City sicker? A meta‐analysis of wildlife health and urbanization

Murray, Maureen H.; Sánchez, Cecilia A.; Becker, Daniel J.; Byers, Kaylee A.; Worsley‐Tonks, Katherine E. L.; Craft, Meggan E.

doi:10.1002/fee.2126

Cited by 135 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 57 publications

(82 reference statements)

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“…Many studies have demonstrated changes in the prevalence of pathogen prevalence, immune function, and stress in urban wildlife [1,68,69]. Shifts in microbiome diversity with habitat use and diet may be an underappreciated mechanism by which urbanization can affect wildlife health.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Gut microbiome shifts with urbanization and potentially facilitates a zoonotic pathogen in a wading bird

et al. 2020

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Microbial communities in the gastrointestinal tract influence many aspects of host health, including metabolism and susceptibility to pathogen colonization. These relationships and the environmental and individual factors that drive them are relatively unexplored for free-living wildlife. We quantified the relationships between urban habitat use, diet, and age with microbiome composition and diversity for 82 American white ibises (Eudocimus albus) captured along an urban gradient in south Florida and tested whether gut microbial diversity was associated with Salmonella enterica prevalence. Shifts in community composition were significantly associated with urban land cover and, to a lesser extent, diets higher in provisioned food. The diversity of genera was negatively associated with community composition associated with urban land cover, positively associated with age class, and negatively associated with Salmonella shedding. Our results suggest that shifts in both habitat use and diet for urban birds significantly alter gut microbial composition and diversity in ways that may influence health and pathogen susceptibility as species adapt to urban habitats.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Gut microbiome shifts with urbanization and potentially facilitates a zoonotic pathogen in a wading bird

et al. 2020

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“…The field of marine urban ecology is a nascent area of investigation (Malerba et al 2019, Todd et al 2019) and it remains unclear how urbanization and human impacts in highly populated areas influence the health of individual organisms in the marine environment. In terrestrial systems, it has been seen that the health of individual organisms is lower in urbanized areas and higher in rural or wild areas (Murray et al 2019). While the differences here were not significant across all sites, they are suggestive that, as in terrestrial environments, human impacts in marine environments also lead to greater injury or reduced health of individual organisms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 59%

Reproductive and energetic costs of injury in the mangrove tree crab

Griffen

Cannizzo

Carver

et al. 2020

Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser.

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Nonlethal injury is a common and ubiquitous feature of marine systems and can result in altered growth and survival rates. Ecological theory predicts that injured animals should face an energetic tradeoff between investing in recovery vs. investing in reproduction. Possible impacts on reproduction may range in magnitude from very strong (elimination of reproduction), to intermediate (reduced number of offspring), to weak (reduced investment in each offspring). While this tradeoff is well established in terrestrial systems, it has received little attention in the marine environment, particularly in a way that quantitatively relates the degree of injury to the degree of reproductive impact. We examined injury via limb loss across 4 sites in the mangrove tree crab Aratus pisonii. We found that limb loss was highest at the site that was closest to roads and had the highest level of human presence, and conversely, injury was lowest at the site furthest from the road and with the lowest level of human presence. We found evidence that the quality of consumed food likely decreases with the number of limbs lost, but found no influence of limb loss on amount of food consumed or on energy storage. We show that limb loss reduced the number of eggs produced and that the mass of the ovary declined with the number of regenerating limbs, providing direct evidence for a tradeoff between reproduction and injury recovery. Further, our study therefore suggests that these impacts may increase with the level of human disturbance.

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“…Highlighting the likely importance of effective immunity for the species to persist in the new area, however, this same measure of immune function was higher for toad offspring whose parents were derived from the invasion front than those derived from the core when raised under standard conditions (Brown, Phillips, Dubey, & Shine, 2014). Similarly, higher pathogen prevalence and more severe disease effects have been identified for several wildlife species in urban and semi‐urban habitats when compared to the same species in more natural environments (Bradley & Altizer, 2006; Murray et al., 2019; Paull et al., 2012). Urban environments are associated with higher stress and reduced immunity, which is likely to help explain increased pathogen susceptibility and shedding.…”

Section: Figurementioning

confidence: 95%

Ecoimmunology at spatial scales

Forbes

2020

Journal of Animal Ecology

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In Focus Becker, D. J., Albery, G. F., Kessler, M. K., Lunn, T. J., Falvo, C. A., Czirják, G. Á., Martin, L. B., & Plowright, R. K. (2020). Macroimmunology: The drivers and consequences of spatial patterns in wildlife immune defence. Journal of Animal Ecology, 89, 972–995. Ecoimmunology seeks to identify and explain natural variation in immune function. Most research so far has focused on differences among individuals within populations, which are often driven by trade‐offs in resource allocation between energetically costly immunity and competing processes such as reproduction. In their review article, Becker et al. (2020) have proposed a framework to explicitly address habitat‐ and population‐level differences in wildlife immune phenotypes. Termed macroimmunology, this concept integrates principles from ecoimmunology and macroecology. Becker et al. (2020) have highlighted three non‐mutually exclusive habitat features that are likely to vary at spatial scales and influence immune function: (a) parasite pressure, (b) abiotic and biotic factors and (c) anthropogenic changes. However, a large and robust body of literature suitable for synthesis to detect macroimmunology patterns and effect sizes is not yet available. Through their systematic review and critical assessment, Becker et al. (2020) identified common problems in existing research that hinders spatial inferences, such as a need for spatial replication in study design and statistical analyses that account for spatial dependence. Overall, macroimmunology has the potential to identify and even predict spatial patterns in immune phenotypes that form the mechanistic underpinnings of important wildlife disease processes, and this review represents an important step to realizing these goals.

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City sicker? A meta‐analysis of wildlife health and urbanization

Cited by 135 publications

References 57 publications

Gut microbiome shifts with urbanization and potentially facilitates a zoonotic pathogen in a wading bird

Gut microbiome shifts with urbanization and potentially facilitates a zoonotic pathogen in a wading bird

Reproductive and energetic costs of injury in the mangrove tree crab

Ecoimmunology at spatial scales

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