As the largest native terrestrial mammal on the channel islands, the santa catalina island FOX urocyon littoralis catalinae is susceptible to many risks including novel diseases and predators USFWS…

As the largest native terrestrial mammal on the channel islands, the santa catalina island FOX urocyon littoralis catalinae is susceptible to many risks including novel diseases and predators USFWS 2004 due to a disease outbreak in the late 1990S the population was reduced to 100 individuals after years of recovery efforts, this FOX remains a conservation reliant species specifically, with over 1 million visitors every year, the risk of disease spread and mortality associated with visitors increases annually, and is the only federally listed subspecies since 2005, the catalina island conservancy has managed and run the daily recovery activities internally including island wide population estimate, vaccination program, weekly monitoring of radio collared foxes, and providing veterinary treatment to foxes injured in the wild following the recommendations from the epidemic response plan for catalina island foxes hudgens ET AL 2014 , the conservancy annually fits 40 70 unvaccinated foxes with collars to serve as disease sentinels the conservancy also developed new threat abatement strategies, conducted disease prevalence research, conducted CDV and rabies vaccine titer persistence research, and provided educational opportunities for island residents and visitors the goal of this project is to support the catalina island FOX telemetry and sentinel program that is so crucial to detecting population declines and disease outbreaks quickly funding will be used to purchase VHF radio collars and hire a FOX telemetry intern to conduct surveys these frequent surveys are necessary to ensure FOX mortalities are detected quickly so that necropsies can be used to determine cause of death and disease presence mortality information will also contribute to our understanding of risk of extinction for the catalina island FOX as well as allow for rapid response in the case of a disease outbreak