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ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thank you very much. Welcome, everyone. I'd like to begin by thanking my colleague and co-editor, Dave Jessup, who invited me to co-edit this book with him and gave me an opportunity to explore in much greater depth, some of the most challenging threats to wildlife in North America. And also, I got an opportunity to work with colleagues and other researchers who I've long admired their work.
A little over a week ago, the environmental community celebrated the 75th anniversary of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. And we start off our book by presenting words that Aldo Leopold penned two decades before A Sand County Almanac, when he wrote "the role of disease in wildlife conservation has probably been radically underestimated."
Now, back in Aldo Leopold's time, this was a novel idea. Because most people felt that diseases, especially diseases of wildlife, were a normal part of the ecosystem. I know probably a lot of things have changed in the 3/4 century since Aldo Leopold penned these words. But I want to ask Dave to start out and tell us, why should people care about the health of wildlife?
DAVID JESSUP: Well, I think what is now popular and called the One Health Concept answers that question. And that is that health of animals on the landscape, the health of people on the landscape, and the health of the landscape itself, environmental health, are inseparable. You can push things towards favoring one area of health or the other. But it's often at the expense of one of the other legs of the stool. And it's only in understanding the complexities of health on the landscape and where they're transmitted between animals and people that we can come up with optimal solutions that hopefully guarantee a little better future for our next generations.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: One of the things that became apparent to me as I began working with Dave and the many chapter authors as we co-edited this book is that our authors were showing us through their work that the diseases that they had spent, in many cases, their lifetimes studying, they were not just about the pathogen. They were not just talking about a bacteria, a virus, a fungus, or a parasite. They were talking about something that our author started calling a disease landscape.
And we also encouraged our authors to think about, what are the social, political, and cultural frameworks that are important to the wildlife disease or the wildlife health problem that they were studying? And this is really reflected in the structure of the book. And I wanted to ask Dave to just elaborate a little bit on why our book is unique in this genre of wildlife literature and how you envisioned organizing this breadth of information and from different species and different environments into a cohesive package.
DAVID JESSUP: Well, I hope we made it a cohesive package. We, obviously, weren't able to cover all diseases and all hosts in the traditional realm of an academic textbook. And we didn't really want to. Because the traditional academic approach is to look very closely at an organism that causes disease or the host itself. And yet, these things all occur within an environment that has many other influences on it. And they really can't be responded to effectively.
And this is what you learn when you work on wildlife diseases for a while, is they can't be responded to effectively if you don't have some way of incorporating public will, political power, if necessary, legal and financial frameworks to deal with them. And I have nothing bad to say about the traditional academic way of dealing with things. But if you don't take it to the larger milieus, you can't really-- I don't know if "solve" is the right word.
But you can't really effectively respond if you aren't involving much of the rest of society. And that's what we really wanted to get across. And each of these chapters, each of these authors have some unique experiences. And we wanted them to share some of those unique experiences with the social, political, financial, legal issues of the disease, as well as the host and pathogen, things that are more traditional in veterinary medicine and health conservation.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thank you.
DAVID JESSUP: Robin, I think, yeah, I was just going to say, maybe we should talk about how Laura got involved in this and how it was an unforeseen circumstance related to COVID-19.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thanks, Dave. Yes, one of my students, when Dave asked me to find an Illustrator, I had a student that was planning to go to Indonesia. This happened right when COVID hit. All international travel was canceled.
And so this young lady came to mind, Laura Donohue. At the time, she was a third year veterinary student at Cornell. I knew she was a skilled artist. She had shared some of her work with me. But most importantly, Laura was a visual learner.
And she told me that once she got really working on this textbook, that many of the concepts that she had been presented earlier in her curriculum at the College of Veterinary Medicine became much more clear as she was required to actually put this down in a visual format. And Laura was also really open to the idea of a field style journal journaling approach to the illustrations, and really, to help align with how ecologists and biologists view the natural world. And they very much take an observational approach.
And so I'm going to share some of the illustrations from the book that Laura did. And I've broken them into categories of types of illustrations that she did. So life cycles were a big part of her work for the book. This illustration shows the life cycle of the Chytrid fungus, which has devastated amphibians globally.
And in this particular illustration, she's showing how the Chytrid fungus not only affects frogs, but also salamanders. And we should be particularly concerned here, in this part of North America, because, believe it or not, we have the highest diversity of salamanders anywhere in the world, right here in upstate New York and the Northeast.
But beyond life cycles, Laura was also asked to really capture the biology and ecology of the system for the disease in which the authors were working. On the left, for long-lived species, like the California condor, we really needed to get across to the reader that the time scale and the exposure to things like lead occurred over long periods of time and long distances.
On the right, Laura illustrated a complex food web for our chapter on the health of gyrfalcons in the Arctic, which was a really important part. Because everything is interconnected, including the causes of disease in wildlife.
