Sara Teemer, disease ecology researcher: COVID-19 cages study of disease transmission in birds

The following story was written in May 2020 by Kate Hennion in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

A head-and-shoulders shot of a young woman with medium-tone skin, long dark straight hair, glasses, and a big smile. The background is live plants, perhaps palm fronds. — Virginia Tech Department of Biological Sciences graduate student Sara Teemer. (Photo courtesy of Sara Teemer)

With summer approaching and nicer weather ahead of us, staying at home to slow the transmission of coronavirus may be a harder choice. But Sara Teemer’s work with a common backyard bird shows that it may ultimately be the best decision for our health.

Teemer, a first year Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, says bird research can provide insight into how we might better understand the spread of disease and why physical distance is so important in preventing it.

Teemer works in Dr. Dana Hawley’s lab in the Department of Biological Sciences and studies how environmental factors affect disease transmission in birds. Through the lens of animal behavior, Teemer researches a bacterial infection caused by Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG). Teemer is looking at infectious wildlife diseases in house finches and studying the effects of temperature on the transmission of this bacterium.

"It [MG] is a relatively new pathogen for house finches that causes a pink eye-like infection,” she explained.

Knowing how temperature affects bird behavior can help Teemer understand how disease is spread among house finch populations in the Blacksburg area, as well as house finches throughout the eastern United States.

A small bird with a short blunt beak, red breast and red markings on its face, and brown wings, feet, and beak stands on a lichen-covered branch. — A male house finch. (Photo courtesy of Bonnie Chapman)

“Individual behavior can affect disease transmission in both humans and animals,” Teemer said, “and behavior itself can be affected by a variety of factors, including temperature. Thus, understanding these behavior changes as a result of temperature changes can help predict disease transmission in birds.”

Teemer spends a lot of her time in labs studying house finch behaviors. She collects birds and places them in bird-friendly “environmental chambers” where she can control the temperature conditions and observe how finches change their behavior and, in turn, how this may affect the spread of disease.

To simulate disease transmission, Teemer applies a fluorescent UV powder to an “index bird” so that she can see contacts between individuals within the flock.

“The main technique that I use to look at the relationship between temperature, behavior, and disease spread is UV powder, which is pretty cool because you can put it on a bird, put it in a cage, and then track which bird gets the powder, similar to how a bird would get an infection,” Teemer explained. “It’s interesting because you can see different contacts that you may not have seen before.”

Eventually, she hopes to scale up the study and infect the house finches to see how the bacteria and disease spreads throughout the flock.

“This [UV powder] is an easy, less invasive way to study infection without actually infecting the birds,” said Teemer.

Teemer does not study only bird behavior. At the microscopic level, when working with the disease bacterium MG, she runs tests that look at antibodies in the birds’ blood. She uses technologies such as qPCR (quantitative polymerase chain reaction) to quantify how much pathogen is present and ELISA (enzyme-linked immunoassay) to determine whether a bird has been exposed to pathogens previously or has recovered from prior infection.

“I want to look at it from the host's perspective to see how the host spreads the disease,” she explained, “and from the pathogen’s perspective to see how well it can survive—and, eventually, infect susceptible hosts.”

Teemer is interested in understanding how the MG pathogen survives in different environments. She hopes that her research will provide some insight into the potential impacts of climate change on wildlife behavior and disease transmission. One goal is to gain an understanding of the “short-term effects of ambient temperature on disease transmission and the potential long-term effects [induced by climate change].”

Through her research, Teemer hopes to answer this question: “Can we use temperature and behavior as a model to predict when or how disease might spread among bird populations?” She hopes her study can provide predictive power when temperatures do change, whether they increase or decrease in certain areas.

This photo shows a section of a tube-style bird feeder filled with black sunflower seeds. On the feeder perch to the left is a male house finch (a bird with brown wings and a red head) and on the perch to the right is a female house finch (brown). — A male and female house finch at a communal bird feeder, where most diseases are spread. (Photo courtesy of Bonnie Chapman)

Teemer’s interest in animals and science originated when she was young and her mother taught her “the basics of anatomy using a fried chicken wing,” she said. Later, when she discovered the show “Monsters Inside Me,” a docuseries about parasites and their adverse effects on the human body, she was enthralled by the aggressive and sometimes gruesome symptoms patients experienced. She often watched the show while eating dinner, demonstrating both her fascination with disease and an iron stomach.

As an undergrad at DePaul University in Chicago, she worked in a behavioral ecology lab studying parasites in a fish species called the Striped Mullet. She completed her master’s degree in biology at DePaul, studying “parasite transmission in a system where parasites turned their hosts into zombies.” Sara fell in love with shore birds during this research project and found the opportunity at Virginia Tech to marry her new passion for birds to her long-time interest in disease.

Of course, Teemer’s experiments now have to wait until the end of the pandemic. In light of the COVID-19 virus, Sara’s research has been put on hold due to social distancing guidelines and research regulations at Virginia Tech. Prior to the outbreak, Sara was in the middle of a pilot experiment to prepare for her fall research project.

“As an aspiring disease ecologist, I definitely understand why it’s on hold,” Teemer laughed. Her first round of data collection, she said, “went great,” and with the help of her lab partners she was “able to gain some useful information.” Despite the extra roadblock to her studies and lab experiments, Teemer remains enthusiastic and hopeful about the progress of her research and a healthier future as the world battles the outbreak.

Though a lot is up in the air at the moment as to when her research can resume, Teemer keeps herself busy working on a research paper and analyzing the data that she does have. Despite her lab’s inability to meet in person, they try to keep some normalcy by maintaining their weekly meetings to check in on the health and welfare of fellow lab members.

“The support in the lab has only grown, even though distantly we’ve had to become further apart,” Teemer said. She and her research partners check on the well-being of one another and keep each other at ease with a good sense of humor.

With the support of the lab team and her rigorous studies of an infectious disease in birds, Teemer has gained a strong understanding of disease transmission.

“Disease is spread by contact, so it is important to physically stay away from others at this time and follow rules,” she said. “I think understanding the relationship between individual behavior and disease transmission is going to be crucial to get us through this time, and I just hope that people are being smart and safe about what they do because that can make a huge difference in the outcome of what actually happens.”

As much as we want to get back outside to our normal activities, heed the advice of a bird disease transmission researcher: it may not be the greatest idea to fly the coop just yet.