One of the top “unsolved problems” in biology is the need to untangle complex networks of species interactions - perhaps nowhere is this more consequential than our need to grapple with the socioecological risks of neglected tropical diseases. Human-livestock-wildlife parasite transmission has been declared a major biomedical challenge for the 21st century with reasons for concern that include the potential for zoonotic helminths—parasitic worms such as nematodes (roundworms), cestodes (tapeworms), and trematodes (flukes) to be transmitted between humans and animals. The effects cause malnutrition, developmental delays, and deaths that disproportionately affect communities undergoing rapid development.

A problem is that our strategies to identify and track wildlife parasites originated to combat livestock diseases a century ago. We know far more about the subset of parasites that harm humans and livestock than all others, and most research has involved learning only enough to kill them. Consequently,  our partners struggle to identify the parasites they encounter, hindering our collective efforts to rehabilitate endangered species, evaluate emerging health threats, and treat diseases.

Fortunately, we have just received a Catalyst award from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society to pursue new strategies. Today, the gold-standard method for studying gastrointestinal helminth parasites in wildlife is rooted in taxonomy. Identifying parasites and evaluating their potential to harm hosts requires us to inspect adult parasites from dead hosts. Of course dead-but-well-preserved wildlife are hard to find, especially in the tropics. As a result, we often rely on less-suitable counts of parasite eggs in fecal samples, which can reveal parasites are present but often precludes identification or comparison across studies. This award will allow us to build on recent work at Brown University, which has brought us tantalizingly close to sparking a new era of genome-enabled parasitology that could overcome these intersecting challenges.

Together with an exciting array of partners - Sloth Conservation Foundation (Costa Rica), The Organization for Tropical Studies (Costa Rica), Fundación Zoológica de Cali (Colombia), and the Instituto de Biología Subtropical (Argentina) - we are embarking on an ambitious plan to document and DNA barcode parasites from tropical wildlife across the Americas.  We are also expanding our work at Brown, tapping into the expertise of tapping into the GeoSpatial expertise of Professor of the Practice Seda Şalap-Ayça and Data Scientist Tim Divoll to build more user-friendly and informative data portals. 

​We are grateful for the new support to build and share this important resource!

Out this month in PeerJ, a paper led by Ezequiel Vanderhoeven on "Host specificity of gastrointestinal parasites in free-ranging sloths from Costa Rica."

This paper is the first to compare compare the parasites of wild two- and three-toed sloths across both primary forests and urban habitats. In partnership with our friends at Sloth Conservation Foundation and their detection dog, our team went searching for sloth latrines at La Selva Biological Station and Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. 

We found a bunch of potentially new parasites for both species. Indeed, we found eight types of parasites from just 38 fecal samples, which we were surprised to discover matches the total number of  parasite types reported in the literature for sloths over the last 100 years.

We also found zero evidence for parasite sharing between two- and three-toed sloths, even though they often overlap at very fine scales in their habitats and share so many interesting characteristics. The more common types of parasites we found in each species were present in multiple populations -- suggesting they are widespread within their hosts -- but rare parasites tended to be restricted to hosts from the primary forest. 

This is just the beginning of our work with sloths and their parasites -- a fun, interesting, and important step we are taking together with our partners at Sloth Conservation Foundation. You can check SloCo's blog about it here!

The magazine Medicine@Brown featured Montana Stone's award-winning photo of "Zorro" -- a culpeo fox -- taken at our long-term ecological research site in Fray Jorge National Park in Chile. It's a fantastic shot of an amazing, and poorly known predator. As the BioMed communications team said, this image from Montana's field work is a poignant way to remind people that our mission in the Division is to advance the "health of people AND planet." We always love to remind people that our health is intimately, and inextricably, linked to what's happening in nature and around the planet.

With some much-anticipated fanfare in a press release from Uppsala University, Elin led a paper on describing the diets and microbiomes of three giraffe species that all live in close proximity to each other around the equator in Kenya. This work was initiated together with Brian Gill and Peter Lokeny many years ago.

This paper involved close collaboration with colleagues at the Mpala Research Centre, The National Museums of Kenya, and Giraffe Conservation Foundation. It represents a meaningful step toward better understanding the ecology of these amazing, but poorly understood endangered species -- and it directly informs on-the-ground conservation efforts aimed at ensuring long-term access to nutritious resources to fuel the recovery of populations.