One of my favorite things that Laura was asked to illustrate were what we called a disease landscape. And I'm sorry that some of this is cut off. But the "disease landscape" was a term that our authors shared with Laura over and over again. And this is an example of the spread and transmission of Yersinia pestis, which is the cause of plague, that has killed Black-footed ferrets and their primary prey, the prairie dog. But these diseases don't happen in isolation. They happen in complex interactions among a variety of species in a landscape.
Beyond the disease landscape, many chapters also required a geographic scale to bring to the illustrations. And that often included a map. On the left, Laura illustrated the flyways. Three flyways come together in Alaska. And this was really important to understanding things like emergence of avian influenza, for example.
And on the right she illustrated-- this is a very interesting illustration, because it shows the political and legal framework that has gone into protecting California condors and other large scavengers through the use of legal means, including banning lead shot and lead bullets. And it shows not only where these laws have taken effect, but also, overlaying the distribution of these highly endangered scavengers.
Any book on wildlife, health, and disease would not be complete without anatomy and pathology. And for wildlife health, that's really important. Because in many cases, we don't see that the wild birds or wild animal's sick. We find them dead.
So Laura, on the left, illustrated a seabird that was exposed to oil. And she was able to capture, through this field journal approach, all of the ways lead can harm a seabird, from loss of insulation qualities to the feathers, to internal effects on the organs. And this is really helpful.
And we also think it's really helpful for an international audience, where English may not be their first language. And the illustrations really help show some of the disease concepts that we're trying to get across in this book. On the right, Laura illustrated the effects of lead in a vulture and use blue to highlight organs where lead is sequestered, such as the liver, the bones, and even the feathers.
I wanted to share one anecdote of Laura's illustration with you. Not long into the project, Laura called me a bit frantically, saying she had a problem, but that she thinks she solved it. She was trying to illustrate the pathology of a trout on the direction from the authors of the fish health chapter.
Being a very ambitious young vet student, Laura took it into her own hands. She went to our local grocery, Wegmans, and went to the meat counter and asked the fish specialist if they could give her a whole trout that had not been cleaned. They looked around a while, and they came back, and they handed her a fresh trout. And they just gave it to her out of the goodness of their heart. And Laura went home, spread newspapers on her kitchen table, and proceeded to dissect this trout in great detail so she could create this illustration for the book that you see on the right.
DAVID JESSUP: One of the other things that I'd like to say about Laura and her illustrating is that she worked so wonderfully with all the authors, many of whom have been around for a long time and have spent a whole career on a particular disease or process. And five or six of them called us up and said, this young lady has taken ideas that I have or concepts that I've seen and put them in a visual format that I know is the best. It's just really wonderful for me.
And to have someone, when you've got 35 or 40 authors, to have someone who works so smoothly with the other authors and can take what's in their minds and illustrate it is just a blessing. And it's a really valuable thing in a book that unfortunately, with what's happening with publishing and everything being as cheap as you can make it, it just doesn't happen very often. We had to raise a substantial amount of money to allow this book to be published full color throughout with all the illustrations.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thanks, Dave. And I should also add that Laura not only worked with 30 to 40 chapter authors, 21 chapters, and more than 100 illustrations, all while she was in clinics in her third and fourth year of veterinary school. Try that sometime.
Dave is going to take over and talk about saving the Southern Sea otter. These are individual chapter highlights from the book. Dave is going to talk about sea otters, and I'm going to highlight another chapter. So Dave, take it away.
DAVID JESSUP: Yeah, one of the chapters I wrote was our experience over the last about 25, 30 years working with Southern Sea Otters in California. And if you could go to the next slide. So some background in sea otters, Southern Sea Otters were are a keystone species in the kelp forest ecosystem. By that, I mean they help structure the kelp forest ecosystem itself by preying on the predators of kelp.
The sea urchins tend to eat the stipe of the kelp and can cause a healthy kelp forest to become urchin barren if they're allowed to exceed the numbers they normally would. And sea otters generally control their numbers. So they provide habitat.
The kelp forest is, essentially, like a Redwood forest in the ocean. And many things live in its lower leaves, in its upper reaches, a variety of other shellfish and fin fish. And ecosystems, particularly from the circular area of the North Pacific, from Baja all the way up to Alaska and then across to Russia, down to Hokkaido, are all dominated by bull kelp and giant kelp. And those forests are much healthier with the presence of sea otters.
And sea otters were there historically. But because their fur is the densest of any animal, about a million hairs per square inch, their fur was extremely valuable. And they were hunted to near extinction by the late 1880s. Sea otter pelts would actually get almost their equal weight in gold or spices in China in the mid-1800s.
And so there was a tremendous effort by both the Russian and American fur traders to capitalize on that. It resulted in what appeared to be the extinction of sea otters from all of Baja California, California, Oregon, Washington, most of Southern British Columbia. There were known to be a few populations left in the Aleutian Islands and in the Kuril and Commander Islands across Siberia. They were extincted from Hokkaido and the area around Japan.
