EPISODE 7

The Wasting Game

Cait Nelson, Wildlife Health Biologist, BC Ministry of Water, land and Resource Stewardship; Alfred Joseph - Community Member ʔakisq̓nuk Community ; Jeff Berdusco, Owner, Confluence Resource Management

IN THIS EPISODE

Managing an Invisible Disease

Is there a Zombie moose on the loose?! Not quite… But there is something lurking in the woods that has our “deer” friends shakin’ in their hooves. Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a 100% fatal illness that’s creeping its way through cervid populations, and it’s nearly impossible to spot. Luckily, wildlife biologists like our guest Cait Nelson from the BC Ministry of Water, Lands, and Natural Resource Stewardship are on the case.

In this episode host Dr. Kaylee Byers and Cait Nelson talk about the clever scientific tools that are helping us track CWD– from grapefruit spoons to genomics! We’ll also hear from Alfred Joseph from the ʔakisq̓nuk First Nation and member of the Ktunaxa Tribe, who explains how CWD is more than just a threat to wildlife, but also has deep implications for community and food sovereignty.

Join us on a pun-packed hunt to find out how we can get ahead of this deadly and stubborn disease, one dead head at a time.

Special thanks to Jeff Berdusco, CWD Coordinator in the Kootenay region for providing field recordings for this episode.

HIGHLIGHTS

(4:46)

What is CWD?

(13:10)

A threat to cultural independence.

(17:48)

Tracking a silent killer.

BONUS CONTENT

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:02

Sam: Oh, hi, I’m Sam. I’m part of the team that puts together Nice Genes! And today, we don’t have a content warning, we have a pun warning. This episode contains an absurd amount of puns, so if you don’t find that funny, too bad, place your bets on how many now and enjoy the show.

READ TRANSCRIPT

00:00:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Today, we are going hunting. In the morning mist, the smell of the pine, the thrill of the chase. Actually, it’s not that kind of hunting. No rifles, no tweed jackets. We’re at a gas station.

 

00:00:36

Jeff Berdusco: A pretty rural area, lots of farmland, lots of wildlife of course. He was eager to show me a picture of an absolutely enormous black bear that he took within just a few feet of this freezer.

 

00:00:47

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And now, we’re not going on a bear hunt either. We are looking to catch something that’s actually already been hunted.

 

00:00:54

Jeff Berdusco: All right. We’ve pulled up to one of our freezers here in beautiful Creston, BC. Let’s get out and have a look and see what we have. My name is Jeff Berdusco. I’m the Chronic Wasting Disease coordinator for the Kootenay Region. I’m a hunter, angler, trapper, born and raised in the East Kootenays.

 

00:01:13

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Jeff is collecting samples from a community freezer.

 

00:01:16

Jeff Berdusco: We’re right in the middle of the season right now, so the samples should be coming in.

 

00:01:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And inside? Deer heads.

 

00:01:27

Jeff Berdusco: It’s not super glamorous.

 

00:01:28

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And why is he doing this, you might wonder?

 

00:01:35

Jeff Berdusco: Just have to be consistent and accurate.

 

00:01:35

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Jeff is collecting the heads from hunted cervids. Cervids are a group of animals in the family, Cervidae, and include deer, elk, moose, reindeer, and caribou. And those heads are being collected in order to test them for Chronic Wasting Disease. And what’s that? 

Well, I’m so elk-cited that you asked because today we are fawning over the deer-tails of this disease that has recently made tracks into our beautiful province of British Columbia and is threatening cervid populations across North America and Scandinavia. But the tricky part, once it’s been detected it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. But there are ways to stop its spread. 

Today, how to target a disease that is out of sight, but maybe not out of reach if we doe it right. And if you thought we overdid the puns on this show, well buckle up because there’s a truly staggering amount of puns in here that will keep you well antler-tained. You are listening to Nice Genes!, the podcast that takes aim at the wild game of science, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host, Dr. Kaylee Byers, your field guide into the world of genomics. 

Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD is unlike most other diseases we deal with. We are pretty familiar with infectious disease-causing microbes like viruses, bacteria, and fungi. But CWD is caused by something completely different, a protein called a prion. And one of the things that makes CWD so difficult to detect and manage is that symptoms of CWD don’t show up until months or even years after an animal’s infected. But when they do, animals can look emaciated. They might drool, they lose coordination, get disoriented, they stagger. It’s almost like they’re zombie deer. We’re not going to see zombie deer walking around. So I just think that characterization is a little misleading. So no zombie deer. All right, kill the music. Zombie deer, we don’t need you anymore. You can all go home. Sorry, sorry. Carry on with your lives. I think Night of the Living Deer is still casting.

 

00:03:52

Zombie: Brains.

 

00:03:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: All right, let’s switch up the vibe in here. Here to tell us more is someone who I know for a fact can talk about Chronic Wasting Disease for hours. Yeah, we can literally talk about it for like 13 hours in a truck on the way to Cranbrook.

 

00:04:08

Cait Nelson: Yeah, 18 hours I think, was our record.

 

00:04:09

Dr. Kaylee Byers: 18, that’s right.

Oh, Cait. This is so fun. First question, who are you?

 

00:04:16

Cait Nelson: So my name’s Cait Nelson and I’m a wildlife health biologist with the provincial government. And I joined back in 2006 and it’s been an exciting ride. And that brings us to, I think what we’re going to talk about today, wildlife health, goodness.

 

00:04:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, goodness. And I like that you said exciting ride and not endlessly frustrating, stressful.

 

00:04:39

Cait Nelson: We try and stay positive.

 

00:04:41

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So to start off, can you tell us what Chronic Wasting Disease is?

 

00:04:46

Cait Nelson: Chronic Wasting Disease is a infectious disease that affects a species in the deer family. So that family of animals are also called cervids. And so this disease is a prion disease. So a prion is a abnormal misfolded protein that accumulates in the body, doesn’t behave like a normal protein should, and it tends to accumulate in the central nervous system of these animals. 

So unfortunately, what ends up happening is it leads to a neurological disease and it’s 100% fatal in all animals that are infected with the disease.So animals that are infected, generally appear perfectly normal. And part of that is because it’s caused by this protein, so the body doesn’t have an initial immune response like it would to a bacteria or a virus. 

So the fact that infected animals can appear healthy, there’s no way to visually determine if they’re positive or infected. It’s challenging because there’s no signal for us that there’s something wrong. And so we call them silent carriers.

 

00:05:49

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We call these prion diseases, like CWD in deer, mad cow disease in cattle or scrapie in sheep, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. And the really wild thing, the thing that makes this protein infectious and deadly?

Well, it has everything to do with its shape. These prion proteins already exist in our bodies. But when they’re in their normal shape, it’s business as usual. They’re just doing their thing, and that thing is still a bit obscure. But what we know is that they sit on the surface of many cells located throughout the body, but especially in the nervous system. And we still don’t entirely understand how this happens. But when these proteins misfold into sort of an abnormal shape, that’s what makes them get clumpy and your brain gets spongy. 

I think one of the things that’s so interesting and frustrating about Chronic Wasting Disease, is unlike other diseases, that are often caused by say a virus or a bacteria, this is not. Right? It is a protein. So how do these animals get this infectious protein? How does it spread among animals?

 

00:06:59

Cait Nelson: Right. Yeah, it is very challenging and you hit on an important point there, where this isn’t like a lot of the other pathogens that are on the landscape. These prion diseases are not naturally occurring in the environment, whereas some of these other pathogens, often those populations will have a chance to recover. But with Chronic Wasting Disease, unfortunately there’s just an increasing trajectory of the number of cases and the animals don’t recover. 

So your question is how animals actually become infected. And so an infected animal will actually shed the disease agent, this prion, into their surroundings through their bodily fluids, so saliva, urine, feces. Infected carcasses, decomposing on the landscape will shed the prion into the environment. 

And once it gets into the environment, those prions are essentially indestructible. They’re resistant to disinfectants, to burning, to freezing. So wildfires won’t touch them. Cooking infected meat doesn’t denature the protein. Freezing it doesn’t do anything. And so an animal will have to ingest these prions to be exposed to the disease. So they can be exposed through direct contact between animals, nose-to-nose contact, grooming, that sort of thing. But they can also pick it up from the environment. 

So these prions can be in the soil, on the surface of plants that the animals are eating, in water that the animals are drinking. And so number of ways that animals can become infected, can actually be exposed to these disease agents.

