A New England loon has died from avian malaria, according to researchers who believe this to be the first known case of a loon dying of the tropical disease.
Loons can live for decades, so losing any adult loon to a new cause casts a long shadow says John Cooley, a senior biologist for the Loon Preservation Committee. Finding a new cause like this malaria strain, raises a real cause for concern. This indicates a new type of stressor associated with climate change.
Avian malaria is carried by certain species of tropical mosquitoes. There is no evidence that avian malaria parasites are harmful to humans, according to Mark Pokras, professor emeritus of wildlife medicine at Tufts University.
The world is changing, and the distribution of mosquitoes is changing for a whole variety of reasons,. Tropical mosquitoes that don’t occur here now are going to move farther north, and so are biting flies and ticks and a whole bunch of lovely parasites.
The dead loon was spotted by campers at Umbagog National Wildlife Refuge and quickly retrieved by a refuge employee. The bird, specifically a “common loon,” was then put on ice and brought to the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Durham for examination.
The examination was done by Inga Sidor, a New Hampshire state senior veterinary pathologist and she wasn’t even considering malaria to be the cause of death. Although she previously had detected malaria parasites in captive birds, such as penguins kept in zoos, but she had never seen malaria in a wild bird.
At necropsy the spleen was really enlarged and tissue looked wet referred to as edema. Sidor then started to look for avian malaria, a disease that attacks red blood cells, affecting the vascular system. “These are tiny, tiny little parasites,” Sidor said. “They fit into a single cell, so you really have to have a body that’s in good condition to find them — and you have to be looking for them.”
Having such a fresh specimen was crucial to the discovery. Sidor found widespread malaria parasites in the bird’s brain and heart, which leads her to believe the bird died either from a heart attack or cerebral paralysis. Furthermore, the degree of the infection leads Sidor to believe the disease was transmitted to the loon in New Hampshire, not when it migrated south to winter off the coast of mid-Atlantic states.
After Sidor’s examination, the loon was inspected by Ellen Martinsen of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, who discovered that the bird contained not one but two different malaria parasite species — an unusual find.
Read more here;http://bangordailynews.com/2016/04/08/outdoors/loon-dies-of-tropical-disease-stirring-talk-of-climate-change/
