Abstract
ABSTRACTIntroduction: Birds serve as reservoirs for tick-borne pathogens as well as hosts for multiple tick species of public health relevance. Birds may perpetuate life cycles of vectors and vector-borne pathogens and disperse disease vectors over long distances, supplementing populations at range margins or seeding invading populations beyond the edges of current tick distributions. Our goal for this study was to identify life history characteristics of birds that most strongly affect tick parasitism.Materials and Methods: We collected 6203 ticks from 5426 birds from two sites in eastern North America and used field-derived parasitism data and published literature to analyze impacts of life history factors on tick parasitism in birds.Results and Discussion: We identified body size and nest site to have the strongest impact on tick prevalence and abundance in the songbird species included in this study. Our findings reveal site-independent patterns in tick parasitism on birds and suggest that physical more than behavioral characteristics may influence a bird species’ suitability as a host for ticks.Conclusions: The data and results published here will contribute to a growing body of literature and information on bird-tick interactions and will help elucidate patterns of tick and tick-borne pathogen geographic expansion.
Highlights
Birds serve as reservoirs for tick-borne pathogens as well as hosts for multiple tick species of public health relevance
Migratory movement of bird-associated Ixodes scapularis ticks infected with the Lyme disease agent, Borrelia burgdorferi, may explain recently observed northward and southward geographic expansion of human Lyme disease cases [1,3,5,8,9,10,11,12, 13] and a theoretical mathematical analysis demonstrated that deposition of ticks by migrating birds can enhance tick population growth and increase human risk of tick-borne disease [14]
Many of the B. burgdorferi genotypic variants detected in birds have been previously unreported, suggesting that bird-tick transmission cycles may contribute to the maintenance of genetic variation in this pathogenic bacterium [9,19,21]
Summary
Birds serve as reservoirs for tick-borne pathogens as well as hosts for multiple tick species of public health relevance. Ticks serve as hosts for a large number of zoonotic pathogens and the relative importance of birds in supporting tick life cycles and as reservoirs for vector-borne pathogens has gained attention of recent years [1,2,3]. Bird migration and dispersal have been implicated in the spread of tick-transmitted pathogens in Europe and North America [4,5,6,7,8] and potentially serve as a common mechanism for range expansion of vector-borne pathogens [2]. The detection of infected larval ticks with B. burgdorferi from avian hosts strongly suggests that birds are capable of, and potentially important to, the transmission of this pathogen in natural systems [18,19,20]. Certain small mammal species are likely to be most important in terms of enzootic transmission and maintenance of this pathogen [22], birds may play an important role in the evolutionary ecology and long-distance movement of B. burgdorferi [3]
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