 Welcome to the day one summary session. I'm Dr. William Bowerman, a member of the Islar Standing Committee. I'm a professor and chair of the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. I'm a trained wildlife ecologist and environmental toxicologist that specializes in population impacts to wildlife species focusing on birds of prey. I am an ornithologist and serve as the vice chair of the Ornithological Council. The National Academy's Convenient Standing Committee for the Care and Use of Animals and Research is charged with engaging with stakeholders regarding new processes, formats, and topics for future updates or additions to the guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. As introduced earlier in the day, the guide now in its eighth edition serves as an important basis for operation of animal care and use committees. The Standing Committee is not an advisory or oversight committee that will make recommendations for changes to the guide. Rather, it provides a venue for the exchange of ideas and knowledge sharing among those involved in scientific research and animal care and use in the academic, government, private and nonprofit sectors. This workshop is extremely useful and important for informing the work of the Standing Committee. I hope you join me in thanking the organizing committee and speakers for an very impactful day. Over the next hour, each of the three session chairs will be provided 15 minutes to provide an overview of their session and address a subset of questions you ask throughout the day that we think are particularly important. After our third chair has finished, the final 10 minutes will be a combined opportunity for synergistic discussion and cross-cutting questions. Our first chair is Dr. Anne Maglia, whose session was entitled, Perspectives on Animal Welfare Considerations Between Lab Animal and Free-Ranging Fish and Wildlife Field Research. Dr. Maglia. Thanks so much, Bill, I appreciate that. So our session was really the opening part of the workshop largely to frame the goals of the workshop to provide some context. And Bob Sykes started us out with a really great overview, presented some history of wildlife research related regulations, identified some high-level challenges that subsequently other folks have talked about during the day in more detail. I then gave an overview of the U.S. National Science Foundation Wildlife Portfolio of Funded Wildlife Research, generally as a way to highlight some of the diversity that we see in wildlife research, not only in the kinds of animals with kinds of research and kinds of procedures and settings, and identified some challenges that some of the funded PIs at NSF have encountered. Carol Clark from the United States Department of Agriculture, then talked about Animal Welfare Act specifically and also talked about some considerations related to wildlife research. Nicolette Peterberry also spoke in our session and she talked about from the perspective of the U.S. National Institutes of Health's Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare. They specifically talked about policies and challenges in regulation and in conducting wildlife work as it relates to all our regulations. And finally, Jeff Wyatt closed us out by presenting from the perspective of ALAC International and talked about accreditation and wildlife animal welfare challenges that ALAC also deals with. And so I think for our session, it was largely just an opening context. We had a couple of questions, I think that were pretty interesting. A few of them, one was about remote data collection. When would you need IACUC review? For example, if you were using a helicopter, would that need IACUC review? Another one was about the number of times to handling in animals what's appropriate. Largely, the answer to that one is more, try to minimize the impact of the animal. But I think the most interesting discussion that started in our session that continued throughout the course of the day was about the use of personal protective equipment in field work. And we saw a number of different folks both talking about not using it and also using it specifically. So I would actually like to turn this over to Bob Sykes and see if Bob, if you could make some comments on PPE and wildlife research. Sure thing. PPE is certainly something that investigators and IACUCs need to be concerned about both for the protection of the personnel and also for the protection of the animals. So what types of PPE should you use? That really depends on the type of the study. The PPE needs to match the risks. First of all, you need to be cognizant of what those risks are. And they also need to match the intended use of those animals. If it is lethal capture, perhaps you're capturing the animals by hand and what have you and it's lethal capture because they're going into a collection, then you're not releasing those animals. You're not as worried about introducing something into the environment. So gloves may not be as much of an issue there. What would be an issue, especially in certain environments is contaminants that you may bring in on your boots or on your clothing. So as a number of speakers have touched on with herbs, the decon procedures when you move between sites I think is very, very critical. I think viewers should also realize that many of the slides that were used, the images that were used may have been collected over a very long span of time. I know for my own presentation, some of the images that I reached out and grabbed were actually scanned from ectochrome slides or codochrome slides from long ago. So some of those images may span 30 or perhaps even 40 years. When we grab that slide to illustrate a specific point. That aside, you've got to really match the PPE for the risks and the risks are going to be situation dependent in working with mammals. For example, I will take, working with rodents in Arkansas, I'm not terribly concerned about Hantavirus. I know it's not much of a risk here, if at all, it's not been reported within the state. On the other hand, if I'm working in other parts of the U.S. Yeah, there are very different risks that come into play. So it's matching the PPE to the risk for that situation. Just got to evaluate and be cognizant of those risks. Great, thank