OOS 36-5 - The science of brucellosis management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Friday, August 12, 2016: 9:20 AM
Grand Floridian Blrm A, Ft Lauderdale Convention Center
Paul Chafee Cross1, Brandon M. Scurlock2, William H. Edwards2, Justin Gude3, P.J. White4, John Treanor4, Rick Wallen4, Angela Brennan5, Mark Drew6, Gordon Luikart7, Jeff T. Foster8, Pauline Kamath9, Jerod A. Merkle10, Eric Maichak2, Kelly Proffitt11, Arthur D. Middleton12, Suelee Robbe-Austerman13, Matthew J. Kauffman14 and Jack Rhyan15, (1)Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center, US Geological Survey, Bozeman, MT, (2)Wyoming Game and Fish Department, (3)Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, (4)Yellowstone Center for Resources, National Park Service, Yellowstone National Park, WY, (5)Ecology, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, (6)Idaho Fish and Game Department, (7)Division of Biological Sciences, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT, (8)University of New Hampshire, (9)U.S. Geological Survey, (10)Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Department of Zoology and Physiology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, (11)Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks, Bozeman, MT, (12)School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, (13)USDA APHIS VS NVSL, Ames, IA, (14)Department of Zoology and Physiology, United States Geological Survey, Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Laramie, WY, (15)APHIS, USDA
Background/Question/Methods:

Brucella abortus is a bacterial infection of cattle, bison and elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. In multi-host systems there is often significant uncertainty about how management actions on one host species may affect others and historically there was a large focus on bison as they were the dominant reservoir of the disease. However, the disease has been increasing in prevalence in some elk herds with coincident increases in cattle outbreaks that result in trade restrictions, additional testing, and complete or partial depopulation. We review how disease research has interacted with management actions over the last 40 years.

Results/Conclusions:

Initial vaccine trials suggested that elk vaccination may be effective on the supplemental feeding grounds. The elk vaccination program was then discontinued over 30 years later due to a combination of logistical constraints and scientific evidence. Extensive research on how disease transmission among elk is related to host aggregations patterns has resulted in ongoing adaptive management trials of shorter and more dispersed feeding regimes on the feeding grounds. However, these results have not been strong enough to support broader management actions to reduce elk population size. Finally, recent whole genome sequencing of brucellosis isolates showed that isolates within Yellowstone National Park are unrelated to those elsewhere in the system suggesting that management actions targeted at bison are unlikely to translate into seroprevalence reductions in elk in other locations. We conclude with a general discussion of how, in practice, adaptive management is implemented given logistical and political constraints as well as scientific uncertainty. We hypothesize that political sensitivity is inversely correlated with the ability to conduct active adaptive management, such that the learning process may be slowest in the most publically scrutinized systems.