Wildlife necropsy project

The projects aims

Enhancing wildlife health and disease monitoring of free-ranging animals through performing necropsies of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals at the Minnesota Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory over a three-year period (July 01, 2025 to June 30, 2028). We accept free-ranging animals that died in the wild in Minnesota or that perish under the care of wildlife rehabilitators and veterinarians at wildlife rehabilitation organizations that are licensed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Animals that died in the wild have to be reported to the authorities (Department of Natural Resources or tribal wildlife departments) prior to submission to the laboratory. As lay person, please do NOT approach a sick wild animal nor handle dead wildlife. If you must remove it from the area, use gloves. To report it, call the DNR info line, local wildlife office, local conservation officer, or even local police department. Eventually, the call will make it to the local wildlife office to respond. The local wildlife office will call the reporting person and will ask questions about the animal, clinical signs of illness, how fresh it is if carcass, how many involved, how long they have seen it, etc. The local wildlife office will get the Wildlife Health Program of the DNR involved if the decision is being made to pick up the carcasses and submit them to the Minnesota Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory for necropsy. The outcome of the project will be the beginning of a wildlife disease inventory for the state of Minnesota.
Building diagnostic capacity by supporting the training of veterinary anatomical pathology residents for the duration of the project. This investment will enable three pathology residents to focus on studying the diseases affecting wildlife, bolstering expertise in this critical but underserved field.

Study criteria

The ideal cases for this study have the following criteria:

The animal is freshly dead. We can avoid frustrations on both ends if you send freshly dead animals. There would be nothing more frustrating for you and us, if you put in all the effort of collecting and submitting a case and we had to report out: "Unsuitable for examination" (or "barely suitable"/"postmortem decomposition precluded meaningful histopathological evaluation"). The perfect case would be a case that was seen alive (you possibly even knew whether the animal acted sick and which signs it had) and later was found dead and being collected within a few hours of death. Alternatively, the finder can state that he found the animal dead in a place where she/he knew the animal hadn't been hours earlier or maybe the day before (this may still work depending on the ambient cold temperatures). Ideally the case was not frozen. Freezing will hamper the histopathological examination and possibly some microbiological tests. Obviously freezing will occur in Minnesota's winter. Frozen carcasses may be suitable for our purpose if the animal is fairly small (e.g. raccoon size), doesn't have a thick fur coat, and was frozen fairly shortly after it died. We are certainly happy to discuss details on the phone when you contemplate sending the carcass.
The animal died from natural causes: You likely will encounter a lot of animals that died due to vehicular accidents, predation or hunting. While such cases may on occasion provide some baseline health data ("normal background"), they usually do not add a lot of information regarding diseases. Since we have been doing wildlife necropsies for some time already, we have some idea regarding the background lesions already and feel that we will not gain too much from doing more of these kinds of cases. It also goes without saying that many roadkill cases have so much trauma that the normal anatomy is no longer readily accessible and some organs may no longer be suitable for our purposes.
The number of neonates is limited. While submitting freshly dead neonates (e.g. first week of life) may offer some meaningful insights under certain circumstances, most of the time the work up of neonates does not provide a lot of conclusive results.
For rehabilitation cases: Ideally, we want to focus on cases that are freshly dead at admission or are euthanized at admission (or within 1 to 2 days of admission). The focus of the study is on finding out what is going on in terms of disease emergence in the environment rather than on what is going on during rehabilitation. However, we also understand that under certain circumstances, it will be helpful to know for submitters why some animals are dying while under the (longtime) care of the rehabbers and we are certainly happy to accept such cases as well on occasion.

Wildlife Necropsy Team

A light-skinned man with short brown hair wearing glasses and a lab coat, a light-skinned woman with short blonde hair wearing protective goggles and blue scrubs, and a medium-skinned woman with black hair wearing glasses and a lab coat stand together in a lab

Dr. Arno Wuenschmann has a DVM degree and doctoral thesis from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. He became board certified in Veterinary Pathology by the American College of Veterinary Pathologists in 1999. He has worked as a diagnostic pathologist at the Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory/Department of Population Medicine, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Minnesota since the year 2000 specializing in wildlife (and exotic animal) pathology. Although he is a diagnostic pathologist with experience in a broad range of domestic species and their diseases, his primary focus is on infectious and toxic diseases of wildlife as evidenced by his numerous publications on the topic of wildlife diseases.

Dr. Ariel de Aguiar is a Brazilian veterinarian born and raised in the middle of Amazon rainforest. She earned her vet degree from the Universidade Federal do Acre (2019) - also in the Amazonia region - where her lifelong connection to wildlife was deeply rooted. In the following years she did residency in Veterinary Pathology at Universidade Estadual de Londrina (2021), a Master’s in Anatomic Pathology at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (2022). With a strong passion for wildlife and infectious diseases, Dr. de Aguiar views pathology as an extraordinary field—an ever-expanding world of discovery where each animal provides a unique opportunity to better understand disease processes. She is equally enthusiastic about teaching and sharing her knowledge with others. In July 2023, Dr. Aguiar joined the Anatomic Pathology Residency Program at the University of Minnesota, where she continues to build a broad and comprehensive understanding of animal diseases and their underlying mechanisms.

Erica graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology from the University of Minnesota–Morris in 2016. After college, she worked first at a preclinical research facility, then as a microbiologist. Since childhood, Erica had dreamed of a career in veterinary medicine. Growing up in a hunting family, she gained hands-on experience with wildlife anatomy from a young age and was fascinated by how the body works. In 2019, she discovered her perfect niche—necropsy—at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. Over the past six years as a necropsy technician, she has worked with a wide range of species, including production animals, companion animals, exotics, and wildlife. Her main interest and focus is on zoo and wildlife species, and she is excited to be part of the wildlife necropsy project!