Wildlife Disease News Digest

TOP STORIES

The Wild’s Creeping Killer
Newsweek - www.newsweek.com
27 Jul 2009
Photo credit: Anoek de Groot / AFP-Getty Images; inset: AP

In 1999, wildlife disease specialist Thierry Work looked over the bow of his small whaler as it cut through a lagoon on the south side of Molokai, an island in Hawaii. On an emergent rock he saw a listless sea turtle, waiting to die.

"This guy was so weak that he just let us pick him up," says Work, who runs the National Wildlife Health Center’sHonolulu field station. "He was so emaciated that his ventral was completely disked in. You could fill him up with water and use him as a bowl." Like more than quarter of the green turtles Work has plucked from the water or found stranded on Hawaii's beaches, this one was covered with tumors on its eyes and mouth, dying from a poorly understood form of cancer.

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Indiana Deer Cull Planned to Test for Bovine Tuberculosis
Muncie Free Press - www.munciefreepress.com
29 Jul 2009
kpaul.mallasch
Area: Indiana, USA

Conservation officers from the Department of Natural Resources will cull up to 30 white-tailed deer this week in a targeted area of Franklin County to help determine if bovine tuberculosis has spread to wild populations.

Three southeast Indiana facilities with captive cervids - deer or elk - have tested positive for the disease since May, according to the Indiana State Board of Animal Health (BOAH).

The DNR has worked cooperatively with BOAH and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on surveillance procedures for the ongoing investigation, which now shifts to testing wildlife.

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British crayfish get a "safe haven" from American invaders and a fungus that eats them from the inside out
Scientific American - www.scientificamerican.com
28 Jul 2009
J Platt
Area: United Kingdom

Looking for crayfish in Britain? Look hard. Almost 95 percent of British crayfish have been wiped out in the last 20 years. Now some of the few remaining crustaceans are going into hiding in a desperate, last-gasp chance to save their species from extinction.

Like so many problems around the world, this one can be placed squarely on the heads of Americans—although in this case, we're talking about American signal crayfish (Pacifastacus leniusculus).

First introduced to Britain two decades ago as food for trout farms, American crayfish have made their way into the wild. They not only outcompete the local white-clawed crayfish (Austropotamobius pallipes) for food, but they also carry crayfish plague (Aphanomyces astaci), a water mold that is deadly to the British crayfish.

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OTHER WILDLIFE RELATED NEWS
Photo credit: Scientific American