Adrian Phillips testified that an altercation where he was held down by Bayden Williams and only able to watch as the father of his girlfriend was strangled, left him humiliated. Photo / Mike Scott
By
Natalie Akoorie
Open Justice multimedia journalist, WaikatoVIEW PROFILE
WARNING: This article discusses suicide and may be upsetting.
As Adrian Phillips sat on a beach near Miranda and prepared to smoke weed he got a message telling him Bayden Williams was on his way to Thames for tea.
Phillips told the High Court at Hamilton he decided to confront the young father on the Kopu-Hikuai Rd over a fight they’d been involved in earlier in the year, for which he thought Williams owed him an apology.
Phillips is on trial for the murder of his former “mate” Williams, on August 5, 2020.
Last month, the US Forest Service (USFS) announced it would freeze prescribed burn work across all 193 million acres of the land it manages until mid-August.
The decision came on the heels of several prescribed burns that grew out of control in the Southwest US. The biggest of them, the combined Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires, have grown to more than 300,000 acres, the largest in New Mexico history. Hermits Peak began when high winds carried a prescribed fire out of bounds, while Calf Canyon grew out of the smoldering embers of a months-old burn.
Nation-wide pauses on prescribed burns aren’t unprecedented. Last August, USFS Chief Randy Moore ordered his agency to immediately extinguish any fires to avoid stretching resources in a year that he described as “different from any before.” What makes the 2022 review significant, however, is that the Forest Service is using the pause to investigate whether climate change requires retooling fire management strategies.
“We’re seeing some really unprecedented type of [fire] behavior … where we have had prescribed fires escape,” Moore said at a May conference hosted by the International Association of Wildland Fire. “So I think we are doing our due diligence, and we owe it to the American people when we see these things happen to pause.”
Scientists both in and outside the Forest Service agree that regular, low-intensity burns are an essential tool for reducing wildfire risk. In its 10-year wildfire crisis strategy, partly funded by the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Forest Service states that it must double or even quadruple the scope of its fuel reduction work. While it currently burns or thins about 2 million acres a year, it will need to average another 5 million acres over the next decade to hit its targets.
There’s an inherent challenge in restoring that spark. After a century of fire suppression, the same landscapes that stand to benefit from prescribed burns are also the ones most prone to catastrophic wildfires. And a warmer world, combined with staffing shortages in fire crews, makes planning burns in those areas more challenging.
“In 99.84 percent of cases, prescribed fires go as planned,” Moore wrote in his announcement of the policy.
But politicians have often targeted prescribed burns that go wrong, even if they support fire management policies in theory. Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, said in a statement that the Forest Service should “tak[e] full responsibility” for the fires this spring. “The federal government must take a hard look at their fire management practices and make sure they account for a rapidly changing climate.”
Advocates of prescribed fire say that the pause makes some sense.
“Even though I’m a huge proponent of bringing good fire back to the landscape, how can you not take some time to reflect?” says Zander Evans, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and serves as executive director of the Forest Stewards Guild, a nonprofit that advocates for ecological management of forests.
Yet according to Evans, it’s a mistake to fully blame the Forest Service, which was working to address the overgrown forests that make the West increasingly prone to massive fires. “When you look at the area where Calf Canyon burned, we haven’t been able to do restoration [including prescribed burning] in that area. It breaks my heart,” he says. He contrasts it to the western slope of the same mountain range, much of which has been intentionally burned over the last decade. Last year, when a wildfire popped up there in dry conditions, firefighters were able to contain it.
“This is public benefit work,” says Craig Thomas, the founder of the Fire Restoration Group, which advocates for prescribed burns. “The question that we all need to talk about is: What is our honest capacity to predict change over what time frame, and how reliable is it?”
Planning prescribed fires
It’s clear that the rising heat and drought caused by climate change make wildfires more common. But managed fires are based on conditions on the ground, which means they should, ideally, already incorporate climate trends.
