Marco Festa-Bianchet 🇨🇦

@marcofesta.bsky.social

1582 Followers 283 Following

🇨🇦🇨🇦 Emeritus ecology prof in Sherbrooke, Canada. Evidence-based wildlife conservation, mountain ungulates, kangaroos, ice-free fishing. 🇨🇦 elbows up!

Mountain goat kid. Pic Éd. Bélanger
The sheep trap at Ram Mountain after a snowstorm.
Ram Mountain got another 20 cm of snow and more is falling. The cookhouse, where I sleep.
Ram Mountain fire lookout, now boarded up. The helicopter landing pad used to be horizontal. Presumably displaced by wind. Over 50 years the sheep trapping crew met many interesting lookout persons, who offered companionship, shelter from storms and communication before cell phones. Apparently lookout people were replaced by web cams.
Ibex male through door of Rosenkrantz hut, Levionaz, Gran Paradiso National Park.
Figure 1 from Morrissey, M.B., R. Bonenfant, F. Pelletier, D.W. Coltman and M. Festa-Bianchet 2026. The potential for rapid evolution in response to exploitation-induced selection. Proceedings of the Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council, 24: 19-35.
Text from Morrissey, M.B., R. Bonenfant, F. Pelletier, D.W. Coltman and M. Festa-Bianchet 2026. The potential for rapid evolution in response to exploitation-induced selection. Proceedings of the Northern Wild Sheep and Goat Council, 24: 19-35.
Empirical data from Ram Mountain. While population was subject to unrestricted hunting of rams with horns describing 4/5 of a curl, the phenotypic decline was about 18 cm, the genetic decline due to artificial selection was about 2.5 cm. Decline stopped when hunting regulations were changed to full-curl and almost no rams were shot after 1996. Figure based on Pigeon, G., M. Festa-Bianchet, D.W. Coltman and F. Pelletier. 2016. Intense selective hunting leads to artificial evolution in horn size. Evolutionary Applications, 9: 521-530.
A 4-year-old bighorn sheep ram shot at Sheep River, Alberta. It was legal to kill this ram because its horns met the minimum definition of 4/5 curl. Had the horns been 2 cm shorter, the ram would have been illegal to kill. Any Alberta resident can buy a trophy sheep licence and harvest during the 2-month season is only limited by the availability of 'legal' rams. Horn size plays an important positive role in ram mating success beginning at about 7 years of age. Success of 4- and 5-year-olds is largely independent of horn size. Negative selective pressure from quota-free selective hunting starts 2-3 years before positive selective pressure of large horns in mature rams. With 40% harvest of legal rams, a ram legal at age 4 has about a 7% chance of surviving to age 7 - selective pressure is comparable to that exerted artificially on domestic animals.
Mother wombat with young-at-foot, Wilson Prom, Victoria, Australia
The ghost is likely the coyote as the pic was less than a minute before the coyote showed up. We had seen a white ermine last winter but this is the first time one shows up on camera.
Canusa street marks border between Canada and US. USA customs.
Separate Canadian and American entrances because US politicians cannot tolerate people walking around the corner to enter theater from the American side of the building.
The black tape indicates international border.
Most of the volunteers for the 2025 meeting of the CSEE/SCÉÉ in Sherbrooke, Québec. The T-shirts illustrate some of the wildlife on Mt Bellevue, next to the UdeS campus. The meeting featured a land acknowledgment where I uttered a few words in Abenaki, a daycare, a nursing room and a substantial amount of French being spoken. The CSEE/SCÉÉ is strong on EDI, a key to its success.
2008 meeting of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), Yellowknife, NWT. I'm sitting, Jeff has a fur hat.