you so much Bob. I know we have another several other folks on our side that were speakers today. If there's anyone else that wants to comment on this, I'm certainly happy to see the floor to you. Heather, maybe you can join and talk a little bit about PPE in general in the field. Hi, sure. Can you hear me okay? Thanks. I work with a lot of undergraduate students at the university level and often our students are joining the field for the first time. They don't have a lot of experience, maybe in the outdoors in general. And so we talk about some pretty basic PPE to keep students safe. And one of the most important things is heavy boots because sometimes I have students that wanna wear flip flops in the field. And so we talk about just working in the desert. It's a hot environment. We need to protect our bodies from sun and spines and maybe venomous animals. And so sometimes it ends up being really basic stuff, sunscreen, drinking water, things of that nature. Excellent. Thank you. Another question that came up during our session that we didn't get a chance to answer was about especially in remote sites or in field settings, how does an IACUC best meet their semi-annual facility inspection oversight requirements? So I'm gonna ask Jeff Wyatt if you would be willing to take this one on. Sure, thanks, Ann. Thank you very much. I've seen IACUCs around the world accomplish this in many ways. And remember what we've heard throughout the day is that there's no one size fits all, that each IACUC really needs to look at what's best for them and feasible for them to achieve the goals that they have, even typical for a semi-annual facility inspection or program review for a mouse facility. You know, animal welfare, animal wellbeing, personnel safety. That, you know, all of these program activities, you know, they validate that those are being achieved as they've been described in the protocol. And the many ways I've seen this happen include videos, camera, photographs while the program is active on site. IACUCs really enjoy seeing that. It's just like the presentations we saw today. Updates, progress reports. I have found at one university I work at that the researcher loves, they love coming to the IACUC and giving in-person updates and progress reports. And you know what? That gives the IACUC an opportunity to do some Q&A. Just like when we visit a mouse lab, you know, we'll ask them open-ended questions. And then we can truly validate that everything is happening as we would expect. So I think it really is, it's personal to each IACUC, but the common theme is that, you know, we're really all looking about promoting best practices, promoting welfare, promoting good science, be it a mouse program or a field research study. Great, thank you. One other question that came up several times throughout the day that it's a little bit in the leads, but I think that because it came up over and over again, I think it is important to just bring up to reiterate. And that is that, you know, when IACUCs are thinking about if they should be requiring protocols for wildlife research. And you know, we know that a lot of times, IACUCs may not have the expertise as we have heard throughout today. But I'd like to ask Nicolette from the perspective of let's say, Ola, and then maybe Bob, you can follow up if you'd like. What kind of information should the IACUCs be gathering? What are the things that we expect to see so that the IACUCs can make that determination? Okay, so we do have an FAQ on this, and that is Ola FAQ A6. And at a minimum, of course, the IACUC is always free to ask PIs to elaborate, but they should know about the location, the procedures, how the procedures are likely to affect the biology and the ecology of the study animals. And there should be an assurance that permit requirements are met. And remember that the IACUC is also responsible for looking at occupational health and safety concerns. So these are things that I think are important to ask about. Regarding written documentation, this is really important, not just so that the IACUC has a written record for compliance purposes, but a form or a written record of IACUC evaluations can be critical for publication since many journals now require some form of IACUC documentation or some form of review. Excellent, thank you. Bob, do you have anything you wanna add to this, especially from the PI perspective? Sure, I'll just add that, I think having the protocol form that asks relevant questions is a first step. That's kind of the first pass for the oversight body to be able to review these activities. And obviously an institution is able to tailor this to fit their needs. I will offer that both the Ornithological Council and the American Society of Mammalogists have template protocol forms that are wild last specific on their websites that are in word format. These were developed together and then we kind of split them apart and went a little bit different way each society. But they're in word format so that anyone can download these and modify them to suit their institution. They're long because we tried to make them very inclusive, but we encourage people to at least look at them if there's a question or two that is important or if the entire approach is important to your institution. And feel free to use them. Thank you, Bob. Anyone else in that first session? Anything, any last comments or things we'd like to bring up that we haven't talked about yet? Not hearing any bill. I think I will turn it back over to you. Thank you very much. Our second chair is Dr. Sharon Shriver whose session was entitled review laws, regulations and permits associated with fish and wildlife field research followed by case studies and examples. Dr. Shriver. Hi, thanks so much. Can you hear me okay? I assume so. So for session two, in part one, we had three speakers. Adam Ferguson from the Field Museum of Natural History talked about animal welfare challenges from a natural history museum perspective. Some of the key points that he presented were that the regulations are extremely complex and that the regulations themselves can tend to drive research agendas, especially in relation to collecting for museums. He presented an analogy of developing a research activity as being like a game of candy