We are committed to removing disease as a roadblock to wildlife conservation. We achieve this through comprehensive disease surveillance programs, disease outbreak investigations, and targeted disease research for all of the animals in our care, including the San Diego Zoo and Safari Park collections and our field conservation programs.
Tortoise 5726 lives in a large patch of the Mojave Desert west of the I-15 and south of Las Vegas in Nevada. 5726 is an adult female that was released to this area from the Desert Tortoise...
If you were a virus, which one would you be? What about a herpesvirus? You can lay dormant in your favorite host and go undetected, just hiding away in a latent stage. However, if you jump into a...
As a necropsy technician in the Disease Investigations Lab at the San Diego Zoo, I am frequently asked how the animal carcass on the table eventually becomes a glass slide to be read under a...
In Part 1 of this blog, our pathologist diagnosed avian mycobacteriosis in a green imperial pigeon....
The diagnosis isn’t difficult to make. I’m looking through a microscope at a specially stained tissue section, and innumerable bright pink bacteria stand out sharply against the blue-...
