Building an integrated infrastructure for exploring biodiversity: field collections and archives of mammals and parasites

Abstract

Museum specimens play an increasingly important role in predicting the outcomes and revealing the consequences of anthropogenically driven disruption of the biosphere. As ecological communities respond to ongoing environmental change, host–parasite interactions are also altered. This shifting landscape of host–parasite associations creates opportunities for colonization of different hosts and emergence of new pathogens, with implications for wildlife conservation and management, public health, and other societal concerns. Integrated archives that document and preserve mammal specimens along with their communities of associated parasites and ancillary data provide a powerful resource for investigating, anticipating, and mitigating the epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary impacts of environmental perturbation. Mammalogists who collect and archive mammal specimens have a unique opportunity to expand the scope and impact of their field work by collecting the parasites that are associated with their study organisms. We encourage mammalogists to embrace an integrated and holistic sampling paradigm and advocate for this to become standard practice for museum-based collecting. To this end, we provide a detailed, field-tested protocol to give mammalogists the tools to collect and preserve host and parasite materials that are of high quality and suitable for a range of potential downstream analyses (e.g., genetic, morphological). Finally, we also encourage increased global cooperation across taxonomic disciplines to build an integrated series of baselines and snapshots of the changing biosphere. Los especímenes de museo desempeñan un papel cada vez más importante tanto en la descripción de los resultados de la alteración antropogénica de la biosfera como en la predicción de sus consecuencias. Dado que las comunidades ecológicas responden al cambio ambiental, también se alteran las interacciones hospedador-parásito. Este panorama cambiante de asociaciones hospedador-parásito crea oportunidades para la colonización de diferentes hospedadores y para la aparición de nuevos patógenos, con implicancias en la conservación y manejo de la vida silvestre, la salud pública y otras preocupaciones de importancia para la sociedad. Archivos integrados que documentan y preservan especímenes de mamíferos junto con sus comunidades de parásitos y datos asociados, proporcionan un fuerte recurso para investigar, anticipar y mitigar los impactos epidemiológicos, ecológicos y evolutivos de las perturbaciones ambientales. Los mastozoólogos que recolectan y archivan muestras de mamíferos, tienen una oportunidad única de ampliar el alcance e impacto de su trabajo de campo mediante la recolección de los parásitos que están asociados con los organismos que estudian. Alentamos a los mastozoólogos a adoptar un paradigma de muestreo integrado y holístico y abogamos para que esto se convierta en una práctica estándarizada de la obtención de muestras para museos. Con este objetivo, proporcionamos un protocolo ...

Sustained impact of holistic specimens for mammalogy and parasitology in South America: Sydney Anderson’s legacy

“…These field techniques have been subsequently expanded and refined through other large sampling efforts worldwide with new cohorts of mammalogists and parasitologists (e. g., Beringian Coevolution Project, Cook et al 2017). From those efforts, best practices in holistic sampling of mammal and parasite faunas (Galbreath et al 2019) now codify the concept of the holistic mammal specimen. Having now advocated for the concept of the "holistic specimens", it must be said that Sydney Anderson was a proponent of saving any piece of animal material he encountered on the roadways of Bolivia, no matter how flattened or degraded as it might be.…”

“…The traditional voucher (skin and skeleton-- Hafner et al 1984, or fluid preserved specimen) was supplemented by an array of ultrafrozen tissues, chromosome cell suspensions, fecal samples, and endo and ectoparasites. Now termed the "Holistic Specimen" (Cook et al 2016;Galbreath et al 2019), but also known as the "Extended Specimen" (Webster 2017), these specimens provide a breadth of materials to address not only traditional systematic and taxonomic questions, but now facilitate and integrate questions in environmental change (e. g., climate change, habitat conversion, pollutants and toxicants, biodiversity loss, introduction of exotics), and other novel and evolving contemporary research areas (e. g., pathogen emergence and discovery, genomics, microbiomes, isotopic and molecular ecology, metagenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics; Cook et al 2017;Dunnum et al 2017;Greiman et al 2018;Schindel and Cook 2018).…”

A new genus and species of pinworm (Nematoda, Oxyuridae) from the gray mouse opossum, Tlacuatzin canescens

“…We urge the examination of preserved mammalian guts available in scientific collections to continue reconstructing the biological inventory of their symbionts, which includes parasites. In addition, we recommend that scientists working in the field should preserve the parasites or the tissues of freshly caught mammals in the field and link both parasite and host through a relational database [10]. The completion of this parasite inventory will give us an opportunity to better understand the expansion of the marsupials and their pathogens as they were both involved in the Great American Biotic Interchange and may be involved in subsequent events of dispersion or translocation.…”

To improve ecological understanding, collect infection data

“…Government scientists and wildlife biologists involved in surveying populations of imperiled species could non-invasively collect skin swabs, blood samples, or fecal samples to share with other scientists interested in monitoring for fungal parasites, blood parasites, intestinal helminths, and other infections (e.g., Justine et al 2012, Franson et al 2015, Torres and Kelley 2017, Carroll et al 2018, Galbreath et al 2019. Such samples could be collected and banked for future processing, in order to gather as much baseline information as possible (Bi et al 2013, Galbreath et al 2019, Harmon et al 2019. Further, the increasing capacity of sequencing technologies has expanded the value of non-destructive sample collection techniques and allows researchers to inexpensively archive samples in ethanol (Bi et al 2013, Yeates et al 2016.…”