UC Davis is working to help rectify the damage done by the oil spill that occurred in the Gulf Coast over three weeks ago – a cause of great concern among the scientific community due to its potential impact on wildlife.

The Oiled Wildlife Care Network (OWCN), a program administered by the Wildlife Health Center at UC Davis, aims to clean and rehabilitate wildlife affected by oil spills. The program is involved daily with activities in the recovery effort in the Gulf Coast, and is watchful for new developments and data.

OWCN Field Operations Specialist Nils Warnock is apprehensive about the vulnerability of wildlife following the oil spill.

“It could have great and long-lasting impacts on the wildlife there,” Warnock said.

According to Warnock, when oil comes in contact with a bird, it influences how feathers thermo-regulate the bird, which often leads to hypothermia. Influence on thermo-regulation is one of many harmful impacts that oil has on birds.

“It is toxic through ingestion, and will cause burns on the skin,” Warnock said.

The oil spill comes in a difficult time, Warnock said, as this is the peak migratory period for birds coming from Central and South America.

Much emphasis is being placed on restricting the oil’s penetration to the shoreline, which would increase the numbers of wildlife affected.

“Generally, it is more probable that different species will come in contact with the oil if it makes it ashore,” Warnock said.

The longevity of the impacts of the spill is still uncertain, but it could last for decades, according to Warnock, who believes this is one of the largest oil spills to happen in North America.

“People should be worried because it has the potential to affect lots of peoples’ livelihoods, along with having severe economic impacts for the economy there [Gulf Coast],” Warnock said.

UC Davis, one of the leaders in the world in responding to oil spills, has already dispatched wildlife veterinarian and OWCN director Mike Ziccardi to the scene of the spill.

Ziccardi has been in Louisiana for almost two weeks and is helping coordinate wildlife recovery and rehabilitation efforts. Through his regular maintenance of a blog for the OWCN while in the Gulf Coast; Ziccardi describes the situation as attracting increased amounts of attention from both media outlets and government.

“Today was another good one [day] for the Mammal/Turtle Unit, though the political and media winds are swirling a bit fiercer,” he said on May 3.

Ziccardi mentioned in his blog that the number of turtles found dead as a result of contact with oil remains at zero. There has been confusion among the media in terms of the 20 dead turtles that washed ashore in Gulfport, Mississippi- an area known for a particularly high number of strandings this time of the year.

“There are excellent biologists here who have a huge amount of knowledge of turtle ecology, as well as an extensive volunteer network of ‘paraprofessionals’ who yearly survey these beaches to monitor the nests,” Ziccardi said.  “With this type of support, I think we stand an excellent chance of dealing with oiled nests and hatchlings if it should happen, when it could have been an extremely difficult undertaking without this level of infrastructure and support.”

Ziccardi reflected upon the highly debated use of chemical dispersants in his blog, noting what he believes to be the overlying positive amongst any negatives.

“I said (and still feel) that it is truly the lesser of two evils, due to its reduction of the immediate effects on birds, mammals and turtles,” Ziccardi said. “This not only dilutes the overall “dose” of the oil, but it also removes it from the surface where the primary exposure to the most “sensitive” wildlife might occur – birds that rest on the surface which can lose their waterproofing, and mammals and turtles that breathe and feed at the surface which can cause significant gastrointestinal and respiratory damage.”

Dispersants can have toxic consequences of which are yet unknown, along with not actually removing the oil from the water but rather limiting its visibility, according to Ziccardi. These actions, which he understands can biomagnify in the food chain, are long-term negatives outweighed by the short-term positives.

The OWCN remains involved with the effort in the Gulf Coast. For more information, go to owcn.org.

ERIC C. LIPSKY can be reached at campus@theaggie.org

While most people have no problem drinking a nice cold mojito, a young dachshund puppy named Mojito was having trouble swallowing anything at all until he underwent a revolutionary procedure to save his life.

Dr. Stanley Marks of the School of Veterinary Medicine collaborated with Dr. Peter Belafsky of the UC Davis Medical Center (UCDMC) in Sacramento to transfer existing medical treatments for humans for use on an animal for the first time.

The Newman family adopted Mojito, a one-year-old longhaired dachshund, late last year. They began to notice that he was having difficulty swallowing both food and water, and decided to take him to Dr. Lisa Hess at the Loomis Basin Veterinary Hospital. There, Hess diagnosed Mojito with a general swallowing disorder, and sent him to Marks at UCD for a more detailed second opinion.

“Vets are in many ways learning to be like pediatricians,” Marks said. “Much like a baby can’t tell you what is wrong, animals depend on detailed observations and clinical tests to determine the causes of problems.”

