have seen some successes, and in the course of this symposium we will learn from some of these – such as the Wildlife Crimes Units in Indonesia.

3.   Reducing the consumer demand for wildlife products such as ivory and rhino horn is essential if on-the-ground protection and control of trafficking is to have any chance of success.  Necessary steps to reduce consumer demand are efforts to increase consumer awareness about effect of the illegal trade.  But ultimately efforts must shift attitudes so that consumer behavior changes.

 

They Gave Up Their Home For Tigers. Would You?

Imam Hussein and family in their new home

 

Ten years ago, Imam Hussein reluctantly moved his family out of their traditional home in the Terai Arc Landscape, a hilly, forested sliver of northwestern India, as part of a government resettlement plan to protect tiger habitat. It was a struggle. The move forced the family to give up the buffalo they had depended on for a pastoral livelihood, and though the resettlement put them on a small plot of arable land, they knew nothing about farming.

But the Husseins’ lives have gradually improved: They farm wheat, they own cell phones, and a 12-year-old daughter is in school. The tigers have benefited too. Hussein used to look around his threadbare forest home and recall, with regret, how it had looked when he was a child. Now, when he visits, that lost forest is visibly recovering.

But the most dramatic change is that his fellow Gujjars, who once clung fiercely to their pastoral way of life, now want to follow him out of the forest. In a new study published this month in Biological Conservation (for which Hussein served as a field assistant), more than 98 percent of the Gujjar families surveyed indicated that they would prefer to leave behind their old lives in the forest to take advantage of what the modern world has to offer.

That’s a major change, not just for the Gujjars and the tigers they’ve shared their homes with, but also for the future of wildlife conservation.

“Ten years ago they wanted to stay. Now they want to leave,” says Douglas MacMillan, a coauthor of the new study and a biodiversity economist at the University of Kent. “That’s part of a big global change, and I don’t know if the conservation mind-set has caught on to that.”

The Terai Arc Landscape is a 2,700-square-mile sliver of hills and mountains, up to about 7,500 feet in elevation, four hours north of New Delhi. It’s best known for two protected areas, Rajaji National Park and Corbett Tiger Reserve, and for two Hindu pilgrimage sites. It’s also home to 6.7 million people and 227 tigers.

To put that in perspective, we’re talking about an area half the size of Connecticut with twice the human population. (Just for fun, imagine the hedge fund managers in Greenwich having to live side by side with all those tigers, not to mention the leopards.) Conflicts  are inevitable, and locals have sometimes committed retaliatory killings of tigers or collaborated with poachers supplying the Chinese folk medicine market. Tigers, in turn, sometimes kill people.

But the plan now is to increase the area’s tiger population by about 50 percent. The multinational Tiger Summit 2010 set a goal of doubling the number of tigers in the wild by 2022. (There are currently fewer than 3,600 wild tigers surviving across Asia, most of them in India, occupying just 7 percent of their former habitat.) Biologists say the Terai landscape, if managed properly, has a carrying capacity of 381 tigers. The challenge is how to fit them in.

The new study, and a companion study of tiger populations in the Terai landscape, are mainly the work of Abishek Harihar, who was a doctoral student at the University of Kent and now works for World Wildlife Fund–Tigers Alive Initiative. He says the plan may not be as difficult to implement as it sounds. Most of the Terai’s human population now lives outside the tigers’ preferred habitat, in more urbanized and agricultural landscapes.

Improving critical tiger habitat would require resettling 2,000 Gujjar families, under the most intensive plan. But it might be enough to start by persuading 200 to 300 families to move out of the two main protected areas. And the Gujjars want to go, in part because their living conditions have steadily deteriorated.

In recent years, they have abandoned their old pastoral tradition of migrating from the lowlands into the hills and back with the changing seasons. Staying in the same spot year-round to graze livestock, gather fodder and firewood, and illegally hunt bush meat has battered the habitat. Chital, sambar, and other prey species are in short supply, so tigers and leopards sometimes target livestock, and those losses, generally uncompensated, can be devastating for families. Average daily income is less than $1.25 per capita.

What the Gujjars want now, according to the new survey, is access to basic medical care, schooling, veterinary care for their livestock, and rural uplift schemes supplied by the government. They’ve seen how the lives of Imam Hussein and others who moved in the earlier resettlement programs have improved. In a cell phone and text message world, they are conscious that only 9 percent of Gujjars can read.

Government programs exist to pay for the relocation, according to Harihar. These programs offer about $1,600 to relocate a family to a roughly four-acre plot within 25 miles of their present home. (In addition, donors can support tiger conservation in the area through World Wildlife Fund and Panthera.) “Everything is there to make this happen,” says Harihar.

But the bigger story may lie in the prospect that the powerful appeal of the modern world, with its educational and other opportunities, will empty the countryside not just in the Terai Arc but in regions around the world. It’s already happening in Europe, where herders and small farmers now abandon a million hectares of marginal land a year, leading to a recovery of wolves, bears, and other wildlife there.

The trend to urbanization could mean rethinking how conservationists go about protecting wildlife. Since the 1990s, conservation groups have typically focused on programs to help people and wildlife coexist in conservation areas, by limiting human exploitation of natural resources and simultaneously supplementing people’s income with work at tourist lodges, as rangers, and in micro-industries. But now, says MacMillan, “they don’t want to coexist, for all kinds of reasons. The key point is that people want to resettle.”

That’s not true everywhere, of course. Involuntary settlements from conservation areas still happen, including one that provoked widespread protest last month in the Embobut Forest of western Kenya. “We want people to tell us what they want,” says MacMillan. “They will be partners in conservation. If that means them staying, that’s great too. They tell us what they want, and we tell them what we want, and in that way we can move forward.” But he believes that, as in the Terai Arc, the exodus from the countryside is increasingly voluntary.

If that’s the case, then the best thing we can do for wildlife, paradoxically, may turn out to be making cities more livable.