Hold on a second.

Glenda just told us that bald eagles are not cool, and she is not down with bald eagles.

Now she's gotta explain.

I think hawks are a better raptor than eagles. One, eagles are basically like a seagull, 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 the trash bin, and they will eat the trash.

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.

So that's Golden Eagles though.

Hot take. Glenda, thanks Bald Eagles are lame.

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.

Seagulls are just I mean, than eagles. Eagles are just like seagulls which are a pest. So anyways

That being said, what's your opinion on pigeons?

Pigeons? I could do without all of them. They are nuisance to dairy farms, to all the farms. They bring in disease, and they just make a mess. So eradicate them.

Owls are cool. Though, like, see, this is what I mean. Like, there's so many other cool birds, and I'm generalizing birds because those aren't really birds, they're raptors. But there's so many other cool ones that like I don't know. Baldies don't really they're not exciting, I guess.

Where do you fall on the ratite side of things?

Like?

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.

I don't know. I've never really interacted with them, but like

No. If don't like eagles, you would hate an

What purpose do they serve, I guess, is my thing.

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.

Really? Where do you find ostriches to eat?

Ostrich farms.

How do you cook it?

Fire.

That doesn't sound like it would be good. Like, do you put a lot of like a one steak sauce or rub on there? That sounds like very lean and like maybe jerky would be better.

I feel like you're judging protein sources without ever having tried them.

I don't like, emus and ostriches, do they have any fat or marbling on them?

No. No. And and unlike chickens, the the meat is not in the breast. It's a it's like sirloins and legs and stuff.

Well, I've never had raptors because

Oh, well that's federal crime.

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.

There are some in Maine. Some people do farm them here.

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.

We're cohosting duties. Colt and I are here in the studio with Dr. Tom Rounsville. Rounsville?

Rounsville.

Rounsville.

Pronunciation, Glenda.

I did both. So, say saved by both. And doctor see, now you're getting in my head, Colt.

Dr. Rounsville, it's great to have you with us on the podcast today.

Thanks, Colt.

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.

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.

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 let's reel back in to the topic at hand. So

It's time to kick the pig and get started.

It's time to get started and kick this pig. So Dr. Tom Rounsville, Rounsville. Is a molecular, geneticist?

Well, I'm an applied molecular specialist.

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.

And a lot of the work that you do right now is with, DNA sequencing as well. So I'm gonna let you introduce your folk yourself to folks because you're a new guest on the Maine Farmcast. So welcome.

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, but 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.

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 invasion 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 the, what I would say, 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.

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, peep 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.

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 they're prevalent.

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.

You never know. So talking about ticks in general, I usually when people ask me about, you know, how is the tick problem made? And 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.

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, Humane 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 turn time 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.

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, a 100 and a 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.

The numbers of folks that participate in the program has really just exploded.

And, so 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

Yeah. Ticks

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 like tick spoons, which, Humana 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. And I know something Colt wants to know is what kind of ticks do we have in Maine?

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.

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.

Yep. Cool. Does that answer your question? Yeah.

But I guess I should say that we 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 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.

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

Yep.

And just hitch a ride in. But we haven't been finding all of the life stages here. And and to talk about that as well, we actually had, someone sent 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 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.

Yep. Yeah. So they, like you mentioned, they it was they brought it in somehow. It was there's not a breeding population here.

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.

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.

So it will become a risk soon.

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 and most of the folks that are really avid outdoorsmen are really getting hit hard with that lone tarp sick disease. Yeah.

So I do not want to see it here because red meat is a staple of my diet.

It will be here soon. I would say in the next ten years, there will be an established breeding population here, unfortunately.

Yep. It's do you think, and 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

Well, the the lone star ticks do not. So the Asian longhorns do.

Asian longhorn ones. Yep.

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.

Yep. Yeah. Alright. So, something that I had, asked Tom to potentially talk about was this term molecular testing and kind of what your you and your team do in your lab because some folks may be you you know, when they think about the word molecular, they 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.

Can you talk more about that?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 more we're better able to manage, I guess is what I'm trying to get at.

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.

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 it glow. And if we can capture that image, then we know that it's there.

So this is cheaper than doing DNA sequencing, which would be looking at the actually orders of the A's, C'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.

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?

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 be 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.

Which is a good problem to have. So because and I retract that. So it's it's good to understand more. Right? Because like you're saying, our tick pop our tick issue, for example, is only gonna grow.

And so starting to document what are 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.

So they need more information to either help them solve a problem on 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 domain?

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.

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.

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 like 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.

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, 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.

Yeah. No, you're totally right. But you're a resource to our colleagues and even your resource to us because, you know, when I maybe are work in 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 provide 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.

And, you 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

I think it is.

Disagreement. And and so

I'm biased for sure.