land where many different obstacles are encountered along the way and the response to those obstacles determines the direction that the project ends up taking. Many of these obstacles have unclear rationales and those may have evolved historically or emotionally rather than being based on scientific reasons. He talked about how museums represent a unique situation where lethal sampling is the norm and specimens are meant to be used and shared and keeping the regulations grounded in biology with a consistent dialogue between regulators and scientists will encourage ethically sound research and scientific advancement moving forward. Adam's presentation was followed by Laurie Baton from the National Park Service who talked about the many challenges for wildlife reviews within the National Park Service System, including the fundamental question, does this activity require IACUC review? These challenges may be logistical, political, or due to a lack of defined oversight. She described the development of a decision-making model to help define research versus management. This model provides really clear definitions and identifies decision points in order to provide direction. And she urged reconsideration of animal welfare considerations for the release and reintroduction of wildlife from captivity. Our final speaker for part one was Kayla Pikman who spoke about research on tribal lands. He talked about how partners of shared boundaries or visiting researchers must understand the legal and ethical sovereignty rights of tribes. He talked about how the concepts of natural resource management and land ownership are different for tribes. So it's important to carefully consider research that includes tribal perspectives. Tribal lands may represent highly biodiverse environments due to their long history of management and connection to native species. However, tribes are disproportionately overburdened and consistently underfunded. So animal care and use processes are often unreasonable leading to reliance on partners and ultimately decreased sovereignty. Session to part two, I'm sorry, I was just checking my messages here. I'm gonna pause here and see if any of these three speakers have any comments they'd like to add from their presentations. Okay, so if not, I'm gonna move to part two of session two where we had three speakers who presented case studies and examples of their own work and how these related to the laws, regulations and permits that we talked about in session one. So our first speaker in session two included Lisa Tell who talked about the unique challenges she's encountered working with free ranging hummingbirds as a case study. Her key points included the fact that researchers who work with free ranging wildlife had the added responsibility of thinking outside the box to ensure the health and welfare of the animals, the research team and the students involved and the public. She talked about the increased time, effort, administrative tasks and pre-planning that are commonly inherent to performing research that involves free ranging wildlife. Examples she provided included situations where a single project may require a diverse collection of overlapping and non-overlapping permits. Another challenge can be conflicting requirements such as when the IACUC wants to see a permit before they'll give approval and the permitting agency needs to see the IACUC approval before they'll grant the permit. She suggested that investigators might need to advocate for the animals and their proposed research and help educate the committees and approving bodies. These efforts might entail the researcher having to actively educate themselves. Lisa's talk was followed by Larry Heaney from the Field Museum, who talked about the discovery of new species. 40 to 50, for example, 40 to 50 previously unrecognized species of mammals are being discovered every year. By definition, these efforts to find and document such species require permits and IAC approval. That's flexible. A great many species are known only from a few specimens. We know they exist, but we don't know much else. And this produces a similar need and support for the most basic kinds of research. He showed how data produced by these studies regarding the existence, distribution, and habitat of species are essential for conservation assessment and planning, especially in an era of habitat loss and climate change. Such data are currently lacking for many species of tropical mammals and other vertebrates. He described few work that produces this data and how it's often conducted in remote areas where conditions are difficult, including places that are the homelands of indigenous peoples whose cultures must be respected, even when these differ from those of Western societies. And our final speaker for this session was Heather Bateman from Arizona State who talked about field research involving reptiles and amphibians, remote study sites, and undergraduate students. She talked about how communication with the IACA can be very helpful when the unexpected happens. An example she provided included some necessary changes to capture methods due to unexpected predation or to a wildfire at a study site. She talked about including undergraduate students in research and how this can benefit students through encouraging critical thinking and exploration. Ultimately, this can be important for the future of the STEM workforce. And she talked about how engaging with students requires sensitivity to their backgrounds and experience and care and training for safety in the field. So I'll ask our speakers if they would like to jump in and ask anything. I know Heather already spoke to you a little bit during the summary from session one, but I think Larry would be happy to provide some additional comments now. Sure, one thought that has occurred to me that I think may bear even more emphasis that it's received already is this notion of collaboration and respect for the people who we work with. This is something that can be difficult, challenging when we're working within the United States, when we're working in other countries and in very different cultures. It is even more important when we go overseas where we're going as their guests. I think are obligated to respect their ways of doing