Camilla “Ylla” Koffler got animals ready for their close-ups.

Nowhere are the words shoot and capture more benevolently applied to animal life than in the work of photographer Camilla “Ylla” Koffler. During her short but prolific career, she celebrated her subjects as individuals with souls and personalities rather than portraying them as objects to be ogled like hunters’ trophies. Author Pryor Dodge ’71 offers the iconic photographer an equally flattering and well-deserved spotlight in Ylla: The Birth of Modern Animal Photography.

Ylla (EE-lah) was born in 1911 to Hungarian parents in Vienna. She began her artistic career studying sculpture, but an aptitude for photography and a penchant for rescuing stray animals led to her capturing their very best angles. At the outset of her career, she primarily photographed house pets or exotic species in zoos, eschewing the gender norms of the day by getting up close and personal with animals typically only approached by male zoo handlers. Her fearlessness eventually took her to Africa, where she discovered a passion for photographing animals in the wild.

Ylla’s appetite for adventure brought her to India in 1955. While riding in a speeding jeep to photograph a bullock cart race, she fell from the vehicle and died from her injuries.

“Ylla’s pictures brought animals into the living rooms of America and Europe in such a way that they conveyed a feeling of sharing in wonderful adventures,” Sports Illustrated nature columnist John O’Reilly wrote upon her death.

Her work also lives on in several books, including two children’s books that became instant classics: The Sleepy Little Lion by Margaret Wise Brown (of Goodnight Moon fame) and The Two Little Bears.

Dodge is also the author of The Bicycle, a history of bicycles and cyclists that features his own extensive collection of antique bikes and cycling memorabilia.

The expansion doubles the size of the small-animal hospital and triples the area devoted to infectious disease research. School of Veterinary Medicine

The UW School of Veterinary Medicine (SVM) has built a new three-story space — which connects to the existing small-animal clinic — to meet a growing demand for more student learning spaces and veterinary patient care.

SVM was scheduled to open the first two floors of the $174 million expansion in June, doubling the size of the small-animal hospital and tripling the area devoted to infectious disease research. The school is home to 75 percent of the vital infectious-disease research conducted on campus, and it provides quality care for nearly 30,000 veterinary patients per year.

The expansion was made possible by a wide community of benefactors. The project received $90 million from the state, with the remaining support contributed by generous donors such as Debbie Cervenka, a member of the SVM board of visitors. “To be involved and have the ability to provide financial support for this expansion has been a tremendous honor,” says Cervenka. Other contributors include current and former teaching hospital clients, alumni, and pet lovers.

The updated space will greatly expand SVM’s ability to meet the increasing demand for research and care that benefits animals as well as humans. Some of the improvements include research and diagnostic equipment, such as CT, MRI, and PET-CT machines; room for more student learning spaces; an oncology center; and a cardiology suite.

The new facility will house biosafety level 3 lab spaces, which are designed for easy decontamination of potential airborne toxins. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 75 percent of the rising infectious pathogens that affect humans originate in animals, and scientists at the school are on the front lines of investigating infectious diseases such as West Nile encephalitis, avian influenza, and COVID-19.

The 150,000-square-foot construction will also offer student collaboration spaces, acupuncture, internal medicine, general surgery, and an ultrasound suite. The MRI machine is capable of accommodating large and small animals alike.

The third floor of the new building will likely be completed in early 2025, along with an enclosed large-animal arena, remodeled isolation stalls for bovine and equine patients, and renovations to the existing building.

“I can’t wait to see what the future holds for this incredible school,” says Chancellor Jennifer L. Mnookin. “The discoveries and innovations, the graduates who will meet the state’s urgent need for veterinarians, and the compassionate care that will change the lives of our animal patients as well as the lives of the humans who love them.”

“I’m a white-water kayaker, so I go up north almost every weekend,” she says, adding that she kayaks elsewhere in winter.

