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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, fill the engineer here. We will get right
Speaker 2: to our conversation with doctor Kristin Schuler, but I just
Speaker 2: wanted to let you all know that there is actually
Speaker 2: a video component to this podcast as well. If you
Speaker 2: would like to head over to the meat Eater YouTube channel,
Speaker 2: you can check out a little tour that we had
Speaker 2: of the knee cropsy lab at the Cornell University Animal
Speaker 2: Health Diagnostics Center. We got a tour from Kristin and
Speaker 2: a pathologist, doctor Gavin Hitchner, and he went over some
Speaker 2: of the basics of what their team does over there
Speaker 2: when studying animal mortality and trauma and whatnot. And get
Speaker 2: a look at an eagle, a bobcat, even the turtle.
Speaker 2: So again, head over to the meat Eater YouTube channel
Speaker 2: if you want to see about thirteen minutes of some
Speaker 2: really cool video footage we got over at Cornell.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're at Cornell University's Animal Health Diagnostics Center next
Speaker 1: to a stuffed two headed calf with Kristin Schuler, a
Speaker 1: wildlife disease ecologist. Explain that to me, like the ecologist part,
Speaker 1: the wildlife disease part I get okay, wildlife disease expert,
Speaker 1: I get sure.
Speaker 3: A collegist Okay, you know what ecology is, right, So
Speaker 3: studying the linkages between things, so with wildlife diseases, trying
Speaker 3: to put all that together with like the biology, but
Speaker 3: then also thinking about communication other social sciences, like human dimensions.
Speaker 3: There's economic elements that I pull in my research. There's
Speaker 3: political angles and things like that. So trying to put
Speaker 3: the whole synthesis together, all the way from the animal
Speaker 3: to people and rules, regulations and how we can make
Speaker 3: that better for wildlife populations.
Speaker 1: Got it and explain? Or I can run through it,
Speaker 1: or you can run through the scope of things you're
Speaker 1: working on.
Speaker 3: We can run through it together.
Speaker 1: Steve all Right, current projects very diverse in scope and species.
Speaker 1: You head up the New York State Interagency Working Group
Speaker 1: on Chronic Wasting Disease. Yes, and you're again we're at
Speaker 1: Cornell in Ithaca. Yes, New York and New York is
Speaker 1: not yet a CWD state.
Speaker 3: Well, New York has the distinction of being the only
Speaker 3: state that has eliminated CWD once it was found in
Speaker 3: the wild. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation actually
Speaker 3: found it first in captive deer and then in wild
Speaker 3: deer in two thousand and five, and they responded pretty aggressively,
Speaker 3: and they formed a containment area. They depopulated the two
Speaker 3: herds where they found CWD. They subsequently found two deer
Speaker 3: in the wild when they were doing some management activities,
Speaker 3: and in the seventeen years since we haven't detected it.
Speaker 1: Knockunwood Man, the only state that's done that. Yep, I
Speaker 1: didn't even know until you just said that, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: known that had ever happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I mean, I.
Speaker 1: Would have known that it's ever been eliminated from a state.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was, you know, either good or lucky.
Speaker 3: Either way, it's helped out New York a lot where
Speaker 3: we haven't had the disease to deal with There have
Speaker 3: been other what we call one and done's where it's
Speaker 3: been found in a single location and you go in
Speaker 3: and do management activity and don't find any subsequent cases.
Speaker 3: So there are conditions where that can happen, but it
Speaker 3: isn't the norm.
Speaker 1: You feel it's uh, we'll come back around talk about
Speaker 1: this a bunch more later. But do you feel that
Speaker 1: it's inevitable it'll come.
Speaker 3: Back inevitable to New York?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, potentially, but you're creasing all forty eight, like
Speaker 1: eventually all forty eight states will have it.
Speaker 3: Well, even even with all states having it, you know,
Speaker 3: if we say that, you know there's thirty plus states
Speaker 3: that have it. Now, it's not everywhere, and there's certain
Speaker 3: conditions that seem to support it better than others. So
Speaker 3: I think if we can do regulations that prohibit movement
Speaker 3: prews so you don't introduce it to new areas, and
Speaker 3: then you set up the environment where it's not the
Speaker 3: disease is going to take off once it's there. It's
Speaker 3: not necessarily inevitable that it's going to be everywhere, and
Speaker 3: I think you can do a lot of stuff to
Speaker 3: prevent it from getting there faster. I think right now.
Speaker 3: We're helping it along quite a bit.
Speaker 1: Got it? And I guess it's like you mentioned, it's
Speaker 1: not everywhere, so the state's almost become I guess talking
Speaker 1: about it in the state sense is almost a little
Speaker 1: bit arbitrary, as opposed to maybe looking at it at
Speaker 1: like a county.
Speaker 4: Wide exactly right.
Speaker 1: Like across the lower forty eight, that you'd look at
Speaker 1: it by county or something rather than by state, because
Speaker 1: the lines are kind of arbitrary, and a state could
Speaker 1: be surrounded by it, but it just hasn't turned up
Speaker 1: in the state, but often cases managed at the state level,
Speaker 1: so it's in some way it is a reflection of
Speaker 1: what a state might be doing or not doing exactly. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: you do that. You a bunch of stuff here, Moose healthy,
Speaker 1: moose health and the Adirondacks. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: that a whole bunch.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: Geographical epidemiology of bear mange ye meaning black bears mange
Speaker 1: and black bears white tailed, do your fawn survival, historical
Speaker 1: accounts of lead and bald eagles which we looked at
Speaker 1: a bald eagle this morning in your lab, and how
Speaker 1: do you pronounce this blank fun fungus in Eastern hell benders. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I find I've been I kind of got into hell benders.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that hell benders were a thing. I
Speaker 1: mean I knew like big, you know, aquatic salamanders, but
Speaker 1: I had no idea there's one as big as a
Speaker 1: hell bender.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: They seem made up, don't they. They can get up
Speaker 3: to two feet long. Yeah, and yeah some of the
Speaker 3: the names for them like snot.
Speaker 1: Otter, OLSONI sides.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really They're really interesting animals and they're super
Speaker 3: slimy and hard to hold on to.
Speaker 1: So is what is like real briefly, what is going
Speaker 1: on with hellbenders?
Speaker 3: So hellbenders throughout most of their range have been extirpated
Speaker 3: or you know, aren't found anymore, just because of things
Speaker 3: like water quality. They need really clear, clean fascillating stream,
Speaker 3: so you know, damming rivers and things like that isn't
Speaker 3: good for them sedimentation. And they are also being impacted
Speaker 3: by this Caittrid fungus, which is a fungus that has
Speaker 3: decimated some frog populations all globally. And there's a new
Speaker 3: strain of Kittrid called B sal which affects salamanders as well.
Speaker 3: So we've done some work here on captive hellbenders trying
Speaker 3: to see if we could vaccinate them against this fungus.
Speaker 3: So we had them here at the lab and you know,
Speaker 3: gave them some topical killed fungus just like you had
Speaker 3: get in sort of a vaccine, and it really didn't
Speaker 3: do much to them. You know, they got sick, but
Speaker 3: they didn't die. We were expecting them to die from it.
Speaker 3: And so what we've seen in working with partnerships with
Speaker 3: the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the
Speaker 3: Seneca Nation of Indians, is that it looks like they
Speaker 3: can survive with low levels because this Kittrid fungus is
Speaker 3: found in the water and so it's kind of ubiquitous everywhere,
Speaker 3: and so you know they're at low levels anyway just
Speaker 3: because of habitat conditions. But this is just another challenge
Speaker 3: that they sort of have to deal with. But it
Speaker 3: seems like they're dealing with it okay.
Speaker 1: And that came from somewhere New.
Speaker 3: Kittred. It's been introduced all over the world. Basically, the
Speaker 3: way that they used to test for pregnancy was through
Speaker 3: xenopus frogs. These African Claude frogs and they had kittred,
Speaker 3: and you.
Speaker 1: Know, hospitals for human pregnancs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like people. So I don't I don't know the
Speaker 3: intricacies of it, since I'm not you know, a human person,
Speaker 3: a human doctor, human person. But they would use frogs
Speaker 3: and inject them to see if they would start producing eggs.
Speaker 3: And it was a way to tell if human females
Speaker 3: were pregnant. And so a lot of the hospitals that
Speaker 3: had these frog colonies to test for pregnancy release them
Speaker 3: after they you know, developed new tests, and so that
Speaker 3: sort of when was that?
Speaker 1: When was that a.
Speaker 3: Thing decades ago?
Speaker 1: So a hospital to keep a little gang of frogs around,
Speaker 1: That's that's the story.
Speaker 3: I was not alive when this was all happening. But
Speaker 3: there's other species now that can harbor kittred, like American
Speaker 3: bull frogs can have kittred, and then it gets in
Speaker 3: the water and other species are exposed to it, so
Speaker 3: it can do a number on native frog species.
Speaker 1: So at some point they cut their frogs loose, their
Speaker 1: pregnancy tester frogs. This is perhaps an explanation. They cut
Speaker 1: the frogs loose, and these frogs had developed this.
Speaker 3: They had the fungus like they were used to it
Speaker 3: and fine with it.
Speaker 1: But then introduced it into the wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we see. I mean there's introduced pathogens all the time.
Speaker 3: So we can talk more about that with some of
Speaker 3: these other things that come from different places and then
Speaker 3: native species can't handle them.
Speaker 1: Got it?
Speaker 5: Uh?
Speaker 1: I want to hit a crackh real quick from someone
Speaker 1: we both know, Jim Hefflefinger. The other day we did
Speaker 1: a we're standing also where did it go? It was
Speaker 1: like a puppy display. Oh, there it is, all those
Speaker 1: puppy feet on display. We recently did an episode what
Speaker 1: episode number was it cream with Doctor Perry. It's the
Speaker 1: whatever the hell it's called dire wolves and ancient honeydogs.
Speaker 1: We got to talking on there about taxonomic lumpers and
Speaker 1: taxonomic splitters.
Speaker 3: Episode four sixty six.
Speaker 1: Episode four sixty six, we got to talk about the
Speaker 1: taxonomy of wolves, and I use an example of what
Speaker 1: I use an example of the somewhat arbitrary divisions that
Speaker 1: will occur in wildlife. Meaning, once upon a time you
Speaker 1: had wolves that if you just look at the western hemisphere,
Speaker 1: you look at North America, let's just say North America.
Speaker 1: You add wolves that existed from the top of Alaska
Speaker 1: way down into Mexico, and there was no distinct borders
Speaker 1: between these different wolf groups. So at some point you
Speaker 1: kind of divide them up, even though no matter where
Speaker 1: you put a division line, there's like genetic crossflow. So
Speaker 1: if you'd traveled from Alaska, northern Alaska down into the
Speaker 1: Sierra Madre of Mexico, let's say you would have always
Speaker 1: been by wolves, and you would gradually notice that those
Speaker 1: wolves changed, but there wouldn't have been actual lines of
Speaker 1: demarcation between these wolves. They would just get smaller in
Speaker 1: different colors. But there's no You wouldn't have been able
Speaker 1: to really say they were all canis lupis. You would
Speaker 1: never been able to say, like, oh, these wolves are
Speaker 1: fundamentally different than the wolves a mile that way, right
Speaker 1: a line of continuity. I'm looking at Christ but this
Speaker 1: isn't her, this isn't your area.
Speaker 3: I don't know where you're going.
Speaker 1: So I use an example of the Mexican wolf. Okay,
Speaker 1: and I was using the example of the Mexican wolf,
Speaker 1: and I forty meaning that they're saying that there was
Speaker 1: this sort of arbitrary division where if a Mexican wolf
Speaker 1: crosses IE forty, it becomes a normal wolf. That was wrong.
Speaker 1: I was saying if a Mexican wolf crosses IE forty
Speaker 1: going north, he becomes a different wolf. Heffelfinger was rolled
Speaker 1: in to say. Frequent gas and commentator Jim Heffelfinger was saying,
Speaker 1: they're always Mexican wolves, Okay, when they crow, well, he says,
Speaker 1: what yours. Here's what he says, you're screwing up. When
Speaker 1: they cross IE forty going north, they leave the experimental
Speaker 1: non essential ten j area, okay, and become a fully
Speaker 1: endangered Mexican wolf. So south of I forty they have
Speaker 1: greater management flexibility because they're an experimental introduced population. There's
Speaker 1: just a different management structure. So that thing remains a
Speaker 1: Mexican wolf, it just enters a different management zone when
Speaker 1: it crosses I forty. He goes on to further correct
Speaker 1: Mexican wolves are physically, genetically and ecologically different from southern
Speaker 1: planes wolves that were in northern Arizona and northern New Mexico.
Speaker 1: He says, there's no way they could have retained those
Speaker 1: differences that they freely interchanged with wolves in the north
Speaker 1: like you said they did. Mexican wolves existed in almost
Speaker 1: complete isolation in the Sierra Madre of Mexico in the
Speaker 1: sky islands of southern Arizona and New Mexico, with large
Speaker 1: expanses of dry desert and a lack of ungulates between
Speaker 1: them and the wolves to the north. This is why
Speaker 1: they are listed separately from other gray wolves on the ESA.
Speaker 1: People who are not I'm good. This is all giant quote.
Speaker 1: People who are not familiar with wolf distribution historically in
Speaker 1: the Southwest often like to say that Mexican wolves just
Speaker 1: naturally blend into other wolves without a definite break. I
Speaker 1: think most of the other subspecies did blend into one
Speaker 1: another because of their adjacent distributions. But he points out
Speaker 1: that is not the case in his argument with Mexican wolves.
Speaker 6: That's a correction, Christen, excellent, good job, Jim uh.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me meet with another thing from the news.
Speaker 1: Remember I told you this is a news item, but
Speaker 1: I'm moving into it not a news item.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk a bunch about c WD and some
Speaker 1: other wildlife diseases. And you and I were recently at
Speaker 1: a little conference about CWD and kind of like updates
Speaker 1: about c WD, and for your listeners who are unaware
Speaker 1: of c WD is as we say, chronic waste and disease.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a preon disease. It's an infectious disease.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you've got ten out of ten in your
Speaker 3: quiz at the meet inside that.
Speaker 1: Uh, that's great. I don't think I told Krann about
Speaker 1: that my high score?
Speaker 3: Did you read prody?
Speaker 1: It's an infectious disease that tax deer tacks all servids
Speaker 1: not sorry, what am I saying? Not all services?
Speaker 3: Not all? Yeah, it's mostly white tailed deer, mule deer,
Speaker 3: elk moose.
Speaker 1: Okay, what servant has never had it?
Speaker 3: Like fallow deer and some of the other uh. Like,
Speaker 3: I mean you can use like munch jack deer and
Speaker 3: give it to them experimentally, but like naturally infected deer.
Speaker 3: It's only those four species so far? Is that not
Speaker 3: cariban caribou? Yes?
Speaker 1: Because I thought in Europe they had a caribou.
Speaker 3: They do. Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking in North America,
Speaker 3: But yeah, reindeer in Scandinavia.
Speaker 1: Have reindeer in Scandinavia. Okay, but it's so far, like,
Speaker 1: so far, not in any North American cariboo.
