Publications

Introduced avian pox virus and malaria have had devastating impacts on native Hawaiian forest birds, yet little has been published about their prevalence and distribution in forest bird communities outside of windward Hawaii Island. We surveyed native and non-native forest birds for these two diseases at three different elevations on leeward Mauna Loa Volcano at the Kona Forest Unit of...

This chapter is devoted to the diseases of anuran larvae that cause morbidity( illness) and mortality (death). The purpose of this chapter is to describe diseases that may be encountered in free-living tadpoles of the United States and Canada. Much of the information in this chapter comes from unpublished diagnostic examinations of amphibians done at the U.S. Geological Survey, National...

Few diseases are reported in salamanders. Two notable exceptions are infections by Ranavirus and Ichthyophonus. Except for mortality events associated with ranaviruses in tiger salamanders (Ambystoma tigrinum) and spotted salamanders (A. maculatum), dieoffs of salamanders are rarely detected or reported. Diseases presented in this chapter are those encountered in free-living salamanders...

The Point Reyes peninsula in northern California is about 45 km northwest of San Francisco and occasionally receives air masses from the city contributing to haze and lowered visibility. Although gaseous pollutants are not a problem, fine particulates containing carbon and other elements are measurable at the park. In this study, five lichen species were sampled along a 40-km linear...

Kin selection is a powerful tool for understanding cooperation among individuals, yet its role as the sole explanation of cooperative societies has recently been challenged on empirical grounds. These studies suggest that direct benefits of cooperation are often overlooked, and that partner choice may be a widespread mechanism of cooperation. Female eider ducks (Somateria mollissima) may...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Records of reported die-offs of the American White Pelican (Pelicanus erythrorhynchos) held by the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center from 1978 through 2003 indicate that type C botulism (caused by Clostridium botulinum) was the major cause of mortality. In 1996, over 15,000 birds, including 8,500 American White Pelicans, were estimated to have died from type C...

We determined 1,600 base pairs of DNA sequence in the 18S small ribosomal subunit from two geographically distinct isolates of Dermosporidium penneri. Maximum likelihood and parsimony analysis of these sequences place D. penneri in the order Dermocystida of the class Mesomycetozoea. The 18S rRNA sequences from these two isolates only differ within a single region of 16 contiguous...

Wildlife population management requires knowledge of factors that affect population sustainability. Mortality is one of the most important of those factors. Without a clear understanding of the causes of mortality, decisions by managers of whether or how to intercede may be inappropriate. Wildlife biologists are usually the first to discover, assess, and respond to wildlife mortality...

We collected samples from apparently healthy geese in the Playa Lakes Region (USA) during the winters of 2000a??01 and 2001a??02 to determine whether carriers of Pasteurella multocida, the bacterium that causes avian cholera, were present in wild populations. With the use of methods developed in laboratory challenge trials (Samuel et al., 2003a) and a serotype-specific polymerase chain...

NPLichen, a database of lichens in the U. S. National Parks (Wetmore and Bennett, 1992), has been extensively revised and expanded, and is now available for public use at www.ies.wisc.edu/nplichen. As of this writing, the database contains 25,995 records of lichens in 144 national park units. The number of records of lichens not in the North American lichen checklist (Esslinger 1997) is...