Turns out there was a small remnant population, genetics tell us, of about 10 or 12 that survived near Bixby Bridge along Big Sur, in California. And the Western populations rediscovered them in the early 1900s, when we began to build Highway 1 down along the coast and found that, indeed, sea otters weren't entirely extinct in California.
By that time, there were dozens of them still there. So as soon as the Endangered Species Act was passed, they were listed as a threatened species in California. They have recovered to a reasonable degree. There are now about 3,000 of them in California. I think we can go to the next slide.
One of the things that we discovered fairly early was that during the periods of time when sea otter populations were not recovering so well, which was in the late 1990s and early 2000, we started doing full post-mortem examinations on all sea otters. And we started finding a number of causes of mortality that hadn't previously been recorded.
One of the first was toxoplasmosis, which I think most people maybe in this audience will recognize as a parasitic disease that has its full life cycle in cats, but get into a whole wide variety of other species. And in some of them, it causes serious and fatal disease. And in others it doesn't cause much.
In humans, the only effects are fetal malformation and hydrocephalus and fetuses. And that's why women are told to avoid cleaning the cat box. In Australian animals, it's highly fatal to most Indigenous species from Australia. In North America, it's kind of varied.
But there's a similar disease, a similar parasite, called sarcocystis, that has as its definitive host the opossum. And the opossum was not native to California. It was introduced around 1910, 1912, and brought with it its similar parasite. And we started seeing significant mortalities due to toxoplasmosis and sarcocystis.
And we even saw them in patterns that suggested point source epidemics, where we would have a whole group of sea otters around Morro Bay, maybe 15 or in a month and a half, die from sarcocystis. And the genetic strain of the sarcocystis were all the same. And they were all clustered around the mouth of a river that had been scoured out by a winter storm.
And so these were some of the first indications that some of these diseases in these animals were coming from land and were occurring as a result of their being exposed to diseases and parasites that they probably weren't historically. We also found that we had a number of fecal bacterial diseases, diseases associated with bacteria that often are in sewage or other farm runoff, or things like that.
We found that we were having nutrient blooms that were causing harmful algal blooms and the creation of biotoxin. And those nutrient blooms were encouraged by and exacerbated by nitrogen, particularly in the form of urea. If you think about it, urea really is only the excretory byproduct of mammals. So unless there's more mammals peeing in the ocean or coming from land or, as we found out, urea being used much more commonly in agriculture for nutrition and plant nutrition, for fertilizers, because some of the other fertilizers are explosive, we begin to find out.
We looked at DDTS, PCBs, and historical contaminants and found that some areas of the Central California Coast had some of the highest DDTs and DDT breakdown products because they've been used 100 years, 150 years, for high-intensity food production-- artichokes, brussels sprouts, all your lettuce, all those things. And we begin to recognize that a lot of these things were coming from land to the ocean. And we developed this concept of a dirty ocean hypothesis.
In 2010, we added to that die-offs due to blue green algae microcystin toxin, when we had a whole group of sea otters, about 10 or 12, die near the river mouth of the area just south of Watsonville, California. And that led us upstream, up Corralitos Creek, to a lake that had become very heavily contaminated with phosphates. And it had a cyanobacteria, or blue green algae bloom, that had come down the river. And so the sea otters, basically-- plus we had a problem inland.
So basically, all these things flow from land to sea singly or together and can kill sea otters. What we also found was that many of these things, the toxoplasmosis, the fecal bacteria, any of the toxins that adhere to small fragments of plants or animals, are taken up by filter-feeding bivalves. And it's this flow from land to sea being taken up by filter-feeding bivalves and sea otters eating them that was allowing this ocean situation to cause a significant mortality in sea otters. I think we can go to the next slide.
So this is Laura's illustration of how a lot of that works. You can see she got the cat and the opossum and the life cycle of toxoplasma in there. And it also suggests a slide that I won't show of some of the things that we can do about this flow from land to sea.
We took these studies considerably further and looked at the effect of buffer zones, of [INAUDIBLE] buffer zones, and found that the microfilm, the slime, on cattails, various types of water plants, sea grasses, will bind up many of the things that can cause mortality in sea otters, and that when we get back to a more vegetated shorelines, more vegetative runoff lines, more vegetated creeks and streams, we can do a little to mitigate some of the problems associated with nutrients and parasites and pathogens flowing from land to sea. Next slide.
So I want to talk a little bit about how California has responded to this. Because like I say, we started back in the late 1990s. And it's difficult sometimes to convince people that health problems in animals, particularly wildlife, are important.
But it has been very heartwarming to see how people have responded, both locally in our area and politically in the state level. Nothing is really as powerful as a community that discovers what it believes in. And I can say that living down here on the coast, sea otters are not only appreciated as interesting animals, but they contribute a huge amount to the economy.