Typically, the fire manager—better known as the “burn boss”—writes out a prescription well in advance that specifies the requirements for a burn: from staffing, to the moisture of the forest floor, to the weather forecast. Even then, the boss and a supervisor are supposed to review whether drought or other climate conditions have changed enough to require an amended plan. The burn boss then only greenlights the fire if it meets all the right specs.
When a fire escapes the prescribed boundaries, the Forest Service reviews the problem in what’s called a “lessons learned” report. In the case of the Hermits Peak fire, that will be incorporated in this summer’s federal review, says Julie Anne Overton, public affairs officer for the Santa Fe National Forest, where the prescribed burn was first conducted. But so far, local USFS officials have said that when foresters began the burn, weather conditions and forecasts were within the ranges needed for a safe operation. By their accounts, the fire only escaped when “unexpected erratic winds” picked up, blowing embers into surrounding forests.
“I think what we need to sort out is: Was it a surprise?” Thomas from the Fire Restoration Group says. “Did something happen that no one could predict?”
Why climate change matters
Although burn decisions are supposed to incorporate climate trends, there are good reasons to think that prescribed burning might be harder in a more combustible world.
Most of the time, climate change won’t make it harder to predict the weather, says Tim Brown, a climatologist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada who studies weather prediction, fire, and emergency management decisions.
“I think there are two potential impacts on prescribed fires,” he says. “One is, we are seeing more extreme weather events, and that by itself can make it easy to find yourself outside prescription parameters.”
Still, he says, he doesn’t know the extent to which burn bosses incorporate larger-scale climate data into prescriptions. “We’ve been in a drought,” he explains. “Now, I’m sure [fire managers] are fully aware of that. But does this happen to be the climatological time of year when it’s most windy?” That, in addition to the speed at which a hotter atmosphere dries out plants and soil, could drive rapid changes in fire conditions.
The second impact of climate on prescribed fire has to do with annual fire conditions, Brown says. “Folks are starting to see shorter burn windows.” And that means that more prescribed fires need to be packed into those short bursts.
Thomas also points to the challenges of burning more land in less time. It might take 10 days of prescribed burning to treat a thousand acres, he says; a weather forecast at the beginning of the prescribed burn might not cover the full scope of the project, which means the conditions could change while the fire is underway. With climate change, the risk of that runs higher.
“We have to treat prescribed fire like an emergency.”
Zander Evans, Forest Stewards Guild
According to an email from E. Wade Muelhof, deputy press secretary for USFS, those are the exact questions the agency hopes to ask in its review.
Muelhof says that the Forest Service is still assembling the team of experts for its prescribed burn analysis this summer, but that it intends to include “climate scientists, wildfire researchers, meteorologists, predictive services and social scientists, fire management officers, fuels management specialists, burn bosses, private practitioners, and tribal representatives for current and traditional ecological knowledge.”
According to Muelhof, the team will tackle questions like: “Is the most current research on climate change informing our prescribed fire program? Do we need to adjust our decision-making due to climate change? Are our models accurately accounting for climate change? Do we let models substitute for instincts as decision-makers?”
At the end of the 90-day review, he says, the Forest Service intends to have a clearer sense of “what may need to be changed with burn plans, [and] acceptable risk for the agency with prescribed fire.”
More firefighters wanted
As the Forest Service climate-proofs its burning protocols, experts note that it will also have to expand its staffing for fire lines.
Having more hands on deck can reduce the risk of prescribed burns in different ways. Spot fires can be better controlled when there are ample firefighters on site. But just as importantly, the agency can put in extra work during low-risk seasons if it has more staff on call.
For the most part, federal prescribed burn crews are the same people that respond to wildfires. And the Forest Service’s wildland firefighting is already understaffed for 2022: It’s going into this summer with about 1,000 open seasonal firefighting jobs, and still needs to figure out how to implement a pay raise approved by the new infrastructure bill.
Balancing short staffing, especially in the winter when the agency hires fewer seasonal workers, with the need to treat more land, could push managers to burn more often in risky shoulder seasons, Thomas says.
Evans, of the Forest Stewards Guild, agrees: When conditions are right for prescribed burns, agencies need to have the staff available to take advantage. “We have to treat prescribed fire like an emergency,” he says. “This past winter, there were a few days we had a decent [snow] dump.” Those storms cut down the chances that a fire would spread, providing a ripe opportunity for burning.
