Roadkill Rules

Normal people collect stamps and coins, CDs and concert tees. Some biologists with a zoological bent, like myself, collect roadkill, originally dubbed "road fauna" in 1938 by James Simmons in his book Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike. Is there no one besides me who relishes stopping to explore a freshly splayed digestive tract, or marveled at the unique aroma of squished annelids driven from their underground lairs by rain?Roadkill finds often come unexpectedly. I move most away from traffic, sometimes burying them. A few, apparently only stunned, have gotten up and walked away. For an injured animal I seek veterinary help, or talk to it during it's final moments, as I recently did for a deer, unthinkingly ignoring the people in the car it had struck. But unusually well-preserved victims I bring home to obtain the skeleton, either by boiling or burying it in a plastic bag and retrieving it months later – habits that do not go over well with nonscientist family members. It's important to learn local laws: Collecting "salvaged furbearers" and amphibians is illegal in some places, or you may need to record the number and location of species. Carrying gloves and Ziploc bags when out and about helps.Not everyone understands a fascination for roadkill. My husband, for example, failed to appreciate the muskrat that I brought home in his brand new car – he had only asked me not to spill coffee, he didn't mention anything about dead animals. My cats festooned my office with the plumage of a spruce grouse that had unfortunately slammed into a window before I took it to a pricey taxidermist. Some biologists do think the practice odd, such as my friend Barry Palevitz, a squeamish sort whose idea of a body fluid is phloem. I made him stop his car in Georgia so that I could peel what was left of an armadillo off the road, unaware that I could have gotten leprosy in the process.Sometimes biologists attempt to prevent roadkills. At a dinner in Cleveland, a biologist asked, in a reverential tone, if I would like to accompany him to a local park after dark to watch salamanders cross a road to reach a pond. Although suspicious, I was intrigued enough to go. So did about 20 others, and even though the ratio of humans to amphibians was 4:1, we had a great time beneath the "salamander crossing" signs.Doomed migrating animals are common. Along a two-mile stretch near Gainesville, for example, concerned environmentalists have erected "ecopassages." These are lipped walls that guide snakes, frogs, turtles, and occasional alligators past highway underpasses.Roadkill has great educational value, as students of vertebrate biology have long known, the specimens stand in for euthanized animals. I use small skulls to explain evolution to children. Researchers use roadkill too. Jim Farlow, a paleontologist at Indiana-Purdue University, posted a "roadkill request" on the Internet to obtain painted turtles for his work, requesting that helpers freeze and ship him their squashed turtles.Tracking roadkill provides population data. Ever wonder how highway personnel know where to post deer-crossing signs? Roadkill. And the epidemiology of West Nile virus emerged in the death trails of birds. Many a museum specimen began on asphalt. For example, a college student in the 1980s provided the only evidence of the jaguarandi, an endangered cat, which now resides at the Smithsonian.Roadkill has practical uses. Hungry pet snakes will settle for the nonmotile meals, but one must be careful. Barbara Beitch, a biology teacher at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Connecticut, was so concerned about her ravenous boa constrictor, Victor, that she fed him a squirrel without first freezing it to kill bacteria. The postprandial serpent swelled horribly, so Beitch and a student gave him a warm bath. "Apparently, the squirrel had decomposed, and the bacteria had produced copious amounts of waste gases, but the skin had not been broken. So my student massaged the snake from the swollen area towards the mouth, and I took the other end. Suddenly, the squirrel's skin broke, and gas started coming out both ends. It was not a pretty sight," she recalls.So it might be wise to keep Victor's experience in mind when contemplating eating roadkill. Cookbooks and Internet recipes offer such fare as bumper thumper, moose casserole, elk parmesan (hold the prions), roasted beaver, and for those with a taste for marsupials, opossum stew. Possums, armadillo, and rabbit are the preferred meat for original Texas roadkill chili; avoid skunk.On a more serious note, we biologists who ponder road-kill are neither ghoulish nor irreverent. We are, in fact, quite the opposite, burying or helping animals when appropriate, learning from and appreciating them when not.Ricki Lewis rlewis@the-scientist.com

Roadkill Rules

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