What is the grossest/weirdest thing you’ve done at work?
Ask a Biologist Monday 3/7/22
Answers from Biologists:
Carried up to 80lbs of raw horse meat for a mile to set up food caches for endangered Mexican wolves.
Hand-stamped thousands of metal tree tags with a tiny letter F.
Climbed into a dumpster full of deer heads to transfer half of them to another dumpster.
Pulled fungus ropes out of raceways.
Clam, oyster and mussel smoothies to test for the presence of biotoxins.
We had a carp die-off in a lake. They floated to the top and I had to boat out and collect them.
Tucked a dead/drowned chick into my pocket because we ran out of whirl packs for storage.
Strung mealworms onto a fishing line to train bats to forage in the air.
Threw dead 20lb fish into the river for stream enrichment.
Common baits in entomology: rotten fruits/shrimp.
Getting regurgitated on by gulls. Will it be fish or hotdogs??
Spending all day every day counting pine cones on trees and making pine seed traps.
If there’s a possible wolf scat, we smell it to see if it smells “wolfy”.
Condor feeding and cleanup. Hiking hundreds of pounds of rotting carcasses in the dark every 3 nights.
Grinding sea anemones into a paste.
Coyote lure leaking in my backpack.
Bear bait. We used fish carcasses and cow’s blood left for a week beforehand.
Sexing geese via the cloaca during banding season. You never know what will squirt or crawl out.
Spread around human feces bait for butterfly surveys.
Cleaned a macerated musk ox skull that had been sitting in a barn for 50 years.
Skunk butter, vaseline, and skunk scent for fox surveys. Everything smelled like it.
Cut off the head of a dead bighorn and packed it out several km (lab check for nasal tumors).
Vacuumed roaches out of tree cavities (made for woodpeckers).
Cut up mice.
Turkey diarhea.
Fall Chinook spawning ground surveys (collect data on dead and decaying salmon carcasses).
Salvaged roadkill to bait turtle traps.
Cleaning out mammal bycatch from pitfall traps.
Being inside a full grown whale carcass during a necropsy.
Tied a skinned beaver hip to a pull string for a bear trap.
Sniff tuco tuco vaginal discharge-monitoring infection postbirth/retained fetuses.
Did scat sorting-reheated wet wolf scat in an oven.
Helped dissect an orca stomach on a concrete driveway.
Putting out rotting rats for ABB surveys.
Aging male malards. IYKYK.
Swabbing turtle cloacas.
Dissecting roadkill armadillos. New or old, it’s all equally stinky in different ways.
Smear sardines on a scent post near a camera trap. Also used Chanel #5.
Handling wolverine bait/lure. Rotten beavers, skunk glands, etc.
I’m a road ecologist and have handled every kind of roadkill.
Assisted with a bison necropsy. Tried to pull out the stomach but it was tough to grip.
Thawing out a freezer full of carnivore scat for analysis. Bear stinks the worst.
Necrospied a deer with systematic infection that had pus throughout most organs.
Collected expired food and waste from restaurant and grocery stores to bait bears.
Hiking miles with dead birds to send out for necropsy. The smell.
Dissecting a 4-5 day old dead black bear.
First day doing falconry work. Had to catch spoiled pork after force casting the hawk.
Dissecting otoliths out of very rotten fish heads.
Throw dead trout that escaped their tanks overnight in a dumpster.
Got cattle blood from a slaughterhouse to mix with the fish emulsion to make bear bait.
Extract several pounds of River herring ovaries to weigh and then leave out for bears.
Pumping live trout stomachs and collecting the contents to see what they’re eating.
Recovering bands from dead and decaying birds. Sometimes an entire leg comes off instead.
Hot glued acetaminophen tablets to dead neonatal mice to drop from helicopters to combat invasive brown tree snakes.
Milked a male sturgeon. Exactly what you’re thinking.
Sexing Douglas fir beetles (~2mm) by looking under their elytra at their abdomen.
Cutting jaws off dead coyotes to pull teeth and necropsies of the animal.
Carried 6-12 live mice with me at all times from March-August for owl surveys.
Walked through a neighborhood with a urine covered pillowcase with rabbits in it.
Shot a massive cockroach at my face with the door of a Sherman trap.
Baited camera traps with raw chicken and Gusto lure (fermented skunk glands) for fishers.
Sampling in a lake that had a sewer overflow of 5 million gallons.
Processing chicken necks and beef hearts for captive animals.
Anything involving Gusto bait.
Measuring bear skulls covered in maggots when the meat is liquifying off them.
Decomposing brains during necropsies.
Sliced open frozen rock doves, removed their reproductive parts, and tied them out for peregrines.
Shoveled bloody sand off a beach into a dumpster.
Bird poop to the face while banding.
Banding pelican chicks was fun but the regurgitated fish smell doesn't come off my hands for days.
Cutting parts off dead birds and bats for carcass persistence study.
Elbow/arm deep in a rancid bull elk to collect CWD sample.
Collecting scales from maggot covered pus bags (decomposing salmon)
Popped a 3 week old (sitting out drying) owl eyeball onto my pants.
Trying to pull a swarm of baby leeches out from under the skin of my toe.
Decapitating deer with a sawzall.
Removed week old turkey vulture carcasses from the survey site.
Sorting through vomit for hours each week.
Made and kept a mosquito colony with my own blood because we didn't have guinea pig permits.
Scuba diving for listed muscles right below chicken farm byproduct dump.
Washing carnivore scat into cheesecloth to do hair follicle/diet work.
Pulled guts out of mice for rehab owls. Saved any fetuses as treats for bats.
Popped the head off a dead bobwhite to get the collar back.
Extracted a sparrow from a mist net that was decapitated by a shrike.
Got squirted in the face by a popped fish eye while baiting a hook for shark surveys.
Discovering brain absesses in deer while sampling for CWD.
Hacked off the flipper of a long dead 500lb sea turtle.
Cutting dead rats in half vertically for raptors in willdife rehab.
Measuring cloacal protuberances (sperm storage organs) of fairy wrens.
Milked male sea lamprey to collect their sperm.
Took down a rotten monarch chrysalis and it exploded in my hand.
Cleaning up dead gopher tortoises on a very hot day (RIP my study population).
Banding puking shearwaters.
Cleaning out a freezer of dead deer 3 weeks after it stopped working.
Necropsies on bats with moldy Play-Doh like organs from the euthanasia agent.
Performing daily necropsies on nutria.
Digging around in road killed turtles to pull out their eggs for incubation.
Manatee or sea turtle necropsies are even worse than cetacean necropsies.
Dissected an egg bound chameleon to save the babies.
Cut and sawed at smelly old deer to age and get skull caps for hunters.
Torn apart day old dead chicks to feed rehab owls.
Fleshed dead dolphin skulls.
Disassembled a calf and staked it out for golden eagle bait.
Collecting stomach contents from roadkill moose.
Rinsing and sorting otter scat.
Cleaned bison skulls of decaying flesh.
Milked male Atlantic killifish.
Collected the remains of a manatee dead for days in belly deep water.
Projectile eider to the face while banding.
Arctic field camp, hauling out our 4 month old waste in 5 gallon buckets.
De-bowl rats for raptor rehab center.
Blended thousands of beetles and dried them in an oven for accurate weight.
Checking steelhead for coded wire tags. If they had them, I cut off the head and bagged it.
