John Rau: Good afternoon from Kennedy Space Center and welcome to a Web cast series, The International Space Station - A Home in Microgravity. My name is John Rau and I’ll be your host today for the next hour.

Our topic for this afternoon entitled, Ecology at the Kennedy Space Center, will be a discussion on how important it is to monitor the overall health of the ecosystem that surrounds the Center. We have two wildlife biologists with us here today to help you understand today’s topic. However, before I introduce them, I would like to show you what’s on today’s schedule.

We will begin the discussion with how KSC monitors the estuaries and waterways that surround Kennedy Space Center. Then we will talk about certain protected species such as manatees, sea turtles, scrub jays, black rail marsh birds, and indigo snakes. We will also discuss how prescribed fires can help the wildlife here at the Center.

Before we start, I would like to introduce our guests for today. Sitting next to me is Mike Legare, who is a certified wildlife biologist who works at the Kennedy Space Center. And to my far right is Douglas Scheidt, who also works here at the Center as aquatics lead in his department.

Michael, why don’t you start it off by telling our viewers who you are and what you do for Kennedy Space Center.

Mike: Thanks, John. My name is Mike and I’m a wildlife biologist here.

Basically, Doug and I work in a group that deals mostly with endangered species, endangered species issues on the Space Center. We’re going to talk about the things that John mentioned: scrub jays, black rails, and indigo snakes. But we both do a number of different things

I think Doug and I are going to talk about our major topics, but a wildlife biologist basically is someone who investigates parameters of wildlife. So, with endangered species it’s normally how you monitor habitats or maintain habitats for the conservation of a species.

So. I’m involved with conservation of several different species, and so what we want to do is to eventually bring these species that are listed on the endangered species list off the endangered species list and assure their presence in the future basically. And we want to make sure they’re around in the future.

And so we do things to the habitats and we do things to their populations to that end.

John: Doug, could you tell our viewers what you do for the Center?

Doug: Well, I’m the lead to Aquatics Program, and we’re in charge of keeping and monitoring the overall health of the aquatic realm here at the Kennedy Space Center, which includes over 35,000 acres of estuarine wetlands, oceanic shoreline habitat around the Space Center. If you can see the map, I could show you that it’s a very large portion, if you can see behind me on the screen.

The Kennedy Space Center covers over 150,000 acres of wetlands and uplands.

And it involves three different estuaries: Mosquito Lagoon, the Indian River Lagoon, and Banana River, along with the shore lines of the Atlantic Ocean. And we do different types of monitoring and see not only how it impacts the space operations, but just the stewardship of the land that the Space Center owns.

John: Actually you covered how the Kennedy Space Center monitors the estuaries and waterways. Let’s talk a little bit about our next photograph here. What exactly is this photograph of, Doug?

Doug: This photograph here shows some water control structures that we use to manipulate water levels in some of the surrounding wetland habitats on the Space Center, which also is also [overran] by the Merritt National Wildlife Refuge, so we work in concert with other agencies in the stewardship of the environment around here.

And this just shows how we can manipulate the water level in some of these what are called wetland [empilements] for different types of animals.

You can keep the water level high for food for water fowl or allow the water to flow back and forth freely for movement of fish into the area. And there are several research projects we have ongoing right now studying the impacts of these management strategies.

John: Let’s take a look at this next photograph here.

Doug: This one here just shows you some other types of habitats we have around here. You can see this is the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean there to your right. Along there is a thin line, but if you look past there to your left that’s an estuary habitat of part of the Northern Banana River. And for an animal to go from, just like our sea turtles which nest on the shoreline there, for the young to actually make it to the other body of water, will have to swim 40 to 50 miles either north or south in the inlet to actually make it into our estuary habitat.

If you look in the very background, you’ll also see a launch pad area, so you can see that we have very close proximity of launch operations to wildlife in the area.

John: How far do you go off shore?

Doug: Most of our work actually, we stop there at the shoreline for, even with sea turtles. We monitor sea turtle movement and nesting on the beach itself.

John: Let’s go on to another photograph. That’s an interesting, in space actually, isn’t it?

Doug: Yes it is. And I just put this slide in here to show the importance of space technology in helping biologists and other researchers use space born technology to do research. And we show the importance of a lot of the things we do on the ground with things in hand, but we can also utilize the technology that we launch here from the Space Center.

And this is an interesting slide here. This is from a Noah Satellite, and there are researchers in different universities and federal organizations are doing work with following global changes in impacts in environments. You can see in the middle of the screen that kind of a dusty brown color. That is an image of a sandstorm coming off the Sahara Desert, which actually is going to be deposited in the Caribbean Basin, which can have impact for alga blooms and maybe coral bleaching.

John: One more picture here as far as our, this is a monitoring of the surface temperatures, correct?

Doug: Yes, and it’s just another type of space born technology that we use, and it can show that we can track different types of water temperatures and currents in our worldwide oceans. And this has implications for such things as El Nino and La Nina effect that we can track those. That’s how scientists are able to predict these things by following the sea surface temperatures, mostly off like the Humboldt Current. We can tell if there’s going to be changes in the Southern Hemisphere, how it will affect us over time. This just here shows our Western Atlantic Basin.

John: Let’s move along to our first protected species. Here I’ve got a picture for you. Let’s talk a little bit about this. Are manatees endangered?

Doug: Yes, they are. They’re on the federal endangered species list, and we’re actually lucky to have a very large population of the West Indian manatee found within the waters of the Kennedy Space Center. Actually sometimes we can have up to a quarter of the population of the state, or basically world population, within our waters.

So we try to keep good stewardship of our waters. That’s why we try to maintain, monitor our water quality for other habitats which is for clear water, better sea grass, which is the major food source for these animals. So we do research with that just to make sure that we’re not impacting the habitat of these animals.

John: Where are the manatees found on Kennedy property?

