Invasive mammals have irreversibly altered ecosystems of Hawai‘i and other tropical Pacific islands in numerous cases through novel herbivory, predation, and diseases, thereby causing the disproportionate extinction of flora and fauna that occur nowhere else on Earth. The control and eradication of invasive mammals is the single most expensive management activity necessary for restoring ecological integrity to many natural areas of Hawai‘i and other Pacific Islands, and have already advanced the restoration of native biota by removing herbivorous ungulates from >750 km². Rodenticides which have been tested and registered for hand and aerial broadcast in Hawai‘i have been used to eradicate rats from remote islands to protect nesting seabirds and are now being applied to larger islands to protect forest birds. The exclusion of other invasive mammals is now being undertaken with more sophisticated control techniques and fences. New fence designs are capable of excluding all mammals from areas to protect endangered native birds. Although the eradication of mammals from large areas has resulted in the restoration of some ecosystem processes such as natural forest regeneration, changes in other processes such as fire regimes, nutrient cycling, and invasive plant proliferation remain more difficult to reverse at larger landscape scales.

Demand for career professionals in the fish and wildlife professions is expected to increase over the next 10–12 years. I discuss education and training of fisheries and wildlife career professionals including who colleges and universities need to educate to meet the professions' needs. I provide a perspective on what these career professionals will need to know and how we will educate and train them. I suggest that we need to educate a more diverse workforce and a workforce that adopts an international perspective on fisheries and wildlife conservation. Designing curricula to meet the professions’ needs will require on-going dialog with state, provincial, and federal agencies and will require innovative approaches that integrate knowledge requirements for these jobs with skill development. The ideal curriculum will have bounded flexibility, accommodate multiple career goals, integrate essential skills and incorporate conservation-relevant concepts throughout, meet professional certification requirements, accommodate study abroad opportunities, and will include at least two internships.

In some small mammals, digestive tract morphology is known to vary between and within individuals over time. Although changes in organs such as the stomach, small intestine, cecum, and large intestine vary among species, there is a trend toward increasing length and mass in individuals faced with increasing energy demands due to cold exposure or to reduced food quality. These morphological changes can also be induced by short day photoperiod, and could therefore serve as a winter adaptation. However, the extent to which these morphological responses to environmental cues are shared among mammals is not known. We examined the influence of cold temperature and short day photoperiod on the digestive tract morphology of Apodemus speciosus. The length and dry mass of all organs increased in response to cold temperature, and the dry mass of the small intestine was also increased by short day photoperiod. The small intestine is the principal site of nutrient absorption, and changes in its morphology may be an important aspect of winter adaptation. These results suggest that digestive tract morphology may alter flexibly as a means of coping with energy challenges.

The first radio tracking study on the endangered leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) in Taiwan was conducted from November 2006 to April 2008. Average minimum convex polygon home range size for combined sex was 5.0 km² (SD = 3.2, N = 4). Males had much larger home ranges than females, but only males reduced their ranges significantly in the dry season. Home ranges overlapped a little between individuals, but their core areas were not overlapped suggesting territoriality. Taiwanese leopard cats in our study area tended to avoid large artificial open areas like agriculture land and man-made construction. Movement analyses showed that males were more mobile than females, but females used their home range in a more concentrated manner. They were nocturnal and exhibited crepuscular activity patterns in the wet season, but were arrhythmic in the dry season. Nocturnal activity was low during the dry season. We found 100% mortality of radio-tagged individuals due to anthropogenic reasons within one year. Our study found that illegal poisoning and trapping was often overlooked but had a profound effect on the survival of the local Taiwanese leopard cat population.

We used a species distribution model to characterize habitat use by red wolves, Canis rufus, on the Albemarle Peninsula of North Carolina, USA. Using more than 4,000 VHF telemetry locations of 178 individual animals from 1999–2008, we quantified habitat use and modeled potential habitat suitability of red wolves. Areas of agriculture where secondary road density was high (up to 1 km/km²) and human population density was low (less than 1.67 individuals/km²) were most suitable. Our study supports the baseline knowledge of red wolf suitable habitat, and shows that red wolves will use habitats altered by humans and occupied by humans at low densities. This research represents the use of the most comprehensive red wolf VHF telemetry dataset for habitat suitability modeling to date, and the results should contribute to the growing knowledge of suitable red wolf habitat. This knowledge is critical to identifying future reintroduction sites and protecting the future of this species.

To maintain local populations of the Siberian flying squirrel Pteromys volans in restricted small habitats, it is necessary to understand their nesting and food biology. Communal nesting of P. volans is well documented in the Eurasian continent, but the details of this behavior have been poorly investigated in Japan. We investigated a group composition of P. volans in Hokkaido, Japan. The mean numbers of individuals using each nest box and tree cavity were 2.17 and 2.44, respectively. Although each female had its own exclusive home range, communal nesting composed by two females was observed in nest boxes. This result suggested that females frequently used nest boxes and formed same-sex groups in urban areas where nest resources might be scarce. Communal nesting of P. volans was found in both nest boxes and cavities with seasonal difference, and cavities were mainly used in winter. Communal nesting of P. volans in Japan may be associated with reproduction, because most cases of communal nesting were composed of one male and one female. To conserve local population of the Siberian flying squirrel, the preservation of cavities, which are usable for more than two individuals, is needed to enable them to breed stably and overwinter safely.

Accurate determination of the abundance and distribution of animals, particularly endangered species, is a fundamental requirement for understanding their ecology and has important applications for their conservation. In Bornean flooded forests, various approaches have previously been used to conduct primate census, including foot-based land surveys and boat-based river surveys at different times of the day such as in the early morning and/or late afternoon. However, the accuracy of primate encounter frequencies and animal counts obtained using these methods has not been assessed. Therefore, in this study, we attempted to assess the accuracy of these methods used in different studies. We found that boat-based river surveys were more accurate than foot-based land surveys for evaluating the abundance and distribution of Bornean primates, particularly proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) and long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis). Furthermore, based on our evaluation of boat-based river surveys at different times of the day, we recommend that such surveys be performed in the late afternoon to yield more accurate estimates of the abundances and distributions of Bornean primates.