Lisette Waits has tracked jaguars and ocelots in Belise, tigers in Nepal and bears, foxes, wolves and other animals in the states. She’s also won an award for her work — the Jean’ne M. Shreeve NSF EPSCoR Research Excellence Award.
Idaho EPSCoR, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, presented Waits with the award earlier this month to recognize her work in molecular ecology developing tools to study genetic diversity, population size and the movement and habits of individual animals.
Waits said the traditional method of tracking animal populations — physical capture and recapture — is intrusive and that she and her team track animals non-intrusively.
To do this, Waits works with what she calls “low-quality DNA samples.” She said these include saliva, hair, bone and fecal matter.
“Our research group is one of the leading groups to get DNA from fecal matter,” Waits said.
Low-quality DNA samples decay rapidly, contain little DNA or often have components that actively interfere with the collection of DNA, she said.
Waits, in University of Idaho’s Laboratory for Ecological, Evolutionary and Conservation Genetics, employs methods to salvage small amounts of DNA such as the polymerase chain reaction, used to duplicate a small amount of DNA into an amount great enough to be analyzed.
Waits and her team have applied these methods to the reintroduction of endangered species. They began monitoring grey wolves in Idaho in 2007. Since their reintroduction, they have spread to Washington, Oregon and California, Waits said. She said her lab is helping to monitor populations in those states, as well as Idaho.
“With reintroduced animals, we can get estimates of how many survived. We can see how far they went,” Waits said. “If we get one we didn’t release, we know it was born in the wild. And that’s the ultimate signal of success.”
Waits said her first project, which she started in 1998, was an NSF EPSCoR-funded project to analyze DNA from the bones of grizzly bears killed between 1850 and 1950 in North America to see how much genetic diversity had declined in Yellowstone Park and other remaining parts of the animal’s historic range. Once free to roam from Mexico to Canada, grizzly bear populations have become smaller and more isolated over time and those small groups have lower genetic diversity, she said.
“If they have less genetic variation, they have less ability to adapt to environmental change,” Waits said. “Genetic variation is the source material to respond to disease. The more the variation, the stronger the immune system of the species. We found they lost genetic diversity slowly over time.”
Waits said that at the time, Yellowstone was disconnected from nearby parks.
“The managers used this information — they considered bringing bears in or building corridors for natural connectivity,” Waits said. “Based on our research, the chose natural connectivity building corridors.”
She finished the project in 2004 and her findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Waits has been at UI for 20 years. Her award is named for current UI Distinguished Professor and former EPSCoR director Jean’ne M. Shreeve, first hired in 1961.
“It’s a huge honor,” Waits said. “Partially because it’s named for Jean’ne Shreeve, who was a female chemist who led the office at UI. She helped develop the program. She was a role model.”
Nishant Mohan can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @NishantRMohan