Doug: They’re found in the Northern Banana River is the most common place. They’re found in all the surrounding bodies of water, but in the northern part of the Banana River we have a manatee sanctuary area there which actually overlaps with some of our security zones. So that when the animals come into the area there’s no other impact from man, so they actually have a haven area for resting and feeding in this area. We also have a very healthy sea grass habitat in that area which is a great food source for them.

John: Another picture of a manatee here. What exactly is going on here?

Doug: This is part of a cooperative program we’re doing with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is a project out of Gainesville.

And you can see here that large thing on the back is actually, that buoy is a satellite receiver, and it’s attached around the trunk or tail of the animal, and this animal carries this along with it and you can see, or you look at this thing in the water right above it is an antenna, and then actually you can send information back to a satellite, again space born technology, to researchers back in Gainesville and we can track the movement of these animals.

And you can see where they move, not only on a small scale like over a few hours, but we can track these animals for months at a time and see do they spend a lot of their time here within our waters, maybe further south. And some actually may move offshore all the way down to Miami area and back and forth.

John: And it doesn’t bother the manatee?

Doug: No. It’s fairly unobtrusive. It doesn’t bother the animals too much.

John: Okay, let’s move along to the next endangered species, which is the scrub jay. And, Mike, why don’t you take that for us.

Mike: A lot of people think of Florida as, what Doug’s talking about, wetlands and estuaries and swamps and that sort of thing, so for people that are not in Florida it might be a little bit of a surprise that there’s lots of really desert-like uplands.

And we call those places Florida scrub or [Zerit] scrub, and the plants and animals there are adapted to water stress. And believe it or not, even though it rains a lot, the soil is so permeable, the water goes through the soil so quickly that plants are adapted to drought-like conditions. And so it’s sort of the poster child of that environment is the Florida scrub jay.

And scrub jays are interesting birds. They’re cooperative breeders. That means a male and female will breed and have offspring, and then those offspring will stay behind a year, two years, and help the following year raise the young, raise basically their nieces and nephews I guess you’d say. So it’s an interesting bird to study for the social aspects of cooperative breeding.

The other thing with Florida scrub jays is that they’re also a threatened species on the endangered species list. The thing with Florida scrub jays is they’re very habitat specific. They need Florida scrub and they need Florida scrub in a certain condition. And so we spend a lot of time trying to get Florida scrub back into a condition that they do well in.

In some places, let’s go to the next slide, in some places they don’t do very well, their populations are declining. And this is a photograph of nestlings in the nest, it’s kind of hard to see with that shot there.

So they typically have four young, believe it or not in this nest there’s four young. They’re what’s called "altritial" birds. They’re born basically blind and helpless, and they don’t have any feathers. These are young; they’re about 12 days old, they’re in the nest. And about three or four days after this photograph was taken those young, they fledge, they leave the nest and they’ll hop along on the ground, and the adults still feed them.

The problem with the scrub that it’s in degraded condition is that the young are being eaten before they leave the nest. So we’re experiencing really high levels of nest predation. So there may be years where the adults never have successful nest where the young leave the nest.

And so what we’re trying to do now is to figure out why that is. So we’ve used this camera that monitors the nest environment 24 hours a day, so that we can figure out what the specific predators are, and maybe we can manage the habitats basically against those predators.

Before we had these cameras we didn’t really know, we didn’t have an idea what the predators were that were taking all these young. And it’s discouraging year after year after year if you follow the same pair or many pairs of scrub jays and don’t have any successful young, it’s discouraging. So we’ve got this new technology, this video camera that’s mounted in a waterproof box, powered by a car battery, and it has a little tiny camera mounted above the nest. We actually found out what the nest predators are. And I think we’ve got some video that we should be able to go to.

John: It’s a time-lapsed video

Mike: Yeah, we’ve got some video to show what the predators are. It turns out that the major predation where we are is yellow rat snakes.

John: Well, here’s the video clip; it’s about a minute or so.

Doug: We’ll go to that and come right back. So there’s no audio here with this, just got to talk along with it. So most of the predation events happen at night, and so you can see here the yellow rat snake went underneath the incubating female while she’s on the nest and the snake is crawling around nestlings that are probably about ten days old at that point. And it’s going to eat those nestlings, and you can see the snake’s looking around for the head.

That’s just one snake there. Yellow rat snakes are really long. They’re very good climbers. They’re arboreal. That means they spend a lot of time up in the trees. And there’s several amazing things about this. One is that the predation events happen at night, and so the adults are basically defenseless against this. The other interesting thing is the size of that snake. You look at the size of that snake, if you saw the nestlings, you wouldn’t think that the snake would be able to eat them. The snake’s head is very small compared to the nestlings that it’s going eat.

And right about here is where it starts to get interesting here. You see the snake will struggle for a few minutes to swallow this nestling, but that’s the major source of predation. It’s actually going to carry the nestling off. You can let that go if you want to or you can come back.

John: Well, thank you very much for having this tape for us, and let’s move along and we’ll talk a little bit about…

Mike: We’re going to get back to Florida scrubs when we talk about fire, too.

John: Let’s switch back to Doug here. We have a question for him about sea turtles. I actually have a picture of a sea turtle on the screen behind us. Looks pretty big to me, Doug. How much does this weigh? How much does a sea turtle weigh?

Doug: This is one of our two most common sea turtle species we find along our beaches in the waters at Kennedy Space Center. This is a Loggerhead sea turtle. The scientific name is Coretta coretta, and it’s probably one of the most abundant animals around here. This animal here is a very large animal. That animal there was too big for us to actually weigh on our boat, but we estimated over 300-plus pounds. You can see the size of that with the person in the background there, one of my colleagues, Les Lauers, is holding this animal. And you can see this very large relative size there.

John: Let’s go on to the next one here.

