Vet Student Summer

Cholinesterase

2006-07-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

I spent two evenings during the week and most of the day Saturday (yesterday) in the lab, but I finally got through all of the samples that I brought back with me (78 of them).

Kimberlee is going to try to send 25 more down this week (some animals that are being net-gunned and radio-collared this weekend), and that will be the last of them.

That would bring the grand total to 128 samples, which is 28 more than originally planned, but hey, the more the merrier! I just hope I'll have enough grant money left over to pay for them!

Here I am in the tox lab working on one of many samples. I start with frozen whole blood, and once it thaws it gets diluted with a pH 8.0 phosphate buffer (10 uL blood and 10 mL buffer). The lab has this nifty machine that does the dilution automatically, whoever invented it is a genius! Once it's diluted (see test tubes below) it sits for 5 - 10 minutes while the red blood cells lyse. We let them lyse so that the cholinesterase in the red cells is measured too.

Once the tubes have sat for a few mintues, the dilution gets put into cuvettes that get placed in the spectrophotometer. I do all the samples in duplicate, plus a standard and a control, so there are 4 cuvettes for each sample.

Here they are in the chamber of the spectrophotometer, just waiting to be read! The clear one is the control, its human plasma with a known amount of ChE. The chamber to the left is the standard, it doesn't get any reagent added, and the spectrophotometer measures the samples against it.

Once they're in there I add a couple of reagents, mix, and hit the start button. It takes 6 minutes to do each sample, and it prints the results immediately afterwards. I think it's neat. There are some smart people out there that have figured out how to do all of this stuff, and they make it user friendly so that people like me can do projects like this.

My diagnostics rotation is moving right along too. This week I was on cytology, so I sat with the clinical pathologist every afternoon while she interpreted impression smears, aspirates, bronchio-alveolar lavages, trans-tracheal washes, and other exciting things.

I got to see some blastomycosis, an aspiration pneumonia, and some sarcomas, carcinomas, and lymphomas. It was great learning for me, the pathologist would give us a few slides to look at before we started for our interpretation. I was right more than half of the time, but I still have a lot to learn! Especially about lymph node cytology.

This week I go back to necropsy, hopefully there will be some interesting things. I doubt there will be any caribou or grizzly bears though.

Back in Illinois

2006-07-02T13:49:00.000-07:00

Well here I am back in the flatlands of Illinois. I got back Sunday night and I started my diagnostics rotation at 9:00 on Monday morning. I thought that this rotation would be much less time consuming than my first rotation (small animal internal medicine), but that's not exactly the case. I am definately at school less (8 - 10 hours a day), but there are necropsy reports to write, "homework" (clin path cases), case correlations, and presentations to prepare for. Overall it's much less stressful than medicine though (mostly because the animals we see are already dead). My first week of diagnostics I necropsied a swan, a Jersey cow, a draft horse, and a mouse.

I had planned on starting my cholinesterase samples on Tuesday, but I kept ending up a school late writing reports. So I ended up in the lab all weekend chugging through my samples. I got 18 of them done yesterday (saturday), and I'm hoping to get through another 20 or so today. In all I have 87 samples to do, so it will take me a few weeks of evenings and weekends to get them done.

This picture is the machine that reads the cholinesterase activity of my samples. It's a Shimadzu 160-UV spectrophotometer (housed in the college of vet med's diagnostic toxicology lab). What it does is send a beam of UV light through my samples (after I have diluted them and added a couple of reagents), then it reads the difference in absorbance based on a standard. It takes about about 6 minutes to do each sample, plus it has to warm up for a while, the samples have to thaw, I have to add the reagents, etc.

I'm actually writing this now as I'm waiting for my samples and the reagents to thaw out. I will be here for a few hours still. Tomorrow it's back to diagnostics, and hopefully I'll have some time in the evenings to do a few samples.

Last Day in AK

2006-06-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

It's not really my last day, I don't leave until tomorrow night, but it's my last day working at ADFG. I'm sad to be leaving, but I'm excited to start the assays on my blood and to really start digging into my project.

Here's just a picture (from yesterday) of the tiniest necropsy yet this summer - an 8 gram little brown bat. It was so small that we did it under a microscope. It can be a challenge to switch from working on something as big as a caribou to something as small as a bat, but that's one of the reasons I love veterinary medicine.

This morning it's smokey in Fairbanks, there have been a couple of wildfires burning not too far away. Every summer tens of thousands (or maybe even hundreds of thousands) of acres of forest burns in the state. That sounds alarming, but it's a necessary part of a healthy ecosystem, and unless it's threatening villages or people, the firefighters leave them alone. In fact, ADFG (and other agencies) often start fires on purpose to manage wildlife habitat.

I started the day like I have for the last few days by picking Ostertagia out of abomasums. I only did that for a couple of hours though, because two necropsy specimens, common ravens, came in. The first one was in great shape, not rotten at all. It had some pretty significant bruising on it's skull, but no other lesions consistent with trauma or disease.

Any raptors or corvids (crows, jays, and magpies) that die up here automatically get samples taken to test for West Nile Virus (WNV). That involves taking three small pieces of brain. After I took the brain samples I swabbed the birds cloaca for Avian Influenza testing. As you may or may not know, Alaska is the frontline for avian flu monitoring in the United States. Since Alaska is only 60 miles from Russia via the Bering Strait, and many birds migrate between the countries, it is feasible that avian flu will arrive to the U.S. through Alaska. I also took a spleen sample for the UAF tularemia project. Since it was in such good shape, I took some samples for histology too.

The second raven, unfortunately was extremely decomposed, so I wasn't able to take any samples. But he did have two severely broken legs, so I'm sure he was hit by a car or something.

After the ravens, I got back to work on the abomasums for a bit, and then another bird came in.

This one was very exciting for me. It was a great gray owl, the largest owl in North America. I had never seen one before (not even a dead one). It was found by a resident of Delta Junction (a town about 100 miles from Fairbanks), and brought to the local veterinarian. The vet took some radiographs, and it had a fractured clavicle. Unfortunately that injury would most likely prevent this owl from ever flying (even if it healed well), so the veterinarian euthanized it and sent it here.

