Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 474: Animal Diseases

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Ep. 474: Animal Diseases · The MeatEater Podcast

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Speaker 2: Hey everyone, fill the engineer here. We will get right
0:42
Speaker 2: to our conversation with doctor Kristin Schuler, but I just
0:44
Speaker 2: wanted to let you all know that there is actually
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Speaker 2: a video component to this podcast as well. If you
0:49
Speaker 2: would like to head over to the meat Eater YouTube channel,
0:52
Speaker 2: you can check out a little tour that we had
0:54
Speaker 2: of the knee cropsy lab at the Cornell University Animal
0:58
Speaker 2: Health Diagnostics Center. We got a tour from Kristin and
1:01
Speaker 2: a pathologist, doctor Gavin Hitchner, and he went over some
1:04
Speaker 2: of the basics of what their team does over there
1:06
Speaker 2: when studying animal mortality and trauma and whatnot. And get
1:10
Speaker 2: a look at an eagle, a bobcat, even the turtle.
1:13
Speaker 2: So again, head over to the meat Eater YouTube channel
1:16
Speaker 2: if you want to see about thirteen minutes of some
1:18
Speaker 2: really cool video footage we got over at Cornell.
1:21
Speaker 3: Thank you.
1:28
Speaker 1: Okay, we're at Cornell University's Animal Health Diagnostics Center next
1:33
Speaker 1: to a stuffed two headed calf with Kristin Schuler, a
1:38
Speaker 1: wildlife disease ecologist. Explain that to me, like the ecologist part,
1:45
Speaker 1: the wildlife disease part I get okay, wildlife disease expert,
1:49
Speaker 1: I get sure.
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Speaker 3: A collegist Okay, you know what ecology is, right, So
1:55
Speaker 3: studying the linkages between things, so with wildlife diseases, trying
2:02
Speaker 3: to put all that together with like the biology, but
2:04
Speaker 3: then also thinking about communication other social sciences, like human dimensions.
2:12
Speaker 3: There's economic elements that I pull in my research. There's
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Speaker 3: political angles and things like that. So trying to put
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Speaker 3: the whole synthesis together, all the way from the animal
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Speaker 3: to people and rules, regulations and how we can make
2:29
Speaker 3: that better for wildlife populations.
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Speaker 1: Got it and explain? Or I can run through it,
2:35
Speaker 1: or you can run through the scope of things you're
2:37
Speaker 1: working on.
2:38
Speaker 3: We can run through it together.
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Speaker 1: Steve all Right, current projects very diverse in scope and species.
2:46
Speaker 1: You head up the New York State Interagency Working Group
2:49
Speaker 1: on Chronic Wasting Disease. Yes, and you're again we're at
2:54
Speaker 1: Cornell in Ithaca. Yes, New York and New York is
2:59
Speaker 1: not yet a CWD state.
3:02
Speaker 3: Well, New York has the distinction of being the only
3:06
Speaker 3: state that has eliminated CWD once it was found in
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Speaker 3: the wild. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation actually
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Speaker 3: found it first in captive deer and then in wild
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Speaker 3: deer in two thousand and five, and they responded pretty aggressively,
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Speaker 3: and they formed a containment area. They depopulated the two
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Speaker 3: herds where they found CWD. They subsequently found two deer
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Speaker 3: in the wild when they were doing some management activities,
3:33
Speaker 3: and in the seventeen years since we haven't detected it.
3:36
Speaker 1: Knockunwood Man, the only state that's done that. Yep, I
3:42
Speaker 1: didn't even know until you just said that, I wouldn't
3:44
Speaker 1: known that had ever happened.
3:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I mean, I.
3:46
Speaker 1: Would have known that it's ever been eliminated from a state.
3:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was, you know, either good or lucky.
3:55
Speaker 3: Either way, it's helped out New York a lot where
4:00
Speaker 3: we haven't had the disease to deal with There have
4:02
Speaker 3: been other what we call one and done's where it's
4:05
Speaker 3: been found in a single location and you go in
4:09
Speaker 3: and do management activity and don't find any subsequent cases.
4:12
Speaker 3: So there are conditions where that can happen, but it
4:16
Speaker 3: isn't the norm.
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Speaker 1: You feel it's uh, we'll come back around talk about
4:22
Speaker 1: this a bunch more later. But do you feel that
4:25
Speaker 1: it's inevitable it'll come.
4:28
Speaker 3: Back inevitable to New York?
4:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, potentially, but you're creasing all forty eight, like
4:36
Speaker 1: eventually all forty eight states will have it.
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Speaker 3: Well, even even with all states having it, you know,
4:42
Speaker 3: if we say that, you know there's thirty plus states
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Speaker 3: that have it. Now, it's not everywhere, and there's certain
4:49
Speaker 3: conditions that seem to support it better than others. So
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Speaker 3: I think if we can do regulations that prohibit movement
5:00
Speaker 3: prews so you don't introduce it to new areas, and
5:03
Speaker 3: then you set up the environment where it's not the
5:07
Speaker 3: disease is going to take off once it's there. It's
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Speaker 3: not necessarily inevitable that it's going to be everywhere, and
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Speaker 3: I think you can do a lot of stuff to
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Speaker 3: prevent it from getting there faster. I think right now.
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Speaker 3: We're helping it along quite a bit.
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Speaker 1: Got it? And I guess it's like you mentioned, it's
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Speaker 1: not everywhere, so the state's almost become I guess talking
5:29
Speaker 1: about it in the state sense is almost a little
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Speaker 1: bit arbitrary, as opposed to maybe looking at it at
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Speaker 1: like a county.
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Speaker 4: Wide exactly right.
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Speaker 1: Like across the lower forty eight, that you'd look at
5:41
Speaker 1: it by county or something rather than by state, because
5:45
Speaker 1: the lines are kind of arbitrary, and a state could
5:47
Speaker 1: be surrounded by it, but it just hasn't turned up
5:49
Speaker 1: in the state, but often cases managed at the state level,
5:53
Speaker 1: so it's in some way it is a reflection of
5:55
Speaker 1: what a state might be doing or not doing exactly. Yeah, okay,
6:01
Speaker 1: you do that. You a bunch of stuff here, Moose healthy,
6:11
Speaker 1: moose health and the Adirondacks. I want to talk about
6:13
Speaker 1: that a whole bunch.
6:14
Speaker 3: Uh.
6:15
Speaker 1: Geographical epidemiology of bear mange ye meaning black bears mange
6:21
Speaker 1: and black bears white tailed, do your fawn survival, historical
6:26
Speaker 1: accounts of lead and bald eagles which we looked at
6:29
Speaker 1: a bald eagle this morning in your lab, and how
6:35
Speaker 1: do you pronounce this blank fun fungus in Eastern hell benders. Okay, yeah,
6:42
Speaker 1: I find I've been I kind of got into hell benders.
6:47
Speaker 1: I didn't know that hell benders were a thing. I
6:49
Speaker 1: mean I knew like big, you know, aquatic salamanders, but
6:52
Speaker 1: I had no idea there's one as big as a
6:53
Speaker 1: hell bender.
6:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.
6:54
Speaker 3: They seem made up, don't they. They can get up
6:56
Speaker 3: to two feet long. Yeah, and yeah some of the
7:01
Speaker 3: the names for them like snot.
7:03
Speaker 1: Otter, OLSONI sides.
7:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really They're really interesting animals and they're super
7:09
Speaker 3: slimy and hard to hold on to.
7:10
Speaker 1: So is what is like real briefly, what is going
7:14
Speaker 1: on with hellbenders?
7:16
Speaker 3: So hellbenders throughout most of their range have been extirpated
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Speaker 3: or you know, aren't found anymore, just because of things
7:25
Speaker 3: like water quality. They need really clear, clean fascillating stream,
7:29
Speaker 3: so you know, damming rivers and things like that isn't
7:31
Speaker 3: good for them sedimentation. And they are also being impacted
7:38
Speaker 3: by this Caittrid fungus, which is a fungus that has
7:41
Speaker 3: decimated some frog populations all globally. And there's a new
7:46
Speaker 3: strain of Kittrid called B sal which affects salamanders as well.
7:51
Speaker 3: So we've done some work here on captive hellbenders trying
7:56
Speaker 3: to see if we could vaccinate them against this fungus.
7:59
Speaker 3: So we had them here at the lab and you know,
8:03
Speaker 3: gave them some topical killed fungus just like you had
8:06
Speaker 3: get in sort of a vaccine, and it really didn't
8:09
Speaker 3: do much to them. You know, they got sick, but
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Speaker 3: they didn't die. We were expecting them to die from it.
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Speaker 3: And so what we've seen in working with partnerships with
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Speaker 3: the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the
8:20
Speaker 3: Seneca Nation of Indians, is that it looks like they
8:23
Speaker 3: can survive with low levels because this Kittrid fungus is
8:26
Speaker 3: found in the water and so it's kind of ubiquitous everywhere,
8:30
Speaker 3: and so you know they're at low levels anyway just
8:35
Speaker 3: because of habitat conditions. But this is just another challenge
8:39
Speaker 3: that they sort of have to deal with. But it
8:40
Speaker 3: seems like they're dealing with it okay.
8:42
Speaker 1: And that came from somewhere New.
8:46
Speaker 3: Kittred. It's been introduced all over the world. Basically, the
8:53
Speaker 3: way that they used to test for pregnancy was through
8:56
Speaker 3: xenopus frogs. These African Claude frogs and they had kittred,
9:01
Speaker 3: and you.
9:02
Speaker 1: Know, hospitals for human pregnancs.
9:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, like people. So I don't I don't know the
9:08
Speaker 3: intricacies of it, since I'm not you know, a human person,
9:12
Speaker 3: a human doctor, human person. But they would use frogs
9:19
Speaker 3: and inject them to see if they would start producing eggs.
9:22
Speaker 3: And it was a way to tell if human females
9:26
Speaker 3: were pregnant. And so a lot of the hospitals that
9:28
Speaker 3: had these frog colonies to test for pregnancy release them
9:32
Speaker 3: after they you know, developed new tests, and so that
9:35
Speaker 3: sort of when was that?
9:36
Speaker 1: When was that a.
9:37
Speaker 3: Thing decades ago?
9:38
Speaker 1: So a hospital to keep a little gang of frogs around,
9:42
Speaker 1: That's that's the story.
9:43
Speaker 3: I was not alive when this was all happening. But
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Speaker 3: there's other species now that can harbor kittred, like American
9:50
Speaker 3: bull frogs can have kittred, and then it gets in
9:53
Speaker 3: the water and other species are exposed to it, so
9:56
Speaker 3: it can do a number on native frog species.
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Speaker 1: So at some point they cut their frogs loose, their
10:01
Speaker 1: pregnancy tester frogs. This is perhaps an explanation. They cut
10:06
Speaker 1: the frogs loose, and these frogs had developed this.
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Speaker 3: They had the fungus like they were used to it
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Speaker 3: and fine with it.
10:13
Speaker 1: But then introduced it into the wild.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, we see. I mean there's introduced pathogens all the time.
10:19
Speaker 3: So we can talk more about that with some of
10:21
Speaker 3: these other things that come from different places and then
10:24
Speaker 3: native species can't handle them.
10:26
Speaker 1: Got it?
10:27
Speaker 5: Uh?
10:29
Speaker 1: I want to hit a crackh real quick from someone
10:31
Speaker 1: we both know, Jim Hefflefinger. The other day we did
10:36
Speaker 1: a we're standing also where did it go? It was
10:42
Speaker 1: like a puppy display. Oh, there it is, all those
10:46
Speaker 1: puppy feet on display. We recently did an episode what
10:50
Speaker 1: episode number was it cream with Doctor Perry. It's the
10:56
Speaker 1: whatever the hell it's called dire wolves and ancient honeydogs.
11:02
Speaker 1: We got to talking on there about taxonomic lumpers and
11:04
Speaker 1: taxonomic splitters.
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Speaker 3: Episode four sixty six.
11:08
Speaker 1: Episode four sixty six, we got to talk about the
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Speaker 1: taxonomy of wolves, and I use an example of what
11:14
Speaker 1: I use an example of the somewhat arbitrary divisions that
11:21
Speaker 1: will occur in wildlife. Meaning, once upon a time you
11:25
Speaker 1: had wolves that if you just look at the western hemisphere,
11:28
Speaker 1: you look at North America, let's just say North America.
11:31
Speaker 1: You add wolves that existed from the top of Alaska
11:37
Speaker 1: way down into Mexico, and there was no distinct borders
11:42
Speaker 1: between these different wolf groups. So at some point you
11:45
Speaker 1: kind of divide them up, even though no matter where
11:49
Speaker 1: you put a division line, there's like genetic crossflow. So
11:52
Speaker 1: if you'd traveled from Alaska, northern Alaska down into the
11:56
Speaker 1: Sierra Madre of Mexico, let's say you would have always
12:00
Speaker 1: been by wolves, and you would gradually notice that those
12:04
Speaker 1: wolves changed, but there wouldn't have been actual lines of
12:08
Speaker 1: demarcation between these wolves. They would just get smaller in
12:12
Speaker 1: different colors. But there's no You wouldn't have been able
12:16
Speaker 1: to really say they were all canis lupis. You would
12:18
Speaker 1: never been able to say, like, oh, these wolves are
12:20
Speaker 1: fundamentally different than the wolves a mile that way, right
12:25
Speaker 1: a line of continuity. I'm looking at Christ but this
12:28
Speaker 1: isn't her, this isn't your area.
12:30
Speaker 3: I don't know where you're going.
12:31
Speaker 1: So I use an example of the Mexican wolf. Okay,
12:36
Speaker 1: and I was using the example of the Mexican wolf,
12:39
Speaker 1: and I forty meaning that they're saying that there was
12:43
Speaker 1: this sort of arbitrary division where if a Mexican wolf
12:46
Speaker 1: crosses IE forty, it becomes a normal wolf. That was wrong.
12:52
Speaker 1: I was saying if a Mexican wolf crosses IE forty
12:54
Speaker 1: going north, he becomes a different wolf. Heffelfinger was rolled
12:59
Speaker 1: in to say. Frequent gas and commentator Jim Heffelfinger was saying,
13:04
Speaker 1: they're always Mexican wolves, Okay, when they crow, well, he says,
13:09
Speaker 1: what yours. Here's what he says, you're screwing up. When
13:12
Speaker 1: they cross IE forty going north, they leave the experimental
13:19
Speaker 1: non essential ten j area, okay, and become a fully
13:27
Speaker 1: endangered Mexican wolf. So south of I forty they have
13:31
Speaker 1: greater management flexibility because they're an experimental introduced population. There's
13:38
Speaker 1: just a different management structure. So that thing remains a
13:41
Speaker 1: Mexican wolf, it just enters a different management zone when
13:44
Speaker 1: it crosses I forty. He goes on to further correct
13:48
Speaker 1: Mexican wolves are physically, genetically and ecologically different from southern
13:54
Speaker 1: planes wolves that were in northern Arizona and northern New Mexico.
14:02
Speaker 1: He says, there's no way they could have retained those
14:04
Speaker 1: differences that they freely interchanged with wolves in the north
14:08
Speaker 1: like you said they did. Mexican wolves existed in almost
14:13
Speaker 1: complete isolation in the Sierra Madre of Mexico in the
14:18
Speaker 1: sky islands of southern Arizona and New Mexico, with large
14:23
Speaker 1: expanses of dry desert and a lack of ungulates between
14:26
Speaker 1: them and the wolves to the north. This is why
14:31
Speaker 1: they are listed separately from other gray wolves on the ESA.
14:35
Speaker 1: People who are not I'm good. This is all giant quote.
14:39
Speaker 1: People who are not familiar with wolf distribution historically in
14:42
Speaker 1: the Southwest often like to say that Mexican wolves just
14:45
Speaker 1: naturally blend into other wolves without a definite break. I
14:50
Speaker 1: think most of the other subspecies did blend into one
14:54
Speaker 1: another because of their adjacent distributions. But he points out
14:58
Speaker 1: that is not the case in his argument with Mexican wolves.
15:04
Speaker 6: That's a correction, Christen, excellent, good job, Jim uh.
15:10
Speaker 1: Okay, let me meet with another thing from the news.
15:13
Speaker 1: Remember I told you this is a news item, but
15:15
Speaker 1: I'm moving into it not a news item.
15:16
Speaker 3: Okay.
15:19
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk a bunch about c WD and some
15:23
Speaker 1: other wildlife diseases. And you and I were recently at
15:29
Speaker 1: a little conference about CWD and kind of like updates
15:33
Speaker 1: about c WD, and for your listeners who are unaware
15:35
Speaker 1: of c WD is as we say, chronic waste and disease.
15:38
Speaker 1: It's a it's a preon disease. It's an infectious disease.
15:44
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you've got ten out of ten in your
15:46
Speaker 3: quiz at the meet inside that.
15:48
Speaker 1: Uh, that's great. I don't think I told Krann about
15:52
Speaker 1: that my high score?
15:54
Speaker 3: Did you read prody?
15:55
Speaker 1: It's an infectious disease that tax deer tacks all servids
16:00
Speaker 1: not sorry, what am I saying? Not all services?
16:03
Speaker 3: Not all? Yeah, it's mostly white tailed deer, mule deer,
16:06
Speaker 3: elk moose.
16:08
Speaker 1: Okay, what servant has never had it?
16:10
Speaker 3: Like fallow deer and some of the other uh. Like,
16:16
Speaker 3: I mean you can use like munch jack deer and
16:18
Speaker 3: give it to them experimentally, but like naturally infected deer.
16:22
Speaker 3: It's only those four species so far? Is that not
16:25
Speaker 3: cariban caribou? Yes?
16:29
Speaker 1: Because I thought in Europe they had a caribou.
16:31
Speaker 3: They do. Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking in North America,
16:35
Speaker 3: But yeah, reindeer in Scandinavia.
16:39
Speaker 1: Have reindeer in Scandinavia. Okay, but it's so far, like,
16:44
Speaker 1: so far, not in any North American cariboo.
16:47
Speaker 3: No, uh they've done some experimental trials and so there's
16:51
Speaker 3: concern about them, but they haven't been listed by the
16:55
Speaker 3: USDA yet, even though they seem like they're susceptible.
16:58
Speaker 1: Okay, so to date and maybe forever, I don't know,
17:04
Speaker 1: to date. White tail deer, mule, deer.
17:06
Speaker 4: Elk, moose, Yeah, North America.
17:08
Speaker 1: Okay, in North America. Uh So, a news piece came
17:13
Speaker 1: out reported from where is this damn thing? Got it? Okay?
17:20
Speaker 1: You w Madison researcher have found that black legged tis
17:25
Speaker 1: commonly referred to as deer ticks, can harbor transmissible amounts
17:29
Speaker 1: of prions. Are you a prion or preon person? Preon
17:35
Speaker 1: the protein particle that causes chronic waste and disease and
17:37
Speaker 1: white tail deer? What do you make of that?
