Interaction of diet and habitat predicts <i>Toxoplasma gondii</i> infection rates in wild birds at a global scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Aim Free‐ranging wildlife are valuable sentinels for zoonotic, multi‐host pathogens, and new insight into parasite transmission patterns is possible through a macroecological approach. Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan capable of infecting all warm‐blooded animals, including humans, primarily through a free‐living oocyst and/or tissue cyst life stage. Anthropogenic disturbance is facilitating the spread of T. gondii , making it crucial to understand the general ecological and life‐history drivers of T. gondii infections in wild birds, which are important intermediate hosts. Our goal was to determine how habitat (terrestrial versus aquatic), dietary trophic level and scavenging behaviour influence the prevalence of T. gondii infection in wild birds at a global scale. Location Global. Time period 1952–2017. Major taxa studied Birds. Methods Our analysis used the serological, bioassay and molecular prevalence data of T. gondii in avian species compiled from 81 studies conducted worldwide and encompassing 24,344 individuals from 393 avian species from 84 families. Results We showed that at a global scale, trophic level and habitat interacted significantly to influence T. gondii prevalence in avian intermediate hosts. In the terrestrial environment, T. gondii prevalence increased with trophic level, consistent with predominant tissue cyst transmission. The highest prevalence was in terrestrial omnivores, which might reflect their synanthropic foraging behaviour. In aquatic species, prevalence was more consistent across trophic levels, but high prevalence in aquatic herbivores and insectivores reflects significant waterborne exposure to oocysts. Contrary to our predictions, generalized scavenging per se was not associated with increased prevalence. Main conclusions This study highlights the value of comparing pathogen prevalence among multiple ecological guilds and ecosystem types for a more comprehensive understanding of the epidemiology of generalist pathogens, such as T. gondii . Increased effort is needed to reduce T. gondii spillover from the domestic cat cycle into wildlife populations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".