Tourism is second only to agricultural production in California, as the biggest agricultural producer in the United States, is second only to agriculture as a source of income. And people expect to be able to see healthy marine wildlife. Even if you're not kayaking in one of the harbors, everybody who sits in nice restaurants and hotels likes to see the otters out there.
And we have an excellent ambassador to the public in the Monterey Bay Aquarium that not only tells people about how interesting and lovable sea otters are, but also, their health and disease problems. And one of our state senators and his children were visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and they were told the story of why one of the surrogate mother females had tremors. Because she had chronic neurologic problems from some sarcocystis and toxoplasma infections she'd had.
And the son asked his father, who was a state senator at the time, Dad, what can we do about this? And he went back to Sacramento and got several other legislators involved, who are equally interested in the health of marine ecosystems. They passed a series of laws that, number one, required that all cat litter have labels on it in California that says, don't dump your used cat litter into the sewer because it goes into the ocean and can infect animals.
And it allowed us to put a tax check-off on the ballot. And for the last 15 years, that's generated between $150,000 and $270,000 a year for research on sea otter health conservation. And it's been very heartening to see California, even the potential industries that might be affected, respond and recognize that this is a health problem that is not just about sea otters. It's also about human health.
Because, as you may recognize, or maybe not, depending on your background, several of those diseases we talked about-- toxoplasmosis, fecal bacterial infections, domoic acid intoxication, blue green algae-- also affect people, affect dogs. Sarcocystis affects horses. So these aren't things that are just-- it's not just about saving sea otters. It's about cleaning up an environment that we all live in, we all benefit from that, that we all profit from.
I think that's probably enough. So one of the things that really inspired us, Robin and I, to work on this book is the realization that the job's not over till the story's been told. The scientists and conservationists need to understand that the social, political, legal, and biological factors that create One Health problems will not change if we only talk among ourselves.
If I have to be critical of my own field science, we tend to spend too much time talking to ourselves and not enough time talking story to our communities, our country, our world, and telling them why these things are not only important to charismatic and interesting animals, but they're important to the health of the environment and to people. We really need to mentor and encourage and pass this knowledge down to the coming generations. That's what Robin and I, we're really trying to do, ultimately.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thanks, Dave. A few of the chapters in this book represent the life work for these authors. And I'm going to present one such life's work. And Dave, I think, jokingly called these their magnus opus. But really, this is something that these authors spent a good part of their life working on.
And I'm going to talk about the work of Dr. Carter Atkinson, who studied Hawaiian forest birds on the islands of Hawaii. And he did that for more than 30 years, working with the US Geological Survey. Here's a young Carter hiking the rugged, mountainous regions of one of the Hawaiian islands, and a couple pictures of Carter collecting mosquitoes on the left, and also, working with Hawaiian forest birds on the right.
The Hawaiian forest birds have been called the jewels of the forest. And they are really amazing birds. But before I talk about the health threats that Dr. Atkinson spent his life studying, I wanted to talk a little bit more about Hawaii and why being an island in a remote region of the Pacific, why that is an important part of the story.
This extreme isolation for not only Hawaii, but other islands really prevented the establishment of mammals, reptiles, birds, and many insects, including mosquitoes, that are often vectors for disease. And this island endemism results in some of the most amazing examples of biodiversity anywhere on Earth.
In Hawaii, Hawaii was a really amazing place, from what we can tell before man arrived. And people have even called it a mythical place. Because it was a place where birds, not mammals, dominated the landscape. And because there were no mammals to prey on these birds, many of these birds grew very large, and they became flightless.
In the local Hawaiian language, these birds were called [HAWAIIAN]. These were the large flightless birds on Hawaii that were literally the large herbivores that defined the ecology of Hawaii. In fact, no mammals patrolled the ground in Hawaii. The only mammal was a bat.
Here's an artist's rendition of what one of these birds might have looked like. And unfortunately, as is the case for the Elephant bird and the Dodo bird, early humans decimated these flightless birds by killing them for their meat and also, their eggs.
Another amazing thing about the bird life of Hawaii is the amazing adaptive radiation. So the Hawaiian islands are thought to have emerged from the Pacific Ocean about 6 to 7 million years ago. And about 3 to 4 million years ago, these cardueline finches arrived on the Hawaiian Islands, presumably blown off course by a tropical storm from North America.
But what's amazing is that in a process that is probably marveled, only topped, by the finches, Darwin's finches, in the Galapagos, from one common Finch ancestor, more than 54 species of these Hawaiian honeycreepers evolved in a process known as adaptive radiation. And as illustrated in the picture, many of these birds developed long bills, curved bills, often to feed on the nectar of specific flowers.
And that's another amazing thing about Hawaii, is the amazing flowering plants that can be found there. And these honeycreepers were not only nectivorous, but they also ate seeds. And they also ate insects. So it was a broad diversity of ecological niches that these birds evolved to fill in Hawaii.
But this isolation really left Hawaii subject to and vulnerable to damage from humans. In fact, Hawaii has the noteworthy distinction of being home to more extinct birds anywhere else on Earth. More than 56 species of birds have become extinct on Hawaii since human arrival. And today, 33 of 42 bird species are in danger of extinction.