It was a very fresh specimen, so I took the same sample as the raven, brain for WNV (see left), a cloacal swab for avian influenza, spleen for tularemia, and tissues for histology. I also just checked everything out to make sure there was no disease present. It looked good, except for some deep bruising in the pectoral muscles (probably caused by whatever broke the clavicle), and hemorrhage in the left lung (also probably from the same event).

So that's it! It was a good last day, I got to do 3 necropsies. Tomorrow I will pack up my stuff, head to Kimberlee's for a barbecue, and then get on the plane to head back to Chicago. I'll get to Chicago Sunday afternoon and make the 3 hour drive down to school. I'm not going to post again until Monday. I've had a fabulous time here in Alaska, and I can't wait to come back!

Fox

2006-06-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

6/22/2006

On her way in to work this morning Kimberlee found a red fox kit on the side of the road. She was sure it was hit by a car, but she brought it in for me to necrposy, since it's a great learning experience, and we wanted a piece of spleen for a study at the University of Alaska (on Tularemia).

It was tiny (only 5 lbs) and very fresh, it had probably been dead for only a couple of hours. One of the biologists estimated that it was 6-8 weeks old. It had a fractured right humerus, femur, and tibia. It had a large hematoma on the left side of it's chest as too. On the inside, the diaphragm had ruptured, and the liver and stomach were in the chest cavity. Ouch. There was a lot of free blood in the chest and abdomen as well. That is probably what killed it.

I have seen that type of injury only once before, in special pathology class, but it was on a formalin fixed specimen, and it was really old. It was exciting to see it on a fresh specimen. This type of thing isn't uncommon in dogs that get hit by cars. If they don't loose a lot of blood right away they can live with it for a while, and sometimes it goes undiagnosed for months. Fortunately it can be fixed with surgery in those cases.

So I took a piece of spleen for the UAF study, and since it was so fresh, I took some blood from the heart for Kimberlee to do serology on. We were also curious to see what kind of parasites it had, so I took some feces and did a float. Surprisingly, it had a ton of coccidia, and some hookworm eggs as well. In this picture, the coccidia are the little protozoa, and the hookworm egg is the large egg in the lower right corner. It ended up being a very interesting necropsy.

After that I washed another abomasum, and I got to use a brand new dissecting microscope to look for worms in it. I didn't get very far though, because we had another necropsy specimen come in.

This one was a little brown bat. It was found in McGrath, a bush town in the interior of Alaska. It weighed only 8 grams, and Kimberlee necropsied it using a dissecting scope. It looked like it had hemorrhagic colitis, a portion of the colon was bright red and bleeding. We also both agreed that it was a female, and might have been pregnant. I have a picture of the tiny critter, I'll post it in tomorrows entry. So we froze the whole bat to send to the University of Alaska Museum, and we fixed the viscera in formalin to send to a pathologist.

I guess that's it. It was a good day, we had two necropsies.

Solstice

2006-06-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

6/21/2006

Today is the longest day of the year. Here in Fairbanks the sun will be up for 21 hours and 50 minutes (but it will be light for 24 hours). There is a big festival downtown called the Midnight Sun Festival, there's lots of food, music, and vendors. That had to wait until after work though.

I started the day doing fecals again (see left). It was the same as usual, some larvae, some fluke eggs, and some tape worm eggs.

The Tularemia case made the newspaper as well (the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner), so that was kind of exciting. Kimberlee is quoted in it several times, and they had some info about the disease for the public.

After I finished the fecals I necropsied a raven that someone reported was dead in a woodpile. I was planning on taking brain samples for West Nile Virus, but unfortunately the bird was pretty decomposed, so I was unable to. But I was able to figure out what happened to it. It had a fractured humerus and scapula, a dislocated stifle (knee), and the front 1/3 of it's beak was broken off. It was found kinda near a road, so it was most likely hit by a car.

After that I worked on abomasums, and found some more Ostertagia.

When I was done working, I headed downtown for the festivities. I ate some pizza, listened to some music, and bought a couple of souveniers. I think that the whole city was there, it was crowded!

At about 9:00 I headed to the ballpark with a few friends from Fish and Game to watch the 101st Midnight Sun Baseball Game. It was between the Alaska Goldpanners and the Beatrice (Nebraska) Bruins (minor leage teams).

The game started at 10:30, and it was a ton of fun! The game is unique in that it's so late at night, but they don't use artificial lights. The picture to the right was taken at midnight during the 8th inning.

It was a great game, and the Panners won 2-1 in the 10th inning with a line drive to the outfield. The game ended at 12:30 and it was still light out. It's strange being up here in the summer. It hasn't been dark since I got here almost 4 weeks ago. Last summer I had a real hard time sleeping for the first couple of weeks, but I'm pretty used to it now.

The Mystery Deepens

2006-06-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

6/20/2006

I couldn't find an appropriate picture for today, so I put this one up that Nikki took on the peninsula. It's of a swallow sitting on the Beaver. I think it's cute.

This morning, Don (the biologist involved with the Eielson bear case), got the head out to investigate further. He was planning on just pulling a tooth for aging and measuring the skull. When he started skinning in order to measure it we noticed a lot of bruising over the skull, as well as a puncture hole in it. There were no punctures at all in the skin, so we never would have noticed it if he hadn't skinned it. So I went and got Kimberlee, and she decided to open the skull to have a look at the brain. When she cut the muscle off of the skull in order to open it, we noticed another puncture mark, only 3.5 cm away from the first (again, with no puncture in the skin). There really wasn't much damage to the brain though, just a tiny bit of hemorrhage, the puctures were pretty superficial.

We had been suspecting that another bear killed the yearling, but the punctures on the skull were only 3.5 cm apart, which is way to small for a bear (it's even too small for a black bear). So we were thinking of all these crazy scenarios involving a bear and a wolf, or two bears (an adult and a cub), or a pack of dogs or something. Finally we decided that the puntures were probably the upper and lower incisors of a large bear (rather than both uppers as we originally thought). The only thing that still seemed odd was that two bears were able to get into that munitions dump at the same time. This just goes to show that there is always something exciting happening in the field of wildlife medicine!