It’s a Wednesday morning in October 2019, and we are en route to an animal shelter in Illinois, where Newbury — the director of UW–Madison’s Shelter Medicine Program — will meet with a group of fellows who are there to learn how to improve the welfare of shelter animals.

Known as the Northern Tier Fellowship, it’s one of several efforts that the program, housed within the UW’s School of Veterinary Medicine, carries out for veterinarians and shelter leaders around the world. Started more than five years ago by Newbury, the program is a leader in the relatively new field of shelter medicine, which focuses on caring for animals in need. The program conducts its work through education and outreach-based research — findings based on work with shelters rather than through clinical trials. Each year, this particular fellowship invites shelter directors and managers in northern states to visit shelters that the program has previously worked with to gain exposure to new ideas and practices that help improve animals’ lives.

Among the many practices covered during the fellowship, the program staff emphasize an unexpected point: in what can be an emotionally taxing field, human welfare is critical to improving animal care.

It’s a Balance

Back in the car that afternoon, Newbury, Peanut, and I return to Madison to meet a second group of fellows at the Dane County shelter. This time, Peanut shares the backseat with three mewing kittens, who are being transferred to help lower the Illinois shelter’s cat population. The kittens — whose mother no longer wanted them — will receive the attention they need at the Dane County shelter.

That morning, Newbury demonstrated to fellows how to identify and manage overpopulation; she noticed that the shelter’s number of cats was over capacity and made recommendations to lower it, such as starting a cat adoption sale and relocating the kittens to a different shelter.

Now on our drive to Madison, I learn that Newbury isn’t only a white-water kayaker — she is also a local circus performer and an aerial dancer, and she has a residency through the Overture Center for the Arts to teach circus arts to children at Madison’s Lussier Community Education Center. She decided to give circus performance a try after enrolling her son in classes.

“I’m pretty open about it,” she says of her hobbies. “I used to keep it secret, and then I was like, ‘I think people should know because everybody knows I work really hard at what I do, and I love what I do as a profession, but I also love these other things that I do.’ ”

Loving things outside of the profession is important. Although the reasons aren’t fully understood yet, veterinarians have high suicide rates. According to a 2019 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, female veterinarians are 3.5 times as likely and male veterinarians are 2.1 times as likely to die from suicide compared to the general population. Being open about her outside interests, Newbury says, is part of the program’s effort to teach veterinarians and shelter staff the value of work–life balance. She leads by example, and sometimes she will build in time for yoga and other activities during the fellowships.

“You can see how sheltering could really be consuming. A lot of the time, especially in shelter medicine, I think, people try to solve the problem,” she says, noting that workers will sometimes bring animals home rather than allow themselves distance from work. “What I try to teach, especially my veterinarians, is to balance their lives so that their career in sheltering will be sustainable and that they won’t just come in, work in shelters for a year, and be so burned out that they never want to help again.”

A Need for Structural Change

Formerly a full-time artist, Newbury was inspired to volunteer for a local shelter after seeing stray cats near her Chicago studio. As she gained more responsibility in the shelter, she saw firsthand veterinarians’ limited involvement and was concerned by their lack of knowledge about shelter care.

“At that time, there really weren’t veterinarians who were interested in animal shelters,” she says. “There was no such thing as shelter medicine.”

In addition, veterinarians working in shelters were often criticized for their role in making euthanasia decisions, especially those made to control crowding. No one wants to be called “Dr. Death,” and veterinarians would quit after a year, contributing to a shortage of professionals and creating a knowledge gap and missing skill set for animal care and welfare.

Even later on, as Newbury helped build a shelter medicine program at the University of California–Davis in the early 2000s, there was misunderstanding around what program staff meant when advocating for population management.