Of the more than 50 honeycreepers, there are only 17 that still survive. And these declines have been caused by habitat loss, introduced alien species, things like rats, cats, goats, and pigs, and more recently, infectious disease.
Probably the most important disease that has impacted forest birds is avian malaria. And really, it's a vector-borne disease. And the vector is a called the Southern house mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus. And it was introduced accidentally in Hawaii in 1826.
And the theory is that a ship carrying ballast water deposited that water onto Hawaii to remove ballast from the ship. And that water contained either the eggs or the larvae of the Culex mosquito. And it quickly established itself on the island of Hawaii.
And then, during the intermittent decades, numerous birds were introduced to Hawaii. Songbirds, pet-caged birds, and other species were introduced. And they believe with those introductions of birds came the parasite, the protozoan parasite for avian malaria, plasmodium relictum. So by the late 1800s, the honeycreepers in Hawaii were largely living above 900 meters, where they were protected from exposure to the mosquitoes and the disease that the mosquitoes were carrying.
More recently, it's really been this trio of introduced species-- the birds, the malarial parasite, and mosquitoes that have been causing threats to the Hawaiian honeycreepers. In fact, I show here that 65% to 90% mortality can happen following a single mosquito. I've even heard reports that a single mosquito can kill a honeycreeper. So that's how sensitive they are. Because they never evolved with these parasites. And so being novel, they have no immunity against them.
But Hawaii, because of its geology, was protective. Many of these birds were surviving at high elevations. Because the malarial parasite can't survive below about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It can't complete its life cycle. So these high, cool mesic forests were refugia for these honeycreepers, and it naturally prevent the spread of the disease up the mountains.
However, honeycreepers are not out of the woods. With climate change, We're. Seeing that these refugia are getting smaller and smaller. The protected zone where honeycreepers have thrived are becoming higher. And there's more of these threatened birds that are being exposed to mosquitoes and also, to the malarial parasite.
I would like to show a-- or it's an audio clip from the Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library. And we're just going to play this short audio clip for you folks now.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- This is Bertha.
[BIRD WHISTLING]
The poignant, bell-like tones you're hearing belong to the Kauai O'o, a small forest bird of the Hawaiian island of Kauai. This recording was made in the Alakai Wilderness of Kauai, a region of native rainforest that often lies shrouded in mist. Sadly, the Kauai O'o's gentle song was heard for the last time nearly 20 years ago.
[BIRD WHISTLING]
The native birds of the Hawaiian Islands, like birds of many island groups, have been hard hit by changes brought about by humans. Habitat destruction, introduction of non-native species, and slaughter of native species have taken a drastic toll on the animal and plant life of islands throughout the world. At least 90% of the bird species driven to extinction in recorded history have been island dwellers.
The demise of the Kauai O'o and perhaps 15 other native Hawaiian forest birds was greatly hastened by mosquito-borne avian diseases, where neither the mosquito nor the disease was native. At least we have the O'o's song to remember it by.
[BIRD WHISTLING]
This song was recorded in 1975. Birdsongs for BirdNote are provided by the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. For a link, come to BirdNote.org. I'm Frank Corrado.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[END PLAYBACK]
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thanks. I asked Carter what his hope for the future was after spending 33 years trying to save these birds, and he told me he personally witnessed the loss of the O'o on Hawaii Island and Kauai, the kama'o on Kauai, the loss of wild populations of the Alala. And he held in his hand the last surviving individual of the po'ouli.
But he's hopeful because there are new technologies that are being applied to conservation of these birds. And in particular, the genetic modification of mosquitoes, something called IIT, or Incompatible Insect Techniques, where they're infecting mosquitoes with a bacteria, a naturally occurring bacteria in mosquitoes called Wolbachia. And they release these male mosquitoes, and they breed with the female mosquitoes, and they produce sterile eggs. And so they, essentially, break the life cycle of the mosquitoes. And they're starting to apply that in Hawaii to control avian malaria.
He also told me that there's much more public engagement and public support for saving the honeycreepers today than there was when he first started. And he also told me that when he held that last po'ouli in his hand, he remembered it was the oldest known individual honeycreeper anywhere in the world. It was 78 years old. It was missing one eye. It was chronically infected with avian malaria.
And while they were searching for mates to develop a captive population, unfortunately it came too late, and they never found the mates. And the bird became extinct. But he told me that he felt like if humans could just give them a chance, remove the habitat loss, stop the habitat loss-- forest restoration is happening in Hawaii already.
If we can control the avian diseases like malaria and some of the introduced species like feral pigs, that these forest birds, they can survive just as this po'ouli bird did that he handled. I'm going to let Dave conclude with a quote that's in the conclusion of our book.
