has a favorite parasite.

“I’m supposed to love them all equally, like my children,” she said. “But I do have a favorite.”

That parasite is called Amphilina foliacea, and Wood wrote about it in her upcoming children’s book, “” The book introduces kids to the world of parasitism – including, of course, �´Ǵǻ�’s personal favorite.

is an oval-shaped tapeworm that used to be a parasite of prehistoric marine reptiles. After the host reptiles went extinct at the , in one of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth’s history, Amphilina foliacea evolved to reach maturity in the body cavity of sturgeons.

“It’s this living fossil of a catastrophe that somehow, it survived,” said Wood, a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “At the K-T boundary, 75% of all species on the planet went extinct. And somehow Amphilina found a way to persist – this weird, unusual, creative, beautiful way to make it through.”

Amphilina foliacea is just one of the parasites covered in �´Ǵǻ�’s book, which will be released Nov. 12 by Godwin Books.

Writing a children’s book never crossed �´Ǵǻ�’s mind until Laura Godwin, publisher of Godwin Books, heard Wood give an interview on NPR and reached out. The topic of that interview? A parasite that induces suicidal impulses in crickets.

“I was like, ‘You really want me to tell that story to children?’” Wood said. “And Laura said, ‘Yes, absolutely. They would love it.’ I wasn’t convinced at first, but Godwin Books is a trusted source for excellent children’s literature. So, I gave it a shot, and it turned out to be so much fun.”

Wood keeps remarks about various parasites prepared for reporters and students, and those well-rehearsed set pieces became chapters in the book. Each chapter covers one parasite or group of parasites: the beginning covers parasites you might find in nature, and the later part of the book discusses parasites of humans, households, pets and food.

One of the chapters introduces , a single-cell parasite passed from cats to rats and back again. It’s also the reason pregnant people shouldn’t clean litter boxes. The parasite’s goal is to return to the cats’ intestine to reproduce. Toxoplasma gondii has learned to “puppeteer rats,” Wood said. While uninfected rats are afraid of cats, infected rats love the smell of cat urine and will run toward it.

People can also host Toxoplasma gondii, replacing the rat in the life cycle. People who are infected have much slower reflexes, Wood said. They’re about three times as likely to get into a car accident. They also undergo personality changes that differ depending on biological sex. While men tend to become more suspicious and less inclined to follow others, women become warmer-hearted and more gregarious.

“We humans envision ourselves as the masters of the universe,” Wood said. “We have the most sophisticated brain on the planet. That might be true, but we’re still susceptible to being manipulated by these tiny, simple, single-celled organisms. I just find that spectacular.”

Still, Wood didn’t completely believe kids would be interested in parasites until she visited a camp with her team while conducting fieldwork in New Orleans this summer. She thought the kids would be bored, but they enthusiastically engaged with the material. One 11-year-old impressed Wood so much with his parasite knowledge that she pulled him aside after the presentation.

“It was a delight to see how pumped the kids were to learn these facts about parasites and how quickly they absorbed it,” Wood said. “It wasn’t hard to convince them that parasites are amazing, and it made me really excited about the book’s potential to provoke kids’ curiosity.”

While in New Orleans, Wood successfully tested a new learning module that incorporates the book and other activities to help reinforce what young readers are learning about parasites. She plans to bring that module to classrooms in Seattle and Albuquerque, where she’ll work in the field next summer. Wood hopes the learning module can serve as an accompaniment to the book or be used independently to help second- to fifth-grade teachers bring parasite biodiversity material into their classrooms.

Wood has plenty of experience teaching undergraduate students the basics about parasites, and the stories she wrote in her book are the same ones she uses in her undergraduate courses. Still, it took some work to pitch the information for an elementary age group.

One challenge arose during a chapter about red grouse and their intestinal parasites. Wood wanted to include graph that walks students through the basics of data visualization, a skill that’s particularly important for scientists. Through discussion with Godwin, Wood settled on an interactive chapter where readers are instructed to use their finger to interpret a graph.

Between the book and learning module, �´Ǵǻ�’s hope is that someday, undergraduates won’t reach college with zero knowledge of parasites. While students enter ichthyology or ornithology classes with a foundation in fish or bird biology, �´Ǵǻ�’s students are often blank slates. It’s fun, she said, to teach students about “things they have never in their wildest dreams imagined.” But she also wants to see biology education at all levels reflect actual biodiversity.

“If we’re estimating really conservatively, parasites make up 40% of all animal species,” Wood said. “How are you getting through high school not hearing about parasites? That’s just nuts to me. Part of the goal of the book is to help address that, and we want the learning module we’re creating to make it easy for elementary teachers to bring this content into their classrooms.”

For more information, contact Wood at chelwood@uw.edu.

Alaskan waters are a critical fishery for salmon. Complex marine food webs underlie and sustain this fishery, and scientists want to know how climate change is reshaping them. But finding samples from the past isn’t easy.

“We have to really open our minds and get creative about what can act as an ecological data source,” said , currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.

As a doctoral student at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý in Seattle, Mastick investigated Alaskan marine food webs using a decidedly unorthodox source: old cans of salmon. The cans contained fillets from four salmon species, all caught over a 42-year period in the Gulf of Alaska and Bristol Bay. Mastick and her colleagues dissected the preserved fillets from 178 cans and counted the number of anisakid roundworms — a common, tiny marine parasite — within the flesh.