“People thought that all I wanted to do is euthanize animals,” Newbury says. “I got to a point where, when I would give presentations on this, I would say at the beginning, ‘If at any point you think I’m saying I want you to euthanize more animals, euthanize animals faster, or anything of the kind, please stop me and raise your hand, because I don’t mean that, and I want to try and clarify that right at the time.’ ”

Starting in her early years of working for a shelter, Newbury sought to counter the spiraling negative trends she was noticing. She created a protocol to make the most of the shelter’s limited veterinarian access, providing staff and volunteers with methods to try when a problem arose with one or more animals. If the protocol didn’t help an animal, that informed staff members that the animal needed the veterinarian’s attention — maximizing the veterinarian’s time and helping as many animals as they could, as quickly as possible.

“I realized pretty early on that what was needed were these structural changes to animal shelters, instead of just trying to deal with each individual problem — which of course doesn’t mean you don’t deal with the individual problem. It’s just a way of dealing with it more efficiently,” she says.

Even with the protocol, Newbury was frustrated by the shelter’s problems, such as outbreaks resulting from a veterinarian’s distrust of vaccinations in cats. That’s when she reached out to the UW’s School of Veterinary Medicine, seeking input from Ronald Schultz, now a professor emeritus in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences. “I decided I should go to vet school after all, because there needed to be veterinarians who knew about animal shelters,” she says. “I think if I had actually known that I wouldn’t be an artist [anymore], I don’t think I would’ve done it — but I’m glad I didn’t know, because I’m really happy with what I do.”

Following veterinary school, she became the medical director at the Dane County Humane Society before working for UC–Davis, where she helped build the first shelter medicine program at any university. (The director of that program, Kate Hurley, was the first in the world to become a resident in shelter medicine.) Although employed by UC–Davis, Newbury continued living in Madison and teaching at the UW. Meanwhile, a few other universities, such as the University of Florida and Cornell, started their own shelter medicine programs. Then, in 2014, Newbury was invited to apply for a grant that would soon create UW–Madison’s Shelter Medicine Program.

Limits to Superpowers

In a highly emotional field in which animals are in need of homes and at risk for health and behavioral problems, it’s natural to want to help every animal. However, this feeling can often translate into shelter staff members taking in more animals than they can manage, which may lead to ongoing problems. Today, the UW’s Shelter Medicine team provides veterinarians and staff with the guidance they need to increase adoption rates and improve animal care, while also helping them work within limits that set up both shelter animals and workers for success.

The program’s staff members teach shelters a series of best practices aimed at upping adoption rates and enhancing animal care, such as giving vaccinations upon intake, decreasing animals’ lengths of stay, and increasing shelters’ capacities for care. They also recommend making adoption applications and processes more approachable and less discriminatory; giving each animal separate spaces to eat and defecate; and offering preselection, permitting visitors to view animals and apply for adoptions before pets’ holding periods are over.

These efforts also mean setting limits, which can be counterintuitive, Newbury says. For instance, the program encourages staff to monitor pet intake and think critically about whether being in a shelter is the best choice for an animal.

“There is recent research to show that, for example, cats are significantly more likely to get back home if you just leave them where they are than if you pick them up and bring them to an animal shelter,” she says. “For a really long period of time, people would pick up every cat that was out walking around and bring it to an animal shelter, but national reclaim rates for cats were 1 to 2 percent.”

To help shelters implement these practices and function within their limits, the program empowers them to tailor practices to their individual needs. If a shelter does not have a full-time veterinarian, for example, the program works with staff members to enforce protocols that help them work efficiently.

“There are limits to your superpowers, and so you’ve got to be sure that you’re using them effectively,” Newbury says. “We talk a lot about making choices for how [shelters are] investing their resources and energy and time.”

When consistently executed, these methods help shelters stay in what Newbury calls the “positive cycle.” That means shelters adopt out animals more quickly, avoid overpopulating, and increase their capacities for care so staff are able to give more attention to each animal. This compares to a “vicious cycle,” in which shelters are not effectively managing these factors, leading to issues such as overpopulation and higher risks of infectious disease and behavioral problems in animals.

This approach helps shelters manage environments where stress levels can run high, as veterinarians and staff are required to make choices that can be matters of life and death for animals.

