Colt Knight: 00:00
Hold on a second.
Colt Knight: 00:02
Glenda just told us that bald eagles are not cool, and she is not down with bald eagles.
Colt Knight: 00:08
Now she’s gotta explain.
Glenda Pereira: 00:08
I think hawks are better raptors than eagles. One, eagles are basically like seagulls, so not cool. They are a pest, in my opinion. And if you’ve ever seen those videos in Alaska with those bald eagles, what do they do? They, like, sit at the trash bin, and they will eat the trash.
Glenda Pereira: 00:32
Like, not cool. Work for your food, man. And so I think hawks, for example, they sound way cooler. All those eagle noises that, like, you see in movies or whatever cool effects, that’s actually a hawk. If you actually hear what eagles sound like, they’re lame.
Glenda Pereira: 00:49
So that’s golden eagles, though.
Colt Knight: 00:52
Hot take. Glenda, bald eagles are lame.
Glenda Pereira: 00:55
I think they’re lame. I think golden eagles are way cooler. And we actually have our colleague Tom here, who probably has done some DNA sequencing on all these animals. I don’t know, like, how many golden eagles we have, how many raptors we have in Maine. They’re way cooler than seagulls.
Glenda Pereira: 01:14
Seagulls are just, I mean, than eagles. Eagles are just like seagulls, which are a pest. So anyways
Colt Knight: 01:21
That being said, what’s your opinion on pigeons?
Glenda Pereira: 01:25
Pigeons? I could do without all of them. They are a nuisance to dairy farms, to all the farms. They bring in disease, and they just make a mess. So eradicate them.
Glenda Pereira: 01:43
Owls are cool. Though, like, see, this is what I mean. Like, there are so many other cool birds, and I’m generalizing birds because those aren’t really birds, they’re raptors. But there are so many other cool ones that, like, I don’t know. Baldies don’t really, they’re not exciting, I guess.
Colt Knight: 02:01
Where do you fall on the ratite side of things?
Glenda Pereira: 02:05
Like?
Colt Knight: 02:06
Ostriches and emus. I don’t like them. I don’t know. The look on your face. I wish we had video in the podcast studio equipped.
Glenda Pereira: 02:19
I don’t know. I’ve never really interacted with them, but like
Colt Knight: 02:24
No. If you don’t like eagles, you would hate an
Glenda Pereira: 02:26
What purpose do they serve, I guess, is my thing.
Colt Knight: 02:29
Well, we’re gonna talk about this with Tom because of the tick thing. Because the lone star tick bites people and they get the alpha-gal syndrome and they can’t eat red meat, and the closest thing that you can have to a steak is an ostrich steak.
Glenda Pereira: 02:47
Really? Where do you find ostriches to eat?
Colt Knight: 02:53
Ostrich farms.
Glenda Pereira: 02:54
How do you cook it?
Colt Knight: 02:56
Fire.
Glenda Pereira: 02:57
That doesn’t sound like it would be good. Like, do you put a lot of, like, A1 steak sauce or rub on there? That sounds, like, very lean, and like maybe jerky would be better.
Colt Knight: 03:09
I feel like you’re judging protein sources without ever having tried them.
Glenda Pereira: 03:14
I don’t know, like, emus and ostriches, do they have any fat or marbling on them?
Colt Knight: 03:20
No. No. And unlike chickens, the meat is not in the breast. It’s like sirloins and legs and stuff.
Glenda Pereira: 03:32
Well, I’ve never had raptors because
Colt Knight: 03:35
Oh, well that’s a federal crime.
Glenda Pereira: 03:36
Right. So I don’t know what they taste like. But I’ve also never had emus or ostriches, and I don’t even know where I would find them. I’ve only seen them in zoos anyways.
Tom Rounsville: 03:46
There are some in Maine. Some people do farm them here.
Glenda Pereira: 03:49
Yeah. So I guess I wasn’t judging the protein source. I was just saying that gamey is what I assume they taste like. So, anyways, we’ll probably add this somewhere into the episode, but, welcome to the Maine Farmcast. This is your cohost today.
Glenda Pereira: 04:12
We’re cohosting duties. Colt and I are here in the studio with Dr. Tom Rounsville. Rounsville?
Tom Rounsville: 04:20
Rounsville.
Glenda Pereira: 04:20
Rounsville.
Colt Knight: 04:22
Pronunciation, Glenda.
Glenda Pereira: 04:23
I did both. So, saved by both. And doctor, see, now you’re getting in my head, Colt.
Colt Knight: 04:35
Dr. Rounsville, it’s great to have you with us on the podcast today.
Glenda Pereira: 04:38
Thanks, Colt.
Colt Knight: 04:42
Now, I would just kick right off into an introduction on Dr. Rounsville and ask everything, but Glenda didn’t invite me to this podcast recording until, like, five minutes before, where she swore she sent me an invitation on the calendar. And I showed her the calendar and there was no invitation.
Glenda Pereira: 05:03
I made a mistake and I got caught up. I got caught making a mistake. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’m admitting this.
Glenda Pereira: 05:10
You have proof that I’m admitting this on live feed. I don’t know if people really care that I made a mistake or not. But let’s reel back in to the topic at hand. So
Colt Knight: 05:25
It’s time to kick the pig and get started.
Glenda Pereira: 05:27
It’s time to get started and kick this pig. So Dr. Tom Rounsville, Rounsville, is a molecular geneticist?
Tom Rounsville: 05:44
Well, I’m an applied molecular specialist.
Glenda Pereira: 05:47
Specialist. That’s what it was. Yes. But really, most of your training would be in a ton of different areas, but genetics being one of them.
Glenda Pereira: 05:56
And a lot of the work that you do right now is with DNA sequencing as well. So I’m gonna let you introduce yourself to folks because you’re a new guest on the Maine Farmcast. So welcome.
Tom Rounsville: 06:06
Sure. Well, thank you for that introduction. So I am a molecular specialist, but I’m a specialist in applying molecular techniques, DNA technologies, to problems that face folks here in Maine. So while my training was primarily in molecular ecology, focused more on wildlife than anything, it was using genetic tools to investigate wildlife management and maybe some health issues associated with wildlife. So in my role in Extension, I was originally hired to help kickstart the tick testing program, which we can talk about more later.
Tom Rounsville: 06:43
But I provided the expertise, because I had done some of this work in my master’s degree, where you would test ticks that folks send to the lab for tick-borne disease and then let them know, oh yeah, that tick that you sent in is carrying the cause of Lyme disease. You know, you should really talk to your doctor about it and so forth. But since I’ve been at the lab, you know, the Diagnostic Research Lab, which is a great facility that’s operated by Extension, I’ve been working with colleagues on a number of different fields, and we use these molecular techniques to address things of veterinary concern, aquaculture, plant disease, insects, you know, a lot of things under what I would say is the One Health umbrella, is just having these tools for that. So my specialty is just to use these techniques to help people with their work.
Glenda Pereira: 07:34
Yeah. And so you talked about how the lab takes in samples, mostly for maybe producers, but you have clients who, if they have a tick and so like people, right? It’s not only animal or plant or aquaculture species, but you do have some, you reach some of the human population here in the state of Maine, which I think is a really critical tool to have. Because like you mentioned, Lyme disease is something that folks struggle with here in Maine. And since, you know, we’ve seen the tick population increase in the previous couple of years, it’s definitely a growing concern.
