Abby Jane, Checkers and Magic need homes.CLEVELAND – They don't teach animal cunning in school, but it's a great diagnostic tool if your patients are among the 3,000 animals at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo.
A Case Western Reserve University graduate student will try to trick a small, furry primate into surrendering a saliva sample.
A rhino will volunteer its leg to receive a pedometer in return for a tasty reward, and restaurant-quality fish will lure a pair of California sea lions to a checkup.
Treatment and diagnostic strategies vary from species to species because the patients can't talk, many are naturally elusive, and some are just plain scary.
Still others are too small for many tests.
So the zoo has what amounts to its own Crime Scene Investigation unit, composed of three veterinarians, three Ph.D.s and five graduate students who assist or conduct their own research at the zoo.
Among them is Dr. Pam Dennis, a vet who also has a doctorate in preventive medicine and a master's degree in environmental law.
With a specialty in veterinary epidemiology, she studies the spread of disease in exotic animals, and her projects range from the zoo to the African veld.
The docs also perform what most "CSI" viewers would recognize as autopsies, but the veterinarians call them necropsies.
One day in early March, Dennis was in the necropsy lab placing samples of deer marrow in 48 small petri dishes.
Her goal was to render the samples down in a convection oven and examine the remnants to assay the kind of fat in the bloodstreams of the Metroparks deer.
The deer amount to a departure for Dennis, because zoo personnel cannot perform the same range of tests on animals that people at a research facility are allowed to do.
They can draw blood from a lion, for example, for the sake of that lion's health but not to gauge health trends in lions.
The deer, from the winter culling in the Metroparks, were being processed for butchering and donation to the Cleveland Foodbank and provided a window on a much larger animal population than Dennis normally gets to look at.
That same day, she'd consult with Dr. Kristen Lukas, the zoo's curator of conservation and science, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology with an emphasis in animal behavior.
They'd discuss a range of projects including the search for what really wiped out most of the golden-frog population in Panama.
They know a fungus killed the thumb-size amphibians, but they still need to find out why and are performing non-lethal tests on golden frogs in North American zoos.
Grace Fuller, a Case Western Reserve University doctoral candidate, works under Dennis' supervision to get saliva samples from the zoo's loris population.
The loris is a prosimian, a small primate that is neither ape nor monkey.
Many live in trees and forage for food at night.
The saliva test measures a hormone that plays a role in the loris's nocturnal rhythms. Fuller is looking for a way to measure the effects of different light levels on the squirrel-size animals.
The challenge is that a loris cannot be trained to present itself for blood samples, and even if it could, the body and vascular system are too small for the procedure.
Fuller has a stick with a small swab; sometimes it has been dipped in a flavoring agent, sometimes it has a live mealworm on it.
The objective is to get the swab in the loris' mouth.
Obesity and diabetes are common problems for captive animals.
But comparative numbers are hard to get, partially because many of the animals are not fully observed in the wild and partially because there are limited data on the ones in captivity.
The zoo has a diabetic mangaby, a distant relative of baboons and mandrills.
Chris Kuhar, the curator of primates and small mammals who has a doctorate in experimental psychology/animal behavior, explained that the sugar-plagued mangaby has been trained to present an arm to a zoo keeper in exchange for a treat, allowing for a quick blood sample.
The zoo also has four baboons.
Two are diabetic, and their ill health makes them relatively easy to work with, Dennis said.
But the two healthy ones are another matter.
They are fast and aggressive and have sharp teeth that could scare a Doberman.
Making the point, the healthy male baboon charged the glass that separated it from the public as Dennis toured the cat and primate building.
"Don't look directly at him," she explained to a zoo visitor.
"Baboons are very territorial and they view direct eye contact as aggressive."
Being able to compare the blood-sugar levels of the healthy and diabetic baboons would be useful.
Dennis told zookeepers that she'd do a back flip if they figured out how to get blood samples from the healthy, and generally uncooperative, baboons.
Sensing an opportunity to teach a new trick to a very highly placed primate, one of the keepers suggested that successful lab work might be a new tool for training at least one human.
"So I have to learn to do a back flip," Dennis lamented.
Anything for science.
