RE: Bird Botulism? Gulls are also susceptible to west nile virus (see Washington Post article)

["Pfister, Mark A." <MPfister@co.lake.il.us>]

West Nile's Widening Toll
Impact on North American Wildlife Far Worse Than on Humans

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 28, 2002; Page A01


First there was the silence of the crows.

Then the horses fell ill -- more than 14,000 this past summer alone -
- along with squirrels, chipmunks and mountain goats. Even mighty
raptors -- eagles, hawks and great horned owls -- dropped from the
sky.

Now scientists are beginning to take stock of West Nile virus's
North American invasion, and they are taken aback by the scale and
sweep of its ecological impact. While the human toll dominated the
nation's attention this year -- the virus killed at least 241 people
and infected many thousands more -- the effects on wildlife were far
worse.

The virus swept westward with alarming rapidity this year, appearing
in almost every state in the nation -- an astonishing expansion for
a bug that had never been seen in the Western Hemisphere until three
years ago. Equally unexpected, nearly 200 species of birds, reptiles
and mammals fell ill from West Nile this year, including rabbits and
reindeer, pelicans and bats, even a few dogs and cats. The virus
also slammed dozens of exotic species in about 100 U.S. zoos,
killing cockatiels, emus, seals, flamingos and penguins. Florida
alligator farms lost more than 200 of the reptiles.

"In my years of working, I've never seen a mosquito-borne virus
spread so quickly," said Robert G. McLean with the Agriculture
Department's National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Colo.

Indeed, the epidemic has so resembled a bioterrorism attack that the
nation's zoos -- which spearheaded an effort to track West Nile's
march and mount emergency vaccinations -- could end up with
potentially important roles in the emerging arena of homeland
security. Just last month, in a hastily organized effort reminiscent
of President Bush's smallpox plan, officials at two California zoos
inoculated their endangered California condors with an experimental
vaccine that may be the animals' only hope for survival.

West Nile is not fatal in all animals, and over time some species
are expected to adapt. But even partial dropoffs in key populations
could have serious consequences. Rodent populations could blossom in
areas where raptors are dying, and pest birds such as house sparrows
may be increasing where crows are absent.

The worst is still ahead, scientists say. Come spring, West Nile is
expected to complete its push to the West Coast, home to endangered
whooping cranes and economically important flocks of domestic geese.
The virus is also poised to leap to the subtropics, where rare birds
and other vulnerable creatures already face formidable threats to
their survival.

"Once it gets to the tropics, where you've got species already
stressed by habitat destruction and you have the potential for year-
round mosquito transmission, some of those populations are not going
to make it," said Peter Marra, an animal ecologist and West Nile
specialist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in
Edgewater, Md. "I'm concerned about parrots and hummingbird
populations. There's not that many of them left."


North American Debut
West Nile made its North American debut in the fall of 1999,
discovered in a dead New York crow. Scientists don't know how the
virus reached U.S. shores -- perhaps it hid inside a single infected
bird imported from the Middle East. But one thing is certain, said
Stephen Ostroff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) in Atlanta: "There's no way that West Nile is going to go
away."

The virus appears no more virulent in Americans than in other people
around the world, and scientists suspect that the population will
gradually gain immunity through low-level exposures. That is the
situation today in countries where the virus has been active for
many years. Most people in those countries have antibodies to the
virus from early childhood, and serious complications or death from
West Nile are rare.

But in North American wildlife, the virus has proven to be unusually
aggressive and capable of infecting a surprisingly diverse array of
animals.

"Most viruses tend to be rather host-specific, but that's not the
case with what we were seeing," said Tracey McNamara, chief of
pathology for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has its
headquarters at the Bronx Zoo, where the first infected crow was
found.

It is still unclear how many of the 200 or so species struck by West
Nile infection have suffered significant population declines. But a
consensus is emerging that among birds, in particular, far more
species are being hurt than scientists had predicted -- not just the
crows, ravens and jays that were known to be especially vulnerable.