things, their priorities. And that extends from respecting their official laws and regulations to the traditions of the people in some open remote areas where we work. This notion of what is sometimes referred to as helicopter research where people just drop in, do their research and leave is something that I think is very destructive in the long run. We all need to be working together on these kinds of issues. And that ends up imposing some very important constraints on the way that we do things with our work with animals in our research programs. And that means that in order to be able to move ahead with the research that we think is important, having a degree of flexibility with the way that we treat these issues becomes critically important. I think that that's probably clear already. I don't think I need to give any more examples, but I'd be happy to talk about it more if people wish to do that. Thanks, Larry. Bill, I think I can pass this back to you for the summary of the next session. All right, thank you very much. Our third chair is Dr. Patrice Klein whose session was entitled Wild Animal Population's Concerns. Dr. Klein. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. I hope I'm audible. That sounds good. So again, I am Pat Klein. I'm the USDA Forest Service IACUC attending veterinarian and the National Program Lead for Fish and Wildlife Health. And again, I'm delighted to have been the moderator for session three. With the main focus, as you have heard, has been on bio-safety, field safety in general, bio-safety, bio-security. And we've had a lot of questions related to that over the course of the day. I do wanna also, again, thank our speakers, Chris Parkinson, Jonathan Reichert, Karen Lips, Vance Vandenberg and John Bryan for their excellent presentations. What I've done is I sort of distilled sort of a composite of the key issues that I heard today. I hope those are also the same that you have also identified. We know that our speakers highlighted the dynamic and complex and often dangerous risks in doing wildlife research activities actually both in the field and in the laboratory. And Chris talked about that with venomous reptiles. Also, just the risk of introduction and spread of wildlife diseases inadvertently, of course, by field researchers and others and the impacts on biodiversity and species conservation. And we had some great presentations certainly by Karen and Vance and also John Reichert. Another big topic we talked about was the importance of this dialogue between the principal investigator, the IACUC committee members, the AUK safety and health or EHS committees when we start to pull together what are the appropriate biosafety or field safety protocols for particular studies. And actually John Reichert did bring up the idea of developing standards of practice around biosecurity, biosafety and animal welfare. And I mentioned as well that these are all about what we call the one health principles that we use throughout our careers and throughout our hopefully our professions that we are all interconnected. So whether we're working in the field or in the laboratory in any of our or work in personal spaces, we need to realize animals and humans. We live in a shared environment. There's lots of opportunities for pathogen spread. We have to look at those interfaces we call them those intersections where we can interrupt potential disease cycles or prevent them from even occurring. And this regards situational awareness, right? To understand what are the types of health hazards that we might be facing in the work that we're doing in going into the field to do work with wildlife or bringing them into the laboratory. What are those risks that can be physical? That can be chemical if you're working with chemical mobilizing drugs or they can be obviously biological. So that's where we have these risk assessment tools and those were talked about in John Microt's presentation when he talked about white nose syndrome. We talked about the risk assessment tools particularly what we call the just in time risk assessment tools when you have a new and emerging infectious disease and you need to actually go into the field and understand the discovery of what's happening. We didn't know what was causing white nose syndrome 15 years ago. We had no idea until people actually took the time to go into the field and work through some of those issues and also bring some of those animals into the laboratory and look at what the pathogens were. Same thing with the B-cell, BD, rhinovirus, all of these emerging infectious diseases need to have the science for understanding to make good management decisions and disease control decisions. So all of this takes training and vigilance as a constant. So some of the key points I just wanted to identify for the audience again in sort of a composite of all these wonderful presentations. I felt really an important thing that came out rather at the beginning of our session and in some of the other presentations is the concern about diversity and inclusion and the fact that everyone deserves to conduct field research as safely as possible. And Chris mentioned some issues of sexual harassment and just other concerns for people that need to be safe under all conditions for working in the field and I'll ask him to come in in a second. We'll come back to that. The same level of planning and discussion for laboratory biosafety should be considered for field work. Those are part of the, how do you extrapolate the existing biosafety principles that we already use in biomedical institutions and try to bring those as best as you can into some of the field work we're doing. These biosafety challenges are inherent in wildlife field work, both on what Don Brian talked about as the macro level, things such as climate and seasonality, terrain and even the equipment that you're using and also the micro level, such as issues with animal diseases or zoonotic diseases, trauma, euthanasia and even some type of toxic exposure. These different scales are really important to consider in these biosafety and hazard, field hazard protocols. Biosafety again is not limited just to pathogen exposure because it can include working with dangerous such as venomous animals, both within the lab and natural