Jacksonville Zoo (Fri, June 26)

Jacksonville Zoo visit
We got to sleep in this morning, which after waking up at 5 am yesterday was definitely needed. After my quick breakfast, I handed in the second part of our group project that was due today, and got on the van to head to the Jacksonville Zoo. We got a few presentations from various zoo staff--both of the veterinarians on staff there, as well as keepers--about the conservation projects that the zoo is working on and funding. Then we were free to roam around the zoo and see the exhibits for a while, before a tour of the vet hospital.

Some of my favorite animals of the day
The black bears, who were settling in for a nap when we saw them and were adorable
Big cats, although they were all sleeping--Florida Panther, Jaguar, and, Amur Leopard
A tapir sleeping with his mouth open, exposing his snaggly gross teeth
The anteater, because he's so funny looking
Cotton-top tamarins, who were all cuddling together and very snuggly looking
The pudu, which was so cute and small
The evil-looking, ROUS-like, Capybara
Roseate spoonbills collecting sticks and building their nests with them
....and, the gopher tortoise, because I now know how to take his blood!

One of the bonobo monkeys at the Jacksonville Zoo

The rest of the day was quite relaxing, especially because a huge thunderstorm knocked some of the power out in Big Game Lodge, so the A/C was off and it was actually a comfortable temperature inside for dinner and our meeting about logistics for Tanzania after dinner.

Wildlife Darting and Anesthesia (Wed - Thurs, June 24-25)

We began our two days of wildlife immobilization and anesthesia with a morning full of lectures. Honestly, a lot of it was either over my head or just hard to follow, since I was just hearing names of drugs that I'd never heard before. It was tough because I've had some physiology and pharmacology, but not with respect to anesthesia. Our lecturers and teachers for these two days are Scott Citino, the vet at White Oak; Jeff Zuba, the vet at San Diego Wild Animal Park; and Greg Fleming, the vet at Disney's Animal Kingdom (and a Canadian, eh!).

Scott and Greg lectured on anesthesia and monitoring before throwing us out into the field with dart guns....to practice on hay bales. We had some target practice with all the different kinds of rifles, pistols, and even blowdarts. My favorite was the DanInject JM CO2 powered rifle, but the blowpipes were pretty fun too--and seemed to take a lot more skill to actually hit anything. We learned a lot about different darting techniques, practiced filling and unloading darts, and Scott demonstrated all the different types of dart guns.

Me shooting at a bale of hay....I had a pretty good shot on these CO2 powered rifles!

Thursday morning Scott had two zebras that needed hoof trims, a rhino with a recheck on a wound, and a gerenuk up for semen collection. We split into teams, and each team was responsible for monitoring one of the animals during anesthesia. We all watched as Scott and Greg shot the two zebra simultaneously in the field--both good shots, obviously. A few minutes later the zebra darted with carfentanil was showing signs, but the M99 zebra was still looking totally normal. Scott ended up darting both a second time, and the M99 I beleive a third time. But eventually both went down, and we checked vitals and the zebra teams ran blood gases and end-tidal CO2 readings, and collected blood while the keepers did the hoof trims.

The zebra while under anesthesia

I was on the gerenuk team, so while the rhino was down I got to watch Scott examine the wound site--after they used a forklift to raise the rhinos leg enough to visualize the site. The male rhino had gored this female right in the perineal region, and Scott had closed the wound about a month ago. On this recheck, he cleaned it and said everything looked fine.

Posing with (on?) the anesthetized rhino

It was finally time for the gerenuk, and the keepers grabbed him from the enclosure and Dharmaveer hand injected the anesthetic agent. We rushed in to set up the monitoring equipment, and Linda Penfold set up her electroejaculation machine at the...ahem...other end. I drew blood from the ear for a lactate test, and from the saphenous vein for the blood bank. The gerenuk was stable the whole time, although the lactate skyrocketed following the electroejaculation owing to all the muscle clenching the little guy was subjected to. But they got the sample successfully, and reversed the gerenuk. An exciting day all around.

The keepers struggling to restrain the gerenuk as it was waking up

Me taking lactate readings from blood from an ear vein before the electroejaculation

Tuesday, June 23

Today we talked about epidemiology and population modeling. We got to break up into groups and do an "investigation" of a disease outbreak as though we were the epidemiologists called in to address the problem. It was interesting, and also felt very similar to a condensed version of a tutor case. We got a little information initially--about island foxes and sea lions that were found dead on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of L.A.--and had to talk through what steps we would take and what we would do. The instructors acted as the "fox biologist" and the "lab," and as we asked them certain questions, they would give us little bits and pieces of information. In the end, we formed a working hypothesis--the foxes were dying of canine distemper virus, which was brought to the island by sick dogs adopted from the mainland and not vaccinated.

