The fisher is a large, stocky, dark brown member of the weasel family, and is related to the mink, otter and marten, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
You might not have heard of the fisher, but it has a lot of threats.
Logging and trapping drove the small forest mammal, also known as the fisher cat, to a "threatened" status on the endangered species list. Illegal pot farms might be poisoning it, too. Even the researchers trying to help the fisher sometimes cause it harm.
Fishers often share habitat with timber companies and illegal pot farms. Ground zero for that nexus is Humboldt County, California. Researchers studying populations there have to walk close to the trees where the animals den. That can disturb a mother fisher, who could be more likely to later flee and endanger herself and her kits while searching for a new home -- something she might do more often than if she hadn't been walked in on.
A graduate student at Humboldt State University came up with a new idea to test for that problem and avoid it, and she's implementing it with help from a $3,984 grant from the Oregon Zoo.
That might not seem like a lot, but it could be enough to help Humboldt State's Caylen Cummins implement a homemade tool for logging data, which she created at one-tenth the price of the commercially available versions, according to the zoo.
Her team has been placing data loggers at den sites after they live trap them and take blood samples (itself not exactly the most un-invasive procedure, but necessary for research on disease and poisoning). With those data loggers, researchers can track when fishers come and go and how many babies are present. Comparing the sounds with temperature and sounds from human activity might give the researchers a better sense of when human activities are disturbing the animal.
-- Tony Schick