Glenda Pereira: 08:18
Maybe it’s always been a concern here in Maine. And do you have kind of like, talk to us about the landscape in it? I don’t want the conversation to only be about ticks, but it’s certainly something that affects everybody because ticks are everywhere in Maine, whether you live in the woods or you live, you know, just in a suburban area, they’re prevalent.
Tom Rounsville: 08:42
Yeah. So, just talking about ticks in general. I run the Applied Genetics and Genomics Lab, which is a part of UMaine Extension, and we provide the molecular testing along with collaborating with the UMaine Tick Lab to do that work. So one important thing to think about is that, while we provide this genetic testing, there’s sort of this collaborative framework with other components. And that’s probably one of the hallmarks of my particular job role, is that I collaborate with so many different groups, that one day I could be working on ticks, the next day I’m working on fish, and the next day I’m working on trees.
Tom Rounsville: 09:19
You never know. So talking about ticks in general, usually when people ask me about, you know, how is the tick problem in Maine? I usually say it’s bad and it’s gonna get worse. I don’t have any good news. We are working on trying to come up with reactive strategies or proactive strategies that we can take to try to reduce human tick encounters.
Tom Rounsville: 09:40
But these are still kind of being researched at the moment, so I don’t really have anything to report on that. But right now, the reactive measure that folks can take is, UMaine Tick Lab has a tick testing program. For $20, we take ticks in from anybody in the state that’s been bit by a tick. We will test it for the most relevant pathogens and then report back to the client. As part of this program, we have a three-day turnaround guarantee where, from a lab standpoint, we gotta move fast to move these samples through. And we’ve been able to actually do most samples within forty-eight hours.
Tom Rounsville: 10:15
So we’re actually doing even better than that. On a typical year, we receive five to 7,000 ticks. This time of year, we’re getting quite a bit. We might get, you know, 100 to 120 ticks daily and then sort them through the system. But it’s been a very well received service since we started the first year in 2019.
Tom Rounsville: 10:34
The numbers of folks that participate in the program has really just exploded.
Glenda Pereira: 10:39
And so something you said, that you have a three-day guarantee, but are there best management practices for handling collecting ticks to send to the lab? Are there certain things that you need from the tick? Are there any recommendations you can provide folks that are sending
Colt Knight: 10:56
Yeah. Ticks
Tom Rounsville: 10:57
So you could send broken tick pieces in if that’s all you have. But generally, the best thing you can do is try to get the tick out whole. There are special tick removal tools that you can use, such as tick spoons, which Humane Extension has available. If you ever stop at the DRL, we can give some to folks. We definitely hand out tick removal kits, plenty of them, at our events.
Tom Rounsville: 11:20
These help to, like, force the tick to let go, because if you just kind of yank and pull it out, often the ticks will, for lack of a better word, regurgitate or throw up all the nasty things inside of their salivary glands and their gut back into you, and that’s where all of the disease-causing organisms live. So if you can get the tick out with as little trauma as possible, then the odds of becoming infected with whatever was in them is that much lower. And then you don’t want to wait on it once you have the sample, send it to the lab right away. Because if you’re waiting for a test result, which you should always talk to your doctor first before you do anything, they might say, okay, well I’ll give you a prophylaxis if your tick tests positive. Then they would get the test result and then be able to be treated for whatever.
Tom Rounsville: 12:02
But I think Lyme disease is ubiquitous in Maine now in most places. It’s even found in Aroostook County in some ticks that we’ve tested. But there’s a lot of other infections that people aren’t as familiar with, such as anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and something called Powassan virus. And these are all things that could be grave health threats, and most doctors will just think about, oh, you got a Lyme test back and it’s negative. You know, no tick-borne disease here.
Tom Rounsville: 12:28
But in reality, there’s a lot more to think about. So the testing is valuable because it’s going to tell people about these other tick-borne diseases that they might not know about that are really increasing in prevalence throughout the state.
Glenda Pereira: 12:39
Yeah. And I know something Colt wants to know is what kind of ticks do we have in Maine?
Tom Rounsville: 12:46
So if you’re bit by a tick, most of the ticks that would bite you would either be the deer tick, also known as the black-legged tick. This is the one that does carry and transmit Lyme disease. The other most frequent tick that you as a person would encounter would be American dog ticks. They’re not really known to transmit diseases that are common in Maine, but people often will go out walking their dog through, like, high grass and end up with, like, 10 ticks on themselves and their dog. However, there are other ticks such as the lone star tick, which is way more common in areas south of here.
Tom Rounsville: 13:22
That tick can carry a number of diseases beyond ones that we’re familiar with, as well as it can cause a red meat allergy known as alpha-gal syndrome, where someone coming down with this, if they consume red meat products, would have severe allergic reactions, which would basically prevent them from eating most mammalian-derived meats.
Glenda Pereira: 13:40
Yep. Cool. Does that answer your question? Yeah.
Tom Rounsville: 13:45
But I guess I should say that every year at the lab, we get maybe 30 to 50 of these ticks, but most of them are travel associated. There isn’t really a breeding population of them in Maine. Okay. Anytime we have ones where people had no travel history, like only, you know, were in their yard and that’s where they found it and hadn’t left the state in a while, we will often send people out to, like, do a tick drag to try to collect ticks to see if there’s more there. And generally, we haven’t turned more up.
Tom Rounsville: 14:12
So the ones that are ending up here, often people are getting them somewhere else and bringing them in, or they can latch on to migratory birds
Colt Knight: 14:19
Yep.
Tom Rounsville: 14:20
And just hitch a ride in. But we haven’t been finding all of the life stages here. And to talk about that as well, we actually had someone send an Asian longhorned tick to the lab a few months ago, and they had no travel history with that. And that is a tick of major concern in some other areas. It’s in a number of places in New England south of us, but that can be a human health risk as well as one to livestock.
Glenda Pereira: 14:47
Yep. Yeah. So they, like you mentioned, they, it was, they brought it in somehow. There’s not a breeding population here.
Tom Rounsville: 14:57
So that tick most likely came in off of a bird. The person that found it found it in their yard and they live in Southern Maine in a very, like, suburban environment. Yeah. Yep. And they had no travel history.
Tom Rounsville: 15:07
So that one probably came in on a bird. And I’m glad that they sent it to the lab because, you know, those ticks can reproduce asexually. So a single tick can, you know, create a population of thousands if, you know? But this can’t be an isolated incident. There’s gotta be more of them throughout the state.
Tom Rounsville: 15:25
So it will become a risk soon.
Colt Knight: 15:27
Yep. I’ve run into a handful of people now here in Maine that suffer from alpha-gal syndrome. I’ve got a lot of colleagues and friends that live in Kentucky, and those ticks are running rampant through Kentucky. It’s like almost all the game wardens have that syndrome now, and most of the folks that are really avid outdoorsmen are really getting hit hard with that lone star tick disease. Yeah.
Colt Knight: 15:53
So I do not want to see it here because red meat is a staple of my diet.
Tom Rounsville: 15:57
It will be here soon. I would say in the next ten years, there will be an established breeding population here, unfortunately.
Glenda Pereira: 16:02
Yep. It’s, do you think, and we’re not gonna dive into this, but there’s just maybe the right conditions for them. And then like you said, they breed asexually. So the more
Tom Rounsville: 16:13
Well, the lone star ticks do not. So the Asian longhorns do.