17:40
Speaker 3: Well, there's a couple different parts of it. So I
17:43
Speaker 3: guess I'm not surprised that they found preons and blood
17:47
Speaker 3: because we knew that happens already, that preons are found
17:51
Speaker 3: throughout the animal, the infected animal's body. It's just different concentrations.
17:55
Speaker 3: So the most preons are going to be in the
17:57
Speaker 3: central nervous system like the brain, the spine cord. In
18:01
Speaker 3: other lymphatic tissues, which is why we sample the lymph nodes,
18:06
Speaker 3: like the things in the throat there that are easiest
18:09
Speaker 3: to get at. Spleen are pretty high, eyeballs are pretty
18:13
Speaker 3: high in preons, but they're in the blood, they're in
18:16
Speaker 3: muscle tissue, they're in urine, but in much much lower concentrations.
18:21
Speaker 3: And now we have very sensitive assays where we can
18:26
Speaker 3: detect those lower concentrations which weren't previously available. One that
18:31
Speaker 3: I think was used in this study is called rt
18:33
Speaker 3: QUICK or real time quaking induced conversion. If you're familiar
18:37
Speaker 3: with PCR, which is a lot of you know testing
18:40
Speaker 3: that we do, it's sort of like that, so if
18:42
Speaker 3: you have one little piece of something, you can amplify
18:45
Speaker 3: it multiple times. And so you know, they were able
18:49
Speaker 3: to feed ticks on membranes with preon infected blood and
18:56
Speaker 3: then look at the ticks and yeah, there was still
18:59
Speaker 3: preons in there. And they also collected preons off of
19:04
Speaker 3: deer in the wild that we're CWT infected, and they
19:07
Speaker 3: were able to find preons in that blood too. So
19:11
Speaker 3: that's that's another way that preons could get around, I guess, but.
19:17
Speaker 1: Because it's not but it's not totally. I guess why
19:21
Speaker 1: I bring up with something that, like I should clarify
19:25
Speaker 1: my question about it is we can't always explain how
19:29
Speaker 1: it moves right right, It'll just it'll emerge in some
19:33
Speaker 1: that the disease will be found in some place. And granted,
19:36
Speaker 1: you're not able to test every deer, right, you know,
19:41
Speaker 1: we're not testing every deer on the planet.
19:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can, we can get to that. Let me
19:46
Speaker 3: just finish this one thing where you know, they say
19:49
Speaker 3: transmissible amounts, but that's the issue that we don't really
19:52
Speaker 3: know what transmissible amounts of preon are yet, and we
19:57
Speaker 3: don't know that a tick feeding on something else would
20:01
Speaker 3: have the mechanism to push the preons back into whatever
20:05
Speaker 3: they're feeding on, because usually after it tick feeds, it
20:09
Speaker 3: molts and goes through another growth phase or you know,
20:12
Speaker 3: if it's an adult, it lays eggs and you know dies,
20:15
Speaker 3: So the odds of it, you know, a nymph that
20:18
Speaker 3: would feed on a deer that has preons like then
20:22
Speaker 3: molts and goes through another stage and feeds on another
20:25
Speaker 3: deer that it would have enough preons to push through
20:28
Speaker 3: the skin into the blood to cause an infection, Like
20:31
Speaker 3: I don't know that that's happening.
20:33
Speaker 1: Yet I see what you're saying.
20:34
Speaker 3: So, you know, I'm sure preons could be there, but
20:36
Speaker 3: whether that's actually going to do anything or not, we
20:39
Speaker 3: don't know.
20:40
Speaker 1: Do you feel that when you see that kind of
20:42
Speaker 1: story and it makes a suggestion of that, do you
20:47
Speaker 1: feel that there's a risk of it being misunderstood?
20:50
Speaker 3: Well? I think CWD is a really complicated disease in general,
20:55
Speaker 3: and the one truth that I've kind of found with
20:58
Speaker 3: it is it always gets worse. Call the news always
21:01
Speaker 3: seems to get worse. So I think it's hard to
21:05
Speaker 3: sometimes talk about these scientific discoveries because they're interesting, but
21:10
Speaker 3: you know, as far as what that means in the
21:11
Speaker 3: grand scheme of things and how how we should take
21:16
Speaker 3: that is scaling it up to management at you know
21:20
Speaker 3: for a state wildlife agency is sometimes a little bit challenging.
21:24
Speaker 3: But you asked about movement of preons, and that's something
21:28
Speaker 3: that I work a lot on and I'm really interested
21:31
Speaker 3: in because in New York we were one of the
21:35
Speaker 3: first states to write a risk minimization plan, and it
21:38
Speaker 3: was pretty simple, you know, like one, don't bring preons
21:41
Speaker 3: into the state. Two, don't let preons be out in
21:45
Speaker 3: the environment where deer scavengers can access them. And three
21:49
Speaker 3: educate the public about it. So by taking steps not
21:52
Speaker 3: to bring preons into the state, and that could be
21:55
Speaker 3: in a live deer or dead deer, you know. So
21:58
Speaker 3: that involves the captive survey industry, and it involves hunters
22:02
Speaker 3: and making sure that there's steps taken so they're not
22:06
Speaker 3: bringing preons in. And then don't let preons get out
22:09
Speaker 3: into the environment. By educating hunters about how to dispose
22:14
Speaker 3: of carcasses. You know, if you're going out of state
22:16
Speaker 3: to hunt, what should you bring back, what's legal, what's not,
22:19
Speaker 3: How can you process your carcass, and you know, debone
22:23
Speaker 3: it so that you're bringing back the meat, you know,
22:25
Speaker 3: the antlers or whatever other things you want to bring
22:28
Speaker 3: back in a safe manner. Those are the type of
22:32
Speaker 3: things that I'm interested in. So like when people get
22:35
Speaker 3: all wound up about birds moving preons or you know,
22:38
Speaker 3: coyotes or ticks, that could be a problem, but it's
22:43
Speaker 3: probably like infinitesimally small compared to what people are doing
22:46
Speaker 3: moving stuff around.
22:47
Speaker 1: Oh, I got you, Yeah, can you explain where we
22:50
Speaker 1: spent time this morning?
22:52
Speaker 3: Sure, we were in the n cropsy Lab of the
22:56
Speaker 3: Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell, and that is a
23:02
Speaker 3: place where we bring in animal carcasses. So I deal
23:06
Speaker 3: with wildlife. So we bring in uh specimens that may
23:09
Speaker 3: be found by the public or the New York State
23:11
Speaker 3: Department of Environmental Conservation. Biologists want to find out why
23:15
Speaker 3: something died, they bring it in and then we go
23:19
Speaker 3: through a whole process called ane cropsy, which is the
23:22
Speaker 3: equivalent of an animal autopsy, and we take tissues for
23:27
Speaker 3: testing and examine the animal and try to figure out
23:30
Speaker 3: why it died and collect specimens for other research or archiving.
23:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, this morning, we looked at a bald eagle. We
23:41
Speaker 1: looked at a turtle. We looked at a bobcat, looked
23:45
Speaker 1: at a horse.
23:46
Speaker 3: Well, we didn't look we looked at a horse. We
23:48
Speaker 3: didn't like look at us said, we.
23:49
Speaker 1: Looked at a horse.
23:50
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, we didn't examin exam there you go.
23:53
Speaker 1: There was a there was a horse that was collaterally observed.
23:56
Speaker 1: There was a collaterally observed horse, and we partially examined a.
24:00
Speaker 3: I don't want people think I'm looking at horses on
24:02
Speaker 3: the side.
24:02
Speaker 1: No, No, it was there was a horse presence. Yes,
24:05
Speaker 1: other people had interest in the horse, and we just
24:08
Speaker 1: observed the horse being there. Uh so I've done this before.
24:14
Speaker 1: A person, you know, a hunter, fishermen, a homeowner, whoever
24:18
Speaker 1: comes out and they they shoot or discover or whatever
24:24
Speaker 1: something that doesn't look right. Yep, it's acting weird. A
24:28
Speaker 1: coyote shows up in their yard, it's missing its hair,
24:32
Speaker 1: it's trying to bite their dog. They call their game warden.
24:38
Speaker 3: Yep.
24:38
Speaker 1: Whoever, like, something's not right with this thing. What's going on?
24:43
Speaker 1: It by some avenue winds up with folks like you.
24:48
Speaker 3: Yes, So there's a whole process, and we go out
24:52
Speaker 3: and do training for the biologists in the state to
24:56
Speaker 3: tell them, you know, what to look for and try
25:00
Speaker 3: to educate them about different diseases. So if it is
25:02
Speaker 3: a coyote with hair and missing, they are familiar with
25:06
Speaker 3: mange and they know what to tell the homeowner. And
25:11
Speaker 3: if it's something serious that they want us to take
25:14
Speaker 3: a look at, they'll, you know, either tell the homeowner
25:16
Speaker 3: to shoot it or they'll come out and euthanize the animal.
25:20
Speaker 3: They know how to keep it cool enough so the
25:23
Speaker 3: carcass is still in good shape to get it to us.
25:26
Speaker 3: And so there's our lab here in Ithaca, but then
25:30
Speaker 3: the New York Department of Environmental Conservation also has a
25:33
Speaker 3: Wildlife health unit over by Albany, New York. So having
25:37
Speaker 3: multiple locations makes it so they can get carcasses. The
25:40
Speaker 3: biologists can get the carcasses to us relatively quickly, so
25:44
Speaker 3: we can figure out what's going on. So they let
25:49
Speaker 3: us know what species they want to prioritize looking at,
25:52
Speaker 3: you know, which populations, which areas are important to them.
25:57
Speaker 3: And we also let them know what diseases to look
25:59
Speaker 3: out for or what might be coming down the pike
26:02
Speaker 3: that we've heard about from you know, other surrounding states
26:05
Speaker 3: is being problematic and ask them to be on the lookout.
26:10
Speaker 3: So like for chronic wasting disease, we always want to
26:13
Speaker 3: hear about sick or abnormal deer. So those are ones
26:18
Speaker 3: that we say yes, like if you get a call
26:20
Speaker 3: from anybody about that, go out get that deer. We
26:23
Speaker 3: want the whole thing to come in here and take
26:26
Speaker 3: a look at it. Whereas like bear marange, we did
26:30
Speaker 3: a pretty intensive study for a few years and we said, yes,
26:33
Speaker 3: we want to know about every report of bears with mange,
26:36
Speaker 3: and if you can get your hands on any we
26:38
Speaker 3: want you to bring them in. We published a paper
26:42
Speaker 3: on that. We said, okay, you know, we kind of
26:43
Speaker 3: know that we have bear range. Now we know where
26:45
Speaker 3: it's happening. But right now there's sort of a larger
26:49
Speaker 3: regional study where other researchers from the University of Georgia
26:52
Speaker 3: came to us and said, hey, we want samples from
26:55
Speaker 3: all these states. Can you help us out and we
26:56
Speaker 3: said okay. And there's different protocols, so if a byllogist
27:00
Speaker 3: is out there, he can he or she can do
27:03
Speaker 3: different things anywhere from like taking a skin scraping to
27:05
Speaker 3: bringing in the whole animal, and we'll take samples and
27:08
Speaker 3: then send them to Georgia for participation in that.
27:11
Speaker 1: Is black bear mange killing black bears.
27:14
Speaker 3: It does kill black bears, and Pennsylvania has been doing
27:17
Speaker 3: a lot of good work on this because when we
27:21
Speaker 3: first started with mange, we kind of said, okay, if
27:24
Speaker 3: fifty percent of the body is hairless and the animal
27:27
Speaker 3: looks pretty bad, you should probably euthanize it. We don't
27:29
Speaker 3: think it's going to recover, but some of the work
27:33
Speaker 3: being done now indicates that you can treat bears and
27:38
Speaker 3: they recover. But some bears even with severe mange seem
27:41
Speaker 3: to recover on their own, so it's kind of a
27:44
Speaker 3: crapshoot on whether they're going to recover or not.
27:48
Speaker 1: But well, how is it new?
27:51
Speaker 3: It's expanded in its range, so it didn't really occur
27:57
Speaker 3: in New York until you know, I'll probably get the
28:02
Speaker 3: year wrong, but in the last decade or so, it's
28:04
Speaker 3: become more prevalent. And so one of the questions was
28:08
Speaker 3: is it a specific it's our Coptis scaby but is
28:11
Speaker 3: it specific to bears or is it the same it
28:13
Speaker 3: sar copty scabye that occurs on coyotes and foxes, because
28:19
Speaker 3: we know red foxes get mange and it usually kills them.
28:22
Speaker 3: So did it jump from a species or did it
28:25
Speaker 3: become more speciated to just being a bear one? But
28:28
Speaker 3: it looks like it's spilled over from other species, and
28:31
Speaker 3: just as going through bears now like.
28:33
Speaker 1: At some point that that happened here or at some
28:37
Speaker 1: point it happened somewhere else.
28:39
Speaker 3: It's probably spilled over multiple places because in New York
28:43
Speaker 3: there's two sort of different areas of bears, So you've
28:47
Speaker 3: got the southern tier and the cat skills, which is
28:49
Speaker 3: continuous with Pennsylvania and bears you know, move across the
28:53
Speaker 3: PA line, and then there's bears up towards the Adirondack,
28:56
Speaker 3: so there's sort of the northern population, and then there's
28:58
Speaker 3: a strip kind of where were bears are just sort
29:01
Speaker 3: of coming into to being here they weren't there.
29:04
Speaker 1: More and more of them and that and that mange
29:06
Speaker 1: will hit them and they'll lose their hair, yeah.
29:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they get it's actually called lignification like a
29:14
Speaker 3: lichen where they get really thick skin and they'll have
29:19
Speaker 3: bacterial overgrowth on their skin, and you know, their eyes
29:23
Speaker 3: might crust over and they're super itchy, so they've just
29:25
Speaker 3: got a lot of ooze and crustyness. Yeah, they smell
29:30
Speaker 3: bad too.
29:31
Speaker 1: Really really, how many of those come through here.
29:33
Speaker 3: We would see a few a year, and when we
29:37
Speaker 3: look when we did that research study, we found it
29:40
Speaker 3: was more likely to be adult females. We would get,
29:44
Speaker 3: you know, not a ton of them, but we would
29:46
Speaker 3: probably have you know, a dozen a year, and then
29:49
Speaker 3: there would be more reports. One of the big things
29:52
Speaker 3: is that these bears with mange usually end up in
29:55
Speaker 3: bad places where they shouldn't be, so they'll be on
29:57
Speaker 3: like people's porches, or they'll be more likely to have
30:00
Speaker 3: an interaction with a human because they're starving to death.
30:04
Speaker 3: They're they're in bad shape, and so then we get
30:07
Speaker 3: calls about them and then they get euthanized.
30:18
Speaker 1: How does something get how does something get mange? Like
30:21
Speaker 1: I remember when I was a kid, even older than
30:24
Speaker 1: a kid, but high school encountering just like an encountering
30:29
Speaker 1: red foxes with mange, and a strong association with red
30:33
Speaker 1: foxes and mange. Even in the trapping world. It would
30:36
Speaker 1: be that I got a red fox but it had mange,
30:39
Speaker 1: and it was just taken as like, you know, a
30:41
Speaker 1: thing that happened. They were out there, but people it wasn't.
30:44
Speaker 1: People weren't seeming like alarmed by it.
30:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, red fox mange has been around for
30:49
Speaker 3: a long time. And so these mites can live off
30:52
Speaker 3: the animal for a little while, you know, depending on
30:55
Speaker 3: the conditions and the moisture, they can last in burrows
30:59
Speaker 3: and things like that for a few days. So then
31:03
Speaker 3: another animal comes along and uses that burrow and might
31:06
Speaker 3: pick up the mites, and then the cycle starts again.
31:09
Speaker 1: So it's moved, like the disease is moved from animal
31:12
Speaker 1: to animal by a mite. Nothing's born with mange.
31:16
Speaker 3: No, No, it's a parasite. So they pick it up
31:20
Speaker 3: and then the female is you know, burrow into the
31:24
Speaker 3: skin and lay a bunch of eggs and those hatch
31:26
Speaker 3: out and then they start burrowing and lay more eggs
31:29
Speaker 3: and the infection just gets worse and worse.
31:32
Speaker 1: And then talk to what's going on with moose right
31:36
Speaker 1: now and what you're interested moose because when you when
31:38
Speaker 1: I read that you were looking at moose, I assumed
31:41
Speaker 1: it's what we keep hearing about with moose, which is
31:44
Speaker 1: like some tickborn.
31:46
Speaker 4: Pathogen winter tick.
31:49
Speaker 1: Killing a lot of moose. But you mentioned another thing
31:51
Speaker 1: killing moose.
31:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have a project on moose right now.
31:58
Speaker 3: We've caught moose with a helicopter after the last two
32:00
Speaker 3: years and put GPS collars on them. There's a student
32:04
Speaker 3: out there with camera traps and within New York it's
32:10
Speaker 3: a pretty small population. This is like the southernmost part
32:13
Speaker 3: of moose range, so we know, you know, moose are
32:16
Speaker 3: challenged by warm temperatures and then throughout most of the
32:21
Speaker 3: range moose have problems with brainworm or parallelristrongelst tenuous which
32:25
Speaker 3: is really long long word, and that is a parasite
32:30
Speaker 3: that's carried by deer and there's an intermediate host, which
32:34
Speaker 3: is a snail. So if moose accidentally eat that snail,
32:37
Speaker 3: they can get infected. And the parasite migrates through the
32:41
Speaker 3: spinal cord up into the brain and sometimes it ends
32:44
Speaker 3: up in the eye and it causes damage in moose.
32:48
Speaker 1: Tell me the life cycle again.
32:50
Speaker 3: So deer are infected, they poop, the larvae come out
32:56
Speaker 3: in the poop, The snail feeds on the poop, and
32:58
Speaker 3: then a moose acts the larvae.
33:01
Speaker 1: It's a snail larvae.
33:03
Speaker 3: No, the worm, the parasite larvae is in the deer poop,
33:08
Speaker 3: and then the snail comes along and likes to feed
33:11
Speaker 3: on the poop. It takes the larvae actually burrow into
33:14
Speaker 3: the snail and then the you know, snail gets infected.
33:19
Speaker 3: Moose comes along accidentally eats a snail and then they
33:22
Speaker 3: get infected because.
33:24
Speaker 1: The snails on a piece of grass or whatever.
33:26
Speaker 4: Right, they're just cruising on the convoluted path.
33:29
Speaker 3: I know. Wait until you hear about the liver fluke.
33:32
Speaker 3: It's even crazier.
33:33
Speaker 1: Well, that's what I'll make sure I got it right.
33:35
Speaker 1: So the deer that poops out the larvae. How did
33:39
Speaker 1: it get infected anyway?
33:41
Speaker 3: Uh, same process where it accidentally ate something that was infected.
33:46
Speaker 1: So there's enough stuff out there. There's enough stuff out
33:48
Speaker 1: there accidentally eating snails.
33:50
Speaker 4: To keep this going apparently.