Piles of burning brush near Santa Fe National Forest last winter. Forest Stewards Guild.
Muelhof noted that’s a gap the Forest Service plans to study as well. “Questions in this area may include if we have enough personnel for the scale of prescribed fire that needs to be done on the landscape, exploring the tension between personnel for wildfire suppression and prescribed fire, and whether our budget policies play into decision making and the ability to react,” he wrote in his email.
Evans says that the Forest Guild, along with a group of New Mexico nonprofits, has had some success in the last year by hiring a team of local prescribed fire workers who could strike when conditions were right. The group, called the “All Hands All Lands Squad,” was only five people, but supported federal, tribal, and private burns. And that could be a model for burning safely in shorter windows, Evans adds. “We set up this crew so that when we see a storm coming, we have dedicated people who are ready to go.”
Asked about the usefulness of AR-15s, Senator John Thune (R-SD) told CNN: “They are a sporting rifle. It’s something that a lot of people [use] for purposes of going out target shooting — in my state, they use them to shoot prairie dogs and, you know, other types ofvarmints.”
AR-15-style rifles are especially popular forwildlife-killing contests. As the Humane Society of the United States reports: “Texas appears to have more wildlife killing contests than any other state, with at least 155 taking place since 2015. The events target bobcats, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, badgers, jackrabbits, mountain lions, ringtails, opossums and other species.” New Mexico, one of the few states to restrict wildlife-killing contests, recently bannedcoyote-killingcontests, but prairie-dog-killing contests are still legal.
As the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for civilian arms manufacturers, points out, the…
Consortium receives £1.5 million from Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council and Defra to develop new strategies to tackle future avian influenza outbreaks.
Scientists are joining forces in a new £1.5 million research consortium to tackle avian influenza.
The consortium has received the money from the Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council and Defra to develop new strategies to tackle future bird flu outbreaks.
Outbreaks occur each year due to the UK’s position in the migratory flight path for wild birds flying across northern Europe, but the country was particularly hit in the winter.
Prevention zones
More than 100 cases – including of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza – were reported across the UK and temporary bird flu prevention zones, which required kept birds to be housed indoors, were set up by the CVOs for the UK, Scotland, Wales, and later Northern Ireland in November.
An eight-strong consortium – headed by the APHA and including The Pirbright Institute, The Roslin Institute, the RVC, universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Nottingham, and Imperial College London – will develop strategies to tackle outbreaks that can then be shared with international partners.
Partnership
The project will bring together expertise from microbiologists, epidemiologists, virologists, genomics specialists and mathematical modellers.
Research will include:
why some strains form larger and longer outbreaks
the difference in transmission and infection in different bird populations
spread of infection over time and across species
resistance
predicting how it will evolve and spread in the future
It will also look, for example, at why some birds, such as ducks, are more resistant to bird flu strains.
Combine expertise
UK CVO Christine Middlemiss said: “This new consortium will allow us to combine our expertise at a national level to increase the speed and quality of our research, ensuring we can develop new strategies to aid our efforts against this insidious disease, and hopefully in time reduce the impact on the poultry sector.”
APHA head of virology and project manager Ian Brown said: “This investment in a new research consortium will bring together the greatest minds from eight world-leading British institutions to address gaps in our understanding of bird flu, helping us to control the spread of the disease, while furthering UK animal health science and ensuring we maintain our world-leading reputation in the field.”
Proud
Munir Iqbal, head of Pirbright’s avian influenza virus group, said: “As an institute we are extremely proud to be part of this.
“Avian influenza is an economically important virus that has devastating effects on the poultry industry; therefore, improved understanding of the virus will give us more insight into how it spreads, and inform our control strategies to prevent it from spreading to people and other animals.”
Guillaume Fournié, senior research fellow at the RVC, said: “The scale of the incursion of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus in the UK and Europe over the winters 2020-21 and 2021-22 makes it necessary to review gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of these viruses, and especially the role of wild birds in spreading, and potentially maintaining, their circulation.”