The original article was published open access in Global Ecology and Conservation and the press release is entitled "Unexpected discoveries in study of giraffe gut flora."

This month we are saying farewell to Beth -- who has been the beating heart of our lab community for years -- as she embarks on the next exciting chapter in her career. 

Beth has been awarded a prestigious Prize Fellow to launch her independent research group at the University of Bath in the UK, where she will join a cohort of talented PIs forming a new research cluster focused on the microbiome. Because Beth will be there, it is sure to become an exciting epicenter for excellence in the field. Students and junior researchers who are interested -- take note!

We will all miss Beth, but we take heart in knowing that we can continue to collaborate and learn from her for years to come. What an all-star she is...!!

Courtney publishes the first product of her dissertation in Journal of Experimental Biology! Should a gerbil jump or run zig-zags when it's confronted by a predator? The upshot: Courtney ran a series of controlled laboratory tests to discover that each individual's decision in that pivotal moment may be enabled by -- or constrained by -- the anatomy of its hind limbs. The best jumpers are not necessarily the best maneuverers, and vice versa. 

Treat yourselves to a look at some videos of gerbils jumping and running through the experimental apparatus that Courtney published in the supplementary materials.

This is a particularly gratifying culmination of significant work in no small part because it originated as a 'pandemic project' when our plans for field research got stymied. The work featured an all-star crew of departmental colleagues, postdocs, and undergraduate researchers to boot. 

The accepted article is online ahead of print at Journal of Experimental Biology and should be published to open-access (freely available) repositories shortly: Distinct morphological drivers of jumping and maneuvering performance in gerbils

Earlier this month, Mary Burak led a workshop together with Save the Elephants and the National Museums of Kenya. The meeting convened at the Save the Elephants headquarters at Samburu, and the team spent a few days learning to collect voucher plant specimens for DNA barcoding. In a very short period of time, they added an important chunk of regional plant diversity to the collections available for barcoding. The training and work completed will dramatically increase our ability to precisely characterize the diets of elephants across Kenya. It was super gratifying to see such a great group of scholars, conservationists, long-time collaborators, and all-around quality people coming together to do such important work. Mary shared some great photos of the team in action: Paul Musili, Rispa Kathurima, Gideon Galimogle, and Evans Nawasa.

A new paper from the lab was led by postdoc Bethan Littleford-Colquhoun and published in Royal Society Open Science: "Body size modulates the extent of seasonal diet switching by large mammalian herbivores in Yellowstone National Park." The paper is free to read and download.

Beth used cutting-edge genetic and GPS-tracking technologies to test age-old ideas about why animals select the foods that they do. The work involved collaboration from experts in wildlife ecology and management, genomics, remote sensing, and botany -- with contributions from the National Park Service, several citizen science organizations, and funding from NSF as well as the Department of Interior. 

As Beth summarized in an interview with News@Brown, we have come to more accurately understand wildlife populations as a collection of animals that can respond individualistically to changes in their environment. From summer to winter, animals have to radically change the kinds of foods they eat. But it's not just that: they also have to take care to update their overall foraging strategy as they shift from foraging socially as part of a large herd to foraging more independently for their own unique sets of resources. 

The news summary by Corrie Pikul is available here: How do coexisting animals find enough to eat? Biologists unlock insights into foraging habits in Yellowstone

Graduation is always bitter sweet and we had so many amazing seniors graduate this year -- the class that began under the most trying of circumstances in the early days of the pandemic. A few highlights and congratulations are in order:

• Eliza Atwood: Environmental Studies Senior Prize for Best Senior Thesis! Eliza is heading to UC Irvine for graduate school in conservation!
• Maddy Florida: Senior Prize for Academic Excellence in Biological Sciences!
  
• Logan Torres: Inaugural senior prize at IBES 10th year anniversary!
• Savianna Gonzales-Wagner: Entering Masters program in education at Columbia!

Always inspiring and successful new students bringing their energy to the lab as well:

• Abigail Grove: rising junior wins the BrownConnect SPRINT|UTRA opportunity to join our team at Yellowstone this summer!