Speaker 3: No, uh they've done some experimental trials and so there's
Speaker 3: concern about them, but they haven't been listed by the
Speaker 3: USDA yet, even though they seem like they're susceptible.
Speaker 1: Okay, so to date and maybe forever, I don't know,
Speaker 1: to date. White tail deer, mule, deer.
Speaker 4: Elk, moose, Yeah, North America.
Speaker 1: Okay, in North America. Uh So, a news piece came
Speaker 1: out reported from where is this damn thing? Got it? Okay?
Speaker 1: You w Madison researcher have found that black legged tis
Speaker 1: commonly referred to as deer ticks, can harbor transmissible amounts
Speaker 1: of prions. Are you a prion or preon person? Preon
Speaker 1: the protein particle that causes chronic waste and disease and
Speaker 1: white tail deer? What do you make of that?
Speaker 3: Well, there's a couple different parts of it. So I
Speaker 3: guess I'm not surprised that they found preons and blood
Speaker 3: because we knew that happens already, that preons are found
Speaker 3: throughout the animal, the infected animal's body. It's just different concentrations.
Speaker 3: So the most preons are going to be in the
Speaker 3: central nervous system like the brain, the spine cord. In
Speaker 3: other lymphatic tissues, which is why we sample the lymph nodes,
Speaker 3: like the things in the throat there that are easiest
Speaker 3: to get at. Spleen are pretty high, eyeballs are pretty
Speaker 3: high in preons, but they're in the blood, they're in
Speaker 3: muscle tissue, they're in urine, but in much much lower concentrations.
Speaker 3: And now we have very sensitive assays where we can
Speaker 3: detect those lower concentrations which weren't previously available. One that
Speaker 3: I think was used in this study is called rt
Speaker 3: QUICK or real time quaking induced conversion. If you're familiar
Speaker 3: with PCR, which is a lot of you know testing
Speaker 3: that we do, it's sort of like that, so if
Speaker 3: you have one little piece of something, you can amplify
Speaker 3: it multiple times. And so you know, they were able
Speaker 3: to feed ticks on membranes with preon infected blood and
Speaker 3: then look at the ticks and yeah, there was still
Speaker 3: preons in there. And they also collected preons off of
Speaker 3: deer in the wild that we're CWT infected, and they
Speaker 3: were able to find preons in that blood too. So
Speaker 3: that's that's another way that preons could get around, I guess, but.
Speaker 1: Because it's not but it's not totally. I guess why
Speaker 1: I bring up with something that, like I should clarify
Speaker 1: my question about it is we can't always explain how
Speaker 1: it moves right right, It'll just it'll emerge in some
Speaker 1: that the disease will be found in some place. And granted,
Speaker 1: you're not able to test every deer, right, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not testing every deer on the planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can, we can get to that. Let me
Speaker 3: just finish this one thing where you know, they say
Speaker 3: transmissible amounts, but that's the issue that we don't really
Speaker 3: know what transmissible amounts of preon are yet, and we
Speaker 3: don't know that a tick feeding on something else would
Speaker 3: have the mechanism to push the preons back into whatever
Speaker 3: they're feeding on, because usually after it tick feeds, it
Speaker 3: molts and goes through another growth phase or you know,
Speaker 3: if it's an adult, it lays eggs and you know dies,
Speaker 3: So the odds of it, you know, a nymph that
Speaker 3: would feed on a deer that has preons like then
Speaker 3: molts and goes through another stage and feeds on another
Speaker 3: deer that it would have enough preons to push through
Speaker 3: the skin into the blood to cause an infection, Like
Speaker 3: I don't know that that's happening.
Speaker 1: Yet I see what you're saying.
Speaker 3: So, you know, I'm sure preons could be there, but
Speaker 3: whether that's actually going to do anything or not, we
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you feel that when you see that kind of
Speaker 1: story and it makes a suggestion of that, do you
Speaker 1: feel that there's a risk of it being misunderstood?
Speaker 3: Well? I think CWD is a really complicated disease in general,
Speaker 3: and the one truth that I've kind of found with
Speaker 3: it is it always gets worse. Call the news always
Speaker 3: seems to get worse. So I think it's hard to
Speaker 3: sometimes talk about these scientific discoveries because they're interesting, but
Speaker 3: you know, as far as what that means in the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of things and how how we should take
Speaker 3: that is scaling it up to management at you know
Speaker 3: for a state wildlife agency is sometimes a little bit challenging.
Speaker 3: But you asked about movement of preons, and that's something
Speaker 3: that I work a lot on and I'm really interested
Speaker 3: in because in New York we were one of the
Speaker 3: first states to write a risk minimization plan, and it
Speaker 3: was pretty simple, you know, like one, don't bring preons
Speaker 3: into the state. Two, don't let preons be out in
Speaker 3: the environment where deer scavengers can access them. And three
Speaker 3: educate the public about it. So by taking steps not
Speaker 3: to bring preons into the state, and that could be
Speaker 3: in a live deer or dead deer, you know. So
Speaker 3: that involves the captive survey industry, and it involves hunters
Speaker 3: and making sure that there's steps taken so they're not
Speaker 3: bringing preons in. And then don't let preons get out
Speaker 3: into the environment. By educating hunters about how to dispose
Speaker 3: of carcasses. You know, if you're going out of state
Speaker 3: to hunt, what should you bring back, what's legal, what's not,
Speaker 3: How can you process your carcass, and you know, debone
Speaker 3: it so that you're bringing back the meat, you know,
Speaker 3: the antlers or whatever other things you want to bring
Speaker 3: back in a safe manner. Those are the type of
Speaker 3: things that I'm interested in. So like when people get
Speaker 3: all wound up about birds moving preons or you know,
Speaker 3: coyotes or ticks, that could be a problem, but it's
Speaker 3: probably like infinitesimally small compared to what people are doing
Speaker 3: moving stuff around.
Speaker 1: Oh, I got you, Yeah, can you explain where we
Speaker 1: spent time this morning?
Speaker 3: Sure, we were in the n cropsy Lab of the
Speaker 3: Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell, and that is a
Speaker 3: place where we bring in animal carcasses. So I deal
Speaker 3: with wildlife. So we bring in uh specimens that may
Speaker 3: be found by the public or the New York State
Speaker 3: Department of Environmental Conservation. Biologists want to find out why
Speaker 3: something died, they bring it in and then we go
Speaker 3: through a whole process called ane cropsy, which is the
Speaker 3: equivalent of an animal autopsy, and we take tissues for
Speaker 3: testing and examine the animal and try to figure out
Speaker 3: why it died and collect specimens for other research or archiving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this morning, we looked at a bald eagle. We
Speaker 1: looked at a turtle. We looked at a bobcat, looked
Speaker 1: at a horse.
Speaker 3: Well, we didn't look we looked at a horse. We
Speaker 3: didn't like look at us said, we.
Speaker 1: Looked at a horse.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, we didn't examin exam there you go.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a horse that was collaterally observed.
Speaker 1: There was a collaterally observed horse, and we partially examined a.
Speaker 3: I don't want people think I'm looking at horses on
Speaker 3: the side.
Speaker 1: No, No, it was there was a horse presence. Yes,
Speaker 1: other people had interest in the horse, and we just
Speaker 1: observed the horse being there. Uh so I've done this before.
Speaker 1: A person, you know, a hunter, fishermen, a homeowner, whoever
Speaker 1: comes out and they they shoot or discover or whatever
Speaker 1: something that doesn't look right. Yep, it's acting weird. A
Speaker 1: coyote shows up in their yard, it's missing its hair,
Speaker 1: it's trying to bite their dog. They call their game warden.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: Whoever, like, something's not right with this thing. What's going on?
Speaker 1: It by some avenue winds up with folks like you.
Speaker 3: Yes, So there's a whole process, and we go out
Speaker 3: and do training for the biologists in the state to
Speaker 3: tell them, you know, what to look for and try
Speaker 3: to educate them about different diseases. So if it is
Speaker 3: a coyote with hair and missing, they are familiar with
Speaker 3: mange and they know what to tell the homeowner. And
Speaker 3: if it's something serious that they want us to take
Speaker 3: a look at, they'll, you know, either tell the homeowner
Speaker 3: to shoot it or they'll come out and euthanize the animal.
Speaker 3: They know how to keep it cool enough so the
Speaker 3: carcass is still in good shape to get it to us.
Speaker 3: And so there's our lab here in Ithaca, but then
Speaker 3: the New York Department of Environmental Conservation also has a
Speaker 3: Wildlife health unit over by Albany, New York. So having
Speaker 3: multiple locations makes it so they can get carcasses. The
Speaker 3: biologists can get the carcasses to us relatively quickly, so
Speaker 3: we can figure out what's going on. So they let
Speaker 3: us know what species they want to prioritize looking at,
Speaker 3: you know, which populations, which areas are important to them.
Speaker 3: And we also let them know what diseases to look
Speaker 3: out for or what might be coming down the pike
Speaker 3: that we've heard about from you know, other surrounding states
Speaker 3: is being problematic and ask them to be on the lookout.
Speaker 3: So like for chronic wasting disease, we always want to
Speaker 3: hear about sick or abnormal deer. So those are ones
Speaker 3: that we say yes, like if you get a call
Speaker 3: from anybody about that, go out get that deer. We
Speaker 3: want the whole thing to come in here and take
Speaker 3: a look at it. Whereas like bear marange, we did
Speaker 3: a pretty intensive study for a few years and we said, yes,
Speaker 3: we want to know about every report of bears with mange,
Speaker 3: and if you can get your hands on any we
Speaker 3: want you to bring them in. We published a paper
Speaker 3: on that. We said, okay, you know, we kind of
Speaker 3: know that we have bear range. Now we know where
Speaker 3: it's happening. But right now there's sort of a larger
Speaker 3: regional study where other researchers from the University of Georgia
Speaker 3: came to us and said, hey, we want samples from
Speaker 3: all these states. Can you help us out and we
Speaker 3: said okay. And there's different protocols, so if a byllogist
Speaker 3: is out there, he can he or she can do
Speaker 3: different things anywhere from like taking a skin scraping to
Speaker 3: bringing in the whole animal, and we'll take samples and
Speaker 3: then send them to Georgia for participation in that.
Speaker 1: Is black bear mange killing black bears.
Speaker 3: It does kill black bears, and Pennsylvania has been doing
Speaker 3: a lot of good work on this because when we
Speaker 3: first started with mange, we kind of said, okay, if
Speaker 3: fifty percent of the body is hairless and the animal
Speaker 3: looks pretty bad, you should probably euthanize it. We don't
Speaker 3: think it's going to recover, but some of the work
Speaker 3: being done now indicates that you can treat bears and
Speaker 3: they recover. But some bears even with severe mange seem
Speaker 3: to recover on their own, so it's kind of a
Speaker 3: crapshoot on whether they're going to recover or not.
Speaker 1: But well, how is it new?
Speaker 3: It's expanded in its range, so it didn't really occur
Speaker 3: in New York until you know, I'll probably get the
Speaker 3: year wrong, but in the last decade or so, it's
Speaker 3: become more prevalent. And so one of the questions was
Speaker 3: is it a specific it's our Coptis scaby but is
Speaker 3: it specific to bears or is it the same it
Speaker 3: sar copty scabye that occurs on coyotes and foxes, because
Speaker 3: we know red foxes get mange and it usually kills them.
Speaker 3: So did it jump from a species or did it
Speaker 3: become more speciated to just being a bear one? But
Speaker 3: it looks like it's spilled over from other species, and
Speaker 3: just as going through bears now like.
Speaker 1: At some point that that happened here or at some
Speaker 1: point it happened somewhere else.
Speaker 3: It's probably spilled over multiple places because in New York
Speaker 3: there's two sort of different areas of bears, So you've
Speaker 3: got the southern tier and the cat skills, which is
Speaker 3: continuous with Pennsylvania and bears you know, move across the
Speaker 3: PA line, and then there's bears up towards the Adirondack,
Speaker 3: so there's sort of the northern population, and then there's
Speaker 3: a strip kind of where were bears are just sort
Speaker 3: of coming into to being here they weren't there.
Speaker 1: More and more of them and that and that mange
Speaker 1: will hit them and they'll lose their hair, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they get it's actually called lignification like a
Speaker 3: lichen where they get really thick skin and they'll have
Speaker 3: bacterial overgrowth on their skin, and you know, their eyes
Speaker 3: might crust over and they're super itchy, so they've just
Speaker 3: got a lot of ooze and crustyness. Yeah, they smell
Speaker 3: bad too.
Speaker 1: Really really, how many of those come through here.
Speaker 3: We would see a few a year, and when we
Speaker 3: look when we did that research study, we found it
Speaker 3: was more likely to be adult females. We would get,
Speaker 3: you know, not a ton of them, but we would
Speaker 3: probably have you know, a dozen a year, and then
Speaker 3: there would be more reports. One of the big things
Speaker 3: is that these bears with mange usually end up in
Speaker 3: bad places where they shouldn't be, so they'll be on
Speaker 3: like people's porches, or they'll be more likely to have
Speaker 3: an interaction with a human because they're starving to death.
Speaker 3: They're they're in bad shape, and so then we get
Speaker 3: calls about them and then they get euthanized.
Speaker 1: How does something get how does something get mange? Like
Speaker 1: I remember when I was a kid, even older than
Speaker 1: a kid, but high school encountering just like an encountering
Speaker 1: red foxes with mange, and a strong association with red
Speaker 1: foxes and mange. Even in the trapping world. It would
Speaker 1: be that I got a red fox but it had mange,
Speaker 1: and it was just taken as like, you know, a
Speaker 1: thing that happened. They were out there, but people it wasn't.
Speaker 1: People weren't seeming like alarmed by it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, red fox mange has been around for
Speaker 3: a long time. And so these mites can live off
Speaker 3: the animal for a little while, you know, depending on
Speaker 3: the conditions and the moisture, they can last in burrows
Speaker 3: and things like that for a few days. So then
Speaker 3: another animal comes along and uses that burrow and might
Speaker 3: pick up the mites, and then the cycle starts again.
Speaker 1: So it's moved, like the disease is moved from animal
Speaker 1: to animal by a mite. Nothing's born with mange.
Speaker 3: No, No, it's a parasite. So they pick it up
Speaker 3: and then the female is you know, burrow into the
Speaker 3: skin and lay a bunch of eggs and those hatch
Speaker 3: out and then they start burrowing and lay more eggs
Speaker 3: and the infection just gets worse and worse.
Speaker 1: And then talk to what's going on with moose right
Speaker 1: now and what you're interested moose because when you when
Speaker 1: I read that you were looking at moose, I assumed
Speaker 1: it's what we keep hearing about with moose, which is
Speaker 1: like some tickborn.
Speaker 4: Pathogen winter tick.
Speaker 1: Killing a lot of moose. But you mentioned another thing
Speaker 1: killing moose.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have a project on moose right now.
