Following in the footsteps of Jane Goodall: A wildlife pathologist’s story

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When she was a kid in the 1970s, Karen Terio wasn’t allowed to watch much television, but wildlife specials were permitted. That was how she learned about the work of Jane Goodall, who was studying the behavior of wild chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, on the western edge of Tanzania. Watching National Geographic documentaries about Goodall’s fearless and pioneering work with wild chimpanzees thrilled and inspired the young girl.

“I got to see somebody who looked sort of like me as a woman out there in the wild doing amazing research,” Terio said. A little later, a family friend gave Terio Goodall’s book, “In the Shadow of Man,” about the chimpanzees.

“That inspired me to think that this was a possibility for a career for me,” Terio said.

Today, now-Dr. Terio and her colleagues in Gombe are making strides in understanding

how chimpanzee behavior affects the animals’ health and well-being. Terio also has contributed to understanding, diagnosing, treating and preventing disease or other afflictions in a host of animals, from bottlenose dolphins to freshwater turtles to big cats like lions, tigers and cheetahs.

Terio is a professor of veterinary clinical medicine and chief of the Zoological Pathology Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her career in veterinary pathology was inspired by another trailblazer, the late Dr. Linda Munson, an expert on diseases of wildlife. Munson was Terio’s mentor and led her into the field of wildlife pathology, giving her an opportunity to make a real difference in veterinary medicine on a global scale.

In a recent Women in Science Lecture Series presentation sponsored by the University of Illinois Archives, Terio described her own work with turtles, chimpanzees and cheetahs.

For the turtle research, she collaborates with turtle expert Dr. Matthew Allender, a professor of veterinary clinical medicine at the U. of I. and the director of the Wildlife Epidemiology Laboratory. As part of this work, Terio’s laboratory discovered a fungus that had never been reported before. The fungus, which the team named Emydomyces testavorans, eats away at the turtles’ shells, creating lesions that make them vulnerable to other pathogens and endangering their health.

“We’ve been doing a lot of work trying to understand how this fungus causes disease,” Terio said.

The team also developed a diagnostic test for the fungus, allowing those working with turtles to track the infection and avoid passing it on to healthy animals. That testing has revealed that the fungus infects turtles in many parts of the U.S.

Terio’s work with cheetahs began with her interactions with Munson, who died in 2010, and has continued in collaboration with those managing cheetah populations globally today. One particularly troublesome challenge was the observation that cheetahs in zoos and conservation breeding centers were becoming ill more often than cheetahs in the wild. The zoo animals also were not producing many, if any, offspring, endangering their long-term survival.

Researchers had long speculated that the cheetahs suffered from a lack of genetic diversity thanks to two population bottlenecks that occurred 100,000 years ago and again 10,000-12,000 years ago, making the cheetahs more susceptible to disease and reproductive problems due to inbreeding. Terio and her colleagues decided to test whether genetics played a role in the problems seen in zoo cheetahs. They began by comparing disease types and disease rates in wild and zoo cheetah populations.

“It didn’t make sense because cheetahs in the wild were thriving and doing well,” Terio said. “We weren’t seeing the same diseases in the wild cheetahs that we were in the managed care populations.”

Because cheetahs in zoos and other managed settings came from the same wild populations that were doing well, this meant that a genetic bottleneck was not driving the problems seen in the captive cheetahs.

An understanding of Goodall’s work with chimpanzees aided the process of discovering what was contributing to the problems in cheetahs, Terio said. Goodall had highlighted animals as individuals, so Terio and her collaborators decided to do the same thing in cheetahs.

“We noticed that different cheetahs thrived in different settings, so we looked at the potential role of stress responses in these cats, and not just documenting it, not just looking at what things triggered it, but also what things made it better,” she said.

By doing this, Terio and her colleagues identified interventions that completely changed the well-being of the cheetahs in zoos, dramatically increasing their health and longevity and boosting their reproductive success so much that some of the reproductive programs may need to be scaled back. The researchers plan to publish their findings within a year.

The work in chimpanzees has been no less dramatic. Through careful data collection, laboratory analysis and observations in the wild, Terio and a large team of animal behaviorists and scientists based in Tanzania and the U.S. made an important discovery: Chimpanzees suffer ill effects when infected with the simian immunodeficiency virus, the precursor of HIV-1 in humans. Until Terio and her colleagues’ work on SIV in chimpanzees, scientists thought the animals were immune to the virus and experienced no symptoms of infection.

Terio’s Tanzanian counterpart and mentee, Dr. Jane Raphael, conducted the necropsy (animal autopsy) on a chimpanzee known as Yolanda who had died prematurely because of SIV infection.

Training Raphael and other veterinarians in wildlife pathology in Tanzania is now part of Terio’s legacy, along with the dozens of student residents she has mentored over the years.

“Wildlife pathology is not taught in most veterinary schools,” Terio said. “And the U. of I. Zoological Pathology Program at the College of Veterinary Medicine is one of the few programs in the world to offer this specialized training.” 

Terio is an important link connecting the pioneering work of Goodall and Munson to people like Raphael in Tanzania and dozens of veterinary pathologists she has trained over the years. Her mentors inspired her, but Terio found her own path to a career that is improving the welfare of animals in managed care settings like zoos, and in the wild.

"My ultimate goal is to conserve species and preserve healthy ecosystems by understanding disease risks through research and empowering others by providing specialized training in veterinary pathology,” she said.

Editor’s note:  

To reach Karen Terio, email kterio@illinois.edu.  

*Michael Jeffords and Susan Post are wildlife photographers, authors and research affiliates of the Illinois Natural History Survey at the Prairie Research Institute of the U. of I. Their photographs are available here.