settings. And all of these must be identified and addressed when you're planning your field work. We talked about responding to urgent conservation threats and that was discussed both with BD and BSAO and White Nose Syndrome, that coordinated disease research and management activities require biosafety protocols to help guide that work and to prevent further spread. We talked about examples of standards of practice, as I mentioned earlier, standards of biosafety practices that was exemplified by the White Nose Syndrome National Response Community, working in partnership with the federal and the state permitting agencies, a good example of collaboration to manage inherent risks in studying these emerging wildlife diseases, again, both in the field and in the laboratory. And when you have these disease driven wildlife population declines, what are these ethical choices of which species to study and the numbers of individuals available for that research, you have to recognize there could be a trade-off that the research to address the problem may potentially further reduce those wild populations, particularly if they're sensitive species endangered species to be considered. Another big issue that we talked about, it was brought up in several presentations and I know John Ryan had really emphasized this, is that the principal investigator and the IACUC or the oversight committee has to be informed on a wide variety of species specific, environmental, pharmacological, infectious disease issues for all the species that would be involved, both the target animals, the ones that are under study and even the non-target animals that are incidentally involved in the study or caught in the traps. That includes also people, plants and even invertebrates. We can't forget the invertebrates as well. And that's a lot of expertise that an IACUC may not have. So where do you get the expertise? That's the big question. Some of those questions came up through the audience. I know, and how do you find the expertise to address some of these risks? Well, part of it is you either add some of those experts to your IACUC committee or they can actually be advisors to the IACUC committee to help fill these gaps and improve some of the oversight competence of the committee. And so at the end, this is why it's essential as we mentioned earlier for the IACUC and the Ock Safety and Health or the EHS program committees to be collaborative partners and to work with the PIs to determine what the best field safety protocols biosafety plans are for field research activities and also for laboratories if those animals are coming into captivity. So I'll just reach out as well to our speakers and ask if they would like to maybe expand upon some of those key messages that I identified. I would first reach out maybe to Chris Parkinson and particularly that he brought up this issue of how do you recognize some of these situations as far as everyone conducting research safely? And I know you mentioned specifically concerns with sexual harassment or diversity inclusion. Do you have any further comments on that, Chris? I mean, I think the biggest thing is training going out and getting the information. There are a lot of articles coming out in the last couple of years on DEA situations in field safety. We can post a lot of those. Dan made a great list that he sent out with some that I didn't have. There's a new one that just came out in EcoBioRx just last week. But field safety is paramount and that's just not your physical safety. That's your mental safety as well. And we need to be aware of this as PIs, making sure our students understand that these are potential aspects and can occur and how we work as teams to mitigate that. Thank you. That's perfect. Thanks. This to me is a big issue of safety, field safety, not just the, like you said, the physical and biological hazards but the psychological hazards as well. I think that really needs to be well addressed and also, like you said, reinforced by a lot of training before folks are actually doing the work in the field, especially in remote situations. I was gonna reach out actually to John Bryan as well. He talked a lot about inherent risks and field work but where do you find that expertise? And I know a lot of the questions that have come in from the audience today have been along those same lines. Like, how do we find these experts? Where are they? And how can they help the IACUC? So John, do you wanna touch a little bit more on that? Sure, I'll be happy to. So where to find the knowledge, the firepower to kind of beef up the experience on the committee to make informed decisions and reviews? So the simple answer is that it's, you may be surprised that there are people right underneath your nose. I talked a little bit about earlier kind of on the sidelines with some of the other presenters about the importance of state wildlife agencies and other people in that arena. If you are at an institution that's got wildlife activities on the docket for your oversight committee, a good place to start to get your foot in the door might be to approach your state wildlife agency. Your state wildlife agency depending on where they are in the country might have an IACUC anyway. And they might be able to have somebody provide a wealth of knowledge and experience to help your committee that doesn't usually deal with free range species activities come to an informed review on that. There are other folks out there, I'm kind of dancing around putting in a shameless plug for myself, but I'd be very happy to help anybody who's looking for that. But these are the places you can start. And actually to tell you the truth, the fact that you all signed up for this workshop, there are a lot of presenters today and tomorrow who have this expertise. Hold on to this presenter roster and don't be afraid to reach out. Dr. Sykes and I have been presenting this kind of stuff for well over a decade now. And we always close things with offering our email addresses or contact information, but feel free to kind of flip through this roster of presenters for this workshop. And I'm sure almost any of us, if not all of us would not hesitate to help you out. I hope that answers the question. I think that might be in the ballpark, but... That sounds