Category: TB Field Reports

Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson at Pandora engaging in some mutual grooming. These new boys at the group are getting much better around people, although they are still wary and seem to much prefer the comfort of each others’ company!

Welcome to my August 2016 field update, and let’s start with some good news. When I last wrote, I reported on the new males at Pandora. At the time, two new wild males had joined the group, neither were comfortable with us being around, and data collection had temporarily ceased at the group to allow for these individuals to settle in. I wrote that both I and the volunteers were spending time trying to habituate the new boys, and I was especially keen to catch the new dominant male, needing to vaccinate him against tuberculosis as part of my study. Well, my field season ended on 30 March, and in the last few days of the month two things went my way.

Firstly, I was able to officially christen the two new boys. For a number of weeks I had been following them both around in the field calling them Mr Holmes (dominant) and Dr Watson, and eventually these names stuck and were adopted by the rest of the team at the project. First success. I was very pleased with the progress that I had made with Mr Holmes, having been able to weigh him on several occasions and apply dye to his left flank to identify him. But would I be able to catch him? As it turned out I only had one opportunity before the end of the season. I promised Laura, one of the current project managers, that he was indeed habituated enough to catch, and then, with my reputation riding upon it, managed to take my one and only chance!

Just as with Guinness, 15 months before, the process of habituating an individual, seeing the improvement over time, and gradual increase of trust, was an amazing experience for me. Whatever beneficial science, and other experiences I will take away from this project, the one on one interactions with individual animals, that all of the volunteers here have every day, will be a very personal highlight. I am happy to say that Mr Holmes appeared to forgive me, and is now vaccinated and a well habituated member of Pandora. Dr Watson has come on a long way, but remains a work in progress.

The meerkat tuberculosis research received this award in August 2016 following a presentation at the Wildlife Disease Association conference.

One of the principal responsibilities of a researcher, I believe, is not only to carry out the research, but also to disseminate it. After 2 ½ years of study on this project, I am now at a stage to begin producing outputs. Two scientific papers which I have authored are currently in the review stage for publication in journals (I’ll let you know when I have news), and this year I had a presentation accepted at the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA), which I gave at the start of this month. The WDA is the international body of researchers and practitioners concerned with wildlife health. This year their conference was attended by nearly 400 delegates, and so it was an excellent opportunity to raise the issue of tuberculosis in the meerkats on the world stage. My presentation was co-authored by my supervisors, Tim Clutton-Brock, Julian Drewe and Dirk Pfeiffer, and was entitled “Who’s at risk: heterogeneities in the risk of tuberculosis in wild meerkats”. I am pleased to tell you that this work was awarded the Terry Amundson honourable mention award for a student oral presentation . The week-long meeting was an excellent opportunity to meet a great bunch of like-minded researchers, all working to improve wildlife health internationally, and our work on meerkats raised a lot of interest, sparking many useful discussions. I must take a moment to thank the Royal Veterinary College’s Animal Care Trust and student travel award, as well as the WDA’s own student travel award, as without these grants, I would not have been able to travel to North America for this conference.

I returned to the Kalahari in the second week of August for what is due to be my final field season out here. As you will no doubt have read in the life history reports, the meerkat population here has thus far failed to recover from last year’s drought. Many of the current groups are very small, but I hope that as long as we can keep hold of these individuals, they will form the seeds of a population expansion over the next 12 months.

Part of the ongoing tuberculosis study involves vaccinating pups in certain groups. This happens at their first routine sampling session and involves a single injection into the back leg. Here I’m carrying out an injection at a group in August. The pups all tolerate this very well.

Tuberculosis cases appeared to be notably lower than expected during the months of drought, making a reappearance as conditions have improved. At the current time, I believe that this may be because when experiencing tough environmental conditions, infected animals were dying sooner, and so disappearing before they developed the clinical signs that we are used to seeing. I am currently developing the evidence to support this theory but it would suggest that the disease has an underlying effect that we do not see, in addition to the losses from full disease that we are used to.

The recent cases of disease that we have seen at the project were in Uberkatz, Pandora, Baobab, and Ewoks. This unfortunately has brought about the very rapid decline and ultimately extinction of Uberkatz, the second group that we have lost this year after Drie. Clearly TB remains a major concern here, continuing to bring about the local extinction of our groups. Currently we have no knowledge of how widespread this disease is and whether it is only meerkats affected. We only have evidence from our own study population.

