24 research outputs found
Glucocorticoids in a warming world: Do they help birds to cope with high environmental temperatures?
Female variation in allocation of steroid hormones, antioxidants and fatty acids: a multilevel analysis in a wild passerine bird.
Concentrations of steroid hormones and antioxidants, and proportions of fatty acids measured in the egg yolk of a wild passerine bird (great tit; Parus major). Data on female condition as well as environmental variables are also provided.
All these data was used in the manuscript "Female variation in allocation of steroid hormones, antioxidants
and fatty acids: a multilevel analysis in a wild passerine bird
Pandora's flying box - Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato prevalence in Ixodes species from birds throughout Europe
Birds are important hosts for ticks and may act as reservoirs for several zoonotic pathogens. Because of their high mobility, especially of the long distance migratory species, they can act as dispersers for ticks and pathogens, ultimately affecting their distribution and phylogeography.N/
Host dispersal shapes the population structure of a tickâborne bacterial pathogen
Abstract
Birds are hosts for several zoonotic pathogens. Because of their high mobility, especially of longdistance migrants, birds can disperse these pathogens, affecting their distribution and phylogeography. We focused on Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, which includes the causative agents of Lyme borreliosis, as an example for tickâborne pathogens, to address the role of birds as propagation hosts of zoonotic agents at a large geographical scale. We collected ticks from passerine birds in 11 European countries. B. burgdorferi s.l. prevalence in Ixodes spp. was 37% and increased with latitude. The fieldfare Turdus pilaris and the blackbird T. merula carried ticks with the highest Borrelia prevalence (92 and 58%, respectively), whereas robin Erithacus rubecula ticks were the least infected (3.8%). Borrelia garinii was the most prevalent genospecies (61%), followed by B. valaisiana (24%), B. afzelii (9%), B. turdi (5%) and B. lusitaniae (0.5%). A novel Borrelia genospecies âCandidatus Borrelia aligeraâ was also detected. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) analysis of B. garinii isolates together with the global collection of B. garinii genotypes obtained from the Borrelia MLST public database revealed that: (a) there was little overlap among genotypes from different continents, (b) there was no geographical structuring within Europe, and (c) there was no evident association pattern detectable among B. garinii genotypes from ticks feeding on birds, questing ticks or human isolates. These findings strengthen the hypothesis that the population structure and evolutionary biology of tickâborne pathogens are shaped by their host associations and the movement patterns of these hosts