When we were finished dealing with the bear I was back to my usual stuff. I washed another abomasum and looked for worms.

Mystery Bear

2006-06-21T17:29:00.000-07:00

6/19/2006

Well it's Monday of my last week in Alaska. I went camping and fishing over the weekend at a place called Tangle Lakes. It's a couple hours drive south of Fairbanks. While I was there I got this great shot of a cow moose and calf. They were crossing a narrow part of the lake together.

Now it's back to work though. This morning I washed another abomasum and picked the Ostertagia out of it, luckily it was a small one and it didn't take too long. Then I entered data for a little while.

Then the mystery started. The area biologist received a call from someone at Eielson Air Force Base that they had a dead bear. So Kimberlee and the biologist went to pick it up. Turns out it was in their munitions dump, which is a very secure area. They weren't sure how it had gotten in there or how it had died, they were thinking there was some foul play involved (like poaching or something). So we decided to figure it out.

It was a grizzly bear, but not a very big one (the biologist estimated it to be a yearling based on dentition). Here's a picture of me beginning the necropsy by measuring the length of it. It was pretty rotten too, we think it was sitting there for 2 days at least (it smelled BAD).

It had a large wound on it's back, right beneath the ribs, which kind of looked like the exit wound of a bullet. We couldn't find an entrance wound though (or any other external abnormalities). So we skinned it. There was extensive bruising all throughout the back musculature, as well as some severe bruising on both thighs and one knee. What appeared to be an exit wound didn't really fit the bill as we explored more, it didn't go anywhere, and there wasn't really very much hemorrhage around it. The viscera was pretty rotten, but it didn't look like a bullet had traveled through the abdomen or chest. It also had a shattered vertebra (L3 to be precise), but it looked like it had happened post mortem.

So we came to the conclusion that a larger bear had probably killed it, and then after it died it must have picked it up and shaken it (breaking the spine). That doesn't really make sense either though, since it's such a secure area, it seems odd that two bears were able to get in there at the same time with nobody noticing.

It was getting late at that point, so we cleaned up. But we saved the head so that a biologist can pull a tooth tomorrow (to age it) and measure the skull (they keep track of all that stuff). Kimberlee and I will also have a look at it to see if there is any evidence of head trauma.

Ostertagia

2006-06-21T10:26:00.001-07:00

6/16/2006

This morning I started by entering the differential data that I collected yesterday. We have quite the Excel file going with all of the results of the bloodwork, fecal floats, larvae counts, and tissues collected.

The rest of the day pretty much all I did was sift through the abomasal (stomach) contents that I started yesterday. There was about 1 L of contents retrieved from it, which Nikki and I went through a couple of mLs at a time under a dissecting microscope. The worms that we are looking for (Ostertagia gruehneri) are tiny, they are thinner than a hair, red to brown in color, and about a centimeter long. The picture here is one I took of the clasping end of a male worm, it's magnified 100X. You can just barely see them with your naked eye. Using a dissecting scope makes it much easier.

Kimberlee also got the PCR results back from the hare spleen, it was positive for Tularemia (which we were expecting).

I guess that's about it. Those abomasums tend to eat up a whole day. We found a lot of worms though, we are going to count them, and they will be sent off to a parasitologist to confirm the species.

Muskox

2006-06-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

6/15/2006

This morning I started doing differential white cell counts on all of the NAP and Mulchatna smears that we made in the field. They weren't too remarkable, there were two animals with a lymphocytosis (too many lymphocytes, which could indicate a viral infection), and most of them had an eosinophilia (which indicates parasitic infection, which we were expecting).

The culture results from the University of Alaska on the spleen from the hare came back as a strong positive for Tularemia. Fortunately we were careful handling it, and we put it in a biohazard bag afterwards to keep anyone from contacting the carcass. We are still waiting on the PCR results from the state public health lab, but we are expecting it to come back positive.

We also necropsied the muskox calf that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. (the one that died up on the north slope) There's a picture of it below. It was a tiny calf, less than 30 pounds.

There were no signs of external trauma (just as we were told by the biologist), and it was in decent condition (not emaciated). We first opened the joints, since there have been a couple of animals positive for Chlamydia on the north slope (which can cause an arthritis). The cartilage looked a little eroded in a few areas, and the joint fluid was thick and red, meaning there was an arthritis going on.

The lungs looked like there was possibly some mild pneumonia with pulmonary edema, but it was hard to say for sure, those kinds of things can be post mortem artifacts.

At this point we were thinking it was Chlamydia, but when we started poking around in the guts we got our answer! Any guesses? It had an intussusception. An intussusception is an intestinal event where a portion of the intestine telescopes in on itself. That causes the blood supply to be cut off and the intestinal wall dies. When the intestine is dying the wall becomes permeable to all sorts of things, including bacteria, which could have spread to distant places in the body (like the joints), causing arthritis.

Intussusceptions (say that 3 times fast), are supposed to be extremely painful, and can lead to death within a day or two. Kimberlee informed me that they have been linked with coccidial infections in muskoxen, so I did a fecal float, but I found no coccidia. When we opened the rumen though, we were surprised to see that it was almost full of it's mothers hair. The hair could have caused a blockage in the small intestines which could have lead to the intussusception.

We don't know why it was eating hair though. One reason would be if the mother wasn't producing milk. But the animal was in good condition, and it had curdled milk in it's abomasum, so it was getting milk. We don't have a good explanation for why it was eating hair.

After all that excitement, I washed another abomasum and started picking Ostertagia out of it. I didn't finish it though, I will work on it again tomorrow.

Tularemia 101

2006-06-20T09:50:00.000-07:00

6/14/2006

Here's a picture of some Francisella tularensis (the bacteria that causes Tularemia) colonies on an agar plate. The disease can cause people to have a fever, chills, headaches, diarrhea, muscle aches, joint pain, a dry cough, or progressive weakness. The CDC also lists it as a potential bioterrorism agent.