Doug: If you can flip down the screen, one interesting thing I could show you from this animal is that it’s a very large, old animal.

If you look down on the lower left part of the animal there, you can see part of its [carriage] is missing, and that’s due to the fact that it probably was bitten as a young animal by a shark or something that actually removed part of its shell from it, so it’s been living for a long time with part of it’s shell missing, and you can see that there’s barnacle, which is actually a community of itself on side the animals.

John: Do these animals have any natural predators once they get to this size?

Doug: At this size probably not as much. But a little smaller size the tiger sharks are very common animal of predation on this, and when they’re hatchlings the birds, of course, and other larger fish, etc., will eat on them.

John: And the name of this sea turtle?

Doug: This is a Loggerhead sea turtle.

John: Let’s go on to the next picture here. This is interesting. What exactly is this? Said it was a growth.

Doug: If you see on this the lower back part of this animal, this is from a Green Sea turtle, [Colonial Midas], which is the second most common sea turtle we have here in the area. And that growth area right there on the back of the fin is called a fibropapillomas tumor. And this is we’re finding on green sea turtles, not only here, but worldwide on sea turtles. And it seems to be maybe an indicator of poor water quality or some type of irritant in there. We’re not really sure what’s the major cause of this, and we’re seeing it’s not only like here, which we have very good water quality, but also more pristine areas such as around the coasts of Hawaii.

And so we collect some of these animals we send off portions of that to researches around the world to help us maybe find out what the problem is with this animal.

John: Next slide here. This is actually a, this is a Loggerhead laying eggs?

Doug: I believe so. Yes, this is along our shoreline here we have over 40 miles of shoreline habitat which include Cape Canaveral, Kennedy Space Center, and Canaveral National Seashore, which makes up the whole length of our shoreline here at the Space Center. And we have several thousand animals nest every year here along the shore, or Kennedy Space Center. And you can see the animal will crawl up onto the beach above the high water mark, dig a nest with its hind flippers, and lay maybe 60 to 90 eggs at a time.

John: The size of those about a ping-pong ball?

Doug: Just about the size of a ping-pong ball. As a matter of fact it’s a great tool we use to show people all the time the size of these animals’ eggs.

John: These are actually when they hatch and try to get to the ocean.

Doug: Right. After the nest is laid the animals will stay for 60 to 90 days on the shoreline, and these animals will hatch. They usually hatch at night and then try to cue onto the light across the water and emerge into the water habitat and start to stay to the light.

John: And how many actually make it initially?

Doug: Well there’s high predation from several factors. Some are just from mortality in the nest; some just don’t hatch. And it depends on when they leave the nest. Raccoons are a major predator on the hatchlings, and they don’t make it to the water when they’re very small in the water during the day when the sun first comes up, when they’re basking on the water, birds are also a large source of predation on these animals.

So survival rate of a nest is maybe only, maybe ten percent if not more, to adulthood. But that’s common in most natural systems that there’s high predation on most animals, that’s why they usually have a large amount of young.

John: This is actually over development, not over development, but a very white beach, and what exactly happens in this one.

Doug: I just put this slide up here to talk about that when most of the time the animal, the nestlings will hatch at night, and as they emerge either on a beach which is usually dark, the only light you usually see on a darkened beach is usually the reflection out on the water of usually the moon or a star. So they usually cue on the brightest light to use that as a cue to which way the water is from the nest.

But the problem along areas that are highly developed is we have a lot of lighting stuff on the beach, so that overpowers that cue they see in the water so we get disorientation. So sometimes these young don’t even make it to the water or they spend so much energy getting there that they’re fatigued when they get to the water and that, of course, will increase their chance of being preyed upon.

John: This picture is pretty interesting. This pretty much shows how much light there really is in the United States.

Doug: And you can imagine something like that hatchling trying to…

John: Right.

Doug: This is a great graphic to show not only the population in the United States, but you can see how much the brighter the lights that you see there usually means more population since there’s more people more light.

If you look at Florida down there, you can see along the east coast of Florida from the Florida Keys going north along the shoreline is very bright. But you see right in the middle of Florida there’s a little black spot. That’s the Kennedy Space Center. And it’s probably the longest stretch of undeveloped beach along the whole eastern seaboard.

You can see that the lights go all the way from Key West all the way up into Maine. So we actually have fairly dark beaches. We do have some, we also try to keep lights impacts down from our launch pads and stuff to help their nesting season to slow down disorientation patterns.

John: This is what basically happens, right?

Doug: Right.

John: The turtle’s going around in circles, don’t know exactly where to go, right?

Doug: Exactly. Most of the time, if it’s a big hatch, they’ll come right up and you’ll see maybe just a little movement that’s usually a straight line down to the shoreline. But here you can see that some of these animals were impacted by the light and they were kind of the circuitous route to get to the water.

John: Let’s go on from aquatics back to the land, so to speak, and talk to Mike about this next endangered species.

Mike: Semi-aquatic, right? John asked me to talk about some other things, and this is a marsh bird, so marshes are an aquatic environment too. And this photo is actually a little deceiving. This bird is the size of a sparrow, a small sparrow, but it’s built more like a chicken. It runs very well. And it’s called a "black rail," and it used to occur up and down the East Coast in marshes that have emerging vegetation. That means they’ve got grass, usually it’s part time in grass.

And this bird doesn’t like to fly very well in the daytime because of, it’s afraid of being food, basically, for hawks. So it behaves more like a mouse.

And the thing that I worked on for my master’s thesis was trying to figure out how you’d survey for an animal that you can very rarely see. They’re almost impossible to see.

So in the bottom of the photograph there you can just see a little bit of a wire, that bird is actually radio-tagged, and I captured a number of them, radio-tag them, let them go back in their environment during the breeding season, and then I've actually played a tape of their calls, and recorded the number of times that the bird will respond back to the tape.