Speaker 3: We've caught moose with a helicopter after the last two
Speaker 3: years and put GPS collars on them. There's a student
Speaker 3: out there with camera traps and within New York it's
Speaker 3: a pretty small population. This is like the southernmost part
Speaker 3: of moose range, so we know, you know, moose are
Speaker 3: challenged by warm temperatures and then throughout most of the
Speaker 3: range moose have problems with brainworm or parallelristrongelst tenuous which
Speaker 3: is really long long word, and that is a parasite
Speaker 3: that's carried by deer and there's an intermediate host, which
Speaker 3: is a snail. So if moose accidentally eat that snail,
Speaker 3: they can get infected. And the parasite migrates through the
Speaker 3: spinal cord up into the brain and sometimes it ends
Speaker 3: up in the eye and it causes damage in moose.
Speaker 1: Tell me the life cycle again.
Speaker 3: So deer are infected, they poop, the larvae come out
Speaker 3: in the poop, The snail feeds on the poop, and
Speaker 3: then a moose acts the larvae.
Speaker 1: It's a snail larvae.
Speaker 3: No, the worm, the parasite larvae is in the deer poop,
Speaker 3: and then the snail comes along and likes to feed
Speaker 3: on the poop. It takes the larvae actually burrow into
Speaker 3: the snail and then the you know, snail gets infected.
Speaker 3: Moose comes along accidentally eats a snail and then they
Speaker 3: get infected because.
Speaker 1: The snails on a piece of grass or whatever.
Speaker 4: Right, they're just cruising on the convoluted path.
Speaker 3: I know. Wait until you hear about the liver fluke.
Speaker 3: It's even crazier.
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I'll make sure I got it right.
Speaker 1: So the deer that poops out the larvae. How did
Speaker 1: it get infected anyway?
Speaker 3: Uh, same process where it accidentally ate something that was infected.
Speaker 1: So there's enough stuff out there. There's enough stuff out
Speaker 1: there accidentally eating snails.
Speaker 4: To keep this going apparently.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: But the parasite is not a snail, correct, It's just
Speaker 1: a carrier.
Speaker 3: It's the worm.
Speaker 1: What is the worm?
Speaker 3: The worm is parallepistron, just tenuous, that's the par.
Speaker 1: What does it ever have a does it remain a worm?
Speaker 1: Does it ever have a bug phase? Okay, so it's
Speaker 1: just a worm, just a worm, I got it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It goes into your brain, all right.
Speaker 1: So a deer gets infected.
Speaker 3: And they pass it through.
Speaker 1: Yep, winds up in their digestive system, they poop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a whole complicated process because it goes to
Speaker 3: their brain too, and then it lays eggs and that's
Speaker 3: what comes out.
Speaker 1: Lays eggs in their brain.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that actually can cause some problems with deer,
Speaker 3: but usually deer fine with it. But yeah, they they
Speaker 3: lay eggs, it goes, the eggs end up in their lungs.
Speaker 3: They cough them up and then they poop them out
Speaker 3: and then through the poop through the snail and a
Speaker 3: moose accidentally gets it.
Speaker 1: But if the mood k let's say, a moose ate, we.
Speaker 3: Need to get a die like some animals to like Okay,
Speaker 3: here's the poop.
Speaker 1: But if the moose ate the poop, that doesn't work.
Speaker 3: No, it has to go through the snaw. Yeah, just
Speaker 3: like what like yeah, I know, right.
Speaker 1: I mean it just seems like something that would just
Speaker 1: be so random, I mean, not random, but so isolated
Speaker 1: the fact that this is happening enough to have population
Speaker 1: level impacts.
Speaker 3: Yep. Then well, I guess if you're a moose, you're
Speaker 3: eating a lot of stuff, so you're gonna.
Speaker 1: Big mouthfuls and stuff. And you know, I've gone out
Speaker 1: to my garden right and we're eating. I remember we
Speaker 1: have a story that floats around in our family where
Speaker 1: my I used to have a little greenhouse and I
Speaker 1: didn't wash the lettuce out of the greenhouse, so I
Speaker 1: thought nothing could get on it because it's in the greenhouse.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And there's a story where I look over and there's
Speaker 1: a ranch dressing coated worm making a break forward across
Speaker 1: my kid's plate. Oh yeah, so yeah, you're just eating stuff.
Speaker 3: I stopped growing broccoli for that exact reason. Those things,
Speaker 3: like the little worms that get in your broccoli are
Speaker 3: the same color as the broccoli. And I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3: I more worms than broccoli.
Speaker 5: Maybe.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I've read that people would like to point
Speaker 1: out that, like, oh, a vegan, you can't be a
Speaker 1: vegan because of vitamin B twelve. But someone's saying that
Speaker 1: there's you get you need such a small amount of
Speaker 1: B twelve that you're going to get it through insect
Speaker 1: contamination on produce. Yeah, it's just not a problem.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So back to these moose.
Speaker 3: Okay, back to the moose.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about we're talking about the winter okay.
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's there's a whole bunch of parasites that
Speaker 3: moose are dealing with right now. So we just went
Speaker 3: over brainworm. M h, winter tick are one.
Speaker 1: Well I want to go back to brainworm from it?
Speaker 3: Okay, you'd like brain worm?
Speaker 1: Well no, no, I just want to I want to just
Speaker 1: make sure I'm understand it right. It doesn't bother white
Speaker 1: tail deer mostly, okay, but it so most mostly doesn't
Speaker 1: bother white tail deer, but it mostly bothers moose. Like
Speaker 1: it's it's hard on moose. Yes, why why?
Speaker 3: Because we're not entirely sure yet. But my theory on
Speaker 3: this is that the worms get lost and they think,
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're used to migrating a certain way
Speaker 3: and a deer, and like a deer is much smaller
Speaker 3: than a moose, and so they kind of get lost
Speaker 3: along their way and will end up in weird places
Speaker 3: like the eye. So when we have moose acting abnormally
Speaker 3: or are emaciated, we usually suspect that is brainworm associated mortality.
Speaker 3: But it moose are what's called an aberrant hoast, and
Speaker 3: other things like lamas and alpacas also can get brainworm
Speaker 3: and die from it. And so these species that haven't
Speaker 3: adapted with this worm may have more of a reaction
Speaker 3: to it migrating through their scent nervous system in their
Speaker 3: brain than whitetail deer do, and so that reaction may
Speaker 3: cause more problems for them.
Speaker 1: Well, okay, if it comes to something like this, how
Speaker 1: is the worm so picky? Anyways? Why would the worm
Speaker 1: Let's say you ate the snail? What is it about
Speaker 1: your What is it about a human's body chemistry that
Speaker 1: would make it that the worm didn't take off that
Speaker 1: the worm didn't go into your brain.
Speaker 3: I don't know because I don't study people.
Speaker 1: Okay, but like do we know that it doesn't. Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well yeah, well, I mean there's a bunch of worms
Speaker 3: that do. Like we don't hear about brainworm being a
Speaker 3: problem in people, But there are other ones in raccoon
Speaker 3: called Ballis ascaris. That's problematic. That's in raccoon poop. And
Speaker 3: so they tell people like cleaning out addicts and stuff
Speaker 3: to make sure that you wear you know, a respirator
Speaker 3: or something and wear gloves because if you inhale these
Speaker 3: eggs from raccoon poop, then you can get infected. And
Speaker 3: that one ends up in your brain and causes problems.
Speaker 1: Oh it does.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then what's the one what's the cat scratch fever? One?
Speaker 3: Is that bord oftella?
Speaker 1: No, that's doc plasmosis. Oh, that's what I'm thinking of.
Speaker 3: Toxic plasmosis. Yeah, that is another one that you know,
Speaker 3: you get from feces, like inhaling the eggs and everything,
Speaker 3: so and that can be a problem from Yeah, that
Speaker 3: one also can end up in your brain. It's a
Speaker 3: different type of parasite though, So it's a like an
Speaker 3: intracellular one that causes a lot of problems. I did
Speaker 3: some work on sea otters and they would get that
Speaker 3: one a lot. And they think it's from cat feces
Speaker 3: washing out into the ocean. What yeah, and other and
Speaker 3: snails might be involved in that one too, So okay.
Speaker 1: Back the brain weren't from men now, and then we're
Speaker 1: jumping around a bunch. That's all right, Uh, I have heard,
Speaker 1: and I might be getting part of this wrong. I've
Speaker 1: heard that we're seeing that one of the problems for
Speaker 1: moose that are enorming in the northern latitudes. Okay, one
Speaker 1: of the problems for moose has been as white tailed
Speaker 1: deer populations have expanded, habitat changes Okay, Warmer winters have
Speaker 1: allowed white tail deer to move and croach on areas
Speaker 1: that were historically moose. Yes, they've always you know, there's
Speaker 1: probably always been some intermingling, but there's been a more
Speaker 1: radical shift of deer moving into moose areas and that
Speaker 1: being problematic for moose. Yep, this is what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: I gather exactly the movement of these parasites into moose.
Speaker 3: And so we'll talk about the other one that we
Speaker 3: think is affecting New York moose. Is liver flukeka. So
Speaker 3: this has anybody ever asked you about little livers, like
Speaker 3: if you if you're eating the liver. I actually had
Speaker 3: somebody ask me this and they're like, oh, what are
Speaker 3: those other little livers? They're kind of like leaf shape,
Speaker 3: they might.
Speaker 1: Get no, no, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so those are liver fluke, giant liver fluke, vaciloidis magna.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I'm not talking about that, Okay, I'm talking
Speaker 1: about like you know, there's like lobes of a liver.
Speaker 1: There's like a little side car liver on there.
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, that's what I thought. No, but these are
Speaker 3: parasites that are in there that some people have fry
Speaker 3: up and eat.
Speaker 1: I'm back up on that. Yeah, tell me what it
Speaker 1: looks like.
Speaker 3: It's it's like yay big and it kind of looks
Speaker 3: like a leaf. We can I'm sure I can find a.
Speaker 1: Picture the girls on a liver.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It grows in the liver. So those migrate through
Speaker 3: the liver and make these cysts that are full of
Speaker 3: like brown gunk and they destroy the liver. And so
Speaker 3: that's the big problem.
Speaker 1: People like eating them or they're accidentally eating them.
Speaker 3: They probably accidentally eat them. I was just curious because
Speaker 3: you get a lot of weird questions.
Speaker 1: And the little sidecar thing I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: I know what you're talking about. Yeah, No, these are
Speaker 3: are parasites within the liver. The kind of they kind
Speaker 3: of look like a liver almost, I guess, like, but yeah,
Speaker 3: they're they're different.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you later about the the nasal bots.
Speaker 3: Oh, those are fun.
Speaker 1: But let's go on.
Speaker 3: We'll keep going, all right. So liver flukes also are
Speaker 3: carried by white tail deer and have a snail intermediate host,
Speaker 3: but these have an aquatic snail as the intermediate host.
Speaker 3: So it's even sort of more complicated. The moose have
Speaker 3: to get this aquatic vegetation where the the fluke actually
Speaker 3: insists on the vegetation and stays there, and then the
Speaker 3: moose comes along and eats it and gets infected.
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's got to be underwater.
Speaker 3: Well he can you know, eating in a wetland or something,
Speaker 3: you know, eating some plants out of there and gets
Speaker 3: it that way, and so out of the moose that
Speaker 3: we have on the air right now, I think we've
Speaker 3: had explain what that means with GPS callers on. Okay,
Speaker 3: that we've we've had about three already that have died
Speaker 3: from liver fluke and these were captured as year lanes.
Speaker 3: And so we're worried about the survival of juvenile moose
Speaker 3: in the Adirondack. So there's been a lot of studies
Speaker 3: by folks here at Cornell in the USGS co Op
Speaker 3: unit at the Sunni School Environmental Science and Forestry doing
Speaker 3: moose work, you know, to see if the habitats appropriate
Speaker 3: to look at adult reproduction. A few years ago we
Speaker 3: collared a bunch of females and all the signs pointed
Speaker 3: to juveniles as their survivorship wasn't very good. So that's
Speaker 3: why we're doing the study. And so the fact that
Speaker 3: we've already seen three die over you know, the course
Speaker 3: of our two years already.
Speaker 1: How many how many moose do you have out there
Speaker 1: with collars on them?
Speaker 3: I forget. I want to say we caught like fifteen
Speaker 3: the first year and nineteen the second year.
Speaker 1: And three have died from that? How many have died
Speaker 1: from other stuff?
Speaker 3: Jen, my PhD student, would have the numbers, but I
Speaker 3: don't think too many others. I mean we have, I
Speaker 3: think most of them are are still in the air.
Speaker 1: So you got a mortality signal, you go out there,
Speaker 1: you get it. Yep, you dissect it, bring it here
Speaker 1: or whatever. Dissect it, open it up. Liver flute. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the liver's destroyed.
Speaker 3: Liver's destroyed so much.
Speaker 1: As someone would know when you're looking at it.
Speaker 3: I mean, you have to kind of get a feel
Speaker 3: for what normal is. And when you have a liver
Speaker 3: that just looks like pulp. And the other thing was
Speaker 3: I was at one of the Moostnee cropsies and it
Speaker 3: was full of fluid, so like liver was failing and
Speaker 3: it couldn't process any any thing anymore. So it was
Speaker 3: just filling up with fluid. Like we punched a hole
Speaker 3: in it and had a five gallon bucket under the table,
Speaker 3: and it like it was overflowing. It had so much
Speaker 3: fluid in it, five gallons over five gallons. Yeah, there
Speaker 3: was so much pressure in its abdomen, Like the fluid
Speaker 3: was like shooting out a couple feet when we punched
Speaker 3: a hole in it.
Speaker 1: Oh how many flukes does it take to do that?
Speaker 3: I don't know, but it was a lot like it.
Speaker 3: It was pretty pretty trashed when you got to the liver,
Speaker 3: and for an animal that young to have that much
Speaker 3: damage when.
Speaker 1: You get to something like that, how do you ever,
Speaker 1: how do you ever make the determination that this is new?
Speaker 1: This has always been here but we hadn't noticed it,
Speaker 1: do you? I mean, like, how do you ever go
Speaker 1: down that path?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard because you're just comparing it to what
Speaker 3: you know already. And that's why we have challenges sometimes
Speaker 3: with saying things are a problem because we get so
Speaker 3: many things opportunistically where we can't go out and just
Speaker 3: sample the population like we'd like to randomly and say, okay,
Speaker 3: is this normal or not normal? So yeah, we have
Speaker 3: to do some some creative statistics and just doing this
Speaker 3: work over time, you get a baseline so you kind
Speaker 3: of know are things you know, we've never seen this
Speaker 3: before in the you know, New York has a really
Speaker 3: long history of doing wildlife health and knowing what's normal
Speaker 3: and what's not. So those people are are really good
Speaker 3: resource of institutional knowledge to compare against to say, hey,
Speaker 3: what do you normally see.
Speaker 1: And to return that real quick to the work you
Speaker 1: guys are doing downstairs. But we're looking at this morning,
Speaker 1: is that gives you that influx of animals coming in,
Speaker 1: gives you a chance to look for this stuff. Meaning,
Speaker 1: someone hits a moose with a car, the moose comes
Speaker 1: in and you'd be like, oh, does not or does yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and it allows you to start getting a snapshot of
Speaker 1: what's going on out there, even though like we looked
Speaker 1: at a bobcat this morning that obviously ques.
Speaker 3: Pretty yeah, that one was.