“Every time we [visit a shelter], it’s scary, but we’ve seen [our practices] work enough times that we believe, and we know, [they’ll] work,” Newbury says. “Even though it’s scary, it’s less scary than poor welfare and the chronic effects of poor welfare on the humans, the animals, and the population.”

A New Support Network

On the third and final day of the Northern Tier Fellowship, the full group of fellows reconvenes to discuss strategies in a conference room at the DoubleTree Hotel on West Johnson Street in Madison (where Peanut makes the rounds to say hello). Through these conversations, Newbury and her team not only give shelters recommendations for improving animal welfare, but also foster a support network that, not long ago, didn’t exist.

They allow time for the group to talk about what they observed the days prior and be candid about the hurdles they face at their own shelters. Some fellows express concerns about bringing the new practices back to teams who are resistant to change.

“I end up saying this once every fellowship: It is important to try what you’re trying,” Newbury says to the group. “It is also important sometimes to recognize that if a particular [person or organization] cannot be motivated, to not just stay and bang your head against the wall forever. Because your passion and your power are important in the field. If it turns out that you cannot effect change in your own organization, there are other organizations that will welcome you where it wouldn’t be so hard.”

As the discussion continues, Newbury emphasizes the support the program provides.

“One of our [past veterinarian] fellows once said that, when she was trying to implement a new recommendation at her shelter, she felt like there were 12 [veterinarian fellows and program staff members] standing behind her helping her. And we were just laughing. We were like, ‘There are. We’re here,’ ” Newbury says. “That is a huge reason that we started these fellowships.”

During a break, I speak with Marta Pierpoint, who attended the program’s inaugural Northern Tier Fellowship and returned as a mentor for its second year. She tells me it’s hard to count the number of ways the fellowship has helped her.

“You’re not only learning from the experts at the University of Wisconsin. You’re learning from your peers, and you’re taking away big-picture thoughts, and you’re also taking back small things that you can implement,” says Pierpoint, who is executive director at the Humane Society of Western Montana.

An attorney by training who practiced law for eight years, Pierpoint served as a longtime volunteer at the shelter before becoming its director. On her first day in the role, however, the shelter received dogs with distemper — something she knew little about at the time. “That is how I was connected with Dr. Newbury, and she was incredibly helpful to our shelter and to me personally in getting through that.”

Now, as a mentor, Pierpoint can use the knowledge she’s gained from the program to help other shelters in her area, further expanding the support network. And if she has any questions, she knows whom to call.

“I have no hesitation if I have a question — whether it’s medical or administrative — I know that I can pick up the phone and call [the program],” she notes. “And that kind of professional support is priceless.”

At the conclusion of the fellowship’s final day, Newbury says she’s “overwhelmed” with happiness knowing that the fellows will leave feeling more knowledgeable and empowered to make change at their shelters.

“[Our work is] about the animals, but these are great people, and they’re trying so hard to do these amazing things, and so whatever we can do to support [them] is incredible to me,” she tells me. “There is so much emotion surrounding the field of sheltering.”

As we sit, surrounded by fellows chatting before heading home, I can’t help but notice the camaraderie among the group. It’s difficult to believe most of them had just met in the course of the three-day fellowship.

And I’m not the only one who notices.

“I mean, look around, everybody’s so happy, they’re all talking to each other. It’s so nice to see that,” Newbury says. “This is a safe place.”

Scout’s final chapter included an appearance on national television and an effort to promote better lives for all animals. Bryce Richter

Earlier this year, Scout inspired a nation with his battle against cancer. The seven-year-old golden retriever was the face of WeatherTech, a company known for creating automotive protection equipment and pet accessories, and though he died in March, his life’s final chapter included an appearance on national television and an effort to promote better lives for all animals.

