There’s a new crop of Northwest College students ready to assist Game and Fish in testing for chronic wasting disease (CWD) in area deer and elk herds. 

Students in associate professor Eric Atkinson’s biology class met with three Cody Region Game and Fish officials to help the students learn how to pull samples for CWD and age testing from the heads of deer.

With the training, the class is now once again available to test deer and elk heads hunters drop off for testing. Atkinson’s classes have been doing this since 2019. While not mandatory this year, Game and Fish is still hoping to collect 200 samples from each hunting zone covering the Lower Shoshone deer herd. 

None of the deer available for the class to dissect had been harvested this year, said Austin Wieseler, Cody regional wildlife biologist — most were deer from in town that had to be put down due to illness or injury. One white-tailed doe, whose head was available for the experiment, had been killed in a vehicle collision just that morning nearly in front of the Game and Fish Office outside Cody. 

But by learning how to extract specific lymph nodes — or in lieu of that, other tissue — required, Wieseler said the students would be fulfilling an important purpose in adding convenience to hunters this season. 

“We have a focus herd in and around Powell, so it’ll be good to have you guys help sample,” Wieseler told the students. 

He said amongst the herd around Powell, roughly half of the mule deer bucks, and a lower percentage of does and white-tailed deer, test positive for the devastating prion disease.

Wieseler was joined by Powell area Game Warden Jordan Winter and Wildlife Technician Ken Feduff. All three assisted students in finding the all-important retrograde lymph nodes used to determine whether the deer was CWD positive. 

“You can almost always get lymph nodes unless they're cut completely off right at the base of the skull,” Wieseler explained to the assembled students, donning lab coats. “And if that's the case, you can get the obex next. So you can almost always get samples from either of those two things. Tonsils are kind of a rare case.”

The obex is a Y-shaped area of the brain stem, where the fourth ventricle narrows to form the central canal of the spinal cord.

Wieseler said students should be prepared for hunters to ask whether or not they should eat CWD positive meat. He said his answer is that Game and Fish follows the CDC guidelines which advise not eating it. However, he said, it’s a tough question to answer, as hunters in high CWD prevalence areas have certainly eaten CWD positive meat for years. 

So, when it comes down to it, he said it’s up to the hunter to decide what to do. Game and Fish, and now a new crop of NWC students, can only be part of the process in providing information for hunters before they make their decision. 

The college has a head drop location at the Science and Mathematics Building. For more information, call 307-754-6018.