The parasites had been killed during the canning process and, if eaten, would have posed no danger to a human consumer. But counting anisakids is one way to gauge how well a marine ecosystem is doing.

“Everyone assumes that worms in your salmon is a sign that things have gone awry,” said , a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “But the anisakid life cycle integrates many components of the food web. I see their presence as a signal that the fish on your plate came from a healthy ecosystem.”

The research team reports in a published April 4 in Ecology & Evolution that anisakid worm levels rose for chum and pink salmon from 1979 to 2021, and stayed the same for coho and sockeye salmon.

“Anisakids have a complex life cycle that requires many types of hosts,” said Mastick, who is lead author on the paper. “Seeing their numbers rise over time, as we did with pink and chum salmon, indicates that these parasites were able to find all the right hosts and reproduce. That could indicate a stable or recovering ecosystem, with enough of the right hosts for anisakids.”

Anisakids start out living freely in the ocean. They enter food webs when eaten by small marine invertebrates, such as krill. As that initial host gets eaten by another species, the worms come along for the ride. Infected krill, for example, could be eaten by a small fish, which in turn gets eaten by a larger fish, like salmon. This cycle continues until the anisakids end up in the intestine of a marine mammal, where they reproduce. The eggs are excreted back into the ocean to hatch and begin the cycle again with a new generation.

“If a host is not present — marine mammals, for example — anisakids can’t complete their life cycle and their numbers will drop,” said Wood, who is senior author on the paper.

People cannot serve as hosts for anisakids. Consuming them in fully cooked fish poses little danger, because the worms are dead. But anisakids — also known as “sushi worms” or “sushi parasites” — can cause symptoms similar to food poisoning or a rare condition called if ingested alive in raw or undercooked fish.

The , a Seattle-based trade group, donated the cans of salmon to Wood and her team. The association no longer needed the cans, which had been set aside each year for quality control purposes. Mastick and co-author Rachel Welicky, an assistant professor at Neumann University in Pennsylvania, experimented with different methods to dissect the canned fillets and look for anisakids. The worms are about a centimeter (0.4 inches) long and tend to coil up in the fish muscle. They found that pulling the fillets apart with forceps allowed the team to count worm corpses accurately with the aid of a dissecting microscope.

There are several explanations for the rise of anisakid levels in pink and chum salmon. In 1972, Congress passed the , which has allowed populations of seals, sea lions, orcas and other marine mammals to recover following years of decline.

“Anisakids can only reproduce in the intestines of a marine mammal, so this could be a sign that, over our study period — from 1979 to 2021 — anisakid levels were rising because of more opportunities to reproduce,” said Mastick.

Other possible explanations include warming temperatures or positive impacts of the Clean Water Act, Mastick added.

The stable anisakid levels in coho and sockeye are harder to interpret because there are dozens of anisakid species, each with their own series of invertebrate, fish and mammal hosts. While the canning process left the tough anisakid exterior intact, it destroyed the softer parts of their anatomy that would have allowed identification of individual species.

Mastick and Wood believe this approach could be used to look at parasite levels in other canned fish, like sardines. They also hope this project will help make new, serendipitous connections that could fuel additional insight into ecosystems of the past.

“This study came about because people heard about our research through the grapevine,” said Wood. “We can only get these insights into ecosystems of the past by networking and making the connections to discover untapped sources of historical data.”

Co-authors on the paper are UW undergraduate Aspen Katla, and Bruce Odegaard and Virginia Ng with the Seafood Products Association. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Washington Research Foundation and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

For more information, contact Mastick at nataliemastick@gmail.com, Welicky at rwelicky@gmail.com and Wood at chelwood@uw.edu.

More than a century of preserved fish specimens offer a rare glimpse into long-term trends in parasite populations. New research from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý shows that fish parasites plummeted from 1880 to 2019, a 140-year stretch when Puget Sound — their habitat and the second largest estuary in the mainland U.S. — warmed significantly.

The , published the week of Jan. 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the world’s largest and longest dataset of wildlife parasite abundance. It suggests that parasites may be especially vulnerable to a changing climate.

“People generally think that climate change will cause parasites to thrive, that we will see an increase in parasite outbreaks as the world warms,” said lead author , a UW associate professor of aquatic and fishery sciences. “For some parasite species that may be true, but parasites depend on hosts, and that makes them particularly vulnerable in a changing world where the fate of hosts is being reshuffled.”

While some parasites have a single host species, many parasites travel between host species. Eggs are carried in one host species, the larvae emerge and infect another host and the adult may reach maturity in a third host before laying eggs.

For parasites that rely on three or more host species during their lifecycle — including more than half the parasite species identified in the study’s Puget Sound fish — analysis of historic fish specimens showed an 11% average decline per decade in abundance. Of 10 parasite species that had disappeared completely by 1980, nine relied on three or more hosts.

“Our results show that parasites with one or two host species stayed pretty steady, but parasites with three or more hosts crashed,” Wood said. “The degree of decline was severe. It would trigger conservation action if it occurred in the types of species that people care about, like mammals or birds.”

And while parasites inspire fear or disgust — especially for people who associate them with illness in themselves, their kids or their pets — the result is worrying news for ecosystems, Wood said.