So when you play a tape of a bird’s call in its territory, it thinks the tape is an intruder, so it’ll call back, frequently it’ll call back to try and warn off this intruder. "Hey, this is my territory, get away." So that’s a tool to use to survey for black rails. And black rails are going to get us into our other issue here.

The way that a lot of the marshes have been maintained historically is with fire. And fire is a wonderful management tool for land managers, but it’s also a naturally occurring event that would keep away woody vegetation from marshes and from uplands, and basically it sets back succession, it sets back plant growth basically.

So in the case of the black rail it’s important to keep marshes grass marshes basically. In a lot of places, if you didn’t have fire, the grass marshes would turn into shrubby wetlands. And it’s important, I want to talk about scrub jays a little bit too; it’s important for scrub jays. And so we’ll go to the next slide.

And the interesting thing here is how we can’t rely on natural fires anymore to do the land management for us because we’ve got so many issues with people and development and houses. A lot of times natural fires don’t occur at the right time of the year, they’re not safe, or they’re not doing the desired effect. So we go out and light fires.

And Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge here, they do a [BREAK In TAPE] lot of prescribed burning, and this is one of the tools. This is called the terratorch and it’s run off of a track vehicle that’s frequently called a Marsh Buggy or something like that. So that’s actually a flame thrower that’s used to set off Florida scrub, and we use helicopters and drip torches and a number of different things, [fuses], a number of different things to light fires.

The main thing is to get a fire to burn to remove that vegetation so that new vegetation has a chance to grow, and it helps lots of things like Florida scrub jays and gopher tortoises.

John: The next slide is actually after everything is burned up.

Mike: Right. Well sometimes the managers that did the prescribed burns are limited to when they can burn and how they can burn, and there’s a little bit of a concern right now that some of these prescribed fires are not behaving like natural burns. And so this is a marsh fire that, in that screen you can probably see about 2,000 acres, and there’s nothing left that’s unburned.

And in a wildfire situation, and in a natural situation, that probably wouldn’t happen. Wildfires tend to be smaller, patchier, and they’ll leave patches of unburned vegetation. So we’re starting to be concerned about the impacts of doing prescribed fire this way versus wildfire.

John: How long will that take to grow back and be healthy?

Mike: Oh, it’ll be green, that area will be green and knee high in two weeks. But it’s the two weeks where it’s black that we’re worried about. What’s the survival of animals in that two-week period of time.

John: The black rail needs vegetation, correct?

Mike: Yeah, black rails are sort of the major species of concern in this situation because, like I said before, they very rarely come out of the vegetation. They use the vegetation to hide from predators, so if you remove every bit of the vegetation, what’s going to happen to that bird is going to be really susceptible to predators. So that’s just a small part of prescribed fire, and it’s one of the issues that we’re sort of concerned with right now.

John: Let’s move on here to our next protected species.

Mike: Indigo snakes. So this is another species that is sort of like [inaudible] Florida scrub. So when you talk about Florida scrub people in Florida know you’ve got Florida scrub jays, indigo snakes, and gopher tortoises, and we haven’t talked about gopher tortoises and we’re not really going to. But indigo snakes and gopher tortoises are sort of tied together.

The Indigos spend a lot of time underground and they use gopher tortoise burrows. This is just a photograph of retrieving an indigo snake. Indigos are another endangered species, they’re on the endangered species list. They used to be all over the southern coastal plain, and now they’re basically restricted to just peninsular Florida, so that part of Florida excluding the panhandle of Florida. And we’re trying to figure out why they’ve declined in the past and if they’re still declining today.

So in order to do that we’ve captured a number of animals and radio-tagged them. And this is a photograph of me retrieving a radio-tagged animal to replace its transmitter.

John: I have a question from the chat room I have to ask you by the way. Let’s move off real quick. And they would like to know actually have you ever been bitten by an indigo snake?

Mike: I used to be able to say no until about two weeks ago, and I can’t say no anymore. But they’re really not aggressive snakes. And the one that bit me just sort of got one or two teeth in my finger and it was my fault basically. I was pulling it out of something very similar to this in vegetation, and the snake was getting agitated with me. But they’re really docile animals and so they used to be collected heavily for the pet trade, and people think that’s why they declined originally is because they’re collected for the pet trade.

John: We’ll continue on a couple more here.

Mike: Why don’t we just go right to the snake here anyway. These guys have been concerned with me because I've been holding the indigo down underneath the table for awhile here.

So this is for the person who wanted to ask the question about how I’ve been bitten here. This is just to show you how docile these guys are. This is a wild snake. I just picked him up this morning. He’s actually been radio-tagged for a year and his transmitter needs to be replaced. And this is a male Indigo. It’s here from the Space Center, and he’s about six feet long, and he’s got a radio transmitter in him.

One of the names for indigo are a Blue Indigo, one of the common names because if you see them in the sun they have a really pretty blue sheen to them, and in Florida you may get this snake confused with a black racer, which is a similar snake, but black racers don’t have any red right here. The Indigos have red on their chin. Black racers have white right here; it’d be visible even from this far away, you’d see all white.

And then black racers are not heavy bodied; they’re really sort of skinny, built like a worm. And the Indigos are, I don’t know if you can tell from the photograph here, but Indigos are fairly heavy-bodied. You can sort of tell when you hold onto my, see him up against my hand. He’s a fairly good-sized snake. This individual probably weighs about 1500 grams which would be about four pounds, four-and-a-half pounds.

John: How big do they usually get?

Mike: Well the indigo is actually the largest snake in North America, and their record is eight feet four inches. My own personal record is seven feet eight inches.

John: They’re non-poisonous?

Mike: They’re non-poisonous. I wouldn’t be holding it like this if it was a poisonous snake. And they’re sort of, again for Florida people, they’re sort of like alligators. They grow in length very quickly, and then after they get to be about this size, he won’t grow in length very much, he’ll really grow in girth. So a year from now or two years from now I would expect this snake would be about twice the diameter it is now and maybe only an inch or two longer. And this snake is probably about, this snake is probably about five years old.