 

00:08:30

Dr. Kaylee Byers: If you think about it, which I know you do a lot, these prions are essentially like superheroes. They spread really well and the fact that they’re indestructible is frankly, bonkers.

 

00:08:41

Cait Nelson: Yeah. They’re so resistant to even high heat and ultraviolet and all that. They really are indestructible.

 

00:08:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay. So we have these proteins that cause this completely lethal disease that are silently and invisibly infecting deer. Cool. Very, very cool. So if most of the time we can’t even see it, how do we know if an animal has it? We were once driving 18 hours in the truck, and we had a hunter call in real time asking if we could take a sample from that animal. And hilariously, we were driving through that town at that exact moment. So we showed up and they had a moose there. And I watched you go into the back of the truck and grab your kit and get to work. So what were the samples that you were taking?

 

00:09:34

Jeff Berdusco: Yeah. The only reliable way to test for this disease is to collect tissues from the head from dead animals. And so we have specific tissues that we target, because these are tissues that we know those prions will start to accumulate, earlier on in the disease. And so what we’re looking for in deer, elk and moose is there’s a specific lymph node at the back of the throat called the retropharyngeal lymph node, and that’s our target tissue. So yeah, when we stopped in that small town in southern BC that time, the gentleman had harvested a moose. So we had the head there and that’s a great sample for us.

 

00:10:14

Dr. Kaylee Byers: For the obex, I always just find this particularly endearing, I guess, in both, like a sampling… Endearing, I swear. I don’t even mean to make these puns, it’s just in my deer-NA. So can you please tell us the tool you use to collect the obex?

 

00:10:34

Jeff Berdusco: It’s a grapefruit spoon, and yeah, it’s amazing. Having a scalpel on hand is helpful, but the best tool are these grapefruit spoons. So if anyone is out there in a thrift store, or is over at their grandma’s house and finds these grapefruit spoons, they’re really sought after. And we would love them.

 

00:10:54

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Getting that call from that hunter was moose-ic to Cait’s ears, but it was a coincidence. There isn’t always a biologist with a grapefruit spoon on hand to sample these carcasses, which is why there are those community freezers where hunters and harvesters can drop off samples. Without the samples we get from hunters, we would have no real way to understand the current state of CWD in an area. So hunters very important to this whole elk-uation.

 

00:11:23

Jeff Berdusco: Hunters and trappers, and butchers and taxidermists, they know their ways around these animals. Right? So if we just give them a little bit of instruction, they can actually pull those tissues themselves and just submit those to us, which helps to expedite the testing process. 

And so for us, being able to access animals that are already being removed from the landscape, and learning as much as we can from those animals, is really key. And so working with partner organizations, the hunting groups, the trappers, even extends to highway crews that are picking up road-killed animals. 

We’re not going to go out and shoot additional animals or remove additional animals from the landscape for the benefit of monitoring because we don’t need to do that. There’s already so many animals being removed from the landscape, and all of these partners, it’s important to them too to protect these populations. Right?

 

00:12:13

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah, I think that’s a great point about the importance of community involvement because it allows you to do this work without having to go sample additional animals. You might be wondering, is it realistic that people will actually participate? Do people really caribou-t CWD that much to take the time to send all their samples for testing? For a lot of folks, hunting isn’t just important. It’s a way of life. You look great with this headset, you look like you’re about to land an airplane. Meet Alfred Joseph. I wanted to ask, what’s the best way to introduce you? Is it elder Alfred Joseph?

 

00:12:48

Alfred Joseph: Just Alfred Joseph, member of the Ktunaxa tribe.

 

00:12:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: In his community, Alfred holds many important roles and a lot of his work now focuses on ensuring that his nation’s culture gets passed on to future generations.

 

00:13:03

Alfred Joseph: Hunting is a very important part of our culture. Being a residential school attendant, I had to relearn who our tribe was as it pertained to myself. So what I did, I started to talk to some of my elders at that time. And so from that, I found that a lot of the cultural stuff wasn’t being carried down within our group up here. And so I started to learn about different things like how to tan hides. Then we had another elder that knew how to make, I’ll call them, elk-horn saddles for horses. The elk has become more important for our group because of the volume of meat that we get off an elk compared to a deer.