33:53
Speaker 3: Yep.
33:54
Speaker 1: But the parasite is not a snail, correct, It's just
33:59
Speaker 1: a carrier.
34:00
Speaker 3: It's the worm.
34:00
Speaker 1: What is the worm?
34:01
Speaker 3: The worm is parallepistron, just tenuous, that's the par.
34:04
Speaker 1: What does it ever have a does it remain a worm?
34:08
Speaker 1: Does it ever have a bug phase? Okay, so it's
34:11
Speaker 1: just a worm, just a worm, I got it.
34:13
Speaker 4: Yeah.
34:13
Speaker 3: It goes into your brain, all right.
34:15
Speaker 1: So a deer gets infected.
34:19
Speaker 3: And they pass it through.
34:21
Speaker 1: Yep, winds up in their digestive system, they poop.
34:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a whole complicated process because it goes to
34:29
Speaker 3: their brain too, and then it lays eggs and that's
34:32
Speaker 3: what comes out.
34:33
Speaker 1: Lays eggs in their brain.
34:36
Speaker 3: Yes, and that actually can cause some problems with deer,
34:38
Speaker 3: but usually deer fine with it. But yeah, they they
34:43
Speaker 3: lay eggs, it goes, the eggs end up in their lungs.
34:47
Speaker 3: They cough them up and then they poop them out
34:49
Speaker 3: and then through the poop through the snail and a
34:53
Speaker 3: moose accidentally gets it.
34:54
Speaker 1: But if the mood k let's say, a moose ate, we.
34:59
Speaker 3: Need to get a die like some animals to like Okay,
35:03
Speaker 3: here's the poop.
35:04
Speaker 1: But if the moose ate the poop, that doesn't work.
35:06
Speaker 3: No, it has to go through the snaw. Yeah, just
35:10
Speaker 3: like what like yeah, I know, right.
35:12
Speaker 1: I mean it just seems like something that would just
35:16
Speaker 1: be so random, I mean, not random, but so isolated
35:20
Speaker 1: the fact that this is happening enough to have population
35:22
Speaker 1: level impacts.
35:23
Speaker 3: Yep. Then well, I guess if you're a moose, you're
35:27
Speaker 3: eating a lot of stuff, so you're gonna.
35:30
Speaker 1: Big mouthfuls and stuff. And you know, I've gone out
35:32
Speaker 1: to my garden right and we're eating. I remember we
35:35
Speaker 1: have a story that floats around in our family where
35:38
Speaker 1: my I used to have a little greenhouse and I
35:41
Speaker 1: didn't wash the lettuce out of the greenhouse, so I
35:43
Speaker 1: thought nothing could get on it because it's in the greenhouse.
35:46
Speaker 3: Yep.
35:46
Speaker 1: And there's a story where I look over and there's
35:50
Speaker 1: a ranch dressing coated worm making a break forward across
35:55
Speaker 1: my kid's plate. Oh yeah, so yeah, you're just eating stuff.
35:58
Speaker 3: I stopped growing broccoli for that exact reason. Those things,
36:01
Speaker 3: like the little worms that get in your broccoli are
36:03
Speaker 3: the same color as the broccoli. And I'm pretty sure
36:05
Speaker 3: I more worms than broccoli.
36:07
Speaker 5: Maybe.
36:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I've read that people would like to point
36:10
Speaker 1: out that, like, oh, a vegan, you can't be a
36:12
Speaker 1: vegan because of vitamin B twelve. But someone's saying that
36:16
Speaker 1: there's you get you need such a small amount of
36:18
Speaker 1: B twelve that you're going to get it through insect
36:20
Speaker 1: contamination on produce. Yeah, it's just not a problem.
36:23
Speaker 3: Right.
36:24
Speaker 1: So back to these moose.
36:26
Speaker 3: Okay, back to the moose.
36:27
Speaker 1: So we're talking about we're talking about the winter okay.
36:31
Speaker 3: So yeah, there's there's a whole bunch of parasites that
36:35
Speaker 3: moose are dealing with right now. So we just went
36:37
Speaker 3: over brainworm. M h, winter tick are one.
36:42
Speaker 1: Well I want to go back to brainworm from it?
36:43
Speaker 3: Okay, you'd like brain worm?
36:45
Speaker 1: Well no, no, I just want to I want to just
36:47
Speaker 1: make sure I'm understand it right. It doesn't bother white
36:51
Speaker 1: tail deer mostly, okay, but it so most mostly doesn't
36:57
Speaker 1: bother white tail deer, but it mostly bothers moose. Like
37:01
Speaker 1: it's it's hard on moose. Yes, why why?
37:06
Speaker 3: Because we're not entirely sure yet. But my theory on
37:13
Speaker 3: this is that the worms get lost and they think,
37:17
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're used to migrating a certain way
37:19
Speaker 3: and a deer, and like a deer is much smaller
37:21
Speaker 3: than a moose, and so they kind of get lost
37:25
Speaker 3: along their way and will end up in weird places
37:28
Speaker 3: like the eye. So when we have moose acting abnormally
37:34
Speaker 3: or are emaciated, we usually suspect that is brainworm associated mortality.
37:41
Speaker 3: But it moose are what's called an aberrant hoast, and
37:45
Speaker 3: other things like lamas and alpacas also can get brainworm
37:49
Speaker 3: and die from it. And so these species that haven't
37:53
Speaker 3: adapted with this worm may have more of a reaction
37:57
Speaker 3: to it migrating through their scent nervous system in their
38:01
Speaker 3: brain than whitetail deer do, and so that reaction may
38:05
Speaker 3: cause more problems for them.
38:07
Speaker 1: Well, okay, if it comes to something like this, how
38:10
Speaker 1: is the worm so picky? Anyways? Why would the worm
38:14
Speaker 1: Let's say you ate the snail? What is it about
38:18
Speaker 1: your What is it about a human's body chemistry that
38:21
Speaker 1: would make it that the worm didn't take off that
38:24
Speaker 1: the worm didn't go into your brain.
38:26
Speaker 3: I don't know because I don't study people.
38:28
Speaker 1: Okay, but like do we know that it doesn't. Yeah?
38:31
Speaker 3: Well yeah, well, I mean there's a bunch of worms
38:33
Speaker 3: that do. Like we don't hear about brainworm being a
38:36
Speaker 3: problem in people, But there are other ones in raccoon
38:39
Speaker 3: called Ballis ascaris. That's problematic. That's in raccoon poop. And
38:44
Speaker 3: so they tell people like cleaning out addicts and stuff
38:47
Speaker 3: to make sure that you wear you know, a respirator
38:51
Speaker 3: or something and wear gloves because if you inhale these
38:55
Speaker 3: eggs from raccoon poop, then you can get infected. And
38:57
Speaker 3: that one ends up in your brain and causes problems.
38:59
Speaker 1: Oh it does.
39:00
Speaker 4: Yeah.
39:00
Speaker 1: And then what's the one what's the cat scratch fever? One?
39:04
Speaker 3: Is that bord oftella?
39:06
Speaker 1: No, that's doc plasmosis. Oh, that's what I'm thinking of.
39:10
Speaker 3: Toxic plasmosis. Yeah, that is another one that you know,
39:15
Speaker 3: you get from feces, like inhaling the eggs and everything,
39:19
Speaker 3: so and that can be a problem from Yeah, that
39:21
Speaker 3: one also can end up in your brain. It's a
39:24
Speaker 3: different type of parasite though, So it's a like an
39:28
Speaker 3: intracellular one that causes a lot of problems. I did
39:30
Speaker 3: some work on sea otters and they would get that
39:34
Speaker 3: one a lot. And they think it's from cat feces
39:38
Speaker 3: washing out into the ocean. What yeah, and other and
39:41
Speaker 3: snails might be involved in that one too, So okay.
39:46
Speaker 1: Back the brain weren't from men now, and then we're
39:48
Speaker 1: jumping around a bunch. That's all right, Uh, I have heard,
39:55
Speaker 1: and I might be getting part of this wrong. I've
39:57
Speaker 1: heard that we're seeing that one of the problems for
40:02
Speaker 1: moose that are enorming in the northern latitudes. Okay, one
40:07
Speaker 1: of the problems for moose has been as white tailed
40:11
Speaker 1: deer populations have expanded, habitat changes Okay, Warmer winters have
40:20
Speaker 1: allowed white tail deer to move and croach on areas
40:24
Speaker 1: that were historically moose. Yes, they've always you know, there's
40:27
Speaker 1: probably always been some intermingling, but there's been a more
40:30
Speaker 1: radical shift of deer moving into moose areas and that
40:34
Speaker 1: being problematic for moose. Yep, this is what they're talking about.
40:39
Speaker 1: I gather exactly the movement of these parasites into moose.
40:43
Speaker 3: And so we'll talk about the other one that we
40:45
Speaker 3: think is affecting New York moose. Is liver flukeka. So
40:49
Speaker 3: this has anybody ever asked you about little livers, like
40:53
Speaker 3: if you if you're eating the liver. I actually had
40:57
Speaker 3: somebody ask me this and they're like, oh, what are
40:58
Speaker 3: those other little livers? They're kind of like leaf shape,
41:01
Speaker 3: they might.
41:01
Speaker 1: Get no, no, exactly.
41:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, so those are liver fluke, giant liver fluke, vaciloidis magna.
41:07
Speaker 1: Oh no, I'm not talking about that, Okay, I'm talking
41:09
Speaker 1: about like you know, there's like lobes of a liver.
41:12
Speaker 1: There's like a little side car liver on there.
41:14
Speaker 3: Sure, yeah, that's what I thought. No, but these are
41:17
Speaker 3: parasites that are in there that some people have fry
41:21
Speaker 3: up and eat.
41:24
Speaker 1: I'm back up on that. Yeah, tell me what it
41:27
Speaker 1: looks like.
41:28
Speaker 3: It's it's like yay big and it kind of looks
41:31
Speaker 3: like a leaf. We can I'm sure I can find a.
41:34
Speaker 1: Picture the girls on a liver.
41:36
Speaker 3: Yeah. It grows in the liver. So those migrate through
41:38
Speaker 3: the liver and make these cysts that are full of
41:40
Speaker 3: like brown gunk and they destroy the liver. And so
41:45
Speaker 3: that's the big problem.
41:46
Speaker 1: People like eating them or they're accidentally eating them.
41:49
Speaker 3: They probably accidentally eat them. I was just curious because
41:52
Speaker 3: you get a lot of weird questions.
41:55
Speaker 1: And the little sidecar thing I'm talking about.
42:00
Speaker 3: I know what you're talking about. Yeah, No, these are
42:02
Speaker 3: are parasites within the liver. The kind of they kind
42:05
Speaker 3: of look like a liver almost, I guess, like, but yeah,
42:09
Speaker 3: they're they're different.
42:12
Speaker 1: I want to ask you later about the the nasal bots.
42:16
Speaker 3: Oh, those are fun.
42:19
Speaker 1: But let's go on.
42:20
Speaker 3: We'll keep going, all right. So liver flukes also are
42:24
Speaker 3: carried by white tail deer and have a snail intermediate host,
42:29
Speaker 3: but these have an aquatic snail as the intermediate host.
42:34
Speaker 3: So it's even sort of more complicated. The moose have
42:37
Speaker 3: to get this aquatic vegetation where the the fluke actually
42:43
Speaker 3: insists on the vegetation and stays there, and then the
42:47
Speaker 3: moose comes along and eats it and gets infected.
42:49
Speaker 1: Okay, so he's got to be underwater.
42:51
Speaker 3: Well he can you know, eating in a wetland or something,
42:55
Speaker 3: you know, eating some plants out of there and gets
42:58
Speaker 3: it that way, and so out of the moose that
43:02
Speaker 3: we have on the air right now, I think we've
43:04
Speaker 3: had explain what that means with GPS callers on. Okay,
43:09
Speaker 3: that we've we've had about three already that have died
43:12
Speaker 3: from liver fluke and these were captured as year lanes.
43:16
Speaker 3: And so we're worried about the survival of juvenile moose
43:20
Speaker 3: in the Adirondack. So there's been a lot of studies
43:22
Speaker 3: by folks here at Cornell in the USGS co Op
43:26
Speaker 3: unit at the Sunni School Environmental Science and Forestry doing
43:31
Speaker 3: moose work, you know, to see if the habitats appropriate
43:33
Speaker 3: to look at adult reproduction. A few years ago we
43:38
Speaker 3: collared a bunch of females and all the signs pointed
43:43
Speaker 3: to juveniles as their survivorship wasn't very good. So that's
43:47
Speaker 3: why we're doing the study. And so the fact that
43:49
Speaker 3: we've already seen three die over you know, the course
43:53
Speaker 3: of our two years already.
43:55
Speaker 1: How many how many moose do you have out there
43:56
Speaker 1: with collars on them?
43:57
Speaker 3: I forget. I want to say we caught like fifteen
44:00
Speaker 3: the first year and nineteen the second year.
44:03
Speaker 1: And three have died from that? How many have died
44:05
Speaker 1: from other stuff?
44:08
Speaker 3: Jen, my PhD student, would have the numbers, but I
44:11
Speaker 3: don't think too many others. I mean we have, I
44:14
Speaker 3: think most of them are are still in the air.
44:17
Speaker 1: So you got a mortality signal, you go out there,
44:19
Speaker 1: you get it. Yep, you dissect it, bring it here
44:22
Speaker 1: or whatever. Dissect it, open it up. Liver flute. Yeah,
44:26
Speaker 1: the liver's destroyed.
44:27
Speaker 3: Liver's destroyed so much.
44:29
Speaker 1: As someone would know when you're looking at it.
44:32
Speaker 3: I mean, you have to kind of get a feel
44:34
Speaker 3: for what normal is. And when you have a liver
44:37
Speaker 3: that just looks like pulp. And the other thing was
44:42
Speaker 3: I was at one of the Moostnee cropsies and it
44:46
Speaker 3: was full of fluid, so like liver was failing and
44:49
Speaker 3: it couldn't process any any thing anymore. So it was
44:54
Speaker 3: just filling up with fluid. Like we punched a hole
44:57
Speaker 3: in it and had a five gallon bucket under the table,
44:59
Speaker 3: and it like it was overflowing. It had so much
45:02
Speaker 3: fluid in it, five gallons over five gallons. Yeah, there
45:06
Speaker 3: was so much pressure in its abdomen, Like the fluid
45:08
Speaker 3: was like shooting out a couple feet when we punched
45:11
Speaker 3: a hole in it.
45:13
Speaker 1: Oh how many flukes does it take to do that?
45:17
Speaker 3: I don't know, but it was a lot like it.
45:20
Speaker 3: It was pretty pretty trashed when you got to the liver,
45:23
Speaker 3: and for an animal that young to have that much
45:26
Speaker 3: damage when.
45:28
Speaker 1: You get to something like that, how do you ever,
45:31
Speaker 1: how do you ever make the determination that this is new?
45:36
Speaker 1: This has always been here but we hadn't noticed it,
45:39
Speaker 1: do you? I mean, like, how do you ever go
45:41
Speaker 1: down that path?
45:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard because you're just comparing it to what
45:45
Speaker 3: you know already. And that's why we have challenges sometimes
45:49
Speaker 3: with saying things are a problem because we get so
45:51
Speaker 3: many things opportunistically where we can't go out and just
45:56
Speaker 3: sample the population like we'd like to randomly and say, okay,
45:59
Speaker 3: is this normal or not normal? So yeah, we have
46:03
Speaker 3: to do some some creative statistics and just doing this
46:07
Speaker 3: work over time, you get a baseline so you kind
46:10
Speaker 3: of know are things you know, we've never seen this
46:13
Speaker 3: before in the you know, New York has a really
46:15
Speaker 3: long history of doing wildlife health and knowing what's normal
46:20
Speaker 3: and what's not. So those people are are really good
46:23
Speaker 3: resource of institutional knowledge to compare against to say, hey,
46:27
Speaker 3: what do you normally see.
46:28
Speaker 1: And to return that real quick to the work you
46:31
Speaker 1: guys are doing downstairs. But we're looking at this morning,
46:33
Speaker 1: is that gives you that influx of animals coming in,
46:38
Speaker 1: gives you a chance to look for this stuff. Meaning,
46:44
Speaker 1: someone hits a moose with a car, the moose comes
46:47
Speaker 1: in and you'd be like, oh, does not or does yeah, right,
46:50
Speaker 1: and it allows you to start getting a snapshot of
46:53
Speaker 1: what's going on out there, even though like we looked
46:55
Speaker 1: at a bobcat this morning that obviously ques.
47:01
Speaker 3: Pretty yeah, that one was.
47:02
Speaker 1: Fairly obviously like probably from the report of whoever brought
47:05
Speaker 1: it in, but also just like at a glance, it's
47:08
Speaker 1: like this thing's been run over by a car bad
47:11
Speaker 1: but you're able to check to see its other what
47:15
Speaker 1: its health might have been like prior to it getting
47:17
Speaker 1: hit by.
47:17
Speaker 3: A car, exactly was there something that may have predisposed
47:20
Speaker 3: it to getting hit by a car. So it's sort
47:22
Speaker 3: of a judgment call, Like we don't run every test
47:24
Speaker 3: on every animal because that would be prohibitively expensive, but
47:29
Speaker 3: by saving the tissues, if there's sort of you know,
47:33
Speaker 3: a potential smoking gun out there that might have caused
47:36
Speaker 3: something like you know, for some of these animals, like
47:41
Speaker 3: maybe they had something you know, on board, or maybe
47:45
Speaker 3: they were sick and that's why they walked in front
47:46
Speaker 3: of the car. Maybe they weren't quite right.
47:48
Speaker 1: So yep, you know, yeah, Christ was saying to me earlier,
47:52
Speaker 1: you were talking about found dead, and you were saying,
47:57
Speaker 1: tell me more found dead.
48:00
Speaker 3: Found dead isn't really helpful, Like we know the animal's
48:02
Speaker 3: dead already, like.
48:03
Speaker 1: Found dead below a power line. Yep, found dead and
48:05
Speaker 1: the birds nests found dead below a big window, right,
48:09
Speaker 1: found dead where yeah, found dead after it bit your
48:12
Speaker 1: dog exactly.
48:14
Speaker 3: Yeah. So one of the things when I go out
48:16
Speaker 3: and talk to the biologists about sort of doing like
48:20
Speaker 3: a crime scene investigation type work, because a lot of
48:24
Speaker 3: times they get tunnel vision on the animal and they
48:27
Speaker 3: go and pick up the animal and they're worried about
48:28
Speaker 3: putting their gloves on and doing everything right. But you know,
48:32
Speaker 3: letting us know what the situation is because that is
48:36
Speaker 3: really a huge part of solving the puzzle. You know,
48:39
Speaker 3: is it hot out? Is you know, is a species migrating?
48:42
Speaker 3: Is it? You know we've been seeing sort of low
48:46
Speaker 3: level of mortality in this area for a long time.
48:49
Speaker 3: Or you know, we found a twenty turkeys dead and
48:53
Speaker 3: there was a smoking tree because it got hit by lightning.
