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The louse that roared?

Article Excerpt
Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

ADAIR VILLAGE - Minutes after being inoculated in its rump with a sedative, a limp mule deer was rolled onto a field stretcher and its eyes covered with a red mechanic's rag to provide calming darkness. An electronic device clipped to its tongue monitored the deer's vital signs while researchers weighed, measured and poked the deer with a thermometer.

Then Jason Robison leaned close, peering intently as he parted patches of hair with a fine-toothed flea comb and looked for lice on the deer's hide.

Such intense scrutiny is something that 32 deer being held in pens at the E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area go through every three weeks as part of Robison's graduate research project into how "Deer Hair-Loss Syndrome" is transmitted from one animal to another.

A louse not previously seen in the Northwest is suspected of being `the driving force' for hair-loss syndrome, Robison said.

Deer infected with a species of Damalina Cervicola, a family of louse native to Asia, are driven to self-mutilation - biting, chewing and scratching themselves so much that they scrape the hair from large patches of their hides.

"You can imagine having, say, 200 lice per square inch crawling all over your body, all moving and biting," Robison said. "And you've got nymphs...

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