No abstract

Global climate change is expected to shift species ranges polewards, with a risk of range contractions and population declines of especially high‐Arctic species. We built species distribution models for Svalbard‐nesting pink‐footed geese to relate their occurrence to environmental and climatic variables, and used the models to predict their distribution under a warmer climate scenario. The most parsimonious model included mean May temperature, the number of frost‐free months and the proportion of moist and wet moss‐dominated vegetation in the area. The two climate variables are indicators for whether geese can physiologically fulfil the breeding cycle or not and the moss vegetation is an indicator of suitable feeding conditions. Projections of the distribution to warmer climate scenarios propose a large north‐ and eastward expansion of the potential breeding range on Svalbard even at modest temperature increases (1 and 2 °C increase in summer temperature, respectively). Contrary to recent suggestions regarding future distributions of Arctic wildlife, we predict that warming may lead to a further growth in population size of, at least some, Arctic breeding geese.

Human T-cell leukemia virus has been linked with adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma (ATLL), a tumor of mature T cells that occurs at elevated rates in southwestern Japan and in the Caribbean Basin. Human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV) or a closely related virus, has also been found in varying proportions of healthy individuals of several species of Old World monkeys. In the present study, conducted with macaques from Taiwan and the New England Regional Primate Research Center, antibodies to membrane antigens of HTLV-infected cells (HTLV-MA) were found in 11 of 13 macaques with malignant lymphoma or lymphoproliferative disease but in only 7 of 95 of healthy macaques. This indicates that antibodies to HTLV are significantly associated with the development of naturally occurring lymphoid neoplasms in at least some species of nonhuman primates.

This study examined the habitat selected by the swamp wallaby, Wallabia bicolor, the red-necked wallaby, Macropus rufogriseus, and the common wombat, Vombatus ursinus. The habitats were unlogged forest and three age classes of logged forest at 16 weeks and 72 weeks after a fire in November 1980 in Mumbulla State Forest on the south coast ofNew South Wales. Habitat selection was determined from decay-corrected dung counts. The dung count for each species varied with the topography and age class of the forest, demonstrating that logging and fire had a marked effect on the habitat selected. The ridges logged during the woodchip-sawlog operation in 1979 and 1980 had little dung, indicating low use as feeding areas. Since these habitats were the most exposed, the conclusion drawn was that they were rarely used by the herbivores. However, ridges logged 10-15 years earlier supported all species because they provided both food and refuge shelter. Recommendations for management of forests subject to logging and fire include the retention of unlogged gully forest and spreading operations through both space and time to minimise population fluctuations.