Wildlife Health Talks – Details, episodes & analysis

Our host Cat Vendl is talking all things Australian wildlife health with wildlife biologist Jane Hall. Jane is the project officer at the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health at Taronga Zoo and a PhD candidate at Griffith University. 
 
 In her many years with the Registry, she has worked with all creatures big and small, from the tiniest marsupials to the giants of the sea, the humpback whales. Her work took her on many trips to one of her favorite places on Earth, Christmas Island, where she has studied the health of the Christmas Island flying foxes. 
 
 On the side, Jane investigates the impact of disease and pollution on New Zealand fur seals for her PhD. 

Links

Jane's research profile at Griffith University

Jane's profile with the Australian registry of Wildlife Health

Wanna be a guest on the show?
Feel free to email communications(at)wildlifedisease.org or catharinavendl(at)gmail.com with a short summary of your research story.   

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

This week on WDA's Wildlife Health Talks podcast, host Dr Cat Vendl immerses herself and our listeners in an interview with Dr Helena Costa on her project 'Whale Exhale'. Helena studies the viruses in the blow of humpback whales that visit the coastline of Norway for the annual herring run.

A PhD student at Nord University in Bodø, Norway, it's a far cry from Helena's homeland of Portugal.

Links: 

Helena's research gate profile

Helena's parapoxvirus paper

WhaleExhale's X account

Article written about project Whale Exhale

Wanna be a guest on the show?
Feel free to email communications(at)wildlifedisease.org or catharinavendl(at)gmail.com with a short summary of your research story.  

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Seals have lice. This might not sound like a revolutionary fact. Many mammal species carry lice. However, as it happens, seal lice are the only marine insects that exist on this planet. In this episode, our host, Cat Vendl interviews Dr Florencia Soto about her work on the host-parasite-relationship between seals and lice and her recent trip to Antarctica. On this expedition, an international team of researchers investigated the presence and impact of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza subtype H5 on Antarctic wildlife. And what they found was more pretty concerning. 

Listen in to Flo’s story about the new thread to the Southern continent, the miraculous marine adaptations of seal lice and why Flo can’t get enough of the eternal ice in the far South. 

Flo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Biology of Marine Organisms (Instituto de Biología de Organismos Marinos) in Puerto Madryn, Argentina.

Links
Article on HPAI Australis Expedition
Video on Flo’s and her colleague’s work with Antarctic seal 

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

We all love to see a conservation project on a previously endangered wildlife species succeed. But what happens if a formerly small population grows to a point where its size becomes unsustainable? Performing a cull? Definitely not the most pleasant option. Our guest, Dr Ai-Mei Chang, works on a way more ethical solution: She develops and tests immuno-castration vaccines for the population control of wildlife species. In addition, she has worked on a range of infectious diseases in small wild carnivores. 

Ai-Mei completed her degree in veterinary medicine and her PhD at the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology in Taiwan. Since Feb this year, she has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tasmania in Australia.

Check out Ai-Mei's website here. 

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They are small, agile, and incredibly cute and their numbers are steadily increasing in Germany. However, the Eurasian otter still faces many challenges in German waterways. Our guest, Dr Simon Rohner, studied their causes of death, their pollutant burdens, and the human-otter-conflict. Him and his colleagues have been working on solutions of how to make Germany a safer otter habitat. After his PhD at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Simon has recently started his new position as assistant curator at Frankfurt Zoo, Germany. And luckily, they have otters there, too. 

Join us on this otterly amazing journey into the German rivers and streams.

Links

https://www.otterspecialistgroup.org/osg-newsite/

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Our guest this week is Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) first female vet. Dr Tania Areori is one of only three vets at the National Agriculture and Quarantine Inspection Authority (NAQIA) in PNG. One of the first challenges in her new position was managing the African swine fever outbreak.

Tania had to work hard to get where she is now. Since she was kid, she wanted to become a vet. Not an easy task considering PNG doesn’t have a vet school. Tania had to win a prestigious scholarship to go to vet school in Australia, having to leave behind her young family. 

Join our host Dr Cat Vendl on Tania’s remarkable journey to become PNG’s first female vet.

Links:
Want to learn more about Tania’s journey and work? Check out this article in the WDA’s Quarterly. 

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Deep in the rainforest between Peru, Colombia and Brazil there is a lot going on. Wildlife trafficking is likely to blame for the occurrence of reverse zoonoses transmitted from humans to owl monkeys caught for biomedical research.
In addition to  studying the occurrence of reverse zoonoses, our guest, Dr Fernando Vilchez Delgado, investigates the potential evolution of Flaviruses  in the making in the local primate population.

Join our host Dr Cat Vendl and Fernando on a trip of adventure, science and true crime to one of the most remote places on earth.

Links

• Link to the website of the NGO Entropika, Fernando's collaborator, fighting wildlife trafficking in Peru.
• Article about Entropika's founder Primatologist Ángela Maldonado

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Deaf dolphins, hooked turtles and manatees hit by boats, Dr Debra Moore has seen it all in her career as aquatic mammal vet. She is the former head vet of the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies, IMMS, in Southern Mississippi, US. In addition to her clinical work, she is an assistant clinical professor at Mississippi State University and gives vet students the opportunity to get hands-on training on sea lions, sea turtles and dolphins. She is passionate about teaching and believes that it is essential that students become aware of the critical role of ocean health for the planet’s and therefore our own well-being. 

And on a side note, Debra is one of our newest WDA members. She joined on the day of the podcast interview. Who thought podcasting can’t make a difference!

Learn more about the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies: https://imms.org/

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Ticks have a microbiome, too. They carry essential symbionts and sometimes less essential members like Borrelia. Our host Dr Cat Vendl and her guest Dr Alice Lau explore the secrets of tick microbiome, but also chat about what it’s like to move to different countries to follow one’s academic career. Alice is an expert in this. She speaks at least four languages fluently and loves to get to know new cultures. Alice is currently based in Tokyo.

Dive into the world of tick bacteria and being sometimes lost in translation with the Wildlife Health Talks. 

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In this first Wildlife Health Talks episode of 2024, we are taking you back to the very beginning, back to the year of 1951, when 28 US and Canadian wildlife biologists at the 16th North American Wildlife Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded the Wildlife Disease Committee.

Only one year later, in 1952 the Committee was renamed to, you might have guessed it, the Wildlife Disease Association. The WDA was born. 

And one of the WDA’s founding fathers and first elected president was the wildlife biologist, Dr Carlton Herman. 

For the first time on this podcast, our host Dr Cat Vendl has a whole bunch of guests to chat with about Carlton Herman and what drove him back in the days to found the WDA, a pretty visionary organization back then. After all, in the 1950s One Health was less than in its infancy. 

Cat chats with three of Carlton’s sons, two of his colleagues, Ed Addison and Tom Yuill, and the WDA’s very own Executive Manager, Peri Wolff.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.