Stuart Lichtenberg News Today

By Lela Nargi for the Food and Environment Reporting Network.Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Wisconsin News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration In 2002, Deirdre Birmingham and her husband, John Biondi, bought a 166-acre farm in southwestern Wisconsin’s Driftless region. On a portion of that land — once used to raise cattle and grow feed crops like corn, soybeans, and alfalfa — they planted apple and pear tr...

A federal district judge has ordered an end to a large-scale industrial logging project in Northwest Montana, a critical part of the states endangered grizzly bear habitat. The section of the Kootenai National Forest has been a center of contention between conservation groups and developers for years. Now, a judge has ruled developers did not do a thorough assessment of the effect a 30-mile-long road would have on 11,000 acres of the habitat for the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population. ...

Scientists are gaining ground in the race to understand what is causing the spread of chronic wasting disease, or CWD, in deer and elk. Stuart Lichtenberg - research scientist at the University of Minnesota and co-author of a new University of Wisconsin at Madison-led report - said the team wanted to find out if deer ticks that were found on white tail deer killed by hunters carried prions, the misfolded proteins that spread the disease. "We were actually able to detect what we calle...

Healthy deer may be swallowing prion-laced deer ticks during social grooming according to research by university scientists in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Ongoing research into the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in whitetail deer has identified a tiny new piece of the puzzle: ticks. University scientists from Wisconsin and Minnesota discovered single deer ticks (a.k.a. blacklegged ticks) in the wild, taken off the heads of CWD-infected deer, with enough disease-causing prions inside of them to spread the disease. Hypothetically, a ...