In 2019, Scout was diagnosed with a malignant tumor on his heart. He came under the care of the UW School of Veterinary Medicine, where staff worked to prolong his life and improve its quality. Scout’s owner (WeatherTech founder and CEO David MacNeil, shown above with Scout and UW chancellor Rebecca Blank) was so grateful that he created a commercial called “Lucky Dog,” featuring Scout and promoting donations to the UW; it ran during the second quarter of the Super Bowl. Thousands of gifts arrived in the following weeks in support of clinical research and specialized equipment at the School of Veterinary Medicine to better diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer — discoveries that are shared with the world.

According to veterinary school dean Mark Markel, “This heroic golden retriever [inspired] an unprecedented opportunity to highlight on a global stage the importance of veterinary medicine for both animals and people, and our impact in advancing innovative therapies to fight cancer and other devastating diseases.”

Ultimately, Scout lost his battle with cancer. But his legacy continues with the Pets Make a Difference campaign in support of work that may lead to cancer treatment breakthroughs.

Irene Duch-Latorre

The UW announced the winners of this year’s Cool Science Image contest in April: 10 photos and two videos, including this shot of pygmy marmosets submitted by Irene Duch-Latorre PhDx’20. “Pygmy marmosets are the smallest monkeys in the world,” she wrote. “While their pocket-friendly size makes them cute, it also makes them desirable exotic pets, and [they are] frequently trafficked far from their home range in the Amazon River basin.” See other winners on the UW News site.

Chewy’s health was failing, and Moody learned that changing his diet had the potential to help. She began preparing her pups meals of raw meats, fruits, and vegetables: a fresh, unprocessed menu intended to be closer to the animals’ ancestral fare. The raw-food diet helped Chewy fully recover — and fired up Moody’s entrepreneurial spirit. She filled her tiny Manhattan apartment with industrial freezers, made her own raw-food blends, and took taxis to personally deliver her small-batch product to customers.

Fifteen years later, Stella & Chewy’s is a multi- million-dollar, national pet-food brand, headquartered in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Moody has stepped away from her role as chief executive; she now serves as founder and chairman of the board.

What keeps you most engaged with Stella & Chewy’s?

Getting people on board who are much smarter than me has been so much fun. To build a brand is like pushing a boulder uphill, so the more people doing it, the better it is.

How have the preferences of pet owners changed over time?

People are able to access so much information, and I think that helps [them] make more educated and intelligent decisions about what they want to feed both themselves and their pets. Pets are our family members, and the kind of unconditional love they give has become really important. With the evolution of the internet and social media, there’s something in between us and other people oftentimes. With your pets, you communicate in person.

You were one of the first entrepreneurs to bring raw pet food to market.

When I started, raw was a bad word. People were like, “Oh, you can’t call it raw. Can you call it gently uncooked?” When people hear raw meat, they still need to sometimes be talked through it, because they might think there could be a food-safety concern. But openness to raw feeding has come a long way.

Is it true that you collaborated with UW scientists on food safety?

I could not have done it without people at the UW. It’s funny, because I was an English major and a women’s studies major, and I came back and worked with an animal nutritionist and a meat scientist. I didn’t even know there was a building for meat science [on campus].

You know more about pathogens than the average person.

I know all about bacteria. More than I want to.

When you worked with UW scientists, was there a breakthrough moment?

They were able to point me to a technology called HPP [high pressure processing, a food-preservation method that retains nutrition and eliminates harmful bacteria]. There was one place to have it done [on a fee-for-service basis] in the United States 10 years ago, and it was in Milwaukee. It was pretty serendipitous.

How did your women’s studies major influence the Stella & Chewy’s brand?

I was coming out of the fashion industry, so I was looking at things like how to name it something besides “Natural Champion,” you know, like a really boring name. Because raw diets were already a brand-new way of thinking, I wanted something that was a little more approachable and friendly. Women’s studies really forced me to question the existing corporate hierarchy. For example, when I wanted to build a manufacturing plant, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t. And that’s thanks to the women who came before us. So I do feel a sense of responsibility to pass that on and to help women coming up now. That gives me great joy.

Has your advice changed for those who want to step forward in business as you did 15 years ago?