Glenda Pereira: 16:16
Asian longhorn ones. Yep.
Tom Rounsville: 16:17
Traditionally, what’s kept a lot of tick species out of Maine has been the climate. Right. And as the winters aren’t as cold as they had been, these ticks can survive and then they can reproduce. So that’s really driven a lot of the range shifts of these tick species, is that the winters aren’t as cold as they had been.
Glenda Pereira: 16:35
Yep. Yeah. Alright. So, something that I had asked Tom to potentially talk about was this term molecular testing and kind of what you and your team do in your lab because some folks may be, you know, when they think about the word molecular, they might just not really understand what it fully entails. And you actually taught in the animal genetics class and you had such a good way of explaining really what it encompasses.
Glenda Pereira: 17:04
Can you talk more about that?
Tom Rounsville: 17:05
Sure. So molecular just gets down into looking at individual molecules. So when we apply that to genetics, we’re looking at individual DNA molecules. So these molecules can tell us all sorts of different things about an organism. They can tell us potentially where that organism came from if we have reference populations.
Tom Rounsville: 17:29
It can also tell us different traits about it, which are often studied in genetics. A lot of what I work on, since it’s more on the applied side, we’re often using genetics as a tool to look at is something here. So when I say that is, you know, if we have some kind of like a poultry disease, for instance, and someone has a chicken that had passed away on their farm and they want to have it tested, there are tests that we could do to say, oh, yep, that disease-causing organism or maybe a virus, we find their genetic material inside of that animal, we know it’s been there. Yep. So it may not be the reason that animal died, but you at least know it was a factor.
Tom Rounsville: 18:06
So breaking down molecules into these small genetic strands allows us to get information about the animals themselves or about things that might be bringing them disease. And working at the Diagnostic and Research Lab, I’d say a lot of the work that’s done there between the laboratories that are in the building, are really focused on disease management, and just providing producers ideas of what they can do now that something is there, how they can manage for it.
Glenda Pereira: 18:34
Right. Yeah. And to clarify too, so we all have DNA encompassed in ourselves. And so really, like you’re saying, it’s kind of as simple as we’re taking a part of our DNA and we’re saying, these are your base pairs that are associated with potentially this or that. And we have a, like, map almost of what the base pairs are for each species.
Glenda Pereira: 19:01
And then you’re kind of using your reference population, which you have a very good map of, you know, here are all of the base pairs for this species and then for this reference population for a species. And then when you get a sample, you’re saying, yep, it matches up. They share a lot of the same base pairs. And so we can sort of match that.
Glenda Pereira: 19:21
Yeah, this is that species and not, because you talked a little bit about some of what you do is try to identify is this the species that we think it is versus being on an individual basis. And so I think it’s important that you, because you sometimes said, when you’ve tested for everything and you kind of are at a dead end for what you can do next, some of what your lab can do is kind of lead you towards a direction of, okay, we think it’s this based on what the genetic similarities are between whether it’s a pathogen species, etcetera. Which is pretty cool because I think, you know, the more data we get, the better able we are to manage, I guess is what I’m trying to get at.
Tom Rounsville: 20:08
So probably to answer that question in a couple of different ways. When we do like our normal disease testing, we often use a technique called qPCR. PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. Easiest way to think about it is it’s just a giant DNA photocopier. In order to do anything with DNA, you usually need to create millions or billions of copies of whatever you’re looking at because it’s just such a small molecule.
Tom Rounsville: 20:32
So when we do qPCR, we’re honestly just doing a presence absence test. And the way that we detect that is using fluorescence. So we basically have a camera and a laser. And if we are able to generate enough copies of this particular fragment that we’re looking for, we can shine a laser on it and actually see it fluoresce or glow. And if we can capture that image, then we know that it’s there.
Tom Rounsville: 20:54
So this is cheaper than doing DNA sequencing, which would be looking at the actual order of the A’s, C’s, G’s of the genome of whatever you’re doing. But this is a lot cheaper and faster to be able to just say yes or no, this thing is here. Then once you know it is there, if you wanna know more about it, then you can do more work with it. So because of that, for ticks, you know, plants, animals, we have these established panels of special tests that will pick up the genetic material of these disease-causing organisms. So if you run these tests and every single one of them comes back negative, but you have symptoms that really are associated with something like that, we can do something called shotgun metagenomics where we can just take a sample, run a bunch of DNA sequences and sequence all the DNA that’s in that sample and tell you everything that’s there.
Tom Rounsville: 21:42
But often you find answers that you weren’t even expecting. And now you have to go back and decide, alright, well, here’s this organism that’s in here. It causes disease. It’s not known to be in Maine. What do we even do with this?
Tom Rounsville: 21:55
So it’s kind of funny that, you know, a lot of the folks that work at the DRL that use my lab to do this often are like, alright. Well, if I give you a sample, am I gonna unlock even more mysteries than if I just, you know, tried to elucidate what I actually thought happened with this animal? Because I’ve had at least three or four times now where I’ve made the quote unquote problem even bigger by the answers I’ve given to people.
Glenda Pereira: 22:19
Which is a good problem to have. So because, and I retract that, so it’s good to understand more. Right? Because like you’re saying, our tick issue, for example, is only gonna grow.
Glenda Pereira: 22:32
And so starting to document what is the current presence and maybe can we get ahead of those proactive management strategies? So it’s good to have that information, even though you’re right, it can cause more, maybe to ask more questions and more testing than if, you know, it was just what that person was potentially thinking as a management strategy. But I think that’s why really what your lab does is kind of support the diagnosis that you get from the lab, right? So you mentioned you work with all the collaborators within the diagnostic lab, and really this data can support and give more information about what’s happening because most of the clients that you guys have at the DRL, maybe they’re producers of something. And so those folks kind of need, you know, this is their livelihood.
Glenda Pereira: 23:26
So they need more information to either help them solve a problem on their farm or, you know, kind of expand on whatever it is that they’re trying to manage. Yeah. Would you say that that’s fair to kind of say how your lab sort of utilizes those tools to help out folks in the state of Maine?
Tom Rounsville: 23:46
Yeah, I would say so. But I think maybe I should talk about my role a little bit more. Unlike a lot of employees of Cooperative Extension who might go out and visit someone’s farm and talk to them about, you know, best strategies for a number of different things, very few people are going to pick up their phone and be like, you know what? I want to talk to a molecular biologist today about whatever. Because yes, I can provide things that are very useful to them.
Tom Rounsville: 24:11
But, you know, I know very little about, for instance, dairy farming. You want to ask me about that? Like, I don’t know. I’m not a good resource for that. But I can stand behind the veterinary diagnostic lab and maybe there’s, you know, some disease on the farm, they collect samples and then I can assist them with the tools and technologies we have in the lab to say, yep, you know, this animal was infected with this bacteria here.
Tom Rounsville: 24:38
And then I can hand that information back to someone from the veterinary lab and then they can talk with the producer about how to do something about it. Yep. So more or less, you know, I’m kind of a weird fish, I guess, so to speak for Extension where I do interface with the public some, but most of what I do is enable other programs to be able to offer more services to folks. Cause, one thing I was asked to talk about too, is how people get samples to me. So for instance, the tick lab has their own tick submission website where they can send samples in that we can do that.
