Planting seeds

Eric Nyquist

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Tracking wildlife diseases—from space
The usual way Vanessa Ezenwa and her colleagues track diseases in wild animals—rounding up vast herds of African buffalo and painstakingly testing them for bovine tuberculosis, for instance—is a mammoth endeavor. But keeping tabs on what infections are spreading, how fast, and where, is a crucial goal related to human health as well as the health of wildlife. Lest we forget, animal diseases can jump to humans, notes Ezenwa, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

So Ezenwa and her collaborators hatched a plan: In captivity, “we’ve seen that as the infection progresses, individuals move—they get farther apart from one another,” she explains. The team used YPS seed grant funds to put GPS ear tags on 400 African buffalo known to be infected with bovine TB, then looked for them on high-resolution satellite images of their wild herds. Now, they are working out whether herd spacing is a reliable measure for the presence of disease in the wild. “Preliminarily, we see a link that is reminiscent of what we see in captivity,” she says. They’ve now hired a new postdoctoral researcher who will continue tracking buffalo spacing on satellite images.