It’s fun to be at this point in my life and to have anything to offer the next generation in terms of advice. People complain about millennials, but I love millennials. I love the way they’re going about building businesses that are more concerned about the environment and sustainability and giving back.

How many pets do you have at home?

One cat, one dog, one kid. We were getting hate mail at Stella & Chewy’s that we weren’t focused enough on cats. My son and I were at a rescue event, and I told him he could pick one out. I just wanted to understand. You know how cats are.

Sandra Newbury DVM’03, clinical assistant professor and director of the UW School of Veterinary Medicine’s Shelter Medicine Program, confirmed earlier this year that the virus — previously confined to dogs in the Midwest — had started to spread to cats. The outbreak in canines began in the Chicago area in 2015, and it was later found in several shelter cats in Indiana. It also became clear that the virus could be passed between cats.

The effects of the virus are mainly limited to upper respiratory symptoms in cats: runny nose, congestion, and excessive salivation. The symptoms are similar in dogs, but they also include a fever. Most dogs can be treated with the H3N2 vaccine, but there is currently no vaccine available for cats. In the spring, Newbury said that all infected cats had been quarantined, and that the shelter would continue monitoring for other outbreaks.

EEI_Tony/istock

Photo Courtesy © Gorilla Doctors/gorilladoctors.org

The sun rises over the nine-thousand-acre expanse. Herds of sable antelope, southern white rhinos, and giraffes roam freely. Somewhere, a newborn Sichuan takin learns to walk. It’s another beautiful day in … Cumberland, Ohio.

This is the Wilds, a fourteen-square-mile safari park and conservation center smack-dab between Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s home to thirty-one rare and endangered species. It’s also where Jan Ramer DVM’95, the Wilds’ director of conservation medicine, goes to work every day.

“It’s first and foremost a conservation and research center,” says Ramer. “It’s also a drive-through safari park. You can go on safari drives right through the pastures and have camels, giraffes, and rhinos come right up to the truck, just like you would in Africa.”

And if anyone knows what it’s like to interact with wildlife in Africa, it’s Ramer. Before joining the Wilds, she regularly made six-hour hikes through rainforests in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda to care for sick and wounded mountain gorillas, a subspecies of eastern gorillas. For two two-year periods (broken up briefly by a stateside job at the Indianapolis Zoo), Ramer worked as the regional veterinary manager for Gorilla Doctors, an international nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of Africa’s critically endangered mountain-gorilla population. That habituated species is the only great ape population that is currently increasing — thanks, in part, to Gorilla Doctors.

“Gorilla Doctors makes a difference and is really contributing to the conservation of eastern gorillas in the wild,” Ramer says. “It felt good to be on the cutting edge of conservation in that way, with such a wonderful team.”

Ramer has always wanted to focus on zoo and wildlife work, particularly nondomestic medicine. “The Wisconsin [School of Veterinary Medicine] was really great about offering extracurricular opportunities and allowing me to go off campus to seek experiences in nondomestic species,” she says.

Even though Ramer completed her undergraduate degree at Purdue, she is a Badger at heart. As a child, she went to summer camps near Eagle River. She and a group of Madison friends reconnect to go camping on Rock Island each year. And she’s made it back to campus to speak at the veterinary school.

“There’s something about the UW and about Madison that makes people want to stay — and stay in touch,” she says.

Philip Tedeschi and his lab, Samara, have a close bond. Photo: Terese Bergen.

Every day is Take Your Dog to Work Day for Philip Tedeschi ’84, MS’87. And you couldn’t find a better-tempered, sweeter-eyed dog than Samara, Tedeschi’s black lab — which is only to be expected from the poster dog of a cutting-edge, animal-assisted therapy program.

Tedeschi is the executive director of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection (IHAC) at the University of Denver, which he co-founded in 2005. Housed within the university’s School of Social Work, the institute offers an animal-assisted social-work certificate to students in the master’s degree program, and distance learners can earn an animals-and-human-health certificate.