I necropsied the hare that I picked up last night, and it definately looked like it had Tularemia. The spleen was gigantic, and the liver was very large too. There were also no signs of trauma, indicating that it had probably died of disease. We submitted spleen and liver samples to the University of Alaska Fairbanks bacteriology lab, as well as to the state public health lab in Anchorage for a Tularemia PCR (polymerase chain reaction - a test that detects the bacterial DNA in a sample). We also took a few histology samples and fixed them in formalin so that a pathologist can interpret them later.

When I was done with that I finished up the last of the NAP fecals. There were 3 random samples that had been found near calf mortalities, as well as the calf fecals to finish. One of the random samples was loaded with Ostertagia larvae, some of them were still alive and squirming around under the microscope. None of the calves had any eggs in their feces, which makes sense, none of them had lived long enough to develop a parasite infection.

When I finished those I got all of the blood samples together that I will be taking back to Illinois to run cholinesterase assays on. I've already run 25 samples (before I came up here), and I will be bringing 78 more frozen samples back with me.

That's all for today. Hopefully I don't have Tularemia now.

Crunch Time

2006-06-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

6/13/06

Here's a picture of one of three arctic ground squirrels that lived at camp. They had burrows through the tundra and would pop out to check out what was going on. They were very brazen, and would come really close if you gave them some food (cheetos for example). I'm not sure which one this is, but the guys at camp had named each of them, there's Francis, Justin, and Ron.

Today was another data collection day. I began by entering all of the fecal results from yesterday into a database. Next I went with Nikki to Alaska Air Cargo to pick up the gear that we had shipped from King Salmon (necropsy equipment, formalin fixed samples, frozen tissues etc.).

Then I started thawing a NAP caribou abomasum from last October (the 4th "true" stomach of a ruminant). Once it was thawed, I emptied all of the contents, washed the lining thoroughly, and sifted through the contents for adult Ostertagia worms. I didn't find any in this animal, but that was expected, it died in October, which is when the larvae encyst in the abomasal wall and go dormant until the summer.

That was all I did during the day. I was home making dinner when Kimberlee called to ask me if I wanted to go collect some specimens for a disease outbreak investigation. I of course said yes.

So a family in the nearby town of North Pole had called to report a "field of dead rabbits" near their home. I went out to investigate with a Fish and Game biologist. We arrived to find that there was no field, but there were 2 dead rabbits (varrying hares, actually) in the woods. One was too rotten to use, but I took the other one back to ADFG. The people who called reported that there had been several other dead rabbits in the area recently.

The primary thing that Kimberlee and I were worried about was Tularemia, a zoonotic disease that periodically shows up in rabbits and small rodents up here. It is a serious disease, and can potentially be fatal to people. So tomorrow we will necropsy that hare and submit samples for Tularemia diagnostics.

Back to Work

2006-06-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

6/12/2006

Today I started working on the samples we brought back from the field. I began with the most fun of them - the fecal floatations! I did floats on all of the NAP and Mulchatna fecal samples that we brought back.

I found all sorts of interesting things. Below is a picture of an embryonated strongylid egg from one of the NAP caribou (most likely Ostertagia). The little worm was squirming around in the egg just waiting to hatch out. I think it's pretty exciting.

I also found Tricurid-looking eggs, Ostertagia eggs, Fasciola-looking eggs, a few Ascarid eggs, and some Coccidia. There were also some hatched out strongyle larvae in one sample (also probably Ostertagia). Every sample but one had something in it.

The ones that look like Fasciola (liver fluke) were very interesting to me. I didn't realize that there were liver flukes in Alaska. I asked Kimberlee about it, and she said that other people have seen eggs in the feces, but nobody has found actual flukes in livers yet. Weird.

I guess that's all I did today. It's not as exciting as being out on the tundra, but it's very important, and this is where all of the data starts to come together and we can start learning things about the NAP caribou.

Back to Civilization

2006-06-19T09:59:00.000-07:00

6/11/2006

We stayed the night at the Fish and Game bunkhouse in King Salmon. There was no wind blowing our tents away, and no runing to the outhouse at 2am when it's 35 degrees outside.

Kimberlee, Nikki, Troy, and I went to the King Ko for breakfast. I had Russian French toast, which is regular French toast stuffed with cream cheese and topped with whipped cream (it's very healthy). I don't know if it's really what people eat for breakfast in Russia, but it was tasty.

Then we went with Troy to the hangar and helped him push the helicopter outside (he had to fly it back to Fairbanks today). Then we went to the airport and checked in for our flight. It's a teeny little airport in KS, there's no security or metal detectors or lines or anything.

After we were all checked in, Kimberlee checked out a dog owned by a Fish and Game employee. There's no permanent veterinarian in KS, normally a vet flies in twice a year to see appointments. So when people get wind that there's a vet in town they take advantage! Anyway, this dog had cut one of his pads deeply while at the beach, the doctor in town cleaned it out, glued it together with tissue glue, and bandaged it. The owner just wanted to make sure that it looked okay. It actually looked pretty good, so Kimberlee rebandaged it and told the owner to keep it clean and keep an eye on it.

Our flight left KS at 11:15, and we got to Anchorage at 12:30 only to find out that our flight to Fairbanks was overbooked and we might not have seats (argh! Why do airlines do that!?). But at the last minute we did end up getting seats. We arrived safely in Fairbanks at about 3:30 pm.

So now I'm here, unpacking my stuff and doing laundry. Tomorrow I'll go back to Fish and Game start working on all the samples we collected.

Last Day at Pumice

2006-06-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

6/10/2006

Unfortunately today was our last day out at Pumice Creek. We had planned on being out there until the 12th (with return to Fairbanks on the 13th), but Troy had to be back to Fairbanks by the 11th. Since we can't do anything without his helicopter, we have to stop.

However, the wind was HORRIBLE all night long, and it didn't get much better during the day. I hardly slept at all last night because the wind was so loud I thought my tent was going to blow away. I kept thinking "tornado" in the back of my head (though there are no tornados here).

It was so windy that I could hear a big gust coming from out of the mountains before it hit my tent. The walls of the tent were flapping around so much they were hitting me in the face all night. Not many of us slept well.

