With Labor Day weekend upon us, I was reflecting back on some of the fun conference travel I've had this summer. Things started off with a great International Chronic Wasting Disease Symposium in Denver, CO at the end of May, and then I had a stellar time attending the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA) conference in Athens, GA in August. It's such a treat to catch up with so many colleagues and meet some new ones! I also had the honor of being an invited speaker at the Veterinary Scholars Symposium in San Juan, Puerto Rico in August. The Veterinary Scholars program is a big part of how I ended up in wildlife disease ecology research, so it was a real treat to return to the conference as a speaker and share my story with so many fresh-faced young veterinary scientists! It's been a delightful summer and I'm looking forward to a busy and productive fall!
Well, it's been a busy year and I'm pleased to share that our research into drivers of white-tailed deer dispersal in Wisconsin has just been published! Our new manuscript, "Agricultural land use shapes dispersal in white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)" is now freely available through the journal Movement Ecology. For this research, we developed a semi-automated method to detect dispersal events from the movement data for almost 600 individual deer. We found that the vast majority of dispersal events were performed by young males, and they typically dispersed short distances (median distance of 5.77km or about 3.6 mi). We also examined how factors like land use (forest versus agricultural land) and the traversability of landscape affected the probability that young males would disperse, how far they dispersed, and the paths that they took during dispersal. We found that, in the spring, young male deer were more likely to disperse with increasing amounts of agricultural land in their natal (pre-dispersal) home range. Regardless of the time of year, we also found that young male deer tended to disperse longer distances with increasing amounts of agricultural land in their potential dispersal paths. Lastly, we found that these males tended to avoid agricultural land during their dispersal events. These results lead us to believe that agricultural land use plays a major role in shaping dispersal ecology in southwest Wisconsin—and this could impact processes like gene flow and geographic disease spread. For example, if the deadly prion disease chronic wasting disease (CWD) were introduced in a heavily agricultural area, we might expect CWD to spread geographically via dispersal more rapidly than if the disease were introduced in a heavily forested area. We are excited to share these new results and look forward to share more of our ongoing work on deer movement ecology and CWD transmission soon! I'm excited to share that some of my Florida panther research was recently published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science! The article, "Apathogenic proxies for transmission dynamics of a fatal virus" is freely available here. In this study, we investigated drivers of transmission of a common but non-disease causing (apathogenic) virus in endangered Florida panthers. We found that transmission of this virus between panthers was more likely when panthers were closer to each other in space, and when panthers were adults (rather than subadults). Importantly, we also found that these drivers of transmission were relevant to predicting transmission of an analogously transmitted, deadly virus in panthers: feline leukemia virus (FeLV). FeLV cause a major outbreak in panthers in the early to mid-2000's, and still poses a threat to the panther population to this day. The results of this study help us better understand what drives close, direct transmission in panthers, and gave us a useful, adaptable framework for improving disease control in this endangered population (see another of my recent articles here). Huge thanks to the highly interdisciplinary team that made this research possible: our group included virologists, wildlife managers, veterinarians, pathologists, disease ecologists, and quantitative ecologists.
This past week was the 70th annual Wildlife Disease Association (WDA) international conference, right here in Madison, Wisconsin. This was my first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic, and it was a real joy to connect with friends and colleagues. I was so impressed by the presentations by brilliant scientists--including student attendees! I've always found the WDA conference to be extremely welcoming to students, and the conference's full day of student talks is such a great way to showcase the great work of student scientists. I also had the honor to present some of my own work, which was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. I'm already looking forward to WDA 2023 in Athens, GA! In some of my recent work with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, I've been evaluating records from hundreds of necropsies (animal autopsies) of Wisconsin white-tailed deer. These necropsies provide a wealth of insight into deer health, causes of death, and how chronic wasting disease affects both individual deer and the population as a whole. Check out this Field Notes newsletter update for more information about this recent work, as well as other great white-tailed deer research going on here in Wisconsin! I'm excited to share that our publication, "Paradoxes and synergies: Optimizing management of a deadly virus in an endangered carnivore" has been published at Journal of Applied Ecology! Florida panthers are an endangered subspecies of mountain lion found only in southern Florida. Panthers are affected by the deadly virus, feline leukemia virus (FeLV), which spills over to their population from domestic cats. Panthers experienced a major outbreak of FeLV in the early 2000's and continue to be managed for this disease today. We set out to determine how we can best use limited management resources to protect panthers from this deadly virus. We found that using a combination of proactive and reactive management interventions was the most effective at limiting panther mortalities in simulated outbreaks. In addition, we found that imperfect vaccine efficacy can have unexpected consequences when too few panthers are vaccinated. Check out the press release and paper to learn more! |
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