But and, you know, I think, like I mentioned, Tom, you presented to our students today and you kind of show 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 I'm more on the applied side. I I would say Tom does more of the basic genetic side as well as applied.

And and we were saying how true geneticists are really statisticians and they love numbers and coding.

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 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 like 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.

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.

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, you know, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And, for farmers that use this, these tools, they're really looking at it as to what animals can I keep on the farm and can become the the ones that we have offspring from on our farm versus not? So we use it a little bit differently. People 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 all of a lot of animals in the population.

And so that's kind of neat.

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.

That's scary.

Why is that scary?

I don't know. I've so have you done a DNA testing, analysis on yourself?

I have. Yes.

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

Are you are you worried about past criminal activity or No. You worried you're gonna discover your part Neanderthal or where's the hesitation here going?

The less information out there the better. Even though my information is everywhere. I know that.

You did you run a panel on yourself? I don't anybody

I don't have one, but I would like to get one.

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.

Because they definitely run a background check.

That's what all the serial killers say.

Yeah, right. I changed I burned all my finger tips.

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.

But yeah, I've I guess, I think it's good to know. But then, I guess, maybe, like, some of where I I think it's important to understand what you 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.

I don't know. That's some of what I if if there's good tools and good interpretation tools and folks know how to use the data.

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.

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 like 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.

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.

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 classes interpretation, which they hate that. They're like, what I calculated this value.

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?

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

I don't know that it does a good job though, which is why I I'm I also try to teach the students how to use AI because I don't think I think it's a good tool for some things. There's some things you shouldn't use it for.

I'm on the opposite end of this. You know, when I do a DNA sequencing run and I generate a 100,000,000 DNA sequences You have to. I cannot check every one manually.

You have to have it.

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 of 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 million a hundred million seconds. I don't have that kind of time.

Yep. So the bigger the data gets, the more we're reliant on AI to process the

data. Absolutely.

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's 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?

I would probably say that part of my 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 mean, our website's kind of buried right now.

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.

Yep. So I have a question. What's gonna take over the world first? Ticks or robots?

You really think it's the tick though, out of all of the species that you have available to you?

Ticks are the only ones threatening my red meat consumption.

How smart are these robots? Pretty smart. Pretty smart.

I mean, they're processing your 100 millions of lines of genetic data. It's true.

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.

So tick checking was just a normal thing of life.

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.

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 a running tally with my lab tech. We would see who had the most ticks on them over the the summer. And for whatever reason, they loved her so much more than me. I only got a couple and she had dozens.

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.

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.

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 phenomena caused it, but there's always a possibility that we'll have another one of those years again, where there's just so many ticks that it's incredible.

Well, we see that with wildlife is just natural boom and bust years. So I would assume ticks are similar.

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 captured 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?

Sure. Do you want to?

So, where did you grow up, Tom?

I grew up in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Cool. So suburban area. I was very happy to like leave and go somewhere more remote. There's too many people there.

Every time I go back to visit, I'm glad I live in Maine because it's just not the same pace of life.

Yeah. Or traffic. No. Yeah. Whenever I go anywhere Southern New England, I I've said it before, the state of Massachusetts, the traffic there, horrible.

I could never live there.

Me neither. That's a shame because the like hub of biotechnology in The United States is all in that area around, you know, Cambridge, Mass. That's kind cool. A lot of the companies are all based there. All the MIT Harvard startups are all based there.

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.

So it was 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 don't I haven't looked at pictures of coyotes in the West as much, but

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.

Yeah. That's kind of cool to think that.

Well, coyotes didn't exist in The United States until fairly recently. I mean, the first ones in Maine weren't until like the 1940s and 50s.

I didn't know that.

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.

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.

Yeah, the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources.

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 popul the 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.

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 that every single bobcat that's either hunted or trapped has to be CITI 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.

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 a 120, $140 a cat.

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 US 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.

Right.

So I haven't looked at the fur market recently, but it's still pretty bad.

Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of cool.

Ask Alison about that. Her husband traps.

For a while raccoons are gone for like $2. Not even worth your time.

I will. I don't know. What does he, what does he trap?

Fur bearing species.

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.

Well, you should go to a trapper meeting then. There's 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.

And I was gonna say, was this always an area of interest to you? Wildlife species and

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 those 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.

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, that we're not getting a cat. So we have not achieved that yet. We're getting closer.

But there's definitely lots of things that cats can eat and hurt themselves in my kids' rooms right now.

Yeah. So, it really just became something that fell on your lap because you did some coyote work. And then

you left 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.

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.

Right next to

I didn't have a flat backyard. Right

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.

Like, that's the reason why it's there.

Yeah. So You've never seen a doghouse on stilts, have you?

No. Is that would you do you guys have a

Well, I mean, you just build them over the hillside.

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 flatten 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

in Wow. This that, yeah.

