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William Miller studies stuff your mom told you never to touch: animal fecal matter.
He can't help it. His work focuses on nutrition among large ruminants, the antelope and deer that graze the grassy parts of Arizona.
You'd think the tools of Miller's trade would look like the backroom of a Coleman Camping store. But they don't. Instead, he has amassed a collection of consoles, big screens, USB cables and CD drives that, on their face, seem better suited to a NASA project, rather than the biology department at Arizona State University's Polytechnic campus in Mesa, where Miller is a biology professor. His graduate students are the ones who collect the animal droppings in natural settings.
Miller's job is to find out what animals are eating, assess its impact on their survival and provide the information to agencies that manage wildlife populations. The best way to do that, he says, is through dogged examination of animal doo-doo, or scat, on a cellular level.
CapSure, a sophisticated new imaging system developed in Arizona, has revolutionized the work, Miller said. It consists of a microscope, a camera shaped like a hockey puck and software that sends microscopic images to a computer screen where users can zoom in and out on them.
Miller and a team of graduate students started using it a year ago to examine the cellular remains of plant food excreted by ruminants, whose multichambered digestive tract reduces all waste to the cellular level.
"The shape of a plant cell is almost like a fingerprint," Miller said. A mesquite cell has one fingerprint, a creosote cell another. Each cell has 42 physical traits that distinguish it, and identifying it can be a long process, requiring comparison with previous specimens or cell drawings.
"One thing I will never be is an artist," Miller said. He used to spend 10 minutes sketching a cell for future reference. Now it takes a couple minutes to compile and save the camera's image with notations.
The technology has improved the speed and accuracy of identifications vastly, Miller said. It shaves days off the weeklong task of "reading" a diet from stained fecal material on slides. It also lets scientists catalog and share the digitized results through teleconferencing or classroom use. Rather than hastily done drawings, the magnifications, hundreds of times more powerful than a microscope, can be screened and used on a split screen for comparison.
"CapSure is a video conferencing tool and allows you to share images, but it has a lot of applications in any situation where you have to look at small things and store the results," said Lindsay Turner, a marketing specialist at GlobalMedia, the Scottsdale video conferencing company that makes it. Turner said the system is commonly used in the medical world to examine and catalog human tissue data, but Miller is the only one using it for wildlife studies.
He plans to use the software for a "flora key" that would make identifying plant cells more like the computerized forensic studies on the CSI television shows.
CapSure is involved in nine of Miller's studies, and was used in a recently completed three-year study of two pronghorn antelope herds near Flagstaff. State biologists have been trying to figure out why one herd is thriving while another about 30 miles away isn't.
"They looked at all kinds of factors, while I looked at nutrition. We found that the group that was doing better had a better diet," Miller said. They fed on rich flowers and leafy plants, while the failing pronghorns were limited to a diet of spindly shrubs.
Miller theorizes that piņon junipers have overtaken former grasslands reducing the pronghorn's nutrition and subjecting them to forest predators such as mountain lions.
"The idea of this work is to establish data for making management decisions," he said.
About GlobalMedia
GlobalMedia Group, LLC, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, has developed award-winning patented technologies and unique intellectual properties within the visual communication field since 2002, and is becoming the leading innovator in digital imaging pathology and visual communication solutions. GlobalMedia has emerged as one of the most respected innovators in the design, development and manufacturing of digital and audio communications solutions, serving customers around the world.
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