Thinking about it, I'd much prefer to be out in the field actually sampling, seeing animals, and assessing health and disease status and doing treatments. Running population models on a computer--while certainly important--doesn't totally appeal to me.

We also had time tonight to work on our group project, and heard from Jackie Ogden, from Disney, about corporate environmental responsibility.

St. Catherine's Island (Sat June 20 - Mon June 22)

Group shot on the dock at St. Catherine's

The modified topless pickup called "The Popemobile" that we drove around the island in, and our tents in the background.

Saturday

We started the day nice and early and practiced putting up mist nets for capturing birds, taking the birds out of them, and doing PEs on the birds we had. Terry Norton, the veterinarian for St. Catherine's Island (and the Georgia Sea Turtle Center) showed us some PE techniques and how to take blood from the birds. After working at various wildlife rehab centers and the Cornell Wildlife Health Center, and a few labs with bird handling and PEs during Block 7, I felt pretty good about my bird handling skills. Although I still don't think I could hit the jugular to take blood. We went out with some of the St. Catherine's Island staff to place traps for different reptiles and amphibians in the manmade lakes on the islands, and we'll check on them tomorrow early in the morning.

The most exciting part of the day came when the staff sat us down with a bucket full of compasses, maps, and gps devices, and proceeded to explain to us that they were going to drop us off somewhere on the island and we'd have to find our way to a certain meeting place to get a ride back for dinner. I am notorious for my lack of sense of direction, so this was a little bit intimidating for me. But actually, after listening to the explanation of how to use the various compasses and how to get the bearing for our target location, I felt a little more confident. We started out at the site of the mission of Santa Catalina on the island, and had to make our way to the "tree with the red yarn" at Wamassee Pond. Checking our heading every 3 steps or so, we skirted around a few big stands of trees and forded through the "stream of death"--so treacherous that each of us got at least one foot a little muddy from stepping over the entire thing. Stephen got a nice colony of seed ticks on his pants, but we all made it to the pond in only about 30 minutes--the first group to get to the destination! We took lots of pictures of the birds nesting in trees around the pond, and saw an alligator peeking its eyes and nose out of the water. With a high today of 104 degrees, and a heat index of 110, it was pretty intense being bundled up with our long pants tucked into our socks to protect from ticks and chiggers.

Terry, Val, and Kimberly demonstrating the funnel trap for turtles and amphibians

Once it got dark, we took a pickup truck ride down to the beach to see the bioluminescence in the water. It was amazing--little blue sparkles anytime the waves broke, and if you moved your hands or feet around in the water, it lit up with a million little points of light. There was also a dead crab on the beach that had the bioluminescent bacteria all over it, and was glowing like a torch. The stars were beautiful, but there was actually more ambient light than I expected so the sky wasn't all that dark. After spending the night last night in a tent that was 90 degrees at its coolest, I moved inside to the air-conditioned building under construction where lots of us were sleeping on air mattresses and sleeping pads on the floor.

Sunday

We started the day by checking the herp traps, and found a few small amphibians and a lot of giant predaceous water beetles. For the afternoon, we went into the field to help with a health assessment project on gopher tortoises that Terry Norton was doing. We split up so that there were two people working on each tortoise, and we had to first identify--by microchips (called PIT tags) and notches in the carapace)--and then gather physical exam and basic health data. The tortoises were big, and really strong, and everything was a little bit complicated by the fact that they kept urinating and defecating all over us. I was working with Jenny, and our tortoise was healthy, except for diarrhea that we suspected was brought on by the stress of being captured and examined, and a small lesion near the cloaca. We each successfully took blood both from a vein in the tendon around the elbow, and the subcarapacial vein. It was the first time I got blood successfully on my first try in any animal ever!

Also on Sunday, we got radio telemetry units and used them to track the troops of Ring Tailed Lemurs that are living on the island. We found the troop that was out without too much trouble and got a chance to take lots of adorable pictures. Some of the lemurs had babies on their backs, making the whole experience even cuter.

Ring-Tailed Lemurs on St. Catherine's Island

Later that night, we got a chance to take a quick swim in the ocean, which was really warm and very pleasant. We also heard from Al Segers, at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, about his research and tracking of sea turtles. I talked to both Terry and Al about the possibility of doing externships or working with them on their projects in some capacity--both sound like a lot of fun, and some nice southern weather will be great come March in upstate New York.

Monday

We got up and broke camp on Monday morning, and headed out to the beach for one last activity before taking the boats back to Midway. We met Gayle Bishop, who talked to us about Sea Turtle nesting habits, and how to find nests on the beach. Since he didn't find any nests from the previous night on the beach that morning, he actually built one so that he could show us how to find them and relocate them if need be.

