Abstract
Long-distance animal movements can increase exposure to diverse parasites, but can also reduce infection risk through escape from contaminated habitats or culling of infected individuals. These mechanisms have been demonstrated within and between populations in single-host/single-parasite interactions, but how long-distance movement behaviours shape parasite diversity and prevalence across host taxa is largely unknown. Using a comparative approach, we analyse the parasite communities of 93 migratory, nomadic and resident ungulate species. We find that migrants have higher parasite species richness than residents or nomads, even after considering other factors known to influence parasite diversity, such as body size and host geographical range area. Further analyses support a novel ‘environmental tracking’ hypothesis, whereby migration allows parasites to experience environments favourable to transmission year-round. In addition, the social aggregation and large group sizes that facilitate migration might increase infection risk for migrants. By contrast, we find little support for previously proposed hypotheses, including migratory escape and culling, in explaining the relationship between host movement and parasitism in mammals at this cross-species scale. Our findings, which support mechanistic links between long-distance movement and increased parasite richness at the species level, could help predict the effects of future environmental change on parasitism in migratory animals.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Article number | 20180089 |
Journal | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
Volume | 285 |
Issue number | 1875 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 28 Mar 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Data accessibility. All data and code are available on Dryad Digital Repository (http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j7401) [84]. Authors’ contributions. C.S.T. conceived of the study, collected movement data and performed analyses. R.J.H. and S.A. contributed to development of ideas and refining analyses. S.H. provided expertise on analytical techniques and GMPD data and helped interpret results. C.S.T. wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors contributed substantially to revisions. Competing interests. We have no competing interests. Funding. This work was supported by NSF/NIH/USDA grant DEB 1316223 to S.A., including a student travel grant awarded to C.S.T., and by NSF grant DEB 1518611 to S.A. and R.J.H. C.S.T. was supported by a University of Georgia Presidential Fellowship. S.H. was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through a postdoctoral fellowship. Acknowledgements. We thank the members of the Macroecology of Infectious Disease Research Coordination Network (including P. Stephens and P. Pappalardo), the Altizer research group at UGA,
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Animal movement
- Comparative analysis
- Disease ecology
- Habitat diversity
- Nomadism
- Range residency
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Biochemistry,Genetics and Molecular Biology
- General Immunology and Microbiology
- General Environmental Science
- General Agricultural and Biological Sciences