James Hutton Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen AB15 8QH, United Kingdom.
Ecol Appl. 2012 Mar;22(2):658-67. doi: 10.1890/11-0458.1.
The management of wildlife hosts for controlling parasites and disease has a history of mixed success. Deer can be important hosts for ticks, such as Ixodes ricinus, which is the primary vector of disease-causing zoonotic pathogens in Europe. Deer are generally managed by culling and fencing for forestry protection, habitat conservation, and commercial hunting, and in this study we test whether these deer management methods can be useful for controlling ticks, with implications for tick-borne pathogens. At different spatial scales and habitats we tested the hypotheses that tick abundance is reduced by (1) culling deer and (2) deer exclusion using fencing. We compared abundance indices of hosts and questing I. ricinus nymphs using a combination of small-scale fencing experiments on moorland, a large-scale natural experiment of fenced and unfenced pairs of forests, and cross-sectional surveys of forest and moorland areas with varying deer densities. As predicted, areas with fewer deer had fewer ticks, and fenced exclosures had dramatically fewer ticks in both large-scale forest and small-scale moorland plots. Fencing and reducing deer density were also associated with higher ground vegetation. The implications of these results on other hosts, pathogen prevalence, and disease risk are discussed. This study provides evidence of how traditional management methods of a keystone species can reduce a generalist parasite, with implications for disease risk mitigation.
控制寄生虫和疾病的野生动物宿主管理取得了喜忧参半的效果。鹿可以是蜱的重要宿主，例如在欧洲引发疾病的人畜共患病原体的主要传播媒介壁虱属。鹿通常通过扑杀和围栏来进行林业保护、栖息地保护和商业狩猎管理，在本研究中，我们测试了这些鹿管理方法是否可用于控制蜱虫，并探讨了对蜱传病原体的影响。我们在不同的空间尺度和栖息地中检验了以下假设：（1）通过扑杀鹿和（2）使用围栏将鹿隔离，从而减少蜱的数量。我们通过在荒野上进行小规模围栏实验、对有围栏和无围栏的森林进行大规模自然实验以及对具有不同鹿密度的森林和荒野区域进行横断面调查，结合使用宿主和游离壁虱属若虫的丰度指数来进行比较。正如预期的那样，鹿较少的区域蜱虫较少，而在大规模森林和小规模荒野区域的围栏中，蜱虫的数量明显减少。围栏和减少鹿密度还与较高的地面植被有关。这些结果对其他宿主、病原体流行率和疾病风险的影响进行了讨论。本研究提供了有关传统管理方法如何减少普遍寄生虫的证据，这对减轻疾病风险具有重要意义。
