Ecological Analysis of the Helminth Community of Microtus lusitanicus (Gerbe, 1879) (Rodentia) in Asturias (NW Spain)

Abstract

The Lusitanian pine vole, Microtus lusitanicus, an endemic fossorial rodent of the Iberian Peninsula, has a burrowing behaviour and prefers to live underground. It feeds on bark and roots causing severe damage to trees. In Asturias (NW Spain), where M. lusitanicus is considered a pest in several orchards, a faunistic-ecological study was carried out to describe the helminth community of this species and the main factors that could influence its helminth component species. For this purpose, our own collection of 710 voles from several orchards of various locations in Asturias was used. Eight helminth species, four cestodes and four nematodes, were found. Statistical non-parametric tests were used to analyse the effects of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on the diversity of the helminth community and species prevalence and abundance. The results show the influence of climate variables, the year and season of capture, as well as host age, on the diversity of the helminth community and the infection parameters of some helminth species, underlining the importance of their life cycles. In addition to shedding light on the helminth community of this rodent in Asturias, the results obtained could be used to improve the biological methods applied to fight the M. lusitanicus pest.

Carolinensis minutus (Dujardin, 1845) Travassos 1937 (Nematoda, Heligmonellidae) in Microtus agrestis in the United Kingdom

“…across the Palearctic. This distribution extends through western Europe (Feliu et al 1991;Audebert et al 2005;Adalid et al 2021), central and eastern Europe and Russia (Meszaros 1977;Kirillova et al 2020), into the Levant (Wertheim and Durette-Desset 1975), and eastwards as far as Nepal (Asakawa et al 1997) and Japan (Ito and Itagaki 2003) (Fig. 1).…”