Towards a more healthy conservation paradigm: integrating disease and molecular ecology to aid biological conservation†

Abstract

Parasites, and the diseases they cause, are important from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they can negatively affect host fitness and can regulate host populations. Consequently, conservation biology has long recognized the vital role that parasites can play in the process of species endangerment and recovery. However, we are only beginning to understand how deeply parasites are embedded in ecological systems, and there is a growing recognition of the important ways in which parasites affect ecosystem structure and function. Thus, there is an urgent need to revisit how parasites are viewed from a conservation perspective and broaden the role that disease ecology plays in conservation-related research and outcomes. This review broadly focusses on the role that disease ecology can play in biological conservation. Our review specifically emphasizes on how the integration of tools and analytical approaches associated with both disease and molecular ecology can be leveraged to aid conservation biology. Our review first concentrates on diseasemediated extinctions and wildlife epidemics. We then focus on elucidating how host-parasite interactions has improved our understanding of the eco-evolutionary dynamics affecting hosts at the individual, population, community and ecosystem scales. We believe that the role of parasites as drivers and indicators of ecosystem health is especially an exciting area of research that has the potential to fundamentally alter our view of parasites and their role in biological conservation. The review concludes with a broad overview of the current and potential applications of modern genomic tools in disease ecology to aid biological conservation.

Host phylogeny matters: Examining sources of variation in infection risk by blood parasites across a tropical montane bird community in India

“…Identifying factors that determine the variation in infection risk in natural populations is of fundamental importance for understanding the ecology and evolution of host-parasite interactions, predicting infection risk and biological conservation [ 1 , 2 ]. In multi-host, multi-parasite systems, a myriad of factors operating at the individual- and species-level can affect the probability of parasite exposure and subsequent infection across host species [ 3 – 6 ].…”

Peer Review #2 of "Genetic signatures of population bottlenecks, relatedness, and inbreeding highlight recent and novel conservation concerns in the Egyptian vulture (v0.1)"

“…This is a critical factor in the conservation of endangered species when it occurs rapidly enough to preclude the purging of deleterious alleles (Brook et al, 2002;Fox, Scheibly & Reed, 2008). Consequently, host susceptibility to disease agents is expected to increase due to inbreeding, although their effects on health can surface depending on whether the population is exposed to particularly dangerous and contagious pathogens (Smith, Sax & Lafferty, 2006;Gupta, Robin & Dharmarajan, 2020). The evidence of recent bottlenecks and the reduction in census and effective population size coincided in time with the first evidence in this species of close inbreeding, confirmed by pedigree of individually-marked nestlings monitored subsequently, and by genetic analysis.…”

Peer Review #2 of "Genetic signatures of population bottlenecks, relatedness, and inbreeding highlight recent and novel conservation concerns in the Egyptian vulture (v0.2)"

“…During the last decades, anthropogenic activities have exerted increasing impacts on biodiversity worldwide. Among the main detrimental factors, disease is an increasing threat with anthropogenic change (Martin et al, 2010;Becker, Streicker & Altizer, 2015;Cunningham, Daszak & Wood, 2017) combined with low diversity impacting ability to fight parasites and pathogens (Spielman et al, 2004;Gupta, Robin & Dharmarajan, 2020).…”

“…The mating between close relatives can cause the loss of genetic variation due to random genetic drift, increasing the expression of recessive deleterious alleles, the loss of heterozygosity, and the extinction of functionally important alleles in the population (Keller & Waller 2002;Charlesworth & Willis 2009). Inbreeding in bird populations may result in several negative biological effects such as hatching failure, low offspring survival, and unviability due to physiological alterations and morphological malformations (Keller & Waller 2002;Gupta, Robin & Dharmarajan, 2020). Therefore, inbreeding can influence the persistence of small and isolated populations by accelerating the extinction process in critically endangered species (Brook et al, 2002;Frankham, Ballou & Briscoe, 2002;O'Grady et al, 2006).…”