I currently have both a study group of squirrels, and a habituated meerkat group, the newly named Thunderkatz, living outside of my room at the project, so I have plenty of inspiration as I begin to write up my work. Keeping track of individuals and new groups is a task in its own right, and I currently have a large diagram on my desk outlining where animals that I have been studying over the last two years have moved during that time. It was good to see Kazeh and Ash this morning when we sampled animals at Ewoks, even though they were members of Jaxx when I began this project. Jaxx alone currently have members in Thunderkatz (Poletje and Chewbacca named by the Friends are now here), Ewoks, and Quintessentials (where Paddington is now dominant) as well as the main group. All of that gets a little confusing. The social perturbation caused by the drought seems to be responsible for the recent high degrees of mixing.

I’m looking forward to the remainder of this season. The current group of volunteers and managers at the project are all working very hard to keep track of the groups that we have, and working with them over the coming weeks looks like it will be another positive experience. The support that I get on the ground from the managers Chris and Laura, and until last week Helen, is critically important to the work that I am trying to do. I will continue to sample the population until the end of September, and maintain vaccinations in study groups, after which time I will head south to Stellenbosch to process these samples in the laboratory there. After a few days with my colleagues there, I will return to the UK to complete the analysis of our results and draw conclusions from the project, which I of course will be keeping you up-to-date with. I’ll be in touch to let you know how the final weeks of sampling have gone. Many thanks as always for your support.

Taking a blood sample at Uberkatz; one of the many samples that I obtained thanks to the help of the KMP meerkat managers. On this occasion, I was working with Lyndsey, who can be seen watching over proceedings here.

It’s nearly eighteen months into the targeted vaccination study now, and I’m out in the Kalahari going over what has been happening with the population over that time. I’m particularly interested of course in those groups that I have been allowed to work with over this time, but you can’t live here and not pick up news about what has been happening at every other group as well!

This morning I was out at the Baobab group doing some routine sampling with Laura when an excited call came over the radio. The gist of it was that we had been blessed with 0.2mm of rain overnight! It certainly doesn’t sound like a lot, but as many of you will know, this has been a tough time for the KMP population – they’ve really struggled to cope with drought conditions in the region, and we are all watching each and every cloud with a great measure of hope. I am reliably informed that when January rains fail, that March is usually the saviour. So let’s see…

I mentioned that I’d been looking at the groups. Sadly, 7 of my 9 study groups have diminished in size since this time last year, with the other 2 remaining fairly static. I’m learning valuable lessons about the importance of stability in a social system for a targeted approach to disease control and hopefully this is something that will form one of the outputs of my PhD.

Regular readers will recognise Guinness as a regular feature of this update! As the dominant male at Jaxx, I was keen to include him, and spent around four months gaining his trust before I was able to get close enough to catch him for sampling. We think that dominant animals have a key role in transmission of disease due to the nature of the contacts that they have with group members, and so these samples are particularly important. All was forgiven (I believe) as he surrendered to a subsequent capture in August, and I’m hoping will be in generous mood again next week…. I doubt that he sees it as being in his own good, but I can hope. He has maintained his dominance and is personally doing well. However, his family have diminished from 17 in November to 5 this month; hopefully a temporary blip! A number of the males from this group have decided that it is time for a change and have moved into the neighbouring group, where they are currently figuring out the issue of who is dominant. Hopefully they continue to thrive there, and Jaxx will replenish themselves over the next few months.

The new dominant male at Pandora in the last week of February. This picture was taken at my latest habituation session with the group. Although, clearly wary, he can be seen approaching me to investigate…. progress indeed!

The problems with Guinness arose because he was a wild male that had come into the population and taken dominance. He just so happened to have done it at a group where I wanted to vaccinate the dominant male. Alas… just over a month ago the same thing happened at a second group that I was interested in. Two (initially three) wild males have joined one of our study groups, Pandora, and have seemingly evicted all the resident males, including the dominant. So…it’s back to work on habituation for me, as it is important to my work that we know the health status of these animals as early as possible. If they were to develop disease in the future, it is good to know whether this was something that they arrived with, or that they picked up at their new group. The project volunteers are helping too and doing a great job. The two new guys don’t have official names yet (but unofficially of course they have – I have to call them something!!), but I can report that I have now managed to get dye marks on them, and got them on the weights box. They are now taking egg from the volunteers, and I hope that at least one of them will be weighable on a regular basis very soon. I have three visits there in the coming week; this is very much a work in progress.