Tom Rounsville: 25:12
Any of the other labs that we work with, like the Aquatic Animal Health Lab, the Veterinary Diagnostic Lab, the Insect Lab, or the Plant Disease Diagnostic Lab, you would just submit a sample to those labs as normal. And if it came to a point where molecular biology services would help that person, then those labs would either reach out to me or a lot of them even have technicians that originally had worked for my lab and we already trained them and they can already do the testing using our equipment and then actually report that back to their clients. So for the most part, people probably won’t even know my lab existed because I just kind of hide in the back, but we’re the ones actually doing the lab work for a lot of this stuff.
Glenda Pereira: 25:50
Yeah. No, you’re totally right. But you’re a resource to our colleagues and even you’re a resource to us because, you know, when I maybe am working with a client myself, you know, I can talk to you and Dana and say, hey, this is what’s going on. And so, getting more folks as part of the team potentially provides a solution. So you’re an awesome resource even though, yeah, you spend most of the time maybe running samples and training folks too, because that’s a big part of what your team does.
Glenda Pereira: 26:23
And you have a lot of training staff and even students within your lab as well, which is kind of really neat because we had a conversation earlier about how genetics isn’t always, you know, the most sexy science stuff. And so
Tom Rounsville: 26:40
I think it is.
Colt Knight: 26:42
Disagreement. And so
Tom Rounsville: 26:44
I’m biased for sure.
Glenda Pereira: 26:47
But, and, you know, I think, like I mentioned, Tom, you presented to our students today and you kind of showed them how, you know, beyond the initial, oh, genetics is kind of this topic that we don’t always understand, but here’s how you really apply it on a day to day basis and provide solutions. So I think we need to get more folks interested in this field. That’s just my thought, though. I also think genetics is sexy, but I’m more on the applied side. I would say Tom does more of the basic genetic side as well as applied.
Glenda Pereira: 27:19
And we were saying how true geneticists are really statisticians and they love numbers and coding.
Tom Rounsville: 27:26
Yeah. So I think one of the biggest things that I want to share is that, as time progresses, genetics has become a lot cheaper. And because of that, it’s now everywhere. I think what really brought this to the forefront was probably the COVID-19 pandemic where a lot of people were required to have PCR tests done all the time. And now people who had never known what PCR was, suddenly, you know, everybody knew what PCR testing was because this was a useful technique for that. So ever since then, there’s been a lot of investment in more testing and sequencing technologies to the point now where it’s getting extremely cheap to run any kind of testing. Because the way to really think about this is the example of the Human Genome Project. So it was the first time that people were going to sequence an entire human genome to use it as reference. You know, this took place in the mid to late nineties.
Tom Rounsville: 28:20
I think it was finished in the early two thousands. And over the course of it, it involved hundreds of scientists. It cost billions of dollars to make this one genome, which was really useful for, you know, medical science and developing technologies. Well, you know, here we are twenty-five years later and you can do a genome for $1,000, one person on a weekend. The technology changes that much in twenty-five years.
Tom Rounsville: 28:41
It’s incredible. So even more so going forward, DNA sequencing and getting these huge data sets is just going to be a normal thing where, you know, okay, I have an animal that’s sick. We’re going to take, you know, a sample of their microbiome and look at all the different organisms that are inside of it and then try to figure out how we can use this to improve their health. Yep. These things are gonna be way more commonplace.
Tom Rounsville: 29:05
So, you know, people like me that do these applied genetics things are gonna be even more in demand. But handling all this data is difficult because I’ve had to pick up a lot of computer science and coding skills because, you know, I can push go on a machine now and generate millions and billions of sequences of DNA. But what do you do with it? Yeah. You physically yourself cannot handle it.
Tom Rounsville: 29:25
You need high-performance computing and models and all of this stuff. So, you know, the field is pivoting, but it’s pivoting towards this era of big data, which, you know, the amount of genetic information we’re gonna be able to find out soon on anything is just gonna completely change the way people do a lot of different parts of science.
Glenda Pereira: 29:44
Yeah. So we need more folks. We need to train more folks in this. And I’m slowly trying. I tell all my kids statistics is cool.
Glenda Pereira: 29:52
Coding is cool. SAS, R, JMP, they’re all cool tools. And the last thing I wanted to say was that second to humans, dairy cows are the species we have the most information on for genome. So I can’t remember how many animals exist within the population, but it’s very commonplace now that we genotype almost all dairy animals. So it’s very affordable, like you said.
Glenda Pereira: 30:21
And for farmers that use these tools, they’re really looking at it as to what animals can I keep on the farm and can become the ones that we have offspring from on our farm versus not? So we use it a little bit differently. People tend to use that information maybe for understanding what their genetic, you know, risks are down the line or if they’re trying to, you know, find out where their family might have come from. But within the farming community, we tend to use it as a tool to sort of benefit as an economic benefit to the farm. So just wanted to add that there, dairy cows, we have a lot of animals in the population.
Glenda Pereira: 31:04
And so that’s kind of neat.
Tom Rounsville: 31:07
And I will say, like to add to that, in the next probably ten years, there’s this field that’s growing of, like, at-home genetics. There are some companies that are developing DNA sequencers or genetic analyzers that can just, like, plug into a smartphone. So probably in the next ten years, you might have just, you know, normal folks at home doing their own DNA testing and then having models that would just run that data through so they wouldn’t even have to send it into a lab.
Glenda Pereira: 31:34
That’s scary.
Tom Rounsville: 31:36
Why is that scary?
Glenda Pereira: 31:37
I don’t know. So have you done a DNA testing analysis on yourself?
Tom Rounsville: 31:46
I have. Yes.
Glenda Pereira: 31:47
I haven’t yet. I don’t know. I’m like, I wanna know and then I don’t wanna know and then I don’t want my information to exist out there. That’s part of my
Colt Knight: 31:57
Are you worried about past criminal activity or, are you worried you’re gonna discover you’re part Neanderthal or where’s the hesitation here going?
Glenda Pereira: 32:13
The less information out there the better. Even though my information is everywhere. I know that.
Glenda Pereira: 32:17
Did you run a panel on yourself? I don’t, anybody
Colt Knight: 32:21
I don’t have one, but I would like to get one.
Glenda Pereira: 32:24
Yeah. That’d be a good Christmas gift, I guess. So that’s just my thing. No. I don’t have any past criminal history because one, I don’t think I could have this job.
Glenda Pereira: 32:35
Because they definitely run a background check.
Colt Knight: 32:36
That’s what all the serial killers say.
Glenda Pereira: 32:38
Yeah, right. I changed, I burned all my fingertips.
Tom Rounsville: 32:43
Well, then you’d be the only person not leaving fingerprints at the crime scene. We could see that there’s a handprint with no fingerprints on it.
Glenda Pereira: 32:51
But yeah, I’ve, I guess, I think it’s good to know. But then, I guess, maybe, some of where I, I think it’s important to understand what, you said this, how do we utilize the data? And I think sometimes if people aren’t well informed when they’re doing this at home and there isn’t potentially an interpretation, if those things exist, I think it’s good. But, you know, I think it can maybe create more misinformation, more fear into, you know, oh, I’m gonna have this disease now and so etcetera.
Glenda Pereira: 33:27
I don’t know. That’s some of what I, if there’s good tools and good interpretation tools and folks know how to use the data.
Tom Rounsville: 33:36
Well, I think this is probably a dual faceted thing because business and maybe the right thing aren’t always in line. So these technologies will probably just get thrown out into the void. Should you sequence your own DNA and discover what potential diseases you might pass on to your offspring without talking to a physician or having the background knowledge? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that those tools aren’t probably going to be thrown out there.
