Author Archives: Nathan Lyle

Increasing mortality rates in diseased populations can retard disease transmission and reduce disease prevalence (Barlow 1996, Lafferty and Holt 2003, Packer et al. 2003, Ostfeld and Holt 2004). Increasing mortality slows transmission via two mechanisms. First, it reduces the average … read more

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a geographically expanding prion disease of wild and captive cervids in North America. Disease can be transmitted directly, animal to animal, or indirectly via the environment. CWD contamination can occur residually in the environment via … read more

What is Echinococcus? Echinococcus is a genus of tapeworm. Two species of Echinococcus (Echinococcus granulosus, and Echinococcus multilocularis) are known to exist in Montana wildlife. E. multilocularis has been documented in coyotes (SeeSee et al., 1983 and SeeSee et al., … read more

In the winter of 2011-2012 Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks initiated the second year of a multiyear project with the goals of delineating the geographical distribution of brucellosis in elk populations, enhancing our understanding of how brucellosis functions in elk … read more

A flurry of recent papers have attempted to taxonomically characterise eastern canids, mainly grey wolves Canis lupus, eastern wolves Canis lycaon or Canis lupus lycaon and northeastern coyotes or coywolves Canis latrans, Canis latrans var. or Canis latrans x C. … read more

High-throughput genotyping technologies developed for model species can potentially increase the resolution of demographic history and ancestry in wild relatives. We use a SNP genotyping microarray developed for the domestic dog to assay variation in over 48K loci in wolf-like … read more