Bears badly burned in wildfires were healed by using fish skin
When Jamie Peyton first examined the bears’ paws last month, she figured they might take six months to heal.
Peyton, a veterinarian at UC Davis, had treated cats and dogs with burns before, and she knew these were severe. The two female black bears in her care had survived the Thomas wildfire that swept through Southern California in December, but both suffered third-degree burns that had caused their paw pads to slough off. They could hardly stand due to pain.
Instead of six months, the bears’ injuries healed in a matter of weeks — a quick recovery Peyton attributed to a treatment never before tried on human or animal burn victims in the United States: Fish skins applied as bandages.
Peyton said she first tried the usual care: Cleaning the burns, removing dead tissue and applying ointments. But she knew two very important steps — covering the burns and providing pain control. A fast recovery was imperative, especially for the second bear. Peyton’s team had discovered the bear was pregnant during an ultrasound exam, and they feared the stress of giving birth in captivity would cause her to reject the cub.
Then, the veterinarian said, she remembered a news story she had read about scientists in Brazil successfully using sterilized tilapia skin on human burns. Like the pig and human tissues that have long been applied to burns, the fish skin is moist and transfers collagen, a protein that helps healing. But it’s cheaper and widely available, because it’s a byproduct of tilapia sold as food. Tilapia skin had some additional selling points in Peyton’s mind: It could remain intact for several days, and no harm would come to the bears if they ate it.
“I thought this would be perfect,” she said. “The skins are really, really strong, and it’ll help with pain control.”
Peyton procured the skin from a local fish market, sterilized it and then sutured it onto the sedated animals’ paws. To keep the scaly bandages protected, her team wrapped the paws in two other edible substances: rice paper and corn husks.
“We wrap their feet like tamales,” she said.
The bears stood soon after waking from sedation, a sign of improvement. They also didn’t remove the skin until their next application 10 days later, which Peyton took to mean the bears understood the treatment helped them feel better.