August 21, 2019 — In 2009, excessive bycatch of endangered sea turtles in the Gulf of Mexico prompted a five-month closure of the Gulf’s longline fishery. Boat captains unexpectedly found themselves locked out of prime fishing grounds, and were forced to look elsewhere to make a living.
As it turned out, some captains fared better than others in this endeavor. And their experience has implications for fishermen today who are adapting to changing environmental and regulatory conditions.
November 9, 2018 — In 2018, the southern resident killer whale population in the Pacific Northwest’s Salish Sea was at its lowest ever. The world watched in September as an orca named Scarlet, or J50, wasted away and died, leaving just 74 of her kind left. Some wondered if this was “What extinction looks like.”
Meanwhile, endangered mountain gorillas in Africa hit a milestone in the opposite direction. Their population climbed to more than 1,000—the highest in nearly a century.
Building on work begun by primatologist Dian Fossey of Gorillas in the Mist fame, Gorilla Doctors, a program led by the University of California, Davis, has been providing personalized veterinary care to these animals in the wild since the late 2000s. The gorillas have their own long-term health records, and the international team of veterinarians that observe and treat them know each one as they would their own family members and friends—down to the individual.
September 4, 2018 — Hundreds of East Coast seals are showing up, stranded on New England shores dead or sick.
Harbor and gray seals on the northern Atlantic Coast of the United States have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fisheries. Others have tested positive for phocine distemper virus, similar to the virus dogs can contract and which has caused epidemics among seals in other parts of the world, killing thousands, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Both gray and harbor seals can range as far south as the Carolinas, where they sometimes travel during the winter months and haul themselves onto beaches to rest and soak up some sun.
The seals that end up stranded but alive are “in poor body condition with clinical signs of lethargy, coughing, sneezing and seizing,” according to NOAA. As of last week, 532 seals had washed up on the coasts of Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Of those, more than 400 were found dead.
Samples from those seals were sent to Tufts University and the University of California, Davis labs for testing, NOAA said. Samples tested “preliminarily positive” for either bird flu or the distemper virus. Four of the seals tested positive for both viruses.
January 26, 2018 — When Jamie Peyton first examined the bears’ paws last month, she figured they might take six months to heal.
Peyton, a veterinarian at the University of California at Davis, had treated cats and dogs with burns before, and she knew these were severe. The two female black bears in her care had survived the Thomas wildfire that swept through Southern California in December, but both suffered third-degree burns that had caused their paw pads to slough off. They could hardly stand due to pain.
Instead of six months, the bears’ injuries healed in a matter of weeks — a quick recovery Peyton attributed to a treatment never before tried on human or animal burn victims in the United States: fish skins applied as bandages.
Using fish skin wasn’t Peyton’s first instinct when state wildlife authorities enlisted her help. They had found one bear huddling on Dec. 9 in a backyard aviary near the town of Ojai and the other two weeks later in a nearby wooded area. A third patient, a 5-month-old male mountain lion with burned paws, was discovered in the woods shortly before Christmas. Kirsten Macintyre, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said officials determined the three were candidates for rehabilitation, which meant transferring them to a state wildlife investigations lab near Sacramento. A vet there suggested calling on Peyton, chief of the Integrative Medicine Service at the UC Davis veterinary teaching hospital.
Peyton said she first tried the usual care: cleaning the burns, removing dead tissue and applying ointments. But she knew two very important steps — covering the burns and providing pain control — would be tricky with these unusual patients, which needed to stay a safe distance from people when not sedated.
There was no guarantee they’d gulp down pain pills hidden in their food, Peyton said. “And we couldn’t put on any type of bandage material they would eat,” because that might cause intestinal obstruction. Also, she said, “if a bandage comes off, you can’t really go into the cage to get it.”
A fast recovery was imperative, especially for the second bear. Peyton’s team had discovered the bear was pregnant during an ultrasound exam, and they feared the stress of giving birth in captivity would cause her to reject the cub.
Then, the veterinarian said, she remembered a news story she had read about scientists in Brazil successfully using sterilized tilapia skin on human burns. Like the pig and human tissues that have long been applied to burns, the fish skin is moist and transfers collagen, a protein that helps healing. But it’s cheaper and widely available, because it’s a byproduct of tilapia sold as food. The Brazilian researchers told Reuters last year that it hastened recovery in their patients and reduced the need for pain medication.
Read the full story at the Washington Post
December 9th, 2016 — Minnow-like Atlantic killifish spend their entire lives swimming in a toxic stew of chemicals in some of the United States’ most polluted waters. Now scientists have figured out why they are not just surviving, but thriving.
In four severely polluted East Coast estuaries, these little striped fish have evolved with genetic mutations that leave them tolerant of normally lethal doses of industrial pollution, according to a study led by University of California, Davis researchers to be published Friday in the journal Science.
Experts say this discovery may hold clues for better understanding how chemical pollutants affect people and animals.
“A big question has been: how quickly or readily do populations adapt in highly contaminated areas? This study really gets at that question,” says Christopher Martyniuk, a fish biologist at the University of Florida who was not involved in the new study.
Killifish, sometimes called mud minnows or mummichog, are abundant in the brackish waterways and marshes along the Atlantic coast. They’re an indicator species—one that is used as a barometer to gauge the health of ecosystems—because they are typically really sensitive to pollution, says lead study author and environmental toxicologist Andrew Whitehead.