Virus dynamics
Dr Fournié added: “As part of this project, the RVC will contribute to improve our understanding of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus dynamics in wild bird populations, at the interface between wild birds and domestic poultry, and its potential to cause large outbreaks among farms.
“This information will allow us to inform the design of more targeted surveillance activities and risk mitigation interventions better tailored to the UK poultry sector.”
In this photo provided by Wonders of the Mekong taken on June 14, 2022, a team of Cambodian and American scientists and researchers, along with Fisheries Administration officials prepare to release a giant freshwater stingray back into the Mekong River in the northeastern province of Stung Treng, Cambodia. A local fisherman caught the 661-pound (300-kilogram) stingray, which set the record for the world’s largest known freshwater fish and earned him a $600 reward. (Chhut Chheana/Wonders of the Mekong via AP)AP
Signed-in readers now can bookmark stories to read later.
BANGKOK — The world’s largest recorded freshwater fish, a giant stingray, has been caught in the Mekong River in Cambodia, according to scientists from the Southeast Asian nation and the United States.
The stingray, captured on June 13, measured almost 13 feet from snout to tail and weighed slightly under 660 pounds, according to a statement Monday by Wonders of the Mekong, a joint Cambodian-U.S. research project.
The previous record for a freshwater fish was a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, discovered in Thailand in 2005, the group said.
The stingray was snagged by a local fisherman south of Stung Treng in northeastern Cambodia. The fisherman alerted a nearby team of scientists from the Wonders of the Mekong project, which has publicized its conservation work in communities along the river.
The scientists arrived within hours of getting a post-midnight call with the news and were amazed at what they saw.
“Yeah, when you see a fish this size, especially in freshwater, it is hard to comprehend, so I think all of our team was stunned,” Wonders of the Mekong leader Zeb Hogan said in an online interview from the University of Nevada in Reno. The university is partnering with the Cambodian Fisheries Administration and USAID, the U.S. government’s international development agency.
Freshwater fish are defined as those that spend their entire lives in freshwater, as opposed to giant marine species such as bluefin tuna and marlin, or fish that migrate between fresh and saltwater like the huge beluga sturgeon.
In this photo provided by Wonders of the Mekong taken on June 14, 2022, a man touches a giant freshwater stingray before being released back into the Mekong River in the northeastern province of Stung Treng, Cambodia. A local fisherman caught the 661-pound (300-kilogram) stingray, which set the record for the world’s largest known freshwater fish and earned him a $600 reward. (Chhut Chheana/Wonders of the Mekong via AP)AP
The stingray’s catch was not just about setting a new record, he said.
“The fact that the fish can still get this big is a hopeful sign for the Mekong River, ” Hogan said, noting that the waterway faces many environmental challenges.
The Mekong River runs through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is home to several species of giant freshwater fish but environmental pressures are rising. In particular, scientists fear a major program of dam building in recent years may be seriously disrupting spawning grounds.
“Big fish globally are endangered. They’re high-value species. They take a long time to mature. So if they’re fished before they mature, they don’t have a chance to reproduce,” Hogan said. “A lot of these big fish are migratory, so they need large areas to survive. They’re impacted by things like habitat fragmentation from dams, obviously impacted by overfishing. So about 70% of giant freshwater fish globally are threatened with extinction, and all of the Mekong species.”
In this photo provided by FISHBIO taken on June 14, 2022, village residents watch as a team of Cambodian and American scientists and researchers, along with Fisheries Administration officials prepare to release a giant freshwater stingray back into the Mekong River in the northeastern province of Stung Treng, Cambodia. A local fisherman caught the 661-pound (300-kilogram) stingray, which set the record for the world’s largest known freshwater fish and earned him a $600 reward. (Sinsamout Ounboundisane/FISHBIO via AP)AP
The team that rushed to the site inserted a tagging device near the tail of the mighty fish before releasing it. The device will send tracking information for the next year, providing unprecedented data on giant stingray behavior in Cambodia.
