For most of this week at the WDA conference in Chicago, Dr. Randy Zarnke has been the one holding the microphone. He is the reason the WDA History Project exists, having had the idea of recording the association's long-timers before their stories are lost. So in this episode we turn it around, and Randy answers the questions.

Randy spent 24 years as the wildlife disease guy at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and has recorded 202 oral history interviews with veteran Alaskan hunters, trappers and bush pilots. He shares what makes someone open up on tape, what surprised him about the careers of WDA's most successful members, and what he would tell a student who feels too intimidated to approach the group of longtime WDA members standing in the corner. Spoiler: they will almost always turn around and ask your name.

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The term One Health didn't come out of a strategy meeting or a peer-reviewed paper. It came out of an interview with a journalist who wouldn't drop a question. Dr. Billy Karesh was explaining why Ebola killing gorillas mattered, and the reporter kept pushing: is this a human disease or an animal one? Eventually Billy said there's just one health, the pathogens don't care about our categories.

Recorded in Chicago for the WDA History project, Billy looks back on building WCS's field veterinary program from nothing in 1989, the first WDA meeting he actually remembers, and what it means to hand the next generation a rapidly evolving organisation in a rapidly evolving world filled with wildlife health challenges. Plus the direction he's quietly moving in after 40 years with animals. It involves plants.

Link
Billy Karesh's LinkedIn profile

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Who could believe a blue-tongued lizard can teach you how to be a good human being? Professor Anne Poelina can, and by the end of this episode you might too.

For International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we're re-playing Anne's Carlton Herman Memorial Lecture from the 2024 WDA conference in Canberra. A Nyikina Warrwa woman, scientist, filmmaker and poet, Anne is the inaugural chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia's Kimberley, and she has spent decades arguing that you cannot separate land, water, people and non-human kin.

Her talk, "Waking Up the Snake", is about waking up consciousness: why the Whanganui's legal personhood puzzled her elders, why the destruction of habitat to create a "nature repair market" makes no sense, and why the wildlife health community, already practised at caring for things that can't speak for themselves, might be exactly the audience she needs. Ancient wisdom, hard politics, and a stubborn coalition of hope.

Links

Check out Anne Poelina's website.

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What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick?

That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carrying Mycoplasma gallisepticum - a pathogen that causes severe disease in US bird populations, yet not one of them looked ill. The infections were invisible from the outside, but their immune systems told a very different story. In this episode, Maria Teresa takes us from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, where she handled her very first finch as an undergraduate, to Cornell and back - explaining why finding a poultry pathogen quietly circulating through wild ecosystems matters for all of us, what won her the 2026 BioOne Ambassador Award, and what she's chasing next in the Galápagos.

Links

Read Maria Teresa's essay on her research on finch leukocytes that won her the BioOne Ambassador Award!

Maria Teresa's website and social media:

• website
• Instagram
• X

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In Iran, there is no established path for a veterinary student who wants to work with wildlife. So Arman Nourishirazi and his teammates built one.

Based in Ahvaz, in the province of Khuzestan, Arman is a final year vet student in one of the richest bird regions in the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf coast, vast wetlands and the Eurasian African Flyway all converge. Working with his university's veterinary hospital and the local Department of Environment, he helped create a system that treats injured wild birds and gives other students a way into a field that was effectively closed to them.

The patients range from eagles and barn owls to white storks and great white pelicans. Arman also talks us through the first documented case of avian malaria in a cattle egret in Iran, and the creative fix he and his team came up with when two juvenile barn owls refused to eat and human imprinting was the last thing they could risk.

Links

Check out Arman's LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.

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What happens when a parasite learns to survive the deep freeze? In this episode, host Cat Vendl talks with parasitologist Cody Malone about Trichinella, the tiny worm behind your grandmother's warnings to cook pork through, and a real hazard for Canada's northern communities who rely on wild game.

Cody shares how this strange nematode completes its entire life cycle in a single host, why freezing meat won't kill it, and how it can lurk in a frozen carcass for years. Along the way: a newly named species discovered on a Yukon mountain, a globe-trotting parasite that turned up in an Alaskan grizzly via what may have been a cruise ship landfill, and the surprising idea that a thriving Trichinella population can actually signal a healthy ecosystem. It's detective work, food safety, and Arctic ecology all in one, an unexpectedly gripping tour of life in the frozen north.

Links

Learn more about Cody's fascinating work on his Researchgate and LinkedIN profile.

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How do you find out which animals a mosquito has been biting? You start by thinking like one. In this episode, biologist Elizabeth Linares Alcántara takes us to a public park in Mérida, Mexico, where she hunts blood-fed mosquitoes in their hiding spots and reads the DNA in their tiny abdomens to reveal who they have been feeding on, from humans and iguanas to feral cats and a neighbour's grazing goat.

The result is a "blood feeding network" that helps anticipate outbreaks of dengue and other emerging diseases. Elizabeth also shares a finding that turns intuition on its head, and offers a preview of next year's WDA conference, hosted in her own backyard on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Links

Learn more about Elizabeth's work on her ResearchGate profile.

Check out more details about next year's WDA conference in Merida, about the Latin American WDA chapter and their student chapter.

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Genevieve Barnett spends their nights caring for one of the world's most misunderstood animals. From Night Flight Rehabilitation, the bat rehab NGO they founded in Colorado, they nurse little brown bats through white-nose syndrome and gently untangle myotis caught in fishing line, one patient at a time.

But Genevieve is also asking bigger questions. Through the lens of queer ecology, they explore what we miss when we view the natural world through one narrow perspective: whose knowledge counts, whose stories get told. From butterflies that are half male and half female to lizard species with no males at all, they reveal a natural world far stranger and more diverse than mainstream science tends to admit, and they make the case that inclusion isn't a side note to One Health. It's central to it.

Link

Follow Genevieve on Instagram and learn more about their amazing bat rehab work:
@night_flight_rehabilitation

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