Vaccine itself was a bit of an issue as I planned this latest trip towards the end of December. I was faced with an international shortage of BCG (the vaccine that I use, and is also used in humans, badgers, and several other species). Fortunately, a South African contact came good, and in February I received enough doses to see me through the remainder of the project. I know many readers of Jules’ life history reports to the Friends are anxious for news of pups in the population, and I am very much in the same boat. There have not been pups for several months now, but I’m hoping that that will change soon and I will be able to restart vaccinating youngsters.

The key benefit of vaccination as far as my work is concerned is that we hope that it will slow disease development to the extent that infected animals either reach an infectious stage much later in life, or never at all. So the real benefit would actually be less new infections in non-vaccinated animals, as there would be less transmission. However, a benefit to the recipient of the vaccine is also highly desirable, and I can report that so far, of the 23 meerkats vaccinated as pups since Sep. 2014, none have gone on to develop signs of disease. It’s far too early, and too few animals to read much into that, but it’s a good start!

I wrote last time that I had been visited by my supervisor, Julian, and since then I have received further visitors! I have been fortunate enough to receive immense support from the Animal TB group at the University of Stellenbosch, and in September, my collaborators Sven and Charlene made the journey from the Western Cape to see where all the samples were coming from – they were also kind enough to give me a lift back to Cape Town which made my life a lot easier. I carry out all of my laboratory work with this group, and we are currently working together to write up our progress with the development of a diagnostic test for TB in meerkats. I have written about this test previously, and progress continues to be encouraging. I think that both Sven and Charlene enjoyed their time here and were impressed by both the smooth running of the project, and the personalities of the meerkats that they met.

Bruce was euthanased the day after this photo was taken at Rascals. The swelling of his submandibular lymph node is very clear in this picture, something that he had been fighting off for several weeks. We hope to learn more from him about how early our tests enable us to detect infection, as we were able to take several samples from Bruce over his last 18 months of life, long before his symptoms started.

Their visit coincided with the first cases of TB I had seen in my three-month visit. Obviously of interest for TB researchers, but otherwise a sad development. We’ve recently seen cases at Drie, Rascals, and Axolotls. Both my experiences, and my research in the database, suggest that the social group is very important in TB transmission. It seems to be relatively difficult for infection to jump from one group to the next but spreads much more quickly within the group. We have taken samples of all the infected and uninfected animals at these groups, and that gives us a good base line to learn about the speed and manner that infection spreads.

Six months from now I ought to be coming to the end of my last sampling season. By that time I hope to be able to update you on my friends at Pandora and their successful habituation. I hope to have had another successful season collecting field samples and processing them in Stellenbosch. And I hope to be able to start to give you a few more ideas about how this disease spreads in the meerkat population and some evidence as to how we might be able to control it. Thanks again for all of your support – I couldn’t do this project without the generous support of the Friends, and it’s truly appreciated.

Ash (top), Koda (showing his back) and Poletje (hiding underneath somewhere), of the Jaxx group.

I have just been reading over my last report and reminding myself how the TB research has moved on in the intervening period. Summer 2014/2015 for me was about getting the central study in my PhD up and running: the vaccination project. There were a few hitches along the way but I think that we got there!

The study is designed around nine social groups: three where all newborn pups are vaccinated, three where we vaccinate those animals who have the most social contacts, three receiving no vaccination who serve as a control. Over a two year period I hope to see differences in the level of infection between the groups.

