High-Throughput Sequencing for Understanding the Ecology of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wildlife-Human Interface

Rising rates of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) demand creative, efficient, and integrative investigations to understand their transmission, ecological contingencies, and dynamics at wildlife-human interfaces. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) methodologies provide enormous potential to unravel these contingencies to improve our understanding, but their potential is only just starting to be realized. While recent work has largely focused on novel pathogen discovery at likely interfaces, high-throughput methods can also allow disease ecologists to better explore the critical effects of climate, seasonality, and land-use changes on EIDs. HTS can facilitate the creation of entire host-pathogen networks, integrate important microbiome and co-infection data, and even pinpoint important exposure routes at interfaces through environmental media. Here we highlight studies at the frontier of HTS and disease ecology research, identify current limitations, and outline promising future applications for EIDs

Effects of mammalian herbivore declines on plant communities: observations and experiments in an African savanna

1. Herbivores influence the structure and composition of terrestrial plant communities. However, responses of plant communities to herbivory are variable and depend on environmental conditions, herbivore identity and herbivore abundance. As anthropogenic impacts continue to drive large declines in wild herbivores, understanding the context dependence of herbivore impacts on plant communities becomes increasingly important. 2. Exclosure experiments are frequently used to assess how ecosystems reorganize in the face of large wild herbivore defaunation. Yet in many landscapes, declines in large wildlife are often accompanied by other anthropogenic activities, especially land conversion to livestock production. In such cases, exclosure experiments may not reflect typical outcomes of human-driven extirpations of wild herbivores. 3. Here, we examine how plant community responses to changes in the identity and abundance of large herbivores interact with abiotic factors (rainfall and soil properties). We also explore how effects of wild herbivores on plant communities differ between large-scale herbivore exclosures and landscape sites where anthropogenic activity has caused wildlife declines, often accompanied by livestock increases. 4. Abiotic context modulated the responses of plant communities to herbivore declines with stronger effect sizes in lower-productivity environments. Also, shifts in plant community structure, composition and species richness following wildlife declines differed considerably between exclosure experiments and landscape sites in which wild herbivores had declined and were often replaced by livestock. Plant communities in low wildlife landscape sites were distinct in both composition and physical structure from both exclosure and control sites in experiments. The power of environmental (soil and rainfall) gradients in influencing plant response to herbivores was also greatly dampened or absent in the landscape sites. One likely explanation for these observed differences is the compensatory effect of livestock associated with the depression or extirpation of wildlife. 5. Synthesis. Our results emphasize the importance of abiotic environmental heterogeneity in modulating the effects of mammalian herbivory on plant communities and the importance of such covariation in understanding effects of wild herbivore declines. They also suggest caution when extrapolating results from exclosure experiments to predict the consequences of defaunation as it proceeds in the Anthropocene

“Let Our Freak Flags Fly”: Shrek the Musical and the Branding of Diversity

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v062/62.2.brater.html“’Let Our Freak Flags Fly’: Shrek the Musical and the Branding of Diversity” argues that DreamWorks used Shrek the Musical to exploit a generic theme of multiculturalism to extend the reach of the Shrek franchise and challenge Disney’s domination of the Broadway market. By bringing a political-economic analysis to bear on the study of commercial theatre, the essay shows that DreamWorks’s marketing strategy—diversification—provided the theme—diversity—for the product it was employing to implement that strategy. Yet because Shrek’s multicultural message is contradicted by the blatant racial stereotyping of Donkey, Shrek’s “jive-spouting sidekick,” the musical in fact epitomizes the contradictions that inform multiculturalism in the early twenty-first-century marketplace and functions as an unlikely emblem of the Age of Obam

East Bay Coalition for the Homeless: Branding Study and Marketing Strategy

There are a number of potential positioning strategies. The two which make the most sense for the EBCH are to “position the EBCH away from others in the category” and to “position the EBCH as unique.” These strategies have the advantage of setting the EBCH apart from the other organizations that address homelessness. Occupying its own “position” in the minds of potential and current donors is not only an effective communications/marketing strategy but also a less costly one because it avoids head-to-head competition and comparisons

Bushmeat hunting and extinction risk to the world's mammals

Terrestrial mammals are experiencing a massive collapse in their population sizes and geographical ranges around the world, but many of the drivers, patterns and consequences of this decline remain poorly understood. Here we provide an analysis showing that bushmeat hunting for mostly food and medicinal products is driving a global crisis whereby 301 terrestrial mammal species are threatened with extinction. Nearly all of these threatened species occur in developing countries where major coexisting threats include deforestation, agricultural expansion, human encroachment and competition with livestock. The unrelenting decline of mammals suggests many vital ecological and socio-economic services that these species provide will be lost, potentially changing ecosystems irrevocably. We discuss options and current obstacles to achieving effective conservation, alongside consequences of failure to stem such anthropogenic mammalian extirpation. We propose a multi-pronged conservation strategy to help save threatened mammals from immediate extinction and avoid a collapse of food security for hundreds of millions of people