“Parasite ecology is really in its infancy, but what we do know is that these complex-lifecycle parasites probably play an important role in pushing energy through food webs and in supporting top apex predators,” Wood said. She is one of the authors of a 2020 report laying out a conservation plan for parasites.

�´Ǵǻ�’s study is among the first to use a new method for resurrecting information on parasite populations of the past. Mammals and birds are preserved with taxidermy, which retains parasites only on skin, feathers or fur. But fish, reptile and amphibian specimens are preserved in fluid, which also preserves any parasites living inside the animal at the time of its death.

The study focused on eight species of fish that are common in the behind-the-scenes collections of natural history museums. Most came from the UW Fish Collection at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The authors carefully sliced into the preserved fish specimens and then identified and counted the parasites they discovered inside before returning the specimens to the museums.

“It took a long time. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart,” Wood said. “I’d love to stick these fish in a blender and use a genomic technique to detect their parasites’ DNA, but the fish were first preserved with a fluid that shreds DNA. So what we did was just regular old shoe-leather parasitology.”

Among the multi-celled parasites they found were , or animals with an exoskeleton, including crustaceans, as well as what Wood describes as “unbelievably gorgeous tapeworms:” the , whose heads are armed with hook-covered tentacles. In total, the team counted 17,259 parasites, of 85 types, from 699 fish specimens.

To explain the parasite declines, the authors considered three possible causes: how abundant the host species was in Puget Sound; pollution levels; and temperature at the ocean’s surface. The variable that best explained the decline in parasites was sea surface temperature, which rose by 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Puget Sound from 1950 to 2019.

A parasite that requires multiple hosts is like a delicate , Wood said. The complex series of steps they face to complete their lifecycle makes them vulnerable to disruption at any point along the way.

“This study demonstrates that major parasite declines have happened in Puget Sound. If this can happen unnoticed in an ecosystem as well studied as this one, where else might it be happening?” Wood said. “I hope our work inspires other ecologists to think about their own focal ecosystems, identify the right museum specimens, and see whether these trends are unique to Puget Sound, or something that is occurring in other places as well.

“Our result draws attention to the fact that parasitic species might be in real danger,” Wood added. “And that could mean bad stuff for us — not just fewer worms, but less of the parasite-driven ecosystem services that we’ve come to depend on.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the UW-based Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and the Washington Research Foundation.

Co-authors are at Pennsylvania’s Neumann University, who did this work as a UW postdoctoral researcher; at Georgia’s Kennesaw State University, who did this work as a UW postdoctoral researcher; , a UW Research Technologist; , a UW doctoral student; , manager of the UW Fish Collection at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture; and , faculty members in aquatic and fishery sciences at the UW; at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center; and at HelmWest Laboratory in Missoula, Montana.

For more information, contact Wood, who is currently in California, at chelwood@uw.edu. Accompanying images and b-roll video available .

Grants: NSF: 2141898

Parasites have a public relations problem.

Unlike the many charismatic mammals, fishes and birds that receive our attention (and our conservation dollars), parasites are thought of as something to eradicate — and certainly not something to protect.

But only 4% of known parasites can infect humans, and the majority actually serve critical ecological roles, like regulating wildlife that might otherwise balloon in population size and become pests. Still, only about 10% of parasites have been identified and, as a result, they are mostly left out of conservation activities and research.

An international group of scientists wants to change that. About a dozen leading parasite ecologists, including ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s , published a Aug. 1 in the journal Biological Conservation, which lays out an ambitious global conservation plan for parasites.

“Parasites are an incredibly diverse group of species, but as a society, we do not recognize this biological diversity as valuable,” said Wood, an assistant professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “The point of this paper is to emphasize that we are losing parasites and the functions they serve without even recognizing it.”

The authors propose 12 goals for the next decade that could advance parasite biodiversity conservation through a mix of research, advocacy and management.

“Even though we know little to nothing about most parasite species, we can still take action now to conserve parasite biodiversity,” said , paper and project co-lead and an assistant professor at North Carolina State University.

Perhaps the most ambitious goal is to describe half of the world’s parasites within the next 10 years. Providing taxonomic descriptions allow species to be named, which is an important part of the conservation process, the researchers said.

“If species don’t have a name, we can’t save them,” said , the other project co-lead and an assistant professor at Georgetown University. “We’ve accepted that for decades about most animals and plants, but scientists have only discovered a fraction of a percentage of all the parasites on the planet. Those are the last frontiers: the deep sea, deep space, and the world that’s living inside every species on Earth.”

Importantly, the researchers stress that none of the parasites that infect humans or domesticated animals are included in their conservation plan. They say these parasites should be controlled to safeguard human and animal health.

The paper is part of an entire devoted to parasite conservation. Wood is the lead author on one in the collection that finds the responses of parasites to environmental change are likely to be complex, and that a changing world probably will see both outbreaks of some parasites and a total loss of other parasite species.

“We need to recognize that there will be a diversity of responses among parasite taxa and not take for granted that every parasite is dwindling toward extinction or about to cause a major outbreak,” Wood said.

Parasites often need two or more host species to complete their lifecycle. For example, some parasites first infect fish or amphibians, but ultimately must get transmitted to birds to reproduce and multiply. They ensure that this happens through ingenious ways, Wood explained, often by manipulating the behavior or even the anatomy of their first host to make these fish or amphibians more susceptible to being eaten by birds. In this way, the parasite then gets transmitted to a bird — its ultimate destination.

