What happens after you take injured wildlife to the vet?

January 14, 2019 by Bronwyn Orr, The Conversation

Australia's wildlife is unique and endearing, with many species found nowhere else in the world. Unfortunately, it isn't rare to encounter sick or injured wildlife around your home or by the side of the road. My research, recently published in the Australian Veterinary Journal, estimates between 177,580 and 355,160 injured wild animals are brought into NSW veterinary clinics alone every year.

But until now, very little was known about what happens to wildlife after they're brought to a vet. My colleagues and I surveyed 132 veterinary clinics around Australia, examining the demands and expectations of treating wildlife. We also looked for risks to animal welfare as a result of these findings.

Most clinics only saw a handful of wildlife patients every week, with birds and marsupials such as possums the most common. Sadly, the majority (82%) of wildlife arrived in veterinary care due to trauma of some kind. The most common cause was animals being hit by cars, followed by undefined trauma and predation by another animal.

Most clinics examined and treated wildlife for free, with less than 10% receiving some kind of payment. These were usually made by wildlife rehabilitation groups or members of the public.

Due to the painful and serious nature of trauma, around a third of clinics reported euthanasia was the most common outcome for wildlife at their clinic. More positively, more than half indicated that wildlife were usually passed onto wildlife rehabilitators, suggesting this is the most common outcome.

Almost three quarters of veterinary clinics said they only saw wildlife when they had spare time. This is concerning, as delays to treatment raises serious animal welfare concerns.

Additionally, many veterinary clinics indicated they felt a lack of time, knowledge and skills interfered with their ability to treat wildlife.

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Emerging significance of gammaherpesvirus and morbillivirus infections in cats

Date:  January 22, 2019

Source:  SAGE

Emerging infectious diseases comprise a substantial fraction of important human infections, with potentially devastating global health and economic impacts. A 2008 paper in Nature described the emergence of no fewer than 335 infectious diseases in the global human population between 1940 and 2004. In the veterinary field, just as in the medical field, advanced molecular techniques and sophisticated computer-based algorithms for genetic sequence assembly and analysis have revolutionised infectious disease research. They have also raised important questions, as the potential pathogenic role of novel viruses can be difficult to determine.

What is well understood is that novel viruses may contribute to diseases that are major causes of feline morbidity and mortality, including cancer and chronic kidney disease (CKD). A state-of-the-art review article published in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery this month focuses on two novel viruses that have the potential to negatively impact feline health and welfare globally -- gammaherpesvirus and morbillivirus. Writing for an international audience of veterinary practitioners and feline researchers, an expert group of feline virologists, clinicians and pathologists from Australia, New Zealand and the USA, led by Dr Julia Beatty, of the University of Sydney, discusses aspects related to virus discovery, epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, prevention and zoonotic potential.

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Far-ranging fin whales find year-round residence in Gulf of California

Date:  January 10, 2019

Source:  Oregon State University

Researchers from Mexico and the United States have concluded that a population of fin whales in the rich Gulf of California ecosystem may live there year-round -- an unusual circumstance for a whale species known to migrate across ocean basins.

What makes the discovery even more unusual, researchers note, is that they identified the pattern of movement of the fin whales, which are the second largest whale species in the world, using a satellite tracking data set from 2001. Oregon State University professor Bruce Mate, director of OSU's Marine Mammal Institute and co-author on the study, tagged 11 whales that year and was able to record the movements of nine of them for up to a year.

Since then, the OSU scientists have worked with colleagues in Mexico to further study the whales, in the process identifying via a 2011 photograph at least one female fin whale from the 2001 study -- this time, with a calf, indicating the whales may even stay in the region for breeding and calving.

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Experts disagree with prior study that claimed sheep have face-recognition abilities comparable to humans

January 23, 2019 by Bob Yirka, Phys.org report

A team of facial recognition experts from the University of New South Wales, Newcastle University and the University of York has published a Comment piece in the journal Royal Society Open Science challenging claims made by another research team. In their paper, they acknowledge that the findings of a team last year regarding the facial recognition abilities of sheep was compelling, but they take issue with the claim that the research showed that sheep have facial recognition abilities comparable to humans.

Humans have very strong facial recognition skills conferring the ability to pick out the faces of friends in a crowd with no problem, for example. Thus, it came as quite a surprise when a team of researchers in 2017 claimed in a published paper that sheep have facial recognition skills that were comparable to humans. In their rebuttal, the authors suggest that the evidence reported by the researchers was insufficient to make such a claim and outline the reasons.

The authors note that the sheep in the study learned to recognize just four faces—all celebrities. The sheep were shown different pictures of the celebrities over the course of three training sessions. Afterward, they were shown a picture of one of the celebrities and chose which of another set was the same person. The sheep were able to pick the right one on average 79 percent of the time when shown identical pictures of the celebrity, and 66 percent of the time when shown a different picture. The authors acknowledge the numbers showed that the sheep were recognizing the people in the images, not just the image. But they also point out that claiming such a finding proves skills comparable to humans is not logical.

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Galápagos island gets its first iguanas since Darwin after mass-release

Land iguanas wiped out by feral pigs have been reintroduced to Santiago Island

Agence France-Presse

Tue 8 Jan 2019 00.58 GMTLast modified on Tue 8 Jan 2019 01.26 GMT

A group of more than 1,400 iguanas have been reintroduced to an island in the Galápagos archipelago nearly two centuries after they disappeared from there, authorities said on Monday.

The Galápagos land iguanas from North Seymour Island were freed onto Santiago Island as part of an ecological restoration program, the National Galapagos park authority said in a statement.

The last recorded sighting of iguanas in Santiago Island was made by British naturalist Charles Darwin in 1835.

“Almost two centuries later, this ecosystem will once again count on this species through the restoration initiative,” said the park authority.

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