Speaker 1: Fairly obviously like probably from the report of whoever brought
Speaker 1: it in, but also just like at a glance, it's
Speaker 1: like this thing's been run over by a car bad
Speaker 1: but you're able to check to see its other what
Speaker 1: its health might have been like prior to it getting
Speaker 1: hit by.
Speaker 3: A car, exactly was there something that may have predisposed
Speaker 3: it to getting hit by a car. So it's sort
Speaker 3: of a judgment call, Like we don't run every test
Speaker 3: on every animal because that would be prohibitively expensive, but
Speaker 3: by saving the tissues, if there's sort of you know,
Speaker 3: a potential smoking gun out there that might have caused
Speaker 3: something like you know, for some of these animals, like
Speaker 3: maybe they had something you know, on board, or maybe
Speaker 3: they were sick and that's why they walked in front
Speaker 3: of the car. Maybe they weren't quite right.
Speaker 1: So yep, you know, yeah, Christ was saying to me earlier,
Speaker 1: you were talking about found dead, and you were saying,
Speaker 1: tell me more found dead.
Speaker 3: Found dead isn't really helpful, Like we know the animal's
Speaker 3: dead already, like.
Speaker 1: Found dead below a power line. Yep, found dead and
Speaker 1: the birds nests found dead below a big window, right,
Speaker 1: found dead where yeah, found dead after it bit your
Speaker 1: dog exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So one of the things when I go out
Speaker 3: and talk to the biologists about sort of doing like
Speaker 3: a crime scene investigation type work, because a lot of
Speaker 3: times they get tunnel vision on the animal and they
Speaker 3: go and pick up the animal and they're worried about
Speaker 3: putting their gloves on and doing everything right. But you know,
Speaker 3: letting us know what the situation is because that is
Speaker 3: really a huge part of solving the puzzle. You know,
Speaker 3: is it hot out? Is you know, is a species migrating?
Speaker 3: Is it? You know we've been seeing sort of low
Speaker 3: level of mortality in this area for a long time.
Speaker 3: Or you know, we found a twenty turkeys dead and
Speaker 3: there was a smoking tree because it got hit by lightning.
Speaker 3: You know, those types of things are really very helpful
Speaker 3: and getting a diagnosis because a lot of times carcasses
Speaker 3: will come in and you know, if it's found dead,
Speaker 3: you don't know how long this thing's been dead for.
Speaker 3: And if it's hot out, they tend to rot really quickly,
Speaker 3: and when that happens, the pathologist will call that autolized.
Speaker 3: And so you know, it's different than having a pet
Speaker 3: that might be euthanized at a clinic and then you
Speaker 3: open it up and it's you know, fresh, these things
Speaker 3: a lot of times we don't know how long they've
Speaker 3: been dead for, and you know, they rot pretty quickly
Speaker 3: depending on the conditions.
Speaker 1: When earlier we explored the idea of being a disease ecologist,
Speaker 1: and you talked about because you know, you're looking at
Speaker 1: a complex situation with all these other inputs. If you're
Speaker 1: looking at a bunch, if you're looking at a lot
Speaker 1: of moose and you're seeing that in northern New York,
Speaker 1: you're having a high prevalence of liver flukes in moose
Speaker 1: you call their moose. A significant percentage of those moose
Speaker 1: die from liver flukes. Who you're not the one that
Speaker 1: declares that liver flukes are having a population level impact
Speaker 1: on moose or are you or does that? Does that?
Speaker 1: Does that information then go to down the road to
Speaker 1: someone else who's doing population level work?
Speaker 3: Oh no, We so we work really closely with the
Speaker 3: New York Department of Environmental Conservation and so we have
Speaker 3: a PhD student working on this because it's a research
Speaker 3: project with them to try to define what's happening with
Speaker 3: the moose population. So, yeah, the student will do population modeling,
Speaker 3: will help out with that based on you know, the
Speaker 3: mortality information that we have from you know, collected over
Speaker 3: the years. She just sent me a manuscript about it.
Speaker 3: You know, we'll we'll try to figure out what's going
Speaker 3: on with that population and then we'll feed that directly
Speaker 3: to the state agency so they can put it into
Speaker 3: their moose management plan and decide how they want to proceed.
Speaker 1: Had it been flagged prior that moose numbers are declining,
Speaker 1: and that opened up the sort of investigation about what
Speaker 1: is going on exactly.
Speaker 3: So there was work done by a lot of other
Speaker 3: researchers looking at archery, hunters, fighting logs to try to
Speaker 3: estimate the population. There's been helicopter surveys for moose trying
Speaker 3: to estimate the population over time and see if it's
Speaker 3: you know, stable, declining increasing. So yeah, and then like
Speaker 3: all the mortality tracking that we've done and trying to
Speaker 3: determine cause of death, we did some preliminary modeling to say, okay,
Speaker 3: we think it's juvenile moose that are being most impacted,
Speaker 3: so those are the ones we should emphasize for putting
Speaker 3: the callers on. You know, there was a previous helicopter
Speaker 3: capture with adult females and with that we were able
Speaker 3: to work with other researchers to develop a test to
Speaker 3: look for brain worm. And when we tested those adult females,
Speaker 3: it showed that they had exposure to brainworm, but they
Speaker 3: obviously survived, So that kind of changed the dogma that
Speaker 3: brainworm might be a death sentence for moose because we
Speaker 3: think that these females got infected and they were able
Speaker 3: to survive the infection. So yeah, trying to get a
Speaker 3: sense of that, we knew the females were also pregnant.
Speaker 3: The state biologists walked in on a lot of these
Speaker 3: to actually get eyes on calves to see if they
Speaker 3: had you know, singles or twins, to kind of get
Speaker 3: those reproductive numbers as well.
Speaker 1: Yep, let's talk about the ego for a minute.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, we didn't finish winter tech though.
Speaker 1: Oh no, okay, let's go back to winter tix.
Speaker 3: Okay. So winter tick is a problem that they're seeing
Speaker 3: in Maine, in New Hampshire and Vermont pretty significantly, also
Speaker 3: killing juvenile moose, and they're trying some new management strategies
Speaker 3: to decrease the population density of moose to see if
Speaker 3: that slows down the transmission of winter tick. Because winter
Speaker 3: tick aren't another thing that deer carry. That deer can manage.
Speaker 3: They can groom themselves enough to get the winter ticks off,
Speaker 3: but moose don't seem to be able to do that
Speaker 3: quite as well. So when they.
Speaker 1: Trying to lower moose numbers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just stop save moose.
Speaker 1: That that's a logic that is going to be that's
Speaker 1: a logic that's going to be challenged by a lot
Speaker 1: of moose hunters.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I guess, I guess if you're a moose
Speaker 3: hunter right now, it's good for you, right like, if
Speaker 3: you're out there helping.
Speaker 1: That's how they're doing the boring of density. But you know,
Speaker 1: the old line, I don't know if it came from Vietnam,
Speaker 1: but the concept of burning a village to save it, right. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's hard for people.
Speaker 3: Oh, I know, I deal with that all the time
Speaker 3: with gronic wasting disease. Yeah, but in New York, we
Speaker 3: hadn't seen winter tick the same way that other Northeast
Speaker 3: states had until recently. So with some of the captured
Speaker 3: moose when they do assessments for winter ticks, so they
Speaker 3: look for them on live animals, and they found more
Speaker 3: than we had seen previously. And we're starting to get
Speaker 3: some game cam pictures in that looks like the typical
Speaker 3: hair loss pattern that you see on moose where they're
Speaker 3: missing hair on the shoulder. And some of the states
Speaker 3: that have it pretty significantly, like Maine and Minnesota, they
Speaker 3: actually call them ghost moose where they've lost so much
Speaker 3: hair that they appear more white because they've rubbed off
Speaker 3: all those guard hairs and everything.
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, let's say you knew, not that you don't know.
Speaker 1: Let's say we know that has a population level impact,
Speaker 1: or the brain worm for instance, or either one of these.
Speaker 1: There's nothing I mean, is there is there any control
Speaker 1: mechanism that would wind up being helpful?
Speaker 3: Well, if you didn't have as many white tail deer
Speaker 3: in moose territory that would be helpful.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, I mean Maine is trying really hard to talk
Speaker 3: about chronic waste and disease and deer numbers and moose
Speaker 3: because a lot of the towns there have started feeding
Speaker 3: programs and those are really hard to stop once they
Speaker 3: get started, because then you have too many deer and
Speaker 3: then you know, people obviously don't want to see them
Speaker 3: starving in winter, so they keep feeding and keep feeding,
Speaker 3: and so then you just can't get people to stop
Speaker 3: it because they don't want the animals to die.
Speaker 1: You know. In Alaska, in eastern Alaska, they have like
Speaker 1: basically a shoot on site policy for meal deer coming
Speaker 1: into Alaska. Yeah, not welcome right around disease issues, right, yep,
Speaker 1: being that those deer are getting there due to human
Speaker 1: induced habitat changes yep. Following road systems, right.
Speaker 3: I mean you see that west with white tails edge
Speaker 3: habitats right, following rivers.
Speaker 1: Up, Yeah, and just and it's changed the policy on
Speaker 1: it's changed mildly, but basically it's like if you see it,
Speaker 1: kill it, yeah, like not wanting the man.
Speaker 3: I know, it's it's challenging because we've you know, I
Speaker 3: think people forget that we've altered habitats so significantly and
Speaker 3: have an impact, and that we're not We're not separate
Speaker 3: from nature. And you know, I hunt deer and you know,
Speaker 3: eat a lot of venison. But in a lot of
Speaker 3: places there's deer densities that are way too high, and
Speaker 3: they're problematic for a lot of different reasons, you know,
Speaker 3: chronic wasting disease being one of them. So, uh, if
Speaker 3: there are ways to lower deer densities or not encourage
Speaker 3: them to encroach in new areas, that's something that I
Speaker 3: think hunters should be behind.
Speaker 1: Can we talk about eagles? Yes, go ahead, you guys
Speaker 1: had an eagle.
Speaker 3: We had an eagle.
Speaker 1: Your interests we're looking. We're looking at an eagle. They
Speaker 1: hadn't begun the knee cropsy on it yet. I asked
Speaker 1: if eagle I could see if eagles were still in
Speaker 1: EESA species and Endangered Species Act Endangered Species Act, Protected Species,
Speaker 1: I could see that like every eagle that died, you'd
Speaker 1: want to take a gander at it.
Speaker 3: That's how it was for years, and.
Speaker 1: That's not the case anymore. Eagles are recovered, Eagle populations
Speaker 1: are increasing. What is why are you guys interest in eagles?
Speaker 1: And then I want to get to the turtle.
Speaker 4: Okay, we'll talk eagles.
Speaker 1: What's of interest about eagles?
Speaker 3: So, eagles are good indicator species for a lot of
Speaker 3: things because the public pays attention to them. You know,
Speaker 3: if people find a bald eagle, they feel compelled to
Speaker 3: report it, so they.
Speaker 1: Feel compelled to tell you that they're seeing one. When
Speaker 1: I have friends come up to my place in Alaska,
Speaker 1: I have to wait a few days for them to
Speaker 1: stop reporting to me that there's eagles.
Speaker 3: Oh, I've got to go to eagle in Alaska store.
Speaker 1: You know what, Wait a minute, and there'll be twenty
Speaker 1: in a tree. And at some point on this trip
Speaker 1: you're going to stop observing them. They're just there.
Speaker 3: I had in my previous job with the US Geological
Speaker 3: Survey at the National Wildlife Health Center. I would hear
Speaker 3: about these mass mortality events and do investigations on them,
Speaker 3: and one of them was about all these bald eagles
Speaker 3: in Alaska where if a truck leaves a fish processing facility,
Speaker 3: it needs to be covered because if it's not, the
Speaker 3: eagles will start dive bombing it to get all the
Speaker 3: fish parts and so one left and was not covered.
Speaker 3: Eagles started going into it and just kept like piling
Speaker 3: in on top of each other, and like twenty bald
Speaker 3: eagles died in this fish truck, just mothering each other,
Speaker 3: like trying to get.
Speaker 1: To thunds after a soccer tournament. Yeah, yeah, so like
Speaker 1: a stampede. It really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a bunch of eagles died just smashing each
Speaker 3: other trying to get to the fish parts. God, it's
Speaker 3: so like uneagle, Like everybody has these ideas of eagles
Speaker 3: being so majestic.
Speaker 1: Didn't like him.
Speaker 3: He wanted the turkey, right, Well.
Speaker 1: That's a myth, but he was being uh, he was
Speaker 1: very disappointed the eagle, and he when he threw the
Speaker 1: turkey thing, he was disappoint because the eagles are scavengers,
Speaker 1: and you know, I didn't think it was a great
Speaker 1: symbol for the country and the way most historians regard
Speaker 1: his comment about the wild turkeys. He was saying basically
Speaker 1: was like, puh, might as well do the wild turkey. Okay,
Speaker 1: at least he's vain, right, Yeah, it wasn't. It's not.
Speaker 1: It's but most people are.
Speaker 3: They don't get the attitude with it.
Speaker 1: Because he didn't write down. But you know that is implied.
Speaker 1: Just make it the turkey. At least he's vain. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't. They think it was in uh In the
Speaker 1: suggestion wasn't jestice, but he was legitimately not happy with
Speaker 1: the eagle.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, a scavenger bird.
Speaker 3: Right, And we see like conspecific trauma all the time,
Speaker 3: like eagles puncturing each other from fighting and things like that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: But they're a good indicator species, right because people taking
Speaker 1: hovere of seb them exactly. And I did. Man if
Speaker 1: I was walking down the road and I saw a dead.
Speaker 4: Eagle, you do something I would.
Speaker 1: Let's say I was walking on the road and on
Speaker 1: the right hand side of the road is a dead eagle.
Speaker 1: In the left hand side of the road is a
Speaker 1: dead buzzard. I'm gonna pay way more attention to the
Speaker 1: dead eagle.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 3: Buzzards don't get any love to.
Speaker 1: The point where I might even notify someone about it
Speaker 1: because I would think of.
Speaker 4: Someone shooting eagles exactly.
Speaker 1: They pissed at eagles, people having that eagle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're looking at them for a couple different reasons.
Speaker 3: One of them is just to keep that historic trend
Speaker 3: going where we want to keep an eye on what's
Speaker 3: happening with them. I mentioned we just finished a study
Speaker 3: a few years ago looking at bald eagles and lead,
Speaker 3: and so we gathered data from seven different Northeast states
Speaker 3: and it was diagnostic labs, rehabers, you know, state agencies
Speaker 3: and put all that together to answer that exact question,
Speaker 3: you know, does lead have a population level impact on eagles?
Speaker 3: And so we put that together and then did some
Speaker 3: very fancy mathematics with my research associate, Brenda Hanley, and
Speaker 3: figured out that led you know, we all know eagles
Speaker 3: have recovered, like there's no debate about that, but the
Speaker 3: long term growth rate of eagles was depressed by three
Speaker 3: to five percent by lead poisoning. And so it wasn't
Speaker 3: that it stopped the the recovery. It was just like
Speaker 3: driving a car forward with your foot on the brake.
Speaker 3: So it just kind of you know, didn't didn't make
Speaker 3: it optimal, and so we used a bunch.