Marks and his team initiated a series of diagnostic tests to better understand what was afflicting the young dachshund.

One advanced tool they used is known as a video-fluoroscopic swallow. The patient swallows five to six boluses of liquid barium, which serves as a contrast agent for an external camera that takes videos similar to the still photographs taken by x-ray machines.

“It was pretty apparent what was going on with Mojito,” Marks said. “He was trying to swallow through a bottleneck, and nothing was getting through.”

According to his owners, Mojito would take as long as 10 minutes to swallow a single mouthful of food or water in a laborious exercise of coughing and retching.

The veterinary team diagnosed Mojito with cricopharyngeal achalasia, a congenital condition that inhibits circular throat muscles as the top of the esophagus from relaxing.

After the diagnosis, Marks decided to reach out to long-time friend and colleague Belafsky, who had collaborated in the past with the veterinary school and viewed such collaboration as mutually beneficial.

“This is truly a group effort,” Belafsky said in a press release. “We are combining the best of our human and veterinary research and surgery teams to advance science and medicine.”

The first step the team took was to employ a treatment familiar to many in a different form. Botulinum toxin A, commonly known as Botox, is a muscle relaxant frequently used in cases of cricopharyngeal achalasia. The problem lies in its temporal nature; within four to six weeks, the effects recede and the problem returns.

To achieve a more permanent solution, Marks and Belafsky decided to pioneer the transfer of an existing treatment used for humans for over a decade to be performed on Mojito.

In the past, cases like Mojito’s were approached externally, with surgical incisions made through the neck to perform the transection on the esophageal muscle. The incision enables the muscle to loosen, allowing food and water to travel more easily from the mouth to the stomach.

Marks and Belafsky proposed a laser myotomy, in which a carbon dioxide laser is used to perform the transection through the mouth in a minimally invasive manner.

“It was totally unique,” Marks said. “Never, ever, ever has this been done on a dog, anywhere on the planet.”

The UCDMC allowed the team to borrow a laser unit costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the treatment, which took less than 30 minutes.

Marks calls the collaboration a complete win-win for all the parties involved, as it allows for the transfer of knowledge from one profession to another, and saved the life of an otherwise doomed puppy.

In an interview with CBS news, dog owner Phyllis Newman said that the $2,000 spent on the revolutionary procedure was well worth saving a member of the family.

According to Marks, Belafsky assists with veterinary medical cases like these free of charge, for the benefit of both the animals and the researchers involved.

“We’re starting to see this more often,” Marks finished. “These animals are much more than just a loving pet, but an intricate family member that plays a really important role in peoples’ lives.”

BRIAN GERSON can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

You don’t have to be a conservation biologist to help regenerate a dying breed of blue oak trees.

This is the hope of citizen science-advocate, Heidi Ballard, a professor in the UC Davis School of Education, who believes that public volunteers can not only help researchers collect data, but can help create the research itself.

“We ask,” Ballard said in a press release, “‘What do local people already know or can contribute to science? And what can scientists contribute to educating these people?'”

Her most recent project involved approximately 25 volunteers from Yolo and Solano counties, who learned to collect samples to determine whether or not oak trees on private ranches were regenerating, or reproducing. The data was then used by Audubon California, a Sacramento-based conservation society.

Tavis Forrester, a student in the Ecology Graduate Group, helped train the volunteers on how to collect the oak tree data.

“[The research is] valuable for me and the volunteers,” Forrester said. “They’re directly contributing to a research community and I’m getting a sense of the interest of the community in relation to conservation.”

Without volunteers, the process would have cost more than 10 thousand dollars, Forrester estimated. He added that one of the main appeals of using volunteers in research is the amount of money it could potentially save.

Ballard and her team of researchers are currently aiming to institutionalize this method of research. The technique takes citizen science – a term coined several years ago by the National Science Foundation- one step further by allowing the volunteers to participate more closely with researchers.

Institutionalizing the method will allow for long-term volunteer-based research, Ballard said. Studies such as the Ballard’s oak survey could jump from a one-year lifespan to 10 years, allowing researchers more insight into population dynamics, demography and regeneration issues with the trees.

“[Long-term] studies have been able to give people details that have led to changing ecological theory,” Forrester said.

However, including volunteers in research also runs the risk of confounding scientific data in favor of a tangible final product, said Pat Mokhtarian, associate director for the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis.

“What’s interesting to the outside world isn’t always the most practical,” she said. “Our job as scientists is to convey the fine print in a way that makes it important to our audience. The headlines are interesting but you have to know things [such as] how representative the sample was.”

Mokhtarian said that although she doesn’t practice citizen science in her research on transit ridership, she does frequently use input from the public to gather data. Using public input like this, she says, ensures that her research will benefit the public.

