Densidade populacional de hospedeiros e sua relação com prevalência e diversidade de parasitas causadores da malária aviária entre aves de sub-bosque na floresta amazônica

Abstract

This work tested two predictions of positive correlation between birds population density and two metrics of avian malaria infection: prevalence and number of parasites lineages. Prevalence measures the proportion of infected individuals in the host population, while number of lineages measures the parasite diversity. For this, we estimated the population density of twelve Amazonian understory bird species (seven Thamnophilidae and five Furnariidae) using a spatially explicit mark-recapture model, fitted to five months of banding data in a upland forest site near Manaus (Amazonas, Brazil). This approach takes into account the individual moviments and the imperfection of sampling process, allowing us to obtain estimates of number of individuals per unit area (density) with associated uncertainties, providing a more accurate picture of a parasite-host system by reducing the sample bias. To estimate prevalence and number of lineages for each host species, we collected and analysed blood samples from host individuals with PCR assays and sequencing of the parasites’ mitochondrial DNA. These samples were taken from the same birds that appear in the mark-recapture data used for estimate species density. Our results didn’t support predictions of a positive relation between host abundance and the two metrics of infection. The absence of relation between abundance and prevalence reinforces the idea that indirect transmission by arthropod vectors prevents host rarity from limiting prevalence. On the other hand, the absence of a relation between density and number of lineages suggests that a community of mostly generalist parasites is shared by a wide group of species.