An island paradigm on the mainland: host population fragmentation impairs the community of avian pathogens
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Post-publication record
- Nature
- Retraction
- Reason
- Concerns/Issues about Data;Investigation by Company/Institution;Investigation by Third Party;Unreliable Results and/or Conclusions;Upgrade/Update of Prior Notice(s);
- Date
- 9/16/2015 0:00
- Flagged by OpenAlex?
- Yes
Source: Retraction Watch, joined by DOI. OpenAlex records retraction as is_retracted, a boolean over a state space with at least four values, so it cannot express an expression of concern, a correction or a reinstatement — it reports them as false, which reads as “fine”.
Abstract
Emergent infectious diseases represent a major threat for biodiversity in fragmented habitat networks, but their dynamics in host metapopulations remain largely unexplored. We studied a large community of pathogens (including 26 haematozoans, bacteria and viruses as determined through polymerase chain reaction assays) in a highly fragmented mainland bird metapopulation. Contrary to recent studies, which have established that the prevalence of pathogens increase with habitat fragmentation owing to crowding and habitat-edge effects, the analysed pathogen parameters were neither dependent on host densities nor related to the spatial structure of the metapopulation. We provide, to our knowledge, the first empirical evidence for a positive effect of host population size on pathogen prevalence, richness and diversity. These new insights into the interplay between habitat fragmentation and pathogens reveal properties of a host-pathogen system resembling island environments, suggesting that severe habitat loss and fragmentation could lower pathogen pressure in small populations.
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The record
- Venue
- Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
- Topic
- Bird parasitology and diseases
- Field
- Immunology and Microbiology
- Canadian institutions
- University of Saskatchewan
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- MetapopulationBiologyHabitat fragmentationEcologyFragmentation (computing)HabitatPopulationSpecies richnessHabitat destructionHost (biology)PathogenBiodiversityGenetics
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes