Abstract
Understanding the driving forces that control vole population dynamics requires identifying bacterial parasites hosted by the voles and describing their dynamics at the community level. To this end, we used high-throughput DNA sequencing to identify bacterial parasites in cyclic populations of montane water voles that exhibited a population outbreak and decline in 2014–2018. An unexpectedly large number of 155 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) representing at least 13 genera in 11 families was detected. Individual bacterial richness was higher during declines, and vole body condition was lower. Richness as estimated by Chao2 at the local population scale did not exhibit clear seasonal or cycle phase-related patterns, but at the vole meta-population scale, exhibited seasonal and phase-related patterns. Moreover, bacterial OTUs that were detected in the low density phase were geographically widespread and detected earlier in the outbreak; some were associated with each other. Our results demonstrate the complexity of bacterial community patterns with regard to host density variations, and indicate that investigations about how parasites interact with host populations must be conducted at several temporal and spatial scales: multiple times per year over multiple years, and at both local and long-distance dispersal scales for the host(s) under consideration.
Highlights
Understanding the driving forces that control vole population dynamics requires identifying bacterial parasites hosted by the voles and describing their dynamics at the community level
Only a small subset of this research has considered the parasites hosted by these populations, despite diseases being the first hypothesis put forward to explain the decline phase[12]. This is in part due to the general conclusions drawn by Chitty in 195413 after earlier research into Toxoplasma and Mycobacterium tuberculosis in cyclic field vole populations in the UK failed to find evidence that these parasites contributed to
We present here the first, to our knowledge, report on the dynamics of the parasitic bacterial communities in the water vole A. terrestris in relation to the host population dynamics
Summary
Understanding the driving forces that control vole population dynamics requires identifying bacterial parasites hosted by the voles and describing their dynamics at the community level. Only a small subset of this research has considered the parasites hosted by these populations, despite diseases being the first hypothesis put forward to explain the decline phase[12] This is in part due to the general conclusions drawn by Chitty in 195413 after earlier research into Toxoplasma and Mycobacterium tuberculosis in cyclic field vole populations in the UK failed to find evidence that these parasites contributed to declines[13,14]: Chitty concluded that diseases were not important, and parasites and diseases in cyclic populations remained relatively understudied for decades. The unifying themes to these investigations have been either the explicit search for a decline-inducing disease, or the identification of extrinsic and intrinsic factors that determine risk of infection by, or prevalence of, one or a few parasite species
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