Prevalence patterns of avian haemosporida on Hispaniola

Abstract

We used PCR to screen for the presence of haemosporidian parasites (Phylum: Apicomplexa; Order: Haemosporida) in avian blood samples, and sequenced the parasite mitochondrial cytochrome b gene from infected hosts, to study patterns in the prevalence of haemosporidians in 1,166 individuals of 50 species in four habitats along an elevation gradient in the Sierra de Bahoruco, Dominican Republic, island of Hispaniola. We found an overall prevalence of 0.44 among species with ≥10 individuals sampled per year, but this varied considerably among species. We found no difference in infection rates between years, between males and females, between second‐year (<1 y old) and older birds, or among members of different foraging guilds. Prevalence differed significantly among migratory, endemic resident, and non‐endemic resident species, with endemics having the highest rates of infection. Prevalence also varied among habitats, decreasing with increasing elevation, but the pattern was confounded by variation in the host species present at each elevation. From 215 sequenced parasites from 17 species of avian hosts, we recovered multiple examples of 12 lineages of Haemoproteus (Parahaemoproteus), two lineages of a Columbiformes‐specific clade of H. (Haemoproteus), and 10 lineages of Plasmodium, with an additional seven lineages sampled only once. A single parasite lineage was responsible for 34.4% of all infections, but five more lineages made up 41.8% of all infections. Several lineages were broadly distributed across multiple host species, but six lineages, all H. (Haemoproteus) or H. (Parahaemoproteus), were recorded from at least five individuals of a single host, suggesting host specialization. The number of host species from which each parasite lineage was recovered varied from one to nine; several host species harbored as many as 5–9 parasite lineages. Longitudinal data suggest that while hosts might harbor the same parasite lineage for more than a year, some hosts appear to clear infections from their circulating blood, while others manifested infections by a different parasite lineage.