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SPORTS  NEWS
Wallowa County Chieftain
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
Lady Cougars go on central Oregon rampage
By Ellen Morris Bishop
Wallowa County Chieftain
The Wallowa Cougar’s girls
team dominated both the Condon
Wheeler basketball team, and the
Ione/Arlington teams on Friday
and Saturday respectively. On Fri-
day night they defeated Condon /
Wheeler 65-23, leading through-
out the game. The Cougars started
off strong with 18 points in the first
quarter, slowed a bit in the sec-
ond quarter, but swamped Condon/
Wheeler 23-7 points in the third
quarter. Shanna Rae Tillery scored
19 with 13 rebounds. Jamie John-
ston tossed 18 points through the
hop, Haley Brockamp scored 13
Megan Aamodt was the high scorer
for Condon/Wheeler with 8. “We
read our break really well,” said
coach David Howe. “Unfortunately
we missed a ton of lay-ins. But our
posts did a great job as a group.”
At Arlington/Ione on Saturday
the Cougars continued their ram-
page, winning 59-32. Jamie John-
ston tossed in 34 points, more than
the entire opposing team.The Cou-
gars led all the way in this game as
well, although at the end of the half
the score was nail-bitingly close, as
14-12. But in the second half things
opened up for the Cougs, while they
allowed just 15 total points to their
opponents. A. Heideman was high
scorer for Arlington/Ione with 11
points. “We ran our break really well
tonight,” Howe said. Our guards are
seeing the post and delivering the
ball on-time. Obviously, Jamie was
a one-woman wrecking machine
today, but our defense and our fight
was just awesome. It’s nice to have
everyone back and healthy.”
Ellen Morris Bishop
In the December game against Cove, Jamie Johnston (left) heads for the basket. Johnston scored 34 points in the Dec. 21 game with Ione/
Arlington.
Men think they
are better liars
than women
Brianna L. Verigin
University of Portsmouth
Jonny Armstrong/Oregon State University
A brown bear consumes sockeye salmon in Yako Creek in southeast Alaska.
Big brown bears eat salmon in little streams
By Chris Branam
Oregon State University
CORVALLIS, Ore. –
It’s a familiar scene to any-
one who’s watched foot-
age of brown bears catching
sockeye salmon in Alaska:
They’re standing knee-deep
in a rushing river, usually
near a waterfall, and grab-
bing passing fish with their
paws or jaws.
But a new study pub-
lished in the journal Con-
servation Letters reveals
a different picture of how
and when bears eat salmon.
Most of these bears, also
known as grizzlies, are dip-
ping into small streams to
capture their iconic prey.
Using a foraging model
based on the Wood River
basin in southwest Alaska,
a study team led by Oregon
State University determined
that while small-stream hab-
itats have only about 20%
of the available salmon in
the watershed, they provide
50% of bear consumption of
salmon.
“This tells us that popula-
tions of sockeye salmon that
spawn in little streams are
disproportionately import-
ant to bears,” said study lead
author Jonny Armstrong, an
ecologist at Oregon State
University. “Bears profit
from these small streams
because they offer salmon
at unique times of the sea-
son. To capitalize on plenti-
ful salmon runs, bears need
them to be spread across
time.”
Small streams typically
have cold water, which leads
to populations of salmon
that spawn much earlier in
the season when no other
populations are available to
predators such as bears.
These results have poten-
tial consequences for how
environmental
impact
assessments are conducted
and evaluated for large proj-
ects such as the proposed
Pebble Mine in Alaska’s
Bristol Bay.
These reports typically
focus on how the project
will affect the abundance
of salmon in lakes and riv-
ers, but they usually over-
look smaller habitats, Arm-
strong said.
“When people want to
build a large mine, they
think these streams don’t
matter because they repre-
sent a small fraction a water-
shed, in terms of area or
salmon abundance. In con-
servation and management,
we generally place value on
the largest runs of salmon at
the expense of the smallest
ones,” Armstrong said. “If
we pose a different question
and ask which habitats are
important for the ecosystem,
then small streams become
particularly relevant.”
The researchers devel-
oped a mathematical model
that explores how water-
shed development and com-
mercial fisheries affect how
many sockeye salmon are
available to grizzlies. The
model simulated different
patterns of development and
explored how they affected
the number of salmon bears
consumed.