"There's been a huge die-off of raptors," said McLean of the
agriculture department's Fort Collins lab.

The experience of the University of Minnesota's Raptor Center, which
rehabilitates sick and injured raptors, was typical. "In mid-August,
we had our first case: a great horned owl," said spokeswoman Sue
Kirchoff. "In September and October, we were just inundated."

The center took in 70 ailing birds of prey, including great horned
owls, eagles and red-tailed hawks. Officials there presume that if
that many were found and brought to the center, countless others
died in the wild, with potentially far-ranging repercussions.

"From a biological standpoint, raptors take longer to mature and
have fewer offspring" than smaller birds, said Patti Bright of the
American Bird Conservancy. "Whether they'll be able to rebound,
well, we just don't know." It will take a while longer, Bright and
others said, before it is known whether rodent populations are
taking advantage of West Nile's impact on birds of prey.

The evidence for declines in songbirds and other small avian species
is less direct, in part because they are so much less
visible. "We're simply not going to know for a while with the
smaller birds, because we're not going to find the bodies," said
David S. Wilcove, a professor of ecology at Princeton University who
has been studying West Nile.

Still, researchers this year found more than 140 bird species
sickened or dead with West Nile, including chickadees, doves,
grackles, gulls, herons, kingfishers, pelicans, sparrows, swans,
turkeys, warblers, woodpeckers and wrens. And while most of those
species will probably pull through as resistant individuals mate and
pass their antiviral vigor to their offspring, ornithologists expect
that others will not be so lucky.

They point to the experience in Hawaii, where the arrival of avian
pox virus in the 1890s and avian malaria in the 1930s drove dozens
of species to extinction or close to it. "Those viruses just
hammered Hawaiian forest birds," Wilcove said. "That illustrates the
potential for harm when a disease organism encounters a naïve
population."

Bird-to-Bird Infection
Several unexpected aspects of the epidemic have fed Wilcove's and
others' pessimism.

One surprise is that the virus can be transmitted directly from bird
to bird, not only via mosquitoes. Raptors can acquire the virus by
eating infected prey, and some birds can apparently spread the virus
in their droppings. There's also evidence that some birds can pass
the virus directly to their chicks while they're still inside the
egg.

Another surprise is that West Nile virus can be transmitted directly
from adult mosquitoes to their eggs, so that newly hatched aquatic
larvae are born infected. That could make insecticides, which
typically kill only adults, less effective.

Scientists have also been surprised to learn that the virus can
persevere through the winter, even in many Northern states.
Researchers are not sure which animals are serving as the virus's
winter host, but the phenomenon is allowing the disease to spread
year round and is giving the summer viral eruption an earlier start
each year.

Yet another surprise is the number of mosquito species -- 36 at last
count -- that carry the virus. "This is a virus that's never seen a
mosquito it doesn't like," said Ostroff of the CDC. "That's not
typical for most pathogenic viruses."

If that weren't enough, some researchers suspect that West Nile
might be capable of mixing its genetic material with that of a
closely related virus, such as the one that causes St. Louis
encephalitis, if both viruses were to infect a single animal. Other
viruses have periodically produced such hybrids, creating in the
process an entirely new and dangerous bug.

"This virus is amazing," said CDC virologist Robert S.
Lanciotti. "I've been in this field almost 20 years, and I've never
seen anything like it."

Neither has the state of California, but it is about to, experts say.

"It's going to spread to the West Coast big time by next year, no
question," USDA's McLean said. "Each habitat is different, but
California seems to be an area that has all the factors you need for
a major spread. I think they're going to be facing major problems in
humans, horses, birds and other animals. I just don't see any
barriers."

Such predictions have a particularly ominous ring for researchers on
the California Condor Recovery Team, who have been struggling to
bring the ungainly bird back from the brink of extinction. They knew
that this summer's experimental inoculations of zoo birds with the
horse vaccine -- the only West Nile vaccine approved for marketing
in this country -- had been disappointing, with many birds failing
to develop protective antibodies. So in November, veterinarians at
the Los Angeles and San Diego zoos injected into the thighs of their
condors an experimental vaccine to try to confer immunity before the
spring egg-laying season.

