By Susan Milius
The white-tailed deer, maybe the best-studied wild animal in North America, turns out to carry a malaria parasite that science has overlooked for decades.
The malaria parasite in deer is a completely different species from the ones that cause disease in humans. A report in 1967 based on one deer in Texas had claimed that the parasite existed and a 1980 paper had named it Plasmodium odocoilei. But no one had reported it again until Ellen Martinsen of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues accidentally rediscovered it.