John: How long do they live to?

Mike: Well, that’s not really well known. You have to study these things using radio telemetry, and radio telemetry’s only been around for the last 15 years or so that you could do indigo snakes with. In captivity the longest one has lived to be about 26 years. And from what we’ve seen the reason why they’re endangered is because they need to live that long just to replace themselves. They lay eggs, and the females only lay about eight eggs every year, and they may only every other year. And so the predation on the juveniles is very high. Predation on the adults normally is very low. That’s one of the reasons why they’re so docile is because they’re not really afraid of anything.

John: That was actually one of the questions, what is an average number of baby snakes that the indigo snakes have.

Mike: Right, and that would be about eight, and they lay eggs. But with people, more and more people, and more and more roads in Florida and across its range, the snakes are being killed directly by people, and they’re being killed indirectly by being run over on the roads. So we call that the impact of fragmentation.

This snake is different from the scrub jay in a good sense. It’s not habitat specific. It’s a habitat generalist. It seems to occur in just about all the habitats we have here in Florida. So that’s a good thing. The bad thing is that it requires a large home range, and it requires unfragmented habitats, which are becoming more rare.

John: We have one more picture before we break to the chat room.

Mike: One of my co-workers, this is her daughter about four years ago with a big female indigo.

Again, to show you how docile they are, she just loves these snakes.

John: This was about six years ago?

Mike: It was about four years ago, I think. That individual, that snake right there ended up getting eaten by a dog. It’s one of the only predation events we’ve ever had, and it was by a dog.

John: That’s unfortunate.

John: Shall we come back to Doug?

Mike: They’re really docile. If you tried to do this with almost any other snake, I would have been bitten five times by now. But these guys being top predators, it’s like those animals you see on Galapagos Islands, they’re not afraid of anything. Because he doesn’t have any natural predators.

John: Well like you said before, the air-conditioning in here is making a little bit of a difference?

Mike: Yeah, it’s 72-73 degrees in here, so that’s pretty close to what he needs. That’s a great shot. See they tongue, people don’t know much about snakes, they tongue flick like that, he’s tasting the air, and actually bringing in particles of air through olfactory organs in his mouth. And that’s how he smells. They have extremely sensitive, extremely good powers of smell. So he smells his way around. They probably don’t have very good vision, but he’ll smell his way around.

John: Okay. Let’s go on to the chat room at this time. I’d like to answer a few questions.

Mike: This snake is actually called Rex. This snake is named after the veterinarian that does the surgery, put the transmitters in.

I’d show you the site where the transmitter is installed, but you really can’t see anything. It just looks like a normal part of its skin. The veterinarian that we use does an excellent job of closing up the snake, and we spend a lot of time closing up the animal as best we can so that the animal can shed its skin because as you know snakes shed their skin, and indigos shed more than most. They may shed up to six times a year, and if you don’t close up the surgery site pretty well, that will stop the animal from shedding properly.

John: Is that rapid growth they shed so much?

Mike: Yeah, and because probably where they live, in the scrub their scales get torn up in that Florida scrub quite a bit.

John: I know you actually went over, our first question was we were on to was, you brought up this question before about fragmentation. What do you mean by fragmentation of the snakes? Does it happen when the snakes get run over by a car?

Mike: Habitat fragmentation. So where the snake lives before there were people there were no roads and canals and ditches and all those sorts of things that we have now. So fragmentation is anything that divides up a piece of habitat.

So say this area is the animals home range. If there’s one road right through the middle of it, then the fragmentation is relatively low compared to like a subdivision where that same area is divided up into 16 or 17 different roads and blocks that go this way.

So there’s different levels of fragmentation, and it’s not the snake being fragmented, but it’s the habitat that’s being fragmented. So the higher the fragmentation, the more likely the snake has of being killed basically on the roads.

John: Do the tagged snakes ever leave KC, and if they do, do you go and get them or let them go?

Mike: Yeah, we have some snakes that make long movements, but we’re not really too concerned about the boundary of KSC. They don’t migrate like birds do. They don’t go a long way. The longest distance anyone indigo’s ever moved on its own is about a mile, mile and half.

So that’s one of the things actually that hurts its population growth and its status, is that it can’t pick up and move very well, so you have to have habitat that’s suitable for the indigos, or suitable for their survival adjacent to one another, otherwise you’ll have these habitats that are broken up where you have patches of no indigos and patches of indigos.

John: Mike, how do you tag a snake? We can’t figure out if you band the snakes or put a tag on them.

Mike: Okay, I actually tag the indigos in two ways. One is with a radio transmitter. The transmitter weighs nine grams and I wish I had one to show you, but I didn’t bring one. It’s a centimeter in diameter and about five centimeters long. So it’d be about like half the size of a double A battery. That transmitter goes inside the snake, and the battery that’s in the transmitter lasts for a year. So for a year I can follow this by tracking it with a receiver just like Doug was talking about with the manatees, but obviously a much smaller transmitter.

And then they’re also permanently marked with a thing called a PIT tag, which is Passive Integrated Transponder. And it’s a little electronic transponder that’s about the size of a grain of rice and it’s made out of glass and it has a bar code that goes with it, so the snake is permanently marked with a bar code. And if you want to read which animal you’re holding, you scan over this PIT tag and the scanner displays a number. So they’re marked in two ways.

John: What happens when they shed their skin and that’s a follow up of the same question.

Mike: What happens when they shed their skin? Both tags would still be on. The transmitter’s actually in the peritoneal cavity, which is basically under the animal’s rib cage. And then the PIT tag is underneath their skin but not where it would be shed with the skin. That’s a good question though.

John: What exactly makes an endangered animal?