"We had absolutely zero negative effects," said Cynthia Stringfield,
veterinarian of the Los Angeles Zoo, and preliminary blood tests
suggested that the birds "had a fantastic immune response."

If further tests show that the vaccine works, the team will try to
vaccinate all 128 captive California condors and the approximately
70 birds now living in the wild.

What Zoos Do
Zoos may take the lead in the fight against West Nile in more ways
than that. More than 100 U.S. zoos and wildlife parks have joined a
newly created information-sharing network, which has its
headquarters at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, to track West Nile and
other emerging infections in exotic animals.

Some scientists suspect the network may even prove useful in the
cause of homeland security, by providing a sensitive,
nationwide "sentinel system" for detecting the first hints of a
bioterrorism attack. After all, zoo officials noted, New York crows
were dying in droves in the fall of 1999, but no one figured out
that West Nile was the culprit -- or that the deaths were related to
a spate of unusual human illnesses -- until a crow died on the
grounds of the Bronx Zoo.

Zoos, it turns out, take every death seriously -- even those of non-
zoo animals on zoo grounds -- because any death can mark the start
of a devastating epidemic. "Every dead animal is picked up and
immediately necropsied," said McNamara, the Bronx Zoo
pathologist. "That's not true in Central Park."

When the Bronx crow was found to be teeming with West Nile, it was
the first evidence that the Old World virus had leaped the Atlantic -
- and the beginning of the recognition that an epidemic was already
underway in humans. With a system in place, McNamara said, a zoo vet
could be the first to know if terrorists have released a human or
animal pathogen. The consortium is seeking federal funding.

Still, some scientists fear that the nation may soon become less
able to prevent outbreaks such as that of West Nile -- whether
accidental or intentional. They said the U.S. system for screening
incoming animal, plant and microbial life -- a patchwork of more
than 20 agencies -- has long been undervalued and underfunded. Now
the largest component, the Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service, is to become part of the new Homeland
Security Department. That's leading many ecologists to fear that it
will narrow its focus to classical bioterrorism pathogens such as
anthrax, leaving the nation more vulnerable to civilian bugs such as
West Nile.

"I have a feeling that beetles in imported wood packaging are not
going to be at the top of the list," said Faith T. Campbell,
director of the invasive species program at the American Lands
Alliance in Washington. Yet the recent U.S. invasion by Asian
longhorned beetles, which arrived in wood packaging from China, is
expected to cost the nation as much as $669 billion in insect-
destroyed trees in urban areas alone in coming decades, Campbell
said.

Whether West Nile ends up decimating many animal populations or
settling in as a mere high-grade ecological disturbance, the
epidemic should be a wake-up call to beef up the nation's
surveillance and quarantine network, said Princeton's Wilcove.

"We may be lucky this time and get by with minimal losses of human
life and minimal losses of wildlife, but this is not going to be the
last disease to get into this country," he said. "One of these days
we're going to draw the short straw."


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard L Whitman [mailto:richard_whitman@usgs.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2003 12:42 PM
To: beachnet@great-lakes.net
Subject: Bird Botulism?


I have a question?

A few summers ago we started noticing gulls dying in particularlly high
number in August at a beach we were studying.  These birds at first seemed
'drunk' at first, then began losing coordination and equilibrium.  They
would then lose the ability to walk and would soon died thereafter. That
was the same time old masses of anaerobic Cladophora was accumulating on
the beach.  Lately, I've been wondering if these bird might have picked up
some botulism from the algal mats.  As anybody else noticed this
phenomenon? Can you remember if it was coincidental with these anaerobic
mats or during this season?   Would you be on the look out this summer for
it, especially if you have big mats of Cladophora?  Let me know what you
think.


Richard Whitman



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