(birds chirping)
("Mountain Sun" by Jason Shaw)
- It's very interesting when you look at
the way our population has grown over the past 50 years,
exponentially, by the way, since we don't have a lot of
large predators here like wolves and grizzly bears.
Basically we are the predator here,
we have to manage our population through annual surpluses.
When the second, first, third week of October rolls around
we have some bison to process and to distribute to
Native American tribes.
We do this once a year to these animals,
we don't bait them in, we don't use any artificial means
of bringing them up here.
We keep bison wild.
Now, one of the reasons the roundup here
is so unique this year, it is the first time
we have decided to move bison from one Park to another.
("Mountain Sun" by Jason Shaw)
("Fastest Man on Earth" by Jahzzar)
- We have GPS collars on animals that were introduced.
We also have resident animals
that we collared for reference, and so,
every hour daily for two years,
we're gonna collect the GPS location of all individuals
and then ask the question statistically.
Is there a difference in a way the introduced animals
are interacting with each other and the resident animals,
and the way that the resident animals
are interacting with each other?
("Fastest Man on Earth" by Jahzzar)
Now, in the long term, we have screened the animals
that came from Badlands National Park,
and we know that they carry some gene forms
that we don't currently observe in our North Unit
of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
So, in the same way, we can look at the occurrence
of those genes in their offspring
and on down the line, over decades, understand
if those genes are coming in to and spreading
throughout the herd, or if instead,
they're forming a sub-population representative
of just those animals that carry those particular genes.
("Fastest Man on Earth" by Jahzzar)
("Thought Soup" by Doctor Turtle)
- There used to be a tremendous population
of bison throughout the American West.
There were millions that roamed the prairies
But in the late 1800s, through overhunting, overharvest,
they were driven down to a few hundred individuals.
("Thought Soup" by Doctor Turtle)
Going forward we must look at the past,
and we understand that bison were
driven to perilously low numbers at one point in time.
We've brought them back numerically at least
among DOI herds, so our question now is,
how do we move forward and best manage the species
using science and our intent is to
get some gene flow among these herds to ensure that
we don't lose genetic diversity that we currently have.
("Thought Soup" by Doctor Turtle)