“The giant stingray is a very poorly understood fish. Its name, even its scientific name, has changed several times in the last 20 years,” Hogan said. “It’s found throughout Southeast Asia, but we have almost no information about it. We don’t know about its life history. We don’t know about its ecology, about its migration patters.”
Researchers say it’s the fourth giant stingray reported in the same area in the past two months, all of them females. They think this may be a spawning hotspot for the species.
Local residents nicknamed the stingray “Boramy,” or “full moon,” because of its round shape and because the moon was on the horizon when it was freed on June 14. In addition to the honor of having caught the record-breaker, the lucky fisherman was compensated at market rate, meaning he received a payment of around $600.
Corporate developers have deployed the climate card in an apparent attempt to turn conservation-minded Americans against each other and convince coastal communities to hand over our most precious resources.
By Roger Berkowitz and Sarah SchumannUpdated June 20, 2022, 3:00 a.m.
Drift boats anchor in large clusters in the Naknek River, on June 19, 2020, awaiting the start of red salmon fishing in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.COREY ARNOLD/NYT
In late May, the Environmental Protection Agency revived proceedings under the Clean Water Act that, if finalized, would prevent destructive copper and gold mining in one of the world’s most valuable salmon watersheds: Bristol Bay, Alaska. As members of the nation’s fishing and seafood industries, we applaud this move and urge the EPA to finalize robust watershed protections as swiftly as possible.
Bristol Bay produces 50 percent of the world’s sockeye salmon, which in turn support 15,000 fishing and seafood jobs and sustain the area’s Yup’ik, Dena’ina, and Alutiiq ancestral ways of life. In recent years, Bristol Bay has been cresting the wave of one record-breaking harvest after another, at a time when salmon returns to other Alaska watersheds have trended downward. The nation cannot afford to put that abundance at risk, and full protection under theClean Water Act would ensure that it never has to.
Advertisement
Regrettably, mine developers have latched onto a new argument to salvage the fate of their hapless investments: the urgency of solving climate change. In a recent press release, the CEO of the Pebble Limited Partnership, which owns mineral rights to the largest deposit in the Bristol Bay watershed, called the EPA’s move to protect Bristol Bay “a giant step backward for the Biden administration’s climate change goals.” Presumably referring to the large amounts of copper needed to mass-produce components of renewable energy systems and electric vehicles, this statement appears to be a last-ditch effort to fool the public into accepting a mining proposal so destructive that 2.5 million comments have been submitted opposing it since 2012.
Get Weekend Reads from Ideas
A weekly newsletter from the Boston Globe Ideas section, forged at the intersection of ‘what if’ and ‘why not.’Enter EmailSign Up
The sight of a developer so cunningly transforming the incontrovertible urgency of climate change into a cudgel to beat back environmental scrutiny should give us all pause.
ADVERTISING
Advertisement
In New England, too, we are being told that jeopardizing fishery-supporting ecosystems is the price we must pay to solve climate change. Here, the argument is coming from offshore wind proponents, who are working hand-in-glove with the Biden administration to set a course to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — from a baseline of almost zero in just eight years — and 110 gigawatts by 2050, with most of the initial development taking place off New England and the mid-Atlantic and limited environmental review taking place prior to the issuance of leases.
What would this scale of development look like? With today’s technology, 110 gigawatts would be almost 8,500 turbines — 137 times the size of the Vineyard Wind facility planned for south of Cape Cod. It would mean near-continuous construction on the continental shelf for three decades. While no one knows what the ecological impacts of such construction might be (and that’s precisely our point), evidence suggests they may include alterations of the acoustic and sensory environment, electromagnetic fields, and current and wind patterns, affecting a variety of species whose survival depends on these aspects of the underwater world.
Offshore wind off New England and mining in the Bristol Bay watershed are linked by more than just spurious ultimatums invoking climate catastrophe as the inevitable consequence of keeping these wild places wild. It also happens that offshore wind, which requires hundreds of miles of electrical cables measuring up to 11 inches in diameter, is the most copper-intensive of all renewable energy technologies. Every mile of cable laid across the ocean floor will spur greater pressure to mine copper in precious, irreplaceable places like Bristol Bay.