It all started at the UW. As a student in the veterinary program, Tedeschi moonlighted teaching horseback riding to adults with schizophrenia. The positive changes he saw in the riders left him fascinated with human-animal interactions. His advisers suggested that he leave the vet school to design his own major. Citing Aldo Leopold as a major influence, Tedeschi says he drew from psychology, educational psychology, social work, occupational therapy, physical and recreational therapies, and companion-animal and equine sciences to create his independent major. He stayed on at the UW and completed his master’s in social work in 1987.

While several veterinary schools have related programs, IHAC’s approach of looking at animal-human interactions through the lens of social science is very new, says Tedeschi, and the response has been overwhelming. Hundreds of the program’s graduates have specialized in animal-assisted therapy, and distance learners have represented every continent except Antarctica.

“Animals are now in human health-care environments across the whole human lifespan,” Tedeschi says. IHAC alumni use animal interventions to help many populations, including survivors of school shootings, children in forensic interviews, self-destructive people in prisons, children with autism, and seniors with depression. “[Our graduates] have opened clinics everywhere from Singapore to Latin America,” he adds.

IHAC is also interested in companion animals and their role in providing an “everyday form of mental health” for millions of people. “That really is a major part of the way people cope with everyday stressors,” he says. “They’re some of the most important relationships we have.”

The institute has formed many national and international alliances. Tedeschi was recently at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to set up internships with the Warrior Canine Connection project, which uses dogs to help service members with PTSD. Last year, the institute hosted its first international conference on the role of animals in trauma recovery. Tedeschi has advocated for biodiversity protection and animal welfare at the UN. He’s taken many students to East Africa, where he encourages them to examine the correlations among ivory poaching, deep poverty, and terrorism.

“I’ve been [at the institute] nearly twenty years,” Tedeschi says, “and this year will be the most exciting yet.”

Lichens are an important part of the world’s ecosystem. They grow slowly but regularly, so they can be used to date major geological and climactic events. Lichens are also important to the diet of a variety of animals such as reindeer. Shutterstock photo.

The Wisconsin State Herbarium has added 60,000 samples to its collection.

Neatly filed away in drawers in the bowels of Birge Hall, tucked into carefully folded slips of paper, you’ll find bits of rare organisms from around the globe. At home within the Wisconsin State Herbarium, they are part of one of the world’s largest lichen collections — a collection that, in 2014, grew 60,000 samples larger.

A herbarium is a group of preserved plant specimens, and Wisconsin’s dates back to the UW’s founding. At the second meeting of the board of regents — in January 1849, a month before the first class gathered — that august group recommended that the university host a “cabinet of natural history.” Today, that “cabinet” holds more than 1.2 million specimens of plants, fungi, and lichens, making it the eleventh-largest herbarium in the Americas.

The Wisconsin State Herbarium’s lichen collection is particularly strong, with more than 180,000 specimens. Lichens are unusual in that they are composite organisms — they develop through a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and algae or bacteria. Each sample includes not only the dried lichen, but also its substrate — the material it was growing on.

Lichens found in the eastern Black Sea region of Turkey. Istock photo.

A scientist who studies lichens is called, not surprisingly, a lichenologist, and in the mid-twentieth century, the UW faculty included the man who wrote the book on lichenology: John Thomson MA’37, PhD’39. (Technically, he wrote the books, plural: Lichens of Wisconsin: American Arctic Lichens, volumes 1 and 2, and so on.) He made the herbarium home to a vast variety of lichens from around the state and across the far north.

In 2014, herbarium director Ken Cameron added 60,000 more specimens when he purchased the collection of German lichenologist Klaus Kalb.

“Kalb’s collection includes mostly specimens from the Old World tropics,” Cameron says. “We had to outbid some big competition — Harvard, the New York Botanical Gardens. But we had a lot to offer, including that we could keep his collection together, and it would round out what we already had.”

The herbarium’s materials are shared with researchers around the world. They can then study how the fungi, algae, bacteria, and substrate interact to create a composite. The UW’s lichens are also available for viewing digitally.