Tom Rounsville: 34:03
Because you think about, you know, as these new technologies, think about AI, think about how well it’s regulated right now. It’s not. You can do a lot of stuff with it. So I feel like sort of the spirit of America in a lot of ways is to develop these really cool technologies, throw them out there, and then watch the world adapt around it. But, you know, kind of not thinking about the consequences that are gonna happen.
Tom Rounsville: 34:27
Because you can think about too, like social media. That was, you know, a really cool thing when it came out to allow all these people to connect to each other. But now, you know, people can connect to each other and bully each other and do horrible things with it. You know, I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of progress, but I also know that interpreting your own genetic tests in a vacuum would be a poor decision.
Glenda Pereira: 34:49
Yeah. Yeah. That’s why I think the general population, that’s why I teach statistics to my students. They need to know what this, and honestly, a lot of my class is interpretation, which they hate that. They’re like, what, I calculated this value.
Glenda Pereira: 35:05
Isn’t that good enough? No. Tell me something about it in reference to what we’re trying to explain. And so I guess if we can get ahead of some of that, how do we interpret?
Colt Knight: 35:15
That’s what scares me about AI, is we’re turning, we’ll be turning over all our statistics and interpretation to a computer. We don’t necessarily know how it
Glenda Pereira: 35:25
I don’t know that it does a good job though, which is why I also try to teach the students how to use AI because I think it’s a good tool for some things. There’s some things you shouldn’t use it for.
Tom Rounsville: 35:38
I’m on the opposite end of this. You know, when I do a DNA sequencing run and I generate 100,000,000 DNA sequences, you have to. I cannot check every one manually.
Colt Knight: 35:46
You have to have it.
Tom Rounsville: 35:47
I have to have it. Yep. So we’re relying on code and the outputs and there’s no way, like, you can go back and spot check them to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to, but you have no way of knowing. Because even if I spent, you know, one second looking at each DNA sequence, that’s a hundred million seconds. I don’t have that kind of time.
Colt Knight: 36:06
Yep. So the bigger the data gets, the more we’re reliant on AI to process the
Tom Rounsville: 36:10
data. Absolutely.
Glenda Pereira: 36:12
That’s super cool. So we’ve come full circle on so many topics. And for the folks listening, I think this is really great to just kind of discuss how there are so many tools available and accessible to folks here in the state of Maine, and there’s so much more to learn still. I think that’s a takeaway from this conversation. Tom, was there anything we missed, we didn’t talk about, that you wanted to cover?
Tom Rounsville: 36:39
I would probably say that part of my job is to just make molecular biology more accessible to everyone. So, you know, maybe you’re at home listening to this and you’re like, oh, man, I think there’s this, you know, disease here, something going on maybe with your own farm and that no one’s looking into it. You know, I spend a lot of my time developing new tests and techniques to get better information in the hands of the people that need it the most. So if you really are interested in something like that, reach out to your local Extension and it’ll eventually find its way to me. Or you can find us on, I mean, our website’s kind of buried right now.
Tom Rounsville: 37:19
It’s, like, in the process of being built. But if you just generally reach out to Extension, like, it’ll eventually end up to me. Yeah. And there might be something we could help you with.
Colt Knight: 37:27
Yep. So I have a question. What’s gonna take over the world first? Ticks or robots?
Glenda Pereira: 37:34
You really think it’s the tick though, out of all of the species that you have available to you?
Colt Knight: 37:43
Ticks are the only ones threatening my red meat consumption.
Tom Rounsville: 37:48
How smart are these robots? Pretty smart. Pretty smart.
Colt Knight: 37:52
I mean, they’re processing your 100 millions of lines of genetic data. It’s true.
Tom Rounsville: 37:57
I’ll probably give it to the robots. I mean, ticks are definitely a threat and they need to be taken seriously. But at the same time, I’m one of those people that will still wear shorts out in the woods when I probably shouldn’t, but I always do check. I did not grow up in Maine. I grew up in a place with ticks.
Tom Rounsville: 38:14
So tick checking was just a normal thing of life.
Colt Knight: 38:16
Oh, I visited West Virginia this summer and I walked from my mother’s porch to check how full her propane tank was and walked back. And I had nine ticks crawling up me after that.
Tom Rounsville: 38:32
But I will say in Maine too, I think my own personal tick record and, just for reference, like I did bobcat research for my dissertation, which I was out in the woods a lot, and I did get ticks. I had a running tally with my lab tech. We would see who had the most ticks on them over the summer. And for whatever reason, they loved her so much more than me. I only got a couple and she had dozens.
Tom Rounsville: 38:57
But there was a couple years ago, there was this boom of dog ticks for some reason, and it happened all over the Eastern United States. And I took my daughter out on a walk on some power lines out behind my house, and I was just picking dog ticks off me the whole way. And I lost track at like 43. And this was just one walk, maybe like three miles. I had at least like 50 to 60 ticks on just me.
Tom Rounsville: 39:19
Wow. Like imagine as you’re a wild animal out there and you can’t pick those ticks off, how many there are on the landscape. It’s just incredible. Yeah. It hasn’t been that bad since then.
Tom Rounsville: 39:29
And, you know, folks I talked to that research ticks all over were also curious that they had these numbers that were really high. And I don’t know what ecological phenomenon caused it, but there’s always a possibility that we’ll have another one of those years again, where there are just so many ticks that it’s incredible.
Colt Knight: 39:45
Well, we see that with wildlife, is just natural boom and bust years. So I would assume ticks are similar.
Glenda Pereira: 39:52
Yeah. So we didn’t talk about your bobcat research, and it is so cool because I’ve never worked with wildlife species. I always work with captive species, with species that are just always there. I don’t know. Do we want to just spend a few minutes talking about your research?
Tom Rounsville: 40:11
Sure. Do you want to?
Glenda Pereira: 40:12
So, where did you grow up, Tom?
Tom Rounsville: 40:16
I grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Cool. So suburban area. I was very happy to, like, leave and go somewhere more remote. There are too many people there.
Tom Rounsville: 40:24
Every time I go back to visit, I’m glad I live in Maine because it’s just not the same pace of life.
Glenda Pereira: 40:29
Yeah. Or traffic. No. Yeah. Whenever I go anywhere in Southern New England, I’ve said it before, the state of Massachusetts, the traffic there, horrible.
Glenda Pereira: 40:42
I could never live there.
Tom Rounsville: 40:44
Me neither. That’s a shame because the hub of biotechnology in the United States is all in that area around, you know, Cambridge, Mass. That’s kind of cool. A lot of the companies are all based there. All the MIT Harvard startups are all based there.
Tom Rounsville: 40:58
So I order stuff from them all the time. Yeah. But anytime I drive through there, I’m like, no, I can’t do this. But yeah, beside that fact then, I did undergraduate work in Western New York at Houghton College, small school. While I was there, I did some work with coyotes and looking into their genetics in the area, because there was a paper published that had shown that the Eastern coyote was a coyote-wolf hybrid most likely because, you know, coyotes in the Eastern United States are like twice the size of ones from the West.
