THE DOWNLOAD: GSM Team in Chile, Tortoise Bladder Stones

When it came time to explore ways to increase UC Davis’ visibility in Latin America, Global Affairs turned to a team of students from the Graduate School of Management.

The six-person team prepared for months before spending a week in Chile, asking, “If UC Davis established a global center in Latin America, what might the activities look like?”

“During our weeklong trip, we hosted stakeholder meetings with government entities, nonprofits, foundations, U.S. centers, and regional universities and major international universities with a presence in Chile,” Bryan Dastmalchi and Ananta Sen wrote on the Graduate School of Management’s website.

Read their post and watch the above video to learn more about the trip.

61-year-old tortoise treated for bladder stones

A tortoise
Mohave, a 61-year-old desert tortoise, was treated for bladder stones at the UC Davis veterinary hospital.
An x-ray showing bladder stones inside a tortoise.
A radiograph of Mohave shows the bladder stones in his coelomic (abdominal) cavity.

Mohave, a 61-year-old desert tortoise, was recently brought to the UC Davis veterinary hospital for a recurrence of bladder stones — an issue he was previously treated for in 2014. A few weeks ago, his caretakers noticed that his urates (a component of a reptile’s urine) were thick and pasty. Shortly thereafter, Mohave prolapsed his cloaca (a common exit for the urinary and gastrointestinal tract), most likely due to straining to eliminate the pasty urates.

“We took some radiographs and saw some distinct white shapes within his coelomic (abdominal) cavity,” said Juliana Sorem, head veterinarian at Wildcare, a wildlife hospital and nature education center in San Rafael, and Mohave’s home since 2003. “We compared the images with the radiographs taken at his last routine physical and didn’t see these objects on them. Given his clinical signs and the radiographic images, I was fairly certain the stones had recurred.”

Read more on the School of Veterinary Medicine website.

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