48:56
Speaker 3: You know, those types of things are really very helpful
49:00
Speaker 3: and getting a diagnosis because a lot of times carcasses
49:03
Speaker 3: will come in and you know, if it's found dead,
49:05
Speaker 3: you don't know how long this thing's been dead for.
49:09
Speaker 3: And if it's hot out, they tend to rot really quickly,
49:11
Speaker 3: and when that happens, the pathologist will call that autolized.
49:16
Speaker 3: And so you know, it's different than having a pet
49:20
Speaker 3: that might be euthanized at a clinic and then you
49:23
Speaker 3: open it up and it's you know, fresh, these things
49:26
Speaker 3: a lot of times we don't know how long they've
49:27
Speaker 3: been dead for, and you know, they rot pretty quickly
49:31
Speaker 3: depending on the conditions.
49:33
Speaker 1: When earlier we explored the idea of being a disease ecologist,
49:37
Speaker 1: and you talked about because you know, you're looking at
49:40
Speaker 1: a complex situation with all these other inputs. If you're
49:47
Speaker 1: looking at a bunch, if you're looking at a lot
49:49
Speaker 1: of moose and you're seeing that in northern New York,
49:52
Speaker 1: you're having a high prevalence of liver flukes in moose
49:56
Speaker 1: you call their moose. A significant percentage of those moose
50:00
Speaker 1: die from liver flukes. Who you're not the one that
50:07
Speaker 1: declares that liver flukes are having a population level impact
50:11
Speaker 1: on moose or are you or does that? Does that?
50:16
Speaker 1: Does that information then go to down the road to
50:19
Speaker 1: someone else who's doing population level work?
50:22
Speaker 3: Oh no, We so we work really closely with the
50:25
Speaker 3: New York Department of Environmental Conservation and so we have
50:28
Speaker 3: a PhD student working on this because it's a research
50:34
Speaker 3: project with them to try to define what's happening with
50:38
Speaker 3: the moose population. So, yeah, the student will do population modeling,
50:43
Speaker 3: will help out with that based on you know, the
50:45
Speaker 3: mortality information that we have from you know, collected over
50:49
Speaker 3: the years. She just sent me a manuscript about it.
50:54
Speaker 3: You know, we'll we'll try to figure out what's going
50:56
Speaker 3: on with that population and then we'll feed that directly
50:58
Speaker 3: to the state agency so they can put it into
51:01
Speaker 3: their moose management plan and decide how they want to proceed.
51:05
Speaker 1: Had it been flagged prior that moose numbers are declining,
51:10
Speaker 1: and that opened up the sort of investigation about what
51:13
Speaker 1: is going on exactly.
51:14
Speaker 3: So there was work done by a lot of other
51:17
Speaker 3: researchers looking at archery, hunters, fighting logs to try to
51:22
Speaker 3: estimate the population. There's been helicopter surveys for moose trying
51:27
Speaker 3: to estimate the population over time and see if it's
51:29
Speaker 3: you know, stable, declining increasing. So yeah, and then like
51:35
Speaker 3: all the mortality tracking that we've done and trying to
51:37
Speaker 3: determine cause of death, we did some preliminary modeling to say, okay,
51:41
Speaker 3: we think it's juvenile moose that are being most impacted,
51:45
Speaker 3: so those are the ones we should emphasize for putting
51:48
Speaker 3: the callers on. You know, there was a previous helicopter
51:51
Speaker 3: capture with adult females and with that we were able
51:55
Speaker 3: to work with other researchers to develop a test to
51:59
Speaker 3: look for brain worm. And when we tested those adult females,
52:03
Speaker 3: it showed that they had exposure to brainworm, but they
52:05
Speaker 3: obviously survived, So that kind of changed the dogma that
52:08
Speaker 3: brainworm might be a death sentence for moose because we
52:11
Speaker 3: think that these females got infected and they were able
52:14
Speaker 3: to survive the infection. So yeah, trying to get a
52:19
Speaker 3: sense of that, we knew the females were also pregnant.
52:22
Speaker 3: The state biologists walked in on a lot of these
52:25
Speaker 3: to actually get eyes on calves to see if they
52:28
Speaker 3: had you know, singles or twins, to kind of get
52:31
Speaker 3: those reproductive numbers as well.
52:32
Speaker 1: Yep, let's talk about the ego for a minute.
52:36
Speaker 3: Oh wait, we didn't finish winter tech though.
52:37
Speaker 1: Oh no, okay, let's go back to winter tix.
52:39
Speaker 3: Okay. So winter tick is a problem that they're seeing
52:43
Speaker 3: in Maine, in New Hampshire and Vermont pretty significantly, also
52:47
Speaker 3: killing juvenile moose, and they're trying some new management strategies
52:52
Speaker 3: to decrease the population density of moose to see if
52:56
Speaker 3: that slows down the transmission of winter tick. Because winter
52:59
Speaker 3: tick aren't another thing that deer carry. That deer can manage.
53:03
Speaker 3: They can groom themselves enough to get the winter ticks off,
53:06
Speaker 3: but moose don't seem to be able to do that
53:09
Speaker 3: quite as well. So when they.
53:11
Speaker 1: Trying to lower moose numbers.
53:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, just stop save moose.
53:14
Speaker 1: That that's a logic that is going to be that's
53:18
Speaker 1: a logic that's going to be challenged by a lot
53:21
Speaker 1: of moose hunters.
53:22
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I guess, I guess if you're a moose
53:25
Speaker 3: hunter right now, it's good for you, right like, if
53:27
Speaker 3: you're out there helping.
53:29
Speaker 1: That's how they're doing the boring of density. But you know,
53:33
Speaker 1: the old line, I don't know if it came from Vietnam,
53:38
Speaker 1: but the concept of burning a village to save it, right. Uh,
53:45
Speaker 1: that's hard for people.
53:46
Speaker 3: Oh, I know, I deal with that all the time
53:48
Speaker 3: with gronic wasting disease. Yeah, but in New York, we
53:52
Speaker 3: hadn't seen winter tick the same way that other Northeast
53:56
Speaker 3: states had until recently. So with some of the captured
54:01
Speaker 3: moose when they do assessments for winter ticks, so they
54:04
Speaker 3: look for them on live animals, and they found more
54:08
Speaker 3: than we had seen previously. And we're starting to get
54:11
Speaker 3: some game cam pictures in that looks like the typical
54:17
Speaker 3: hair loss pattern that you see on moose where they're
54:19
Speaker 3: missing hair on the shoulder. And some of the states
54:23
Speaker 3: that have it pretty significantly, like Maine and Minnesota, they
54:27
Speaker 3: actually call them ghost moose where they've lost so much
54:29
Speaker 3: hair that they appear more white because they've rubbed off
54:32
Speaker 3: all those guard hairs and everything.
54:33
Speaker 1: Really, yeah, let's say you knew, not that you don't know.
54:42
Speaker 1: Let's say we know that has a population level impact,
54:47
Speaker 1: or the brain worm for instance, or either one of these.
54:51
Speaker 1: There's nothing I mean, is there is there any control
54:54
Speaker 1: mechanism that would wind up being helpful?
54:58
Speaker 3: Well, if you didn't have as many white tail deer
55:01
Speaker 3: in moose territory that would be helpful.
55:03
Speaker 1: Yeah.
55:04
Speaker 3: So, I mean Maine is trying really hard to talk
55:10
Speaker 3: about chronic waste and disease and deer numbers and moose
55:15
Speaker 3: because a lot of the towns there have started feeding
55:18
Speaker 3: programs and those are really hard to stop once they
55:21
Speaker 3: get started, because then you have too many deer and
55:23
Speaker 3: then you know, people obviously don't want to see them
55:25
Speaker 3: starving in winter, so they keep feeding and keep feeding,
55:28
Speaker 3: and so then you just can't get people to stop
55:32
Speaker 3: it because they don't want the animals to die.
55:34
Speaker 1: You know. In Alaska, in eastern Alaska, they have like
55:39
Speaker 1: basically a shoot on site policy for meal deer coming
55:44
Speaker 1: into Alaska. Yeah, not welcome right around disease issues, right, yep,
55:50
Speaker 1: being that those deer are getting there due to human
55:58
Speaker 1: induced habitat changes yep. Following road systems, right.
56:02
Speaker 3: I mean you see that west with white tails edge
56:04
Speaker 3: habitats right, following rivers.
56:06
Speaker 1: Up, Yeah, and just and it's changed the policy on
56:10
Speaker 1: it's changed mildly, but basically it's like if you see it,
56:13
Speaker 1: kill it, yeah, like not wanting the man.
56:15
Speaker 3: I know, it's it's challenging because we've you know, I
56:19
Speaker 3: think people forget that we've altered habitats so significantly and
56:24
Speaker 3: have an impact, and that we're not We're not separate
56:27
Speaker 3: from nature. And you know, I hunt deer and you know,
56:32
Speaker 3: eat a lot of venison. But in a lot of
56:34
Speaker 3: places there's deer densities that are way too high, and
56:37
Speaker 3: they're problematic for a lot of different reasons, you know,
56:39
Speaker 3: chronic wasting disease being one of them. So, uh, if
56:43
Speaker 3: there are ways to lower deer densities or not encourage
56:47
Speaker 3: them to encroach in new areas, that's something that I
56:51
Speaker 3: think hunters should be behind.
56:55
Speaker 1: Can we talk about eagles? Yes, go ahead, you guys
56:58
Speaker 1: had an eagle.
56:58
Speaker 3: We had an eagle.
57:00
Speaker 1: Your interests we're looking. We're looking at an eagle. They
57:02
Speaker 1: hadn't begun the knee cropsy on it yet. I asked
57:07
Speaker 1: if eagle I could see if eagles were still in
57:09
Speaker 1: EESA species and Endangered Species Act Endangered Species Act, Protected Species,
57:15
Speaker 1: I could see that like every eagle that died, you'd
57:17
Speaker 1: want to take a gander at it.
57:19
Speaker 3: That's how it was for years, and.
57:21
Speaker 1: That's not the case anymore. Eagles are recovered, Eagle populations
57:26
Speaker 1: are increasing. What is why are you guys interest in eagles?
57:32
Speaker 1: And then I want to get to the turtle.
57:33
Speaker 4: Okay, we'll talk eagles.
57:37
Speaker 1: What's of interest about eagles?
57:38
Speaker 3: So, eagles are good indicator species for a lot of
57:43
Speaker 3: things because the public pays attention to them. You know,
57:45
Speaker 3: if people find a bald eagle, they feel compelled to
57:48
Speaker 3: report it, so they.
57:50
Speaker 1: Feel compelled to tell you that they're seeing one. When
57:52
Speaker 1: I have friends come up to my place in Alaska,
57:55
Speaker 1: I have to wait a few days for them to
57:58
Speaker 1: stop reporting to me that there's eagles.
58:01
Speaker 3: Oh, I've got to go to eagle in Alaska store.
58:03
Speaker 1: You know what, Wait a minute, and there'll be twenty
58:05
Speaker 1: in a tree. And at some point on this trip
58:07
Speaker 1: you're going to stop observing them. They're just there.
58:11
Speaker 3: I had in my previous job with the US Geological
58:15
Speaker 3: Survey at the National Wildlife Health Center. I would hear
58:17
Speaker 3: about these mass mortality events and do investigations on them,
58:21
Speaker 3: and one of them was about all these bald eagles
58:25
Speaker 3: in Alaska where if a truck leaves a fish processing facility,
58:30
Speaker 3: it needs to be covered because if it's not, the
58:33
Speaker 3: eagles will start dive bombing it to get all the
58:35
Speaker 3: fish parts and so one left and was not covered.
58:40
Speaker 3: Eagles started going into it and just kept like piling
58:43
Speaker 3: in on top of each other, and like twenty bald
58:45
Speaker 3: eagles died in this fish truck, just mothering each other,
58:49
Speaker 3: like trying to get.
58:49
Speaker 1: To thunds after a soccer tournament. Yeah, yeah, so like
58:53
Speaker 1: a stampede. It really.
58:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a bunch of eagles died just smashing each
59:00
Speaker 3: other trying to get to the fish parts. God, it's
59:02
Speaker 3: so like uneagle, Like everybody has these ideas of eagles
59:07
Speaker 3: being so majestic.
59:10
Speaker 1: Didn't like him.
59:11
Speaker 3: He wanted the turkey, right, Well.
59:13
Speaker 1: That's a myth, but he was being uh, he was
59:17
Speaker 1: very disappointed the eagle, and he when he threw the
59:21
Speaker 1: turkey thing, he was disappoint because the eagles are scavengers,
59:24
Speaker 1: and you know, I didn't think it was a great
59:27
Speaker 1: symbol for the country and the way most historians regard
59:31
Speaker 1: his comment about the wild turkeys. He was saying basically
59:35
Speaker 1: was like, puh, might as well do the wild turkey. Okay,
59:39
Speaker 1: at least he's vain, right, Yeah, it wasn't. It's not.
59:45
Speaker 1: It's but most people are.
59:48
Speaker 3: They don't get the attitude with it.
59:50
Speaker 1: Because he didn't write down. But you know that is implied.
59:56
Speaker 1: Just make it the turkey. At least he's vain. But
59:59
Speaker 1: it wasn't. They think it was in uh In the
1:00:03
Speaker 1: suggestion wasn't jestice, but he was legitimately not happy with
1:00:06
Speaker 1: the eagle.
1:00:06
Speaker 3: Okay.
1:00:07
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, a scavenger bird.
1:00:09
Speaker 3: Right, And we see like conspecific trauma all the time,
1:00:12
Speaker 3: like eagles puncturing each other from fighting and things like that.
1:00:16
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean.
1:00:17
Speaker 1: But they're a good indicator species, right because people taking
1:00:20
Speaker 1: hovere of seb them exactly. And I did. Man if
1:00:22
Speaker 1: I was walking down the road and I saw a dead.
1:00:24
Speaker 4: Eagle, you do something I would.
1:00:26
Speaker 1: Let's say I was walking on the road and on
1:00:28
Speaker 1: the right hand side of the road is a dead eagle.
1:00:29
Speaker 1: In the left hand side of the road is a
1:00:31
Speaker 1: dead buzzard. I'm gonna pay way more attention to the
1:00:33
Speaker 1: dead eagle.
1:00:33
Speaker 4: I know.
1:00:34
Speaker 3: Buzzards don't get any love to.
1:00:35
Speaker 1: The point where I might even notify someone about it
1:00:38
Speaker 1: because I would think of.
1:00:39
Speaker 4: Someone shooting eagles exactly.
1:00:41
Speaker 1: They pissed at eagles, people having that eagle.
1:00:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're looking at them for a couple different reasons.
1:00:58
Speaker 3: One of them is just to keep that historic trend
1:01:01
Speaker 3: going where we want to keep an eye on what's
1:01:04
Speaker 3: happening with them. I mentioned we just finished a study
1:01:09
Speaker 3: a few years ago looking at bald eagles and lead,
1:01:13
Speaker 3: and so we gathered data from seven different Northeast states
1:01:19
Speaker 3: and it was diagnostic labs, rehabers, you know, state agencies
1:01:25
Speaker 3: and put all that together to answer that exact question,
1:01:28
Speaker 3: you know, does lead have a population level impact on eagles?
1:01:32
Speaker 3: And so we put that together and then did some
1:01:37
Speaker 3: very fancy mathematics with my research associate, Brenda Hanley, and
1:01:42
Speaker 3: figured out that led you know, we all know eagles
1:01:46
Speaker 3: have recovered, like there's no debate about that, but the
1:01:49
Speaker 3: long term growth rate of eagles was depressed by three
1:01:54
Speaker 3: to five percent by lead poisoning. And so it wasn't
1:01:58
Speaker 3: that it stopped the the recovery. It was just like
1:02:01
Speaker 3: driving a car forward with your foot on the brake.
1:02:04
Speaker 3: So it just kind of you know, didn't didn't make
1:02:08
Speaker 3: it optimal, and so we used a bunch.
1:02:12
Speaker 1: Of slowing like slowing recovery.
1:02:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it it still happened, but it would have
1:02:19
Speaker 3: been more efficient if eagles weren't getting lead poisoning.
1:02:24
Speaker 1: So now would there be uh, we were talking about
1:02:30
Speaker 1: trigger warnings. I'm going to give it. I'm going to
1:02:32
Speaker 1: issue my first ever trigger warning.
1:02:34
Speaker 3: Really should I do I get like a plaque or something.
1:02:37
Speaker 1: No, you're not cann get triggered.
1:02:38
Speaker 4: Okay, but this is I was I was.
1:02:40
Speaker 1: Trying to see clarification about what. You know, I heard
1:02:48
Speaker 1: it all the time. I never knew what the element
1:02:50
Speaker 1: it would be. You notify someone if they were going
1:02:52
Speaker 1: to hear something upset. People get riled up about this subject.
1:02:56
Speaker 3: I know.
1:02:57
Speaker 1: You know, when we're talking about lead in birds, it's
1:03:03
Speaker 1: we're talking about bullets.
1:03:04
Speaker 3: I know.
1:03:05
Speaker 1: Okay, So for you people that are going to get
1:03:07
Speaker 1: all one way, like, no matter what, you're gonna if
1:03:11
Speaker 1: you hate lead ammo, if you love let ammo, here's
1:03:15
Speaker 1: a trigger warning, okay, because you're gonna hear yourself.
1:03:18
Speaker 3: To discuss something I know, right.
1:03:20
Speaker 1: And like, there's very few people who just want to
1:03:23
Speaker 1: discuss things. Not very few. There's a lot of people
1:03:28
Speaker 1: who just don't even want to talk about ship.
1:03:30
Speaker 3: Oh I know, yeah, I know, my dad not interested
1:03:34
Speaker 3: in discussing this whatsoever.
1:03:36
Speaker 1: They'd rather just be that I don't want to talk
1:03:38
Speaker 1: about it. But we're going to talk about it so,
1:03:42
Speaker 1: and I'll and I'll do my best to throw in
1:03:44
Speaker 1: I'll do my best to interject, like, well, what about isms?
1:03:48
Speaker 4: Okay, we're talking about bullet lead, Yes.
1:03:55
Speaker 1: And birds get bullet lead by eating shit that's been
1:04:01
Speaker 1: shot with a bullet. With a bullet. So you go,
1:04:07
Speaker 1: you get a deer, say you shoot a deer hid
1:04:12
Speaker 1: in the shoulder blade. You're using some kind of you know,
1:04:16
Speaker 1: jacketed bullet, some kind of bonded bullet. Whatever, it's a
1:04:19
Speaker 1: it's it's probably copper sheathed around of small what what
1:04:28
Speaker 1: what would strike you as a very small monol lead? Okay,
1:04:32
Speaker 1: so most bullets have there's a lot of different bullet construction.
