Who could believe a blue-tongued lizard can teach you how to be a good human being? Professor Anne Poelina can, and by the end of this episode you might too.

For International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples, we're re-playing Anne's Carlton Herman Memorial Lecture from the 2024 WDA conference in Canberra. A Nyikina Warrwa woman, scientist, filmmaker and poet, Anne is the inaugural chair of the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council in Western Australia's Kimberley, and she has spent decades arguing that you cannot separate land, water, people and non-human kin.

Her talk, "Waking Up the Snake", is about waking up consciousness: why the Whanganui's legal personhood puzzled her elders, why the destruction of habitat to create a "nature repair market" makes no sense, and why the wildlife health community, already practised at caring for things that can't speak for themselves, might be exactly the audience she needs. Ancient wisdom, hard politics, and a stubborn coalition of hope.

Links

Check out Anne Poelina's website.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick?

That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carrying Mycoplasma gallisepticum - a pathogen that causes severe disease in US bird populations, yet not one of them looked ill. The infections were invisible from the outside, but their immune systems told a very different story. In this episode,  Maria Teresa takes us from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, where she handled her very first finch as an undergraduate, to Cornell and back - explaining why finding a poultry pathogen quietly circulating through wild ecosystems matters for all of us, what won her the 2026 BioOne Ambassador Award, and what she's chasing next in the Galápagos.

Links

Read Maria Teresa's essay on her research on finch leukocytes that won her the BioOne Ambassador Award!

 Maria Teresa's website and social media:

• website
• Instagram
• X

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

In Iran, there is no established path for a veterinary student who wants to work with wildlife. So Arman Nourishirazi and his teammates built one.

Based in Ahvaz, in the province of Khuzestan, Arman is a final year vet student in one of the richest bird regions in the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf coast, vast wetlands and the Eurasian African Flyway all converge. Working with his university's veterinary hospital and the local Department of Environment, he helped create a system that treats injured wild birds and gives other students a way into a field that was effectively closed to them.

The patients range from eagles and barn owls to white storks and great white pelicans. Arman also talks us through the first documented case of avian malaria in a cattle egret in Iran, and the creative fix he and his team came up with when two juvenile barn owls refused to eat and human imprinting was the last thing they could risk.

Links

Check out Arman's LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

What happens when a parasite learns to survive the deep freeze? In this episode, host Cat Vendl talks with parasitologist Cody Malone about Trichinella, the tiny worm behind your grandmother's warnings to cook pork through, and a real hazard for Canada's northern communities who rely on wild game. 

Cody shares how this strange nematode completes its entire life cycle in a single host, why freezing meat won't kill it, and how it can lurk in a frozen carcass for years. Along the way: a newly named species discovered on a Yukon mountain, a globe-trotting parasite that turned up in an Alaskan grizzly via what may have been a cruise ship landfill, and the surprising idea that a thriving Trichinella population can actually signal a healthy ecosystem. It's detective work, food safety, and Arctic ecology all in one, an unexpectedly gripping tour of life in the frozen north. 

Links

Learn more about Cody's fascinating work on his Researchgate and LinkedIN profile.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

How do you find out which animals a mosquito has been biting? You start by thinking like one. In this episode, biologist Elizabeth Linares Alcántara takes us to a public park in Mérida, Mexico, where she hunts blood-fed mosquitoes in their hiding spots and reads the DNA in their tiny abdomens to reveal who they have been feeding on, from humans and iguanas to feral cats and a neighbour's grazing goat.

The result is a "blood feeding network" that helps anticipate outbreaks of dengue and other emerging diseases. Elizabeth also shares a finding that turns intuition on its head, and offers a preview of next year's WDA conference, hosted in her own backyard on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Links

Learn more about Elizabeth's work on her ResearchGate profile.

Check out more details about next year's WDA conference in Merida, about the Latin American WDA chapter and their student chapter.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Genevieve Barnett spends their nights caring for one of the world's most misunderstood animals. From Night Flight Rehabilitation, the bat rehab NGO they founded in Colorado, they nurse little brown bats through white-nose syndrome and gently untangle myotis caught in fishing line, one patient at a time.

But Genevieve is also asking bigger questions. Through the lens of queer ecology, they explore what we miss when we view the natural world through one narrow perspective: whose knowledge counts, whose stories get told. From butterflies that are half male and half female to lizard species with no males at all, they reveal a natural world far stranger and more diverse than mainstream science tends to admit, and they make the case that inclusion isn't a side note to One Health. It's central to it.