Given this dynamic, Wood and colleagues wanted to see what would happen to the abundance of parasites if the ecosystems in which they live changed. They designed an experiment across 16 ponds in central California’s East Bay region. In half of the ponds, they installed structures such as bird houses, floating perches and mallard decoys intended to attract more birds, thus temporarily altering the natural ecosystem and boosting biodiversity in these ponds.

After a couple of years, the researchers analyzed parasite biodiversity in each of the 16 ponds. What they found was a mixed bag: Some parasite species responded to elevated bird biodiversity by declining in abundance. But other parasites actually increased in number when bird biodiversity increased. The authors concluded that as biodiversity changes — due to climate change, development pressure or other reasons — we can expect to see divergent responses by parasites, even those living within the same ecosystem.

Traditionally, the field of disease ecology assumes one of two paths: That we are either heading toward a future of more disease and massive outbreaks or toward a future of parasite extinction. This paper shows that both trajectories are happening simultaneously, Wood explained.

“This particular experiment suggests that we need to anticipate both trajectories going forward. It starts to resolve the conflict in the literature by showing that everyone is right — it’s all happening,” Wood said. “The trick now is to figure out what traits will predict which parasites will decline and which will increase in response to biodiversity loss.”

�´Ǵǻ�’s lab is working on that question now by reconstructing the history of parasites over time, documenting which parasites increased in abundance and which declined. However, there’s almost no historical record of parasites and without this information, it’s difficult to know how to conserve them. By dissecting museum specimens of fish, the researchers are identifying and counting various parasites found in the specimens at different places and times.

“These pickled animals are like parasite time capsules,” Wood explained. “We can open them up and identify the parasites that infected a fish at its death. In this way, we can reconstruct and resurrect information that previously we didn’t think was possible to get.”

Co-authors on this paper are and Margaret Summerside of the University of Colorado Boulder. This research was funded by the Michigan Society of Fellows, National Science Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, the University of Colorado, the National Institutes of Health and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

See the for the full list of authors and funders for the special edition.

For more information, contact Wood at chelwood@uw.edu and Hopkins at hopkins@nceas.ucsb.edu.

Rick Mohler receives Architect magazine 2020 R+D award for housing access prototype ‘ADUniverse’

, UW associate professor of architecture, has won a from Architect magazine for a project designed with Seattle city planner Nick Welch to give local homeowners the information they need to plan and build on their property.

The two led a team��at the in creating a prototype app called��, that uses neighborhood-level demographics and GIS data to help homeowners determine the physical and financial feasibility, on a parcel by parcel basis, of building a self-contained cottage or apartment.

Mohler and Welch’s project was one of seven honored in the magazine’s , chosen from 90 submissions that, the magazine said, “are scalable, thought-provoking, and promising in achieving a more equitable and healthy built environment.”

Mohler is also a licensed architect with Mohler + Ghillino Architects and serves on the . Welch is senior planner with the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development.

“The short-term goal is simply increasing the number of available housing units, but the longer-term goal is increasing equity,” Mohler said.

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UW Libraries 2017 video exhibit ‘The Age of the Kampuchea Picture’ wins Center for Research Libraries research award

A UW Libraries video installation based on the work of New York Times journalist Elizabeth Becker has won a 2020 in research from the , an international consortium of academic and independent research libraries.

“” was an interactive video installation created in 2017 by filmmaker — who has since earned a Master’s degree in Southeast Asia Studies from the Jackson School — in collaboration with the Southeast Asia Section of UW Libraries, and , UW assistant professor of anthropology. It was among events in conjunction with a visit to campus by and French Cambodian filmmaker .

The research award is for innovation in expanding research in the social sciences or humanities. The installation was based on notes, audio and photographs from Becker’s December 1978 visit to Democratic Kampuchea just before the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Becker started donating her materials to UW Special Collections in 2007.

“The installation speaks to the question of what is allowed to be seen, what is hidden, and how we might seek the truth in that absence of seeing,” wrote Judith Henchy, UW Southeast Asia Section librarian, on the Southeast Asia Center website. . .

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College of Environment’s Chelsea Wood named runner-up for 2020 APEC ASPIRE prize

, assistant professor in the UW College of the Environment’s School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, has been named one of two runners-up for the national prize.

APEC, or , is a 21-country forum for governments in the Pacific Rim that promotes free trade throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The annual APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education — called ASPIRE — is awarded by the state departments of APEC-member countries. It recognizes young scientists committed to excellence in scientific research, based on scholarly publication and cooperation with scientists from other member economies.

As one of two runners-up for the prize, Wood will receive $1,200 from scholarly publishing firms Wiley and Elsevier, co-sponsors of the prize, and will be invited to a roundtable with senior government officials and to give a virtual public lecture along with the ASPIRE winner and fellow runner-up, probably in August. The United States, an APEC member, selects one grand prize winner and two runners-up each year from across the sciences.

Wood’s research studies the ecology of parasites and pathogens in a changing world. Watch .

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UW Medicine’s Dr. Gail Jarvik begins as president-elect of American Society of Human Genetics

UW Medicine’s in January began a three-year term as of the . She was elected to the position in June of 2019.

