Abstract
Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The changes that characterize urban ecology—including landscape transformation, modified diets and shifts in community composition—can either increase or decrease susceptibility and exposure to parasites. We used a meta-analytic approach to systematically assess differences in endoparasitism between mammals in urban and non-urban habitats. Parasite prevalence estimates in matched urban and non-urban mammal populations from 33 species were compiled from 46 published studies, and an overall effect of urban habitation on parasitism was derived after controlling for study and parasite genus. Parasite life cycle type and host order were investigated as moderators of the effect sizes. We found that parasites with complex life cycles were less prevalent in urban carnivore and primate populations than in non-urban populations. However, we found no difference in urban and non-urban prevalence for parasites in rodent and marsupial hosts, or differences in prevalence for parasites with simple life cycles in any host taxa. Our findings therefore suggest the disruption of some parasite transmission cycles in the urban ecological community.
Highlights
Urbanization is transforming patterns of societal growth, resource consumption, energy use and cultural attitudes towards the natural world [1]
Parasite prevalence data were available on mammal populations representing 33 species in urban and non-urban habitats of six continents
Accounting for confounding variables, we found that the urban setting was weakly associated with overall lower parasite prevalence in mammal populations (OR = −0.37, p = 0.05; figure 1b)
Summary
Urbanization is transforming patterns of societal growth, resource consumption, energy use and cultural attitudes towards the natural world [1]. Intense land-use change and urban dangers exclude most native mammals from the urban environment, especially mammals with larger body sizes, slow life histories or specialized diets and activity patterns [11,12,13] These ‘urban avoiders’ are displaced from urbanizing areas by a select few species that establish populations in or around cities [8,10]. Populations of urban mammals may occur at higher densities and forage in areas of clumped food resources, allowing for more frequent interactions with conspecifics that could increase exposure to directly transmitted parasites [9,31,32,33,34,35]. Under the ‘urban burden hypothesis’, urban habitat use increases parasite prevalence because urban stressors, abundance of competent reservoir species and higher host population density increase susceptibility and exposure to infectious disease. We predict that parasite prevalence will be higher in urban mammals than in non-urban mammals if the former hypothesis is supported, but the opposite pattern will prevail if the latter hypothesis is supported
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