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