Jarvik, the Arno G. Motulsky Endowed Chair in Medicine, is a professor of medicine and genome sciences and adjunct professor of epidemiology who is also affiliated with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The American Society of Human Genetics, or ASHG, was founded in 1948; its nearly 8,000 members include researchers, academicians, clinicians, laboratory practice professionals, genetic counselors and nurses. Jarvik has served on several of its committees and was on its board of directors from 2015 to 2018.

is a ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý-wide institute connecting scholars with community partners to address environmental challenges. The institute announced awards for its 2020 on May 5.

Four research teams were chosen from 43 that applied. Proposals were reviewed by an 11-member committee including faculty and staff in several areas as well as an outside community member. This is the program’s second year.

Each team will receive up to $75,000 as well as administrative and communications support for a 16-month period ending in September 2021.

Crucially, the researchers also plan to collaborate with community partners from El Centro de la Raza locally to universities internationally for these projects. All of the community partners involved are listed on the .

Does vegetation help mitigate roadway and aircraft-related air pollution in Seattle?

, associate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences, is principal investigator on this community-engaged study using drones for 3D air quality measurements.

Co-investigators are professor and assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and , professor of atmospheric sciences.

According to their proposal, “Findings from this study will provide local and highly relevant evidence on the effectiveness of urban planning initiatives that may utilize greenery as an approach to address particulate air pollution.”

Hazard planning, food sovereignty and climate adaptation in the Alaskan Arctic��

, assistant professor in the Department of American Indian Studies and the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, is this project’s principal investigator and co-director.

is a 500-person community in Northwest Alaska about 80 miles above the Arctic Circle. Sea-ice cover around this area has decreased dramatically in the last two decades, increasing coastal erosion during storms and the frequency of traveler distress calls, among other concerns.

For this research, an interdisciplinary team of UW polar researchers will work with area search and rescue volunteers to help Kivalina and its residents achieve more safety, resilience and food sovereignty, and become a model of community-driven polar research. The team also plans to develop new methods in sea ice forecasting to support local decision-making, among several other goals.

Other UW researchers involved are , chair and professor; and , research assistant professor, both in atmospheric sciences.

Píkyav on the Mid-Klamath River: Peeshkêesh Yáv Umúsaheesh

The flows through parts of Oregon and Northern California. Four hydroelectric dams along the river are scheduled for removal in 2022. The , in that area, is among the largest in California.

This research team proposes a river restoration process on the Klamath that centers on Karuk tribal sovereignty using a model of justice, helping to bring tribal perspectives to large-scale governance. The title of the project, they write, translates to “the river will look good” — and the phrase “goes far below the surface to include function, connection and ceremonial renewal.”

The team plans an intergenerational, field-based school on the river, working with Karuk youth and cultural practitioners to gather historical maps, stories and spatial data on Karuk uses of floodplain ecosystems.

UW team members for this project are , assistant professor in the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs; , a lecturer in Comparative History of Ideas and the Program on the Environment; and Karuk tribal member Kimberly Yazzie, a doctoral student in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

Lessons from urban indigenous immigrants ��

“This project will compare a self-managed indigenous immigrant community still using traditional practices in Iquitos, Peru,” the team wrote, “to a similar indigenous immigrant community nearby that developed with social and political pressures to colonially urbanize and leave traditional practices behind.”

UW members of the research team are , affiliate assistant professor of landscape architecture; , photographer with the UW Center for One Health Research; , lecturer in the UW Bothell School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences; Kathleen Wolf, research social scientist with the School of Environment and Forest Sciences; and doctoral student of the School of Public Health.

“We use an innovative, mixed-methods approach by combining indigenous knowledge, science and art to document environmental conditions, ecosystem health, traditional knowledge practices, and human-nature connections in each community,” the team wrote.

Environmental and human health impacts of a new invasive species in Madagascar

A fifth project was in March, representing the second project funded in collaboration with the UW Population Health Initiative. The project’s UW leads are , assistant professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences; and , professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences.

For more information, contact the EarthLab Innovation Grants program lead at elgrants@uw.edu.

The next time you eat sashimi, nigiri or other forms of raw fish, consider doing a quick check for worms.

A new study led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý finds dramatic increases in the abundance of a worm that can be transmitted to humans who eat raw or undercooked seafood. Its 283-fold increase in abundance since the 1970s could have implications for the health of humans and marine mammals, which both can inadvertently eat the worm.

Thousands of papers have looked at the abundance of this parasitic worm, known as Anisakis or “herring worm,” in particular places and at particular times. But this is the first study to combine the results of those papers to investigate how the global abundance of these worms has changed through time. The were published March 19 in the journal Global Change Biology.

“This study harnesses the power of many studies together to show a global picture of change over a nearly four-decade period,” said corresponding author , an assistant professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “It’s interesting because it shows how risks to both humans and marine mammals are changing over time. That’s important to know from a public health standpoint, and for understanding what’s going on with marine mammal populations that aren’t thriving.”

Despite their name, herring worms can be found in a variety of marine fish and squid species. When people eat live , the parasite can invade the intestinal wall and cause symptoms that mimic those of food poisoning, such as nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. In most cases, the worm dies after a few days and the symptoms disappear. This disease, called or anisakidosis, is rarely diagnosed because most people assume they merely suffered a bad case of food poisoning, Wood explained.