1:04:35
Speaker 1: But if we're going to divide two big game, big
1:04:38
Speaker 1: game bullets into two classifications for our purposes here, we
1:04:41
Speaker 1: would talk about like monolithic, meaning that they're all copper
1:04:48
Speaker 1: or there are some combination of copper and lead. There
1:04:51
Speaker 1: was a time when it was just lead, but they've
1:04:53
Speaker 1: mostly most bullets are jacketed. So you shoot a deer
1:04:56
Speaker 1: hit in the shoulder blade, that bullet breaks up, sends
1:05:00
Speaker 1: little bits of stuff here and there, deer dies. Everybody's
1:05:04
Speaker 1: happy you except for the deer. Yeah, deer's dead. Everybody
1:05:08
Speaker 1: else is happy. You got the deer. Maybe while you're
1:05:13
Speaker 1: gutting the deer, you uh, you have some damage, some
1:05:18
Speaker 1: severe damage on the opposing shoulder. You cut that out
1:05:22
Speaker 1: and don't even bring that home. Later you butcher your
1:05:27
Speaker 1: deer at home. There's some parts that are shot up
1:05:30
Speaker 1: that you don't want. You take those and you go
1:05:33
Speaker 1: out and put them out back because you like to
1:05:35
Speaker 1: watch birds and whatnot. Whatever you dump in a ditch somewhere,
1:05:40
Speaker 1: whatever you do, and it winds up being introduced into
1:05:43
Speaker 1: the food chain in the wild. Things consume it and
1:05:48
Speaker 1: they can get let And if you're like we had
1:05:50
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier in a bald eagle whose specialty is scavenging, right,
1:05:55
Speaker 1: and your long lived bird, and you get tuned into
1:05:59
Speaker 1: deer gut piles, and you're like most things where you
1:06:03
Speaker 1: realize that a great place to there's certain great places
1:06:06
Speaker 1: to hang out in the fall because that's going on.
1:06:09
Speaker 1: I remember to give an example of how would animals
1:06:12
Speaker 1: ever tune into this. I remember hearing about this project
1:06:15
Speaker 1: where there's a particular highway in northern Montana where there's
1:06:21
Speaker 1: really high white tailed deer populations, and it would actually
1:06:24
Speaker 1: impact Golden Eagle distribution that there were eagles who would
1:06:29
Speaker 1: spend their winter they were specially they were roadkill specialists.
1:06:33
Speaker 1: It would spend their winter around ninety three.
1:06:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, psycha.
1:06:37
Speaker 1: You could make a living all winter flying up and
1:06:40
Speaker 1: down and picking off eat one carcass, go to the
1:06:43
Speaker 1: next carcass. So you're an eagle, you live a long time.
1:06:47
Speaker 1: Over the course of your lifetime, you'd enough little tidbits
1:06:50
Speaker 1: of lead that you get a lead poisoning, you get
1:06:56
Speaker 1: a fatal mono lettin. You're shaking your head.
1:06:58
Speaker 3: No, well potentially, yeah, But the way we looked at
1:07:01
Speaker 3: it was so there would be eagles that didn't have
1:07:06
Speaker 3: any lead on board, then there would be exposed eagles
1:07:10
Speaker 3: that had, you know, a little bit. And we have
1:07:12
Speaker 3: problems sometimes people talk about like chronic and acute, which
1:07:15
Speaker 3: you're kind of talking about like chronic over the course
1:07:18
Speaker 3: of your lifetime, and then there's sort of levels that
1:07:24
Speaker 3: are enough to kill.
1:07:26
Speaker 4: You over in a dose.
1:07:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, nice, and then that would be like lead poisoning.
1:07:32
Speaker 3: And so people would often term like if you get
1:07:35
Speaker 3: a big helping like if you ease lead sinker or
1:07:38
Speaker 3: something that would be acute lead poisoning and that would
1:07:41
Speaker 3: be a level you know, enough to kill you.
1:07:44
Speaker 1: So dying from a single meal.
1:07:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can't tell that the way that we get
1:07:49
Speaker 3: the data, So we don't know if they accumulate enough
1:07:52
Speaker 3: lead over time to kill you know, to get to
1:07:55
Speaker 3: that level, or if they just eat, you know, happen
1:07:58
Speaker 3: to get a fragment that's big enough. Because a lead
1:08:01
Speaker 3: fragment a small grain of rice is enough to kill
1:08:04
Speaker 3: an eagle because they have a very acidic digestive system
1:08:07
Speaker 3: and so they break that down a lot more than
1:08:11
Speaker 3: like people eating lead. You know, it tends to pass
1:08:14
Speaker 3: through and not get as digested as it might in
1:08:17
Speaker 3: an eagle.
1:08:18
Speaker 1: See, that's the thing I'll hear from people is they'll
1:08:20
Speaker 1: say that that lad and a lot of things that
1:08:23
Speaker 1: lead just passes through and you're not breaking it down.
1:08:26
Speaker 3: But we did. We're doing a study now looking at
1:08:29
Speaker 3: fissure so mammalian scavengers to try to figure out, you know,
1:08:33
Speaker 3: our other animals getting led from what we term attractive
1:08:37
Speaker 3: nuisances like a gut pile. And I want to say
1:08:41
Speaker 3: it's like seventy percent of the fissures we've texted from
1:08:46
Speaker 3: hunter from trapped animals had some levels of lead in them.
1:08:50
Speaker 3: So a lot of fishers are getting.
1:08:53
Speaker 1: Lead to some level led in them in what way
1:08:57
Speaker 1: from scavenging? No, no, but detected where in them?
1:09:00
Speaker 3: In their liver? Okay, So we asked trappers did to
1:09:03
Speaker 3: give us carcasses. We took out the livers and tested them.
1:09:06
Speaker 1: And you incinerate the liver and then it leaves behind
1:09:10
Speaker 1: these metal residues. Ye, you can find the lead. And
1:09:14
Speaker 1: how much lead might you get out of a fisher's liver?
1:09:16
Speaker 3: They were like just trace amount, so not not super high,
1:09:20
Speaker 3: not enough to kill them obviously because they were trapped animals.
1:09:23
Speaker 1: And I'm not trying to like create like a suspicion
1:09:26
Speaker 1: of doubt, but what else might they have done to
1:09:31
Speaker 1: get that lead? Is there any other.
1:09:33
Speaker 3: I mean, people throw out ideas like tire weights, you know,
1:09:38
Speaker 3: if there's tire weights that have been thrown off tires
1:09:40
Speaker 3: alongside the chewing on that potentially discarded batteries.
1:09:46
Speaker 1: And they're chewing on that.
1:09:48
Speaker 3: I don't but these are the things that people.
1:09:50
Speaker 1: To create a suspicion or to throw out some possible
1:09:53
Speaker 1: other explanations exactly.
1:09:55
Speaker 3: And so for some of the eagle stuff, we did
1:09:58
Speaker 3: try to look at the isotopes, the lead isotopes to
1:10:03
Speaker 3: figure out is it coming from bullets or is it
1:10:05
Speaker 3: coming from you know, lead paint chips or whatever. And
1:10:08
Speaker 3: so we did that analysis. But apparently because there's such
1:10:14
Speaker 3: a limited amount of lead smelting anymore, that a lot
1:10:18
Speaker 3: of the lead is recycled, so you can't tell where
1:10:21
Speaker 3: that lead actually came from. So we weren't able to
1:10:25
Speaker 3: identify it.
1:10:26
Speaker 1: But you know, logic bullet for bullet making, that's all
1:10:29
Speaker 1: recycled lead, right, so all from batteries.
1:10:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, we did try, but it wasn't helpful.
1:10:35
Speaker 1: Here's the thing people say, and this isn't your area,
1:10:38
Speaker 1: but this is a thing people would point to. Here
1:10:41
Speaker 1: you have that. Let's take the eagle example, and the
1:10:44
Speaker 1: eagle we look at today will have we'll be tested
1:10:46
Speaker 1: for lead. Yes, Okay, there's an argument that it's not
1:10:52
Speaker 1: an argument you can ignore really because it's a it's
1:10:54
Speaker 1: a sound argument. Be eagles were endangered, and they were
1:11:00
Speaker 1: endangered because of DDT Okay, they were endangered because of
1:11:04
Speaker 1: a pesticide that would cause their shells to be very thin,
1:11:09
Speaker 1: and they would kill their own shells, they'd break their
1:11:12
Speaker 1: own eggs when they incubated them. That's simplified, but that's
1:11:17
Speaker 1: what happened with eagles. The use of DDT was prohibited,
1:11:22
Speaker 1: eagle numbers started to increase. They were one of these few,
1:11:27
Speaker 1: I think one of I don't know what it is.
1:11:29
Speaker 1: Two percent of the species that go on the endangered
1:11:31
Speaker 1: Species list come off because of recovery. It's not very common.
1:11:37
Speaker 1: Some come off because they're gone, they go extinct. Some
1:11:41
Speaker 1: come off because we realized that they didn't warrant being
1:11:44
Speaker 1: on there anyway. But it's a rare thing to hit recovery,
1:11:51
Speaker 1: and it's always celebrated to hit recovery. The peregrine, faulk
1:11:53
Speaker 1: and bald ego actually hit recovery and now their numbers
1:11:56
Speaker 1: are growing. And someone would point to and say it, well,
1:12:00
Speaker 1: bullet lead, Yes, they're growing, but bullet lead is slowing
1:12:06
Speaker 1: the growth. And an argument, and it's true, would be
1:12:16
Speaker 1: there are many kinds of human cause mortality that are
1:12:18
Speaker 1: slowing recovery. Vehicles like they're increasing, Yes, would they be
1:12:26
Speaker 1: increasing faster without vehicles? Sure? Would they be increasing faster
1:12:32
Speaker 1: without power lines? Would they be increasing faster without X,
1:12:36
Speaker 1: Y and z? So there are many human cause things
1:12:39
Speaker 1: that are slowing the increase, but the increase is there,
1:12:45
Speaker 1: and they would argue this is an acceptable level. This
1:12:49
Speaker 1: is how the argument goes. It's a you know, like
1:12:52
Speaker 1: I said, can't be ignored. We as a species have
1:12:57
Speaker 1: an accepted level of human mortality. Meaning that's like they're growing.
1:13:02
Speaker 1: There are certain there's a bunch of things you could
1:13:03
Speaker 1: do to make them grow faster, but we're not going
1:13:06
Speaker 1: to do all those things because there's an inconvenience level.
1:13:10
Speaker 3: Well that I think that's the rub right there, is
1:13:13
Speaker 3: that if we're talking about lead from bullets and hunters
1:13:18
Speaker 3: are hunting because you know they're conservationists, they love the animals,
1:13:24
Speaker 3: to think about that you're causing you know, if you
1:13:28
Speaker 3: think about all the rules for shooting and know your target,
1:13:31
Speaker 3: what's beyond and one bullet one kill all those types
1:13:34
Speaker 3: of things. If you're leaving something out in the environment
1:13:38
Speaker 3: that's killing other animals that you didn't intend to know
1:13:41
Speaker 3: that that might be happening, I think is something that
1:13:45
Speaker 3: hunters should should know about. And you know, I'm not
1:13:49
Speaker 3: sitting here saying don't use lead bullets, but knowing that
1:13:52
Speaker 3: this is happening to other species, and if people want
1:13:57
Speaker 3: to make a change and how they hunt. Maybe they
1:14:00
Speaker 3: don't leave the gut pile out in the field. You know,
1:14:03
Speaker 3: if you want to shoot lead, okay, but don't leave
1:14:06
Speaker 3: that out there for scavengers. You know, if you want
1:14:09
Speaker 3: to change your AMMO, that's okay too. But just knowing
1:14:14
Speaker 3: that it's a problem and getting back to your argument,
1:14:17
Speaker 3: like there's a lot of things out there that they
1:14:20
Speaker 3: could slow the population growth, that's absolutely true. This is
1:14:24
Speaker 3: one where hunters are making this choice. And the thing
1:14:29
Speaker 3: that I thought was most interesting about the work we
1:14:33
Speaker 3: did with the population modeling. Yeah, people are like a
1:14:36
Speaker 3: three to five percent we can okay, it's not you know,
1:14:40
Speaker 3: stop the recovery. That's not a huge number. But one
1:14:44
Speaker 3: of the elements that we were able to look at
1:14:46
Speaker 3: was the population resilience. So how much flexibility does that
1:14:50
Speaker 3: population have to absorb other threats and keep operating. And
1:14:58
Speaker 3: bald eagles are kind of mac out, so they've stretched
1:15:01
Speaker 3: their population, and how much they can adjust their population
1:15:06
Speaker 3: parameters to make that recovery happen. And so in the
1:15:10
Speaker 3: paper we talked about how if other threats come along,
1:15:13
Speaker 3: you know, like you know, with climate change, we're talking
1:15:17
Speaker 3: about using more wind energy and if that, you know,
1:15:20
Speaker 3: the wind turbans are knocking down eagles and killing them
1:15:24
Speaker 3: or other infectious disease. And we actually put this paper
1:15:27
Speaker 3: out before highly pathogenic gaving influenza came out and then
1:15:33
Speaker 3: poof that happened and we saw a lot of ball
1:15:35
Speaker 3: eagles dying from that. So it's it's not that they
1:15:39
Speaker 3: can't absorb that stress. It's that you might be stressing
1:15:42
Speaker 3: them too much. So the same thing you were talking
1:15:45
Speaker 3: about with DDT, like maybe having lead and DDT was
1:15:50
Speaker 3: just too much for the eagles and that's why the
1:15:51
Speaker 3: population was crashing. So you can't just say it was
1:15:54
Speaker 3: just DDT that was doing that. And you also had
1:15:58
Speaker 3: the ban on ld A in waterfowl in nineteen ninety one,
1:16:02
Speaker 3: and so all the eagles eat a lot of ducks
1:16:04
Speaker 3: and you know, wounded animals, and so they we might
1:16:08
Speaker 3: have actually seen less lead poisoning recently, you know, since
1:16:13
Speaker 3: that ban, because they weren't eating you know, shot waterfowl.
1:16:17
Speaker 3: Now there's other places that are expanding use of bullets
1:16:23
Speaker 3: in different areas, like in New York, they're adding new
1:16:25
Speaker 3: counties that can use rifles instead of shotguns. So it's
1:16:29
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily things like shots. Uh, like slugs that
1:16:32
Speaker 3: are the problem even well, slugs a hell of a
1:16:36
Speaker 3: lot more lead, right, exactly a lot more lead. Yeah,
1:16:38
Speaker 3: So hopefully the eagle's smart enough that it doesn't eat that.
1:16:41
Speaker 3: But it's it's those small fragments when a bullet shatters,
1:16:45
Speaker 3: you know, that go everywhere, like up to thirty centimeters
1:16:48
Speaker 3: away from the womb channel that can be problematic.
1:16:51
Speaker 1: So I understand what, I understand the point you're making
1:16:55
Speaker 1: that three percent from this some percent for that years ago,
1:17:02
Speaker 1: I was looking at and had a conversation with someone
1:17:04
Speaker 1: about impacts of wolves on elk Okay. And you know,
1:17:11
Speaker 1: you start with this thing where let's say you look
1:17:14
Speaker 1: and you have one hundred calves, right, and you were
1:17:19
Speaker 1: maybe you were of those hundred calves you were always
1:17:24
Speaker 1: losing for many decades in the past, you were always
1:17:28
Speaker 1: losing thirty of those calves to mountain lions. And that
1:17:31
Speaker 1: stayed the same. And wolves come in, wolves are reintroduced
1:17:37
Speaker 1: into an area, and you see a real decline and elk.
1:17:44
Speaker 1: But the wolves aren't even eating as much, they're not
1:17:46
Speaker 1: killing as many calves as mountain lions are. But that
1:17:49
Speaker 1: mountain lion thing had always been there, right, you know,
1:17:52
Speaker 1: they were always carrying off thirty percent. Yeah, there was
1:17:57
Speaker 1: some sort of equilibrium there and you're used to that.
1:18:00
Speaker 1: But then you add another.
1:18:02
Speaker 3: Seven ye and it's enough to tip it to a
1:18:05
Speaker 3: different direction.
1:18:06
Speaker 1: You notice this thing, but you still look and everyone
1:18:09
Speaker 1: will be like, wolves are killing all the elk, and
1:18:14
Speaker 1: in some areas it's well, mountain lions are killing all
1:18:17
Speaker 1: the elk. The wolf thing is just a new additive
1:18:19
Speaker 1: thing that has disrupted what we've accepted to be normal
1:18:24
Speaker 1: exactly if you want to talk about what like when
1:18:26
Speaker 1: an elk calf hits the ground, its biggest risk remains
1:18:29
Speaker 1: a mountain line. But that's just always been so consistent
1:18:34
Speaker 1: and this is a new party. So I get the
1:18:38
Speaker 1: point that you know, with I think that you can
1:18:41
Speaker 1: that that someone could make the decision, you know, to say,
1:18:46
Speaker 1: like I use copper ammunition, I use ammunition with leading.
1:18:49
Speaker 1: It still all right, Like I'm pretty well versed on
1:18:52
Speaker 1: the pros and cons of it, the efficacy of it,
1:18:58
Speaker 1: the technology on copper. Animals come a long way, but
1:19:01
Speaker 1: there's some you know, when you get into efficacy, there's
1:19:04
Speaker 1: some definite arguments for there's some real arguments for lead ammunition.
1:19:09
Speaker 1: I have found generally that in cases where people are
1:19:14
Speaker 1: given in cases where people are offered an alternative, they'll
1:19:21
Speaker 1: often go for it. Voluntary compliance areas, here's free AMMO.
1:19:25
Speaker 1: You know, if you're gonna be hunting on the Kaibab
1:19:27
Speaker 1: plateau where there's a lot of condors, will give you
1:19:32
Speaker 1: AMMO to use. People are like eager to accept AMMO.
1:19:34
Speaker 1: We want you to remove your gut pile. People are
1:19:36
Speaker 1: eager to move the gut pile. That goodwill evaporates when
1:19:44
Speaker 1: it comes to mandatory Yes, the goodwill evaporates when it
1:19:48
Speaker 1: comes to mandatory restrictions. And a lot of it's driven
1:19:52
Speaker 1: by some amount of efficacy, for sure. A lot of
1:19:55
Speaker 1: that pushback, a lot of that goodwill evaporates also around
1:19:59
Speaker 1: call lost.
1:20:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean it's hard.
1:20:02
Speaker 1: Very different cost card right now to get that to
1:20:04
Speaker 1: get to move away from lead amim what can be expensive?
1:20:07
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure. And I mean just having ammunition
1:20:10
Speaker 3: shortages in general, trying to tell people to to use
1:20:13
Speaker 3: non lead when they can't find anything at all. So
1:20:16
Speaker 3: trying to make sure that that people sort of know
1:20:19
Speaker 3: what their options are and don't just say, oh, you know,
1:20:21
Speaker 3: using lead is bad. Like, Okay, if that's the only
1:20:24
Speaker 3: thing you can use, that's the only thing you can use.
1:20:26
Speaker 3: But you know, think about what you want to do
1:20:29
Speaker 3: after you pull the trigger.
