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Critters' status skunks scientists

Florida's spotted skunk could be rare or common. Its status, unstudied, may not be up to a sniff test.

DAYTONA BEACH - A spotted skunk makes a memorable first impression. Before letting fly with a greeting of noxious musk, it does a little handstand.

"It's hysterical to watch, as long as you're out of range," said Dee Ann Snyder, a Port Orange wildlife rehabilitator. "When they get excited, they run around in circles doing one handstand after another."

Eastern spotted skunks are not classified as endangered, threatened, or even a "species of special concern" in Florida.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, in a recent report to the federal government, has classified the spotted skunk, along with the striped skunk, as species of "unknown" status.

They could be doing fine, or on the brink of extinction.

They are hardly alone; more than half of the 974 species the state deems "of greatest conservation need" are listed as unknowns. Some are cryptic and obscure, like the star-nosed mole or the shamefaced crab.

Others, like the skunks, would seem hard to miss.

"We call the unknowns "data gaps,' and there are a lot of them," said Christine Small, who collected opinions from some 1,500 wildlife experts for the commission's report.

Once the report is signed and sealed this fall, Florida will be eligible for a few million conservation dollars through a multiagency federal program nicknamed "keeping common species common."

A goal of the program is to manage nongame species as well as species that are hunted. Every state that wants money needs to draw up a list of animals that might need protection, and the habitats they live in.

But the data gaps show that this isn't so simple. If they are ever thoroughly surveyed, many of these species may prove not so common after all - merely fallen through the cracks of science, funding and public interest. The spotted skunk's story shows how easily this can happen.

In 1901, Arthur H. Howell, a biological surveyor for the Agriculture Department, described the smelly paradox at the heart of skunk research.

"Their peculiar means of defense has served to make them conspicuous, but the repugnance in which they are commonly held has prevented as thorough study of their habits and characteristics as has been afforded other common mammals," Howell began a report on striped skunks.

Howell, in a separate pamphlet, noted that the eastern spotted skunks of Florida were strictly nocturnal, liked beaches, climbed trees, ate bugs and mice and lizards, and borrowed the burrows of other animals.

In at least 10 Midwestern and Southern states, eastern spotted skunks all but dropped off the face of the earth. It took a while for anyone to notice.

Part of the problem, said Matthew Gompper of the University of Missouri, is that even though people noticed the local declines, they still perceived the skunks as common - elsewhere.

So what happened in Florida? Did the skunks join in the national nose dive, or were they isolated from the problems that caused their decline elsewhere?

In 2002, the state sought to find out. The conservation commission set up a mailing address and Web site and asked anyone who saw or even smelled a skunk to report it.

The letters and e-mails came in - reporting 794 skunks of the striped variety, and 197 of the spotted kind. The problem was, no one knew if the same skunks were seen more then once.

Or, for that matter, if those numbers were good or bad - because they didn't know how many skunks there were supposed to be. And without historical data, there was no way to fill in the blanks.

The new wildlife lists, even with their great gaps and unknowns, at least offer the chance that someday, someone might do surveys.

[Last modified October 2, 2005, 04:52:21]