After the worms hatch in the ocean, they first infect small crustaceans, such as bottom-dwelling shrimp or copepods. When small fish eat the infected crustaceans, the worms then transfer to their bodies, and this continues as larger fish eat smaller infected fish.

Humans and marine mammals become infected when they eat a fish that contains worms. The worms can’t reproduce or live for more than a few days in a human’s intestine, but they can persist and reproduce in marine mammals.

Seafood processors and sushi chefs are well-practiced at spotting the worms in fish and picking them out before they reach customers in grocery stores, seafood markets or sushi bars, Wood explained. The worms can be up to 2 centimeters in length, or about the size of a U.S. 5-cent nickel.

“At every stage of seafood processing and sushi preparation, people are good at finding worms and removing them from fish,” Wood said.

Some worms can make it past these screening steps. Still, Wood — who studies a range of marine parasites — said she enjoys eating sushi regularly. For sushi consumers who remain concerned about these worms, she recommends cutting each piece in half and looking for worms before eating it.

For the analysis, the study’s authors searched the published literature archived online for all mentions of Anisakis worms, as well as another parasitic worm called Pseudoterranova, or “cod worm.” They whittled down the studies based on set criteria, ultimately keeping only those studies that presented estimates of the abundance of each worm in fish at a given point in time. While Anisakis worms increased 283-fold over the study period of 1978 to 2015, Pseudoterranova worms did not change in abundance.

Although the health risks of these marine worms are fairly low for humans, scientists think they may be having a big impact on marine mammals such as dolphins, whales and seals. The worms actually reproduce in the intestines of these animals and are released into the ocean via the marine mammals’ feces. While scientists don’t yet know the physiological impacts of these parasites on marine mammals, the parasites can live in the mammals’ bodies for years, which could have detrimental effects, Wood said.

“One of the important implications of this study is that now we know there is this massive, rising health risk to marine mammals,” Wood said. “It’s not often considered that parasites might be the reason that some marine mammal populations are failing to bounce back. I hope this study encourages people to look at intestinal parasites as a potential cap on the population growth of endangered and threatened marine mammals.”

The authors aren’t sure what caused the large increase of Anisakis worms over the past several decades, but climate change, more nutrients from fertilizers and runoff, and an increase in marine mammal populations over the same period could all be potential reasons, they said.

Marine mammals have been protected under the since 1972, which has allowed many populations of seals, sea lions, whales and dolphins to grow. Because the worms reproduce inside marine mammals — and their rise occurred over the same time period as the mammals’ increase — this is the most plausible hypothesis, Wood said.

“It’s possible that the recovery of some marine mammal populations has allowed recovery of their Anisakis parasites.” Wood said. “So, the increase in parasitic worms actually could be a good thing, a sign that the ecosystem is doing well. But, ironically, if one marine mammal population increases in response to protection and its Anisakis parasites profit from that increase, it could put other, more vulnearble marine mammal populations at risk of increased infection, and that could make it even more difficult for these endangered populations to recover.”

Other co-authors are , who completed the work as a UW graduate student; , a graduate student in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences; of Bates College; of Washington Sea Grant; and of the UW School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences; and of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

This study was funded by Washington Sea Grant, the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

For more information, contact Wood at chelwood@uw.edu.

Satellite images, drone photos and even Google Earth could help identify communities most at risk for getting one of the world’s worst tropical diseases.

A team led by the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý and Stanford University has discovered clues in the environment that help identify transmission hotspots for , a parasitic disease that is second only to malaria in its global health impact. The , published Oct. 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses rigorous field sampling and aerial images to precisely map communities that are at greatest risk for schistosomiasis.

“This is a game-changer for developing-country public health agencies, because it will make it possible for them to efficiently find the villages that need their help the most,” said lead author , an assistant professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.

More than 200 million people have schistosomiasis, which is treatable but has been difficult to eliminate from some regions of the world. Schistosomes, the worms that cause this disease, grow within freshwater snails, where they multiply and are released into the waters of rivers, lakes and streams. The worms infect people by penetrating their skin when they swim, bathe or wade. Schistosomiasis causes bloody urine and stool and abdominal pain, and can damage the liver, spleen, intestines, lungs and bladder. In children, the infection can stunt growth and impair cognitive development.

The disease is found across sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Though schistosomiasis is treatable with the drug praziquantel, it’s easy for a person to become re-infected after treatment if they swim or bathe in freshwater where the parasite is present.

The World Health Organization recently recognized that efforts to slow transmission of the disease through drug distribution weren’t working in some regions. In addition to drug distribution, WHO now recommends targeting the types of snails that transmit the parasitic worms, which is how this research team got involved.

“The ecological side of the problem is what’s holding us back from schistosomiasis control and elimination — and now ecologists are stepping in and filling that gap,” Wood said. “It’s an exciting time because there’s so much for us to learn. The kind of innovation we have introduced is just the beginning of what ecologists have to contribute to the control of schistosomiasis.”

The researchers worked across more than 30 sites in northwestern Senegal, where villages use a local river and lake for everything from bathing and swimming to washing dishes and clothes. This location was the epicenter of the largest schistosomiasis outbreak ever recorded, in the mid-1980s.