Advertisement
No one has more at stake from climate change than those who catch wild fish for a living. But fishermen won’t succumb to false dichotomies. Our leaders must get serious about pursuing solutions that work for both the climate and aquatic ecosystems — not one at the expense of the other. Addressing climate change is indeed urgent, but this urgency is no excuse for allowing reckless mining in Bristol Bay or potentially reckless energy development in New England waters.
Roger Berkowitz is founder and CEO of Legal Sea Foods Marketplace and president of the Massachusetts Seafood Collaborative. Sarah Schumann fishes commercially in Rhode Island and Alaska and coordinates the Fishery Friendly Climate Action campaign.
PORTLAND,Ore.— The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted new rules today that reduce some of the state’s trap check times, making it less likely that animals will suffer for extended periods of time and more likely that non-target wildlife can be safely released.
These new rules require trappers using live restraining devices to check their traps every 48 hours. The changes were adopted by a vote of 6-1.
Oregon previously had four different trap check times, ranging from 48 hours to 30 days. For animals the state deems “predatory,” check times for live restraining traps ranged from 72 hours to seven days. Today’s decision reduces those trap check times to 48 hours. The commission also voted to reduce the trap check times for kill traps or snares from 30 days to 14 days.
Something was wrong with the foxes. That was what callers to the Dane County Humane Society in Wisconsin kept saying in April, as they reported fox kits, or young foxes, behaving in strange ways: shaking, seizing or struggling to stand. The kits, which were often lethargic and wandering by themselves, also seemed unusually easy to approach, showing little fear of humans.
“We just kept getting calls,” said Erin Lemley, a wildlife veterinary technician at the humane society’s wildlife center. “And the foxes started coming in.”
Some of the kits that were admitted for treatment were quiet and withdrawn, she said. Others stumbled around or had seizures, their heads ticcing, their eyes flicking rhythmically. After the staff ruled out rabies, low blood sugar and other potential causes, laboratory testing revealed a surprising culprit: a highly virulent strain of bird flu.https://5e2990388dffc32040b40c52dcc57abe.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
“It was not a fun surprise,” said Dr. Shawna Hawkins, a zoo and wildlife veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The virus, a type of bird flu known as Eurasian H5N1, has been spreading rapidly in the United States this spring, infecting flocks of farmed poultry in 36 states and prompting mass culls of domestic birds.
At least seven U.S. states have detected the virus in red fox kits, to which the pathogen appeared to be particularly lethal. Two bobcats in Wisconsin, a coyote pup in Michigan and skunks in Canada have also tested positive for the virus, as have foxes, otters, a lynx, a polecat and a badger in Europe. (Two human cases, one in the United States and one in Britain, have been reported as well, both of which were in people who had close contact with birds.)
There is no evidence that mammals play a significant role in spreading the virus, and the risk to humans remains low, experts said. “This is very much still an avian virus,” said Richard Webby, an influenza virus expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
“What it’s going to take for this virus to transition from being a duck or a chicken virus to being a mammalian virus is more chances to replicate in those mammalian hosts,” Webby said. “So that’s why when we see these mammals being infected by this virus, we do take notice.”
Twitching foxes
The new lineage of the virus spread through Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia last year, sparking outbreaks in wild and domestic birds. It also showed up in a handful of wild mammals, including fox kits in the Netherlands in the spring of 2021.
In some bird species, the virus caused obvious neurological symptoms, and many infected foxes displayed abnormal behaviors, too. They twitched, walked in circles and salivated excessively. In the most severe cases, the foxes developed seizures; death often followed shortly after, experts said.
Post-mortem examinations revealed that many of the kits had pneumonia, said Dr. Betsy Elsmo, a diagnostic pathologist at the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory who performed the necropsies. When she examined the animals’ brain tissue under a microscope, Elsmo saw clear signs of damage.
“There was a lot of inflammation in the brain microscopically,” she said. “The pattern of injury that I saw was consistent with a viral lesion.”https://5e2990388dffc32040b40c52dcc57abe.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
So far, the virus appears to be taking a greater toll on fox kits than adult foxes, potentially because the young animals do not yet have fully developed immune systems, experts said.