Tom Rounsville: 41:28
So it was a really interesting hypothesis to me at the time and more evidence has shown that this is, you know, truly the case, that our eastern coyotes have some wolf ancestry in them. Then I did a master’s degree at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. While I was there, I learned a lot more genetic techniques. I did some tick work. But I did a project there on coyotes again, looking into some of their exposure to Lyme disease pathogens as well as looking at genetic structure, which was interesting.
Tom Rounsville: 41:58
And then after that, I did a PhD at West Virginia University and my project was to figure out how many bobcats were in the state of West Virginia and where they were. So I used non-invasive genetic sampling where I created these devices called hair snare cubbies. It’s a small corrugated plastic device that has closed ends on, like, the long sides of it and then the opposite sides had openings that an animal could pass through. We put scent baits, and then a little bit of food inside of them to convince animals to go in them. And then we had gun brushes inside of them to pull, like, a little bit of hair off of the animal that we could then use to test their DNA back in the lab.
Tom Rounsville: 42:39
So we’re able to use that information to try to estimate how many bobcats there were by marking individuals and then trying to recapture them at the same sites.
Glenda Pereira: 42:48
Yeah. And these structures that you were mentioning, they kind of look like a tunnel. If you were to go in a tunnel, right? So there’s an opening at the end and at the beginning, more like a tent structure. And something that I just wanted to mention was, so you said that coyotes and, there were these, the population of Eastern coyotes tends to be more closely related to wolves.
Glenda Pereira: 43:16
Mhmm. So there’s been a ton of submissions to this Maine wildlife page on Facebook. And there’s always pictures of coyotes in there. And they look so much like a wolf, you know, they’re massive. So now that you say that, I can see that. I can see that being maybe, I haven’t looked at pictures of coyotes in the West as much, but
Tom Rounsville: 43:37
They’re scrawny and little. Okay. Most of them are like 25 pounds, 30 pounds at most. The Eastern coyotes, some of them have been fifty, sixty pounds plus. And that’s just a factor of genetics, most likely that they’re gray wolf hybrids.
Glenda Pereira: 43:52
Yeah. That’s kind of cool to think that.
Tom Rounsville: 43:55
Well, coyotes didn’t exist in the Eastern United States until fairly recently. I mean, the first ones in Maine weren’t until like the 1940s and 50s.
Glenda Pereira: 44:02
I didn’t know that.
Tom Rounsville: 44:04
That’s pretty cool. A lot of times they’re treated as invasive species because they weren’t here. But they’re mostly here because humans killed off the gray wolf. There was kind of this vacuum of large canid predator space. So they’ve kind of filled that void.
Glenda Pereira: 44:18
Yep. Yeah. And so I kind of cut you off there. You were talking about the snare traps that you had. And so, you worked in concert with the Conservation Service.
Tom Rounsville: 44:34
Yeah, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.
Glenda Pereira: 44:37
And because you were saying that you needed to estimate potentially the population, because something that you talked about in the class was how we need to understand the population so that you can kind of understand how much hunting can potentially influence the population, that wildlife population. And so this was something that you were working in concert with because they had an estimate, but you were gathering the data to kind of put some, you know, numbers behind that.
Tom Rounsville: 45:09
Yeah. So the requirement for management is because bobcats are listed under CITES. I don’t remember the exact acronym, but it’s basically an international convention on the trade of endangered species because they look like some species of wildcats that are found in other locations in the world that are critically endangered. So because of that, they’re federally regulated and every single bobcat that’s either hunted or trapped has to be CITES sealed and has one of these seals on it. Otherwise, it’s illegal to possess it or sell it or any of that sort of thing.
Tom Rounsville: 45:40
So because of that, there is a requirement that any population that’s sort of CITES regulated, there has to be data showing that any of the use, the hunting or the trapping of those animals, is sustainable and that the population can handle it. So gathering the data is the prerogative for doing that, to show that, yes, the bag limit of animals that we have right now is within what the population could actually handle. Right. Because at least when I started my project, the fur market was doing really well. Bobcat furs were going for like $120, $140 a cat.
Tom Rounsville: 46:11
And then by the time I finished my project, bobcats were maybe $20, to the point that some people weren’t even bothering to go trapping anymore. And I’m not really gonna go into why that was, but the fur market prices in the U.S. are subject to world geopolitics because the largest buyers are off the continent. And because of that, what’s going on in the world has a major impact on what people are harvesting in the woods or in Maine.
Glenda Pereira: 46:35
Right.
Tom Rounsville: 46:36
So I haven’t looked at the fur market recently, but it’s still pretty bad.
Glenda Pereira: 46:40
Yeah. Yeah. That’s kind of cool.
Colt Knight: 46:43
Ask Alison about that. Her husband traps.
Tom Rounsville: 46:48
For a while raccoons were going for like $2. Not even worth your time.
Glenda Pereira: 46:52
I will. I don’t know. What does he, what does he trap?
Colt Knight: 46:57
Fur bearing species.
Glenda Pereira: 46:58
Yeah. I’m not a hunter. So, and I spend very minimal time in the woods. And like I mentioned, wildlife is not sort of my area of expertise. So this is a foreign concept to me.
Tom Rounsville: 47:10
Well, you should go to a trapper meeting then. The Maine Trappers Association has a meeting when they have, like, a fur sale. You can go there and talk to the trappers. They’ll bring their furs in and sell them.
Glenda Pereira: 47:20
And I was gonna say, was this always an area of interest to you? Wildlife species and
Tom Rounsville: 47:26
I was very interested in wildlife, but, you know, the bobcat project just happened to be there. I definitely am, like, more cat oriented. If you ask, is a cat or a dog person, I would say cats. I don’t have any pets right now. My kids are begging for a cat.
Tom Rounsville: 47:39
And I don’t really want to get a pet, but we’ll probably get a cat anyway. But I told them that they need to be able to keep their room clean and safe for a cat. And until they can do that, we’re not getting a cat. So we have not achieved that yet. We’re getting closer.
Tom Rounsville: 47:53
But there are definitely lots of things that cats can eat and hurt themselves with in my kids’ rooms right now.
Glenda Pereira: 47:58
Yeah. So it really just became something that fell on your lap because you did some coyote work. And then
Tom Rounsville: 48:06
So it was a project that they had posted, a PhD position, and then I applied to it and I had the right skill set because of the other work that I had done. But I mean, I’m very interested and I was very grateful to work on bobcats because, you know, that’s a very charismatic animal that a lot of people wish they could work on. I was grateful to have that opportunity for sure.
Glenda Pereira: 48:25
And something that was cool that you showed was that even though you were working to understand the bobcat population when you were sampling, it was in remote areas. So a lot of, you know, hiking in and out in West Virginia, like you mentioned. Maybe, I don’t know, Colt’s backyard was flat. But Tom mentioned there’s not a flat place in West Virginia.
Tom Rounsville: 48:48
Right next to
Colt Knight: 48:49
I didn’t have a flat backyard. Right
Tom Rounsville: 48:50
next to the river is about the only place that’s flat. And if you’ve watched the news at all, those places flood horribly bad because there’s nowhere else for that water to go but down into the valleys. Yeah. So a lot of times people are like, well, why would you build your house in the valley where it’s gonna flood? It’s like the only place you can.
Tom Rounsville: 49:06
Like, that’s the reason why it’s there.
Colt Knight: 49:07
Yeah. So You’ve never seen a doghouse on stilts, have you?
Glenda Pereira: 49:12
No. Is that, would you guys have a
Colt Knight: 49:16
Well, I mean, you just build them over the hillside.