The researchers first set out to methodically count and map the distribution of snails across each site over two years. The fieldwork was difficult and exhausting — they couldn’t let the schistosome-infested water touch their skin while they waded chest-deep to sample mud and plants. It was hot and humid, and the thick shoreline vegetation was full of mosquitoes, spiders, snakes — and even feral dogs.

Their fieldwork demonstrated that snails were found in the river in patchy and inconsistent distributions over time. Snails might be present in one location, then completely absent three months later. Given the snails’ ephemeral nature, the researchers realized that targeting aggregations of snails for removal might not be an efficient way to reduce schistosomiasis transmission.

Instead, they shifted their focus to the habitat where snails live. The snails thrive in unrooted, floating vegetation that is visible in images from satellites and drones.

Considering these habitat features, plus other data they had gathered about each site such as snail density, village size and location, they used models to evaluate which factors could best predict schistosomiasis transmission. The total area of a water access point and the area of floating vegetation were the two best indicators that human infection would occur nearby.

These habitat features are all easy to measure in drone or satellite imagery.

“Counting snails is not an easy undertaking, and it also produces data that are not as useful as the data you can get from a drone,” Wood said. “Once we understand the association between snail presence and particular habitat features, we can use drone and satellite imagery to detect those habitat features. This cuts the time needed to evaluate the risk of schistosomiasis infection down to a fraction of what it would be if you were just looking at snails.”

Public health agencies in Senegal can now look at aerial images across their jurisdiction, find areas with the most floating vegetation in water access points and target those villages for schistosomiasis treatment, the researchers explained.

“Now we can take these aerial images season to season and have an idea of how the pathogenic landscape changes in time and space. This can give us a better idea of infection rates,” said co-author , a biology professor at Stanford University. “This project has been a tremendous effort and an example of collaborative research that would be impossible by a single person or a single lab.”

The team is also trying to use machine learning to automate the identification of floating vegetation in photos, making it even easier for agencies to use the information. They plan to test their approach in other parts of Africa at a broader scale, using publicly available infection data and satellite imagery.

“We’re cautiously optimistic, but we still have some work to do to generalize our findings to new contexts,” said co-author , a research scientist at Stanford University. “If, indeed, we find that the predictors for schistosomiasis are scalable and automatable, then we will have a powerful new tool in the fight against the disease, and one that fills a critical capacity gap: a way to efficiently target environmental interventions alongside human treatment to combat the disease.”

Other co-authors are Isabel Jones, Andrew Chamberlin and Andrea Lund of Stanford University; Kevin Lafferty of U.S. Geological Survey at University of California, Santa Barbara; Armand Kuris of University of California, Santa Barbara; Merlijn Jocque of Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences; Skylar Hopkins of Virginia Tech; Evan Fiorenza and Grant Adams of the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý; Julia Buck of University of North Carolina Wilmington; Ana Garcia-Vedrenne of University of California, Los Angeles; Jason Rohr of University of Notre Dame; Fiona Allan, Bonnie Webster and Muriel Rabone of London’s Natural History Museum; Joanne Webster of Royal Veterinary College, University of London; and Lydie Bandagny, Raphaël Ndione, Simon Senghor, Anne-Marie Schacht, Nicolas Jouanard and Gilles Riveau of Biomedical Research Center EPLS in Saint Louis, Senegal.

This research was funded by University of Michigan, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Wood at chelwood@uw.edu��and De Leo at deleo@stanford.edu.

Learn more about the UW’s Population Health Initiative: A 25-year, interdisciplinary effort to bring understanding and solutions to the biggest challenges facing communities.

Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields — chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics — the fellowships honor those early-career researchers whose achievements mark them as the next generation of scientific leaders.

The 126����were selected in close coordination with the research community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate’s research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in his or her field. Each fellow will receive $65,000 to apply toward research endeavors.

This year’s fellows come from 53 institutions across the United States and Canada, spanning fields from evolutionary biology to data science. The new Sloan Fellows at the UW reflect this diversity, probing complex questions in robotics, quantum physics and the formation of the galaxy.

Cakmak, for example, directs the , where she studies human-robot interactions, end-user programming and assistive robotics. She aims to develop robots that can be programmed and controlled by diverse users.

“It’s about packaging robot capabilities at the right level and creating the right interface for different users,” said Cakmak.

Rather than aiming for a one-size-fits-all robot, Cakmak argues for customizing each robot to the unique needs, preferences and environments of users. Today, only expert roboticists can do that sort of customization. Cakmak aims to make robot programming accessible to a much wider audience. She believes this could be the key to mass adoption of robots and democratize “robot programming” jobs of the future.

Chu, of the , ��focuses on the synthesis and characterization of materials with unconventional electronic and magnetic ground states, such as high-temperature superconductors and topological insulators. Simply put, Chu manufactures materials and measures their properties.

“My goal is to find more materials of this kind and study their properties to find why they come out this way, or if there are additional hidden properties that people don’t know about,” said Chu.

The goal is to understand and control these emergent quantum behaviors and apply them to energy and information technology.

Majumdar, a researcher with the , is at the forefront of the interdisciplinary research that combines quantum materials and nanophotonics. His research attempts to store light in an optical resonator to study its tiniest components. Majumdar is setting out to build quantum systems using light that can mimic the interactions between electrons in many of today’s technologies. That would pave the way for new materials and optical nano-structures that could revolutionize computing. Developing these technologies, however, can be very difficult.