Protecting large salmon
runs at the expense of
smaller ones turned out to be
bad for bears.
“This causes the bears’
total salmon consumption
to drop off faster compared
to strategies that protected
small salmon runs and the
early feeding opportunities
they offer to bears,” Arm-
strong said. “If you impair
these areas, you may only
reduce the total number of
salmon by a little, but the
number of salmon that end
up in bear’s stomachs – you
could reduce that a lot.”
According to the study
authors, there are two signif-
icant reasons why the larg-
est bears in the world are
drawn to small streams to
eat salmon.
First, the fish in these
streams are easy to catch for
adult and juvenile grizzlies.
And second, because the
water is colder than in lakes
and rivers, salmon spawn
in them earlier – proba-
bly to give their eggs more
time to incubate, the authors
said. So, the fish are plenti-
ful by the first week of July –
making them the first places
bears fish after they emerge
from hibernation.
“When they come out of
hibernation, the bears are
just scraping by and barely
making it,” Armstrong
said. “Having these streams
means they can start eating
salmon in early July, which
is about six weeks before the
river- and lake-salmon pop-
ulations start spawning and
become available to bears.
It’s an incredible foraging
opportunity for bears.”
Armstrong added, “I’m
sure that native Alaskans
who subsisted on salmon
were keenly aware of this,
too.”
Armstrong is an assistant
professor in the Department
of Fisheries and Wildlife in
OSU’s College of Agricul-
tural Sciences.
Men are twice as likely
as women to consider
themselves to be good at
lying and at getting away
with it, new research has
found.
People who excel at
lying are good talkers and
tell more lies than others,
usually to family, friends,
romantic partners and col-
leagues, according to the
research led by Dr Brianna
Verigin, at the University
of Portsmouth.
Expert liars also prefer
to lie face-to-face, rather
than via text messages, and
social media was the least
likely place where they’d
tell a lie.
Verigin said “We found
a significant link between
expertise at lying and gen-
der. Men were more than
twice as likely to consider
themselves expert liars
who got away with it.
“Previous research has
shown that most people tell
one-two lies per day, but
that’s not accurate, most
people don’t lie every-
day but a small number of
prolific liars are responsi-
ble for the majority of lies
reported.
“What stood out in our
study was that nearly half
(40 per cent) of all lies are
told by a very small num-
ber of deceivers. And these
people will lie with impu-
nity to those closest to
them.
“Prolific liars rely on a
great deal on being good
with words, weaving
their lies into truths, so it
becomes hard for others to
distinguish the difference,
and they’re also better than
most at hiding lies within
apparently simple, clear
stories which are harder for
others to doubt.”
Dr Verigin quizzed 194
people, half men and half
women, with an average
age of 39.
They were asked a
series of questions includ-
ing how good they were
at deceiving others, how
many lies they’d told in
the past 24 hours, the type
of lies they’d told, who to,
and whether they’d done
so face-to-face or via other
means.
She said: “Time after
time, studies have shown
we are not as good at
detecting lies as we think
we are. At best, most of us
have a 50:50 chance of get-
ting it right when someone
is pulling the wool over
our eyes.
“We wanted to focus on
those who are good at lying
and try to understand how
they do it and to whom.”
The study found one of
the key strategies of liars
is to tell plausible lies that
stay close to the truth, and
to not give away much
information. And the better
someone thinks they are at
lying, the more lies they’ll
tell.
The most commonly
used strategy among all
those who admitted to
lying, whether experts or
poor liars, was to leave
out certain information.
But expert liars added to
that an ability to weave a
believable story embel-
lished with truth, making
the lies harder to spot.
In contrast, those who
thought they weren’t good
at lying resorted, when
they did lie, to being vague.
Overall, of the 194
people, the most com-
mon types of deception,
in descending order, were
‘white lies’, exaggerations,
hiding information, bury-
ing lies in a torrent of truth
and making up things.
Most people chose to
lie face-to-face, then via
text message, a phone call,
email, and last, via social
media.
Most
expert
liars
lie most often to fam-
ily, friends or colleagues.
Employers and authority
figures were least likely to
be lied to.
The study showed no
link between level of edu-
cation and lying ability. Dr
Verigin said more research
needs to be done, particu-
larly on better understand-
ing good liars’ expertise
at embedding lies within
truthful information, and
at using facts that were
impossible to check.