When the early risers got out of bed, they noticed Dave's tent was missing (the little yellow one at the end). It turns out it had blown 200 yards down the gravel bar (with all of his stuff in it) and lodged in some brush overnight. Dave was stuck in King Salmon due to wind after going to get the bigger plane the night before. A couple hours later Dom's tent's fly tore wide open and blew away.

So, it was WAY to windy to risk flying, and we were stuck in the cabin AGAIN. By this point we were all getting a little stir crazy. We played more cards, did more puzzles, and did our best to entertain ourselves. I think I even fell asleep for a while sitting upright in a chair (I was tired because the wind kept me up all night).

Just when we were beginning to think we would be stuck there overnight, the wind began to die down. So we quickly packed everything up and started to load up the Beaver. It was still to windy for Jim and Patrick to fly their 2-seaters, but it was safe enough for the Beaver and helicopter. So everyone but Jim, Patrick, and Dom headed up to King Salmon.

Here's a picture from the air of the landscape of the peninsula. The Aleutian Mountains are in the backround. It just goes on like this for hundreds of miles. There are no trees (or people), and lakes as far as you can see. I like it.

We got back to King Salmon in the evening and unloaded everything from the plane. We took the short drive to the Fish and Game bunkhouse where we were going to stay the night. We all took much needed showers and went out for a night on the town.

We went to a cute restaurant called the Quinot and had pizza (it was SO good), and then we walked across the street to the King Ko Inn and had a drink and watched some live music (a guy and his guitar - who were actually really good).

So now we are back to civilization (kind of), and we'll head back to Fairbanks tomorrow morning. I'm sad to leave the field camp, but I'm excited to move on with my project.

Lazy Day

2006-06-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

6/9/2006

Today was another nasty day. It was windy and rainy and just no fun. We had planned to necropsy two more NAP adults, but it was windy enough that the pilots didn't really feel like flying, so we were all trapped in the cabin all day.

So we pretty much played cards ALL day long. We played pinochle (my favorite), and Patrick taught us to play bridge, which is far to confusing for me. Whoever invented that game had an active imagination.

We also had a newspaper (the Anchorage Daily News), that someone (I think Patrick) brought from town yesterday. So we passed the sections around to read, and we did all of the puzzles. There were two crosswords, including the New York Times crossword, a word find, and Sudoku. The NYT crossword took all 10 of us to finish, but it was fun, and very satisfying when we filled in the last square. Lem taught Bruce how to do Sudokus, and that kept them both busy for a while (see right).

Kimberlee and I made chili for everyone for dinner, and we kinda just hung out until we tottered off to our tents for bed. I was one of the crossword holdouts, I stayed up with Troy and Bruce until it was done, which took until midnight.

Not Such a Nice Day

2006-06-16T09:11:00.000-07:00

6/8/2006

Here's just a nice picture of the cabin I took yesterday (when it was nice out). If it were closer up you would notice that the roof is attached to ground with cables (to keep it from blowing away in the wind).

Today we didn't do much. The weather was pretty nasty, and we were exhausted after yesterday's marathon in the driving rain and hail, so we decided to wait and see if it cleared up. We made a BIG breakfast since we had time, and it was so good! We had eggs, potatos, and sausage. Every single bite of it got eaten. Lem had the brilliant idea to dig a hole in the ground to keep food cool, and it worked great! It was nice to have eggs and cheese and things.

The biologists went out radiotracking and found one mortality for us, which I necropsied (below). It was a young calf with an infected umbilicus, which may have weakened it and made it easy prey. Unfortunately most of the abdominal viscera had been eaten by the wolves that killed it, so we didn't get a very good sample set.

They also went out looking for wolves, which they planned on collaring. There are 4 packs on the peninsula between King Salmon and Pumice Creek, and they would eventually like to radio-collar 3 animals in each pack. Unfortunately they didn't see a single wolf after several hours of looking. I still have not seen a wolf in Alaska. I was here all summer last year, and I've been for a week now this year, and...nothing. I have anti-wolf radar or something, they know I'm around and they run for cover. Everyone else at camp has seen them, I guess I just have bad luck.

That's pretty much all we did today. We ended the day playing cards, like most days.

Mulchatna

2006-06-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

6/7/2006

I just realized that I haven't posted a picture of an actual living caribou yet. So here goes. This is the mother of the poor calf that died yesterday. She hung around the body for hours. Although right now she doesn't have antlers, female caribou do grow them (they are the only cervid that does). She will start to grow them in a month or two, and they will fall off right after she calves next year.

Today I got to go up to help with necropsies on the Mulchatna herd. This herd has about 20,000 animals right now, and is located on mainland Alaska, right where the peninsula splits off.

I got to take the hour and a half long ride up there in the Beaver (pictured here). It's kind of an old stinky plane, and very noisy, but it has a lot of character. On the way we flew over the villages of Pilot Point, Ugashik, Egigik, and Naknek. We flew over the Bering Sea for a little while, and we saw whales!! It was very exciting. We saw two Grey Whales feeding near shore, and up near Naknek we saw a school of Belugas :) I had never seen Belugas in the wild before, unfortunately I didn't get a picture.

We based our necropsies out of a village called Kaligonek, another tiny town not on the road system. All we did there was use their landing strip, the necropsies were out on the tundra.

Unfortunately the weather was TERRIBLE all day long. It was like 35 degrees and raining/hailing. We were all wearing layers and layers of clothing covered by full rain gear. It was going to be a challenge to keep things sterile, but Kimberlee is resourceful, and we ended up having Lem and Troy hold garbage bags up around the carcass to keep it as clean as possible.

We did four adults that day, and it took us about 5.5 hours. We were beat after that! I think if I hadn't been sawing through spines and skulls the whole time I would have frozen solid. I feel tough now though, having survived almost 6 hours of freezing rain in the middle of the Alaskan tundra.

One of the animals that we did was a female that had no calf, which is odd. She didn't even have mammary development indicating that she had had one and lost it to wolves or something. She actually ended up having cystic ovaries bilaterally, which was pretty exciting. We have the uterus and ovaries on their way to a pathologist in Anchorage so we can figure out exactly what was going on.