DAVID JESSUP: "In the end, we'll preserve only what we love, we'll love only what we understand, and we'll understand only what we've been taught." Really, the bottom line for most of these wildlife health problems, and One Health problems are that it's going to take humans to deal with it. And the generations need to be taught. They'll need to understand what is precious and what needs to be saved.
So it's not just a scientific issue. It's a social issue, one would even say maybe a religious issue, depending on how deeply you feel about animals. But I think it's just really this simple.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: And we would like to thank our sponsors, who made possible the wonderful illustrations for the book. And, Dave, I know you wanted to say a few words about the broad sponsorship that made this possible.
DAVID JESSUP: Well, it was interesting for me to be involved in a book for the first time and to realize that publishing is a very, very-- it's not a business model where you're going to get rich. And it's become more and more difficult to publish books that are rich in illustration and high in quality because of the price issues.
So we asked a whole variety of organizations who are involved in wildlife health and conservation, including Cornell University and UC Davis, where Robin and I have homes, as well as the Wildlife Conservation Society, American Association of Wildlife Vets, Wildlife Disease Association, Wildlife Disease Function within USDA, International Wildlife Veterinary Services, Veterinarians Without Borders. All these people came up with funds to help us cover the cost of illustration and full color in the book.
And it's an example of cooperation among organizations. Unfortunately, sometimes organizations compete with one another. And we can accomplish so much more if we cooperate and collaborate and recognize that we all have goals in common and opportunities to really help by cooperating and collaborating.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Thanks, Dave. And John Hopkins press kindly is offering a 30% discount, if anyone wants to buy the book. But mostly, we wanted to open it up for questions if anyone wanted to ask about the presentation today or had questions about either the book or our wildlife health or Dave and myself.
[APPLAUSE]
Any questions from the group?
MODERATOR: Is there a question? Oh, sorry.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: There's one back there.
MODERATOR: Sorry. That's in your hand.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Do you have any advice for undergraduate students that are looking to pursue similar pathways or maybe talk about how you got involved in wildlife medicine and just how to break into One Health, in general?
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Yeah.
DAVID JESSUP: That would be great. Thank you.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: Great. Thanks for the question. I'll start. And then I'm sure Dave has some thoughts, too. How can you get involved as an undergraduate?
There's lots of opportunities here at Cornell University. We have a wildlife health lab at Cornell. We also have a wildlife health hospital, where they treat native wildlife.
I run a program called Conservation with Communities, where I send students, actually, probably one of the few programs that sends both DVM students and undergrads together to some of these places where I work-- Indonesia, Eastern Africa, West Africa, Namibia. And I send a team of two students, one DVM and one undergraduate.
So there are lots of opportunities at Cornell. But as an undergrad, I would start taking advantage of any opportunities to get involved even before if you decide to go to veterinary school. But what I tell my students, I have many of my undergrads who actually bring really unique skills to the table that my DVM students, who are usually more focused on health, including ecology, sometimes communications. I had a film major.
I've had students interested in public health. And also, some of my undergrads have come with the language skills. Because many of the places I send my students, English may not be the first language. So students traveling Indonesia, they would be nice to know some Bahasa Indonesian. In the Congo, they speak French.
So yeah, there's a lot of things that our undergrads have contributed. So I'm glad you're interested. And I would definitely recommend that you explore the options not only at the College of Veterinary Medicine, but in CALS. There's a lot of opportunities to work with faculty that are doing work internationally, particularly engaged learning work, where you're working with communities for conservation.
Not all of it is directly related to health. But all of our students-- the reason I send a DVM student and an undergrad together is because our field requires a multidisciplinary approach to conservation. And people need to be able to work together across fields. And so that has been a really strong peer model for us to combine professional and undergraduate students. Dave, do you want to add anything?
DAVID JESSUP: I think you've covered it pretty well. There are certain areas, certain universities, that have real strong wildlife conservation life management departments. And I don't think there's any substitute for getting actual experience. Any field experience, any hands-on experience you can get, first of all, gives you a much better grounding in reality of what the work is about, more grounding in reality than perhaps watching something on Nature on TV.
But it also allows you to realize who these people are, what drives them. I think when we're younger, we really want to know where life is taking us and what we can realize and make happen in our lives. And it helps to have mentors. And you can find them, dedicated people who are working on wildlife in the field.
And whether it's in veterinary medicine or some other aspect of conservation, it's great. It allows you to explore, how much of this fits with me? How much of it fits with my lifestyle. I came in an older generation. And when I graduated from veterinary school, there were only four veterinarians in the United States working on free-ranging wildlife. And there was only one residency zoo medicine and four internships in zoo medicine and none in wildlife.
So things have expanded. There are now hundreds of undergraduate and graduate opportunities to work in the One Health wildlife health conservation arena. Take advantage of those. That's what's going to tell you if this is really for you and if you really can find a way to make it work.
And I'd also say, don't give up. What I've seen in the last 40 or 50 years is that people who really have it in their heart, have it in their soul, want to do wildlife conservation work, want to do wildlife veterinary work, will find a way to make it. And jobs that don't even exist today will exist four or five years from now.
