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Does the virus cross the road? Viral phylogeographic patterns among bobcat populations reflect a history of urban development

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posted on 2023-05-20, 17:29 authored by Kozakiewicz, CP, Christopher BurridgeChristopher Burridge, Funk, WC, Craft, ME, Crooks, KR, Fisher, RN, Fountain-Jones, NM, Jennings, MK, Kraberger, SJ, Lee, JS, Lyren, LM, Riley, SPD, Serieys, LEK, VandeWoude, S, Scott CarverScott Carver
Urban development has major impacts on connectivity among wildlife populations and is thus likely an important factor shaping pathogen transmission in wildlife. However, most investigations of wildlife diseases in urban areas focus on prevalence and infection risk rather than potential effects of urbanization on transmission itself. Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is a directly transmitted retrovirus that infects many felid species and can be used as a model for studying pathogen transmission at landscape scales. We investigated phylogenetic relationships among FIV isolates sampled from five bobcat (Lynx rufus) populations in coastal southern California that appear isolated due to major highways and dense urban development. Divergence dates among FIV phylogenetic lineages in several cases reflected historical urban growth and construction of major highways. We found strong FIV phylogeographic structure among three host populations north‐west of Los Angeles, largely coincident with host genetic structure. In contrast, relatively little FIV phylogeographic structure existed among two genetically distinct host populations south‐east of Los Angeles. Rates of FIV transfer among host populations did not vary significantly, with the lack of phylogenetic structure south‐east of Los Angeles unlikely to reflect frequent contemporary transmission among populations. Our results indicate that major barriers to host gene flow can also act as barriers to pathogen spread, suggesting potentially reduced susceptibility of fragmented populations to novel directly transmitted pathogens. Infrequent exchange of FIV among host populations suggests that populations would best be managed as distinct units in the event of a severe disease outbreak. Phylogeographic inference of pathogen transmission is useful for estimating the ability of geographic barriers to constrain disease spread and can provide insights into contemporary and historical drivers of host population connectivity.

History

Publication title

Evolutionary Applications

Volume

13

Issue

8

Pagination

1806-1817

ISSN

1752-4563

Department/School

School of Natural Sciences

Publisher

Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Place of publication

United States

Rights statement

© 2020 The Authors. Evolutionary Applications published by John Wiley. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Control of pests, diseases and exotic species in terrestrial environments

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