great. Thanks, John. There's a couple other questions that have come in and comments that were made in the presentations, particularly when it came to the sort of novel introduction of these emerging infectious diseases. And particularly if there's importation, as we believe with B-sal or possibly with white nose syndrome and even West Nile virus many years ago, as we know, not only the pet trade, but just airline traffic, people traveling globally, everything is moving at the speed of sound or faster these days. So look at SARS-CoV-2. I mean, we have seen a global pandemic not necessarily spread through wildlife trade, but we realize how fast pathogens can move around the globe these days. So I was gonna ask Karen if she might have some additional thoughts, particularly about if we don't have existing policies or regulations in place, what are other things that we can consider doing as far as introduction of these novel diseases and how does the research community sort of present itself or stage itself to sort of help figure out some of this discovery in this new science? Thanks, Patty. That's a great question. It's going to be tough. I think it's gonna require primarily communication and cooperation and coordination because what is happening here in the US is just as likely to happen in any other country with infectious diseases and where the problem starts first, we can get that information and share that information as quickly as possible with our partners around the world, kind of tagging off of what John said about communication, scientific societies, field stations. I mentioned the B-Sale Task Force. There are existing groups of people who are doing research on this, either government or non-governmental groups, researchers, and if you can find a website with somebody who's working on it, they can direct you to the appropriate person or group that can help you mobilize a response or get the information out. Perfect. Yeah, and I was just thinking that somebody who many years ago in my early career worked with the whooping crane reintroduction program between Canada and the US, I mean, there was a lot of work on the research side with some of the biosafety protocols. We had to test those animals before they were transported from the captive propagation facilities that I used to work at at the Tuxent Wildlife Research Center, when all those animals were being prepared to be introduced into the wild or to be reintroduced in some cases, all the work that went into health and safety concerns, not only of the population that was in captivity, but the ones that were also in the wild, so you weren't taking infection inadvertently from a captive population and putting it into the wild. So all of that dialogue that happened both nationally, internationally, and through those types of working groups was really helpful in getting that program to be successful and making sure the birds were healthy when they were brought out. And that actually leads me to your partner, let me go over to Vance, because that is a question that came up about ethical considerations. You touched on that a little bit with some of the amphibian work that you've been involved in, but reintroducing animals into the wild. And in the research perspective, sometimes animals are brought from the wild into a research facility to study them. Are those animals that have been in temporary captivity, can they be returned back to their original site? Is that questionable or what about, like I mentioned, actually breeding animals in captivity for reintroduction purposes? How does that play out with some of the biosafety concerns that we would have as far as not introducing or reintroducing unintentional pathogens? I think that's a great point. As we face the biodiversity crisis and try to do something where we're doing research, in many cases, with the end game being, we're trying to solve these issues where species are being threatened, perhaps because of human activities. Getting these populations to stabilize again sometimes takes a lot of intervention. And I think in particular, the IACUC framework is a really great way to get people to communicate across different platforms. So for example, working with zoos and researchers. When I first started working on a project where we were gonna reintroduce animals into the wild, my IACUC at the university was not open to that idea at all. But the zoos, because they have a history of working under the context of, the very real context of conservation as like one of their pillars, that wasn't really in research, but it was at the zoos. Their IACUC committee was much more open to that idea. And so after years of communication between our committees, we've sort of moved forward. And I think we need more of that. But certainly, we are in these situations that where we've done discovery. So we've discovered a pathogen that wasn't known. And then we bring that pathogen into the lab and start learning about how those pathogens interact, pathogen or pathogens interact with individuals of different species. And then we wanna try to take what we learn in the lab and take it back to the field. So there's definitely this need to go back and forth. And I think the IACUC framework is the way that we need to get that communication going across these different platforms, from the wildlife people to the research people to the zoo community people. Great comment. And it actually leads me to sort of my last sort of question that I was going through from a lot of the questions submitted today was a relatively recent one that asked, how do you distinguish between the responsibilities of the IACUC, the OX safety health or environmental health and safety teams or programs evaluating these wildlife activities? So how is that sort of dynamic worked out obviously with the principal investigator? I mean, the PI to me is also the expert in this discussion right there, the ones who are leading the study. So I was gonna first turn to John Bryan, I think if you wanted to maybe tackle that. And then any of the other session speakers if you have some other thoughts, again on this sort of dynamic of working with the IACUC and these safety and health NPIs. Sure, thanks, Patty. Yeah, that was a question that was just posted on the chat. So with an