From there we drove south and back across the causeway out to Jekyll Island to the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, where Terry is the head veterinarian. We got a tour of the patients, and Terry took us back into the hospital and we watched him work on one Loggerhead--named Cerrata Hope--who had Debilitated Turtle Syndrome. We said goodbye to Terry and headed back to White Oak for dinner and a lecture from Mark Stetter (from Disney Animal Programs) on vasectomizing African Elephants.

Terry and his techs, with a few Envirovet students, at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center, cleaning Cerrata Hope's shell and checking her out

Day 4: Friday, June 19

We started the day with a tour of the White Oak Conservation Center's facilities and animal collection. There were tons of interesting and unique animals, most that I had never seen before (a full list is here: http://www.wocenter.org/index.asp?id=wocc/animals.asp). We got to watch the staff run the cheetahs--they laid out a course made up of a dog toy that moved around a wire in a large pasture, and the cheetahs were released one-by-one to chase the bait. We also saw a variety of rhinos, including a mother and four-day-old baby white rhino pair, and a juvenile Sumatran rhino--supposedly one of only four Sumatran rhinos in the US right now. We also saw 3 cassowaries: one female, and one male with a juvenile--the male cares for the baby and the female is territorial. Some other highlights included giant eland, giraffes, grevey's zebras, and okapis. After a break we drove out to Midway, GA, and took a boat across the intercoastal waterway to St. Catherine's Island for the weekend. We had dinner and set up camp, anticipating a long, hot, humid, mosquito/tick/chigger-ridden weekend, full of herps, amphibians, other marine animals, and beaches.

Day 3: Thursday, June 18

Our first lecturer today was Mishkat Al-Moumin (shown lecturing in the picture to the right), the former Minister of the Environment in the Interim Iraqi Government. She spoke to us and did some thought experiments about environmental scarcity and violence. We discussed governmental representation of the people, and how governments can influence or control resource distribution. She maintained that government must be representative of the people to be effective. I wonder how to maintain the perspective and representative nature of government that comes from the general population of people. Can this be built into a system, or does it have to come from the individual in power? Mishkat also talked about the importance of working directly with people, and not neccesarily with governments that are not going to help the poor people of their country. But if we try to relieve scarcity by simply getting resources to the people--rather than the rulers--won't the rulers simply take those resources from the people? I suppose you have to start somewhere, and working with the people "at the bottom of the pyramid," as Mishkat said, is more effective than continually funneling millions of dollars into the people "at the top of pyramid"--the government--and seeing no change at the bottom.

Pat Erickson, a professor at UVM, then talked to us about the Grassroots Soccer program that she started in Batey Libertad in the Dominican Republic, and we got to play some of the games they use as educational tools. Bateys were started essentially as labor camps for Haitians who would come to the DR to work on sugar cane plantations, but as time passed more families came to immigrate to the DR and live in the Bateys with the men who originally came just for a few months at a time. Now the Bateys are permanent, in the sense that the people who live in them live there for life, although the DR government periodically conducts "raids" and sends these people "back" to Haiti--a country most of them have never even seen. Pat's program focuses on HIV/AIDS education through soccer (futbol?!), and community projects in one Batey, called Batey Libertad.

Later, Carol Franco introduced us to the topic of Environmental Economics with an exercise called "Where do you stand?" We had to move around the room and debate our opinions on the truth of statements such as "Economic growth and environmental protection are fundamentally conflicted," "There should be a limit on the amount of money an individual can earn," and "Free markets will solve our environmental problems." We had interesting discussions, but most of us are like-minded in that we value conservation and the environment. I still don't know how to respond to people who are set in the status quo, or who are complacent about their role in doing some kind of good, and this is something I think I'll continue to struggle with.

Class List

A list of the participants in Envirovet 2009:

Nike Adeyemo (Nigeria): Lecturer and researcher at University of Ibadan
Khun Bala (Myanmar): Veterinarian in Yangon, focus on elephants
Valentina Colodro (Chile): Veterinarian in Santiago
Anza Kharibe (South Africa): Clinician/researcher at National Research Foundation in Pretoria, worked in Military Health Services
Michael Kuwong (Cameroon): PhD student at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, focusing on elephants and climate change; worked for WWF on various projects from 1999-2006
Meing' Ataki Godwell (Tanzania): Park ecologist at Ruaha National Park
Denis Muhangi (Uganda): Researcher in mountain gorillas, wildlife pathology in Kampala
Julius Nziza (Rwanda): Veterinarian for Nyungwe National Park in Southwestern Rwanda, focusing on primates
Bose Omonona (Nigeria): Lecturer in wildlife and fish diseases as University of Ibadan
Boris Pfaender (Switzerland): Small animal practice in Lausanne, now working in wildlife
Fidi Rasambainarivo (Madagascar): Staff veterinarian at Parc Zoologique d'Ivoloiina in Toamasina, focus on Malagasy lemurs
Siti "Reti" Retnowulandari (Indonesia): Small animal veterinarian on island of Java, interest in Sumatran Rhino
Bernard Saba (Nigeria): Lecturer in pharmacology and toxicology at University of Ibadan
Harrison Sadiki (Tanzania): Field Coordinator for Health of Animals and Livelihood Improvement Project in Ruaha National Park
Dharmaveer Shetty (India): Researcher in lion parvovirus study in Bangalore

