Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2020 May 27;287(1927):20200397. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.0397. Epub 2020 May 13.
Rates of urbanization are increasing globally, with consequences for the dynamics of parasites and their wildlife hosts. A small subset of mammal species have the dietary and behavioural flexibility to survive in urban settings. The changes that characterize urban ecology-including landscape transformation, modified diets and shifts in community composition-can either increase or decrease susceptibility and exposure to parasites. We used a meta-analytic approach to systematically assess differences in endoparasitism between mammals in urban and non-urban habitats. Parasite prevalence estimates in matched urban and non-urban mammal populations from 33 species were compiled from 46 published studies, and an overall effect of urban habitation on parasitism was derived after controlling for study and parasite genus. Parasite life cycle type and host order were investigated as moderators of the effect sizes. We found that parasites with complex life cycles were less prevalent in urban carnivore and primate populations than in non-urban populations. However, we found no difference in urban and non-urban prevalence for parasites in rodent and marsupial hosts, or differences in prevalence for parasites with simple life cycles in any host taxa. Our findings therefore suggest the disruption of some parasite transmission cycles in the urban ecological community.
城市化率在全球范围内不断上升，这对寄生虫及其野生动物宿主的动态产生了影响。一小部分哺乳动物物种具有在城市环境中生存的饮食和行为灵活性。城市生态系统的变化——包括景观转化、饮食改变和群落组成的变化——可能会增加或降低对寄生虫的易感性和暴露程度。我们使用荟萃分析方法系统地评估了哺乳动物在城市和非城市生境中的内寄生虫感染率的差异。从 46 项已发表的研究中收集了来自 33 个物种的匹配城市和非城市哺乳动物种群的寄生虫流行率估计值，并在控制了研究和寄生虫属之后得出了城市生境对寄生虫感染的总体影响。调查了寄生虫生命周期类型和宿主分类群作为效应大小的调节因素。我们发现，与非城市种群相比，具有复杂生命周期的寄生虫在城市食肉动物和灵长类动物种群中的流行率较低。然而，我们没有发现啮齿动物和有袋动物宿主中寄生虫在城市和非城市的流行率存在差异，也没有发现任何宿主分类群中具有简单生命周期的寄生虫的流行率存在差异。因此，我们的研究结果表明，城市生态群落中的一些寄生虫传播周期被打乱了。
