#88 Maria Teresa and a single drop of finch blood (Mexico & USA)

What if the birds you walked past this morning were quietly fighting off bacteria that have been devastating poultry farms for decades, and you'd never know, because they show absolutely no signs of being sick?That's what Dr. Maria Teresa Reinoso Perez discovered when she started looking inside seemingly healthy house finches in Mexico. More than 70% of the birds she sampled were carrying Mycoplasma gallisepticum - a pathogen that causes severe disease in US bird populations, yet not one of them looked ill. The infections were invisible from the outside, but their immune systems told a very different story. In this episode,  Maria Teresa takes us from her hometown of San Luis Potosí, where she handled her very first finch as an undergraduate, to Cornell and back - explaining why finding a poultry pathogen quietly circulating through wild ecosystems matters for all of us, what won her the 2026 BioOne Ambassador Award, and what she's chasing next in the Galápagos.LinksRead Maria Teresa's essay on her research on finch leukocytes that won her the BioOne Ambassador Award! Maria Teresa's website and social media:websiteInstagramXWe'd love to hear from you ... share your thoughts, feedback and ideas.