This was forwarded around the office today. Another payback from exotic organisms. Bob Russell, USFWS > > Thousands of bluebills dead since Thursday > Sam Cook > Duluth News Tribune - 11/06/2007 > Dan Markham and Noel Hill of Duluth were setting up to hunt ducks on Lake > Winnibigoshish near Deer River on Saturday when they noticed a dead bluebill > on shore. A quick walk along the shore turned up another three dozen dead > bluebills. > > Waterfowl biologists with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources > estimate that as many as 3,000 bluebills, also known as lesser scaup, may > have died along the west shore of Lake Winnie. > > The die-off began Thursday, said Steve Cordts, DNR waterfowl specialist in > Bemidji. Biologists believe the cause is a microscopic trematode, a kind of > fluke, present in snails that the bluebills are feeding on. > > Cordts thinks the die-off could continue. "We're going to find a lot more > dead," he said in a telephone interview Monday. > > Cordts and other DNR employees collected about 1,000 dead bluebills from a > stretch of shoreline on Friday. In the time it took to collect about 900 of > those birds, another 30 to 50 had died in the same stretch. > > "This is potentially pretty bad because of this snail," Cordts said. "The > trematode is likely brand new to the system. It could be along the whole > stretch of the Mississippi River and could get into other lakes and into > other species. It's way too early to speculate a lot." > > "We were just heartbroken," Markham said. "It's depressing." > > The die-off also has affected coots, Cordts said, although most coots have > already left Lake Winnie. He didn't know how many bluebills remained on the > lake. > > The snail that apparently is a host of the trematode is the banded mystery > snail, Cordts said. It was first documented on Lake Winnie eight years ago > by fisheries biologists. > > "It's been concentrated on the west side [of the lake]," he said. "Its > numbers have really exploded." > > Die-offs of waterfowl due to trematodes have occurred in the spring and fall > since about 2002 on the Mississippi River near Winona, Minn., Cordts said, > though not in numbers as high as those on Lake Winnie. > > DNR officials sent a few ducks to the National Wildlife Health Center in > Madison, Wis., on Thursday. An initial inspection turned up the trematode > identification in one duck, but DNR officials were waiting Monday for > confirmation of that in other samples. > > Hunters or others should not eat any duck that appears to be obviously > diseased, Cordts said. Hunters should use latex gloves when cleaning their > ducks. > > Cordts said he doesn't know of any other major waterfowl die-offs due to > trematodes other than those near Winona. Controlling the snail that serves > as a host would be "almost impossible," he said. > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://moumn.org/pipermail/mou-net_moumn.org/attachments/20071106/4102428d/attachment.html