Tom Rounsville: 49:18
There was a joke that one of my colleagues had. I don’t know if this is true, but he said, imagine if you took the state of West Virginia and you had a gigantic rolling pin and you flattened the entire state, that the state would be about the size of Texas, is what they had said. Just because there’s that much vertical complexity
Glenda Pereira: 49:34
in, wow. This, that, yeah.
Tom Rounsville: 49:36
Every everything’s hilly.
Glenda Pereira: 49:37
That’s incredible. Yeah. So you were in remote settings, so you had to have, you know, a good basis of, or a good skill set to be able to get to those areas. And then, because bobcats are cat species, you know, they tend to like to not socialize as much. So it’s not like you could be observing them yourself.
Glenda Pereira: 49:59
A lot of the work that you did was through game cameras or trail cams. And then you mentioned that you actually captured a lot more samples and specifically from bears and even feral cats.
Tom Rounsville: 50:14
Yep.
Glenda Pereira: 50:14
When you were collecting your samples, which obviously just added, you know, complicated more of the time that you spent sorting through your samples. So I just wanted you to maybe elaborate on kind of what you found when you were sampling out in this area of West Virginia. And it was the entire state that you sampled in.
Tom Rounsville: 50:33
Yeah. So we did a study that sampled a fair amount of the actual land area of the state, looking for how many bobcats were there. There was an incredible effort put forward from Division of Natural Resources, had a number of folks who had helped out with it and worked on the project at different times and aspects in these different districts of the state. So as we were doing the sampling, like you had mentioned, besides the bobcats that we were actually trying to get, we collected, you know, about 4,000 hair samples and only a fraction, maybe 10% of all of them, were actually from bobcats. A lot of them were from bears and raccoons and, you know, bears love smells.
Tom Rounsville: 51:12
They would rip up the traps and bite holes in them and knock them over. And I showed a video in class of a bear just kind of stomping a trap down and watching it pop back up again and just keep doing it until it was completely flat. Yeah. And then we also had a possum love the traps too, and they would leave all their hair inside of them. And we actually had other videos I hadn’t shown of ones with, like, cottontail rabbits, like, living inside the traps.
Tom Rounsville: 51:33
They thought it was a nice place to live because it had a roof on it. And I joked about that’s great bobcat lure because they’ll come and check out the rabbit. But one of them actually, like, we put carpet squares inside of them. That’s what we put the scent lures on. One of them ate the entire carpet square.
Tom Rounsville: 51:47
I just have videos of it sitting there eating the carpet square. Weird stuff that you never thought you would see. Yeah. I mean, I had videos of, like, pileated woodpeckers coming on logs there, just like pecking insects off the logs. So a lot of weird stuff happens in the woods that, you know, you won’t even imagine.
Tom Rounsville: 52:03
Yeah. So at the end of the day, yeah, we got all these hair samples, but there are feral cats all over the place. And I’ve seen a lot of studies where people actually put cameras on feral cats just to see what they do during their day. And you’d be surprised about, like, where they are and what they get into. It’s incredible.
Tom Rounsville: 52:17
Yeah. So
Glenda Pereira: 52:19
Yeah. No. The videos you showed were pretty cool. And, you had multiple species interacting in some of them, which was also kind of cool to see. And then something that you mentioned was capture and recapture.
Glenda Pereira: 52:33
So I, like I mentioned, hadn’t been introduced to this term or knew about it. And especially with wildlife species, it can be difficult to, you know, get a sample from one individual and then get that individual to come back to that sampling area again. Do you want to talk about this concept more?
Tom Rounsville: 52:52
Sure. So capture recapture is what biologists usually use to try to get at population numbers. This originated from statistical theory from the 1700s actually, where what you would do is go out and sample an area and you would just capture as many animals as you could get and then you would mark them in some way. In my case, we’re using genetics as a marking, but it could be as simple as just putting, like, an ear tag on an animal with a number. So that way when you come back to the same site again later and you do a second capture session, you would mark how many new individuals you got that you hadn’t captured the first time, as well as the ones that were already marked with those ear tags or the genetic tags in my case.
Tom Rounsville: 53:33
So what you can then do is do a ratio where the ratio of new individuals that had never been caught that came that second time to the ones that had been recaptured. And you can use that as a way to infer how many animals are in the population. Now there’s a lot of statistical assumptions that you have to make about that, as well as how far you can extrapolate what you learned because what you learned was about your study area, but you can’t study the entire state at once. So you have to decide if your inference is valuable across obviously changing environmental conditions. But this technique is, you know, standard, what is used in wildlife practice.
Tom Rounsville: 54:09
In my case, we had a really high success rate of capturing bobcats that showed up at these sites, but then we couldn’t get them to go back in the traps again. So I really did not have enough recaptures for a very robust model. Over time, I’ve learned that, you know, we needed to change the scent baits out between trapping sessions because we just used the same ones the entire time. And bobcats did not find them as interesting when they approached a trap another time.
Glenda Pereira: 54:36
Yeah. And I see some of those behaviors. My cat gets tired of the same toy. She needs an introduction of a new toy so I can maybe see where they need constant new stimulation or enrichment. You know, they get tired of the same things.
Glenda Pereira: 54:53
Things don’t get interesting to them. And then something cool that you also taught me was that people maybe think bobcats live in places like, you know, rural places or remote places where you might not really have people accessing it, but that’s actually untrue.
Tom Rounsville: 55:14
Well, it is true and not. The bobcats will live there, but the density is low because there’s not a diversity of food items there. So it can’t support a larger population. Bobcats thrive in locations that have, I guess the best way to put it, a mosaic of habitat types. So when there’s a mixture of agricultural land and forests and wetlands and all of this together in an area, there are a lot of different food items that they can eat because bobcats aren’t specialist predators.
Tom Rounsville: 55:41
They’ll eat whatever they can find. So because of that, having this diverse array of prey allows for larger populations. Because actually, through the study, some of the places with the highest bobcat densities that we sampled were reclaimed coal mines. So for those that aren’t familiar in West Virginia, at least in Southern West Virginia
Glenda Pereira: 56:00
They should be because Colt’s talked about mining before. Our listeners anyways. Okay. Yeah.
Tom Rounsville: 56:05
So they often do some mountaintop removal mining where they’ll actually just remove part of the hillside, and that’s how they get at the coal there. And then once they’re done, it just kind of gets rewilded. And as it’s being rewilded, a lot of those early successional species, like the trees that first come up, feed a lot of these prey items, like cottontail rabbits, squirrels, things like that. And they show up there in high density. And now the bobcats find all these prey items in these locations and then they come and move there.
Tom Rounsville: 56:32
So some of the highest bobcat densities were on these reclaimed coal mines, of all places. That’s
Glenda Pereira: 56:38
pretty cool. Yeah. So you mentioned that they eat kind of whatever is accessible to them. What is the, do you think, their number one food item? Because I don’t remember.
Glenda Pereira: 56:47
Did you use any manure? Did you collect any scat samples?
Tom Rounsville: 56:51
I did not collect scat during my project. Probably it depends on the time of year. Like during wintertime, they’re mostly eating deer. I mean, bobcats can hunt and kill a full grown deer, but usually it would have to involve some snow and them being kind of weaker because they haven’t eaten much in the winter.
Glenda Pereira: 57:10
Yeah.