Speaker 1: Of slowing like slowing recovery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it it still happened, but it would have
Speaker 3: been more efficient if eagles weren't getting lead poisoning.
Speaker 1: So now would there be uh, we were talking about
Speaker 1: trigger warnings. I'm going to give it. I'm going to
Speaker 1: issue my first ever trigger warning.
Speaker 3: Really should I do I get like a plaque or something.
Speaker 1: No, you're not cann get triggered.
Speaker 4: Okay, but this is I was I was.
Speaker 1: Trying to see clarification about what. You know, I heard
Speaker 1: it all the time. I never knew what the element
Speaker 1: it would be. You notify someone if they were going
Speaker 1: to hear something upset. People get riled up about this subject.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: You know, when we're talking about lead in birds, it's
Speaker 1: we're talking about bullets.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: Okay, So for you people that are going to get
Speaker 1: all one way, like, no matter what, you're gonna if
Speaker 1: you hate lead ammo, if you love let ammo, here's
Speaker 1: a trigger warning, okay, because you're gonna hear yourself.
Speaker 3: To discuss something I know, right.
Speaker 1: And like, there's very few people who just want to
Speaker 1: discuss things. Not very few. There's a lot of people
Speaker 1: who just don't even want to talk about ship.
Speaker 3: Oh I know, yeah, I know, my dad not interested
Speaker 3: in discussing this whatsoever.
Speaker 1: They'd rather just be that I don't want to talk
Speaker 1: about it. But we're going to talk about it so,
Speaker 1: and I'll and I'll do my best to throw in
Speaker 1: I'll do my best to interject, like, well, what about isms?
Speaker 4: Okay, we're talking about bullet lead, Yes.
Speaker 1: And birds get bullet lead by eating shit that's been
Speaker 1: shot with a bullet. With a bullet. So you go,
Speaker 1: you get a deer, say you shoot a deer hid
Speaker 1: in the shoulder blade. You're using some kind of you know,
Speaker 1: jacketed bullet, some kind of bonded bullet. Whatever, it's a
Speaker 1: it's it's probably copper sheathed around of small what what
Speaker 1: what would strike you as a very small monol lead? Okay,
Speaker 1: so most bullets have there's a lot of different bullet construction.
Speaker 1: But if we're going to divide two big game, big
Speaker 1: game bullets into two classifications for our purposes here, we
Speaker 1: would talk about like monolithic, meaning that they're all copper
Speaker 1: or there are some combination of copper and lead. There
Speaker 1: was a time when it was just lead, but they've
Speaker 1: mostly most bullets are jacketed. So you shoot a deer
Speaker 1: hit in the shoulder blade, that bullet breaks up, sends
Speaker 1: little bits of stuff here and there, deer dies. Everybody's
Speaker 1: happy you except for the deer. Yeah, deer's dead. Everybody
Speaker 1: else is happy. You got the deer. Maybe while you're
Speaker 1: gutting the deer, you uh, you have some damage, some
Speaker 1: severe damage on the opposing shoulder. You cut that out
Speaker 1: and don't even bring that home. Later you butcher your
Speaker 1: deer at home. There's some parts that are shot up
Speaker 1: that you don't want. You take those and you go
Speaker 1: out and put them out back because you like to
Speaker 1: watch birds and whatnot. Whatever you dump in a ditch somewhere,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, and it winds up being introduced into
Speaker 1: the food chain in the wild. Things consume it and
Speaker 1: they can get let And if you're like we had
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier in a bald eagle whose specialty is scavenging, right,
Speaker 1: and your long lived bird, and you get tuned into
Speaker 1: deer gut piles, and you're like most things where you
Speaker 1: realize that a great place to there's certain great places
Speaker 1: to hang out in the fall because that's going on.
Speaker 1: I remember to give an example of how would animals
Speaker 1: ever tune into this. I remember hearing about this project
Speaker 1: where there's a particular highway in northern Montana where there's
Speaker 1: really high white tailed deer populations, and it would actually
Speaker 1: impact Golden Eagle distribution that there were eagles who would
Speaker 1: spend their winter they were specially they were roadkill specialists.
Speaker 1: It would spend their winter around ninety three.
Speaker 4: Yeah, psycha.
Speaker 1: You could make a living all winter flying up and
Speaker 1: down and picking off eat one carcass, go to the
Speaker 1: next carcass. So you're an eagle, you live a long time.
Speaker 1: Over the course of your lifetime, you'd enough little tidbits
Speaker 1: of lead that you get a lead poisoning, you get
Speaker 1: a fatal mono lettin. You're shaking your head.
Speaker 3: No, well potentially, yeah, But the way we looked at
Speaker 3: it was so there would be eagles that didn't have
Speaker 3: any lead on board, then there would be exposed eagles
Speaker 3: that had, you know, a little bit. And we have
Speaker 3: problems sometimes people talk about like chronic and acute, which
Speaker 3: you're kind of talking about like chronic over the course
Speaker 3: of your lifetime, and then there's sort of levels that
Speaker 3: are enough to kill.
Speaker 4: You over in a dose.
Speaker 3: Yeah, nice, and then that would be like lead poisoning.
Speaker 3: And so people would often term like if you get
Speaker 3: a big helping like if you ease lead sinker or
Speaker 3: something that would be acute lead poisoning and that would
Speaker 3: be a level you know, enough to kill you.
Speaker 1: So dying from a single meal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can't tell that the way that we get
Speaker 3: the data, So we don't know if they accumulate enough
Speaker 3: lead over time to kill you know, to get to
Speaker 3: that level, or if they just eat, you know, happen
Speaker 3: to get a fragment that's big enough. Because a lead
Speaker 3: fragment a small grain of rice is enough to kill
Speaker 3: an eagle because they have a very acidic digestive system
Speaker 3: and so they break that down a lot more than
Speaker 3: like people eating lead. You know, it tends to pass
Speaker 3: through and not get as digested as it might in
Speaker 3: an eagle.
Speaker 1: See, that's the thing I'll hear from people is they'll
Speaker 1: say that that lad and a lot of things that
Speaker 1: lead just passes through and you're not breaking it down.
Speaker 3: But we did. We're doing a study now looking at
Speaker 3: fissure so mammalian scavengers to try to figure out, you know,
Speaker 3: our other animals getting led from what we term attractive
Speaker 3: nuisances like a gut pile. And I want to say
Speaker 3: it's like seventy percent of the fissures we've texted from
Speaker 3: hunter from trapped animals had some levels of lead in them.
Speaker 3: So a lot of fishers are getting.
Speaker 1: Lead to some level led in them in what way
Speaker 1: from scavenging? No, no, but detected where in them?
Speaker 3: In their liver? Okay, So we asked trappers did to
Speaker 3: give us carcasses. We took out the livers and tested them.
Speaker 1: And you incinerate the liver and then it leaves behind
Speaker 1: these metal residues. Ye, you can find the lead. And
Speaker 1: how much lead might you get out of a fisher's liver?
Speaker 3: They were like just trace amount, so not not super high,
Speaker 3: not enough to kill them obviously because they were trapped animals.
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to like create like a suspicion
Speaker 1: of doubt, but what else might they have done to
Speaker 1: get that lead? Is there any other.
Speaker 3: I mean, people throw out ideas like tire weights, you know,
Speaker 3: if there's tire weights that have been thrown off tires
Speaker 3: alongside the chewing on that potentially discarded batteries.
Speaker 1: And they're chewing on that.
Speaker 3: I don't but these are the things that people.
Speaker 1: To create a suspicion or to throw out some possible
Speaker 1: other explanations exactly.
Speaker 3: And so for some of the eagle stuff, we did
Speaker 3: try to look at the isotopes, the lead isotopes to
Speaker 3: figure out is it coming from bullets or is it
Speaker 3: coming from you know, lead paint chips or whatever. And
Speaker 3: so we did that analysis. But apparently because there's such
Speaker 3: a limited amount of lead smelting anymore, that a lot
Speaker 3: of the lead is recycled, so you can't tell where
Speaker 3: that lead actually came from. So we weren't able to
Speaker 3: identify it.
Speaker 1: But you know, logic bullet for bullet making, that's all
Speaker 1: recycled lead, right, so all from batteries.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did try, but it wasn't helpful.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing people say, and this isn't your area,
Speaker 1: but this is a thing people would point to. Here
Speaker 1: you have that. Let's take the eagle example, and the
Speaker 1: eagle we look at today will have we'll be tested
Speaker 1: for lead. Yes, Okay, there's an argument that it's not
Speaker 1: an argument you can ignore really because it's a it's
Speaker 1: a sound argument. Be eagles were endangered, and they were
Speaker 1: endangered because of DDT Okay, they were endangered because of
Speaker 1: a pesticide that would cause their shells to be very thin,
Speaker 1: and they would kill their own shells, they'd break their
Speaker 1: own eggs when they incubated them. That's simplified, but that's
Speaker 1: what happened with eagles. The use of DDT was prohibited,
Speaker 1: eagle numbers started to increase. They were one of these few,
Speaker 1: I think one of I don't know what it is.
Speaker 1: Two percent of the species that go on the endangered
Speaker 1: Species list come off because of recovery. It's not very common.
Speaker 1: Some come off because they're gone, they go extinct. Some
Speaker 1: come off because we realized that they didn't warrant being
Speaker 1: on there anyway. But it's a rare thing to hit recovery,
Speaker 1: and it's always celebrated to hit recovery. The peregrine, faulk
Speaker 1: and bald ego actually hit recovery and now their numbers
Speaker 1: are growing. And someone would point to and say it, well,
Speaker 1: bullet lead, Yes, they're growing, but bullet lead is slowing
Speaker 1: the growth. And an argument, and it's true, would be
Speaker 1: there are many kinds of human cause mortality that are
Speaker 1: slowing recovery. Vehicles like they're increasing, Yes, would they be
Speaker 1: increasing faster without vehicles? Sure? Would they be increasing faster
Speaker 1: without power lines? Would they be increasing faster without X,
Speaker 1: Y and z? So there are many human cause things
Speaker 1: that are slowing the increase, but the increase is there,
Speaker 1: and they would argue this is an acceptable level. This
Speaker 1: is how the argument goes. It's a you know, like
Speaker 1: I said, can't be ignored. We as a species have
Speaker 1: an accepted level of human mortality. Meaning that's like they're growing.
Speaker 1: There are certain there's a bunch of things you could
Speaker 1: do to make them grow faster, but we're not going
Speaker 1: to do all those things because there's an inconvenience level.
Speaker 3: Well that I think that's the rub right there, is
Speaker 3: that if we're talking about lead from bullets and hunters
Speaker 3: are hunting because you know they're conservationists, they love the animals,
Speaker 3: to think about that you're causing you know, if you
Speaker 3: think about all the rules for shooting and know your target,
Speaker 3: what's beyond and one bullet one kill all those types
Speaker 3: of things. If you're leaving something out in the environment
Speaker 3: that's killing other animals that you didn't intend to know
Speaker 3: that that might be happening, I think is something that
Speaker 3: hunters should should know about. And you know, I'm not
Speaker 3: sitting here saying don't use lead bullets, but knowing that
Speaker 3: this is happening to other species, and if people want
Speaker 3: to make a change and how they hunt. Maybe they
Speaker 3: don't leave the gut pile out in the field. You know,
Speaker 3: if you want to shoot lead, okay, but don't leave
Speaker 3: that out there for scavengers. You know, if you want
Speaker 3: to change your AMMO, that's okay too. But just knowing
Speaker 3: that it's a problem and getting back to your argument,
Speaker 3: like there's a lot of things out there that they
Speaker 3: could slow the population growth, that's absolutely true. This is
Speaker 3: one where hunters are making this choice. And the thing
Speaker 3: that I thought was most interesting about the work we
Speaker 3: did with the population modeling. Yeah, people are like a
Speaker 3: three to five percent we can okay, it's not you know,
Speaker 3: stop the recovery. That's not a huge number. But one
Speaker 3: of the elements that we were able to look at
Speaker 3: was the population resilience. So how much flexibility does that
Speaker 3: population have to absorb other threats and keep operating. And
Speaker 3: bald eagles are kind of mac out, so they've stretched
Speaker 3: their population, and how much they can adjust their population
Speaker 3: parameters to make that recovery happen. And so in the
Speaker 3: paper we talked about how if other threats come along,
Speaker 3: you know, like you know, with climate change, we're talking
Speaker 3: about using more wind energy and if that, you know,
Speaker 3: the wind turbans are knocking down eagles and killing them
Speaker 3: or other infectious disease. And we actually put this paper
Speaker 3: out before highly pathogenic gaving influenza came out and then
Speaker 3: poof that happened and we saw a lot of ball
Speaker 3: eagles dying from that. So it's it's not that they
Speaker 3: can't absorb that stress. It's that you might be stressing
Speaker 3: them too much. So the same thing you were talking
Speaker 3: about with DDT, like maybe having lead and DDT was
Speaker 3: just too much for the eagles and that's why the
Speaker 3: population was crashing. So you can't just say it was
Speaker 3: just DDT that was doing that. And you also had
Speaker 3: the ban on ld A in waterfowl in nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 3: and so all the eagles eat a lot of ducks
Speaker 3: and you know, wounded animals, and so they we might
Speaker 3: have actually seen less lead poisoning recently, you know, since
Speaker 3: that ban, because they weren't eating you know, shot waterfowl.
Speaker 3: Now there's other places that are expanding use of bullets
Speaker 3: in different areas, like in New York, they're adding new
Speaker 3: counties that can use rifles instead of shotguns. So it's
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily things like shots. Uh, like slugs that
Speaker 3: are the problem even well, slugs a hell of a
Speaker 3: lot more lead, right, exactly a lot more lead. Yeah,
Speaker 3: So hopefully the eagle's smart enough that it doesn't eat that.
Speaker 3: But it's it's those small fragments when a bullet shatters,
Speaker 3: you know, that go everywhere, like up to thirty centimeters
Speaker 3: away from the womb channel that can be problematic.
Speaker 1: So I understand what, I understand the point you're making
Speaker 1: that three percent from this some percent for that years ago,
Speaker 1: I was looking at and had a conversation with someone
Speaker 1: about impacts of wolves on elk Okay. And you know,
Speaker 1: you start with this thing where let's say you look
Speaker 1: and you have one hundred calves, right, and you were
Speaker 1: maybe you were of those hundred calves you were always
Speaker 1: losing for many decades in the past, you were always
Speaker 1: losing thirty of those calves to mountain lions. And that
Speaker 1: stayed the same. And wolves come in, wolves are reintroduced
Speaker 1: into an area, and you see a real decline and elk.
Speaker 1: But the wolves aren't even eating as much, they're not
Speaker 1: killing as many calves as mountain lions are. But that
Speaker 1: mountain lion thing had always been there, right, you know,
Speaker 1: they were always carrying off thirty percent. Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: some sort of equilibrium there and you're used to that.
Speaker 1: But then you add another.
Speaker 3: Seven ye and it's enough to tip it to a
Speaker 3: different direction.