Doug: There are several types of status, animal species of special concern where biologists and the federal organizations are concerned about it. If this animal’s habitat is being declined, or population numbers are declining, threatened means it’s a little more concern about his animal that there’s a chance that this animal could become endangered or actually extinct or endangered where it would think it’s at a critical juncture in its overall life cycle, or the population structure to the point where either we can lose this animal due to different types of extenuating circumstances such as total habitat loss or population loss. They’re not reproducing enough to keep the population at a stable level.

John: From Justin actually. He wants to know how did some many of these endangered animals end up on the endangered species list here on Kennedy property.

Doug: It’s not from Space Center, we actually are lucky to have such a large area or habitat that some of these habitats have actually probably been saved by having the Space Center here, and also since it’s a wildlife refuge. So the reason that we have so many here is because we have such a large amount of still habitat available for these animals to exist in.

Mike: I might add to that, it’s not that the animals came here, it’s the animals were here and the Space Center came here. And where we are in Florida, we’re in the transition between the tropical environment and the sub-tropical environment. Or the [talkover] yeah, the Space Center is actually so long that we’re basically in two environments. So not only do we have the endangered species from the northern environment, we also have the endangered species from the southern environment. So we’re right on that boundary.

And it’s basically, that boundary is made by a freeze line basically. The northern end of the refuge actually experiences a frost about once every eight or ten years, and the southern end of the refuge actually really infrequently experiences frost. It’s one of those things.

John: Here is a question from Louis. Do all manatees live in rivers?

Doug: They’re found in all the aquatic habitat around Florida. They live off shore in the ocean usually near shore habitat within a few miles. They move up and down the coast in different estuarine habitats. And then they live in the lagoonal system such as the Indian River Lagoon, Tampa Bay, [Shar] Harbor, Florida Bay, and they also do live in a traditional what you’d consider a fresh water river such as the St. John’s River. So they handle all the different types of aquatic habitats found around not only the Space Center, but around Florida.

John: This is a follow up actually, there’s more to that question. Louis said I thought "legends say sailors at sea thought they saw mermaids."

Doug: One of the common names for the manatee, it’s the [Weston] manatee, but they’re also called sea cows since they usually graze on sea grass. And one reports are that the early Spanish sailors and stuff thought they were mermaids because when they’re swimming in the water when their tail goes down you can see the fluke come out of the water and it looks like the traditional what you’d think how a mermaid would look swimming in the water. But you can see it’s a long way from a mermaid.

John: That’s for sure. Randy would like to know, why is NASA and KSC so interested in these type of things.

Doug: Well the reason is it’s for, since there’s such a large landowner here, not only in Florida but in the United States, that it’s a good stewardship of the land that we have, and since the Space Center only impacts six to seven percent of all the available land that they own around here, so the actually buildings and the space launch operations take a very minute portion of that. So as responsible landowners we’ve taken a pretty much of a proactive approach to monitoring the health of the system.

John: Question from Julie. And Mike, where do black rails live?

Mike: Well specifically they live in marshes that have usually brackish water or salt water and vegetation, and they like really shallow water because they’re a small bird, and then geographically they’re in Florida year round. They’re permanent residents in Florida, and north to the New Jersey coast they’re probably breeding mostly on its own, then probably not there in the wintertime. Maryland, just the eastern shore of Maryland is a hot spot for black rails. There’s a place called Cedar Island, North Carolina that’s a hot spot for black rails.

And then on the West Coast there’s another subspecies that’s actually federally threatened in California that used to occur in all of San Francisco Bay. But the Bay Area’s been developed so much that they’re basically in one portion that’s North Bay and South Bay, and then over at a place called Yuma Arizona on the Lower Colorado River there’s a population of black rails. And that’s basically all the black rails that we have now. There are some birds that winter sporadically along the Texas coast, but basically that’s all the black rails.

John: And the biggest population as far as numbers, does Kennedy have the most or is it kind of spread out?

Mike: Yeah, that’s not really well known. Probably the people that would say they have the most either Cedar Island, North Carolina, or Elliott Island in Maryland. Kennedy definitely can’t lay claim to that honor.

John: Unlike the scrub jay.

Mike: The scrub jay, yeah. Scrub jays are basically in three populations: Ocala National Forest, Kennedy Space Center, and then Lake Wales, south central part of Florida. And Kennedy definitely is one of those three major populations.

John: Sean would like to know, do you both interact with the wildlife daily?

Mike: Pretty much. Prefer to get outside both than sit in our office. We wish it was everyday. But for me it’s normally about two or three days a week, three days a week.

Doug?: Usually during some seasons like nesting season, well, you spend more time being with the animals since they’re available for your research, and the rest of the time you may work on data and stuff back in the office.

Mike: Yeah. Unfortunately it’s not all fun in the field. A lot of it is behind a computer or writing a report or writing papers or something like that. So I spend about two-thirds of my time in the field.

John: From Marianne from the eighth grade wants to know, what types of courses do you need to take in high school or college to become an ecologist?

Doug: You need a strong math/science background. Another important thing that people should realize that when you’re going to science, you also need to have strong communication skills such as written and oral presentation skills. You actually need a well-rounded education for dealing with science in general.

Mike: And start as early as you can. When I was in high school I went to a summer training class. At Providence College they offer a training class in ecology, so it was like six weeks. So there are a lot of programs around that people might not know about.

But here at Kennedy there’s at least three different programs for high school students and college students where you can basically work with us as interns. And so there’s lots of things, yeah, there’s a lot of things to go out there and look. You can check the NASA Web site. You can check all kinds of Web sites to find out about that. But basically get started as early as possible.

And then the courses that you take basically depend on the college that you go to. So I went to a school where they have a curriculum for wildlife biology. And the Wildlife Society says, this is the classes you’re going to take. And so I actually get to choose about three classes out of four years. The rest of them they chose for me. So it all depends on where you go and what you want to do. But get started as early as possible.

