BUGGING THE NEST: A bloodsucking bug pokes its head out of a perforated dummy egg—a setup that ecologist Peter Becker uses to collect blood from nesting birds. COURTESY OF CHRISTINA BAUCHPeter Becker, who studies the ecology of seabirds in northwest Germany, traps birds to measure, tag, and sample them. Like generations of naturalists and ornithologists before him, Becker, whose home base is the Institute of Avian Research in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, works with animals that can weigh just ounces and have delicate bones that can break under very slight pressure. So the less he disturbs them, the better for their health and that of his data. Sensitive to this problem, Becker found inspiration in a 2004 seminar on bats and bloodsucking insects by wildlife biologist Christian Voigt of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research.
Biologists, both in the field and in the lab, often draw blood samples from animals to study their physiology, ecology, and reaction to drugs or other therapies. Analyzing these samples can provide abundant data, including cell counts, hormone levels, pathogen and toxin loads, and antibody titers.
In order to collect blood, researchers typically capture, restrain, and anesthetize the animals, especially wild ones. But the stress of this manipulation can dramatically alter the characteristics of blood and its components. “Stress-sensitive parameters like the hormone corticosterone rise quickly” in stressed birds, says Christina Bauch, an ornithologist and Becker’s former PhD student. “If one is not able to bleed them within three minutes, one cannot measure baseline levels [of hormones].”
Researchers have used triatomine bugs to collect blood ...