Speaker 1: You notice this thing, but you still look and everyone
Speaker 1: will be like, wolves are killing all the elk, and
Speaker 1: in some areas it's well, mountain lions are killing all
Speaker 1: the elk. The wolf thing is just a new additive
Speaker 1: thing that has disrupted what we've accepted to be normal
Speaker 1: exactly if you want to talk about what like when
Speaker 1: an elk calf hits the ground, its biggest risk remains
Speaker 1: a mountain line. But that's just always been so consistent
Speaker 1: and this is a new party. So I get the
Speaker 1: point that you know, with I think that you can
Speaker 1: that that someone could make the decision, you know, to say,
Speaker 1: like I use copper ammunition, I use ammunition with leading.
Speaker 1: It still all right, Like I'm pretty well versed on
Speaker 1: the pros and cons of it, the efficacy of it,
Speaker 1: the technology on copper. Animals come a long way, but
Speaker 1: there's some you know, when you get into efficacy, there's
Speaker 1: some definite arguments for there's some real arguments for lead ammunition.
Speaker 1: I have found generally that in cases where people are
Speaker 1: given in cases where people are offered an alternative, they'll
Speaker 1: often go for it. Voluntary compliance areas, here's free AMMO.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're gonna be hunting on the Kaibab
Speaker 1: plateau where there's a lot of condors, will give you
Speaker 1: AMMO to use. People are like eager to accept AMMO.
Speaker 1: We want you to remove your gut pile. People are
Speaker 1: eager to move the gut pile. That goodwill evaporates when
Speaker 1: it comes to mandatory Yes, the goodwill evaporates when it
Speaker 1: comes to mandatory restrictions. And a lot of it's driven
Speaker 1: by some amount of efficacy, for sure. A lot of
Speaker 1: that pushback, a lot of that goodwill evaporates also around
Speaker 1: call lost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean it's hard.
Speaker 1: Very different cost card right now to get that to
Speaker 1: get to move away from lead amim what can be expensive?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure. And I mean just having ammunition
Speaker 3: shortages in general, trying to tell people to to use
Speaker 3: non lead when they can't find anything at all. So
Speaker 3: trying to make sure that that people sort of know
Speaker 3: what their options are and don't just say, oh, you know,
Speaker 3: using lead is bad. Like, Okay, if that's the only
Speaker 3: thing you can use, that's the only thing you can use.
Speaker 3: But you know, think about what you want to do
Speaker 3: after you pull the trigger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that it's keeping all that in mind
Speaker 1: is important. But I also think it's important that people
Speaker 1: realize you make choices. I make choices, right, And it
Speaker 1: is like lead kills raptors. Now does that mean rather
Speaker 1: that we're gonna lose raptors, that they're you know, they're
Speaker 1: gonna vansh from the landscape, not necessarily, but it kills rafters.
Speaker 3: So it comes down what's your your choice?
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of being an uncalledfort reality that it's the
Speaker 1: thing that happens and how many how often do they
Speaker 1: come through here that you find, and what is the symptomology.
Speaker 3: So lead is really a tough thing that affects all
Speaker 3: sorts of different systems in the body. So it's a neurotoxin.
Speaker 3: It's bad for your kidneys, Like it gets circulated in
Speaker 3: the blood and taken up into your bones, so you
Speaker 3: kind of lose it constantly through your bones. I had
Speaker 3: one case a long time ago with a mountain lion
Speaker 3: that had eaten a whole bunch of lead shot from
Speaker 3: something or other, and the lion was so rotten that
Speaker 3: we actually tested the bones in its paw and it
Speaker 3: came out screamingly high for lead.
Speaker 1: So it had been like metabolized that fast.
Speaker 3: So that it killed it and we could find it
Speaker 3: in its bones already, So it goes throughout the body.
Speaker 3: And I mean the main thing that people focus on,
Speaker 3: especially like with chill and is the neurological development. So
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily you know, at this point, if you
Speaker 3: lose a few brain cells from eating lead, it's you know,
Speaker 3: hard to tell the difference maybe, but for kids that
Speaker 3: are developing, that's the real challenge, you know that.
Speaker 1: You know that work where they looked at rural people
Speaker 1: who had a high consumption of game meat versus urban
Speaker 1: people who had no consumption of game meat, but the
Speaker 1: urban people were having higher levels.
Speaker 3: Lead from paint chips.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, just environmental.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We have had this working group on lead in
Speaker 3: New York for a few years. It's got Department of
Speaker 3: Health on it, it's got venison donation people on it,
Speaker 3: it's got autobond to talk about all these different issues.
Speaker 3: And I've done work here with people in the communications Department,
Speaker 3: And one of the things that we talk about is backlash,
Speaker 3: Like if you tell people like using lead is bad,
Speaker 3: then they're just going to dig in harder on that,
Speaker 3: so that, you know, really backfires. And what you want
Speaker 3: to do so just making people aware of what the
Speaker 3: issue is in a non judgmental way and letting them
Speaker 3: make the choice about what they want to do.
Speaker 1: I remember sending in some garden soil one time and
Speaker 1: the garden soil having.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's everywhere, super high lead levels.
Speaker 1: The thing you can think, I was back from leaded
Speaker 1: gas exactly.
Speaker 3: I mean we used to have lead in everything. It's
Speaker 3: kind of interesting like.
Speaker 1: Leaded fuel would just like would drift down oh yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and getting your soil. And then then the recommendation was
Speaker 1: wash the produce that it's like the plants aren't taking
Speaker 1: it up. Yeah, it's just you're ingesting it because it's
Speaker 1: folded within the leaves of your spinach. Sure it's like
Speaker 1: you know, leaf like cabbage or whatever, things where it's
Speaker 1: hard to clean. Yep, we're more likely that you're going
Speaker 1: to be just consuming it. You know. I don't the
Speaker 1: lead thing, like one of the areas where I don't
Speaker 1: have personal concern I guess because it's me or whatever.
Speaker 1: I never have personal concern about personally ingesting it, but
Speaker 1: it weighs on me about the wildlife fissue, Yeah, especially
Speaker 1: when I learned from you today about fishers.
Speaker 3: Right. And it just depends. Some people are moved by
Speaker 3: the wildlife issues, depending on what your ethos is. Some
Speaker 3: people are more concerned about it, and you know, their
Speaker 3: their own human consumption. It just it's variable, you know,
Speaker 3: just the same way people punch for a lot of
Speaker 3: different reasons, whatever is meaningful to them.
Speaker 1: Uh, crystal ball, mean, give me some crystal ball stuff
Speaker 1: on CWD.
Speaker 3: On CWD. Oh man, that's that's sort of tough, I am.
Speaker 1: I know researchers get really uncomfortable with the crystal boy.
Speaker 3: I know we don't do that. We're looking backwards most
Speaker 3: of the time.
Speaker 1: So just give me some thoughts. It doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be predictions. Just give me some, you know, some thoughts.
Speaker 3: Well, U, I'll talk about one of the things that
Speaker 3: we're doing that I hope people can get behind. So
Speaker 3: right now, we have a large program called the Surveillance
Speaker 3: Optimization Project for Chronic Wasting Disease, and this started out
Speaker 3: as a way based on what we did here in
Speaker 3: New York with doing more risk based surveillance, because there's
Speaker 3: you know, still a lot of states that haven't found
Speaker 3: CWD and they don't necessarily know where to look. So
Speaker 3: like New York had it in two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: you know, sampled really intensively until twenty ten for their
Speaker 3: five years, and then they're sort of like, now, what,
Speaker 3: like what do we do? So we set up this
Speaker 3: risk based surveillance based on deer density, based on hazards,
Speaker 3: like you know, Pennsylvania's got a lot of CWD, so
Speaker 3: we want to make sure we sample intensively along the
Speaker 3: southern tier and then going back to the you know,
Speaker 3: how do preons get into the state and how could
Speaker 3: they get spread? We want to sample more around those areas.
Speaker 3: And so we did this for New York, and then
Speaker 3: Tennessee asked us to do the same surveillance program for them,
Speaker 3: So we did that and that was how they found CWD,
Speaker 3: and we've subsequently done it for seven other states and
Speaker 3: now Alabama found it and then Florida just found it.
Speaker 3: So we said, okay, we can't. We don't want to
Speaker 3: do this just for individual states anymore, like states are
Speaker 3: struggling spending a lot of money on CWD. How can
Speaker 3: they do their surveillance more efficiently and effectively? So right
Speaker 3: now we.
Speaker 1: Have uh kind of erupted from Yell, if you did
Speaker 1: it for a bunch more states, doesn't it make sense
Speaker 1: that you'd have a bunch more states, it would be
Speaker 1: the head CWD, meaning.
Speaker 3: Well some of them already had CWD, like Pennsylvania and
Speaker 3: Virginia Florida.
Speaker 1: This got added to the list. Yeah, and they got
Speaker 1: added the list because they went and looked for it.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you remember this conversation around COVID being
Speaker 1: like there'd be the arguments that, well, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot you're seeing high levels of COVID seemed to go
Speaker 1: hand in hand with high levels of COVID testing.
Speaker 3: But the thing is, it's not that they're not looking
Speaker 3: for it, it's just they don't know where. Like they
Speaker 3: were doing surveillance, but it wasn't like innecessarily emphasized in
Speaker 3: the right places. So like Tennessee was doing about the
Speaker 3: same numbers as they were previously, but before they were
Speaker 3: getting samples where they were easy to get them, and
Speaker 3: so they kept coming from, you know, the same places
Speaker 3: where we're like, no, no, look in these two counties
Speaker 3: are your highest risk and that's where they found it.
Speaker 3: Yet you so.
Speaker 1: They might have been conducting some number one hundred samples
Speaker 1: kind of pulled from.
Speaker 3: Roadkilled deer, well thousands of samples, but you know, just
Speaker 3: not in the places where they needed to be getting
Speaker 3: them from.
Speaker 1: And so the so the idea or program or whatever
Speaker 1: that you were exporting was a was the more precise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, survey, collect data on where your risks are and
Speaker 3: then sample in those high risk areas. And we also
Speaker 3: know from other states that have CDBD like adult males
Speaker 3: are more likely to have you know, test positive than
Speaker 3: you know fawns usually don't test positive. So put the
Speaker 3: test costs the same whether you test an adult mail
Speaker 3: or a fund, so put your money into that. We
Speaker 3: don't get a lot of adult mails in just because
Speaker 3: they usually go to a taxidermist. So how can we
Speaker 3: engage with taxidermists to help us collect samples so that
Speaker 3: we can get those in and make it more efficient
Speaker 3: for the agency where the biologist isn't having to pool
Speaker 3: samples all the time. Kick some money over the taxidermists
Speaker 3: to have them do it for you. You know, they're
Speaker 3: just going to throw that stuff away anyway. So but
Speaker 3: every state sort of recreates the wheel and how they
Speaker 3: do this, and so they're collecting data separately. They're you know,
Speaker 3: spending a lot of time invested in surveillance and how
Speaker 3: they should do these things. When if we had a
Speaker 3: more regional or more collective approach, we could compare data
Speaker 3: across states. Other states would know, you know, like what
Speaker 3: their neighbors are doing, how much sampling they're doing, and
Speaker 3: they can have some decision making tools associated with that.
Speaker 3: So the management agency can say, hey, you know, we're
Speaker 3: mostly worried about you know, this particular area. What should
Speaker 3: we be sampling in there? How many should we sample?
Speaker 3: So we have software now that we're giving away to
Speaker 3: state agencies or tribes or provinces for free that they
Speaker 3: can use this system and use it to whatever. You know,
Speaker 3: if they want to upgrade from their Excel spreadsheet that
Speaker 3: they've been using, fine, If they want to run models
Speaker 3: in it to make decisions, they can do that. If
Speaker 3: they want to see what their neighbors are doing, it's
Speaker 3: useful for that. So that's that's sort of as far
Speaker 3: as you know, maybe aspirational crystal ball. I really want
Speaker 3: to see wildlife agencies sort of come together with more
Speaker 3: standardized work that can be compared across the country rather
Speaker 3: in each states were to doing their their own thing.
Speaker 1: And then if you look at a state, let's say
Speaker 1: take Florida, which was very recently added to the list
Speaker 1: of states that had a positive case in it they
Speaker 1: get a positive case, then there's kind of a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a so what.
Speaker 3: Or not? So what happens then? Or what does that
Speaker 3: mean for the public?
Speaker 1: Or yes, meaning meaning let's say you're doing a bunch
Speaker 1: of testing. Let's say all the states are doing the
Speaker 1: same testing. You can't expect that all the states are
Speaker 1: going to have the same response to the testing, because
Speaker 1: there's some there's some states, and where the agencies have
Speaker 1: a perspective, it's kind of like a little bit of
Speaker 1: inevitability doesn't matter. We're not going to do any kind
Speaker 1: of we're not going to do any real extreme containment measures.
Speaker 1: So that would lead you to be like, well, then
Speaker 1: perhaps testing isn't like valuable to them if you're you know, so,
Speaker 1: how are you from a national perspective? How are people
Speaker 1: coping with with that?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I don't know the ambivalent, like the ambivalence or great
Speaker 1: care or whatever that the state takes about the disease, right,
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 3: Know I sort of step out when it gets to
Speaker 3: management because it's so much people orientated and what they
Speaker 3: can do. So if you if a state finds CWD
Speaker 3: and they want to do something about it, their first
Speaker 3: detection is their best opportunity because from a human centric perspective,
Speaker 3: that's when people are fired up and care about it
Speaker 3: and like, yeah, let's get rid of it. I mean,
Speaker 3: I totally lean on New York having been the only
Speaker 3: state to get rid of it, to be like, yeah,
Speaker 3: we're we're going to try to kick its ass again
Speaker 3: if we find it, because that's the only real opportunity
Speaker 3: you have to do something. So it just depends on
Speaker 3: the management agency and what they choose. I mean maybe
Speaker 3: like with Tennessee, their first detection they had you know,
Speaker 3: over a dozen animals, so they're kind of like, crap,
Speaker 3: we're way further in it than you know, the very
Speaker 3: first detection. So like if you get a whole bunch
Speaker 3: all at once, you're like, Okay, we've had it for
Speaker 3: a while and just haven't found this pocket now we
Speaker 3: know what to do with it. But I think you'd
Speaker 3: be hard pressed to find any agency that wouldn't do something,
Speaker 3: you know, as far as like carcass or feeding or baiting,
Speaker 3: like bands that they would put in place on that
Speaker 3: to try not to spread it further. Because the thing
Speaker 3: that I talk about is, you know, CWD pools away
Speaker 3: resources from everything else in an agency. If you know,
Speaker 3: in some agencies they have their fish biologists out there,
Speaker 3: you know, pulling samples opening week in a gun season.
Speaker 3: So it's even if you don't care about deer deer hunting,
Speaker 3: like maybe your thing is butterflies, Like it's pulling resources away.
Speaker 3: So everybody should kind of care about it at that
Speaker 3: point because it's such a behemoth and it sucks so
Speaker 3: much money and time away from agencies that it's it's
Speaker 3: worth caring about.
Speaker 1: Doesn't Uh. There's gotta be some part of you. And
Speaker 1: I understand you know, if you if you got to
Speaker 1: punt this one, that's fine. There's got to be some
Speaker 1: part of you, because it definitely exists in my head
Speaker 1: that that it's just like an inevitability. Meaning I know
Speaker 1: New York did it, but.
