Abstract
Most emerging pathogens can infect multiple species, underlining the importance of understanding the ecological and evolutionary factors that allow some hosts to harbour greater infection prevalence and share pathogens with other species. However, our understanding of pathogen jumps is based primarily around viruses, despite bacteria accounting for the greatest proportion of zoonoses. Because bacterial pathogens in bats (order Chiroptera) can have conservation and human health consequences, studies that examine the ecological and evolutionary drivers of bacterial prevalence and barriers to pathogen sharing are crucially needed. Here were studied haemotropic Mycoplasma spp. (i.e., haemoplasmas) across a species‐rich bat community in Belize over two years. Across 469 bats spanning 33 species, half of individuals and two‐thirds of species were haemoplasma positive. Infection prevalence was higher for males and for species with larger body mass and colony sizes. Haemoplasmas displayed high genetic diversity (21 novel genotypes) and strong host specificity. Evolutionary patterns supported codivergence of bats and bacterial genotypes alongside phylogenetically constrained host shifts. Bat species centrality to the network of shared haemoplasma genotypes was phylogenetically clustered and unrelated to prevalence, further suggesting rare—but detectable—bacterial sharing between species. Our study highlights the importance of using fine phylogenetic scales when assessing host specificity and suggests phylogenetic similarity may play a key role in host shifts not only for viruses but also for bacteria. Such work more broadly contributes to increasing efforts to understand cross‐species transmission and the epidemiological consequences of bacterial pathogens.
Highlights
Most pathogens that cause disease in humans, domestic animals and wildlife are capable of infecting multiple host species (Woolhouse, Taylor, & Haydon, 2001)
To determine the ecological and evolutionary drivers of bacterial prevalence and barriers to pathogen sharing, we focused on haemotropic Mycoplasma spp. in a species-rich bat community in Belize (Fenton et al, 2001; Herrera, Duncan, Clare, Fenton, & Simmons, 2018)
Haemoplasma infection risk was weakly higher for males but was better predicted by phylogeny, with large-bodied and largecolony bat species showing greater prevalence
Summary
Most pathogens that cause disease in humans, domestic animals and wildlife are capable of infecting multiple host species (Woolhouse, Taylor, & Haydon, 2001). Pathogen jumps between species depend on infection prevalence in the donor host, transmission opportunities between donor and recipient species, and suitability of the recipient host for pathogen replication (Plowright et al, 2017) Each of these steps can be shaped by ecological and evolutionary factors (VanderWaal & Ezenwa, 2016). Identifying the ecological and evolutionary factors that allow some species to harbour greater prevalence and have facilitated pathogen sharing can improve our general understanding of disease emergence (Fountain-Jones et al, 2018). Haemoplasmas are common and genetically diverse in bats (Di Cataldo, Kamani, Cevidanes, Msheliza, & Millán, 2020; Ikeda et al, 2017; Mascarelli et al, 2014; Volokhov, Becker, et al, 2017), which offers an ideal model system for identifying the ecological and evolutionary factors structuring bacterial infection risks within and between host species. Ecological traits that increase the risk of pathogen exposure between species, such as occupying a greater diversity of roosting habitats, could facilitate pathogen genotype sharing among less closely related hosts (McKee et al, 2019)
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