Monday, August 26, 2002

Chronic Wasting Disease Checking out the national cwd website as well as talking to co-workers. Most of my co-workers will continue hunting and eating deer in Minnesota.  DNR testing this fall has a 95% likelyhood of finding the disease if it is present in 1% of the deer. Does this include a 30% failure rate in the tests themselves?  I asked a guy from the division of wildlife and he said yes, the 95% confidence includes all aspects of the testing from finding the deer to testing them.  The DNR will concentrate its testing near the border with Wisconsin. I didn't understand how deer would get here from Wisconsin, but I guess they cross on the ice. Minnesota's record deer was actually shot in Wisconsin but was tracked to Minnesota across the St. Croix river.  Out west, CWD is endemic but does not threaten the entire population because the deer and elk out there are much less concentrated than here in the upper midwest.   Minnesota DNR proposed a ban on deer feeding. The feeding causes them to cluster and more readily transmit the disease. 2:43:37 PM    comment [] Carp-smack! "fishermen have lately been reporting sightings of the once-infrequently seen silver carp springing like torpedoes from rivers in the Mississippi basin when outboard motor boats pass. "It's common behavior to jump when frightened," Dr. Killgore of the Army Corps of Engineers said. "One clipped my ear."   (From NYT article) Actually, the invasive carp outcompetes native species.  Minnesota bans the stocking of carp but the good old boys down south don't have a problem with it.  Supposedly, they use triploid fish that can't reproduce but some fish farms find it more cost effective to break the rules and breed their own normal fish that escape and breed and eventually come north.  And so, another invasive species is on its way.  2:03:14 PM    comment []

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