Wildlife Disease News Digest

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Drowning in plastic: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France
Telegraph - www.telegraph.co.uk
24 Apr 2009
R Grant
Photo credit: B Ryder

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

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VA Preparing for Possible Fish Kills
WHSV 3 News - www.whsv.com
28 Apr 2009
Area: Virginia

The Department of Environmental Quality and the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries are directing ongoing scientific studies this year in preparation for potential fish kills.

Spring 2009 investigations will focus on weekly observations, continued fish health evaluations and in-depth study of possible bacterial causes of the kills.

Since 2004, unexplained fish kills have occurred in the Shenandoah River basin. During 2007 and 2008 similar events took place in the upper James and Cowpasture rivers. No kills have been observed in these rivers in 2009, though April and May are the most likely time for occurrences.

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Major Research Gives New Insights Into the Needs of Whooping Cranes
PRNewsWire - news.prnewswire.com (Source: Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority)
29 Apr 2009
Area: Texas, United States

. . . The Texas A&M team investigated the diet, behavior and habitat of whooping cranes at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on the Texas coast around San Antonio Bay, and evaluated the relationship between freshwater inflows feeding San Antonio Bay and the health of its endangered whooping crane population. The population of whooping cranes at ANWR increased from 133 in 1994 to 270 this last winter in 2008 before 23 of them died over the winter.

"What the research showed is that the whooping crane diet and the impact of inflows and other stimuli on whooping cranes is very complex," said Slack, professor and associate department head of Undergraduate Programs, Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M.

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OTHER WILDLIFE HEALTH RELATED STORIES
Photo credit: Paul Mannix, Mother Nature News