#92 Jacopo and the art of wild bear anaesthesia (Norway/UK)

Every GPS collar, every blood sample, every dataset built on a wild mammal begins the same way: a dart, and a vet standing over an unconscious animal hoping nothing goes wrong. Dr. Jacopo Morelli has been that vet more than 300 times with brown bears alone, and he thinks our field has been far too relaxed about those few minutes. Jacopo takes us inside wildlife anaesthesia, where the same handful of drugs used worldwide clamp shut the peripheral arteries and quietly starve organs of oxygen while everything looks calm from the outside. Through a self-funded PhD in Norway, he is testing drugs to stop it, and he explains why night shifts in James Herriot's old practice were the perfect training for making fast decisions alone in a boreal forest. Jacopo was also a winner of the inaugural William R Lance Award in 2026, presented to recognize, reward, and encourage an early-career professional who has conducted and published innovative research on the humane and safe capture, handling, immobilization, or anesthesia of managed or free-ranging species, and who has sought to build collaborations and cooperation in the pursuit of their work.  Links on Jacopo's work and achievements: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacopo-morelli-84a756178/ ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacopo-Morelli WAWRP fundraiser: https://gofund.me/0ab121a6f https://www.brownbearproject.com/post/jacopo-morelli-receives-william-r-lance-award https://heyzine.com/flip-book/EWDA_Newsletter_Summer_2026.html#page/10 We'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.