Tom Rounsville: 57:11
But if an animal just, you know, dies in the winter, their carcass is just kind of frozen. So the coyote, or excuse me, coyotes as well, but bobcats will just show up and kind of eat that. So deer is probably a larger percentage of what they eat during the wintertime. But they’ll also eat, in Maine anyway, snowshoe hare, grouse, squirrels, mice, you know, whatever smaller mammals that they can kind of go after.
Tom Rounsville: 57:38
Yeah. But in other places, there’s more variety of other, like, squirrel species and things like that for them to prey on. But Maine’s a little bit more limited. I mean, at least Northern Maine anyway is kind of the edge of bobcat range because they have short stubby legs. They don’t do well in deep snow.
Tom Rounsville: 57:53
Yep. And that’s where the lynx really thrive. But if we, you know, going forward, get less snow in the winters, then bobcats can range more north. And then the lynx will have to contract their range because bobcats are often better hunters in these conditions. So the environment’s really what’s keeping them out of Northern Maine.
Glenda Pereira: 58:12
Right. Right. That’s so fascinating. This is so cool. Even though you’re a molecular biologist, I really think you’re like a behavioralist.
Glenda Pereira: 58:22
Everything that you’ve talked about today really makes
Tom Rounsville: 58:25
Wildlife ecology.
Glenda Pereira: 58:25
Wildlife ecology.
Tom Rounsville: 58:25
Yes. And you mix that with molecular, it’s molecular ecology. That’s what I subscribe to, I guess. Using molecular biology to better understand wildlife conservation and the environment.
Glenda Pereira: 58:38
Yeah. Well, it was super awesome. Was there anything we missed about wildcat research? Because I just, I just think it’s super fascinating. And like you were mentioning, with livestock examples of genetics, we really have a good understanding of the population because it’s always accessible to us.
Glenda Pereira: 58:52
Right? I just go out and sample these animals, but with wildlife, you’re making a lot of assumptions. And in this case, you were trying to understand what the actual population was. And if I recall, it was similar to what the state had as an assumption for what the population, the existing population was, which was kind of cool that you were on track of what it actually was. But, you know, in developing these methods to understand and better understand wildlife and kind of help them thrive in a sense is just so fascinating.
Glenda Pereira: 59:26
And I wish that I got to do more in these different sectors. And I don’t have all the time in the world, but I’m going to add this to, like, entomology is so cool. And I don’t have any time, but I love to dive into it. There’s just, it’s just always fun to keep learning.
Colt Knight: 59:44
Doesn’t sound like ornithology though is your thing.
Glenda Pereira: 59:49
Remind me what that is. I know what, hang on. Hang on.
Tom Rounsville: 59:52
You had talked about it quite a bit at the beginning.
Glenda Pereira: 59:55
Is it raptors? Birds. Birds. Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
Glenda Pereira: 59:59
Yes. Yeah. I like watching birds but we only really get the, the coolest bird I’ve ever seen is the red-breasted grosbeak. They’re fascinating. I have, like, so many blue jays in my yard.
Glenda Pereira: 01:00:16
They’re the same on the eagle scale. Lame. There are way too many of them. They’re not cool. I have one sole cardinal, female and male.
Glenda Pereira: 01:00:28
But the blue jays just freaking eat all the food source. They just take up too many resources.
Tom Rounsville: 01:00:36
I think, you know, you didn’t ask it, but I think probably one of my favorite birds is wood ducks. I really like male wood ducks, they’re very pretty, and I love that they live in trees and you always see the videos of them leaving the nest in the spring and they’re jumping seven feet out of a tree to the ground and then bouncing. So cool
Glenda Pereira: 01:00:53
to, are there wood ducks in Maine?
Tom Rounsville: 01:00:54
Absolutely.
Glenda Pereira: 01:00:55
I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve heard of them a lot in Minnesota and in Wisconsin.
Tom Rounsville: 01:01:00
They live there too. Yep.
Glenda Pereira: 01:01:01
But I’ve never seen one here in Maine.
Colt Knight: 01:01:05
You said you don’t like to get out in the woods and stuff.
Glenda Pereira: 01:01:08
Yeah, I guess.
Tom Rounsville: 01:01:09
They are at most of the, like, privately held nature reserves around here, have wood duck boxes, like in trees near lakes. They’re all over.
Glenda Pereira: 01:01:18
So would you say that that’s your, what is your favorite wildlife species? Tigers. Tigers.
Tom Rounsville: 01:01:24
Yep.
Glenda Pereira: 01:01:25
Tell me something cool about them.
Tom Rounsville: 01:01:27
I just really appreciate how, like, large and muscular they are. But anytime I’ve been close to tigers, I realize that it’s foolishness. And that if I lived in places where tigers were native, and I was a farmer there living in these rural communities, I’d be scared out of my mind every day that a tiger was going to eat me. Yeah. And rightfully so.
Colt Knight: 01:01:46
Yeah. Like I’ve got some books on the British hunting them off the top of elephants in India.
Tom Rounsville: 01:01:52
Yeah. It’s crazy. So, I mean, I very much appreciate them as a species, but, you know, the tolerance for huge predators, you know, as a parent now, would I want that in my backyard when I let my kids out and play? No, absolutely not. So I don’t know.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:07
That’s kind of cool. They also love to eat red meat. So it would potentially
Tom Rounsville: 01:02:14
Alpha-gal syndrome tigers. That’d be a
Colt Knight: 01:02:18
I don’t think the vegan tigers would make it very long.
Tom Rounsville: 01:02:21
No, absolutely not. Their digestive tract is so short. They really can’t handle anything but that meat diet. No.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:28
Yeah. Well, awesome. Was there anything else you wanted to ask, Tom? You’ve been quiet today, which is very unlike Colt. So from a behavior standpoint, either Colt’s tired because new parenting.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:42
Colt’s what? Almost two months?
Colt Knight: 01:02:44
He’s nine weeks old.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:45
So past two months. So he’s
Tom Rounsville: 01:02:48
Not much sleeping. Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:49
Yeah. So maybe you’re tired, but you’ve been quiet.
Colt Knight: 01:02:53
Yeah.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:55
Just taking it all in.
Tom Rounsville: 01:02:56
Mhmm.
Glenda Pereira: 01:02:57
And Tom was our guest that’s had the most, spent the most time in West Virginia.
Tom Rounsville: 01:03:02
Probably.
Glenda Pereira: 01:03:03
Yeah. Mhmm. I don’t think other folks you’ve had on, maybe you’ve had, I think Greg’s Kentucky. Mhmm. And Jeff’s Kentucky, but that’s, you’ve
Colt Knight: 01:03:15
had quite a few Kentucky folks on.
Glenda Pereira: 01:03:17
Yeah. But not West Virginia. Or folks that spent quite a bit of time in West Virginia. Alright. Well, I guess we’ll wrap this up.
Colt Knight: 01:03:25
Calling it a day?
Glenda Pereira: 01:03:26
Yes. Tom’s had enough of us. Yeah. He’s bored and wants to move on from this
Colt Knight: 01:03:34
activity. Might be getting hungry. It’s lunchtime.
Tom Rounsville: 01:03:38
Have some red meat and enjoy our rice.
Colt Knight: 01:03:41
Glenda, tell the listeners where to go if they would like to report questions, comments, or concerns.
Glenda Pereira: 01:03:51
Email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.
Colt Knight: 01:04:03
Everybody stares at me while I push the