1:20:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that it's keeping all that in mind
1:20:35
Speaker 1: is important. But I also think it's important that people
1:20:38
Speaker 1: realize you make choices. I make choices, right, And it
1:20:43
Speaker 1: is like lead kills raptors. Now does that mean rather
1:20:48
Speaker 1: that we're gonna lose raptors, that they're you know, they're
1:20:50
Speaker 1: gonna vansh from the landscape, not necessarily, but it kills rafters.
1:20:56
Speaker 3: So it comes down what's your your choice?
1:20:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of being an uncalledfort reality that it's the
1:21:01
Speaker 1: thing that happens and how many how often do they
1:21:05
Speaker 1: come through here that you find, and what is the symptomology.
1:21:11
Speaker 3: So lead is really a tough thing that affects all
1:21:17
Speaker 3: sorts of different systems in the body. So it's a neurotoxin.
1:21:22
Speaker 3: It's bad for your kidneys, Like it gets circulated in
1:21:26
Speaker 3: the blood and taken up into your bones, so you
1:21:28
Speaker 3: kind of lose it constantly through your bones. I had
1:21:31
Speaker 3: one case a long time ago with a mountain lion
1:21:35
Speaker 3: that had eaten a whole bunch of lead shot from
1:21:38
Speaker 3: something or other, and the lion was so rotten that
1:21:42
Speaker 3: we actually tested the bones in its paw and it
1:21:45
Speaker 3: came out screamingly high for lead.
1:21:48
Speaker 1: So it had been like metabolized that fast.
1:21:51
Speaker 3: So that it killed it and we could find it
1:21:53
Speaker 3: in its bones already, So it goes throughout the body.
1:21:56
Speaker 3: And I mean the main thing that people focus on,
1:21:59
Speaker 3: especially like with chill and is the neurological development. So
1:22:02
Speaker 3: it's not necessarily you know, at this point, if you
1:22:05
Speaker 3: lose a few brain cells from eating lead, it's you know,
1:22:09
Speaker 3: hard to tell the difference maybe, but for kids that
1:22:12
Speaker 3: are developing, that's the real challenge, you know that.
1:22:16
Speaker 1: You know that work where they looked at rural people
1:22:19
Speaker 1: who had a high consumption of game meat versus urban
1:22:23
Speaker 1: people who had no consumption of game meat, but the
1:22:27
Speaker 1: urban people were having higher levels.
1:22:30
Speaker 3: Lead from paint chips.
1:22:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, just environmental.
1:22:33
Speaker 3: Yeah. We have had this working group on lead in
1:22:38
Speaker 3: New York for a few years. It's got Department of
1:22:40
Speaker 3: Health on it, it's got venison donation people on it,
1:22:43
Speaker 3: it's got autobond to talk about all these different issues.
1:22:47
Speaker 3: And I've done work here with people in the communications Department,
1:22:51
Speaker 3: And one of the things that we talk about is backlash,
1:22:54
Speaker 3: Like if you tell people like using lead is bad,
1:22:56
Speaker 3: then they're just going to dig in harder on that,
1:22:59
Speaker 3: so that, you know, really backfires. And what you want
1:23:02
Speaker 3: to do so just making people aware of what the
1:23:06
Speaker 3: issue is in a non judgmental way and letting them
1:23:10
Speaker 3: make the choice about what they want to do.
1:23:12
Speaker 1: I remember sending in some garden soil one time and
1:23:17
Speaker 1: the garden soil having.
1:23:19
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's everywhere, super high lead levels.
1:23:21
Speaker 1: The thing you can think, I was back from leaded
1:23:23
Speaker 1: gas exactly.
1:23:24
Speaker 3: I mean we used to have lead in everything. It's
1:23:26
Speaker 3: kind of interesting like.
1:23:28
Speaker 1: Leaded fuel would just like would drift down oh yeah, right,
1:23:30
Speaker 1: and getting your soil. And then then the recommendation was
1:23:34
Speaker 1: wash the produce that it's like the plants aren't taking
1:23:38
Speaker 1: it up. Yeah, it's just you're ingesting it because it's
1:23:41
Speaker 1: folded within the leaves of your spinach. Sure it's like
1:23:44
Speaker 1: you know, leaf like cabbage or whatever, things where it's
1:23:47
Speaker 1: hard to clean. Yep, we're more likely that you're going
1:23:49
Speaker 1: to be just consuming it. You know. I don't the
1:23:55
Speaker 1: lead thing, like one of the areas where I don't
1:23:57
Speaker 1: have personal concern I guess because it's me or whatever.
1:24:00
Speaker 1: I never have personal concern about personally ingesting it, but
1:24:05
Speaker 1: it weighs on me about the wildlife fissue, Yeah, especially
1:24:08
Speaker 1: when I learned from you today about fishers.
1:24:10
Speaker 3: Right. And it just depends. Some people are moved by
1:24:14
Speaker 3: the wildlife issues, depending on what your ethos is. Some
1:24:17
Speaker 3: people are more concerned about it, and you know, their
1:24:20
Speaker 3: their own human consumption. It just it's variable, you know,
1:24:25
Speaker 3: just the same way people punch for a lot of
1:24:27
Speaker 3: different reasons, whatever is meaningful to them.
1:24:31
Speaker 1: Uh, crystal ball, mean, give me some crystal ball stuff
1:24:36
Speaker 1: on CWD.
1:24:37
Speaker 3: On CWD. Oh man, that's that's sort of tough, I am.
1:24:43
Speaker 1: I know researchers get really uncomfortable with the crystal boy.
1:24:45
Speaker 3: I know we don't do that. We're looking backwards most
1:24:49
Speaker 3: of the time.
1:24:52
Speaker 1: So just give me some thoughts. It doesn't need to
1:24:54
Speaker 1: be predictions. Just give me some, you know, some thoughts.
1:24:58
Speaker 3: Well, U, I'll talk about one of the things that
1:25:02
Speaker 3: we're doing that I hope people can get behind. So
1:25:06
Speaker 3: right now, we have a large program called the Surveillance
1:25:11
Speaker 3: Optimization Project for Chronic Wasting Disease, and this started out
1:25:16
Speaker 3: as a way based on what we did here in
1:25:20
Speaker 3: New York with doing more risk based surveillance, because there's
1:25:24
Speaker 3: you know, still a lot of states that haven't found
1:25:26
Speaker 3: CWD and they don't necessarily know where to look. So
1:25:30
Speaker 3: like New York had it in two thousand and five,
1:25:34
Speaker 3: you know, sampled really intensively until twenty ten for their
1:25:37
Speaker 3: five years, and then they're sort of like, now, what,
1:25:40
Speaker 3: like what do we do? So we set up this
1:25:43
Speaker 3: risk based surveillance based on deer density, based on hazards,
1:25:48
Speaker 3: like you know, Pennsylvania's got a lot of CWD, so
1:25:52
Speaker 3: we want to make sure we sample intensively along the
1:25:54
Speaker 3: southern tier and then going back to the you know,
1:25:56
Speaker 3: how do preons get into the state and how could
1:25:58
Speaker 3: they get spread? We want to sample more around those areas.
1:26:02
Speaker 3: And so we did this for New York, and then
1:26:04
Speaker 3: Tennessee asked us to do the same surveillance program for them,
1:26:09
Speaker 3: So we did that and that was how they found CWD,
1:26:13
Speaker 3: and we've subsequently done it for seven other states and
1:26:16
Speaker 3: now Alabama found it and then Florida just found it.
1:26:20
Speaker 3: So we said, okay, we can't. We don't want to
1:26:23
Speaker 3: do this just for individual states anymore, like states are
1:26:26
Speaker 3: struggling spending a lot of money on CWD. How can
1:26:30
Speaker 3: they do their surveillance more efficiently and effectively? So right
1:26:33
Speaker 3: now we.
1:26:34
Speaker 1: Have uh kind of erupted from Yell, if you did
1:26:40
Speaker 1: it for a bunch more states, doesn't it make sense
1:26:42
Speaker 1: that you'd have a bunch more states, it would be
1:26:44
Speaker 1: the head CWD, meaning.
1:26:46
Speaker 3: Well some of them already had CWD, like Pennsylvania and
1:26:48
Speaker 3: Virginia Florida.
1:26:49
Speaker 1: This got added to the list. Yeah, and they got
1:26:51
Speaker 1: added the list because they went and looked for it.
1:26:53
Speaker 1: I mean, do you remember this conversation around COVID being
1:26:55
Speaker 1: like there'd be the arguments that, well, yeah, there's a
1:27:00
Speaker 1: lot you're seeing high levels of COVID seemed to go
1:27:05
Speaker 1: hand in hand with high levels of COVID testing.
1:27:07
Speaker 3: But the thing is, it's not that they're not looking
1:27:09
Speaker 3: for it, it's just they don't know where. Like they
1:27:11
Speaker 3: were doing surveillance, but it wasn't like innecessarily emphasized in
1:27:17
Speaker 3: the right places. So like Tennessee was doing about the
1:27:20
Speaker 3: same numbers as they were previously, but before they were
1:27:23
Speaker 3: getting samples where they were easy to get them, and
1:27:26
Speaker 3: so they kept coming from, you know, the same places
1:27:29
Speaker 3: where we're like, no, no, look in these two counties
1:27:32
Speaker 3: are your highest risk and that's where they found it.
1:27:34
Speaker 3: Yet you so.
1:27:36
Speaker 1: They might have been conducting some number one hundred samples
1:27:40
Speaker 1: kind of pulled from.
1:27:41
Speaker 3: Roadkilled deer, well thousands of samples, but you know, just
1:27:45
Speaker 3: not in the places where they needed to be getting
1:27:47
Speaker 3: them from.
1:27:47
Speaker 1: And so the so the idea or program or whatever
1:27:52
Speaker 1: that you were exporting was a was the more precise.
1:27:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, survey, collect data on where your risks are and
1:27:59
Speaker 3: then sample in those high risk areas. And we also
1:28:04
Speaker 3: know from other states that have CDBD like adult males
1:28:07
Speaker 3: are more likely to have you know, test positive than
1:28:10
Speaker 3: you know fawns usually don't test positive. So put the
1:28:14
Speaker 3: test costs the same whether you test an adult mail
1:28:16
Speaker 3: or a fund, so put your money into that. We
1:28:19
Speaker 3: don't get a lot of adult mails in just because
1:28:22
Speaker 3: they usually go to a taxidermist. So how can we
1:28:24
Speaker 3: engage with taxidermists to help us collect samples so that
1:28:28
Speaker 3: we can get those in and make it more efficient
1:28:31
Speaker 3: for the agency where the biologist isn't having to pool
1:28:33
Speaker 3: samples all the time. Kick some money over the taxidermists
1:28:36
Speaker 3: to have them do it for you. You know, they're
1:28:38
Speaker 3: just going to throw that stuff away anyway. So but
1:28:42
Speaker 3: every state sort of recreates the wheel and how they
1:28:44
Speaker 3: do this, and so they're collecting data separately. They're you know,
1:28:49
Speaker 3: spending a lot of time invested in surveillance and how
1:28:53
Speaker 3: they should do these things. When if we had a
1:28:56
Speaker 3: more regional or more collective approach, we could compare data
1:29:00
Speaker 3: across states. Other states would know, you know, like what
1:29:03
Speaker 3: their neighbors are doing, how much sampling they're doing, and
1:29:07
Speaker 3: they can have some decision making tools associated with that.
1:29:10
Speaker 3: So the management agency can say, hey, you know, we're
1:29:12
Speaker 3: mostly worried about you know, this particular area. What should
1:29:16
Speaker 3: we be sampling in there? How many should we sample?
1:29:19
Speaker 3: So we have software now that we're giving away to
1:29:23
Speaker 3: state agencies or tribes or provinces for free that they
1:29:27
Speaker 3: can use this system and use it to whatever. You know,
1:29:31
Speaker 3: if they want to upgrade from their Excel spreadsheet that
1:29:33
Speaker 3: they've been using, fine, If they want to run models
1:29:36
Speaker 3: in it to make decisions, they can do that. If
1:29:39
Speaker 3: they want to see what their neighbors are doing, it's
1:29:41
Speaker 3: useful for that. So that's that's sort of as far
1:29:46
Speaker 3: as you know, maybe aspirational crystal ball. I really want
1:29:49
Speaker 3: to see wildlife agencies sort of come together with more
1:29:54
Speaker 3: standardized work that can be compared across the country rather
1:30:00
Speaker 3: in each states were to doing their their own thing.
1:30:03
Speaker 1: And then if you look at a state, let's say
1:30:08
Speaker 1: take Florida, which was very recently added to the list
1:30:11
Speaker 1: of states that had a positive case in it they
1:30:16
Speaker 1: get a positive case, then there's kind of a you know,
1:30:18
Speaker 1: there's a so what.
1:30:21
Speaker 3: Or not? So what happens then? Or what does that
1:30:25
Speaker 3: mean for the public?
1:30:26
Speaker 1: Or yes, meaning meaning let's say you're doing a bunch
1:30:29
Speaker 1: of testing. Let's say all the states are doing the
1:30:33
Speaker 1: same testing. You can't expect that all the states are
1:30:36
Speaker 1: going to have the same response to the testing, because
1:30:39
Speaker 1: there's some there's some states, and where the agencies have
1:30:43
Speaker 1: a perspective, it's kind of like a little bit of
1:30:46
Speaker 1: inevitability doesn't matter. We're not going to do any kind
1:30:50
Speaker 1: of we're not going to do any real extreme containment measures.
1:30:57
Speaker 1: So that would lead you to be like, well, then
1:31:00
Speaker 1: perhaps testing isn't like valuable to them if you're you know, so,
1:31:07
Speaker 1: how are you from a national perspective? How are people
1:31:12
Speaker 1: coping with with that?
1:31:16
Speaker 3: Yeah?
1:31:16
Speaker 1: I don't know the ambivalent, like the ambivalence or great
1:31:19
Speaker 1: care or whatever that the state takes about the disease, right,
1:31:22
Speaker 1: And I.
1:31:23
Speaker 3: Know I sort of step out when it gets to
1:31:25
Speaker 3: management because it's so much people orientated and what they
1:31:30
Speaker 3: can do. So if you if a state finds CWD
1:31:35
Speaker 3: and they want to do something about it, their first
1:31:38
Speaker 3: detection is their best opportunity because from a human centric perspective,
1:31:42
Speaker 3: that's when people are fired up and care about it
1:31:44
Speaker 3: and like, yeah, let's get rid of it. I mean,
1:31:47
Speaker 3: I totally lean on New York having been the only
1:31:49
Speaker 3: state to get rid of it, to be like, yeah,
1:31:51
Speaker 3: we're we're going to try to kick its ass again
1:31:53
Speaker 3: if we find it, because that's the only real opportunity
1:31:57
Speaker 3: you have to do something. So it just depends on
1:32:01
Speaker 3: the management agency and what they choose. I mean maybe
1:32:05
Speaker 3: like with Tennessee, their first detection they had you know,
1:32:08
Speaker 3: over a dozen animals, so they're kind of like, crap,
1:32:11
Speaker 3: we're way further in it than you know, the very
1:32:14
Speaker 3: first detection. So like if you get a whole bunch
1:32:17
Speaker 3: all at once, you're like, Okay, we've had it for
1:32:19
Speaker 3: a while and just haven't found this pocket now we
1:32:21
Speaker 3: know what to do with it. But I think you'd
1:32:24
Speaker 3: be hard pressed to find any agency that wouldn't do something,
1:32:28
Speaker 3: you know, as far as like carcass or feeding or baiting,
1:32:32
Speaker 3: like bands that they would put in place on that
1:32:34
Speaker 3: to try not to spread it further. Because the thing
1:32:37
Speaker 3: that I talk about is, you know, CWD pools away
1:32:41
Speaker 3: resources from everything else in an agency. If you know,
1:32:45
Speaker 3: in some agencies they have their fish biologists out there,
1:32:48
Speaker 3: you know, pulling samples opening week in a gun season.
1:32:51
Speaker 3: So it's even if you don't care about deer deer hunting,
1:32:55
Speaker 3: like maybe your thing is butterflies, Like it's pulling resources away.
1:33:00
Speaker 3: So everybody should kind of care about it at that
1:33:03
Speaker 3: point because it's such a behemoth and it sucks so
1:33:06
Speaker 3: much money and time away from agencies that it's it's
1:33:09
Speaker 3: worth caring about.
1:33:20
Speaker 1: Doesn't Uh. There's gotta be some part of you. And
1:33:24
Speaker 1: I understand you know, if you if you got to
1:33:26
Speaker 1: punt this one, that's fine. There's got to be some
1:33:28
Speaker 1: part of you, because it definitely exists in my head
1:33:33
Speaker 1: that that it's just like an inevitability. Meaning I know
1:33:40
Speaker 1: New York did it, but.
1:33:42
Speaker 3: Like you said, you think it's just going to be
1:33:44
Speaker 3: everywhere at some point.
1:33:45
Speaker 1: Man, Like, let's say I had to make a like
1:33:48
Speaker 1: a huge bet okay, like every dollar I'll ever have
1:33:52
Speaker 1: or ever have had, and I had to bet it
1:33:55
Speaker 1: on that it'll uh me. This isn't a demonstration of
1:34:01
Speaker 1: what I'd like to see, Yes, but I've had it
1:34:03
Speaker 1: bet on what I thought would happen.
1:34:08
Speaker 3: Is there a time frame?
1:34:10
Speaker 1: I just like, I hate to say it by but
1:34:15
Speaker 1: I hate to say but I don't want to be dishonest,
1:34:16
Speaker 1: like it just feels unstoppable.
1:34:19
Speaker 3: I agree with you to some extent, but my point is,
1:34:23
Speaker 3: what's what's what's the time frame on that? You know,
1:34:26
Speaker 3: like are are we gonna you know, young people right
1:34:31
Speaker 3: now feel that way about the earth, like that the
1:34:33
Speaker 3: earth is just gonna die at some point? Like what's
1:34:36
Speaker 3: the time frame for that?
1:34:37
Speaker 4: So I feel like.
1:34:38
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of a way. That's that's bad parenting.
1:34:41
Speaker 3: Okay, Well we're not here to discuss guarantee. Yeah, I
1:34:49
Speaker 3: don't know. It's it's one of those like fight the
1:34:51
Speaker 3: good fight, like do what you can while you've got it.
1:34:54
Speaker 1: I understood that, but I wasn't talking. I know I
1:34:57
Speaker 1: was talking, and I know it's counterproductive. It's kind underproductive
1:35:00
Speaker 1: to point it out. But I just wish there were more.
1:35:07
Speaker 1: I wish there were more victories.
1:35:09
Speaker 3: I do too, and.
1:35:15
Speaker 1: To me, and I've had friends of mine and my
1:35:19
Speaker 1: friend Dog I'm sure is listening to every word I say.
1:35:22
Speaker 3: Right now, Hi Dog.