The crucial issue for this trip was to get vaccinations into those study groups. Readers of my last entry may remember one of the difficulties with this: Guinness! Guinness is the dominant male at Jaxx, and I have to confess, my favourite (I know that I shouldn’t have a favourite!). I spent a lot of sessions last year trying to persuade Guinness to allow me to get close to you, and we built up a wary trust over time. It was around Christmas time that I felt that I could get close enough to catch him: I was wrong! I have to thank the capture team at the KMP for their patience as Guinness’ capture ended up requiring four trips to Jaxx! That’s three lie ins that I deprived my colleagues of! As if sensing that our relationship had taken an unexpected turn for the worse, my friend had suddenly decided that although he wasn’t nervous around me, he wanted to maintain a respectable distance. I wasn’t able to get close enough to even attempt a capture. Finally the day before New Years’ Eve, he let his defences down and we managed to give him his vaccine. Given my previous difficulties, project manager Lyndsey had settled down at the car for a relaxing morning and was most surprised to see me returning almost immediately with Guinness – but it was a good job that she was there because my hands were shaking so much at that point that I needed help administering the anaesthetic!
As a footnote I was relieved to find that later that morning Guinness came to my call and took food from me – I seemed to have been forgiven.

When I left the fieldsite in February I had vaccinated the dominant animals, those making the most aggressive contacts, in my three treatment groups. I now have to watch these groups carefully in case there are any changes in group structure.

I am focusing on pups with my other vaccinations as we believe that these are the animals most susceptible to acquiring infection. I have all pups vaccinated in two groups, despite groups not necessarily breeding quite when I would like! Taking a particular interest in pups makes you pay far more attention to the timing of litters! Unfortunately you will know by now that Friks Army are no more; and they were to have been my third pup vaccination group. Like many of the Friends, I am very sad to have seen this group go as they were such a pleasure to visit. The large size of this group last year, when many other groups were so small, meant that there were lots of interesting behaviours to observe, and a fair few characters emerged. Unfortunately TB has really taken its toll on this group over the last twelve months; the rate of decline has been dramatic. No pups were born here at all over the breeding season as group health declined. On a positive note, I have managed to collect a number of blood samples from this group, and these have been possibly the most important samples that I have for developing a new diagnostic test for TB in meerkats. I am currently writing up these results for publication with collaborators at Stellenbosch University. I hope that these findings will mean that despite their own demise, Friks Army have made a big contribution to our ability to control TB in our meerkat population.

I was pleased to have Julian Drewe visit me just before Christmas – and not just because of the toffees and newspapers from home! Julian has been supervising me since I began the PhD and it was a useful as well as reassuring few days to be able to show him how the fieldwork was progressing and to discuss how to carry the work on. I think that he enjoyed the opportunity to come back to the site and see what changes had taken place since he was last out there for his own PhD study on meerkat TB.

Processing samples at the lab involved learning new laboratory skills this year. Here, Stuart can be seen pipetting blood samples onto a test plate.

The behaviour of the tuberculosis bacilli provides diagnostic challenges different to those of other bacteria or the viruses. Diagnostic testing is notoriously difficult, especially in the early stages of infection and this is why I am using the common tactic of combining multiple tests on a sample drawn from the same animal. One of these tests, known as a cell-mediated test, is being used in the field for the first time this year. This new test is the one that we have used samples from the KMP to develop – I wrote about this last June. This is the first time that a blood test has been used specifically designed for use in meerkats. I am using this alongside a cattle antibody test (mentioned previously) and bacterial culture methods.

So what now? I’m currently enjoying the London early Summer (I have missed out on an English Winter for the second successive year) and getting some written work done. I’ll be back out in the Kalahari in July, August and September to experience my first South African Winter. During this time I will be topping up vaccinations in the study groups where necessary, and carrying out my third round of sampling. The nature of my study design means that repeat sampling is very important – it is the change in a group’s infection status over time that will be of interest.

The samples are mixed with various reagents, and a colour change can be seen. The intensity of the colour is measured and compared to a reference range. The level of colour change indicates the density of antibodies bound to the plate and is used to gauge the immune response to tuberculin.

I continue to be grateful to the support that the Friends have given me in this work, and to those individuals that have made additional donations to my project through this website – everything goes towards funding the fieldwork, the main cost of which is the cost of the diagnostic reagents that I use when testing the samples. If anybody has questions about the work or tuberculosis in the meerkats then I would be happy to discuss the project. Just send me an e-mail at Spatterson (at) rvc.ac.uk

Stuart with Guinness at Jaxx

It’s been six months now since I last updated you with how things were going with the tuberculosis research. At that point I was in England planning for the main stage of my research and working out how best to tackle our questions. Now I am back out in the Kalahari putting plans into action!

