Amy Welsh, West Virginia University – Bobcat Populations

How do you track the population of an elusive wild animal?

Amy Welsh, assistant professor of wildlife and fisheries at West Virginia University,  explains her research into tracking bobcat populations in West Virginia.

A winding path brought me to the field of conservation genetics and I have always enjoyed the journey. I grew up in Baltimore, MD and received my B.S. degree in Zoology and Psychology from the University of Maryland-College Park (1996). I then worked at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research looking at the effects of sleep deprivation on performance (1996-1999). I received my Masters of Forensic Science degree from The George Washington University (1999) and then worked at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (1999-2001), where I was introduced to genetics and its important applications. Ecology and zoology remained an important passion and I moved out west to pursue my Ph.D. in Ecology at UC-Davis (2006). The focus of my dissertation was the population genetics of lake sturgeon. I then moved to the shore of Lake Ontario and was an assistant professor at SUNY-Oswego (2006-2011). The journey has now brought me to wild and wonderful West Virginia, where I continue research on the genetics of fish and wildlife populations.

Bobcat Populations

Bobcats are harvested in West Virginia and there’s some interest among trappers to increase the bagging limit.  One of our most recent projects at our conservation genetics lab, Wild Genomics, is to study the bobcat populations in the state.  However, a population estimate for bobcats in the state hasn’t been generated since the 1970s, so we have no idea about how large (or small) the population is.  The other difficulty is that bobcats are pretty elusive so it can be hard getting a population count using traditional field methods. 

That’s where the genetics come in.  My Ph.D. student Tom Rounsville has designed a hair snare that’s in a cubby and it’s been very effective at grabbing hairs off of bobcats.  These cubbies are being deployed throughout West Virginia, luring bobcats in with scents.  The bobcats then rub against the cubbies and gun brushes attached to the cubby collect their hair.  We can then extract DNA from the collected hairs and, based on the genetic profile, determine whether the hair came from a bobcat and essentially use DNA fingerprinting to determine the number of individuals that have been caught.  That data can then be used to generate an estimate of the population size of bobcats in West Virginia. 

In addition to coming up with a population size estimate, we’re also using the genetic data to determine how many populations are in the state.  Identifying population structure can help managers define the scale at which management should occur.  If you have some isolated populations, then they may need to be managed separately.  Finally, we’re going to use the genetic data to identify potential landscape barriers to movement.  These could either be natural barriers, like rivers, or human-created barriers, like roads.  All of the results generated from the genetic data will help to better inform bobcat management in West Virginia.