Wildlife Disease News Digest

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Caribou Populations See Rapid Decline
Discovery News - dsc.discovery.com
22 Jun 2009
E Sohn

In Alaska, Canada, Greenland and other Arctic regions, people depend on caribou and reindeer as both a food source and a spiritual anchor. A new study reports that the animals have declined dramatically in recent decades.

Overall, caribou and reindeer populations have dwindled by an average of nearly 60 percent, the study found. In some cases, dips have been far more extreme than that.

. . . With warming, whitetail deer have also spread further north -- bringing along a parasitic disease that doesn't sicken the deer but does kill the caribou. At the same time, spring is getting greener earlier that it used to, but caribou haven't adjusted the timing of their migrations. As a result, birthing females are missing out on the freshest vegetation and the chance to build up the highest-quality milk for their calves.

>>>FULL ARTICLE

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Polluted water endangers Mekong dolphins: WWF
Reuters (India) - in.reuters.com
18 Jun 2009
Location: Asia - Map It

Toxic waste in the Mekong River is a factor pushing an endangered dolphin species to extinction, the WWF warned on Thursday, estimating there were less than 80 left in a stretch of water between Cambodia and Laos.

Conservation group the World Wildlife for Nature (WWF) said high levels of mercury and other pollutants had caused the deaths of 88 Mekong River Irrawaddy dolphins since 2003, over 60 percent of them calves under two weeks old.

Bacterial disease killed many of the calves, it said.

"This disease would not be fatal unless the dolphin's immune systems were suppressed, as they were in these cases, by environmental contaminants," said Verne Dove, a veterinarian with WWF Cambodia, in a statement.

>>>> FULL ARTICLE

>>> Trash bag leads to death for whale, nursing calf

Sick sea lions present a mystery
San Francisco Chronicle - www.sfgate.com
19 Jun 2009
J Kay
Photo credit: Stephan Lam/The Chronicle
Location: California, USA - Map It

Fluctuating ocean conditions may be depleting the food supply of young sea lions that are turning up skinny and ill on California beaches, mirroring the fate of Brandt's cormorants earlier this spring.

. . . Scientists agree that the youngsters, born nearly a year ago on the Channel Islands off Southern California, aren't getting enough food. But they're at a loss to determine whether the sea lions' favorite foods - northern anchovies and sardines - are hard to find because they're moving south in response to falling and rising ocean temperatures.

That's the suspected scenario for the Brandt's cormorants. More than 500 of the birds, which also eat the anchovies and sardines, were picked up starving or dead in April and May by the Farallones Beach Watch program.

>>> FULL ARTICLE

OTHER WILDLIFE HEALTH RELATED NEWS
Photo credit: Christopher Thomond/Guardian News