But the overall infection and mortality rate is unknown. “We’re just getting kind of anecdotal reports in nature right now,” said Michelle Carstensen, the wildlife health program supervisor for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
Wisconsin officials also detected the virus in two adult bobcats this spring. “Both bobcats showed reduced to no fear of humans,” Dr. Lindsey Long, wildlife veterinarian for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said in an email. “They were noted sitting on porches and in close proximity to human activity without the usual fear response.” One bobcat seemed to be shivering, while the other appeared to be having trouble breathing, she added. The bobcats, which were euthanized, had microscopic brain lesions that were “pretty much identical” to those in the affected foxes, Elsmo said.https://5e2990388dffc32040b40c52dcc57abe.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
The virus was also recently detected in a coyote pup in Michigan, said Dr. Megan Moriarty, the wildlife veterinary specialist at the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
Scientists suspect that the animals are acquiring the virus by eating infected birds. In a laboratory study, researchers had previously demonstrated that red foxes that were fed infected bird carcasses could contract, and then shed, the virus.
Although it is possible that the virus has evolved in ways that make it better at infecting mammals, scientists say that the most probable explanation for the sudden rise in infected mammals is that this lineage is infecting enormous numbers of wild birds, increasing the odds that hunters and scavengers might stumble across infected food sources.https://5e2990388dffc32040b40c52dcc57abe.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
So far, the virus does not appear to be causing enough illness or death in wild mammals to put these species at risk, experts said. And there is no evidence of sustained mammal-to-mammal transmission. “Mammals are generally considered to be dead-ends for highly pathogenic avian influenza,” Moriarty said. An early analysis of viral genomes from the Wisconsin fox kits suggests that the infections are essentially a series of one-offs — the result of individual foxes coming into contact with infected birds rather than foxes transmitting the virus to each other. “The preliminary data that we have suggests that these are all independent spillover events,” Elsmo said.
But much remains unknown, including whether the virus will establish itself in wild birds for the long haul, which could pose a sustained risk to mammals.
And even isolated mammalian infections provide the virus with new opportunities to evolve. “There’s a risk of it adapting to and then transmitting between mammals, and then you have a new problem,” said Dr. Jolianne Rijks, a veterinarian at the Dutch Wildlife Health Center. Some state officials said that they had started more routinely testing sick mammals for the virus, especially ones with neurological symptoms. Animals that test positive should also have samples of their virus sequenced so scientists can monitor for any potentially worrisome changes, Webby said.https://5e2990388dffc32040b40c52dcc57abe.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html?n=0
Experts also encourage members of the public to report any wild animals that appear to be acting strangely. “That’s how all this started,” Elsmo said, “as citizens seeing abnormally behaving kits and reporting them.”
Watch now: Phil Hands draws a cartoon about Ron JohnsonPlay Video
spaceplay / pause
qunload | stop
ffullscreen
shift+←→slower / faster
↑↓volume
mmute
←→seek
.seek to previous
12…6seek to 10%, 20% … 60%
Follow along as State Journal cartoonist Phil Hands draws his latest cartoon about the decision of U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Oshkosh, to run for reelection.
James Ault uses some trivial characteristics of the AR-15 to justify his false claim that it is a hunting rifle rather than an assault rifle (“AR-15 is natural evolution,”Our Readers’ Views, June 15). It is more instructive to look at relevant characteristics of the AR-15. Its ammunition is the 5.56 NATO cartridge, the same as the M16. This is the cartridge that all NATO armies, including the U.S. Army, must use in their assault rifles. The barrel velocity of the AR-15 is the same as that of the M16 at 3,300 feet/second.
To reload the firing chamber, the AR-15 and M16 use exactly the same semi-automatic gas-piston system. It is key to the functioning of an assault rifle. While the AR-15 is sold without the fully automatic function of the M16, fully automatic function can easily be added to…
/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/nzme/QBX7QUSGFBEDPWACZGDJLJJES4.jpg)