John: Here’s a question for you. What animals are affected by a space shuttle launch?

Doug: Well, there’s actually very few we’ve found over the years that there’s some minimal impact right behind the pads during launch operations. But there’s maybe a small group of fish in the water around there. And we saw some birds that are maybe impacted. But overall the launch operation is fairly limited to the impact of the animals.

That’s one of the first things we did before even the shuttle program, there’s these biologists in this group spent several years assessing what would be the impacts on this surrounding wildlife from space operations, and we’ve continued that for the past like almost 20 years no, following up on that. And we’ve seen over time that the impact is pretty minimal.

Mike: Doug does most of the fishes, and I've done some work around the pads before and after the launches. And really, there is an impact both to fishes and to birds, but the impact is minimal compared with everything else that’s going around the space center, like water development, fire, and human development. And the other thing is launches are pretty infrequent as people know. So it’s a major thing for about three minutes. That’s not very long.

John: From Brandy, it’s a follow up question to Marianne. What made you think to look for a job in your field at NASA? What inspired you, I guess.

Doug: Actually I worked at an oceanographic institution before then, but I was looking at other things, and actually some friends of mine that I went to school with, and I've known these people as colleagues through the state, so they were looking for a position and I applied here and I actually was lucky enough to come up here.

Mike: I actually worked at the wildlife refuge that as an overlay they share property boundary with the Center, and I started to work at a wildlife refuge because I did my master’s thesis on black rails, so you’ll find out really frequently one thing leads into another. So I worked for the wildlife refuge for a couple of years and then the project with indigo snakes came along and so I started that about four years ago.

John: Why do you think this area has these diverse water systems? And this question’s from Steven.

Doug: Well one of the points Mike made earlier that due to the way just the geography of the area, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, and the Kennedy Space Center actually sits on Merritt Island itself, and it’s surrounded by an estuary, the Indian River Lagoon. It has Indian River Lagoon to the west, the Banana River and Mosquito Lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean. And so that’s the geography of that.

And also another reason too is that the reason we have such diverse animals in these areas, inhabiting these areas is because when there’s geographic overlap zone where we get the tropical fauna, the northern range of tropical animals and the southern range of what we call temperate or Carolinian fauna, so we’re actually in an area that, the interface area. If we were probably another 50 miles north or south, we’d probably have only half the number of animals that we find right here at the Space Center.

John: Here’s a question for you, Mike. Ruth wants to know, when did it become a common practice that you start fires to control the environment?

Mike: When did it become a common practice?

John: Yes.

Mike: That’s a good question. There’s actually some good history about that. Actually it’s, well, you know, that’s a really good question. Good questions take longer to answer. Yes. A lot of people would say that the Native Americans used fire extensively throughout wherever Native Americans lived throughout this country. And there’s a lot of evidence for that with tree scars and soil sediments that indicate that. Basically burning frequency was much higher than what it is today and what could be explained by natural phenomena.

In the South burning was common place until about the 1920s when basically bands of Northerners came down to the South and really hammered people that were doing prescribed fires. They actually had wagon trains of people that would go into towns and insult people that burned and did wildfires and called them all sorts of ridiculous names. And the educated their children against fire. And then Smoky Bear came along and that sort of became a national phenomenon where the forest service really went against fire.

And then it’s only been since the ‘70s and ‘80s, very recently, that people have embraced the idea of prescribed fire and in nowhere stronger than the Southeast. And there’s some folks at Tall Timbers Research Station in Tallahassee that they really are sort of the fathers of modern prescribed fire in the Southeast. The [Comerick] brothers, two brothers that had a bunch of land in North Florida, and they were also natural ecologists. They were really responsible for re-educating people in the South and throughout the country about the benefits of prescribed fire. So that’s a really good question.

John: Yeah, they almost got you.

Mike: Well, no, there’s actually somebody at the University of Georgia, a professor at the University of Georgia that actually has a really excellent about an hour presentation on that one question.

John: That’s a long question.

Mike: It’s a very interesting history.

John: From Cassandra, do you think your ecology efforts are making a difference?

Doug: I think we’re making an impact not only on our local habitat here, I think we make one statewide and probably national wide level that some of our research I think is applicable to other things, but I think it’s the overall ecosystem, I think we’re doing a very good job in making it work.

John: All right, Mike, can you talk about the impact of house cats that are allowed outside to birds and other animals.

Mike: Yeah, another great question. I saw that one and I wanted to answer that. That’s another really great question. Whoever asked that, you’re wonderful.

The house cats, they’re really a center of controversy here at the Space Center. There are people such as myself who are opposed to letting cats out in the wild because feral cats or house cats, pets that are allowed to go in the wild are really responsible for destroying an enormous number of wildlife, enormous amount of wildlife.

There’s a classic study done in Wisconsin where they radio-tagged farm cats, and they radio-tagged a fair number of them and calculated and published the information, that just farm cats in Wisconsin are responsible for the deaths of two million song birds, just in Wisconsin. So if you extrapolate that out, it’s a huge number of song birds that are dying just from cats. And that doesn’t get to geckos and snakes and lizards and all those things that are in Florida that house cats also eat.

But house cats are one of these things that no one wants to really touch the issue because animal rights activists really love cats, and we have the problem right here in the Space Center. We have an organization called spacecats.com. You can get on the worldwide Web and go to spacecats.com and you’ll hit a Web site that’s generated and actually I think it’s supported by the Space Center.

And so we had to deal with that issue right here. And the way that we’ve dealt with it temporarily for the past five years is by keeping the feral cats contained in one area and actually are supposed to be indoors in a building. But really the thing to do is treat those cats just like any other exotic animal, and that’s to destroy them. Because they don’t belong in a native environment.

John: Wow.

Mike: It’s harsh.