Every everything's hilly.

That's incredible. Yeah. So you were in remote settings, so you had to have, you know, 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.

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.

Yep.

When you were collecting your samples, which obviously just added, know, complicate 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.

Yeah. So we did a study that sampled a fair amount of the actual like land area of the state, looking for how many bobcats that 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Yeah. So

Yeah. No. The the videos you showed were 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.

So I, like I mentioned, hadn't been introduced to this term or or knew about it. And especially with wildlife species, it can be difficult to, you know, get a sample from one one individual and then get that individual to come back to that sampling area again. Do you want to talk about this concept more?

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 came as well as the ones that were already marked with those ear tags or the genetic, tags in my case.

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 inference 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.

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 the scent baits out between trapping sessions because we just used the same ones the entire time. And bobcats did not find them as interested when they, approached a trap another time.

Yeah. And, I see some of those behaviors. My cat gets tired of the same toy. She needs a new 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.

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 where remote places where you might not, really have people accessing it, but that's actually untrue.

Well, 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's a lot of different food items that they can eat because bobcats aren't specialist predators.

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

They should be because Colt's talked about mining before. Our listeners anyways. Okay. Yeah.

So they often do some mountaintop removal mining where they'll actually just remove part of the the hillside, and that's how they get at the coal there. And then once they're done, it just kinda 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 cottail 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.

So some of the the highest bobcat densities were on these reclaimed coal mines of all That's

pretty cool. Yeah. So you mentioned that they, eat kind of whatever is accessible to them. What is the you think their number one food item? Because I don't remember.

Did you use any manure? Did you collect any scat samples?

I did not collect scat during my project. Probably it depends on the time of year. Like during wintertime, they're mostly eating deer. May like bobcats can hunt and kill a full grown deer, but usually would have to involve some snow and then being kind of weaker because they haven't eaten much in the winter.

Yeah.

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 biocats 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.

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.

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, these conditions. So the environment's really what's keeping them out of Northern Maine.

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.

Everything that you've talked about today really makes Wildlife ecology.

Yes. And you mix that with molecular, it's molecular ecology. That's subscribe to, I guess. Using molecular biology to better understand wildlife conservation and the environment.

Yeah. Well, 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 with livestock examples of genetics, we really have a good understanding of the population because it's always accessible to us.

Right? I just go out 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 the state had as an assumption for what the population, the existing population was, which was kind of cool that you 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 it's just so fascinating.

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.

Doesn't sound like ornithology though is your thing.

Remind me what that is. I know what hang on. Hang on.

You had a talked about it quite a bit at the beginning.

Is it raptors? Birds. Birds. Oh, that's right. That's right.

Yes. Yeah. I 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 blue I have like so many blue jays in my yard.

They're the same on the eagle scale. Lame. There's way too many of them. They're not cool. I have one sole cardinal, female and male.

But the bird the blue jays just freaking eat all the food source. They just take up too many resources.

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 are 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

to Are there wood ducks in Maine?

Absolutely.

I don't know why, but I feel like I've heard of them a lot in Minnesota and in Wisconsin.

They live there too. Yep.

But I've never seen one here in Maine.

You said you don't like to get out in the woods and stuff.

Yeah, I guess.

There are at most of like the, privately held nature reserves around here have wood duck boxes, like in trees near lakes. They're all over.

So would you say that that's your what is your favorite wildlife species? Tigers. Tigers.

Yep.

Tell me something cool about them.

I just really appreciate how, like, large and muscular they are. But anytime I've been close to tigers, I realized that it's foolishness. And then if I lived in places that 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.

Yeah. Like I've got some books on the British hunting them off the top of elephants in India.

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 let my kids out and play? No, absolutely not. So I don't know.

That's kind of cool. They also love to eat red meat. So it would potentially

Alpha-gal syndrome tigers. That'd be a

I don't think the vegan tigers would make it very long.

No, absolutely not. Their digestive tract is so short. They really can't handle anything but that meat diet. No.

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.

Colt's what? Almost two months?

He's nine weeks old.

So past two months. So he's

Not much sleeping. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe you're tired, but you've been quiet.

Yeah.

Just taking it all in.

Mhmm.

And Tom was our guest that's had the most spent the most time in West Virginia.

Probably.

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

had quite a few Kentucky folks on.

Yeah. But not West Virginia. Or folks that spend quite a bit of time in West Virginia. Alright. Well, I guess we'll wrap this up.

Calling it a day?

Yes. Tom's had enough of us. Yeah. He's bored and wants to move on from this

activity. Might be getting hungry. It's lunchtime.

Have some red meat and enjoy our rice.

Glenda, tell the listeners where to go if they would like to report questions, comments, or concerns.

Email us at extension.farmcast@maine.edu.

Everybody stares at me while I push the