The role of species ecology in predicting Toxoplasma gondii prevalence in wild and domesticated mammals globally
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Macroecological approaches can provide valuable insight into the epidemiology of globally distributed, multi-host pathogens. Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan that infects any warm-blooded animal, including humans, in almost every habitat worldwide. Toxoplasma gondii infects its hosts through oocysts in the environment, carnivory of tissue cysts within intermediate host prey and vertical transmission. These routes of infection enable specific predictions regarding the ecological and life history traits that should predispose specific taxa to higher exposure and, thus infection rates of T. gondii. Using T. gondii prevalence data compiled from 485 studies representing 533 free-ranging wild mammalian species, we examined how ecological (habitat type, trophic level) and life history (longevity, vagility, gestation duration and torpor) traits influence T. gondii infection globally. We also compared T. gondii prevalence between wild and domesticated species from the same taxonomic families using data compiled from 540 studies of domestic cattle, sheep, and pigs. Across free-ranging wildlife, we found the average T. gondii prevalence was 22%, which is comparable to the global human estimate. Among ecological guilds, terrestrial species had lower T. gondii prevalence than aquatic species, with freshwater aquatic taxa having an increased prevalence compared to marine aquatic species. Dietary niches were also influential, with carnivores having an increased risk compared to other trophic feeding groups that have reduced tissue cyst exposure in their diet. With respect to influential life history traits, we found that more vagile wildlife species had higher T. gondii infection rates, perhaps because of the higher cumulative risk of infection during movement through areas with varying T. gondii environmental loads. Domestic farmed species had a higher T. gondii prevalence compared to free-ranging confamilial wildlife species. Through a macroecological approach, we determined the relative significance of transmission routes of a generalist pathogen, demonstrating an increased infection risk for aquatic and carnivorous species and highlighting the importance of preventing pathogen pollution into aquatic environments. Toxoplasma gondii is increasingly understood to be primarily an anthropogenically-associated pathogen whose dissemination is enhanced by ecosystem degradation and human subsidisation of free-roaming domestic cats. Adopting an ecosystem restoration approach to reduce one of the world's most common parasites would synergistically contribute to other initiatives in conservation, feline and wildlife welfare, climate change, food security and public health.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".