Some researchers even argue that Ballard’s progressive citizen science approach is the next logical step in scientific advancement.

“We’re already a decade or more into really robust citizen science programs,” said Mark Schwartz, director of the John Muir Institute of the Environment. “It’s because of these massive efforts by the public that we’ve been able to advance science. There’s no way there are enough specialists to collect the data used in a lot of research.”

Schwartz added that involving the public in research will help the research data benefit the public by keeping a common interest in mind from the start. If the public has a say from the beginning, they will be more interested in not only the outcome, but also the process of science itself.

“We have a shockingly large public misunderstanding of how science gets done,” Schwartz said. “We have, as a society, a cartoon view of these scientists in their white lab coats doing experiments and that’s so far from how it actually looks. We really should involve the people from start to finish – it’s going to have a lot more impact when it’s done if we do it like this.”

LAUREN STEUSSY can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

Superheroes and the villains they vanquish are always stealing their powers from the animal kingdom. Spiderman launched webs and Dr. Octopus had eight limbs. Sabertooth was vicious and Wolverine emulated a member of the weasel family. Catwoman? More like copy-cat.

I’d like to see some of the world’s less glamorous organisms get a spot in superhero fandom. We never see bacteria-related superpowers. Where’s Dr. Strep Throat (he fiendishly strikes students during finals) or the quickly-multiplying E. Coli Boy?

Forget DC and Marvel – biologists have recently discovered some great superpowers. If I ever get to zap critters with radiation and absorb their abilities, here are my top five choices:

5. Toad

According to a recent paper in the Journal of Zoology, toads may be able to predict earthquakes. A scientist in Italy noticed that toads disappeared three days before a 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit the region. The toads did not return until 10 days after the aftershocks ended. This phenomenon seems pretty anecdotal, but the same trend was spotted in China before a massive quake hit in 2008.

Researchers don’t know how toads sense quakes coming. Some think toads feel small vibrations or changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. Others wonder if toads can detect gasses released by seismic activity. Whatever the cause, I’m a California girl and I want quake-predicting powers.

4. Ground squirrel

Turns out regular old ground squirrels have a secret weapon against their rattlesnake enemies: They can neutralize snake venom. A snake bite that would leave a human in agony is easily brushed off by a full-grown ground squirrel. Sign me up for natural anti-venom powers.

3. Great white shark

Sharks are undeniably thrilling already: sharp teeth, great sense of smell, fast swimmers. But scientists have also discovered that great whites are leading secret lives in the deepest parts of the ocean. Michael Domeier, a scientist with the Marine Conservation Science Institute, recently tracked 22 great whites off the coast of Hawaii. He found that they dive to the depths where all those crazy, fluorescing fish live. Researchers in New Zealand documented the same behavior. Domeier thinks the sharks may be hunting giant squid.

Sperm whales traditionally join giant squid in the “clash of the titans” mythology, but perhaps sharks also join the fray? Picture a battle in the icy darkness: tentacles flailing and teeth gnashing, the arena lit by glowing deep-sea eels. That would be an epic fight for my super alter-ego.

2. Tyrannobdella rex

Known as the “tyrant leech king,” this newly discovered leech species is my first choice for super-villain. T. rex (yes, like the dinosaur) is only 7 centimeters long, but it is miles of freaky. It lives in fresh water and swims into mammals’ noses to feed off the mucous membranes. Researchers discovered it when a girl in Peru complained of head-pain and her parents spotted the squirming leech in her nostril. Leeches are scary enough, but T. rex has longer teeth than any species previously discovered. Researchers believe the species is related to leeches that were around 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the planet.

“Our T. rex may be been up that other T. rex’s nose,” Smithsonian researcher Mark Siddell told Discoverynews.com.

A leech that attacks dinosaurs is pure evil-mastermind.

1. Tardigrade

This microscopic animal is not only adorable (its chubby body, tiny claws and stocky legs earn it the nicknames “water bear” and “moss piglet”), but it is also practically immortal. Some of these animals are able to survive temperatures of -273°C, close to absolute zero. They can withstand intense radiation and 10 years without water. Tardigrades have been found in the Himalayas and ocean sediment, but they are my No. 1 choice because they can survive in outer space.

In 2007, the European Space Agency launched the “Tardigrades in Space” project to see how organisms react to the vacuum of space. Two of the tardigrade species did well enough in space that they were able to have happy baby tardigrades when they returned to Earth. Now that is super.

MADELINE McCURRY-SCHMIDT learned that another term for a wolverine is “skunk bear.” That would be a great X-Man name! Skunk Bear will save you! E-mail her your hero or villain names at memschmidt@ucdavis.edu.