 

00:13:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Communities that rely on these animals and for whom they hold a cultural value, Chronic Wasting Disease is more than a threat to food. It’s a threat to community relationships and identity.

 

00:14:06

Alfred Joseph: All that I’m doing, and trying to teach, is for our people to become independent again, which we were a couple of generations ago. So I have been trying to get back to that state where our people are fairly independent with their food sovereignty. There has been a total decrease in a lot of our, I’ll call it our native food supply. So I think there’s more than just the deer that we have to worry about.

 

00:14:41

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The issue of food sovereignty is huge in the CWD conversation. And management plans need to consider the cultural impact as well. And anything in nature’s delicate doe-see-doe, there’s always a ripple effect.

 

00:14:56

Alfred Joseph: If the different water sources start to dry up, then there’s really… I can talk about, “ Oh yeah, we should manage the Chronic Wasting Disease and have a plan there.” But the most important thing that the animals and we rely on is the water.

 

00:15:13

Dr. Kaylee Byers: And like you say, right, if there’s less water, they’re going to be congregating in closer areas. That’s more opportunity for them to spread disease. Everything’s connected. Alfred’s concern is that if CWD threatens the deer population, then his community might need to find other food sources like fish or beavers. But then if the water quality is also an issue, the options start to get really limited. So in order for communities to retain their food sovereignty and ensure the healthiness of our animal populations broadly, we have to take this seriously and we have to act.

 

00:15:45

Alfred Joseph: Alberta and I think Saskatchewan have got a lot of Chronic Wasting Disease. What is the data sharing between provinces? Or are we just going along doing our own thing, and Alberta’s doing their own thing? With common issues like Chronic Wasting Disease, there should be a lot of collaboration and discussion on it rather than waiting for the outside to come in. And I guess, I’m one of those people that dig right in. If you see a problem or you can divert a problem, let’s get at it.

 

00:16:21

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I agree. Yeah, I like that. Let’s get at it. I like it. I like the framing of it. Coming up, what we can learn from other places that have dealt with Chronic Wasting Disease. And how genomics is giving us the information that we need so that this disease doesn’t reindeer on our parade. 

You are listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m your host Dr. Kaylee Byers, and we want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that are shaping our world. 

So if you like Nice Genes!, hit follow on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your shows. If you like this episode, here’s a good i-deer, share it with a friend and help spread the love for the moose-terious world of science.

 

00:17:10

Sam: All right, everyone just checking in with your mid-show pun count. I think we’re at 17, that’s a pun per minute. Who knew it was possible? It’s probably illegal. Anyways, back to the show.

 

00:17:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: For a while, British Columbia has been focused on preventing CWD from entering the province. But earlier this year, we had our first two positive cases. And if there’s a couple, there are likely more of them out there. So we’ve had to switch our mindset from prevention to action. So what’s that look like? Let’s talk about management. So we get these first cases. What are you thinking about when you’re deciding how you’re going to manage this outbreak?

 

00:17:48

Cait Nelson: A great question, and complicated question. But really, we have the benefit that we’re not the first to have to deal with this. The disease has been unfortunately affecting a number of different jurisdictions around North America for a few decades now. And we’ve learned a lot through those experiences in places like Alberta and Wisconsin. 

With the best intentions, they came out with some really aggressive management approaches. And I think that it was effective in slowing the disease for sure, but those approaches weren’t very popular. 

And so after just a few short years, they lost support and a lot of those management efforts were halted. And so unfortunately, that just left the disease to just do its thing and continue to expand and take hold of these populations. But what we learned through those experience and the testing, is that the cases actually really cluster on the landscape. 

And so when you identify positive cases, you can zero in and have really targeted, really focused responses to the disease, and really know where to focus your efforts. And so, that’s really one of the most important things about our surveillance and testing program, is identifying those positive cases.

 

00:19:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You mentioned Alberta having an aggressive strategy. What does that look like?

 

00:19:08

Cait Nelson: Some of the more aggressive strategies that were implemented 20 years ago, were a broad-scale culling. With this disease, like with many others, the best way to contain the disease and to manage it, is to remove infected animals from the system. So those early, more aggressive approaches, had the best intentions. Right? Let’s stamp it out, let’s not let it spread through the province or through the-

 

00:19:32

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Kill 100, save thousands essentially.