I was just on a conference call earlier today with people who were working with US Fish and Wildlife Service in a fisheries health program that didn't exist before 2017, and now has five veterinarians working in it, and is an excellent program. So, opportunities are coming along because this is a significant problem for human health, for wildlife health, and for environmental sustainability.
MODERATOR: We have a question from Durga. "Just wondering, as a New York State licensed wildlife rehabber, we get an abundance of raccoons, not endangered and not always welcome. Some are orphans. We had an epidemic killing these animals, which caused their hind legs to be paralyzed. So we hypothesized that it is a neurological issue.
We weren't sure if it was contagious, but the autopsies performed at Cornell couldn't find a reason. In your lecture, a light bulb went on. Since this is a highly agricultural cultural area, I'm thinking maybe pesticides are the cause. Can you comment? And thanks. I'm very thankful for Cornell's Wildlife Animal Hospital."
DAVID JESSUP: I don't know of a particular toxin or pesticide that causes only posterior paresis, but rabies will do that. And we've actually had raccoons come in that were paralyzed in the hind legs and turned out to have rabies. But if they were examined at the Cornell Veterinary Lab, if they had rabies, you'd know. Robin, you got any ideas on that?
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: There are some parasites. I know raccoons carry Baylisascaris. I don't think it causes pathology in them, but I'm not an expert on that. But certainly, I think things like that would show up on an autopsy.
DAVID JESSUP: There's also an emerging disease that was just described last year in mountain lions, that causes neurologic disease and posterior paresis. And there was one described about four years ago in bears that causes posterior paresis and neurologic disease. And it's a virus that they're still trying to characterize.
And one of the things you find out when you work in wildlife is there's a whole lot of things out there that have not yet been discovered. That would be probably my first guess, is that you have a viral organism that there aren't good diagnostics for yet, because they really haven't been well-described. This mountain lion thing has got us reviewing all of the history of neurologic disease and problems in bears in the Sierra Nevadas. So that's another little thought there.
MODERATOR: Question for you-- David, you spoke of the social structures, the interface or the crossing, the need to expand beyond working with each other, biologists, conservationists, and working with social society. We've had an election this week, regime change ahead that is probably going to be less-- or that environmental conservation concerns are going to be more difficult to, essentially, represent effectively at the national level or to be protected. Let's put it that way.
From your point of view, what would be some of the most promising ways that people concerned, people wanting to do more for conservation, could work? Where would efforts be most effective, from your point of view?
DAVID JESSUP: First of all, I would say, don't be discouraged. It's been a hard week for many. But these things are important to everybody, whatever their political, social, religious affiliations are. And you'd be surprised how cross-cutting these things are.
Also, the politics at the national level does not lead these kinds of things. They're local. They're often associated with particular studies, particular universities, particular research groups, or particular species that are in trouble. And I worry about a lot of things on a global scale, but you can act locally, and you can work on wildlife. And I don't think a relatively hostile environmental administration is going to discourage a lot of these things. So I would say, don't let that be top on your list of things to worry about.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: And I would also add that North America is unique in having what's called the North American model of wildlife conservation, where wildlife is not owned by the public, but the public, that there's a public trust doctrine that supports preservation and protection of wildlife through your elected representatives. So at the end of the day, the constituents in the local level are going to decide the politicians that are going to govern the wildlife regulations in your state and your local region.
And I think the model of a public trust encumbers the government to take care of its wildlife and its environment. And hopefully, despite the administration, we will have successes in conservation, even though there may be challenges.
MODERATOR: Question from Angela-- "Thank you for your wonderful presentation." Sorry, another one just popped up. "What kinds of careers exist in wildlife health and conservation apart from becoming a wildlife veterinarian?"
DAVID JESSUP: There's a much larger field of wildlife management and conservation. And the largest group in North America with that is the Wildlife Society. On the other side of that, there's the American Fisheries Society. These are the professional organizations that support biologists, ecologists, conservationists of various types that work for private nonprofits, state wildlife agencies, federal wildlife agencies, conservation groups. Frankly, their numbers dwarf veterinary medicine, and it is a very good route into conservation to find out what's going on with the Wildlife Society and similar organizations.
Society for Conservation Biology is another one. Ecohealth Alliance is another one. There are quite a few that are not veterinary. And frankly, veterinarians, I mean, I hate to say it, but we're sort of last in on this.
When I was in veterinary school, wildlife veterinary medicine, essentially, almost didn't exist. And now it exists in spades. So it's a big deal.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: And I would add that the social sciences are also intricately involved in conservation. We have a group here at Cornell that really works with the public engagement side of conservation and understanding how values and beliefs drive both the legal protection and human thinking surrounding saving animals and the environment. Dave, do you want to take on that question?
DAVID JESSUP: I could not hear the question. I could hear some words in the background.
