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Studying Birds and West Nile Virus on the National Mall
Poziom:
Temat: Sztuka i rozrywka
BIRD NOISES
BIRD CALLS
There's a cat bird in here
Sometimes squeaking will allow us to to bring the
bird in
I'm Dr. Peter Marra, a research scientist
at the Smithsonian's Migratory Birds Center
at the National Zoo.
We're down here on the National Mall. We're
capturing birds to study West Nile Virus.
We're studying the birds that carry the virus,
so we set up mist nets, fine, nylon nets
that the birds can't see. So as they're flying through the area,
they can't see the net and get caught in it.
It is totally harmless to them and we capture them
multiple times over the season
from May until October to understand how the
virus get s more and more intense
to the point where it actually can be transmitted
to humans. And we're studying this over an urbanization gradient
So this area here is very very urban, lots of
impermeable surfaces and that means fewer mosquitoes
But we we also have sites in really
forested areas in Virginia and the eastern shore of Maryland
where mosquito abundance can be very high
So we expect West Nile Virus to also be potentially
very high there.
Here on the mall we'll be catching species like
gray catbirds,
house sparrows an invasive species,
pigeons. We could also catch song sparrows.
We check the nets every twenty minutes. We pull the birds out
and we take a small blood sample from their
wing, we band the birds and we release them.
Then we come come back two weeks later
and we catch them again and we bleed them again. Over
the course of the summer, or that West Nile Virus
breeding season, we have multiple samples that we can
look at and learn how
West Nile Virus is transmitted over that
breeding season in the same individual birds
One of the interesting story that we've found and
published on is that robins are an important part
of the the story. When robin abudance is really
high, mosquitoes will actually go out and choose
robins over people
to bite and potentially infect
When robin abundance goes down, mosquitoes
switch hosts and they actually start
biting humans more than they bite robins.
So if there were all of a sudden a peak
in West Nile Virus emergence
we would start looking at birds to tell us more about the story.
What's going on with bird abundance?
So birds are playing a really important role here
and we really want to understand what's controlling
the emergence of West Nile Virus
The data from mosquitoes, the data from the birds are
all written up and published
into papers that are
out into journal. We publicize these in newspapers and magazines
We give talks at national meetings
We talk to local health departments to further advertise
and discuss the importance of our results
to ultimately influence and minimize the impact
that West Nile Virus can have on human health