Speaker 3: Like you said, you think it's just going to be
Speaker 3: everywhere at some point.
Speaker 1: Man, Like, let's say I had to make a like
Speaker 1: a huge bet okay, like every dollar I'll ever have
Speaker 1: or ever have had, and I had to bet it
Speaker 1: on that it'll uh me. This isn't a demonstration of
Speaker 1: what I'd like to see, Yes, but I've had it
Speaker 1: bet on what I thought would happen.
Speaker 3: Is there a time frame?
Speaker 1: I just like, I hate to say it by but
Speaker 1: I hate to say but I don't want to be dishonest,
Speaker 1: like it just feels unstoppable.
Speaker 3: I agree with you to some extent, but my point is,
Speaker 3: what's what's what's the time frame on that? You know,
Speaker 3: like are are we gonna you know, young people right
Speaker 3: now feel that way about the earth, like that the
Speaker 3: earth is just gonna die at some point? Like what's
Speaker 3: the time frame for that?
Speaker 4: So I feel like.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of a way. That's that's bad parenting.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well we're not here to discuss guarantee. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't know. It's it's one of those like fight the
Speaker 3: good fight, like do what you can while you've got it.
Speaker 1: I understood that, but I wasn't talking. I know I
Speaker 1: was talking, and I know it's counterproductive. It's kind underproductive
Speaker 1: to point it out. But I just wish there were more.
Speaker 1: I wish there were more victories.
Speaker 3: I do too, and.
Speaker 1: To me, and I've had friends of mine and my
Speaker 1: friend Dog I'm sure is listening to every word I say.
Speaker 3: Right now, Hi Dog.
Speaker 1: If it pisses Doug off when I say this, but
Speaker 1: I've brought up to him, I've said I used to say,
Speaker 1: if I somehow knew that it would never jump to humans,
Speaker 1: I would care a lot less. Meaning like it's clear
Speaker 1: what I mean. Meaning when I think about chronic wasting disease,
Speaker 1: I think about it's never happened, But I think about
Speaker 1: how catastrophic it would be to deer hunters, to deer
Speaker 1: hunting if we suddenly had these cases. You know, some
Speaker 1: community or some family that they developed some novel, uh
Speaker 1: you know, they developed some novel version of mad cow
Speaker 1: disease and chacka kreutz felt whatever the hell they call it,
Speaker 1: and it, you know, killed some family and it turned
Speaker 1: out that that family had, you know, eating some quantity
Speaker 1: of infected deer meat, and it became you know, the
Speaker 1: Holy cow. Right, it would be catastrophic. It would change
Speaker 1: the way people think about deer. It would change.
Speaker 4: The way people peons.
Speaker 1: It'd be like you'd look at now you look at
Speaker 1: deer and you get excited. It's great. People are excited
Speaker 1: to see deer, they're excited to see deer tracks in
Speaker 1: new places, like and if it was, if it was
Speaker 1: a disease causing animal, it's just it's so devastating, right,
Speaker 1: and you can look and and and be that. And
Speaker 1: I'm remember one day you and I had an argument
Speaker 1: about this where I said, and I stand by it.
Speaker 1: I've said, hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD
Speaker 1: infacted deer. Maybe it was you, maybe as someone else
Speaker 1: that said hundreds, not tens. And then then that caused
Speaker 1: me to think about it a bunch, and I thought
Speaker 1: about it a bunch.
Speaker 3: And man, it's like sticking with hundreds hundreds.
Speaker 1: Okay, hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD infected
Speaker 1: deer meat, but it has to be true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: But okay, how about ninety nine.
Speaker 3: Ninety nine people?
Speaker 1: Ninety nine thousand, No.
Speaker 3: Come on, I don't think so.
Speaker 1: Give me your number lower prices, right, tens of thousands.
Speaker 1: There's no way you're going to argue there's a case
Speaker 1: for one hundred people in one meat.
Speaker 3: That was in New York. I'll give you ten thousand.
Speaker 1: It's okay, hundreds of thousands, tens, okay, whatever the hell
Speaker 1: it is a.
Speaker 3: Lot, Okay. People have eaten infected deer and have not
Speaker 3: gotten CWD that we know about, we.
Speaker 1: Know about have not yet. Okay. So I look at that,
Speaker 1: and that's heartening. I'd rather that than the opposite, for sure,
Speaker 1: anybody would. But people, there's no one that can come
Speaker 1: and tell you. There's no one that can come and
Speaker 1: tell you. And if someone does like you can't believe them.
Speaker 1: There's no one could come and tell you that it's impossible.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So in the past I have brought up that if
Speaker 1: if I knew somehow for some as some fact, which
Speaker 1: is impossible, but if I knew as a fact that
Speaker 1: it wasn't possible, my concern about it would go way
Speaker 1: way down. But now there's emerging evidence in places where
Speaker 1: they're seeing evidence of population level impacts. Because it used
Speaker 1: to be that you could look and you'd look at
Speaker 1: these areas of CWD and they oddly would be areas
Speaker 1: that had some of damned.
Speaker 3: Dear right, Yeah, because GWd.
Speaker 1: And Southwest Wisconsin's like, why South Wisconsin has some many
Speaker 1: deer and they got all these giant bucks. So how
Speaker 1: do I look at that and get worried If I'm
Speaker 1: not worried about catching it and dying And there are
Speaker 1: places that have have a lot of deer and they're
Speaker 1: still shooting big bucks, I'm not going to worry about that.
Speaker 1: But the but the emerg like this emerging stuff, and
Speaker 1: I haven't looked at it a lot, but I've heard it.
Speaker 1: I've seen it demonstrated by people that I have faith in.
Speaker 1: That it's beginning to see where the populations can't support
Speaker 1: it exactly, and that you might wind up down the
Speaker 1: road with really damaged deer populations exactly.
Speaker 3: I Mean we were talking earlier about kids and hunting,
Speaker 3: and so when I first started studying CWD twenty years ago,
Speaker 3: I'd say, you know, this probably isn't going to impact you.
Speaker 3: It's probably not going to impact your kids, but it
Speaker 3: might impact your grandkids. And now the speed with which this,
Speaker 3: like the prevalence curve, you know, the exponential curve of
Speaker 3: how the disease takes off once it gets told, like
Speaker 3: I'm worried about my son hunting and like the opportunities
Speaker 3: that he's going to have or if he even wants to,
Speaker 3: because you know, it's not much fun going out and
Speaker 3: you know, shooting a deer and you come up to
Speaker 3: it and it's all scrawny and sickly, and I mean,
Speaker 3: like on Doug's place, they can practically identify them by
Speaker 3: sight now because they know they have the disease and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that one's probably infected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're when you're shooting deer in an area
Speaker 1: and the majority of the deer you're shooting are positive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you've made the call that, if you've made the
Speaker 1: call that you don't want to eat it. I came
Speaker 1: up with a test.
Speaker 4: I haven't done it yet, Okay, I'm curious.
Speaker 1: When I'm talking to friends of mine, and I got
Speaker 1: a lot of friends who really don't they're not hostile,
Speaker 1: Like they'll listen to us have this conversation. They're not hostile.
Speaker 1: They discussing it, but in the end of the day,
Speaker 1: they don't care. Yeah, and it's like, not these are
Speaker 1: not dumb people. It's like they don't care because they
Speaker 1: have a hard time with the population level decline, especially
Speaker 1: when people say, hey, the cre to CWD is the
Speaker 1: lower deer numbers, or else they might get a disease
Speaker 1: that will lower deer numbers. And then it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: well is the is the medicine worse than the sickness?
Speaker 1: You're telling we should kill all of our deer so
Speaker 1: that all of our deer don't die. It's like a
Speaker 1: challenging logic. Yeah, I'm just trying.
Speaker 3: To get boys back to the burning down the village
Speaker 3: to save it.
Speaker 1: Burning the village to save it. And also they're like,
Speaker 1: no one's gotten it. What are the chances I'll get it?
Speaker 1: And so really smart people, really smart people who are
Speaker 1: not adverse to scientific information, have decided that they're not
Speaker 1: concerned or they're not as concerned as they are about
Speaker 1: other stuff. And I'll debate this with them, but I formulate,
Speaker 1: like there's a test I would like to do, and
Speaker 1: I've talked was before. I would like to go and
Speaker 1: get deer meat. I'd like to find twenty CWD positive
Speaker 1: deer sick looking ones and get all that meat and
Speaker 1: make a burger. Okay, and I make a big batch
Speaker 1: of burgers. And when I meet a friend that says,
Speaker 1: they don't care. I make them that burger. I fry
Speaker 1: them that burger. Yeah, okay, this is me making the patty.
Speaker 3: Okay, good visual.
Speaker 1: Fry just how they like it.
Speaker 3: Meet him rare because killed by cookie, him rare.
Speaker 4: Pickles who pickles?
Speaker 1: And I and I would say to them, I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: in the minute you eat that burger, I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you about how you don't give a shit about c
Speaker 1: w D exactly. And I want to know how many
Speaker 1: burger takers. And I've got people that said, you do it.
Speaker 1: I'll eat that burger.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. If if I made that burger and
Speaker 1: and someone said, okay, I want you to give those
Speaker 1: burgers to your kids now, dude, right sitting where I'm
Speaker 1: sitting right now, there's no even if I could hide
Speaker 1: it from my wife, which is probably not smart, there
Speaker 1: is no I just like, right now what I know
Speaker 1: right now, and i'd like pay a lot of attention,
Speaker 1: and I try not to be alarmist, right and I'm
Speaker 1: not alarmist. I could not give that burger to my kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: I agree, I couldn't do it either, you know, knowing
Speaker 3: that similar disease in sheep scrapy. They've never had a
Speaker 3: documented human case that they've known about, even with mad cow.
Speaker 3: You know, there, I would agree with you about the
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of people. It was only you know,
Speaker 3: there's been two hundred plus people that have ever gotten
Speaker 3: mad cow, and they likely have some genetic makeup that
Speaker 3: you know, made them susceptible to get that, And I
Speaker 3: suspect it's the same way that there is some genetic
Speaker 3: makeup in humans that would allow that preon to cross
Speaker 3: that species barrier.
Speaker 1: If you know, you're making me want to eat the burger, But.
Speaker 3: How do you know? Right? Like, so I don't can they?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what we need to find out, so you
Speaker 1: can test and they give you the green light on burgers.
Speaker 3: But it's very human centric, isn't it, Like we only
Speaker 3: care if it's going to affect us, Like, why not
Speaker 3: care if it affects the wildlife population? Why not care
Speaker 3: that deer dying this horrible disease that puts holes in
Speaker 3: their brain? You know, we say we love these animals,
Speaker 3: but yet we're not willing to do the few steps
Speaker 3: or like let the management agency take some action in
Speaker 3: the short term to try to stop that disease because
Speaker 3: it might be inconveniencing us.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a thing. Let's move on from burgers
Speaker 1: from it. Let's just talk about big giants.
Speaker 3: How you're making me hungry, I know, but let's.
Speaker 1: Talk about big giant bucks.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: This is This is to my friends who aren't concerned
Speaker 1: abouty eating burgers they haven't yet seen or are convinced
Speaker 1: about they haven't yet seen, and are not convinced about
Speaker 1: population level declines, but they love big giant bucks, and
Speaker 1: all of their recreational free time is put into the
Speaker 1: finding of the making suitable habitat for big giant bucks. Now,
Speaker 1: I was recently in a room with you, and we
Speaker 1: were looking at prevalence rates and the fact that it's
Speaker 1: always fatal, right, always kills you. Yep, there's no getting
Speaker 1: around it. You get it. A deer gets it. That
Speaker 1: deer is gonna die.
Speaker 3: Yes, probably sooner than it would have otherwise.
Speaker 1: Takes six or seven years to make a trophy buck,
Speaker 1: I mean sometimes less, but like right, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: you have a trophy bucket four years. But it takes
Speaker 1: a long time to make a trophy buck. When the
Speaker 1: disease becomes so prevalent that a deer's not going to
Speaker 1: get to two years of AI without getting it right,
Speaker 1: because prevalency rates are like you know, prevalency rates among
Speaker 1: two year olds, get this, like sixty percent, seventy percent.
Speaker 1: It's always fatal. It's fatal within a couple of years.
Speaker 1: The idea that you might be that if that ideal
Speaker 1: big bucket is five years old, six years.
Speaker 3: Old, whatever, yeah, you're not going to get there.
Speaker 1: That you get to be where they're You're still seeing
Speaker 1: tons of deer on the ground because there's a carrying
Speaker 1: capacity to the landscape right right, you might still be
Speaker 1: seeing there's like, yeah, you go out and see deer
Speaker 1: all the time, but you just start to be that man,
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on. But they are not
Speaker 1: getting to five years old. Nope, they're not getting to
Speaker 1: six years old because they're getting sick at one or two,
Speaker 1: and they're succumbing to the illness at three or four.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And they just aren't making it through because so few
Speaker 1: make it through anyway, right, remember time early about additive mortality.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: So few make it through anyway that they don't get
Speaker 1: shot by someone, they don't get hit by a car.
Speaker 1: They don't get killed by a kyle, They don't get
Speaker 1: hung up on a fence, all the shit that kills deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, there's this other little thing
Speaker 1: that just kind of helps guarantee they never get that old.
Speaker 1: That will make people. Yeah, And it's like that's perhaps
Speaker 1: we're already seeing that. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: I think about when I think about CWD is if
Speaker 1: I wish that all areas had a lot more tracking
Speaker 1: of not just Boone and Crocket, but like a lot
Speaker 1: more scoring trafficking. It'd be very interesting if you could
Speaker 1: have gone back and looked at counties, how many Boone
Speaker 1: and Crocket entries were counties getting And do you see
Speaker 1: boone and Crocket entry.
Speaker 3: As much anymore?
Speaker 4: Lowering?
Speaker 1: Yeah, in areas that have had long term infection. Because
Speaker 1: if what it seems to be true is true, I
Speaker 1: think that you're gonna have yet another thing.
Speaker 3: We'll steal that idea for box Master's.
Speaker 4: Projects back to college.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that prevents another thing, making bucks not be five
Speaker 1: years old or six years old or whatever. To help
Speaker 1: right trophy bucks. That man, I got friends that will
Speaker 1: go out and spend days hinge, cutting trees and plantness
Speaker 1: and that, right mm hm. And if you told them, like, man,
Speaker 1: you know what your biggest problem is about making big
Speaker 1: bucks and getting big bucks is they're not gonna live
Speaker 1: that long anyway, dude, because of a disease.
Speaker 3: That that would change their tune.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me, it's the it's the eat.
Speaker 3: I know well that. I mean people, You're called meat
Speaker 3: eater for a reason, right, like people hunt for different reasons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not why I with that, kid, So why
Speaker 1: I came up with that name? You know, I came
Speaker 1: up with that name the show. No. I had a
Speaker 1: little little teeny kid, and we'd read a lot of
Speaker 1: books about animals, and we'd read about books about dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and you get to the t rex chapter, this frocious
Speaker 1: meat eater. That sounds a cool word, very good. I
Speaker 1: like the word sabertooth too. Oh yeah, it could have
Speaker 1: just been that all long.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I eat a lot of deer meat. Yeah, me too,
Speaker 1: And I get and that scares me. Man.
