Disease-limited distributions? Contrasts in the prevalence of avian malaria in shorebird species using marine and freshwater habitats

• Main Authors: Luisa Mendes, Theunis Piersma, Miguel Lecoq, Bernard Spaans, Robert E. Ricklefs
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2005
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.416.153; http://www.umsl.edu/~ricklefsr/Reprints/Mendes2005.pdf

distributions? Contrasts in the prevalence of avian malaria in shorebird species using marine and freshwater habitats. / Oikos 109: 396 /404. Migratory shorebirds show strong dichotomies in habitat choice during both the breeding and nonbreeding season. Whereas High Arctic breeding species are restricted to coastal marine and saline habitats during the nonbreeding season, more southerly breeding species tend to use freshwater habitats away from coasts. It has been proposed that this co-variation in habitat use is a consequence of a single axis of adaptation to pathogens and parasites, which are hypothesized to be relatively scarce in High Arctic, marine, and saline habitats and relatively common at lower latitudes and in freshwater habitats. Here we examine this contrast by comparing the prevalence of avian malaria infections in shorebirds occupying different habitats. We used a PCR-based assay on 1319 individuals from 31 shorebird species sampled in the Arctic, in temperate Europe and in inland and marine habitats in West Africa. Infections mainly occurred in tropical wetlands, with the shorebirds in freshwater inland habitats having significantly higher prevalence of malaria than birds in marine coastal habitats. Infections were not