At some point during one of the early necropsies, I realized that I had left my water bottle in the Beaver. Since I was fighting off a cold, nobody would share their water with me. (what a bunch of meanies) So Troy radioed the pilot of the plane, and a little while later he buzzed over camp and dropped my 1L Nalgene bottle right out of the window! It hit every strut on the way down, and landed about a hundred yards from us. It made it in one peice though, crusted with tundra moss and dirt.

We finished up and headed back to camp. The Beaver loaded up all of the meat from the day and made several stops on the way back to donate it to villages. I went back in the helicopter, and I almost fell asleep during the ride.

When we got back it was the same as usual: dinner, bloodwork, and a few hands of rummy.

Another nice day

2006-06-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

6/6/2006

Today was another busy day. I woke up early and went with Lem and Troy to pick up mortalities. Earlier in the day Patrick had tracked all of the radio-collared calves (about 30 of them), and found three of them dead. He took GPS waypoints on all of them so that we could pick them up later in the helicopter and necropsy them and get the collars back.

It was an absolutely gorgeous day flying around the peninsula. One of the morts was in the mountains, and it was a picture perfect scene (except for the dead calf of course). We flew right past Mt. Chiginagak, a 4559 ft. tall volcano, which happened to have a little steam escaping from it's cone. It was very pretty.

At one of the mortality sites we happened to land near the nest of a sandhill crane. He (or she) was NOT happy about that! He started towards us in a very threatening posture (see left). Sandhill cranes are very neat birds, they spend the winter on the Gulf Coast, and then migrate all the way up here to nest in the summer. The mother of the dead calf we were picking up was also hanging around, and the crane was trading off between facing us and the cow.

After we got done picking up morts we went back to camp and had lunch, then we went out to do two more adult necropsies. We found them close to camp, so it didn't take very long. One was a healthy bull, and the other was full of parasites. It was a beautiful day, almost t-shirt weather :) This is a picture of me sawing out a section of spine so that we can take it back to camp and remove the spinal cord with a power saw.

After necropsies we went back to camp and had dinner (spaghetti I think). Then Nikki and I did bloodwork.

Then we were all sitting around the cabin, playing rummy I think. Katie (Jim's puppy, at right) was crawling around under the desk and came out with a box of d-CON in her mouth!! He started yelling for Kimberlee right away, and the two of us started running around frantically. There were no more pellets in the box, and we had no idea if it was empty already, or if she had eaten them.

We were looking for something to make her vomit. We searched every first aid kit in the cabin and could find no hydrogen peroxide or ipecac. We did find some garden hose though, so we cut off a section and shoved it down her throat. Kimberlee blew air down it, and she puked! There were bits of tundra, rocks, plastic, carpet string, and dog food in there, but no d-CON (thankfully). But better safe than sorry.

So Katie stayed away from the two of us for the rest of the night, but by morning she had forgotten the whole incident.

Beautiful Weather

2006-06-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

6/5/2006

Today was the nicest day yet on Pumice! It must have been 75 or 80 degrees out (that's HOT for these parts), and there was hardly any wind. Above is a picture of the creek from down on the banks of it.

Today we planned on flying up to the Mulchatna herd of caribou to necropsy 4 animals. The Mulchatna herd is much larger than the NAP, and is located on mainland Alaska, just north of where the peninsula splits off (about 150 miles north of camp). This time just Kimberlee, Lem, Bruce, Troy, and Jim went up there, to make sure that there were enough animals, enough space to do necropsies, and a town nearby where the plane could land (and where Nikki and I could wait in the future while they collected the animals).

So Nikki and I got to hang out at camp all day :) We were kinda bummed at first not to be able to help out, but we had a good time. First, I shot some golf balls (which Bruce had brought) on the gravel strip while the puppy chased them (and would not bring them back to me).

I also went down to the creek to explore, and I found some brown bear tracks in the mud. They weren't that large of tracks (use my foot as a scale), but I was still a little nervous that they were so close to camp. Yesterday while we were flying out to one of the necropsies we saw a bear near camp, it may have been the same one to leave the tracks.

Everyone returned from the necropsies early in the evening, and then we got really busy! It turns out that they were only able to do 2 adult necropsies, but they brought back 5 calves that were euthanized, as well as blood from each animal (7 samples).

So Nikki and I started on the blood right away, and it was the same as before. Here is a picture of me in the "lab" doing bloodwork (the lab is just a table near some bunks, which is being used as a pantry - notice the canned goods).

After the blood was done we headed out to the necropsy tent to do the calves. Kimberlee did the first 4 while we assissted, but she let me do the 5th one by myself, which was great! They pretty much looked healthy, but we took a bunch of samples to be thorough.

We didn't finish until almost 1:00 am (and it was just getting dark), and we were dead tired.

Let the Necropsies Begin

2006-06-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

6/4/2006

Here is an awesome picture of the pumice creek camp taken from the air. It's a really nice setup, planes can land right on the gravel (you can see the tracks), the creek is close, and there's lots of room to pitch tents (my tent is the first one to the right of the cabin). There were 10 of us altoghether, but only 4 bunks in the cabin. So two people stayed in the cabin, and the rest of us stayed in tents. Like I said earlier, it's really a state trooper cabin, and they are nice enough to let us use it for this project.

We had lots of "luxuries" while out in the field. We had a pump to move water into a holding tank behind the cabin, which was hooked into plumbing for the shower and sinks. The water didn't get filtered, but it was fine for taking showers and doing dishes. We had two large Nalgene filters for drinking and cooking water. We also had a generator to run the plumbing and lights in the cabin. So after meals when we needed to do dishes, or when someone wanted to take a shower we could just crank the generator on. While we did have a shower, it really wasn't very nice (or warm), so it didn't get used very much.

This was the day we really got started on necropsies. We had planned on necropsying 7 North Alaska Peninsula adults, and 8 Mulchatna adults throughout the trip.

