Could new oral vaccine technologies protect endangered wildlife against a rising tide of infectious disease? We used captive chimpanzees to test oral delivery of a rabies virus (RABV) vectored vaccine against Ebola virus (EBOV), a major threat to wild chimpanzees and gorillas. EBOV GP and RABV GP-specific antibody titers increased exponentially during the trial, with rates of increase for six o...

The challenges to execute wildlife conservation projects successfully have become more complex as anthropogenic changes continue to stress the planet, changing wild lands. As the wild becomes less so, more species are placed in captivity to improve their chances of long-term survival, while concurrently management (and medicine) for free-ranging wildlife has become increasingly important. A var...

Wildlife DNA forensics is an applied field that has emerged from a synthesis of conservation genetic research and forensic genetic practice to meet the increasing need for investigative tools in wildlife law enforcement. This review describes the principal technologies and applications available to wildlife forensic geneticists, focussing on the four most common casework questions: What species...

Hematologic and serum chemistry values are used by veterinarians and wildlife researchers to assess health status and to identify abnormally high or low levels of a particular blood parameter in a target species. For free-ranging lions (Panthera leo) information about these values is scarce. In this study 7 hematologic and 11 serum biochemistry values were evaluated from 485 lions from the Krug...

The Columbia basin subpopulation of pygmy rabbit Brachylagus idahoensis was listed as endangered by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in November 2001, and no pygmy rabbits have been seen in the wild since spring 2002. Captive propagation efforts have attempted to increase population size in preparation for reintroduction of animals into central Washington. Disseminated mycobacteriosi...

This study reports on an investigation of Mycobacterium tuberculosis cases in mostly captive wild animals using molecular typing tools [Variable Number of Tandem Repeat (VNTR) typing and Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism typing]. The investigation included cases from (i) the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa (NZG) recorded between 2002 and 2011; (ii) Johannesburg Zoo, where tub...

Using current methods of age determination, white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) from the same cohort are classified as 1.5-year-old deer when actual age may vary by 6 or more months. We measured mandibular tooth row length (mm) on mandible impressions of 41 (23 males and 18 females) known-age captive white-tailed deer to develop an aging model that would estimate age in days. To test the...

Aircraft collisions with wildlife (primarily birds) are costly in terms of injury or loss of human life, loss of the animals involved, damage to property and business, and the use of lethal control of wildlife at airports worldwide. One potential nonlethal technique to reduce bird–aircraft collisions—pulsed white and wavelength-specific aircraft-mounted light—has been considered for nearly 3 de...

Transposition of diagnostic tests used in domestic livestock species to free-ranging and captive wildlife species has two problems. First, most existing tests have not been adequately validated in domestic livestock. Second, assumptions that a serological test will perform identically in wildlife and livestock species may not be correct, due to differences in pathogenic strains and serovars, ho...