John: Yes. Yeah. But if you want to save the other animals.

Mike: Yeah. The impact that they have to our native fauna is just unacceptable. So good question.

John: From Randy, please name all the wildlife animals on KSC.

Mike: Yeah, I think there are 172 species of birds, and the plants are probably around 600 species, and mammals.

Doug: And the Indian River Lagoon itself has over 450 species of fish.

John: What happens if another animal eats the tagged snake?

Mike: Well, that actually hasn’t happened with the snake. I’ve had it happen the opposite way. We radio-tagged some Florida scrub jays and found those radio-tagged Florida scrub jays inside the snakes. That’s how we first got clued into the snake idea. But it hasn’t happened the opposite way. I’m sort of waiting for that to happen.

But the transmitter’s actually encased in a metal pan, so it can take a lot of abuse, so it would probably keep on working. It hasn’t happened yet. Like I said, we haven’t had, other than the one dog, we haven’t had any snakes predated, any of the indigos predated by anything.

John: Going back to scrub jays. Where do the scrub jays live, on the ground or in the trees?

Mike: Scrub jays, they’re pounce predators, so they’ll perch up on trees and they’ll pounce on grasshoppers and crickets and big insects and eat. So they’re on the ground and they’re in trees. They nest usually about this high off the ground in usually oak trees, scrub oaks. And so they’re considered, they’re scrub inhabitants. So you don’t usually see them up high in the trees, but they don’t nest on the ground either. A little in-between, I guess.

John: From [Laurel], what is the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?

Doug: I enjoy working in the habitats doing something I wanted to do all my life. So that’s one of the major things. It’s also I enjoy working with the people I work with since we all have kind of the same common interests, so you get stimulation intellectually from dealing with people along that level. So there’s several aspects of it I enjoy.

Mike: Yeah, the best part of my job is, and Doug feels the same way I think, we get to do lots of different things, not doing the same thing over. And then sometimes we get to figure out problems, and when you find the solution to a problem, that’s pretty rewarding. And being outside and doing lots of neat things out, in the outdoors.

John: That’s why you chose this career because you really enjoy it.

Mike: Yeah. Definitely. I enjoy going to work everyday.

John: That’s good. I think we may have covered this. But from Claudia, what is the importance of the diverse water system exactly? You may have covered that.

Doug: No, I mean it’s an important habitat, and that’s I think what we’re most concerned about that this area is very unique, like I said, geographically it makes it an important area. So that’s probably what makes it unique.

John: As Florida’s human populations continue to uncontrollably expand and use more ground, will this cause salinity levels in estuaries to increase to lower ground water pressure?

Doug: Actually I think there’s the thing about that, it can do two things especially on the Indian River Lagoon which runs along the east coast of Florida. It’s a very long estuary. It runs 167 miles. If you ever see a map of Florida, it’s a little ribbon of water runs down the east coast of Florida.

Probably one of the other things that we actually find is the more people around, for one thing is we get more surfaces, impervious surfaces are basically asphalt and concrete, we get more fresh water runoff into the system and actually it can lower the salinity at times during rain events because all this storm water runs directly into the lagoonal system without filtering through it. So I remember, one of the things is actually sometimes it can lower the salinity as opposed to boosting it.

John: So let’s answer a few more here actually. Like what do manatees like for food exactly?

Doug: They’re herbivore and they feed on several different species of sea grass that grow on the bottom of the lagoon system, which is a plant and it needs actually light to grow. So that’s one of the things we do with our water quality is we need good clean water to get light penetration into the bottom so that the plants can grow that’s a food source for the manatees.

John: Do manatees migrate at all?

Doug: Yeah, actually they do. They have a thermal tolerance that they prefer, they don’t like really super cold water since they’re more of a tropical animal. So when the water temperature gets around 11 or 12 degrees Celsius for an extended period of time over a couple of days, they’ll actually start moving either further south, or we’ve found lately too that they move to these large manmade thermal refuges which are basically outfalls of power plants we find all around the state. And actually when we do some of our aerial surveys that during really cold winter things that you don’t find animals in the rest of the lagoon, you find them aggregated around these outfalls of power plants.

John: A question for you, Mike. Actually this will be our last question for this afternoon. Why do you choose a bird and a snake to work with? Aren’t they predators and prey?

Mike: Yeah, sure. Like the video I showed, the snakes do prey on birds. Indigos and black rails don’t typically encounter one another because of the habitats that they’re in. They very well could encounter one another, and an indigo would eat a black rail. Black rail would be a perfect meal for an indigo. But those two normally don’t get together.

But why you choose what you work with is normally practical issues like who’s going to, where’s the funding going to come from, and who’s going to provide the funding, or what sort of questions are needed to be answered. And in the case of black rails I was thinking about the biologist at a refuge, since I was working for the wildlife refuge, how would you survey for these animals.

So I sort of developed or refined the technique for survey for animals. And indigos, we’ve been tasked by the Fish and Wildlife Service to try and figure out are they declining and how fast are they declining, and basically what are going to do about it. So it’s not necessarily that I like birds or snakes, it’s just that I like interesting questions, and both of those two species had interesting questions.

John: Well, thank you very much. I believe that’s all the questions we have for today. But before we end the Web cast I would like to make a couple of announcements.

Our next Web cast is on May 1^st, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. The important thing to remember, the Web cast will be on a Wednesday, not our typical Thursday. And also be sure and check our calendar page for the latest updates.

I’d like to finish by thanking our experts for taking time out of their busy schedule.

Mike and Doug: You’re welcome.

John: Thank you very much, guys.

Mike: You’re welcome, enjoyed it.

Doug: You’re welcome. Thank you.

John: Also we’d like to thank NASA Quest [fundamental] biology and Kennedy Space Center. But most importantly I'd like to thank you, our viewer, for participating in today’s event.

Once again, my name is John Rau. Have a great day.