1:35:25
Speaker 1: If it pisses Doug off when I say this, but
1:35:28
Speaker 1: I've brought up to him, I've said I used to say,
1:35:33
Speaker 1: if I somehow knew that it would never jump to humans,
1:35:37
Speaker 1: I would care a lot less. Meaning like it's clear
1:35:42
Speaker 1: what I mean. Meaning when I think about chronic wasting disease,
1:35:45
Speaker 1: I think about it's never happened, But I think about
1:35:49
Speaker 1: how catastrophic it would be to deer hunters, to deer
1:35:55
Speaker 1: hunting if we suddenly had these cases. You know, some
1:36:00
Speaker 1: community or some family that they developed some novel, uh
1:36:09
Speaker 1: you know, they developed some novel version of mad cow
1:36:12
Speaker 1: disease and chacka kreutz felt whatever the hell they call it,
1:36:16
Speaker 1: and it, you know, killed some family and it turned
1:36:19
Speaker 1: out that that family had, you know, eating some quantity
1:36:24
Speaker 1: of infected deer meat, and it became you know, the
1:36:27
Speaker 1: Holy cow. Right, it would be catastrophic. It would change
1:36:31
Speaker 1: the way people think about deer. It would change.
1:36:34
Speaker 4: The way people peons.
1:36:36
Speaker 1: It'd be like you'd look at now you look at
1:36:40
Speaker 1: deer and you get excited. It's great. People are excited
1:36:44
Speaker 1: to see deer, they're excited to see deer tracks in
1:36:46
Speaker 1: new places, like and if it was, if it was
1:36:50
Speaker 1: a disease causing animal, it's just it's so devastating, right,
1:36:57
Speaker 1: and you can look and and and be that. And
1:36:59
Speaker 1: I'm remember one day you and I had an argument
1:37:01
Speaker 1: about this where I said, and I stand by it.
1:37:04
Speaker 1: I've said, hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD
1:37:08
Speaker 1: infacted deer. Maybe it was you, maybe as someone else
1:37:10
Speaker 1: that said hundreds, not tens. And then then that caused
1:37:15
Speaker 1: me to think about it a bunch, and I thought
1:37:16
Speaker 1: about it a bunch.
1:37:17
Speaker 3: And man, it's like sticking with hundreds hundreds.
1:37:19
Speaker 1: Okay, hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD infected
1:37:22
Speaker 1: deer meat, but it has to be true.
1:37:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think so.
1:37:25
Speaker 1: But okay, how about ninety nine.
1:37:28
Speaker 3: Ninety nine people?
1:37:29
Speaker 1: Ninety nine thousand, No.
1:37:31
Speaker 3: Come on, I don't think so.
1:37:32
Speaker 1: Give me your number lower prices, right, tens of thousands.
1:37:37
Speaker 1: There's no way you're going to argue there's a case
1:37:39
Speaker 1: for one hundred people in one meat.
1:37:41
Speaker 3: That was in New York. I'll give you ten thousand.
1:37:46
Speaker 1: It's okay, hundreds of thousands, tens, okay, whatever the hell
1:37:50
Speaker 1: it is a.
1:37:51
Speaker 3: Lot, Okay. People have eaten infected deer and have not
1:37:55
Speaker 3: gotten CWD that we know about, we.
1:37:57
Speaker 1: Know about have not yet. Okay. So I look at that,
1:38:01
Speaker 1: and that's heartening. I'd rather that than the opposite, for sure,
1:38:05
Speaker 1: anybody would. But people, there's no one that can come
1:38:09
Speaker 1: and tell you. There's no one that can come and
1:38:12
Speaker 1: tell you. And if someone does like you can't believe them.
1:38:15
Speaker 1: There's no one could come and tell you that it's impossible.
1:38:17
Speaker 3: Right.
1:38:18
Speaker 1: So in the past I have brought up that if
1:38:22
Speaker 1: if I knew somehow for some as some fact, which
1:38:26
Speaker 1: is impossible, but if I knew as a fact that
1:38:29
Speaker 1: it wasn't possible, my concern about it would go way
1:38:34
Speaker 1: way down. But now there's emerging evidence in places where
1:38:44
Speaker 1: they're seeing evidence of population level impacts. Because it used
1:38:49
Speaker 1: to be that you could look and you'd look at
1:38:51
Speaker 1: these areas of CWD and they oddly would be areas
1:38:55
Speaker 1: that had some of damned.
1:38:56
Speaker 3: Dear right, Yeah, because GWd.
1:39:01
Speaker 1: And Southwest Wisconsin's like, why South Wisconsin has some many
1:39:04
Speaker 1: deer and they got all these giant bucks. So how
1:39:08
Speaker 1: do I look at that and get worried If I'm
1:39:10
Speaker 1: not worried about catching it and dying And there are
1:39:13
Speaker 1: places that have have a lot of deer and they're
1:39:15
Speaker 1: still shooting big bucks, I'm not going to worry about that.
1:39:20
Speaker 1: But the but the emerg like this emerging stuff, and
1:39:23
Speaker 1: I haven't looked at it a lot, but I've heard it.
1:39:25
Speaker 1: I've seen it demonstrated by people that I have faith in.
1:39:29
Speaker 1: That it's beginning to see where the populations can't support
1:39:32
Speaker 1: it exactly, and that you might wind up down the
1:39:36
Speaker 1: road with really damaged deer populations exactly.
1:39:43
Speaker 3: I Mean we were talking earlier about kids and hunting,
1:39:47
Speaker 3: and so when I first started studying CWD twenty years ago,
1:39:51
Speaker 3: I'd say, you know, this probably isn't going to impact you.
1:39:53
Speaker 3: It's probably not going to impact your kids, but it
1:39:55
Speaker 3: might impact your grandkids. And now the speed with which this,
1:40:00
Speaker 3: like the prevalence curve, you know, the exponential curve of
1:40:03
Speaker 3: how the disease takes off once it gets told, like
1:40:08
Speaker 3: I'm worried about my son hunting and like the opportunities
1:40:12
Speaker 3: that he's going to have or if he even wants to,
1:40:14
Speaker 3: because you know, it's not much fun going out and
1:40:17
Speaker 3: you know, shooting a deer and you come up to
1:40:19
Speaker 3: it and it's all scrawny and sickly, and I mean,
1:40:22
Speaker 3: like on Doug's place, they can practically identify them by
1:40:25
Speaker 3: sight now because they know they have the disease and like, yeah,
1:40:28
Speaker 3: that one's probably infected.
1:40:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're when you're shooting deer in an area
1:40:32
Speaker 1: and the majority of the deer you're shooting are positive. Yeah,
1:40:35
Speaker 1: if you've made the call that, if you've made the
1:40:37
Speaker 1: call that you don't want to eat it. I came
1:40:41
Speaker 1: up with a test.
1:40:43
Speaker 4: I haven't done it yet, Okay, I'm curious.
1:40:46
Speaker 1: When I'm talking to friends of mine, and I got
1:40:48
Speaker 1: a lot of friends who really don't they're not hostile,
1:40:52
Speaker 1: Like they'll listen to us have this conversation. They're not hostile.
1:40:54
Speaker 1: They discussing it, but in the end of the day,
1:40:56
Speaker 1: they don't care. Yeah, and it's like, not these are
1:41:00
Speaker 1: not dumb people. It's like they don't care because they
1:41:05
Speaker 1: have a hard time with the population level decline, especially
1:41:10
Speaker 1: when people say, hey, the cre to CWD is the
1:41:13
Speaker 1: lower deer numbers, or else they might get a disease
1:41:16
Speaker 1: that will lower deer numbers. And then it's like, okay,
1:41:19
Speaker 1: well is the is the medicine worse than the sickness?
1:41:22
Speaker 1: You're telling we should kill all of our deer so
1:41:24
Speaker 1: that all of our deer don't die. It's like a
1:41:28
Speaker 1: challenging logic. Yeah, I'm just trying.
1:41:30
Speaker 3: To get boys back to the burning down the village
1:41:33
Speaker 3: to save it.
1:41:34
Speaker 1: Burning the village to save it. And also they're like,
1:41:37
Speaker 1: no one's gotten it. What are the chances I'll get it?
1:41:39
Speaker 1: And so really smart people, really smart people who are
1:41:43
Speaker 1: not adverse to scientific information, have decided that they're not
1:41:50
Speaker 1: concerned or they're not as concerned as they are about
1:41:53
Speaker 1: other stuff. And I'll debate this with them, but I formulate,
1:41:56
Speaker 1: like there's a test I would like to do, and
1:41:59
Speaker 1: I've talked was before. I would like to go and
1:42:01
Speaker 1: get deer meat. I'd like to find twenty CWD positive
1:42:07
Speaker 1: deer sick looking ones and get all that meat and
1:42:12
Speaker 1: make a burger. Okay, and I make a big batch
1:42:16
Speaker 1: of burgers. And when I meet a friend that says,
1:42:21
Speaker 1: they don't care. I make them that burger. I fry
1:42:25
Speaker 1: them that burger. Yeah, okay, this is me making the patty.
1:42:28
Speaker 3: Okay, good visual.
1:42:30
Speaker 1: Fry just how they like it.
1:42:32
Speaker 3: Meet him rare because killed by cookie, him rare.
1:42:36
Speaker 4: Pickles who pickles?
1:42:39
Speaker 1: And I and I would say to them, I'm like, man,
1:42:41
Speaker 1: in the minute you eat that burger, I'll talk to
1:42:46
Speaker 1: you about how you don't give a shit about c
1:42:47
Speaker 1: w D exactly. And I want to know how many
1:42:50
Speaker 1: burger takers. And I've got people that said, you do it.
1:42:52
Speaker 1: I'll eat that burger.
1:42:53
Speaker 3: Man.
1:42:53
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. If if I made that burger and
1:42:59
Speaker 1: and someone said, okay, I want you to give those
1:43:01
Speaker 1: burgers to your kids now, dude, right sitting where I'm
1:43:06
Speaker 1: sitting right now, there's no even if I could hide
1:43:10
Speaker 1: it from my wife, which is probably not smart, there
1:43:13
Speaker 1: is no I just like, right now what I know
1:43:16
Speaker 1: right now, and i'd like pay a lot of attention,
1:43:18
Speaker 1: and I try not to be alarmist, right and I'm
1:43:21
Speaker 1: not alarmist. I could not give that burger to my kid. Yeah,
1:43:26
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it.
1:43:27
Speaker 3: I agree, I couldn't do it either, you know, knowing
1:43:32
Speaker 3: that similar disease in sheep scrapy. They've never had a
1:43:37
Speaker 3: documented human case that they've known about, even with mad cow.
1:43:43
Speaker 3: You know, there, I would agree with you about the
1:43:45
Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of people. It was only you know,
1:43:49
Speaker 3: there's been two hundred plus people that have ever gotten
1:43:53
Speaker 3: mad cow, and they likely have some genetic makeup that
1:43:58
Speaker 3: you know, made them susceptible to get that, And I
1:44:00
Speaker 3: suspect it's the same way that there is some genetic
1:44:04
Speaker 3: makeup in humans that would allow that preon to cross
1:44:06
Speaker 3: that species barrier.
1:44:08
Speaker 1: If you know, you're making me want to eat the burger, But.
1:44:10
Speaker 3: How do you know? Right? Like, so I don't can they?
1:44:14
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what we need to find out, so you
1:44:15
Speaker 1: can test and they give you the green light on burgers.
1:44:18
Speaker 3: But it's very human centric, isn't it, Like we only
1:44:22
Speaker 3: care if it's going to affect us, Like, why not
1:44:26
Speaker 3: care if it affects the wildlife population? Why not care
1:44:30
Speaker 3: that deer dying this horrible disease that puts holes in
1:44:33
Speaker 3: their brain? You know, we say we love these animals,
1:44:36
Speaker 3: but yet we're not willing to do the few steps
1:44:40
Speaker 3: or like let the management agency take some action in
1:44:44
Speaker 3: the short term to try to stop that disease because
1:44:47
Speaker 3: it might be inconveniencing us.
1:44:49
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a thing. Let's move on from burgers
1:44:51
Speaker 1: from it. Let's just talk about big giants.
1:44:53
Speaker 3: How you're making me hungry, I know, but let's.
1:44:55
Speaker 1: Talk about big giant bucks.
1:44:56
Speaker 3: Okay.
1:44:59
Speaker 1: This is This is to my friends who aren't concerned
1:45:02
Speaker 1: abouty eating burgers they haven't yet seen or are convinced
1:45:08
Speaker 1: about they haven't yet seen, and are not convinced about
1:45:12
Speaker 1: population level declines, but they love big giant bucks, and
1:45:17
Speaker 1: all of their recreational free time is put into the
1:45:20
Speaker 1: finding of the making suitable habitat for big giant bucks. Now,
1:45:28
Speaker 1: I was recently in a room with you, and we
1:45:29
Speaker 1: were looking at prevalence rates and the fact that it's
1:45:33
Speaker 1: always fatal, right, always kills you. Yep, there's no getting
1:45:37
Speaker 1: around it. You get it. A deer gets it. That
1:45:39
Speaker 1: deer is gonna die.
1:45:40
Speaker 3: Yes, probably sooner than it would have otherwise.
1:45:43
Speaker 1: Takes six or seven years to make a trophy buck,
1:45:46
Speaker 1: I mean sometimes less, but like right, yeah, I mean
1:45:49
Speaker 1: you have a trophy bucket four years. But it takes
1:45:51
Speaker 1: a long time to make a trophy buck. When the
1:45:54
Speaker 1: disease becomes so prevalent that a deer's not going to
1:45:58
Speaker 1: get to two years of AI without getting it right,
1:46:01
Speaker 1: because prevalency rates are like you know, prevalency rates among
1:46:05
Speaker 1: two year olds, get this, like sixty percent, seventy percent.
1:46:08
Speaker 1: It's always fatal. It's fatal within a couple of years.
1:46:13
Speaker 1: The idea that you might be that if that ideal
1:46:17
Speaker 1: big bucket is five years old, six years.
1:46:19
Speaker 3: Old, whatever, yeah, you're not going to get there.
1:46:23
Speaker 1: That you get to be where they're You're still seeing
1:46:26
Speaker 1: tons of deer on the ground because there's a carrying
1:46:28
Speaker 1: capacity to the landscape right right, you might still be
1:46:32
Speaker 1: seeing there's like, yeah, you go out and see deer
1:46:34
Speaker 1: all the time, but you just start to be that man,
1:46:37
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on. But they are not
1:46:39
Speaker 1: getting to five years old. Nope, they're not getting to
1:46:41
Speaker 1: six years old because they're getting sick at one or two,
1:46:46
Speaker 1: and they're succumbing to the illness at three or four.
1:46:50
Speaker 3: Yep.
1:46:51
Speaker 1: And they just aren't making it through because so few
1:46:54
Speaker 1: make it through anyway, right, remember time early about additive mortality.
1:46:58
Speaker 3: Yep.
1:46:58
Speaker 1: So few make it through anyway that they don't get
1:47:02
Speaker 1: shot by someone, they don't get hit by a car.
1:47:05
Speaker 1: They don't get killed by a kyle, They don't get
1:47:07
Speaker 1: hung up on a fence, all the shit that kills deer. Yeah,
1:47:11
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, there's this other little thing
1:47:13
Speaker 1: that just kind of helps guarantee they never get that old.
1:47:18
Speaker 1: That will make people. Yeah, And it's like that's perhaps
1:47:24
Speaker 1: we're already seeing that. And one of the things that
1:47:27
Speaker 1: I think about when I think about CWD is if
1:47:34
Speaker 1: I wish that all areas had a lot more tracking
1:47:37
Speaker 1: of not just Boone and Crocket, but like a lot
1:47:40
Speaker 1: more scoring trafficking. It'd be very interesting if you could
1:47:43
Speaker 1: have gone back and looked at counties, how many Boone
1:47:48
Speaker 1: and Crocket entries were counties getting And do you see
1:47:52
Speaker 1: boone and Crocket entry.
1:47:54
Speaker 3: As much anymore?
1:47:55
Speaker 4: Lowering?
1:47:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, in areas that have had long term infection. Because
1:47:59
Speaker 1: if what it seems to be true is true, I
1:48:04
Speaker 1: think that you're gonna have yet another thing.
1:48:07
Speaker 3: We'll steal that idea for box Master's.
1:48:10
Speaker 4: Projects back to college.
1:48:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, that prevents another thing, making bucks not be five
1:48:16
Speaker 1: years old or six years old or whatever. To help
1:48:18
Speaker 1: right trophy bucks. That man, I got friends that will
1:48:23
Speaker 1: go out and spend days hinge, cutting trees and plantness
1:48:27
Speaker 1: and that, right mm hm. And if you told them, like, man,
1:48:31
Speaker 1: you know what your biggest problem is about making big
1:48:33
Speaker 1: bucks and getting big bucks is they're not gonna live
1:48:35
Speaker 1: that long anyway, dude, because of a disease.
1:48:39
Speaker 3: That that would change their tune.
1:48:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, me, it's the it's the eat.
1:48:44
Speaker 3: I know well that. I mean people, You're called meat
1:48:47
Speaker 3: eater for a reason, right, like people hunt for different reasons.
1:48:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's not why I with that, kid, So why
1:48:51
Speaker 1: I came up with that name? You know, I came
1:48:53
Speaker 1: up with that name the show. No. I had a
1:48:55
Speaker 1: little little teeny kid, and we'd read a lot of
1:48:57
Speaker 1: books about animals, and we'd read about books about dinosaurs
1:49:01
Speaker 1: and you get to the t rex chapter, this frocious
1:49:04
Speaker 1: meat eater. That sounds a cool word, very good. I
1:49:08
Speaker 1: like the word sabertooth too. Oh yeah, it could have
1:49:11
Speaker 1: just been that all long.
1:49:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:49:13
Speaker 1: I eat a lot of deer meat. Yeah, me too,
1:49:15
Speaker 1: And I get and that scares me. Man.
1:49:18
Speaker 3: Well, that's the thing. Everybody's going to have a different
1:49:21
Speaker 3: just like the lead, Like, people are going to have
1:49:23
Speaker 3: different reasons for caring about something. So you asked about
1:49:27
Speaker 3: ecology like I try to give people a suite of
1:49:30
Speaker 3: like all the different why they should care about these,
1:49:33
Speaker 3: Like maybe they don't care about deer populations, Maybe they
1:49:36
Speaker 3: just care about what it's going to do to them,
1:49:38
Speaker 3: Maybe they care about big bucks. Like try to give
1:49:40
Speaker 3: them enough information that they can make an informed choice
1:49:44
Speaker 3: about it.
1:49:45
Speaker 1: But you mentioned a thing about eagles and lead, and
1:49:50
Speaker 1: I think it's true of deer diseases. There's another thing
1:49:53
Speaker 1: I think about when I said around worrying about CWD
1:49:56
Speaker 1: is like, uh, there's no doubt that human activities are
1:50:04
Speaker 1: increasing the spread. Yes, it's not really a debatable point.