 

00:19:34

Cait Nelson: …Exactly. But unfortunately, yeah, they didn’t have the support. And thankfully, we’ve learned so much through that. While they were doing these management responses, there was also research happening. And so they were gathering a lot of really important information that we can now benefit from. And the fact now that this disease tends to cluster on the landscape, just tells us that, “ Okay. So you don’t really need to go and remove all the animals from this larger area. You can identify those positive cases and really zero in.” And those types of management approaches have been more effective because they’ve been sustained because they had support of the communities.

 

00:20:12

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Here in BC, when we first had an outbreak, the government actually partnered with one of the nations and did some sampling. So can you tell us a little bit about why you took that approach?

 

00:20:21

Cait Nelson: We defined, basically, a initial response area around each of those positive cases, based on what we understood of distribution of animals on the landscape and where they might be at that time of year. And we worked with some first Nations partners to go and do a targeted harvest. And so we determined that we needed to harvest an additional 25 animals, around each of the positive cases, getting us close to that point of that positive case as possible, to see if we could identify any additional positive cases. 

Thankfully, all of those animals came back negative. But in partnering with the local Nation, we were able to access those animals in a very short timeframe, test them. Nobody ever wants to have to go and lethally remove animals, but it was really important for us to understand initially, what was going on in the landscape. And we had the fortune to have that support from the local partners and to be able to preserve the meat of those animals for food.

 

00:21:19

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So it’s through this type of collaboration that we can all come together, and it’s so important that we’re including the communities whose land these animals are on. We have to share information and a great way to gather all that information. Oh, genomics. So thinking about our approach to managing these animals, how does genomics come into the whole mix?

 

00:21:42

Cait Nelson: There’s a few different important pieces of information to understand the ecology of these populations. And how these animals move and use the landscapes, as a way to understand potential roots of this disease transmission. 

So population genomics is a really, really important tool to inform what was happening on the Alberta landscape. Looking at population structuring, and the connectivity between populations, is a really good way to understand risk to adjacent populations. And to predict potential flow of where the disease might move on the landscape. 

To be honest, it’s not something that we have done in BC before, and so that was a knowledge gap. We might not have the results of a population genomics study right away. But 3, 4, 5 years down the road, we’re going to look back and say, “ That was really important to get that research program established, so we can look back and we can use that information.”

 

00:22:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: This is an area where we are actively doing research now. We’re taking the DNA of deer in the Kootenay region of British Columbia and scouring their genetic code to look at something we call SNPs. These are single nucleotide polymorphisms, essentially these single-base pair differences in the DNA. 

Based on similarities and differences of these SNPs among animals, we can group them together into more closely related individuals and more distantly related ones. It’s sort of like looking for extended families and seeing how far they’ve moved away from home. Okay. So we can use genomics to understand how deer are related to each other, which can tell us how far they move and how that disease might spread. Are there other ways we can also use genomics to study this prion?

 

00:23:31

Cait Nelson: We can actually look at susceptibility. And looking specifically, at the CWD prion gene to see how different animals might be impacted, or the susceptibility to different strains of CWD. There was work done in Saskatchewan looking at susceptibility of caribou using genomics, and it turns out they are susceptible. But yeah, there’s a lot of nuance there. And I think down the road, in evaluating risk to different populations, looking at susceptibility is going to be a really useful tool.

 

00:24:04

Dr. Kaylee Byers: There are still a lot of unknowns about CWD, but these genomic tools are helping give us the antlers, I mean, the answers we need so we can doe our best…

I mean, sorry, do our best to keep this disease in stagnation. Okay. I can’t help it. You know what? I’m not even sorry. But genomics is nothing without data. 

So again, back to the importance of hunters. What are some things hunters need to know? Okay, so say I’m a hunter and I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “ Okay. Some of the things that we do is we test animals, maybe we’re going to harvest certain animals that are more likely to get sick.” What other measures, or preventative measures, can people who hunt take in this process?

 

00:24:46

Cait Nelson: Although there’s never been a confirmed case of Chronic Wasting Disease in people, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this disease. And so the public health authorities indicate that we can’t rule out that risk completely. And so they advise a precautionary approach and recommend that any animal infected with CWD is not consumed.