During my time at home I had chance to keep up to date on the latest research in both TB and meerkats. I attended an international conference in Cardiff on tackling TB and was able to chat with other researchers who are working on this disease both in livestock and wildlife. This was a really useful chance to meet people and share ideas. I presented a poster at the conference outlining my research plans, which gave me the opportunity to discuss the work with a range of delegates. Following on from this, I was invited to a research station in the UK where a long term study of TB in badgers has been taking place for over thirty years. I went out with the sampling teams to compare their testing strategies with my own. Broadly, our approaches were very similar, but I was able to pick up some pointers whilst I was there which I think will help me, and the presentation that I gave them on the meerkat work led to some interesting discussions. I also took the opportunity to go to Cambridge for the annual Meerkat and Mongoose meeting and hear about all of the research that is currently taking place in these species.

Whilst spending time with the meerkats and obtaining the samples is always very enjoyable, there is an added excitement when a set of results come in! Last season I wrote about the difficulties that TB presents when it comes to diagnostics, and two tests that were under development. I was able to run samples from 80 animals through a new antibody test – the interpretation of those results is still being considered, but all indicators were that this would be a useful test and that the samples had all run properly. This season I have a second test which I will use alongside the first, looking at different indicators in the blood. This test has been developed with colleagues at Stellenbosch University, and looks for markers of TB that would be expected to show up at an earlier stage than the antibodies in the first test. Again this test has been run on a set of samples that I have collected this year, and is running well. At this stage the results have to be interpreted very cautiously, but I would estimate that around half of the meerkats in the current study population have been exposed to TB at some point in their lives. This is not as bad as it sounds, as the disease progresses slowly and so most of these animals will never show signs, but it is an indicator of how much infection there is within the population.

My second field season started in September this year. I am now working on the vaccination strategy trial. I have found no suggestion anywhere that anybody has ever vaccinated meerkats against TB before, so we have had a world first at the KMP – we now have 5 adults and 3 pups vaccinated which is very exciting! In three groups we are vaccinating those animals who make the greatest number of risky contacts for disease spread – Julian’s previous research suggest that these will be the  dominant individuals. In another three groups we are vaccinating pups at emergence to see whether protecting the most susceptible animals is better for the group as a whole. A further three groups are being followed as controls. Samples will be taken from all of these groups every three months to monitor the transmission of infection – this work has already begun.

Stuart and Guiness (the most distant meerkat…)

One of the challenges of this study is that very specific animals are required for vaccination – I can’t pick the easiest animals to catch! Unfortunately two of the dominant males that I need to vaccinate for this work are wild-born and not fully habituated! This has led to an interesting few weeks! Fortunately Sky and Lyndsey, the project managers here, are very experienced in working with the meerkats and have been able to catch one of these guys for me with no difficulties. The second, Guinness is proving more difficult and I am spending a number of sessions each week working on his habituation prior to capture. This is involving spending time with him when he is foraging, and getting him used to me being close by. I like to think that we are developing an understanding – mainly lubricated by a good supply of boiled egg and the occasional scorpion! – and I hope to be in a position to vaccinate him in the next couple of weeks. Currently he is progressing well, and has started to climb in the weights box on a regular basis and is accepting of close proximity. In the meantime it is a good excuse for getting out in the field, watching the meerkats, and getting to know at least one personality very well!

In sadder news, Friks Army continue to have problems with clinical TB and the group has suffered a number of losses recently. I hope that the group can survive their current problems and will thrive again as they are always a good group to visit. Similarly, difficulties continue at Mayans, and Attenborough is doing a valiant job, at a young age, of holding together a group that has suffered severe losses over the last year. It is a reminder to me of the importance of the work that we are undertaking, as it affects everyone out here when individuals that are well known to the project are lost.

Stuart getting robbed while trying to lure Guiness in

Going forwards now, I am planning to stay out at the KMP for the next few months to continue with the vaccinations, and I will soon begin my second round of sampling for the season. It is going to be very interesting to see the repeated blood test results on individual animals and how they change over time. I will of course update you on my progress with the work, and I’ll late you know how my friendship with Guinness develops!