Vanessa Choy: University of Guelph, Class of 2011. Background in engineering
Alissa Deming: University of Florida, Class of 2012. Aquatic animal research
Jenn Frolich: University of Pennsylvania, Class of 2011. Cornell undergrad
Nicole Hodges: Mississippi State, Class of 2011
Helen Ingraham: Purdue University, Class of 2012
Stephen McGrath: University of Wisconsin, Class of 2011
Jaimie Miller: University of Florida, Class of 2012. Wildlife pathology
Jenny Mitchell: Oregon State, Class of 2011
Joanna Morel: Tufts University, Class of 2012
Mike Thompson: University of Wisconsin, Class of 2011. Zookeeper at Minnesota Zoo

More pictures

Since the space to post pictures here is limited, I'm only posting highlights. I've made a gallery on picasa that you can take a look at if you want to see more pictures. It's not organized or captioned, at this point, but I might get around to it....

Envirovet 2009 - White Oak

Day 2: Wednesday, June 17

Val Beasley gave us an introductory lecture in the morning, talking about the various drivers of ecosystem disease, and the general organization of the course. Kirsten Gilardi then spoke about climate change and biodiversity. Aaron Bernstein, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, talked about the links between human health and the environment, especially zoonotic disease. This lecture was particularly interesting to me, and brought me back to the class I took in undergrad on emerging infectious diseases and the environment.
Dr. Bernstein's talk got me to thinking about the role of veterinarians in zoonotic disease research, prevention, and treatment. He mentioned that these outbreaks are extremely hard to predict, which makes practicing preventative medicine quite difficult. On the other hand, simply responding to outbreaks as they occur doesn't seem like a very efficient way to practice medicine. I also talked to him a little bit about the interaction between veterinarians and human doctors in this field. He thought that vets may have a better background and are ideally situated to understand emerging zoonoses--more so than human doctors--but to me it seems like we sort of gloss over zoonotic disease potential, and focus only on the effects that infectious diseases can have on specific animal populations. This is an area of interest for me, and I think I'd like to spend more time thinking about the research that can be done integrating disease surveying and health assessments in different wildlife populations.

Later in the day we got some free time to start working on our group projects. My group--Boris, Reti, Fidy, Mike, and myself--met in the pool to start discussing ideas, and came up with an idea to create an ecotourism destination as a method of preserving Amazonian rainforest. Maybe not the most original idea in the world, but hopefully we can integrate some more unique features, like using locally grown food sources, and making the rates economically accessible for "regular people" instead of the super wealthy.



The pool outside our room during the thunderstorm that woke me up this morning.

Day 1: Tuesday, June 16

Welcome to the first day! Everyone arrived throughout the day today from around the world, and we spent some time getting to know each other over wine, beer, and bowling. We had a nice introduction to the White Oak Conservation Center, where we're staying for the next 2 and a half weeks. We'll be having lectures in the Game Lodge and staying in the Lake Lodge, both of which are gorgeous spaces to live and work.
I'll be staying with a roommate--Vannessa Choy, a second year vet student from Guelph--for the time we're here at White Oak. There is a lake out behind our room (which the staff assures us probably has alligators in it, at least sometimes), and two pools--one set up for laps and one for playing and lounging. After dinner, a few of us started to go for a walk around the grounds, but then quickly retreated back inside after being attacked by more mosquitos than I've ever seen. We spent the rest of the evening bowling and looking at pictures--Nike's children in Nigeria, Fidy's lemurs in Madagascar, and Jenny's chickens in the States. Tomorrow will be our first full day, starting with breakfast bright and early at 7 am!




Pictures:
Inside the Game Lodge
and
Dr. Val Beasley, Director of Envirovet, giving us an
introduction to the course

(I'm still working out how to add and caption photos, so bear with the terrible formatting....)

Introduction

I set up this blog to share--as best I can--my experiences during the Envirovet Program of 2009. For more information on Envirovet, see their website

http://vetmed.illinois.edu/envirovet/index.html

Our schedule for the summer takes us through intensive lectures, labs, and field experiences, for almost 3 weeks at the White Oak Conservation Center in Yulee, FL, then about 2 weeks at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Ft. Pierce, FL. We then travel to Tanzania for some hands-on experience for about 3 weeks. It should be an exciting summer!