Link

Follow Genevieve on Instagram and learn more about their amazing bat rehab work:
@night_flight_rehabilitation

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

This episode takes us to Bangladesh, a first for the podcast, where Dr. Sabrina Ferdous is doing wildlife health research in one of the most unusual field sites you'll ever hear about: a centuries-old religious shrine, home to a critically endangered turtle found almost nowhere else on earth.

The shrine pond is visited by thousands of devotees who consider both the turtles and their water sacred. But when Sabrina and her team started investigating a troubling decline in eggs and hatchlings, they found a cocktail of zoonotic bacteria in that same water people were taking home to drink. The public health implications are hard to ignore.

Sabrina also gives us a candid look at what it means to be a pioneering female wildlife veterinarian in a male-dominated field in Bangladesh, and shares a story from a research trip that nearly ended her career before it began. Spoiler: she was back in the field within two months.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Every day at Project Wildlife in San Diego, Briana Eisan sees the consequences of a scroll: baby raccoons scooped up by well-meaning strangers, people reaching bare-handed toward bats, wildlife encounters going viral for all the wrong reasons. As a veterinary assistant at one of the largest wildlife rehabilitation programs in the US, she's on the front lines of both disease surveillance and an quieter epidemic: the spread of wildlife misinformation online.

In this episode, Briana explores how social media shapes public behavior toward wildlife and what that means for disease transmission, animal welfare, and conservation. From naturalized Amazon parrot flocks over San Diego to the psychology behind why people anthropomorphize wild animals, she makes the case that the same platforms driving dangerous encounters can, in the right hands, become powerful tools for change.

Links

Learn more about the Project Wildlife of the San Diego Humane Society

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Northern Kenya is one of Africa's most biodiverse landscapes, and one of its most demanding places to be a wildlife vet. Dr. Sharon Mulindi, senior veterinary officer at Kenya Wildlife Service, covers a vast stretch of this arid, wildlife-rich region where a 24/7 on-call schedule is less a job requirement and more a way of life. From darting wounded lions before breakfast to treating elephant calves in the midday heat, her days rarely go as planned.

In this episode, Sharon shares the detective story behind a troubling spike in elephant deaths on the slopes of Mount Kenya, where an invasive plant quietly transformed a lush forest into a nutritional trap, and reflects on the growing pressures of climate change on Northern Kenya's wildlife and communities. She also discusses her research interests in zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance, and what it means to build a career as one of very few female wildlife vets in the region.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

What happens when a wildlife vet who spent years nursing slow lorises back to health walks into a live animal market, not to rescue animals, but to sit down with the vendors selling them?

That's exactly what Dr. Wendi Prameswari does. Based in Indonesia with conservation NGO YIARI, Wendi works across two of the country's most pressing wildlife-human interfaces: the live animal markets of West Java, and the forest communities of West Kalimantan where hunting wildlife is woven into daily life. Her approach isn't to shut anything down, it's to build trust, one conversation at a time.

In this episode, Wendi shares what it takes to gain the confidence of traders who have every reason to be suspicious, why talking about COVID's economic impact opens doors that talking about viruses never could, and how a local tribe's ancient village-closing ritual turned out to be a remarkably effective form of quarantine.

Links

Learn more about Yayasan Inisiasi Alam Rehabilitasi Indonesia (YIARI), the nonprofit organization Wendi is working for here.

Read the story of 10 years of YIARI's work in slow loris conservation here.

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.

Dr. Justorien Rambeloniaina grew up in northeastern Madagascar watching lemurs captured and killed, not yet knowing they were among the world's most endangered primates. Today he's fighting for them on every front, reconnecting fragmented forests with a five-kilometre wildlife corridor, combating the illegal pet trade, and sharing a quietly powerful encounter with a family keeping two mouse lemurs in a yellow water container, and what happened next.

But his approach goes beyond the animals themselves. By establishing healthcare and education centres in remote villages, his team tackles the deeper drivers of habitat loss, because when communities thrive, lemurs have a fighting chance too. This is One Health conservation at its most grounded: built on community trust, shaped by personal experience, and driven by the conviction that Malagasy people are best placed to protect Madagascar's natural heritage.

Links

Learn more: 

The Dr. Abigail Ross Foundation for Applied Conservation (TDARFAC)

The Lemur Freedom Project

We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.