Chronic Wasting Disease
Science Center Objects
Over the past 20 years, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Wyoming has been spreading slowly outward from the southeastern corner of the state toward the Greater Yellowstone Area and Wyoming's elk feed grounds, where more than 24,000 elk are supplementally fed each winter.
Recently, however, the disease was detected in mule deer near Alpine and Pinedale, setting off renewed concern about the impact of CWD on feed ground elk. These feed grounds facilitate dense aggregations of elk during the feeding season, and it is these high elk densities that may put feed ground elk at greater risk of CWD spread and subsequent declines in survival and population growth. Studies show that CWD prevalence tends to be higher in mule deer than elk and Wyoming surveillance data suggest that CWD in mule deer is more widely distributed across the state. As a result, introduction of CWD into the feed ground system is likely to come from interaction with infected mule deer or the environment contaminated by infected mule deer.
(Public domain.)
Current objective:
To relate mule deer migratory pathways and habitat use to elk space use and connect these areas of overlap to locations where those elk will be during the hunting season.
Past work:
Our past work on CWD focused on modeling efforts to understand how a persistent environmental reservoir may affect long-term disease dyanmics and population dynamics of deer and elk. In addition, we worked on assessing mule deer connectivity around Montana by contributing to collaring efforts as well as using genetic methods.
When environmentally persistent pathogens transform good habitat into ecological traps
Habitat quality plays an important role in the dynamics and stability of wildlife metapopulations. However, the benefits of high-quality habitat may be modulated by the presence of an environmentally persistent pathogen. In some cases, the presence of environmental pathogen reservoirs on high-quality habitat may lead to the creation of ecological...
Leach, Clint; Webb, Colleen T.; Cross, Paul C. The population history of endogenous retroviruses in mule deer (Odocoileus heminous)
Mobile elements are powerful agents of genomic evolution and can be exceptionally informative markers for investigating species and population-level evolutionary history. While several studies have utilized retrotransposon-based insertional polymorphisms to resolve phylogenies, few population studies exist outside of humans. Endogenous...
Kamath, Pauline L.; Elleder, Daniel; Bao, Le; Cross, Paul C.; Powell, John H.; Poss, Mary Microsatellites indicate minimal barriers to mule deer Odocoileus hemionus dispersal across Montana, USA
To better understand the future spread of chronic wasting disease, we conducted a genetic assessment of mule deer Odocoileus hemionus population structure across the state of Montana, USA. Individual based analyses were used to test for population structure in the absence of a priori designations of population membership across...
Powell, John H.; Kalinowski, Steven T.; Higgs, Megan D.; Ebinger, Michael R.; Vu, Ninh V.; Cross, Paul C. Modeling routes of chronic wasting disease transmission: Environmental prion persistence promotes deer population decline and extinction
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal disease of deer, elk, and moose transmitted through direct, animal-to-animal contact, and indirectly, via environmental contamination. Considerable attention has been paid to modeling direct transmission, but despite the fact that CWD prions can remain infectious in the environment for years, relatively...
Almberg, Emily S.; Cross, Paul C.; Johnson, Christopher J.; Heisey, Dennis M.; Richards, Bryan J. Scale-dependent approaches to modeling spatial epidemiology of chronic wasting disease.
This e-book is the product of a second workshop that was funded and promoted by the United States Geological Survey to enhance cooperation between states for the management of chronic wasting disease (CWD). The first workshop addressed issues surrounding the statistical design and collection of surveillance data for CWD. The second workshop, from...
Conner, Mary M.; Gross, John E.; Cross, Paul C.; Ebinger, Michael R.; Gillies, Robert; Samuel, Michael D.; Miller, Michael W.