IACUC that is registered with Olan is doing the guide, there's a direct relationship between the oversight body and OX health. But if you've got a different setup at your institution, so to speak, how do you manage that conversation? How do you manage that collaboration between reviewing an animal use protocol and making sure that folks aren't going out into the field and act of the fool and getting hurt or getting exposed to dangerous things. So like I said earlier in the presentation, the animal welfare act does not say, does not give IACUCs the mandate to organize or manage occupational health for the institutions they serve. However, there is a lot of overlap in review of animal use protocols that has to do with safety, biosecurity and biosafety of the animals under study and the environment that absolutely overlaps with human health. And that is where you can manage this sort of thing. For instance, this is especially in play when you talk about disease transmission. Zoanoses is kind of a no-brainer. If you are imploring if the IACUC is demanding mitigation strategies to an AUP that speak to diminishing risk of disease transmission between animals you're studying, then the conduit is you as the handler. So there is every bit of authority there to demand that human safety be inherently tied to not transferring disease from one animal to the other. In other words, wearing gloves is a simple one. It also protects animal A from being, getting a disease from animal B, but it also protects the human from also getting the disease from animal A as well. Issues like rabies and this kind of stuff, this is a no-brainer. Montevirus, et cetera. These are ways that you can initiate this kind of dialogue and start this. So, but I would argue that a team that goes into the field that demands that the IACUC kind of look the other way or not examine or ask these kind of questions about AUK Health is doing kind of a less than ideal review. Yes, an IACUC that's not registered with OLA doesn't really have the mandate to oversee AUK Health, but they have every right to ask questions about it. And they have every right to interview the PI and the team to ensure that proper precautions are being taken to make sure that that protocol is safe in the field. And I guess in the presentation, it's almost inevitable. It will almost always be the case that what's safe for the animals and what's safe for the environment, hosting the project will be also safe for the human beings. Any others on the session speakers? I'd like to jump in, thanks. This is Nicolette. So from the OLA perspective, it's very clear that the Occupational Health and Safety Program is an institutional responsibility. However, IACUCs are responsible for all animal care and use within their institutions. And it's a spiderweb, right? Just like John was explaining, there are lots of impacts. So if there are safety issues that could be related to training, if there are safety issues that might impact the animals, that's an animal welfare issue, especially in terms of zoonosis, what if you bring it back to the animals in the laboratory? So there are human and animal aspects intertwined and there are also research aspects. What if the occupational health and safety issues are so worrisome that you're worried that the research goals won't even be accomplished? So there are a lot of reasons why the IACUC should be an active participant, but also consult with experts in the occupational health and safety arena to help them evaluate protocols in light of occupational health and safety issues. That's a great point. And actually we're all living through SARS-CoV-2 right now and obviously not just about the human pandemic, but all of the work and discussions that have happened over the course of two years at the federal, state, university research levels as to whether we can actually go safely into the field, not only to protect human health but also to protect potentially what we call at-risk species, right? We've all been watching the news. We've seen pet dogs and cats infected by their COVID positive owners. We've seen a number of zoo, large cats, lion's tigers, leopards, Canada Lynx. We've seen a number of the large felids. We've seen gorillas. We've realized that now white-tailed deer just to add that to the interesting discussion, free-ranging white-tailed deer. So we realize that this novel virus that has somehow been introduced globally into the human population is now a spillover event, certainly into domestic and wild animals. We don't know whether it may be a spillback event but how that affected research. In many cases, research was postponed or in some cases canceled or altered in some way over the course of the past couple of years. And I know John Riker can speak to that. He mentioned it, I think in his presentation, particularly with bats. I mean, that was one of the first keystone species that everybody had their hair on fire, if you don't mind saying so, because we worried they already are being decimated by white-nose syndrome and introduced fungal pathogen. And we don't know whether North American bats had a similar susceptibility as Asian bats considered sort of the reservoir for the prototype SARS-CoV-2 virus or progenitor virus. We didn't know if they would be susceptible or not. And so a lot of research and frankly, some management activities for white-nose syndrome and studying bat populations across the North American continent came to a screeching halt in many ways. I mean, that is an unfortunate circumstance just for science. And for us to learn more about white-nose syndrome and how to manage that, but we didn't want to introduce yet a second disease on top of that that could create even a sort of a worse risk. John, did you have any other thoughts on that, John Riker? I mean, just looking through that kind of situation through the lens of also a regulatory agency that is issuing permits. Yeah, I think you covered it really well, Patty. We definitely had a very quick sort of adoption of those high precaution approaches with largely a hands-off unless there was critical activity that had to happen. But we very quickly wanted to move back. So putting that effort into really identifying where the, how we could safely move back into those activities was