1:50:09
Speaker 1: I mean, there's other things, and there's other things spreading it,
1:50:11
Speaker 1: but humans are facilitating increasing spread. We are stewards of
1:50:19
Speaker 1: the landscape. Ideally, we're stewards of the landscape. Do you
1:50:27
Speaker 1: if you love deer and you love deer hunting, is
1:50:30
Speaker 1: it in you to be like really okay with the
1:50:35
Speaker 1: disease that kills deer.
1:50:40
Speaker 3: Yeah. That's why I don't understand how people can be like, eh.
1:50:44
Speaker 1: No, no big thing, because there's well, someone's gonna and
1:50:49
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this before we close. Someone
1:50:52
Speaker 1: and I do it too, is going to be what
1:50:53
Speaker 1: about EHD.
1:50:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can talk about.
1:50:57
Speaker 1: What about EHD. I mean, here's a disease that not
1:51:00
Speaker 1: some hard it's got to be painful, sure, but they
1:51:06
Speaker 1: give me the butt.
1:51:06
Speaker 3: Okay.
1:51:07
Speaker 1: So I say that we're talking about CWD, and I
1:51:09
Speaker 1: say to you, yeah, well, what about EHD that kills
1:51:11
Speaker 1: all kinds of deer?
1:51:12
Speaker 3: So EHD episodic chemorrhagic disease, and we'll throw in blue tongue,
1:51:17
Speaker 3: which is another haemorrhagic disease, and just call them HD
1:51:20
Speaker 3: for hemorrhagic diseases because they function pretty much the same.
1:51:23
Speaker 1: So I said, okay, what about HD that kills all
1:51:27
Speaker 1: kinds of deer?
1:51:27
Speaker 3: There you go, Yes, it does kill deer, but not
1:51:32
Speaker 3: all deer. It's not fatal like CWD. And in New
1:51:36
Speaker 3: York we've been doing another study on this because we
1:51:41
Speaker 3: had some pretty significant outbreaks in like two thousand, you know,
1:51:46
Speaker 3: which was super inconvenient timing, since you know, the pandemic
1:51:50
Speaker 3: was going on and people were in their houses and
1:51:53
Speaker 3: just kind of trying to deal with a big deer
1:51:57
Speaker 3: die off. So it started in the Hudson Valley and
1:52:01
Speaker 3: we started tracking reports from the public. The biologists were
1:52:04
Speaker 3: going out and collecting deer. It's challenging.
1:52:07
Speaker 6: We can we include the creepy part, sure, which one
1:52:11
Speaker 6: floating in ponds? Yeah so okay, laying next to the creek,
1:52:15
Speaker 6: floating in ponds in a water trough.
1:52:18
Speaker 3: So with hemorrhagic diseases, the deer get a bad viral
1:52:24
Speaker 3: infection and so they get very feverish. So a lot
1:52:28
Speaker 3: of times they'll go to water, which is why you
1:52:30
Speaker 3: find these deer around water. But we have to be
1:52:33
Speaker 3: careful because we mentioned that we had a Raby's positive
1:52:35
Speaker 3: deer a couple weeks ago. Rabies a lot of times
1:52:38
Speaker 3: will find the deer in water too, again another viral disease.
1:52:42
Speaker 3: They tend to go to water when they get feverish.
1:52:44
Speaker 1: We got to do a big digression. I'm sorry, okay,
1:52:46
Speaker 1: because this is the thing I've always wandered about. Why
1:52:50
Speaker 1: how can rabies at one time be that they're drawn
1:52:53
Speaker 1: to water, but then also in humans it induces hydrophobia.
1:52:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean you can be thirsty and go
1:53:00
Speaker 3: to water, but then the paralysis of being able to drink.
1:53:05
Speaker 3: So it might not be that you're afraid of water.
1:53:08
Speaker 3: It might be that your body stops functioning to allow
1:53:11
Speaker 3: you to drink.
1:53:13
Speaker 1: But I thought, so, it's not that people get scared
1:53:16
Speaker 1: of water.
1:53:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not up on the human hydra, I know,
1:53:22
Speaker 3: but yeah, it's more that they're not physiologically able to
1:53:27
Speaker 3: drink anymore. So they're very thirsty, they're feverish, but they
1:53:31
Speaker 3: can't drink.
1:53:32
Speaker 1: John defended my family from a rabid squirrel one time.
1:53:35
Speaker 3: No, but please tell.
1:53:37
Speaker 1: It was in this state. We were at a friend's.
1:53:39
Speaker 1: We were visiting a friend. A squirrel came to that
1:53:43
Speaker 1: My kids were al swimming in the pool. The squirrel
1:53:45
Speaker 1: ran up to the edge of the pool, very agitated,
1:53:49
Speaker 1: started running up and down the pool like if this
1:53:52
Speaker 1: is the pool? My kids are like sprinkled throughout here,
1:53:55
Speaker 1: and the squirrel is going like this back and forth,
1:53:57
Speaker 1: back and forth, back and forth, jumps in the pool,
1:54:01
Speaker 1: starts chasing kids around. I grabbed the squirrel by the
1:54:06
Speaker 1: tail and gave.
1:54:07
Speaker 4: It a no.
1:54:10
Speaker 3: Squirrel flinger.
1:54:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had you been rabbit rodents.
1:54:18
Speaker 3: We don't see a lot of rabies and squirrels. Rodents
1:54:20
Speaker 3: don't get it as often. But we just did have
1:54:23
Speaker 3: the beaver that was positive for rabies.
1:54:26
Speaker 1: How else would you explain what that squirrel was doing?
1:54:27
Speaker 3: Squirrels have a lot of issues. I don't know if
1:54:29
Speaker 3: you've noticed this.
1:54:33
Speaker 4: I don't know.
1:54:34
Speaker 1: You guys have had a rabid beaver. Yeah, you've been
1:54:36
Speaker 1: five people. He did make a movie about that.
1:54:39
Speaker 3: There you go, you're the production company.
1:54:41
Speaker 1: Okay, So back to EHD.
1:54:44
Speaker 3: Back to HD.
1:54:45
Speaker 1: So deer could get rabies, yes, and they'll wind up
1:54:48
Speaker 1: in the water sometimes.
1:54:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, But if I hear about deer in water, I
1:54:53
Speaker 3: usually think rabies or hamorrhagic disease. So why should we
1:54:58
Speaker 3: worry more about CWD than and hamorrhagic diseases? Even though
1:55:03
Speaker 3: we had a big die off there were you know,
1:55:06
Speaker 3: over two thousand dead deer reported. We don't know how
1:55:09
Speaker 3: many actually died in the area that.
1:55:13
Speaker 1: Was affected in a short period of time.
1:55:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, one summer wow. And then the next year we
1:55:18
Speaker 3: also had pretty significant die off, but it was more
1:55:22
Speaker 3: sprinkled around the state, so Hudson Valley up towards Lake,
1:55:25
Speaker 3: Ontario and then on Long Island. But what we did
1:55:30
Speaker 3: in those hunting seasons was we collected spleen and we
1:55:33
Speaker 3: collected blood from hunters, and we looked for antibodies to
1:55:39
Speaker 3: the viruses to see if any of the deer survived,
1:55:42
Speaker 3: and we found a pretty good proportion of deer had
1:55:45
Speaker 3: been infected and then survived. So those are very sort
1:55:49
Speaker 3: of short term transitory mortality events. And then last year
1:55:56
Speaker 3: there was like nothing like no big, big mortality. So
1:56:00
Speaker 3: it might hit local areas pretty hard and knock the
1:56:02
Speaker 3: deer down because that virus is transmitted by a biting
1:56:08
Speaker 3: midge puliqoites, and those don't travel very far. So we're
1:56:13
Speaker 3: still trying to figure out the right environmental conditions, whether
1:56:16
Speaker 3: they get dry or they wet for breeding in mudflats,
1:56:21
Speaker 3: and the deer seem to rebound really quickly with those,
1:56:25
Speaker 3: so that is something that they can build up immunity
1:56:28
Speaker 3: to and you know, continue on without a long term
1:56:33
Speaker 3: population impact. It might be short term, but you know,
1:56:37
Speaker 3: over the long term it's not gonna you know, do
1:56:40
Speaker 3: as much damage as chronic wasting disease.
1:56:42
Speaker 1: And I'll point out too that you don't have to
1:56:44
Speaker 1: have that nagging fear right about catching a brain disease.
1:56:50
Speaker 3: That's true. Yeah, we generally recommend people don't eat stuff
1:56:55
Speaker 3: they find dead, so like, yeah, haemorrhagic disease, they kind
1:56:59
Speaker 3: of mushy real fast because it's usually in the heat
1:57:02
Speaker 3: of the summer.
1:57:03
Speaker 1: Got it. Well, I just mean I don't mean that
1:57:07
Speaker 1: about finding dead deer and eating it. Yeah, I just mean, like, yeah,
1:57:12
Speaker 1: why you know, as much as I was pointing, I
1:57:15
Speaker 1: was playing Devil's advocate to point out that, well, why
1:57:17
Speaker 1: not worry about EHD because that kills a bunch of deer,
1:57:20
Speaker 1: And I would just say, added to the fact that
1:57:22
Speaker 1: there's some resiliency that that they bounce back quickly, that
1:57:26
Speaker 1: you can get it passed through a deer herd, and
1:57:28
Speaker 1: then a couple of years later it's not in the
1:57:29
Speaker 1: deer herd, it's different. But then there's also that later
1:57:34
Speaker 1: when you harvest a deer.
1:57:35
Speaker 6: That yeah, you added, you're not at right, Well, we
1:57:40
Speaker 6: don't know if you're at risk, you're not at potential risk.
1:57:43
Speaker 4: There you go, do you.
1:57:48
Speaker 1: I don't know how well you can word this. This
1:57:50
Speaker 1: is my last question about CWD. Do you don't eat it?
1:57:57
Speaker 1: I'm just asking you personally what.
1:57:59
Speaker 3: I hate to see to be positive deer?
1:58:00
Speaker 1: Yeah?
1:58:01
Speaker 3: No, m.
1:58:03
Speaker 4: Why I don't have to.
1:58:08
Speaker 3: I have a choice there, so you know, I'm not starving,
1:58:11
Speaker 3: like I think the risk to humans is very small,
1:58:16
Speaker 3: but why chance it?
1:58:19
Speaker 1: Yeah?
1:58:19
Speaker 3: I mean Honestly, I've with the field work I've done
1:58:23
Speaker 3: and taking CBD samples from live deer, I've been in
1:58:26
Speaker 3: their mouth like I was taking Tounsler biopsies when I
1:58:29
Speaker 3: was doing my research. So like, I've had c TOBD
1:58:32
Speaker 3: positive deer breathing in my face that I know they
1:58:36
Speaker 3: were positive. So yeah, I'm probably going to donate my
1:58:40
Speaker 3: brain to science, like when I kick the bucket, just
1:58:43
Speaker 3: so people can check for preance.
1:58:47
Speaker 1: We've been talking a lot about we're trying to get
1:58:49
Speaker 1: someone from the body farm. Where's that place, Tennessee? I believe, yeah,
1:58:53
Speaker 1: they don't if you want to donate your science.
1:58:55
Speaker 3: We heard that they are, like are they not taking more?
1:58:58
Speaker 1: Everybody wants their body there?
1:59:00
Speaker 3: Oh really it's a popular thing now.
1:59:02
Speaker 1: They can't accept them all.
1:59:03
Speaker 3: Well, maybe you can get on a wait list.
1:59:07
Speaker 1: Did some work there. You know raccoons like, uh, when
1:59:10
Speaker 1: it comes to carcass preference on raccoons, they're like people
1:59:14
Speaker 1: who have diabetes.
1:59:15
Speaker 5: Interesting, I did not know that, I mean just from
1:59:19
Speaker 5: this person who wrote in, Yeah, I would verify that.
1:59:23
Speaker 5: I didn't know raccoons were that picky about there.
1:59:26
Speaker 1: They're like thighs and buttocks.
1:59:28
Speaker 3: Well, don't you.
1:59:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Okay, diabetes.
1:59:36
Speaker 3: Interesting. I'm going to have to check this one out.
1:59:39
Speaker 1: We're gonna try to do a site visit down there.
1:59:41
Speaker 3: Okay, that'll be good. Now that you got some more
1:59:44
Speaker 3: dead animals, can I come with.
1:59:45
Speaker 1: You where you hang out and work? You probably have
1:59:48
Speaker 1: zero problem with that.
1:59:50
Speaker 3: I don't know. Humans screws me out a little bit.
1:59:52
Speaker 3: Like animals I'm okay with, but people are kind of gross.
1:59:56
Speaker 1: I was when did our tour today, I was thinking that.
2:00:02
Speaker 1: I was thinking about the resiliency of of your colleagues.
2:00:09
Speaker 3: The ones that have to cut up the dead stuff.
2:00:10
Speaker 1: It's a lot.
2:00:12
Speaker 3: Oh smells, it could be.
2:00:14
Speaker 1: It's a lot. It's it's like just the environment, right,
2:00:20
Speaker 1: that lab environment, and and just the the what's coming
2:00:26
Speaker 1: through the door, right, it's a lot.
2:00:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I'm sure you used pretty quick, right.
2:00:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:00:32
Speaker 3: It's just what their job is. I mean, you think
2:00:34
Speaker 3: about people working like nurses having to deal with live
2:00:37
Speaker 3: people complaining all the time like at least these are dead.
2:00:41
Speaker 1: So well, it's different though, because I don't get that.
2:00:44
Speaker 1: It's a lot feeling hanging out in a butcher shop
2:00:48
Speaker 1: or in a slaughterhouse that doesn't because you're because it's
2:00:50
Speaker 1: like food production, but the disease element, okay, the sickness element.
2:00:54
Speaker 3: But see they find joy and people that really like
2:00:58
Speaker 3: kid exactly. You know, they get very excited. I mean
2:01:02
Speaker 3: you mentioned nasal bots previously, and when I was doing
2:01:07
Speaker 3: the helicopter capture for my PhD to catch deer, we
2:01:10
Speaker 3: had immortality and so we euthanized it. And one of
2:01:14
Speaker 3: my fellow grad students, who loves dead stuff, you know,
2:01:18
Speaker 3: started doing the knee cropsy and it was chock full
2:01:21
Speaker 3: of nasal bots. And this again, this was in South Dakota, Okay.
2:01:26
Speaker 3: And she was so excited, I mean she pulled. She
2:01:29
Speaker 3: had two handfuls with the nasal bots and came like
2:01:31
Speaker 3: skipping around to show us all and just thought it
2:01:35
Speaker 3: was like the best thing ever.
2:01:36
Speaker 1: We had some guys in Sonora one time tell us
2:01:39
Speaker 1: some cowboys and Sonora tell us that that thing does
2:01:45
Speaker 1: the thinking for the deer. O interesting, It'll take over
2:01:49
Speaker 1: and do it the deer's thinking, and the deer does
2:01:52
Speaker 1: it's bidding.
2:01:54
Speaker 3: All right. You were asking about ticks earlier at the
2:01:58
Speaker 3: c TOB conference in Denver. Recently they found preons and
2:02:01
Speaker 3: nasal bots too.
2:02:02
Speaker 4: Oh yep, sure so.
2:02:06
Speaker 1: And the fact that one day he just goes it's
2:02:09
Speaker 1: the hacks.
2:02:10
Speaker 3: I know, a big old nasal bug out.
2:02:15
Speaker 1: That a good video to capture.
2:02:16
Speaker 3: There, there you go aspirational.
2:02:19
Speaker 1: So how do people what if? What's the best when
2:02:22
Speaker 1: you want to wake up in the morning and find
2:02:24
Speaker 1: out about wildlife diseases? What do you like to read?
2:02:27
Speaker 3: What do I like to read?
2:02:28
Speaker 1: Yeah? Like where if someone wants to track wildlife disease issues.
2:02:31
Speaker 1: Let's say someone's so inspired.
2:02:33
Speaker 3: So inspired? So I a I am line of work
2:02:38
Speaker 3: with the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, which is part of
2:02:41
Speaker 3: the New York State Wildlife Health Program. Uh, you can
2:02:46
Speaker 3: look up Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. We've got lots of
2:02:48
Speaker 3: fact sheets and information about all the research that we do.
2:02:51
Speaker 3: You can go you know, New York State has a
2:02:54
Speaker 3: great website. There's other states out there that have really
2:02:58
Speaker 3: good information. Depending on you know where they are, it's
2:03:01
Speaker 3: probably more applicable to them. So check out uh your
2:03:07
Speaker 3: state agency website and see what wildlife health information. But
2:03:11
Speaker 3: if you want general stuff, you can always come to
2:03:13
Speaker 3: Cornell Wildlife Health Lab.
2:03:15
Speaker 1: And don't try to bring a dead animal down here.
2:03:17
Speaker 3: Well, you can just call us first, call us first. Yeah, yeah,
2:03:20
Speaker 3: well you can, but it might take a little bit.
2:03:26
Speaker 1: I might.
2:03:26
Speaker 3: I might get a nasty phone call and they're like, who.
2:03:29
Speaker 1: Is this at the right door? The door is so tall,
2:03:34
Speaker 1: the intake door. Yes, it's so tall.
2:03:38
Speaker 3: You can back a semi in that.
2:03:39
Speaker 1: It is known to have accommodated elephants and drafts. Yep,
2:03:45
Speaker 1: look for that door.
2:03:46
Speaker 3: That's the door you want.
2:03:48
Speaker 1: If you say to yourself, that's not going to accommodate
2:03:50
Speaker 1: an elephant, you're at the wrong door.
2:03:52
Speaker 3: You can't put an elephant through there.
2:03:55
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Absolutely,
2:03:58
Speaker 1: it's fascinating work. I love wildlife and I like to
2:04:03
Speaker 1: and it's good to know that there's people out there
2:04:04
Speaker 1: monitoring wildlife diseases and it becomes upsetting to me when
2:04:09
Speaker 1: there's things that humans. There's preventable things we're doing. Yeah,
2:04:14
Speaker 1: they could make it that less wildlife vanishes from the
2:04:16
Speaker 1: landscape because of diseases. So it's good to have a
2:04:19
Speaker 1: heads up.
2:04:19
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think remembering we're part of the ecosystem, and
2:04:24
Speaker 3: you know, if we can be part of the solution
2:04:25
Speaker 3: rather than part of the problem, that's always a good thing.
2:04:28
Speaker 1: We're part of the disease ecollogy. We are well, all right, Well,
2:04:32
Speaker 1: thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. Kristen Schuler, thank.
2:04:36
Speaker 3: You, thank you.
2:04:43
Speaker 1: Right all seal great.
2:04:53
Speaker 3: Like silving the Sun. Ride Ride, Ride on a line, sweetheart.
2:05:08
Speaker 1: We're done beat this damp horse to death, So taking
2:05:12
Speaker 1: a new one and ride away.
2:05:18
Speaker 3: We're done beat this damn horse today, mh. So take
2:05:23
Speaker 3: a new one and ride on.