Update: Thanks to the contributions received here I have been able to buy 12 new game cameras and fund a crew of undergraduates and myself to conduct preliminary research  through the summer of 2016. I am, however, excited to continue this campaign. If I can raise sufficient funds ($8000) I will be able to conduct this research full-time through the winter and summer of 2017 - which is necessary for me to robustly answer these questions. I am so grateful to all my supporters for their help.

In brief:

• Wild introduced burros dig wells of more than a meter deep to reach subsurface water in the Sonoran desert.
• Many species use these wells for drinking water
• This behavior has never been described in the literature, likely due to prevailing negative attitudes towards introduced species
• My research is motivated by the desire to understand these species as they are, without a priori categorization of them as 'pests'

Four years ago I was camping on a beautiful river in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. This river winds through a brutally gorgeous landscape that looks like melted wax; old multicolored volcanic debris, steep canyons, saguaros and cottonwoods. As a field biologist, I was becoming interested in how ecologists understand and describe invasive species. I was beginning to realize that to demonize a species because it doesn't belong may prevent us from seeing what it actually does. It was on this trip that I began seeing, after years of working and camping on this river without noticing, these strange features: wells. 

Three years later, I have documented the origin of these wells, and confirmed my suspicions: burros dig wells. Burro well-digging has never been described in the scientific literature. Burros are introduced species that are commonly described by the scientific community as "scourges". Nearly all primary scientific effect-studies about them focus on how burros overgraze and outcompete native species. Yet these studies have failed to yield generalizable understandings because of weak methodologies and their failure to consider the ecological context of apex predator control. This is the essentialist paradigm that this well-digging phenomena  forcefully brings into question. 

I am now doing my PhD research on this phenomena, which connects to a growing body of scientific thought that is shifting our paradigms about introduced/invasive species. As this paradigm changes, conservation biology may transition from a field focused in many ways on 'belonging' and 'nativity' to one focused on process and ecological context.

From my preliminary data, it appears that burros are significantly increasing water availability in the desert. I have found sites that are very arid, with limited and intermittent surface water, where burro-wells maintain access to subterranean water throughout the year. Furthermore, in certain contexts, these burro-wells appear to function as vegetation nurseries; significantly more cottonwood and willow seedlings germinated in abandoned burro-wells than in adjacent riverbank zones.

With a small grant from ASU I was able to buy several trail cameras and have documented 13 species using these wells, including bighorn sheep, and I am surely missing many smaller bodied species. In fact, javelina and cattle appear to use these wells at a greater frequency than even burros.

This research is revealing a more nuanced understanding of this introduced species. Not only is this relevant to the management of wild burros, but also to the paradigms which shape our understandings of ecological communities in general. I am currently unfunded during the summers, when this field work takes place. Any donation you can make will help me buy gasoline and field equipment (cameras, batteries). While I have set a humble benchmark for this fundraising site, if I were to be able to work on this project full time next summer, 2017, (~$8000) I would be able to gather more data to understand how this behavior, and burros in general, interact with their local ecosystems. Primarily, I need to map the distribution of this behavior, of these well-features, across the larger southwestern landscape to understand how common this phenomena is, and to what extent it influences the availability and persistence of water.

If you are interested in reading more about some of the new perspectives emerging in ecology and conservation, visit the papers below, or email me for the pdfs.

References

Carroll SP, Loye JE, Dingle H, Mathieson M, Famula TR, Zalucki MP. 2005. And the beak shall inherit – evolution in response to invasion. Ecology Letters 8:944-951.

Collier MJ. 2015. Novel ecosystems and social-ecological resilience. Landscape Ecology 30:1363-1369.