Speaker 3: Well, that's the thing. Everybody's going to have a different
Speaker 3: just like the lead, Like, people are going to have
Speaker 3: different reasons for caring about something. So you asked about
Speaker 3: ecology like I try to give people a suite of
Speaker 3: like all the different why they should care about these,
Speaker 3: Like maybe they don't care about deer populations, Maybe they
Speaker 3: just care about what it's going to do to them,
Speaker 3: Maybe they care about big bucks. Like try to give
Speaker 3: them enough information that they can make an informed choice
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: But you mentioned a thing about eagles and lead, and
Speaker 1: I think it's true of deer diseases. There's another thing
Speaker 1: I think about when I said around worrying about CWD
Speaker 1: is like, uh, there's no doubt that human activities are
Speaker 1: increasing the spread. Yes, it's not really a debatable point.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's other things, and there's other things spreading it,
Speaker 1: but humans are facilitating increasing spread. We are stewards of
Speaker 1: the landscape. Ideally, we're stewards of the landscape. Do you
Speaker 1: if you love deer and you love deer hunting, is
Speaker 1: it in you to be like really okay with the
Speaker 1: disease that kills deer.
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's why I don't understand how people can be like, eh.
Speaker 1: No, no big thing, because there's well, someone's gonna and
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this before we close. Someone
Speaker 1: and I do it too, is going to be what
Speaker 1: about EHD.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can talk about.
Speaker 1: What about EHD. I mean, here's a disease that not
Speaker 1: some hard it's got to be painful, sure, but they
Speaker 1: give me the butt.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: So I say that we're talking about CWD, and I
Speaker 1: say to you, yeah, well, what about EHD that kills
Speaker 1: all kinds of deer?
Speaker 3: So EHD episodic chemorrhagic disease, and we'll throw in blue tongue,
Speaker 3: which is another haemorrhagic disease, and just call them HD
Speaker 3: for hemorrhagic diseases because they function pretty much the same.
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, what about HD that kills all
Speaker 1: kinds of deer?
Speaker 3: There you go, Yes, it does kill deer, but not
Speaker 3: all deer. It's not fatal like CWD. And in New
Speaker 3: York we've been doing another study on this because we
Speaker 3: had some pretty significant outbreaks in like two thousand, you know,
Speaker 3: which was super inconvenient timing, since you know, the pandemic
Speaker 3: was going on and people were in their houses and
Speaker 3: just kind of trying to deal with a big deer
Speaker 3: die off. So it started in the Hudson Valley and
Speaker 3: we started tracking reports from the public. The biologists were
Speaker 3: going out and collecting deer. It's challenging.
Speaker 6: We can we include the creepy part, sure, which one
Speaker 6: floating in ponds? Yeah so okay, laying next to the creek,
Speaker 6: floating in ponds in a water trough.
Speaker 3: So with hemorrhagic diseases, the deer get a bad viral
Speaker 3: infection and so they get very feverish. So a lot
Speaker 3: of times they'll go to water, which is why you
Speaker 3: find these deer around water. But we have to be
Speaker 3: careful because we mentioned that we had a Raby's positive
Speaker 3: deer a couple weeks ago. Rabies a lot of times
Speaker 3: will find the deer in water too, again another viral disease.
Speaker 3: They tend to go to water when they get feverish.
Speaker 1: We got to do a big digression. I'm sorry, okay,
Speaker 1: because this is the thing I've always wandered about. Why
Speaker 1: how can rabies at one time be that they're drawn
Speaker 1: to water, but then also in humans it induces hydrophobia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean you can be thirsty and go
Speaker 3: to water, but then the paralysis of being able to drink.
Speaker 3: So it might not be that you're afraid of water.
Speaker 3: It might be that your body stops functioning to allow
Speaker 3: you to drink.
Speaker 1: But I thought, so, it's not that people get scared
Speaker 1: of water.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not up on the human hydra, I know,
Speaker 3: but yeah, it's more that they're not physiologically able to
Speaker 3: drink anymore. So they're very thirsty, they're feverish, but they
Speaker 3: can't drink.
Speaker 1: John defended my family from a rabid squirrel one time.
Speaker 3: No, but please tell.
Speaker 1: It was in this state. We were at a friend's.
Speaker 1: We were visiting a friend. A squirrel came to that
Speaker 1: My kids were al swimming in the pool. The squirrel
Speaker 1: ran up to the edge of the pool, very agitated,
Speaker 1: started running up and down the pool like if this
Speaker 1: is the pool? My kids are like sprinkled throughout here,
Speaker 1: and the squirrel is going like this back and forth,
Speaker 1: back and forth, back and forth, jumps in the pool,
Speaker 1: starts chasing kids around. I grabbed the squirrel by the
Speaker 1: tail and gave.
Speaker 4: It a no.
Speaker 3: Squirrel flinger.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had you been rabbit rodents.
Speaker 3: We don't see a lot of rabies and squirrels. Rodents
Speaker 3: don't get it as often. But we just did have
Speaker 3: the beaver that was positive for rabies.
Speaker 1: How else would you explain what that squirrel was doing?
Speaker 3: Squirrels have a lot of issues. I don't know if
Speaker 3: you've noticed this.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 1: You guys have had a rabid beaver. Yeah, you've been
Speaker 1: five people. He did make a movie about that.
Speaker 3: There you go, you're the production company.
Speaker 1: Okay, So back to EHD.
Speaker 3: Back to HD.
Speaker 1: So deer could get rabies, yes, and they'll wind up
Speaker 1: in the water sometimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But if I hear about deer in water, I
Speaker 3: usually think rabies or hamorrhagic disease. So why should we
Speaker 3: worry more about CWD than and hamorrhagic diseases? Even though
Speaker 3: we had a big die off there were you know,
Speaker 3: over two thousand dead deer reported. We don't know how
Speaker 3: many actually died in the area that.
Speaker 1: Was affected in a short period of time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one summer wow. And then the next year we
Speaker 3: also had pretty significant die off, but it was more
Speaker 3: sprinkled around the state, so Hudson Valley up towards Lake,
Speaker 3: Ontario and then on Long Island. But what we did
Speaker 3: in those hunting seasons was we collected spleen and we
Speaker 3: collected blood from hunters, and we looked for antibodies to
Speaker 3: the viruses to see if any of the deer survived,
Speaker 3: and we found a pretty good proportion of deer had
Speaker 3: been infected and then survived. So those are very sort
Speaker 3: of short term transitory mortality events. And then last year
Speaker 3: there was like nothing like no big, big mortality. So
Speaker 3: it might hit local areas pretty hard and knock the
Speaker 3: deer down because that virus is transmitted by a biting
Speaker 3: midge puliqoites, and those don't travel very far. So we're
Speaker 3: still trying to figure out the right environmental conditions, whether
Speaker 3: they get dry or they wet for breeding in mudflats,
Speaker 3: and the deer seem to rebound really quickly with those,
Speaker 3: so that is something that they can build up immunity
Speaker 3: to and you know, continue on without a long term
Speaker 3: population impact. It might be short term, but you know,
Speaker 3: over the long term it's not gonna you know, do
Speaker 3: as much damage as chronic wasting disease.
Speaker 1: And I'll point out too that you don't have to
Speaker 1: have that nagging fear right about catching a brain disease.
Speaker 3: That's true. Yeah, we generally recommend people don't eat stuff
Speaker 3: they find dead, so like, yeah, haemorrhagic disease, they kind
Speaker 3: of mushy real fast because it's usually in the heat
Speaker 3: of the summer.
Speaker 1: Got it. Well, I just mean I don't mean that
Speaker 1: about finding dead deer and eating it. Yeah, I just mean, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: why you know, as much as I was pointing, I
Speaker 1: was playing Devil's advocate to point out that, well, why
Speaker 1: not worry about EHD because that kills a bunch of deer,
Speaker 1: And I would just say, added to the fact that
Speaker 1: there's some resiliency that that they bounce back quickly, that
Speaker 1: you can get it passed through a deer herd, and
Speaker 1: then a couple of years later it's not in the
Speaker 1: deer herd, it's different. But then there's also that later
Speaker 1: when you harvest a deer.
Speaker 6: That yeah, you added, you're not at right, Well, we
Speaker 6: don't know if you're at risk, you're not at potential risk.
Speaker 4: There you go, do you.
Speaker 1: I don't know how well you can word this. This
Speaker 1: is my last question about CWD. Do you don't eat it?
Speaker 1: I'm just asking you personally what.
Speaker 3: I hate to see to be positive deer?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, m.
Speaker 4: Why I don't have to.
Speaker 3: I have a choice there, so you know, I'm not starving,
Speaker 3: like I think the risk to humans is very small,
Speaker 3: but why chance it?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean Honestly, I've with the field work I've done
Speaker 3: and taking CBD samples from live deer, I've been in
Speaker 3: their mouth like I was taking Tounsler biopsies when I
Speaker 3: was doing my research. So like, I've had c TOBD
Speaker 3: positive deer breathing in my face that I know they
Speaker 3: were positive. So yeah, I'm probably going to donate my
Speaker 3: brain to science, like when I kick the bucket, just
Speaker 3: so people can check for preance.
Speaker 1: We've been talking a lot about we're trying to get
Speaker 1: someone from the body farm. Where's that place, Tennessee? I believe, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't if you want to donate your science.
Speaker 3: We heard that they are, like are they not taking more?
Speaker 1: Everybody wants their body there?
Speaker 3: Oh really it's a popular thing now.
Speaker 1: They can't accept them all.
Speaker 3: Well, maybe you can get on a wait list.
Speaker 1: Did some work there. You know raccoons like, uh, when
Speaker 1: it comes to carcass preference on raccoons, they're like people
Speaker 1: who have diabetes.
Speaker 5: Interesting, I did not know that, I mean just from
Speaker 5: this person who wrote in, Yeah, I would verify that.
Speaker 5: I didn't know raccoons were that picky about there.
Speaker 1: They're like thighs and buttocks.
Speaker 3: Well, don't you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Okay, diabetes.
Speaker 3: Interesting. I'm going to have to check this one out.
Speaker 1: We're gonna try to do a site visit down there.
Speaker 3: Okay, that'll be good. Now that you got some more
Speaker 3: dead animals, can I come with.
Speaker 1: You where you hang out and work? You probably have
Speaker 1: zero problem with that.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Humans screws me out a little bit.
Speaker 3: Like animals I'm okay with, but people are kind of gross.
Speaker 1: I was when did our tour today, I was thinking that.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about the resiliency of of your colleagues.
Speaker 3: The ones that have to cut up the dead stuff.
Speaker 1: It's a lot.
Speaker 3: Oh smells, it could be.
Speaker 1: It's a lot. It's it's like just the environment, right,
Speaker 1: that lab environment, and and just the the what's coming
Speaker 1: through the door, right, it's a lot.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I'm sure you used pretty quick, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's just what their job is. I mean, you think
Speaker 3: about people working like nurses having to deal with live
Speaker 3: people complaining all the time like at least these are dead.
Speaker 1: So well, it's different though, because I don't get that.
Speaker 1: It's a lot feeling hanging out in a butcher shop
Speaker 1: or in a slaughterhouse that doesn't because you're because it's
Speaker 1: like food production, but the disease element, okay, the sickness element.
Speaker 3: But see they find joy and people that really like
Speaker 3: kid exactly. You know, they get very excited. I mean
Speaker 3: you mentioned nasal bots previously, and when I was doing
Speaker 3: the helicopter capture for my PhD to catch deer, we
Speaker 3: had immortality and so we euthanized it. And one of
Speaker 3: my fellow grad students, who loves dead stuff, you know,
Speaker 3: started doing the knee cropsy and it was chock full
Speaker 3: of nasal bots. And this again, this was in South Dakota, Okay.
Speaker 3: And she was so excited, I mean she pulled. She
Speaker 3: had two handfuls with the nasal bots and came like
Speaker 3: skipping around to show us all and just thought it
Speaker 3: was like the best thing ever.
Speaker 1: We had some guys in Sonora one time tell us
Speaker 1: some cowboys and Sonora tell us that that thing does
Speaker 1: the thinking for the deer. O interesting, It'll take over
Speaker 1: and do it the deer's thinking, and the deer does
Speaker 1: it's bidding.
Speaker 3: All right. You were asking about ticks earlier at the
Speaker 3: c TOB conference in Denver. Recently they found preons and
Speaker 3: nasal bots too.
Speaker 4: Oh yep, sure so.
Speaker 1: And the fact that one day he just goes it's
Speaker 1: the hacks.
Speaker 3: I know, a big old nasal bug out.
Speaker 1: That a good video to capture.
Speaker 3: There, there you go aspirational.
Speaker 1: So how do people what if? What's the best when
Speaker 1: you want to wake up in the morning and find
Speaker 1: out about wildlife diseases? What do you like to read?
Speaker 3: What do I like to read?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Like where if someone wants to track wildlife disease issues.
Speaker 1: Let's say someone's so inspired.
Speaker 3: So inspired? So I a I am line of work
Speaker 3: with the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, which is part of
Speaker 3: the New York State Wildlife Health Program. Uh, you can
Speaker 3: look up Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. We've got lots of
Speaker 3: fact sheets and information about all the research that we do.
Speaker 3: You can go you know, New York State has a
Speaker 3: great website. There's other states out there that have really
Speaker 3: good information. Depending on you know where they are, it's
Speaker 3: probably more applicable to them. So check out uh your
Speaker 3: state agency website and see what wildlife health information. But
Speaker 3: if you want general stuff, you can always come to
Speaker 3: Cornell Wildlife Health Lab.
Speaker 1: And don't try to bring a dead animal down here.
Speaker 3: Well, you can just call us first, call us first. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: well you can, but it might take a little bit.
Speaker 1: I might.
Speaker 3: I might get a nasty phone call and they're like, who.
Speaker 1: Is this at the right door? The door is so tall,
Speaker 1: the intake door. Yes, it's so tall.
Speaker 3: You can back a semi in that.
Speaker 1: It is known to have accommodated elephants and drafts. Yep,
Speaker 1: look for that door.
Speaker 3: That's the door you want.
Speaker 1: If you say to yourself, that's not going to accommodate
Speaker 1: an elephant, you're at the wrong door.
Speaker 3: You can't put an elephant through there.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating work. I love wildlife and I like to
Speaker 1: and it's good to know that there's people out there
Speaker 1: monitoring wildlife diseases and it becomes upsetting to me when
Speaker 1: there's things that humans. There's preventable things we're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could make it that less wildlife vanishes from the
Speaker 1: landscape because of diseases. So it's good to have a
Speaker 1: heads up.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think remembering we're part of the ecosystem, and
Speaker 3: you know, if we can be part of the solution
Speaker 3: rather than part of the problem, that's always a good thing.
Speaker 1: We're part of the disease ecollogy. We are well, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Kristen Schuler, thank.
Speaker 3: You, thank you.
Speaker 1: Right all seal great.
Speaker 3: Like silving the Sun. Ride Ride, Ride on a line, sweetheart.
Speaker 1: We're done beat this damp horse to death, So taking
Speaker 1: a new one and ride away.
Speaker 3: We're done beat this damn horse today, mh. So take
Speaker 3: a new one and ride on.