By Mark P. Nelder, Public Health Ontario<\/p>\n
——————<\/p>\n
William R Maples\u2019<\/a> Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist<\/i>, created a lasting memory for me. Aside from the fascinating science, Dead Men Do Tell Tales<\/i> underscored that passion and resourcefulness is the key to learning.<\/p>\n With an interest in blowfly ecology and ectoparasites, I set out to study these two fields as side projects during my graduate research at University of South Alabama<\/a> (MSc) and Clemson University<\/a> (PhD). Yes, \u201cside projects\u201d is a phrase that can send any supervisor running in fear, but I was lucky.<\/p>\n During my research on black fly larvae and their gut fungi<\/a> in Alabama, I initially thought that the undersides of bridges (easiest place to look for streams and black flies; #overlyhonestmethods<\/a>) are where headless white-tailed deer went to die. These morbid scenes of poaching were both a source of amazement and one of convenience – easily accessed streams with black fly larvae accompanied by robust populations of blowflies and louse flies (my first sight of the very cool Lipoptena mazamae<\/i><\/a>). These deer were just a gateway carcass, leading to a downward spiral of seeking out additional species of dead wildlife and their ectoparasites. I was now a roadkill prospector.<\/p>\n Realizing that I needed experience with ectoparasites, prior to starting research on biting flies and ectoparasites of South Carolina zoos, I turned to the sometimes flattened, bloated, and unrecognizable critters I saw on my daily drive to campus. Equipped with latest intelligence on a fresh carcass, all I needed was a garbage bag, latex gloves, and a vehicle.<\/p>\n Roads pose a real threat to animal populations. The numbers are staggering, as reported by @TetZoo<\/a> or Darren Naish in Dead Animals at the Roadside<\/a>. In Belgium, an estimated 230,000 and 350,000 hedgehogs fall victim to vehicles per year. Not exploring this biodiversity source would constitute a wasted opportunity.<\/p>\n Insects and roads do not mix either. In Japan, a study of two routes resulted in 5000 dead insects per kilometer, collections dominated by Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, and Diptera (Yamada et al. 2010<\/a>).<\/p>\n Roadkill are ideal subjects for biodiversity studies (the vertebrate hosts, along with their ectoparasites and internal parasites). As One Health<\/a> opens the doors to collaboration between the fields of human medicine, veterinary medicine, and the environment, scientists often remain confined in their respective silos. Roadkill offers a potentially important source of data on zoonoses and generate collaboration between veterinarians, entomologists, microbiologists, ecologists, and others.<\/p>\n Interest in roadkill science is about as old as the automobile, albeit slower wildlife succumbed to horse drawn carriages of the 1800s. AW Schorger had more than a passing interest in roadkill, identifying 64 species of birds from 1932 to 1950, on the same roads between Madison, Wisconsin and Freeport, Illinois<\/a>. Avian roadkill was dominated by English (House) Sparrows (N = 2784), Red-headed Woodpeckers (389), American Robins (310), Ring-necked Pheasants (271), Screech Owls (235), and Northern Flickers (230). Imagine the possible research if Schorger had a curious entomologist to tag along on these trips and to inspect each bird.<\/p>\n Transportation ecology is a relatively new field that looks to study how wildlife interacts with our roads and how road design can minimize wildlife impact. The University of California Davis and partners have established a citizen-science project that allows the public to report roadkill on California highways, California Roadkill Observation System<\/a> (see Maine<\/a> and Idaho<\/a>). Championed by the Toronto Zoo, the Ontario Road Ecology Group<\/a> looks to combat the impact of roads on biodiversity in southern Ontario. Yet another is the South African initiative Wildlife Road Traffic Accidents \u2013 A Biodiversity Research Project<\/a>. These programs offer an existing infrastructure that provides the basis for longitudinal studies of ectoparasites and their hosts.<\/p>\n Aside from the basic understanding of host-ectoparasite relationships, roadkill are increasingly becoming a tool for hypothesis testing. A few examples are worth mentioning here. The Cardiff University Otter Project<\/a> provided road-killed otters to test hypotheses surrounding otters, ticks, and climate. The prevalence, but not intensity, of the tick Ixodes hexagonus<\/i><\/a> infestation on otters was associated with higher Central England temperatures, while both prevalence and intensity were associated with positive phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation.<\/p>\n Without roadkill, we would not know that as lice burden increases in barn owls, the number of pectinate claw teeth decreases and bill hook length increases (Bush et al. 2012<\/a>). Bush and colleagues also noted rodent ectoparasites on barn owls; e.g., the louse Hoplopleura acanthopus<\/i><\/a> <\/i>(normally found on rats) and the flea Malaraeus telchinus<\/i> (from mice and voles). Is this a potential example of incipient evolution through host switching?<\/p>\n Roadkill prospecting excited me (and still does)\u2026.not unlike an unexplored stream has excited many a black fly expert, as an illuminated cloth at night for the moth lover, and as CDC light trap the mosquito ecologist. As Dr. Diane Kelly<\/a> said in her excellent Story Collider tale Confronting Death on the Road<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n When you open up an animal, there is all kinds of awesome in there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Mark P. Nelder, Public Health Ontario —————— William R Maples\u2019 Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist, created a lasting memory for me. Aside from the fascinating science, Dead Men Do Tell Tales underscored that passion and resourcefulness is the key to learning. With an interest in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[473,552,494,513],"tags":[748,593,749,750],"class_list":["post-3684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-fr","category-natural-history-fr","category-public-sector-fr","category-research-fr","tag-mark-nelder-fr","tag-medical-entomology-fr","tag-parasitology-fr","tag-roadkill-fr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3684"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5583,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3684\/revisions\/5583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esc-sec.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}