important. Another consideration as we did that was the potential public perception of what we were doing and what that would mean for the wildlife we were working with. So as we take this precautionary approach with working with bats, the perception to the public could then be that bats are dangerous, that there is this threat coming from the bats. Whereas in reality, what we were doing was trying to protect to the bats from the threat we were posing to them. Had we allowed that misperception to occur that could again have even worse consequences for the bats down the road. Exactly. And a lot of that discussion was again about biosafety and biosecurity in the field in both directions. Not only protecting humans who were traveling to the field and working with colleagues and being safe themselves, but also wearing the right type of personal protective equipment, face masks, gloves, whatever was necessary to prevent or at least minimize potential risk to introduce this novel SARS-CoV-2 virus to whatever species you were working on. So that brings us full circle back around to the issues of field safety and biosafety and how that has to percolate through the research community and with all of the people sitting around and having this thoughtful conversation together. Last thing, I just wanna make sure that I mentioned as far as looking for expertise on all these different species to assist the eye cooks or the PIs or the safety and health folks is again to reach out to our tax on specific associations, Association of Society of Immology or Nephological Council, et cetera, even the Association of American Fish Society, excuse me, and the Fish and Ix and Herbs. So all of these other professional associations also are there to provide some guidance and add additional expertise into the discussion. So I'll turn everything back over to our moderator host for this afternoon. Okay, thank you. We just have a few minutes. So if there's more synergistic discussion, this third session started getting cross-cutting. So if anybody has another topic, we've got about five minutes left among the chairs if you'd like to bring something else up. Okay, I'll throw a quick question out there. There was a question that came in about standardized eye cook protocols. I think that goes across a lot of the things we discussed today. I didn't know if anyone, moderator speakers had any thoughts about making standardized eye cook protocols. I worry that you don't necessarily have a one size that fits all, but there is some value in having certain standardized protocols. So the researchers don't have to continue to rewrite every time they submit a new study protocol, write the same information over and over again. I think there's certainly a lot of value to that in exactly what you said, saving time and not reinventing the wheel each time. But I do think that a hallmark of many of the presentations through session two was the need for flexibility and the need to think outside the box and deal with the situation at hand rather than relying on precedent which may be historically unclear. It may not be clear why a rule is in place or why a standard practice is in place. And it may end up hampering doing something really valuable. So there's probably a balance there between providing some standardization but also leaving that flexibility that we need. I completely agree with Sharon. I do think that having those categories so that we have some general guidance specifically for the, as we had talked about earlier what are those specific activities or those specific items that the iCook really needs to know about. And so having some of those in a standardized protocol or standardized forms but yet still being able to in specific variation I think is probably the best way to approach it. So we had one other question that was in here related to a catch 22, where the iCooks want a permit before they approve a protocol or can you get the approval before you get the permit? Anyone want to tackle that one? I'd like to tackle that one. I'm happy to. So it happens quite frequently actually especially when you're doing international field work. And what we've done or what we did while I was IRCAC chair at University of Central Florida was the PI signed off a statement that said they will and are responsible to garner all of the required permits to carry out said research in this protocol. And then a lot of times on our annual renewals and things we would look at those permits because it was post them doing the work. And so they would have them. Yes, that's basically what we have here too. We have to show our permits but we don't need them to get our iCook protocol approved. Shirley Bill, could I add something to that? Sure. What Sharon just said about precedent and institutional policy and procedure and the program's culture and what is the root of the issue here? I think because like others were saying there are international issues here that you don't have control over. And so you're trying to get your researcher into this space to facilitate the work safely. And also then if there are these other barriers really take a look, use those semi-annual program review times to analyze and look at what is going on and why is it there? Ask the questions. That's an opportunity to show your researchers the good faith effort the committee and the program is making to work collaboratively and to communicate and to get stakeholder input. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. We're coming right up against five o'clock. And this is definitely a catch-22 issue at the very end. So one thing I'm just gonna start I'm gonna thank all of our chairs, our presenters for their excellent overviews and answer to our questions. Those questions that aren't answered during the sessions are gonna be addressed in the transcript of the meetings. We've been overwhelmed with the number of questions and remember we have over 1700 people across the world that are registered for this workshop. So this is the end of our first day. We will reconvene at 10 a.m. Eastern US time tomorrow. Same time as today. We look forward to your participation tomorrow. So good morning, good afternoon or good night depending on where you are viewing this in the world and we'll see you tomorrow. So thank you.