Spatiotemporal Bird-Haemosporidian Analysis of an Urban Bird Assemblage

Prevalence responses to anthropic factors differ across hosts and parasite species. We here analyzed the spatiotemporal variation of avian haemosporidian prevalence in bird assemblages of the Mooswald forest (i.e., urban greenspace; Freiburg, Germany), in response to local environmental features (e.g., water sources, human presence (visited)/absence (unvisited)) and bird-level traits (e.g., body condition, age, sex) in 2 years. We analyzed a total of 544 samples of seven bird species. Haemosporidian prevalence was significantly different between some focal bird species. There was a negative association between distance to the nearest water source and prevalence in the year 2011, and the opposite pattern for the year 2013. However, when analyzed for the six focal species separately, such a relationship could change from a negative to a positive one, or there could be no relationship at all. For Leucocytozoon there was higher prevalence in the section of the forest visited by humans. We did not find spatial autocorrelation for prevalence across the study site, but there were statistically significant local spatial clusters in the visited section. Although there were similar responses of prevalence to some factors, infection patterns were generally bird species specific. Thus, prevalence is a labile epidemiological parameter, varying spatiotemporally in an idiosyncratic way.

International Journal for Parasitology 49 (2019) 235–246. You can download the paper from the following link during the next 50 days: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1YkCD4j~kk0TK

First Morphological Phylogeny of Avian Haemosporidians (Editor´s Choice)

The traditional classification of avian Haemosporida is based mainly on morphology and life history traits. Recently, molecular hypotheses have challenged the traditional classification, leading to contradictory opinions on whether morphology is phylogenetically informative. However, the morphology has never been used to reconstruct the relationships within the group. We inferred the phylogeny of avian Haemosporida from 133 morphological characters present in blood stages. We included all species with at least one mitochondrial gene characterized (n = 93). In order to recover the evolutionary history and identify phylogenetically and taxonomically informative characters, they were mapped on the total evidence phylogeny. We identified a unique combination of morphological traits, clearly differentiating avian Haemosporida genera, sub-genera of Leucocytozoon and Haemoproteus, and some Plasmodium sub-genera. Plasmodium had the highest number of synapomorphies. Furthermore, 86% of the species presented a unique combination of taxonomically informative characters. The combination of morphology and mtDNA proved to be a robust alternative to reconstruct the relationships among avian Haemosporida, obtaining a resolution and support similar to that obtained using full mitochondrial genome sequences for over 100 lineages.

Citation: Hernández-Lara C, Espinosa de los Monteros A, Ibarra-Cerdeña CN, García-Feria L, Santiago-Alarcon D. 2018. Combining morphological and molecular data to reconstruct the phylogeny of avian Haemosporida. International Journal for Parasitology 48: 1137-1148