 

00:25:04

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Don’t eat infected meat. It could be a big moose-steak. But that doesn’t mean stop hunting.

 

00:25:11

Cait Nelson: Hunting is considered to be the most important management tool in the fight against CWD. So it’s really important that people keep hunting in those areas, because without that hunting pressure in these areas, then that just gives the disease the advantage. Right? If we’re not managing those populations through hunting, the disease will spread quicker. 

But the second thing is, the hunters that are harvesting animals in those areas are also our best source of samples, which provide the information that we need to make science-based decisions around management. And then hunters also have a responsibility to understand risk. 

So you harvest an animal in a CWD-affected area, understand the risks of moving that carcass or parts of that animal around because any part of that animal can contain those CWD prions. And if you’re transporting parts of that carcass back to your residence, maybe that’s on the coast or some other area of BC, and you process the animal. And then you have this waste material, what are you doing with that? How are you disposing of that? 

So we’re really recommending that people just educate themselves to understand their responsibility in this. And I think hunters get it. Hunters are the best conservationists out there. Right? They want to protect these populations. So we’re just trying to empower them with the information that they need to reduce that risk as much as possible.

 

00:26:28

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Tackling Chronic Wasting Disease requires all of us to stay informed and work together. As Alfred reminded us, real progress comes from collaboration, sharing knowledge and finding solutions as a community, rather than expecting one person to hold all the answers. How do you think the best way to share that information is within community?

 

00:26:48

Alfred Joseph: I think we rely too much on the elders supposedly knowing everything. We are not the encyclopedias of our tribe or of our little group. And sometimes, that is the feeling that I get. But for myself, it was the preservation of our knowledge, for me to give it to other people that it continue. How long has Alberta and Saskatchewan had Chronic Wasting Disease? And we should have a lot more videos or reports on what to expect and what to watch out for. And that is my biggest thing is sharing the information. For me, it’s very important that communication needs to happen.

 

00:27:39

Dr. Kaylee Byers: On our hunt to learn about Chronic Wasting Disease, I think we had a successful harvest. This disease is about more than just our deer friends. It’s about conservation, it’s about preserving cultural practices, it’s about food sovereignty, and it’s about learning from each other and working together. So if you’re out this hunting season and you could submit your samples, it might just save yourself, and all of us, some bucks.

 

00:28:03

Jeff Berdusco: So another sampling week. We have 207 heads or samples on the floor, thawing out, ready for the sampling crew to come in a couple of days and process them all. That’s 207 individual animals in one week. It’s a lot of meat provided, that’s on a weekly basis right now. And it’s an important food source for this area, and that’s something very important that we want to keep going through to the future. 

It’s certainly been shown that when people take part in the natural world through the procurement of food, they’re more apt to take care of it. I think anything that challenges that relationship is certainly complex and requires our attention, but that’s what makes the CWD subject so important. We want to see healthy wildlife populations through to the future, so my kids and my kids’ kids, can enjoy the same benefits that I grew up accustomed to.

 

00:28:59

Dr. Kaylee Byers: If you want to learn more about Chronic Wasting Disease, head to the link in our show notes. Our guests for today were wildlife health biologist with the BC Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, Cait Nelson and Alfred Joseph from the Ktunaxa tribe. Special thanks to Chronic Wasting Disease coordinator for the Kootenay region in British Columbia, Jeff Berdusco.

 

00:29:18

MUSIC: My dear, the boy, cast and clear.

 

00:29:23

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Zombie deer.

 

00:29:23

Zombie: Brains.

 

00:29:23

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You’ve been listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you like this episode, go check out some of our previous ones, wherever you listen from. Share us with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on social media by going to @GenomeBC. The state of Chronic Wasting Disease is always evolving just like us. Join us next time as we explore the wonder of rapid evolution. We’re going to banter about some bats and learn what’s in store for the future of human adaptation.

 

00:29:57

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: We tend to find that evolution happens faster on islands, and that’s been shown for mammals that the rate of change is faster than what we find on the mainland.

 

00:30:06

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Thanks for listening. Mark your calen-deers and we’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. I’m sure you’ll be very fawn-ed of, here’s a good i-deer.

 

00:30:19

Sam: If you guessed 642 puns, you are correct. Thanks for listening.

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