We were very hesitant to euthanize any animals from the NAP herd since they are in such decline (the herd has gone from 20,000 animals in the mid '80's to 1,200 now), but if we can't figure out what is causing the decline we can't help them recover. To have the least impact on the population, we selected 3 sickly looking bulls to necropsy (to leave all of the breeding females alone).

So what would happen is that Kimberlee and Lem would go out in the helicopter and find a group of caribou and pick a bull out that was sickly (very skinny, lagging behind, coughing, etc.), and Lem would shoot it (in the neck so it would die very quickly). The two of them would stay with the animal and draw blood and begin measuring and skinning it. The helicopter would come back to camp (which was never very far away) and pick up Nikki and I, and bring us to the site to do the necropsy.

While Kimberlee, Nikki, and I were doing the necropsies, Lem and the helicopter pilot would butcher the meat so that it could be donated to local villages (where a majority of the people live off of subsistence hunting and fishing).

Here is a picture of one of the three necropsies that day. It just happened to be a really nice day (which was not the case most of the time), and you can see the Aleutian Mountains in the background. (That's me with the blue shirt and hat)

I'm not sure which necropsy this was, but two of the three animals that we did that day had a lot of parasites (nasal bots, echinococcus, taenia, sarcocystis, ostertagia, warbles, and rumen flukes), and one had lesions consistent with pneumonia.

We collected full sample sets on each of the animals (which took about an hour and a half each). We collected tissues for microbiologic culture, toxicology, parasitology, and histopathology.

When we were done we all flew back to camp and started working on the blood from each of the animals. I made smears for differentials and reticulocyte counts, did hematocrits and total proteins, and did manual red and white blood cell counts. Nikki spun the serum and trace mineral tubes down and aliquoted serum and plasma out for various serologic and toxicologic assays.

This is where my particular project comes in. I am taking 0.5 mL of whole blood from each animal to do cholinesterase levels on.

So we had a really busy day, and we were up pretty late, but we got a lot done. I was so tired that I didn't even hear Jim's plane land after midnight when he got to camp.

Bad Weather

2006-06-13T18:09:00.000-07:00

6/3/2006

I thought before I went any further, I should let people know who was out working on the peninsula. Let's start from the back left:

Jim: Area biologist from Dillingham (also a pilot), in charge of the Mulchatna herd of caribou (which we necropsied some of). Brought his dog Katie with. Is a great cook. Grew up in Indiana.

Patrick: Pilot (brought his own plane). Taught us how to play Bridge. Grew up in South Africa.

Bruce: Area biologist from Palmer, caribou expert, and a pilot. Learned how to do Sudoku at camp. Grew up in Indiana.

Troy: Helicopter pilot (has his IPod linked into the headsets). Very interested in wildlife, he helped us with every necropsy. Grew up in Illinois (oh yeah).

Nikki: Newly graduated wildlife student. Is another of Kimberlee's employees. Hopes to one day work in conservation. She's holding Katie (Jim's puppy). Grew up in Philly.

Bottom row:
Lem: Area biologist from King Salmon. In charge of the Northern Alaska Peninsula caribou herd (which we were studying). Sudoku whiz (not much else to do in King Salmon). Grew up in Pennsylvania.

Me: No explanation needed :)

Dom: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. Has only been in Alaska a few months, he loves it. Is almost finished with his masters on endangered Florida Key deer. Grew up in New Mexico.

Kimberlee: ADF&G wildlife veterinarian. She's the one I worked with last summer too. Makes great Chili. Grew up in Illinois (another one!).

Now that you know everyone I can tell you what I did today. Nikki and I slept in until almost 10 am (nobody woke us up!). When we finally did step outside our tent, we saw that the weather was really bad. It was probably 40 F out, and windy (it's always windy down there). So everyone got a late start.

The biologists went out to track the calves that had collars on, and the rest of us stayed back at camp. Patrick taught a few of us how to play hearts, and that killed some time. Nikki, Dom, and I went on a hike along Pumice Creek for a couple of hours, it was nice. We saw a merganser, and a yellowlegs.

When the guys got back from tracking they told us that none of the calves had died. This is very good for the calves (and the dwindling population of the NAP herd), but it meant that we had no necropsies to do. So I studied a little for boards.

Later that night Bruce arrived in the Beaver (a big orange airplane) and he brought some much needed supplies, and beer.

Arrival at Pumice Creek

2006-06-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

I am done with my field work, and I have a lot of days to catch up on. I am going to post them as if I wrote them on that day.

6/2/2006

At 6:00 am I left for King Salmon. My flight to Anchorage was uneventful, except for the fact that there were 2 prisoners onboard. Their hands and legs were shackled, and they had a police escort. They sat in the very last seats on the plane, and nobody sat near them (except for their escort and his pistol). They were very quiet though, if not for their "jewelry" and escort, you wouldn't have been able to tell them from anyone else.

We flew over Mt. McKinley (aka Denali - "The High One"), and the sky was clear, and it was so beautiful! I think I took 5 pictures of it from my window (my favorite is above). McKinley is the tallest mountain in North America, it's 20,320 feet. I know that sounds big, and you may think you can picture it, but trust me, you can't! It's SO big that you can clearly see it from the ground in Anchorage (250 miles away), and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger as you drive north. You may think you're 10 miles away from it, but really you're 150 or 200. It's even more amazing from the air. I think being from the flatlands of Illinois makes it seem so much more impressive.

My flight to KS left Anchorage at 7:45 am (aboard PenAir), it was on a small commuter plane that seats 30 passengers. It was a nice flight, we flew over Mt. Augustine, a volcano that has been erupting for several months. It made national headlines when it first started spewing. When we flew over it had a nice plume of smoke stretching out from the top of it for miles. It was pretty amazing. I wanted to take a picture, but I didn't think it would turn out.

I got to KS at 9:10 am, and I had three hours until my pilot arrived to take me to Pumice Creek. So I explored the town. It's the smallest, cutest town, I have been to yet. I was able to walk from the Fish and Game office (which is across the street from the airport), to the visitor center, to the grocery store (where orange juice was $7.50 a 1/2 gallon), and to the gift shop in the airport in under an hour. That was pretty much the whole town, so I read my book until I left for Pumice Creek.