Large-herbivore nemabiomes: patterns of parasite diversity and sharing

Amidst global shifts in the distribution and abundance of wildlife and livestock, we have only a rudimentary understanding of ungulate parasite communities and parasite-sharing patterns. We used qPCR and DNA metabarcoding of fecal samples to characterize gastrointestinal nematode (Strongylida) community composition and sharing among 17 sympatric species of wild and domestic large mammalian herbivore in central Kenya. We tested a suite of hypothesis-driven predictions about the role of host traits and phylogenetic relatedness in describing parasite infections. Host species identity explained 27 – 53% of individual variation in parasite prevalence, richness, community composition and phylogenetic diversity. Host and parasite phylogenies were congruent, host gut morphology predicted parasite community composition and prevalence, and hosts with low evolutionary distinctiveness were centrally positioned in the parasite- sharing network. We found no evidence that host body size, social-group size or feeding height were correlated with parasite composition. Our results highlight the interwoven evolutionary and ecological histories of large herbivores and their gastrointestinal nematodes and suggest that host identity, phylogeny and gut architecture — a phylogenetically conserved trait related to parasite habitat — are the overriding influences on parasite communities. These findings have implications for wildlife management and conservation as wild herbivores are increasingly replaced by livestock

Bushmeat hunting and extinction risk to the world’s mammals

Terrestrial mammals are experiencing a massive collapse in their population sizes and geographical ranges around the world, but many of the drivers, patterns and consequences of this decline remain poorly understood. Here we provide an analysis showing that bushmeat hunting for mostly food and medicinal products is driving a global crisis whereby 301 terrestrial mammal species are threatened with extinction. Nearly all of these threatened species occur in developing countries where major coexisting threats include deforestation, agricultural expansion, human encroachment and competition with livestock. The unrelenting decline of mammals suggests many vital ecological and socio-economic services that these species provide will be lost, potentially changing ecosystems irrevocably. We discuss options and current obstacles to achieving effective conservation, alongside consequences of failure to stem such anthropogenic mammalian extirpation. We propose a multipronged conservation strategy to help save threatened mammals from immediate extinction and avoid a collapse of food security for hundreds of millions of people.http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/2054-5703/http://www.iucnredlist.org/am2016Mammal Research InstituteZoology and Entomolog

Night Shift: Expansion of Temporal Niche Use Following Reductions in Predator Density

Predation shapes many fundamental aspects of ecology. Uncertainty remains, however, about whether predators can influence patterns of temporal niche construction at ecologically relevant timescales. Partitioning of time is an important mechanism by which prey avoid interactions with predators. However, the traits that control a prey organism's capacity to operate during a particular portion of the diel cycle are diverse and complex. Thus, diel prey niches are often assumed to be relatively unlikely to respond to changes in predation risk at short timescales. Here we present evidence to the contrary. We report results that suggest that the anthropogenic depletion of daytime active predators (species that are either diurnal or cathemeral) in a coral reef ecosystem is associated with rapid temporal niche expansions in a multi-species assemblage of nocturnal prey fishes. Diurnal comparisons of nocturnal prey fish abundance in predator rich and predator depleted reefs at two atolls revealed that nocturnal fish were approximately six (biomass) and eight (density) times more common during the day on predator depleted reefs. Amongst these, the prey species that likely were the most specialized for nocturnal living, and thus the most vulnerable to predation (i.e. those with greatest eye size to body length ratio), showed the strongest diurnal increases at sites where daytime active predators were rare. While we were unable to determine whether these observed increases in diurnal abundance by nocturnal prey were the result of a numerical or behavioral response, either effect could be ecologically significant. These results raise the possibility that predation may play an important role in regulating the partitioning of time by prey and that anthropogenic depletions of predators may be capable of causing rapid changes to key properties of temporal community architecture

Connectomic markers of disease expression, genetic risk and resilience in bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder (BD) is characterized by emotional dysregulation and cognitive deficits associated with abnormal connectivity between subcortical-primarily emotional processing regions-and prefrontal regulatory areas. Given the significant contribution of genetic factors to BD, studies in unaffected first-degree relatives can identify neural mechanisms of genetic risk but also resilience, thus paving the way for preventive interventions. Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) and random-effects Bayesian model selection were used to define and assess connectomic phenotypes linked to facial affect processing and working memory in a demographically matched sample of first-degree relatives carefully selected for resilience (n=25), euthymic patients with BD (n=41) and unrelated healthy controls (n=46). During facial affect processing, patients and relatives showed similarly increased frontolimbic connectivity; resilient relatives, however, evidenced additional adaptive hyperconnectivity within the ventral visual stream. During working memory processing, patients displayed widespread hypoconnectivity within the corresponding network. In contrast, working memory network connectivity in resilient relatives was comparable to that of controls. Our results indicate that frontolimbic dysfunction during affect processing could represent a marker of genetic risk to BD, and diffuse hypoconnectivity within the working memory network a marker of disease expression. The association of hyperconnectivity within the affect-processing network with resilience to BD suggests adaptive plasticity that allows for compensatory changes and encourages further investigation of this phenotype in genetic and early intervention studies