“Our plan is to engineer new materials and new optical nanostructures to make photons interact with each other, which is a key element for performing computation with light, be it quantum or classical computing,” said Majumdar.

Werk is a kind of galaxy historian, studying matter on atomic scales to help understand how galaxies — and the universe as a whole — evolve. By aiming giant telescopes at the night’s sky, she uses spectrographs to study atoms billions of light years away. Werk looks at the distinction between subatomic particles that exist both outside and inside galaxies. The outcome, she hopes, will help elucidate a better understanding of our own cosmic origins.

“When I look at the sky I see lots of different atomic transitions that I’m trying to piece together into a coherent picture,” said Werk.

�´Ǵǻ�’s research explores the ecology of parasites and pathogens in a changing world. She is interested in how human impacts on ecosystems affect the transmission of parasites. �´Ǵǻ�’s work has shown that disruption can alter what kinds of parasites are common and rare — increasing the abundance of some kinds of parasites and decreasing the abundance of others. The Sloan Fellowship will allow Wood and her team to look back in time at how parasite transmission changed as industrialization intensified human impacts on the oceans. She’ll accomplish this by examining parasites preserved in museum specimens — mainly fish floating perennially in ethanol — including many that are more than a century old.

“These fish are basically parasite time capsules,” said Wood.

By developing time profiles of parasite abundance, Wood will provide the world’s first glimpse of what parasite communities might have been like in a more “pristine” ocean.

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For more information, contact Jackson Holtz at the UW News Office at 206-543-2580 or��jjholtz@uw.edu.

But improved human health is not among those benefits ― at least when health is measured through the lens of infectious disease. That’s the main finding of a published April 24 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which analyzed the relationship between infectious diseases and their environmental, demographic and economic drivers in dozens of countries over 20 years.

The new study found that increased biodiversity ― measured as the number of species and amount of forested land ― was not associated with reduced levels of . In some cases, disease burdens actually increased as areas became more forested over time.

“There are a lot of great reasons for conservation, but control of infectious disease isn’t one of them,” said lead author and parasite ecologist , an assistant professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý. “We’re not going to improve public health by pushing a single button. This study clearly shows that ― at the country level ― conservation is not a disease-control tool.”

Surprisingly, Wood said, the study also found that increasing urbanization reduced disease, probably because cities bring people closer to medical care and give them greater access to vaccinations, clean water and sanitation.

Even though cities crowd people together, the net benefit of their services results in reductions of infectious disease.

“It seems pretty clear that urbanization is good for people’s health ― at least when it comes to infectious disease. And that’s good news, because the world is rapidly urbanizing,” Wood said.

The researchers relied on the UW-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s , a massive, worldwide effort to document premature death and disability from hundreds of diseases and injuries from 1990 to the present.

The study’s authors compared data on 24 infectious diseases ― ranging from malaria, dengue and rabies to typhoid, tuberculosis and leprosy ― with separate, published data on population density, wealth, bird and mammal species richness, forest cover, precipitation and other environmental measures to analyze the effects these factors had, if any, on disease burden per country. This study is the first to look at the association between biodiversity and disease over time.

Most conservation decisions are made at the country level, so the researchers focused at that scale when analyzing whether conservation could be used as a tool for improving public health. Over the 20-year period, they saw no relationship between biodiversity (number of species present) and the overall burden of infectious disease. But for each individual disease, there was a unique set of drivers that were important in deciding whether burden increased or decreased over time.

For example, as rates of precipitation went up, so did the burden of “” ― a group of gut parasites that includes hookworm, whipworm and roundworm. Together, the geohelminths affect 1.5 billion people.

Moist soil is an ideal environment for the development of these worms. Humans can become infected when they contact or accidentally ingest contaminated soil ― for example, on unwashed vegetables. As rates of precipitation increase with climate change, this public health threat should be acknowledged and accounted for, the researchers said.

The authors hope the disease-specific information included in this study reveals pathways toward effective control, and helps country officials to avoid inadvertently exacerbating existing public health problems.

“I hope this study encourages people to explicitly acknowledge the potential disease-related risks and benefits of conservation projects,” Wood said. “The absolute last thing we want to do is a conservation project that gets people sick.”

This paper is the concluding piece in an entire dedicated to exploring whether conservation promotes or hinders infectious disease control. The edition’s co-authors convened about two years ago to explore all sides of this controversial question, and the resulting papers examine specific diseases such as malaria, Lyme disease and schistosomiasis, as well as broader topics of policy and economics.

“The special issue arose from an interest in moving away from the very heated but some somewhat academic debate about the influence of ‘biodiversity’ on disease prevalence, to the more practical question about the efficacy of conservation action as a public health intervention strategy, particularly as compared to other intervention strategies,” said paper co-author of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is also an editor for the special edition.

Other co-authors are Alex McInturff of the University of California, Berkeley; DoHyung Kim of the University of Maryland; and Kevin Lafferty of the U.S. Geological Survey.

This study was supported by the Michigan Society of Fellows and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan, along with funding from the authors’ institutions and agencies.

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For more information, contact Wood at chelwood@uw.edu or 206-685-2163.