At 12:15 Dave (a bush pilot) arrived to take me to the field site. I met Dave last summer on the same expedition. I hung around the hangar while he gassed up the plane, then we were off! He was piloting a 4 seat "Found" (pictured above). It took a little over an hour to fly 100 miles south on the Alaska Peninsula to Pumice Creek. The landscape is really different (for me). It's called moist tundra, which basically means a million lakes and no trees. It was pretty crazy to fly over.

We got to Pumice at about 2 pm, and I went straight to work. There were two caribou calves to necropsy right away. They were calves that were radio-collared by wildlife biologists during the previous weeks. That day they had been radio-tracking them and they found these two dead. It turns out that they had both been killed (and partially eaten) by wolves. We took a few samples to hopefully learn something from them.

After the necropsies and dinner, we settled in to the cabin and played a few games of rummy until bed.

More blood and feces

2006-06-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

This is a moose neutrophil. I was doing differentials this morning, and I thought it was pretty, so I took a picture of it. Moose (Alces alces) are one of my favorite Alaskan animals. I had never seen one in the wild until I came up here. They are gigantic (the largest member of the cervid family), and very majestic.

Today I have been finishing up with my differentials and caribou fecal floatations. Nothing too exciting.

Also, a dead muskox calf arrived from the north slope of Alaska today. Apparently it just died. There were no signs of illness and no predators around. The biologist from the area quickly froze it and sent it to Kimberlee, so that she can necropsy it when we get back from King Salmon. Hopefully I will get to help.

Tomorrow morning I will be leaving for King Salmon and Pumice Creek, and I am excited about that! I will not be able to post while I am gone, but I am going to keep track of what I do each day, and of course I will take a lot of pictures to post. I will be back on June 13th.

A little about King Salmon

2006-05-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

So I said I'd write more today, and here it is. I'm just winding down my workday here in Fairbanks. This morning I finished the fecals that I started yesterday (I found more of the same bugs), and then I started some differential white blood cell counts on some wolf blood that Kimberlee had collected in March. For people reading this who are not in vet school, differential counts can help determine what type of infection is present in an animal. These wolves, for example, had a higher than normal eosinophil number, which is expected, they are wild animals and probably have some parasites.

My fieldwork will be based out of King Salmon, AK. (the town, not the fish) I will fly there via Anchorage on Friday. King Salmon (KS) is a town of about 350 - 450 people (depending on who you talk to). It is not on the road system, so you have to fly there. There are a ton of these "bush" towns in Alaska that you cannot drive to. (In the largest state in the nation there are surprisingly few roads). It is about 500 air miles from Anchorage to KS, just to give you some scale.

From KS I will board a 2 to 4 seat light aircraft and fly 100 miles south on the Alaska Peninsula to the Pumice Creek field camp. It's really a state trooper outpost that they use to patrol hunting at other times of the year. (The state troopers patrol in helicopters in this area, since there are no roads). I had no idea what to expect last year, at least I can tell you a bit about it this time since now I have some experience there.

That's all I'm going to say for now about Pumice Creek, I will have a ton of pictures to post when I get back!

Finally Here!!

2006-05-31T11:02:00.000-07:00

Well I'm here in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I've finally figured this blog thing out. I warned people when this blogging opportunity came up that I was not good with computers and would probably screw things up!

I arrived early Monday morning (1 am Alaska time - that's 4 am Illinois time), and took the rest of the day to sleep and relax after my long travel. I went out on the Tanana river with a friend and his new boat, we took a picnic and found a nice sandbar to have lunch on. I wish I had a picture to post, but my camera ran out of batteries! (I told you I am not good with this technical stuff!). But now my camera is loaded and ready to go, so I should have some pictures posted soon.

Tuesday (May 30) I came in to the ADF&G office at about 8am. My mentor (Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen) is gone right now, she's at the ADF&G's Moose Research Center (MRC) in Soldotna, AK, collecting some samples. She left me some stuff do do though - fecals! So I did about 15 fecal floatations on caribou feces collected at a few different times throughout the year. I found a few eggs that looked like Ostertagia spp., a few that looked like Capillaria spp., and just a couple that looked like Monezia spp. Of course I was using a text written on cattle parasites, so the eggs I was seeing are not the same species that cattle get. We are happy to just narrow it down to a family or genus in most cases.

The Ostertagia most significant, last summer we found many lesions attributable to the little worm in the abomasums of the North Alaska Peninsula Herd. We think that the infestation may be contributing to the decline of the herd, since Ostertagia can have significant health impacts on domestic cattle.

That's about all I did on Tuesday, I have two more days until I leave for King Salmon and Pumice Creek (my field site). Later today I will post again and try to get some pictures up of where we are going and so forth. Right now I have to get back to my feces!

About Nina in Alaska

2006-05-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

Cristina (a.k.a. Nina), a native of Huntley, Illinois, has entered the fourth and final year of the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine professional degree program at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. She has wanted to be a veterinarian since she was two years old.

During the summer of 2005, Cristina worked with Dr. Kimberlee Beckmen, a 1989 graduate of the College of Veterinary Medicine and a wildlife veterinarian for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, on a study that assessed the health of the North Alaska Peninsula caribou herd.

While there Cristina noted a gap in the knowledge base for that species. As a result of her insight, she applied for funding from the Morris Animal Foundation and is going back to Alaska this summer to study how measuring cholinesterase activity could contribute to the overall health evaluation of Alaskan caribou. Her mentor and the principal investigator on the study is Dr. Petra Volmer, faculty member in the College's Department of Veterinary Biosciences. The research experience is also part of the College's Summer Training Program, a program of the Center for Zoonoses Research that promotes research by veterinary students.

After she finishes her DVM degree, Cristina plans to work in private practice for a few years, then pursue a PhD in wildlife pathology or toxicology. Her dream is to become a wildlife veterinarian and work for an agency like the Alaska Department of Fish and Game where she can conduct research on issues affecting the health and welfare of wild animal populations. Most of all, she would like to help sustain healthy wildlife populations.