ROBIN RADCLIFFE: OK, the question is, given that we recognize that the real impact of wildlife health and disease is going to come from reaching beyond the scientific community to the public, what is the intended audience of our book?
DAVID JESSUP: Well, the book is not intended specifically for veterinary medicine. It was more aimed at the wildlife conservation and wildlife management professions, but giving them access to health and disease information from the veterinary realm that typically, isn't that available with them. As Robin noted when we started, Aldo Leopold said that the impacts of wildlife disease were relatively undervalued.
And I can tell you that when I came up within veterinary medicine, the quote that we heard from Richard Dasman, one of the professors that had written several wildlife-management books, is that disease was a form of compensatory loss and of no significance to wildlife populations. Except that it is and that it's all changing.
And it's not just the effect on populations. It's also the effect on human health and the environment. So I think I've answered that question by running around in a circle. And maybe we ought to ask that question again. What exactly were you asking again?
MODERATOR: I think, Dave, the question was, how do we reach with a scientific-focused textbook like this? How do we reach the general public and tell that story that needs to go beyond our colleagues?
DAVID JESSUP: Speak in ways that are compelling or direct or attractive, that are intelligible to regular people. Don't cloud it up with science-ese. One of the things we asked our authors was just to not get too tied up in medical-ese verbiage, and try to say things in a way that are readily understandable. Because if you don't reach people, if you don't reach their hearts and minds, what's the point?
And I think, including videography, including-- I mean, now everybody's got a cell phone you can take a video on. If you see something really compelling, you can capture that. You can find a way. Use it to move people.
MODERATOR: Thank you. Your talk today and our discussion today really set an example of how passionate explanations with all the care can make a difference. I certainly myself appreciate this very much. And any other questions from the audience for the last call? OK. Just
AUDIENCE: A quick question about the example you mentioned with the Southern Sea Otter populations. You had mentioned that all of the runoff, the diseases that were coming from agriculture and from houses and homes, and stuff like that, could be mitigated by allowing vegetation to take back waterways. And I was wondering what exactly you had meant by that and how that mitigates.
DAVID JESSUP: That was a very truncated response. There are actually multiple ways of managing wastewater. For one thing, most of the sewage in our cities now here on coastal California are being tertiary treated and pumped down into the aquifer to renew the freshwater that's being pumped out for agriculture. And that not only benefits agriculture by keeping the aquifer from getting saline, it also takes all of the [INAUDIBLE] that are in that water and tertiary filters it and then puts them down.
Most of them don't get down into the groundwater. And they're so deep that it doesn't cause that much of a problem. Other things that are being done are pervious landscaping, so that your water doesn't all run off on the street and sheet out and go out into the ocean in a big plume with everything else that's in the pipe. It filters down through the landscape and stays in there.
One of the things that's happening with fertilizing is that some of the newer farm equipment is able to actually read what levels of fertilizer are needed. So instead of running your fertilizing equipment over the whole field and putting on the maximum amount, you can tailor fertilizer to what the crops need. And then, number one, you don't waste fertilizer. You don't have the expense of the excess fertilizer, and you don't have it running off to the ocean.
There are actually at least half a dozen-- well, one of the things we found with the lake up in Pajaro that had the cyanobacterial blooms is that we were able to get the community involved and use alum to precipitate out the existing bacteria and then put big mats of floating vegetation in to absorb the phosphates so the phosphate levels wouldn't get so high that we got cyanobacterial blooms. So there are a bunch of ways of bioengineering and geoengineering to decrease the outflow and trap some of these various nutrients and parasites and pathogens.
Unfortunately, I didn't give you a very good answer. I just grabbed on to one thing that was available through that illustration. One of the things we're doing in some of the sloughs and waterways that serve some of the farmlands is increasing the vegetative buffer so that there is more a vegetation to grab on to some of these nutrients and flocculants, and things like that.
It's not a matter of sea otters versus the farmers. Many of the solutions that we're working out are beneficial to everybody. And it isn't an oppositional situation of, gee, you can have sea otters, or you can have cheap lettuce. It's not a simple one or the other type situation. You can have both.
MODERATOR: Great. Well, let's thank Dr. Jessup and Dr. Radcliffe again for this inspirational learning journey again.
[APPLAUSE]
Most existing and emerging infectious diseases have their origin in animal populations. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the need to understand the cause and impacts of wildlife diseases, as well as how to manage them, has only become increasingly salient. In a November 2024 Chats in the Stacks book talk at Mann Library, Robin Radcliffe, associate professor of practice in Wildlife and Conservation Medicine in the Veterinary School, and David Jessup, former senior wildlife veterinarian of the California Department of Fish and Game and former executive manager of the Wildlife Disease Association, presented a discussion of their co-edited volume "Wildlife Disease and Health in Conservation" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). The book combines theory and practice, offering cutting-edge scientific information to aid in planning for, responding to, and conducting research on these serious challenges to both human and wildlife health, and to conservation efforts around the world.
