CSI: Critters — Solving Animal Deaths In the Wild

CSI for the animal kingdom with wildlife pathologist Carol Meteyer at the National Wildlife Health Center. Bats, wolves, eagles, frogs and the stories their autopsies/necropsies tell.

On television, CSI units get out the autopsy knives to learn what happened at a murder scene.

On Carol Meteyer’s exam table, the lights are bright and the knives are sharp, but the bodies have fur, feathers, scales, claws, wings. Meteyer does CSI work for the animal kingdom.

To figure out what killed a golden eagle. A gray wolf. Jaguar. Beaver. Bluebird. Opossum. A cave full of bats. Five thousand blackbirds.

The story under knife and microscope is the story of our natural world, from nature’s side.

This hour On Point: the wildlife pathologist and CSI: Animal Kingdom.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guest:

Carol Meteyer, wildlife pathologist and Veterinarian and the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Joe Walston, executive director of the Asia Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Later in the hour, a snow leopard discovery in Afghanistan. See photos and a video here.

From Tom's Reading List:

• Miller McCune: "Dead animals arrive at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., almost every day, usually by overnight delivery in plastic coolers. State and federal wildlife biologists from all over the country send carcasses to the lab hoping to solve cases of mysterious animal deaths, to confirm their own diagnoses or to provide evidence in legal cases against an animal’s killer. Because it does solve animal murder mysteries through scientific investigation, the center has been called wildlife’s own CSI unit. It would be just as accurate, though, to call it a wildlife Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also solves deadly mysteries, but the emphasis there, as at the wildlife health center, is on research, outreach and prevention of needless death."

Here are some photos of Carol Meteyer at work in the lab.

Carol Meteyer at the National Wildlife Health Center.