When Biologists Get Bombed

Abstract

Elephant-biologist-in-training Joseph P. Dudley didn't need a message from the department chairman to know that his plans for a master's degree project had crashed and burned. It made world news, he recalls dryly. The year was 1984, and Dudley was in graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Like most of the newspaper-reading world, he saw war bulletins from Sri Lanka about the Tamil Tigers fighting to expand their territory. Unlike much of the public, Dudley took the news personally. The Tigers took over the land in which he was scheduled to survey elephants. Sixteen years later in Missoula, Mont., Dudley tells his missed-elephant story at the annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology as he opens a session entitled Wildlife and War. What starts with presentations from a panel sitting at the front of the room turns into an openmike night for recollections of war-torn science. Audience members volunteer tales of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kuwait ... War itself is hardly new, but for field biologists, I'm not aware that it's ever been a major focus, Dudley muses. In the future, it may become more important. Roads and settlements are carving wildernesses into smaller and smaller fragments. Conservation biologists have long documented the impact of oil spills, catastrophic storms, alien species, and other plagues on scraps of habitat. Now, they find themselves examining the destructive boot prints of war.